Word: bacchuses
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...able to deceive two entire centuries . . . Guido's laborious conscientiousness is void of thought and true feeling." Two years later, Bernard Berenson wrung his neck: "We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable." And it was downhill from there; in 1910 one of his versions of Bacchus and Ariadne sold at Christie's for just under (pounds)10, a fraction of its auction price 60 years before. The nadir was in the late '50s, when you could get a 10-ft. Guido Reni (if you wanted it, which few did) for less than $300 at auction. Reni's posthumous...
That is why, however incongruously, some Renis call to mind "classical" Picasso in the early '20s: both are parodies, Reni's part-subliminal and Picasso's wholly deliberate, of the same antique fantasy of ideal beings on the Mediterranean shore. The point is made by Reni's Bacchus and Ariadne, with its enameled colors, its air of travesty -- one doesn't believe for a second in jilted Ariadne's grief, but one does wonder what her right hand is about to do -- and its iron-butterfly stylishness. This is an idyll that makes no bones about its own artificiality. Brilliance...
What elsewhere one sees only in travel brochures, one finds in Thailand daily. It often seems, in fact, as if ancient gods -- Bacchus, Neptune, Zeus and Venus -- conspired to make the land a composite of holidaymakers' fantasies. Here is a never-never land built on solid ground; a fairy-tale monarchy ruled by a Renaissance King and his classically beautiful Queen; an orchid-scented garden of scintillant temples, lush jungles, palmy white beaches and a capital built along tree-shaded canals; and a gentle Buddhist retreat filled with smiling, gracious people who make "tourist industry" sound like a contradiction...
...percentage of them in costume seems to have decreased, as that part of the Carnival celebration has changed from a family costume party to another stop on the relentless tour of all- purpose American event-attenders. Mardi Gras turned a corner in 1969 when the Krewe of Bacchus was formed by restaurant and hotel operators to stage a parade tailored specifically for tourists -- a spectacle considerably more lavish than the parades of the old-line krewes. The king of the parade each year was not some anonymous banker, secure in the knowledge that anyone who counts knows who's behind...
Eventually, though, the story was finished. At home, Bacchus-like, I poured myself a preprandial libation, but I was far too tired to contemplate an evening of Dionysian delights. Myths, I thought. Too many demons and deities. They are all about us. Here. There. Everywhere...