Word: balthasar
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...promoted to kings, probably because frankincense is associated with royalty in one of the Psalms. Their number, which varied in different accounts from two to 12, eventually settled on three, most likely because of their three gifts. By the 700s they had achieved their current names--Melchior, Gaspar and Balthasar--and multiculti composition. "The first is said to have been ... an old man with white hair and a long beard," reads a medieval Irish description. "The second ... beardless and ruddy-complexioned ... the third, black-skinned and heavily bearded." Scholars have suggested that the mix either was intended to underscore Christianity...
...saints at the great cathedral in Cologne, Germany, where their alleged remains are housed: "Having undergone many trials and fatigues for the Gospel," it reads, they met one last time in Armenia. "Thereupon, after the celebration of Mass, they died. St. Melchior on Jan. 1, age 116; St. Balthasar on Jan. 6th, age 112; and St. Gaspar...
...painter of Protestant churches, Gerard Houckgeest, whose beautifully bare Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent, 1650, is composed with fanatical, emphatic strictness and gave rise to a whole dynasty of memorial church interiors. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would have had to draw...
...Erich Klossowski was both a painter and an art historian; his mother Elizabeth Spiro was a painter who liked to be known as Baladine and had a long, intense friendship with one of Germany's greatest modern poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, who became young Balthus' mentor. Thus from childhood Balthasar Klossowski, to give his actual name, was steeped in an artistic milieu, and he grew up with a considerable sense of himself as a prodigy. But young Balthus never enrolled at an art school: he learned from impassioned study and much copying of museum...
...years Balthus was director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome: never a sinecure for the meek, and perhaps not since Ingres's day held by a more indurated snob than Balthus. One can follow his appetite for grandeur as the name evolves: plain Balthasar Klossowski to start, then Balthasar de Klossowski, then Klossowski de Rola, and now, in his eighth decade, the "Comte de Rola." The fact that he has been able to fend off inquiry about his origins for so long is a tribute to the alarm that this glacial, gifted and pretentious...