Word: bas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Perhaps Manzù's greatest work, the doors (opposite) bear four bas-reliefs representing four saints of charity. They show St. Martin of Tours cutting his cape on an icy night to share it with Jesus, appearing as a beggar (upper left); St. Severinus, who died near Salzburg, helping a woman out of prison during a Hun invasion (upper right); the execution of St. Engelbert Kolland (lower left); and St. Francis offering his cloak (lower right). In the center a sheaf of wheat and a cluster of vines, symbolizing the bread and wine of the Eucharist, serve...
...years Manzù taught at Milan's Brera Academy ("You can't teach art, only techniques"), now works in a whitewashed, high-ceilinged studio on the city's outskirts, specializes in the figures of dancers (see overleaf). He is also at work on bronze bas-reliefs for the "Door of Death" (opened only for funerals) in St. Peter's in Rome. While modern sculpture continues on its merry road to abstraction, Giacomo Manzù keeps to the realistic tradition. "I am a modernist," he says, "but I do not deny the past...
...hero of Là-Bas is a novelist named Durtal, who is doing research into the monstrous life of Gilles de Rais, often mistaken for the original Bluebeard.*A dedicated researcher, Durtal himself dabbles in the same black arts that Gilles de Rais practiced- for De Rais, found guilty of murder and executed in 1440, seems to have attracted disciples in 19th century Paris. The core of their infamy is the bizarre and blasphemous rite known as the Black Mass, in which every imaginable obscenity is committed and the Eucharist itself is invoked to bring the celebrants closer...
...confides that his book about Gilles de Rais will be "as tedious to read as to write." But Durtal's affair with the seductive Hyacinthe - widow of a manufacturer of chasubles and wife of an au thor of religious biographies - might be enough to put Là-Bas off the public shelves of most libraries. It is she who leads Durtal into the obscene rituals of Satanism, presided over by an unfrocked priest. (Both the weird wife and the de frocked priest were drawn from life by Author Huysmans...
Bluebeard & Bluenose. Ever since it first appeared serially in Echo de Paris, the book has enjoyed a kind of scandalous celebrity among men of letters. Zola attacked Huysmans; Maupassant, Verlaine and others defended him. In 1924, the present publishers report, Là-Bas was is sued in the U.S. but ran afoul of John S. Sumner, industrious secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Publisher Albert Boni agreed to withdraw the book and destroy the plates. Now, a generation later, readers may well be of two minds as to who had the right of the matter - the celebrated...