Word: benvenuto
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...contrast, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and the late Truman Capote thrust their work and themselves into the world of commerce, celebrity, hostility and jealousy. "Envy, envy, envy!" cries Capote. "The people simply cannot endure success over too long a period of time. It has to be destroyed." Not since Benvenuto Cellini has there been a major talent with such a courtier's view of his art. His social timing and instinct for wounding gossip were displayed in published sections of his controversial work in progress, Answered Prayers. He refers to it as his "big ace up my sleeve," though...
Michelangelo's next challenge was to produce a fresco in the huge new hall of the Palazzo della Signoria, to match a similar fresco to be done by his great rival, Leonardo da Vinci. Though neither painting was ever finished, the cartoons for them became, as Benvenuto Cellini recorded, "so long as they remained intact ... the school of the world"; Michelangelo's surviving sketch for a bathing soldier demonstrates...
...Indeed, David Kepesh is the same slick monologuist that Portnoy was, given to frequent exclamations, flurries of rhetorical questions ("Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known?") and carefully italicized emphases. He tosses off one-liners (calling, for instance, his Aunt Sylvia "the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel") as if he has a stable of Borscht Belt writers churning out his material. On the psychiatric couch, Kepesh is a regular lie-down comic: "I cannot maintain an erection, Dr. Klinger. I cannot maintain a smile, for that matter...
Working with stone hammers and crude huairas, or wind-draft casting furnaces, the Indian goldsmiths attained a level of technical skill that seems no less amazing today than it did in the 16th century, when that consummate metalworker Benvenuto Cellini is said to have spent weeks trying (and failing) to duplicate an Aztec fish of flexible silver plates inlaid with gold. The earlier goldworking cultures of Peru used hammered sheets as their basic material, but the Colombian artisans preferred to cast their images from gold. They were masters of the lost-wax technique, whereby a model of clay and charcoal...
...King-whose sharp little eyes, scrolled mouth and drooping wedge of a nose survive in many effigies-set up court in a manor at Fontainebleau. To it Francis brought some of the best Italian artists of the day: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolo dell'Abate. Even Benvenuto Cellini spent several years, from 1540 to 1545, in the King's employment, making statues and, as a culmination of his skill as a goldsmith, the famous gold saltcellar (now in Vienna) that he finished in 1543. The Italians' work set a new cultural norm for France and turned...