Word: cistern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seized a torch and, shouting "Who are they? We'll soon find out!" lit the string of mummers. A young duchess, throwing her robe over the king, extinguished the sovereign, while one flaming courtier bit through the rope and dived "like a flaming comet" throught the window into a cistern in the court. The other four "whirled hither and thither through the horrified mob, struggling with one another, fighting with the flames, cursing, shrieking with pain," as Walsh describes it. Although the flames at last burnt out, none of the four maskers survived...
...leaves proclaims the image to be formed as much by style as by the impulse to "objective" description. The two work perfectly together. To see why, one may look at the most famous of his water studies, the image of water gushing from a pipe into a cistern. There seems to be no doubt, as Kenneth Clark pointed out a generation ago, that Leonardo's eye was preternaturally fast; he could grasp and isolate fractions of movement in time with a precision that would only be confirmed, more than four centuries later, by strobe photography. So with his drawing...