Word: courtiers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...maneuvering on their own for the big commissions. But with Luther raging against Vatican corruption and a reformist chill blowing through the papal court, Pope Clement VII was not going to make a pornographer his official painter. At this point Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael's friend and author of The Courtier, fixed Giulio up with his job in Mantua...
Here was the way things were: "The scene was strictly for novelists, people who were writing novels and people who were paying court to The Novel. There was no room for a journalist, unless he was there in the role of would-be novelist or simple courtier of the great. There was no such thing as a literary journalist working for popular magazines or newspapers," writes Wolfe in the 1973 book, The New Journalism...
...ebullient loser he plays in Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes, is a virtual anthology of Marcello males, and the actor finds vibrant life in each of them. In his rich wife's mansion Romano is the buffoon philanderer, tiptoeing toward domestic calamity. At the spa he is the exuberant courtier, wading into a mud bath to retrieve a woman's hat. On business in Russia he is the dapper salesman, mainly of himself. And years later, reminiscing with a stranger, he is the old seducer whose spirit nearly broke when his heart did. Dark Eyes won Mastroianni the Best Actor...
...masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved the lineaments of a world soon to be buried like Pompeii, along with Sargent's own reputation, beneath the ash and rubble of World War I. Of course, he had to be revived. In Reagan's America, you cannot keep a good courtier down. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroiding, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. And the public that...
...combative horses, whose armed riders look dwarfed and almost incidental; a 17th century Deccan woman, jeweled and draped for display rather than mobility, feeding a bird in an imaginary hillside landscape suggestive of the Italian Renaissance; a painfully detailed sketch, Leonardo- like in its medical curiosity, of a shriveled courtier on his deathbed...