Word: di
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Falstaff, with which the celebrated Welsh National Opera was making its American debut. But the applause that swept the amiably musty BAM theater was not just for Stein. Nor just for Donald Maxwell's passionate performance as Sir John. Nor even just for the smiling Princess of Wales, Princess Di herself, who appeared in a glowing white satin dress for the black-tie benefit. Also to be applauded and celebrated was the start of a new kind of opera season in a place where opera has been something of a rarity...
...sensational charge in J.A.M.A. is contained in a letter from researchers who claim that Premier, a cigarette-size cylinder that heats tobacco rather than burns it, can be used to smoke crack, the cocaine derivative. That one has lit a fuse at RJR. Last week research head G. Robert Di Marco attacked the accusations in J.A.M.A. as "distortions to further the political goals of its parent organization...
This emblematic world is at full intensity in the Met's own The Creation, and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, circa 1445. God the Father hurtles down from heaven, supported by blue cherubim and bowling before him an immense wheel depicting the concentric divisions of the universe -- the earth, the spheres of water, air and fire, those of the seven planets, the zodiac and the dark blue primum mobile. On the right, an angel chivies our first parents -- pale, forked creatures -- out of a tapestry paradise of emblematic plants...
...brown outcrops that appear in the background of Saint Anthony Tempted by a Heap of Gold are hardly the result of fantasy and are recognizably based on the gullies and crests of Le Crete, the bare hills southeast of Siena. And by the end of the quattrocento, in Benvenuto di Giovanni's image of Christ on his way to Calvary, the landscape is real and full of fantastical character: a Roman soldier like an armed Boschian lobster, tormentors pulling and grabbing at Christ, knots of rope, pebbles underfoot -- each bearing its own color and polish, like a cabochon stone...
...fierce empiricism of Masaccio, determined to fill real space with real figures that the senses could know, made its mark on some painters but not others. Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with...