Word: dianas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among them is Tobias, an unbeliever, who has felt himself somehow impelled to embark upon a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on behalf of an unknown woman whom he had found dead with the stigmata-the marks of the Crucifixion. Attached to Tobias is Diana, a once beautiful woman turned promiscuous slattern, who ridicules the idea of the pilgrimage and tags along only to be with him. Ahasuerus joins them, and the three unbelievers set out on a strange, symbolic pilgrimage several days' journey behind the other pilgrims...
Amidst a buzz of rumors, the Cleveland Museum of Art paid an estimated $550,000 in 1959 for Rubens' Diana and Her Nymphs Departing for the Chase. Last week Oil Billionaire Jean Paul Getty said he had gambled more than $400,000 that Cleveland has a fake. New Year's guests at Getty's Sutton Place mansion near London saw, on a wall of pale green silk, an 8-ft. by 6-ft. canvas that Getty said was the real Diana and Her Nymphs. And it is generally acknowledged that Rubens never painted the same subject twice...
Cleveland traces its Diana back to 1796, when Amsterdam Widow Elizabeth Hooft sold it. The painting was authenticated in 1959 by the late Dr. Ludwig Burchard. then the greatest living Rubens expert, who flatly discounted rumors that it was really the work of Rubens' assistant, Frans Snyders. Burchard. pointing out the dog that Diana caresses, said that Snyders "could never have created on his own an animal so highly expressive both in movement and feeling." The birds in the background, the flowers in the foreground, the "freshness and luminous color," he concluded, stamped it an early Rubens original...
Getty boasts an even longer pedigree for his Diana, tracing it to 1655 (Rubens died in 1640), when the Marquis de Leganés. Spanish Ambassador to Brussels and a friend of Rubens', listed the work in an inventory of his collection. Getty's Rubens expert, Columbia Professor John Held, argues that the Cleveland painting has the sort of minor details-the birds, the elaborate ironwork on Diana's lance, the foreground foliage-that "are not infrequently added by copyists to make their pictures more superficially interesting." In one matter Getty's canvas is more detailed...
...follower some militant advice: "Call on God, my dear! She will help you!" But the Deity ignores wrongly addressed prayers, and He has kept to the old system, under which women bear babies and men pretty much run everything. No woman has yet been elected President, and, as Critic Diana Trilling once remarked, it is hard even to imagine "a play called Death of a Saleswoman." Women are still at sea, and their rule is men and children first...