Word: dilettanti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Here is little Cupid as a London linkboy, sporting demonic bat wings and an immense phallic torch to remind those in the know of the proclivities of a certain patron. And here are Reynolds' friends in the learned Society of Dilettanti, arguing about antiquities and knocking back the vintage claret, while Sir William Hamilton points to an engraving of one of his own Greek vases and Mr. John Taylor holds up a lady's garter. Peering into this lost world--reprehensible, no doubt, for its elitism, sexism, amateurism and other social vices, yet not without its allure--one realizes what...
...curiosity about the animal world. Strange creatures and people from the corners of a growing empire drew crowds when they were put on show in rented London rooms; photography had not made all things familiar. The wonders of Africa, America and the Pacific glared peevishly back at the Georgian dilettanti from their wooden dens and dirty straw. "Just arrived from Botany-Bay," ran a newspaper advertisement in 1789, "three new live animals for the amusement of the public, with that 3 singular animal the African Savage, a noble Lion and Lioness, a pair of 3 beautiful Leopards, a Lynx...
Bohemianism did not attract him. He went to Paris in the late 1920s and found it "invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sightseers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population . . ." He took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, a member of the working population 13 hours...
...wealth; he did not need to build for a living. The son of a well-off Cleveland lawyer who handed over to him a bundle of stock in a new company named Alcoa, Johnson lives in a manner unrivaled by many architects since the days of the gentlemen dilettanti of Georgian England. He maintains several buildings for his personal use, most of them in a rolling park in New Canaan, Conn., including an underground culture bunker for part of his private collection of paintings...
...Dilettanti Nuovi, a Renaissance vocal sextet...