Word: ducal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...implicit acknowledgment that the noble lineage of stiff-upper literature was now wholly in the care of the boy from Bombay, the kid from Oregon and the Polish-German lady who'd married an Indian. Merchant, Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala were like the servants who'd been bequeathed a ducal castle just as its ramparts were crumbling, its halls haunted by the ghosts of the glory days...
...16th century court painter was expected to turn out anything and everything, from ceremonial portraits to painted coach panels, from large allegorical paintings to banners for tourneys, costumes for masques, sets for the theater (which Alfonso delighted in) and perhaps the occasional crucifix or emblem of chastity for the ducal mistress's bedroom. Dosso had to second-guess the veering tastes of his boss--flatter him, keep him interested. And then there were the courtiers to deal with...
Serious Lotto scholarship, based on newly unearthed documents (including Lotto's studio journal), didn't begin until the late 19th century. When Bernard Berenson wrote the monograph that defined Lotto's oeuvre in 1895, he caused a scandal by throwing out scores of pseudo-Lottos. Collectors, particularly ducal ones in Britain, were enraged by the high-handedness with which this young, upstart American Jew downgraded their swans to ducks, but the fact was that Berenson was 90% right in his Lotto reattributions. From this point the critical overhaul of Lotto slowly began...
...politics came into the study of art history, along with the more familiar ones of iconography, style, subject matter and patronage. The old division between "high" and "decorative" arts ceased to hold. The once "merely" ornamental object came to be as full of meaning as a nude or ducal portrait. The more that was known about the world's art, the more there was to know. An obvious example, which suggests the kind of shifting sands on which "definitive" edifices of art history are built, has been the ongoing reattribution of once accepted Rembrandts by a team of Dutch scholars...
...play is an adaptation of The Revenger's Tragedy, a preposterous Elizabethan melodrama. It depicts an Italian ducal court, stuffed to the gills with lecherous courtiers. The action is chock full o' deceit and betrayal, with a healthy dose of gratuitous violence, and lashings and lashings of sexual misconduct. The original (anonymous) author was so out of control that the play ends with only three characters still standing. This production lowers the tally to zero, although the last living soul succumbs, somewhat improbably, to a chronic case of backache...