Word: ducale
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...impressive if slightly servile early image of Floridablanca, Prime Minister to the liberal Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on record an extraordinary...
...this be Rigoletto? The curtain rises on a mid-20th century New York City hotel ballroom instead of a 16th century Mantuan ducal palazzo; the Duke and his courtiers are not nobles but crime lords, and Rigoletto is a bartender, not a jester. The second scene takes place in a Little Italy tenement where Rigoletto has secreted his daughter, Gilda, and where she is wooed by the Duke, who sports a high school warmup jacket. The finale is set in a seedy, Hopperesque waterfront dive. When the Duke sings his famous La donna e mobile aria, in English, he first...
MALFI DOESN't EXIST in this production of The Duchess of Malfi. The turgid program note warns that Webster's seventeenth-century tragedy is a "waking dream." An empty lavender platform represents the ducal palace of Malfi; in Laura Shiels and Cynthia Raymond's stylized production, this psychological drama could take place anywhere or anytime within one's imagination. Shiels and Raymond interpolate dance and mime into the story to indicate the tensions beneath the Renaissance rhetoric. A veil hangs at the back of the stage, behind which a "Duchess of Imagination" flirts while the real Duchess in front disclaims...
There is an instant chic, a feeling of sophistication, in visiting auction rooms; decorated with pricey art and antique furniture, they resemble a cockney's dream of ducal halls. Sotheby's main salesroom in London, hung with chandeliers and often lined with valuable paintings, resembles a grand ballroom. Christie's, a few blocks away, has the slightly more venerable atmosphere of a London men's club. However, the principal attraction of an auction house before a sale is that it enables the viewer to make closer and longer observation of art works than he can possibly...
...monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967 and named after the Los Angeles suburb where he now lives, have attracted their share of hyperbole. One New York critic likened them to both Rubens' Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre and Mantegna's frescoes in the Ducal Palace in Mantua - which may be the silliest indulgence since Truman Capote last compared himself to Marcel Proust. However, they are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the past 20 years...