Word: giovanni
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...remote-controlled bomb obliterated anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino and five police bodyguards last week, no one could miss the message: the Mob would kill anyone, anywhere, in its campaign of intimidation. The brave efforts of a handful of Sicilian judges and prosecutors like Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, assassinated in a similar blast in May, had won only feeble support from Rome. Nonetheless, the courts managed to put more than 400 suspected mobsters on trial and convict the vast majority of them. But now the Mafia has challenged the prosecutors to back off, and its bloody taunt has thrust...
...Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone...
Still, you may luxuriate in the landscapes and in the performances -- by Rupert Graves, Helen Mirren, Giovanni Giudelli and (of course) Helena Bonham Carter -- that subvert caricature. And you are permitted to weep at the film's climax: a last embrace of two not-quite lovers, closest at this instant of separate, mutual despair. It is a sweet, seductive, haunting final shot...
These things may seem obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of the real motivation that drives hardcore classical music listeners when they cloak their enjoyments with a veil of esotericism, exchanging knowing winks and nods at the sales counter when someone asks who the composer of "Don Giovanni...
...nature of stone goes straight into Mantegna's formal system. It is hard and precise, never atmospheric: he has none of the mellowness of his relative Giovanni Bellini. None of his shapes are fudged or merely alluded to. You see every pebble and crack in the rocks, and of course every line of expression on the human face; in his Portrait of a Man, circa 1470-75, the folds of the red costume have the density of marble, the eyes are gray agate, and the net of lines around them and on the brow is described down to the point...