Word: gonzaga
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...life is precious to Bennett, a Catholic whose parents divorced 40 years ago, when pious folk did not. His mother, who disliked the rich and called the family "us common folk," moved Bill, an older brother Bob and their Hungarian grandmother from Brooklyn to Washington. There, Bennett flourished at Gonzaga High, a Jesuit school. "The only guy in the honors class to be starting on the football team," he brags. But he chafed under the discipline of the fathers. "They regarded me as a smarty-pants, and they were absolutely right," he says...
...extent of the Gonzaga art treasures was revealed in the mid-17th | century, a period marking the clan's decline. Smelling a credit crunch, dealers alighted in Mantua to bargain for works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Veronese and Van Dyke. Simon estimates that 700 paintings by these and other masters were sold, and eventually found various ways into the world's museums. One immovable prize was the Gonzaga pleasure palace at Te, the walls and ceilings of which bloomed with mural paintings that were forerunners of the mannerist style...
Even earlier, the lives of Mantua's rich and famous had grown so excessive that Cardinal Ercole, a Gonzaga, ordered controls. "His new rules," writes Simon, "called for severe restrictions in the consumption of peacocks, pheasants, and other game birds; only two kinds of roast and poultry were to be served at one time; no fish or oysters were to be offered with meats; dishes were not to be ornamented with figurines, fine inlays, bits of gold, as was the court custom." Women were limited to wearing "only one conspicuous gem" at a time...
...autobiography, Simon recalls her father's efforts to thwart her own intellectual curiosity. Here she writes with scarcely disguised bitterness of one promising Gonzaga daughter: "Her impressive knowledge of Virgil, every line, didn't matter, nor did her command of Greek, and so what if she could explain the propositions of Euclid? Her vocation was marriage...
Renaissance women like the connoisseur Isabella d'Este-Gonzaga, the poet Vittoria Colonna, the medical experimenter Caterina Sforza and Renee of France, who married into the court of Ferrara and founded a distinguished academy there, appear to have been the equal of their male counterparts in everything but the arts of war. But, as the determined faces in Simon's glittering tapestry suggest, many important victories were won in alcoves and bedrooms...