Word: lazuli
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...Clement VIII (1592-1605). In those years the most vivid and impressive aspects of papal taste came to their highest pitch, sometimes nearly bankrupting the papacy with the mania for the Antique, the demand for vast fresco cycles, fountains and pharaonic tombs, and the general love of lapis lazuli and gold...
...boyfriend Salai. It is not, of course, the only masterpiece of portraiture in the show. The tradition of the Roman portrait bust was kept and amplified among patrician families. The show is also exceptionally rich in objets de luxe, ranging from a golden Aphrodite set on a lapis lazuli shell to The Casket of Projecta, a bridal coffer, dug up in Rome late in the 18th century, but made around 375 A.D. to celebrate a marriage of Christian aristocrats. A m�lange of Christian symbol ism and the still-active images of classicism ?Nereids riding on sea serpents, Aphrodite...
...exception to the rule. He did take it with him. All of it. When the tomb was unsealed in 1922 after about 3,000 years, it disgorged a funerary trove unrivaled in history or the imagination: golden chairs and chests, pearly alabaster statuary and polychromatic bursts of gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, jasper and obsidian jewelry: some of the most beautiful body ornaments ever designed. And, of course, there was also the famous quartzite sarcophagus with its nesting of golden inner coffins that protected the mummified remains of the frail king who died about 1325 B.C., before his 20th birthday...
Indeed, Tutankhamun lived during a blaze of pharaonic wealth and power. Besides their use of gold, his artists worked in silver, alabaster, obsidian, lapis lazuli, wood, glass and gems, handling each material as masterfully as if it were clay. They had turned from much of the rigid formality that marks artworks of earlier periods to more natural poses and more intimate scenes...
...long ago-a matter of 20 years-that art nouveau was considered a minor style, deservedly forgotten. Those tendriled doorknobs and flowing pedestals, that panoply of rare materials (zebrawood, pâte de verre, lapis lazuli, champlevé enamel), that air of hothouse elegance, glazed and nuanced-what did such things amount to but decoration? And what was decoration but a sin against the purity of modern...