Word: leda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Silvio Baldeschi, the husband, should have been a completely happy man. He is rich, well-educated and married to Leda, a woman of opulent femininity. It makes Silvio happy just to watch Leda move, to study the changes of her face. He delights in their love as man & wife, "that mixture of violent devotion and lawful sensuality." Yet Silvio is restlessly unsure of himself. To cap the other triumphs of his life, and give himself the deep assurance that always eluded him, Silvio determines to write a great novel...
...ambition is based on nothing but urgent vanity. But when he continuously fails in his writing, Silvio persuades himself that he has "exhausted all my aggressive force in my wife's embrace." He maneuvers bewildered Leda into suggesting that until he finishes his book they should sleep apart...
What follows is predictable, yet always moving. As Silvio loses himself in his literary obsession, Leda becomes bored, is seduced by a commonplace Casanova, Silvio's barber. In a climax of selfdiscovery, Silvio realizes that his wife has been unfaithful, that he is a failure as a writer, and that most of their troubles are his own fault. Humbled, he hopes to patch up his marriage: "To accept my status as a human being ... a decent fellow . . . modestly conscious of his own limitations ... the lover, and the beloved, of a young and beautiful wife...
Nearly all of the twelve oils on display were done since Muccini's marriage last fall to a girl named Leda. Marriage takes money, so Muccini has stopped being "self-unemployed" and started working "almost hard." Hit of the show was his violet-toned portrait of Leda, a study both tender and exact. "I like to paint women," Muccini observes with a frown, "because of the great, curious attraction they have for me." He is little more articulate about his second favorite subject: "The bull attracts me as a theme in that it is always associated with a wall...
...funds, II Sodoma gave in to the pleas of his admiring patrons and worked a bit. He had well assimilated the painting techniques of his consistently great contemporaries, Da Vinci and Raphael. He had once taken the trouble to copy Da Vinci's painting of Leda, which has since been lost, and II Sodoma's copy was long mistaken for the original. He could draw, when he cared to, with serene accuracy; he knew how to round out shapes by blurring their contours (sfumato), and how to steep his fingers in rippling depths of light and shadow (chiaroscuro...