Word: leda
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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...
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...
Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History put on a little show this week to make the weariest museum trudger smile: eight plaster statuettes of fabled animals. Among them were Pegasus sitting exhausted on a cloud, Leda tête-à-tête with a Donald-Duckish swan, Brer Rabbit battling the rude Tar Baby, Androcles nursing a huge, unhappy lion, and the elastic-nebbed elephant and tenacious crocodile of Kipling's Just So Stories. What the sculptures lacked in naturalism they more than made up for in naturalness...