Word: leonardo
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Whether done as studies or for their own sake, all the drawings are strangely affecting. Leonardo's Leda-possibly a study for the painting that has been lost-has a sensual rhythm not often revealed by Leonardo. Rembrandt's landscapes and village scenes are masterful mixtures of meticulousness and freedom. Holbein could almost carve with his crayon, and Rubens, with his delicate and flowing line, could transform an act of drudgery into an act of grace. Somehow, the workings of genius are never more clear than in drawings of the quality of the collection at Chatsworth...
...them for clues to their secrets, for almost nothing else told so much about how they built up their compositions or what sort of scene or gesture would catch their eye and cry out for immediate recording. But they were not only blueprints; they were often masterpieces in themselves. Leonardo's Leda (see opposite page) almost bursts out of her paper world; a landscape by Rembrandt sweeps up the eye, leads it to fill in details where the artist left only hints...
...remains unhappily true that before then they can do nothing. It hardly matters that wherever he moves, Philip Kerr (as Leonardo) creates a patch of splendid resilience and vitality so powerful that he draws the Bride (Ann Lilley Kerr) into the circle of his power; she and Leonardo's wife (Pat Fay in an unhappily neutral role) flash and charm in his presence. If anybody has duende Kerr has; he explains better than Lorca can how Leonardo manages to drag the Bride along like "the pull of the sea." Yet out of what, in this production, does he drag...
Neither bride nor groom cares much about these tribal parental interests; but on their wedding day a member of the murdering family, Leonardo, sweeps the bride he loves out of the village ritual, and independent as a "shooting star," rides off with her. Feuding at last, the groom chases after them; the two men meet and kill each other. The bride makes a definite return to the village, announcing that she has followed the rule of custom at least in that she remains caste--and so leaves Leonardo to be the tragic protagonist, the only individual outside the force...
...blood, horses, water, rose, carnation, snow--blood in particular, because blood is the center of the tragedy's force. It is the link between generations, and is therefore also the past, the necessity to procreate, the vendetta--the entire culture that comes together at the wedding and presumably makes Leonardo's defeat heroic and inevitable. In the face of all this formidable blood, the H.D.C. production's cast seems faintly embarrassed...