Word: leonardos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Minichiello, guzzling coffee to stay awake, was sometimes brusque, sometimes polite, alternately vague and acute. As the Jet approached Rome's Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino airport, Minichiello issued an elaborate set of instructions to the control tower. The plane was to be directed to a remote parking spot; a "police chief" was to drive up alone and unarmed, and come aboard in his shirtsleeves...
Beset as they are by snarled traffic and chaotic driving conditions, the citizens of Rome could scarcely believe the words uttered at Leonardo da Vinci Airport by the visiting dignitary. "The U.S. hopes to be able to benefit," said U.S. Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe, "from Italy's well-known achievements in the field of transportation, and to cooperate in attacking the problems of rapid urban transportation." In Italy to call on the Pope and to visit his parents' birthplace at Pescara, Volpe had an embarrassing admission to make when he turned up half an hour late...
Legacy and Vision. Leonardo seemed to feel something like a passion for his human subjects only when he happened to view them with disgust or satirical malice. He was powerfully attracted by strange faces and would sometimes follow some chance passer-by all day long in order to memorize his countenance. His pen caricature of five grotesque heads shows five prototypes of stupidity, cruelty, narrow-mindedness, arrogance and rage...
Latter-day biographers, including Britain's Sir Kenneth Clark, have presumed that Leonardo was a homosexual, citing as part of their evidence the equivocal smile of the Mona Lisa and the faintly cold, faintly remote quality of his drawings...
...Leonardo was supremely a man of infinite possibilities-so many that only a fraction of them were ever realized. He should have devoted himself to painting, say the painters. To engineering, say the engineers. To city planning, say the planners. To anatomy, say the anatomists. His drawings most completely preserve and record what he dreamed and was. His legacy, his inspiration and his exasperating, incomplete genius are all there...