Word: mantua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Professor of the History of Architecture Howard Burns of the Graduate School of Design (GSD) is directing a project based out of a museum in Mantua, Italy, designed to recontruct a full-scale model of an early Renaissance Italian architect's home. Using only 16th-century documents, a few drawings and analyses of Renaissance era houses still standing, Burns travelled to Mantua last summer with a "research cum-design cum-construction crew" of Harvard students to begin the project...
Simon concentrates on the less-known but equally compelling Gonzaga of Mantua, a city, she notes with subdued irony, that was dismissed in the 1923 edition of Cook's Guide as "of no interest except for art and history." The distinction between the two was not always apparent during the Renaissance. Like other leading families of the time, the Gonzaga schemed, fought and intermarried for almost three centuries to secure power and wealth, which they used to glorify their names with masterpieces. It was a good time for architects, painters, goldsmiths, furniture makers, costume designers and jewelers. According...
...extent of the Gonzaga art treasures was revealed in the mid-17th | century, a period marking the clan's decline. Smelling a credit crunch, dealers alighted in Mantua to bargain for works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Veronese and Van Dyke. Simon estimates that 700 paintings by these and other masters were sold, and eventually found various ways into the world's museums. One immovable prize was the Gonzaga pleasure palace at Te, the walls and ceilings of which bloomed with mural paintings that were forerunners of the mannerist style...
Even earlier, the lives of Mantua's rich and famous had grown so excessive that Cardinal Ercole, a Gonzaga, ordered controls. "His new rules," writes Simon, "called for severe restrictions in the consumption of peacocks, pheasants, and other game birds; only two kinds of roast and poultry were to be served at one time; no fish or oysters were to be offered with meats; dishes were not to be ornamented with figurines, fine inlays, bits of gold, as was the court custom." Women were limited to wearing "only one conspicuous gem" at a time...
...small, delicately structured leaf emerges. More colored glass is added to the gas jet, layer upon layer of opaque, translucent and transparent browns, yellows, oranges and reds, and one by one petals, stamens and stems bloom into being. Paul Stankard leans back from the workbench at his home in Mantua, N.J., and his broad, open face creases into a smile. "You know what I do for a living?" he asks. "I take $25 worth of material, make love to it for a few hours and then sell...