Word: mantua
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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...
...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...
What does it matter when and where an opera is set? Does the nature of Verdi's Rigoletto fundamentally change if the action takes place in the court of France (Verdi's original intention), 16th century Mantua (his ultimate choice) or even 20th century Manhattan as long as the relationships among the characters are preserved? Adventurous stage directors, for whom tradition is the memory of the last bad performance, are answering that in many cases, it does not. "Tradition is slovenliness," exclaimed Gustav Mahler. His cry has never seemed more apt, and it is being taken up with brio...
...Modernism. When Johnson decreed that "you cannot not know history," orthodox Miesians were scandalized. Johnson had allowed himself private ironies when building for himself; the gazebo on his lake in New Canaan, Conn., is scaled down to the proportions of the famous dwarves' quarters in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, a complete antifunctionalist joke. But for a long while Johnson was too embedded in the world of high taste and big money to permit himself large public ironies: that is one of the freedoms l'architecte du roi has to abjure...