Word: mastiffs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before his death in 1560, at 94, the fleets of this fierce Genoese had many times confirmed his native city as master of the Mediterranean. Doria ships also helped Emperor Charles V in his struggles to win Italy. Charles rewarded him with a huge mastiff - and then a princedom "for the dog to run in." The admiral kept his palace staff hopping to the tune of bosun's pipes, once exercised his princely humor by order ing all his silver flung into the sea at a banquet's end. Afterwards Andrea Doria hauled his silver up again...
Vision of Carnage. Hodgson's latest poetry is filled with an old theme: fury at human cruelty to nature, to animals, to the imagination. In most of his uncompleted The Muse and the Mastiff, this theme is put in the mouth of an ancient wild bear, who seldom has a kind word for any other animal. To Hodgson, cruelty seems to be getting worse and worse in the hands of men ("I see such carnage in the future"). As for what may come to the world that he has broodingly watched from his lonely farmhouse for so many years...
...space that Velásquez implied. Velásquez himself has been erected into a towering, plastic figure on the left. The watcher in the doorway has been raised in ominous emphasis by reducing him to black silhouette. The dwarf has become a Charlie Brown cartoon, and the mastiff transformed into Picasso's own dachshund. The mysterious, airy space of the room's depth has been chopped into emphatic fragments by the invented windows on the right...
...finishing a portrait of the King's daughter, the blonde, five-year-old Infanta Margarita. Around the demure princess bustled two noble maids of honor and two attendant dwarfs (one got, as a special favor, a pound of snow for each summer-day's work). A mastiff dozed on the floor, and in a mirror, Velàsquez occasionally caught sight of the King and Queen stopping to see how the sittings were progressing. Seized by new inspiration, Velàsquez ordered a huge canvas, quickly painted the whole mirror scene, including his own self-portrait, the only...
...rinsed Marshal Tito's silver hair. The Marshal donned a corset, a medal-spangled uniform with extremely wide red stripes down the pants, then strode off to a fashionable garden party. Behind him through lines of bowing guests, like a plainly dressed retainer showing off a gorgeous bull mastiff, came India's Jawaharlal Nehru. After several days of such festivity, the Marshal decided that he should also demonstrate that he was a Socialist man of the people. Tito thereupon upset New Delhi's snob-laden society by inviting red-turbaned railroad porters to a diplomatic reception...