Word: medicis
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...most prestigious names in French art. One admirer is Pablo Picasso, who has a prized Balthus painting of two children in his Vallauris villa. Another is Minister of Culture André Malraux, who three months ago flabbergasted Paris by making the eccentric Balthus director of the Villa Medici, the home of the academy that France established 295 years ago in Rome in order to benefit from Italian models and taste in painting and architecture...
...French Ambassador to Lisbon in 1561, Diplomat Jean Nicot failed in his mission to marry off Queen Catherine de Medici's daughter to the King of Portugal. But Nicot won royal favor all the same by picking up in Lisbon an American weed whose most important ingredient today bears his name: nicotine. Ground into snuff, the tobacco successfully cured Queen Catherine of incessant headaches -it made her sneeze hard enough to clear out her sinuses...
...mother at six and found his vocation before his teens. There is the taunt ("Big man, big wind") by the small Michelangelo to a large fellow artist that cost the hero a smashed nose and lifelong disfigurement. There is the early patronage and early death of Lorenzo de' Medici ("77 Magnifico"). There are the later duels of wills (with Pope Julius II) and skills (with Da Vinci, Bramante, Raphael). There is the unmarried Michelangelo's dutiful, lifelong support of his brothers and of a father who believed that "working with his hands" was beneath a Buonarroti...
...three drawings by Michelangelo, the sculptor struggles to discover the proper angle for a tensely muscular leg, later carved in marble for the famous figure Night in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence. Titian is represented by a study of legs done in thick black chalk a decade before the resulting painting, Martyrdom of St. Lorenzo, was hung in the church of the Jesuits in Venice. On a sheet of paper measuring 5¼ in. by 5¾ in., Leonardo da Vinci crammed almost two dozen men and half a dozen horses in two detailed, swirling battle scenes...
...Vatican conclave from which he emerged, basket on arm, as Pope Clement XII. The Serristori loaned their priceless illuminated manuscripts, as well as two elaborately decorated Renaissance trays once used to carry water to noblewomen in labor. A plate bearing the arms of Roberto Strozzi and Maddalena de Medici marked one of the great weddings of the 16th century. A delicately inlaid table had been the gift of Clement VII to his Governor of Bologna, Francesco Guicciardini...