Word: oeil
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...Renaissance Italian design and quasiabstract German folk-art motifs, it looks like an improbable combination of the Pitti Palace and a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Inside, its bright colors (whites, golds and reds) and intimate dimensions (only 1,300 seats) give it a light, cozy ambience. Trompe l'oeil reigns: columns that appear to be marble turn out to be made of skillfully disguised plaster. Scenes from plays like Goethe's Faust and Lessing's Nathan der Weise adorn the doorways; in the auditorium, the gilt chandelier is topped with the crest of the old Saxon monarchy. It illuminates...
...however, is safe from a return of the vanquished, often dressed as an avantgarde. Today spartan modernism has been surprised in its sleep by a postmodern taste for ornament and the revival of moribund styles. Partly as a result, some artists are garnishing the edge again. Trompe l'oeil frames, tutti-frutti borders and jigsaw-cut silhouettes are multiplying in galleries that not long ago featured only trim metal runners...
...keeps this panorama of victories and defeats moving through exhaustive permutations in high gear, and the translation from Spanish by David Pritchard and Suzanne Jill Levine proceeds vigorously. Imaginative enchantments pop up everywhere: the ballroom at Marulanda, where the real exits, amid a host of trompe l'oeil imitations, are considered false; the elaborately thwarted arabesque performed by a wife who offers her husband younger women to be rid of him, while he in turn grows ever more grateful and faithful...
...granted that the successful home artist would have to study either in Düsseldorf or, more likely, in Paris. It is true that some very good American art of this period could not plausibly have been done elsewhere; for example, John Haberle's trompe-l'oeil painting A Bachelor's Drawer, 1890-94, with its laconically joky collection of mementos signifying the past lusts and present debts of a minor artist's life. Yet for every apparent isolate like Homer, there were a dozen Americans beavering away in the teaching studios of Paris, especially those...
...flickering on the walls? Wasn't that what Shakespeare meant when he had Prospero conclude his pageant by declaring that "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" would all dissolve, for "we are such stuff as dreams are made on"? Trompe l'oeil (trickery of the eye) is the artistic term for it, and Italy is full of palaces with flat ceilings painted to look vaulted and plaster made to resemble marble. Even Renaissance landlords liked to economize...