Word: palimpsestic
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...Continental gutters. Clearly the man liked wine and women; it is his song that Davies manages to ignore. He dismisses, for instance, the difficult but hardly inaccessible Finnegans Wake as a "monument to perversity." So much for 18 years of his subject's life-and for a palimpsest dream-epic of surpassing erudition and beauty. Davies' stumblebum Joyce is thus every bit as one-dimensional as the St. James who has been propped up by generations of acolytes...
...laboratories as a sort of talisman, is an 18th century Madonna which, on patch cleaning, turned out to have a 17th century version under it. When that in turn was tested, the restorers found a 13th century Madonna by the so-called "Master of the Magdalens" beneath. The final palimpsest, a Virgin with three eyes, two noses and a pair of bambini (see opposite, lower right), was playfully christened "Picasso's Madonna...
...artist ever possessed a city more ravenously than Giovanni Battista Piranesi did Rome. Generations of builders, from the anonymous creators of the Forum to Michelangelo and Bernini, set down that tawny palimpsest on the Tiber. It was left to a failed 18th century architect, who built one long-ignored church on the Aventine, to give the city its definitive shape: the word Piranesian, as a synonym for phantasmagoric grandeur, has entered the language of art. This month, a splendid exhibition of Piranesi's studies and engravings opened at Columbia University in Manhattan; its centerpiece...
Ingres was not out to draw from Rome a grandiose nostalgia, a la Piranesi; what fascinated him was the particularity of the city, its palimpsest of styles and periods-as in the masterly View of Santa Maria Maggiore, with its jostle of medieval tower, 16th century facades and Baroque dome. He spurned atmospheric effects (even a puff of smoke, he once remarked, should be done with a line) in favor of utter concreteness. The most-quoted remark Ingres ever made was that "drawing is the probity...
...them to say." Never has an artist worked so steadily in the austere yet cheerful light of self-scrutiny, with homage to the past, and concern for the future, without servility, repetition, or arrogance. Each composition is a new problem to be solved as well as possible, a new palimpsest of feeling to be disciplined into resonant order. Eliot's lines are absolutely applicable...