Word: paragone
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Sometimes the image of the heroic victim holds up. Other times, however, the paragon of virtue is revealed -- as was Charles Stuart -- to be a very flawed human being. At which point the press, like an avenging ex-lover, typically executes an about-face and attacks with self-righteous fury, as if to say, "How dare you misrepresent yourself...
...forget Goody Two-Shoes. This paragon wades into controversy with brio. She has publicly criticized Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies and rallied British writers to think more politically. She marches for Soviet Jewry. She organizes petitions and badgers officials to help free dissident writers in jails across Europe and Africa. One of these has made history: playwright Vaclav Havel, the new Czech President. For years, from his prison cell, he exchanged letters with Pinter. The couple will visit Havel to share his triumph in February...
Giulio Romano was so well known in his time that he is the only painter mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. Famous, and rather vulgar. If Raphael was the epitome of grace among artists of the High Renaissance and Michelangelo the paragon of sublimity, then Giulio was all licentious facility. So ran the judgment of our Victorian forebears, who could not quite forgive Raphael's best pupil for his indelicacy. An air of brilliant second- rateness still clings to his name. Those who can thrust their way through the crowds in Palazzo Te in Mantua and manage a long...
...dwarfs and idiots kept for the court's amusement. Nothing human is alien to him. Everything is worthy of respect -- a respect whose sign is an unswerving attentiveness. The morality of his art is one of transparency and proud restraint. He was, as all who knew him agreed, a paragon of the phlegmatic temperament: a walking mirror whose reflections could not be argued with...
...only to find that they cannot so easily escape themselves). Puck, we realize, would make a dream host on The Love Connection, and the rude mechanicals, rehearsing "most obscenely and courageously," would surely be an instant hit on prime time. We recognize, too, that the malaprop artists' confusion of "paragon" and "paramour" is not an idle joke; the idealizing of love is as old as broken hearts...