Word: portraited
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...fire at ground zero burned for exactly 100 days, finally going out on Dec. 19. But not before it forged a new America. The old America made its final appearance just hours before the planes hit, when the Sept. 11 New York Times featured a rather wistful portrait of American terrorist Bill Ayers. A former member of the Weather Underground who claimed credit for a string of bombings (including the Pentagon in 1972), Ayers was reminiscing with the Times reporter about the various romances of his revolutionary days, especially his "love affair with explosives." "Even today," wrote the Times...
Mercifully, although the catalog essays give an excellent account of the motives behind the portraits (the claiming of sexual and family territory, the presentation of the bride as property and so on), they don't overdo the vintage feminist rhetoric. Perhaps it is true, for instance, that the profile portrait implies male control over its subject. But where does that leave the fact that Renaissance husbands were also painted in profile? Is a woman dressed and jeweled to the nines a symbol of passivity, a man similarly kitted up one of power...
...most beautiful of the pure-profile images, not only in this show but in Renaissance painting as a whole, is the portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, circa 1488, by Domenico Ghirlandaio. She died in childbirth in 1488 at the age of only 20, and it's possible that the image was made after her death, as a kind of monument. (J. Pierpont Morgan, who kept it in the study of his library in New York City, doted on it because it reminded him of his own dead wife, Amelia Sturges.) What is certain, however, is that Ghirlandaio's rich...
Gradually, the goddess of the palazzo comes closer. She turns toward you in three-quarters view, in imitation of Flemish painting. (There had been a big vogue in Florence for artists like Hans Memling and Petrus Christus.) This shift is just beginning in Botticelli's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, but her pearl-encrusted beauty still has the idealized remoteness of myth. From the turn toward the viewer's eye would be born the modern idea of portraiture as the making of a "speaking likeness"--speaking, that is, to a viewer, rather than holding itself aloof. But absolute truth to nature...
...unpleasant meetings with his ex-wife's obnoxious boyfriend. He has lost parental control of his bright but troubled teenage daughter. Why doesn't he pack up and start somewhere new? In answering that question, Richard Russo's richly textured novel not only offers an enthralling and sometimes scary portrait of small-town life but also reveals a dignity, unexpected yet totally convincing, in its beleaguered hero...