Word: putty
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...paradise regained. In the end the villainous goblins are revealed as babies, but in the author's view this makes them no less terrifying: What could be more incessant and demanding than an infant? At each turn, Sendak provides illustrations that refer to-and bear comparison, with-the putti of Raphael, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and the entire school of German Romanticism. The sprung rhythms of the text and the richly allusive paintings do not make Outside Over There inappropriate for children. Even the very young can appreciate the work on its outer level...
...whose pleasures, no matter how refined, are menaced by time. Boucher painted pleasure as though it were a perpetual state, coquetry without end, threatened by neither satiety nor boredom. The elements that constitute his afternoon kingdom take on a preternatural luxury as objects; the sky, swarming with clouds of putti and looping swags of fabric, itself acquires the crisp sheen of taffeta or Chinese silk, dyed, rinsed and gleaming; landscape and woods undulate in a feathery quiver, surprised in the act of love...
...about freshness, birth, starting new. Aurora, goddess of dawn, advances from a distant pearl-pink horizon, and a newborn baby lies squirming on a carpet of grass and flowers. In a flood of crystalline blue light, lilies open in the sky to release their freight of music-making putti. "When I turn to flowers and trees," Runge once wrote, "it becomes clearer to me how in each plant is contained a certain human spirit, idea or feeling, and it is very clear to me that it must have originated in Paradise." -Robert Hughes
...heavenly throng, many of them unfamiliar except to scholars, are a powerful sight in themselves. But their impact is strengthened by the evocative narration, spoken by Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell, and by the imaginative sequence of the pictures. Sometimes the figures almost seem to move, and the putti to dance...
...sumptuous interiors on display evoke the spacious days when every European princeling was building his own little Versailles and architects like Nash, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wyatt were adapting Italian magnificence for English country gentlemen. The modern eye can only goggle in awe at heroic staircases, ceilings bulging with putti, acres of marble floors reflecting miles of gilded plaster. Magnificence had become largely a semi-public affair, as in Queen Victoria's railway carriage (sapphire satin and tasseled draperies with a white quilted ceiling) and not merely ostentatious, as in the dining room at London's Ritz Hotel...