Word: rococo
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...attempt to draw stark materials into a tumultuous play of form and light. The skeins of trusswork, the rippling stairways and the wafflepatterned underside of the terraces combine in an optical tangle compounded by a riot of reflecting surfaces. Without resorting to molded ornament, the atrium reaches toward a rococo extravagance. Says Jahn: "Elements that break the norm --romance, fantasy, surprise--are what put architecture beyond engineering...
...hypnotized by the spell Lynch has woven around them-especially the lustrous Francesca Annis, as Paul's mother, who whispers her lines with the urgency of erotic revelation. In those moments when Annis is onscreen, Dune finds the emotional center that has eluded it in its parade of rococo decor and austere special effects. She reminds us of what movies can achieve when they have a heart as well as a mind...
...heirs-Boucher, Pater, Lancret-would embody rococo. But Watteau died in 1721, just over a year before Louis XV was crowned. Thus the artist whose feathery trees and pastoral scenes of gallantry seem the very essence of rococo sensibility only reached the edge of the rococo. His time was that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. If the intimacy of his art seems so far from the bemusing pomp of Versailles, it is partly because his imitators lagged; it took time to convert the scenography of Watteau's fugitive, shadowed mind into a system of decor suitable...
...hill. The bar is really an old-fashioned soda fountain: you can have whatever you want, ice cream, milkshakes, sodas. The living room is like a garden, with hundreds of flowers printed on the couches and rugs. The dining room is more of the same: mahogany and gilt with rococo flourishes...
...cerebral," muses one female crook, "but not about women." With a dash of irony and a hint of irreverence, Ann Cornelisen puts that theory to the test in her puckish new novel. Determined to tease men out of their cozy gallantry, and also to expose Italy's rococo inefficiency, a sextet of foreign women in a sleepy Tuscan village decide to rob a local mail train. Plotting the crime as if it were a script, they adopt literary aliases, don disguises and then, without much difficulty, carry off the million-dollar theft. The lackadaisical local police force instantly sets...