Word: roomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time to act is now. But the Commerce and Interior departments have waged constant guerrilla warfare against any effort to make good on the President's prior commitments. Meanwhile, the President's chief of staff John Sununu has taken to questioning aspects of the greenhouse theory. There is room for debate over the exact magnitude of climate change that will result from CO2 emissions, but no respectable scientist denies that if humanity keeps pouring gases into the atmosphere, the earth will heat up. The U.S. has spent several trillion dollars over the past 40 years buying insurance against a Soviet...
...overdetermined. But with Giulio, design and invention were inseparable, and their combination is worn so lightly that one may not realize how difficult were the problems he set for himself. How do you create long processional friezes of figures based on a Roman triumph, as in the Stucco Room at Palazzo Te, without monotonously repeating poses and gestures? How do you cram an imagined temple with such an excessive throng of spectators that the Circumcision of Christ looks more like a PEN dinner thrown by Gayfryd Steinberg, and yet keep the action coherent? Virtuosity was in Giulio's nature...
Some were almost impenetrably learned: no ordinary visitor today knows enough about Renaissance astrology to "read" the arcane designs in the Room of the Winds. Others are quite straightforward, like those in the chamber in which Federico had Giulio and his assistants paint life-size effigies of his favorite horses, with their names written underneath them. In between there is an amazing variety of images, some of which seem to teeter between grandeur and farce in a way unheard of in Renaissance art before...
...Room of Psyche, the physical effervescence and the characters of the picnicking gods are set forth as explicitly as in a Roman pantomime, and one can easily see why Giulio had such an influence on Rubens and Poussin. Lusting, half-tipsy, bare bottomed and prone to fits of hilarity and rage, Giulio's Olympians cavort and cuckold one another across the walls to the accompaniment of all manner of phallic puns. When sword-brandishing Mars is seen pursuing Adonis, whom he has just caught in flagrante with his wife Venus, even the antique statues in the background display their truncated...
...course the most popular thing in Palazzo Te, now as then, is the Room of the Giants, where Giulio (whose taste for apocalyptic catastrophe may have been sparked by talking to Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre...