Word: roundels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Naturally, secular art was more relaxed. The homosexual content of Greek art is lovingly preserved in a tiny blue glass roundel made in Alexandria in the late 3rd century A.D. Called a portrait of "Gennadios most accomplished in the musical art," and rendered with innumerable scratches of a needle on a sheet of gold leaf, it presents a young man who, from his curly hair, might be a cousin of Leonardo's boyfriend Salai. It is not, of course, the only masterpiece of portraiture in the show. The tradition of the Roman portrait bust was kept and amplified among patrician...
...tiny blot on the elaborate escutcheon of heraldry, one must be a herald. The author, director of the German General Roll of Arms, explains the code of identification that was already fiendishly complex in the 12th century. It is no use. Even introductory definitions flutter toward mystification ("Fountain. A roundel barry wavy argent and azure"). Fortunately, the book's 1,700 illustrations fill this simple information gap with a tournament of griffins rampant and bends sinister. They may be best perused couchant (lying down but with head erect...
Embroidery is essentially decorative. As illusion, it is hobbled by the pattern of stitches, which could never attain the fluidity of line and shading that paint or wash gave. Refined as it is, with its or nue or "shaded gold" method of gold thread couched with varicolored silks, a roundel like the 16th century Spanish Adoration of the Magi (based, probably, on an unidentified Renaissance painting) is almost too limited in technique for the painting style it simulated. But in flat pattern, Renaissance and later embroiderers could and did achieve magnificent results-sometimes lighthearted and almost naive...