Word: sigismund
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Free and Faithful. Alexis Sigismund Weissenberg realizes now that his problem was not the critics who switched from cooing to carping. Nor was it the managers who booked him into that deadly round of whistle-stop tours called Community Concerts. His problem was the quandary of every young performer: "He must perform early for an audience to develop his personality. On the other hand, the inner gifts need development privately. If these are developed in front of the public, many things are exaggerated, experimental, uncertain...
Backbreaking Gesture. The reliquary bust of St. Sigismund (see color page) demonstrates the multiple origins of Polish art. Given by Polish King Casimir the Great to the cathedral in Plock in 1370, the gilt object commemorates the martyred king of Burgundy, killed by the Franks during the 6th century, who became so popular that three kings of Poland took the name of Sigismund. The crown, studded with tourmalines, diamonds, pearls and sapphires, was commissioned in Venice nearly 150 years before the making of the bust, which was fashioned in Germany...
Polish artistry drew on the resources of Europe. During the early 16th century reign of Sigismund I, Italian Renaissance artists were at work in Poland. Even two centuries later, the most famous master in the country bore the name of Bernardo Bellotto, a nephew of Canaletto. A court painter from 1767 to 1780, he used a camera obscura to obtain perfect perspectives for his city scapes. After the destruction of Warsaw during World War II, his paintings were so accurate that they were used to reconstruct demolished monuments and buildings. The horn of the Wieliczka salt miners, made...
...Hals and Rembrandt painted citizen companies of harquebusiers, Polish burghers formed shooting fraternities. Their aim was to defend their city walls; more often they were social militias. Their targets were wooden birds atop staffs, a custom recalled in the Cracow fraternity's emblem, which was the gift of Sigismund Augustus in 1565, with its silver cock resplendent in royal crown and symbolically attached by a chain to its perch. Poland has been partitioned out of existence only to re-emerge as a nation, changed again under present-day Communism, but its ancient traditions are preserved...
...satisfied by a number of men." He named four specific adulterers: John Cohane, 50, a U.S. businessman living in Ireland whom the court described as a "self-confessed wolf" with "the morals of a tomcat"; Harvey Combe, 37. onetime press officer at London's Savoy Hotel; Baron Sigismund von Braun. 52, brother of Rocket Scientist Wernher, who was counselor of West Germany's London embassy until 1958, and is now his government's U.N. observer in New York; and an unidentified partner who had been photographed in the nude with the duchess. The judge did not spare...