Word: simonizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks...
...Simon concentrates on the less-known but equally compelling Gonzaga of Mantua, a city, she notes with subdued irony, that was dismissed in the 1923 edition of Cook's Guide as "of no interest except for art and history." The distinction between the two was not always apparent during the Renaissance. Like other leading families of the time, the Gonzaga schemed, fought and intermarried for almost three centuries to secure power and wealth, which they used to glorify their names with masterpieces. It was a good time for architects, painters, goldsmiths, furniture makers, costume designers and jewelers. According...
...extent of the Gonzaga art treasures was revealed in the mid-17th | century, a period marking the clan's decline. Smelling a credit crunch, dealers alighted in Mantua to bargain for works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Veronese and Van Dyke. Simon estimates that 700 paintings by these and other masters were sold, and eventually found various ways into the world's museums. One immovable prize was the Gonzaga pleasure palace at Te, the walls and ceilings of which bloomed with mural paintings that were forerunners of the mannerist style...
Even earlier, the lives of Mantua's rich and famous had grown so excessive that Cardinal Ercole, a Gonzaga, ordered controls. "His new rules," writes Simon, "called for severe restrictions in the consumption of peacocks, pheasants, and other game birds; only two kinds of roast and poultry were to be served at one time; no fish or oysters were to be offered with meats; dishes were not to be ornamented with figurines, fine inlays, bits of gold, as was the court custom." Women were limited to wearing "only one conspicuous gem" at a time...
...other Democratic candidates trailed far behind. Sen. Paul Simon (D-III) won 34 votes at the two Harvard voting locations, Sen. Albert J. Gore Jr. '69 (D.-Tenn) gained 29, Rep Richard Gephart (D.-Mo.) won eight and former senator Gary Hart collected only six votes...