Word: sphinx
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...image of Cléo de Mérode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cléo!" when she walked into Maxim's, fused with those of Cleopatra and the Sphinx. So what could be more natural than to make her a votive cosmetic box, filled with souvenirs of Egypt...
Unable to penetrate her mystery, (So easy to look at/So hard to define) he can only, in true poet's fashion, give her names--"sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life...scorpio sphinx in a calico dress...glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow"--and finally, simply, ask of her, "Don't ever leave me/Don't ever...
...great deal in the show that will be unfamiliar to even the most assiduous Metropolitan goer, and the general level is high. One would have to travel a long way east of New York to find objects comparable, in their fields, to the Met's tiny sphinx of Amenhotep III, modeled in a faïence of such dazzling blue that even in a glass case it seems to vibrate in front of one's eyes; or the massive silver head, possibly of the Sassanian King Shapur II; or the exquisitely elaborated 17th century flintlock gun made...
...Only a psychiatrist would know why I really did it," mused Photographic Cartoonist Alfred Gescheidt of his latest creation. After superimposing the face of Jackie Onassis on Mount Rushmore ("to show her place in history") and on the head of the Sphinx (because "that is the natural place for a woman"), Gescheidt has now fitted the former First Lady into the Mona Lisa. "The Mona Lisa is forever, and people are always interested in Jackie," said the artist. "She has the same inscrutable smile; it's dead perfect...
Kenneth Clark called Leonardo "the great Sphinx of art history," but he was also its great Rorschach blot. The past century has seen almost as many Leonardos as there have been léonardistes. Magus, "Renaissance man," supergay, world's first nonlinear thinker -the parade of stereotypes marches on. At one moment he struck the Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere...