Word: squez
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...sense, a limbering-up exercise. When Diego Velásquez was living in Rome in 1649, he was summoned to paint the portrait of Pope Innocent X. The artist was out of practice; he had done no heads for some years. So, to get his hand in, Velásquez decided to make a portrait of his color grinder and studio hand, a husky mulatto slave named Juan de Pareja. Roman cognoscenti greeted it, according to one of Velásquez's contemporaries, "with admiration and astonishment," and from then on this aloof, brooding presence on canvas with...
...Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, and the record for a private sale, an estimated $5,000,000 that was paid in 1967 for Leonardo's Ginevra dei Bend, by Washington's National Gallery of Art. The buyer of the Velásquez, Alec Wildenstein, 30, vice president of the New York firm of Wildenstein, firmly denied that he was acting on behalf of any art collector. Said he: "To buy this painting at that price is no risk. This is really cheap." Still, the expansive price staggered most art experts. "I'm stunned...
Juan de Pareja is a remarkable painting, but it is not the best Velásquez. His Rokeby Venus at Britain's National Gallery, for instance, is far more important. Similarly, the Met's Aristotle is not the best Rembrandt. The dazzling prices such paintings fetch are merely reflections of the fact that there are few Old Masters left outside museums...
Antonio Como (José Luis López Vásquez) is a once powerful industrialist reduced by an automobile accident to a virtual vegetable in his own garden. His incapacity is pitifully childlike: to entice him to drink his daily milkshake, a servant must first bare her breast. But his mind still functions with chaotic clarity as he fantasizes the possible consequences of his helplessness. He sees himself in his wheelchair careening wildly across the quiet greensward and into the swimming pool; mailed lancers from the picture that covers his office wall safe appear before...
...olive oil!" exclaimed Salvador Dali, surveying one of the dishes at a small luncheon in Nice with two new acquaintances. "It's thanks to olive oil that great painting came into existence, somewhere around the time of Velásquez, I think." After that lesson in the salad days of art, his amused friends, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, dug into the lettuce...