Word: torsos
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...think it's really artsy. It wasn't in a skanky way." Thus did America's big sister, Miley Cyrus, describe a Vanity Fair photo by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz of herself, tousled and clutching a blanket to her torso. Many parents of fans of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, on the other hand, saw not an homage to classical portraiture but a topless 15-year-old. Um, no, they demurred. That was totally in a skanky...
Deep in the Prado Museum's massive new Goya exhibition hangs a muted watercolor titled One Can't Look. Completed some time in the years before 1815, it depicts a prisoner, his torso draped in cloth, with ropes dangling from his tensed limbs. There is no hood over his head, no box beneath his feet, and what initially appear to be outstretched arms turn out, upon closer inspection, to be tattered folds of cloth. Yet it is almost impossible to look at this small work and not be reminded of the more recent image of a hooded prisoner...
...comment on the transience of things, but Goya's piles of lifeless fish and game lend unexpected violence to this theme: the white fur of a rabbit's belly exposes the wound where it was shot; the blank eyes of a lamb's skull look disconsolately at its butchered torso. Equally unsettling, a large painting of The Taking of Christ is notable less for the sorrowful figure at its center than for the jeering, crazed mob that surrounds him. The same menacing irrationality appears in disturbing later works such as The Burial of the Sardine and Procession of Flagellants...
...business suit or polo shirt that other stars of the '50s and '60s wore. The present was too puny a place to confine him. But put him in a toga or a military uniform from any millennium, or strip him to the waist to reveal that finely muscled torso, then let his tense, intense baritone voice articulate a noble notion, and you had Hollywood's ideal of Mensa beefcake. In the era of the movie epic, he was the iconic hero, adding to these films millions in revenue, plenty of muscle and 10 IQ points. The movie Heston was almost...
...Heston was surely a movie Colossus, made to be seen on the wide screens that proliferated in the 50s. Or, even better, on a tall one - the CinemaScope frame should have been stood on its side to do justice to his star bulk, physically and psychologically. Beyond the stupendous torso, he gave the impression of thinking out his dialogue before he spoke it; he was a pensive glamour boy. Like fellow postwar stars Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, he'd tense his neck muscles and speak in a sonorous growl that brought authority and menace to his speeches; he could...