Word: venetian
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Priest to Poet. He was born (1749) in the Venetian town of Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto). His parents were Jews; his original name was Emanuele Conegliano. But his father changed the family faith, and Emanuele took the names of his baptizer. Bishop Lorenzo da Ponte. Aided by the bishop. Da Ponte became a Roman Catholic deacon...
...Handsome, intelligent, ardent." Da Ponte was also totally irreligious, unscrupulous and dishonest. Of the three Venetian rules-"A little Mass in the morning, a little gamble in the afternoon, and a little lady in the evening"-he paid lip service to the first, indulged rarely in the second, concentrated wholeheartedly on the third. While priest of San Luca in Venice, he took as his mistress Angioletta Bellaudi, a married woman who had been little better than a prostitute since the age of ten. Their first child barely missed being born on a sidewalk, with Father da Ponte probably acting...
...whizzing variety of incident must be duplicated by musical, visual, verbal, choreographic variety of treatment. Seldom, thanks to Scene Designer Oliver Smith and Costume Designer Irene Sharaff, has calamity been more glowingly or sumptuously caparisoned; such things as the stage set of Lisbon and the Guardi-like Venetian figures are superb. And seldom has so complicated a show received such expert and animated staging as Tyrone Guthrie has provided...
Another touchstone is the mirror, developed by Venetian craftsmen. Observes Mary McCarthy: "The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real." In its decay, Venice is frozen in a kind of narcissistic trance with each Venetian "a connoisseur of Venice," and somehow slightly saddening in his obsessive concern with sacred artistic relics...
...Lust for Beauty. In its heyday, Venice pioneered the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, the gambling casino, and the ghetto (though no Renaissance power was less overtly anti-Semitic). Many of these reflect what Author McCarthy regards as the persistent Venetian style and temperament-dry, succinct, tough-minded. In the 18th century, the last of the doges, handing the ducal cap to an attendant, remarked matter-of-factly, "I won't be needing this any more." Venice can boast no profound thinkers, no religious martyrs, no native-born legendary lovers...