Word: venetian
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...point and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl. Hence the vividness of Abraham's gesture in The Sacrifice of Isaac, holding his wailing son down on a rock like a man about to gut a fish, even though the landscape behind them is Venetian in its pastoral calm. In The Supper at Emmaus, the characters seem ready to come off the wall, as Christ makes his sacramental gesture over the food. This insistence, this feeling of a world trying to burst from the canvas, is epitomized in one detail of the Supper--the basket of fruit...
...here," it as much as says, "and I'm soooo smart." It is too; it creates elegant riddles of space and time, then solves them with an originality that hits the viewer like a rabbit- punch line. The lovers repose in bed, a turnstile fan lazing above them, Venetian blinds notching shadows on their backs, and outside their window looms the detective. For a moment the low growl of Marty's backyard incinerator can be heard, and then the screen whitens in an atomic flash, as if the lovers had been cremated. It is the flash of the detective...
...Georgetown home of Joseph Canzeri, a former presidential scheduler who now runs a public relations concern. Delayed slightly by the Washington Redskins' 29-27 win over the St. Louis Cardinals (occasionally even power rituals are only the second most interesting game in town), Canzeri's Venetian-style Christmas fete attracted a classic "interesting Washington mix": diplomats (Nepalese Ambassador Bhekh Thapa), members of Congress (Senators John Tower and Sam Nunn), name journalists (Columnist Mary McGrory), plus the Reaganaut social front line (Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese and Wife Ursula, along with Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver and Wife Carolyn...
...stare) "You saw it?' (disinterested gaze, combined with sip from sherry glass and lengthy stare at shoelaces) "Yes." (raised eyebrows, implication of deep passions long ago; brutal, passionate love, spurned by a lover ago; brutal, passionate love, spurned by a lover who came out of the closet on a Venetian gondola and shtupped his wife in their bridal suite...
...erudition is as thin as a museum postcard. All it retains from the beaux-arts tradition is the desire to get the highlight on the Spartan's backside right-not that it always does so. It has the calm not of classical elevation but of exhausted decadence. The Venetian setting is unfair to it, for anyone can take the water-bus back to the Scuola di San Rocco and see what Tintoretto could do with the human figure. The right place for it is Las Vegas, among the fountains of Caesars Palace and La Scultura Sinatra. -By Robert Hughes