Word: venetian
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...Republic of Venice, from 1415 to 1525, planned or attempted about two hundred assassinations for purposes of its foreign policy. Among the prospective victims were two emperors, two kings of France and three sultans. The documents record virtually no offer of assassination to have been rejected by the Venetian government. From 1456 to 1472, it accepted twenty offers to kill the Sultan Mahomet II, the main antagonist of Venice during that period. In 1514, John of Ragusa offered to poison anybody selected by the government of Venice for an annual salary of fifteen hundred ducats . . . In the same period...
There is also, all too briefly, an appearance by Colin Blakely, an actor of consummate accomplishment. Blakely - who plays a Venetian official - has a self-effacing power that makes him one of the best actors now at work on the English stage. One would have thought those qualities qualification enough for the perfect Galileo...
...rooted in his own time and society. Moreover, he was sure that that society-optimistic, promethean England with its empire and its burgeoning industrial revolution, now rising from its triumph over Bonaparte-was in fact on the edge of collapse. This is implicit in Turner's Venetian paintings, where the fretted and tottering profiles of the once omnipotent city melt (so ravishingly, and with such implied finality) into their last erosion by light and water...
Venice, as every visitor learns, is built on low islands in a huge, protected lagoon. When exceptionally high tides strike-which occurs about 25 times a year-the charming Italian city is flooded. Last week for instance Venetians had to cross the Piazza San Marco on wooden gangplanks; the great square was once again ankle-deep in sea water. Though floods have plagued Venice for centuries (one was recorded in A.D. 885), lately they have been getting worse. Main reason: to permit the passage of large ships, the Italians have widened and deepened the three channels through the 38-mile...
Such figures as the majestic green-feathered angel and the rigid Madonna on the lunette fresco from Sant'Angelo in Formis (see color overleaf) are flesh-made-geometry. Even when a mosaicist tried to be more "naturalistic," as the Venetian artist who executed a Head of an Apostle in Rome around 1218 seems to have done, the medium itself-thousands of glass cubes like colored teeth-automatically formalized the work...