Word: villone
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...Thayer, could have written it." No one is apt to quarrel with him, for Author Thayer has reached an Everest of vulgarity that may well stand as a mark until standards of literary decency are chucked entirely. His fancy is that Mona Lisa is written by French Poet Francois Villon; it turns out to be a between-the-sheets foray into the political brawls and sexual excesses of Renaissance Italy. It begins with the hero. Giovantonio Del Balzo-Orsini, lying under his mother's bed as she submits to her wifely duties, and it maintains that level of fictional...
...unnoticed, scratch out a life al fresco in the shadows of Notre-Dame, the teeming Les Halles markets and the Seine bridges. The French of Paris call their dedicated bums les clochards (ones who limp), and think of them as the spiritual descendants of the great and vagrant Francois Villon...
...Though Villon has made more than 600 prints in his long career, the Eclogues was his first major try at book illustration. Like all lasting illustrations, his works liberate rather than confine the imagination of the reader. He presents no bluntly defined scenes but bathes the pages in storms, mists and sunny fields of color. His tenuous drawing comes through the color only by degrees; then it whispers convincingly of the lofty world and divine forms that Virgil more robustly describes. Whether Villon is picturing the morning sun or a fertile valley at evening (opposite), he excites the observer...
...Villon's father, a stern Norman notary named Duchamp, sent him to Paris to study law. The youth took up painting instead, changed his name to conceal the fact. Later, two brothers and a sister joined him on Montmartre. One, a cubist sculptor, called himself Duchamp-Villon. Painters Suzanne and Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase} Duchamp braved their father's wrath by using the family name. Marcel was by far the most successful artist of the family, but he was bored by his work. He finally gave up painting for chess...
...Villon kept hard at art. He was not so much bored as boring -a dry and impecunious cubist. He made a living from newspaper cartoons, architectural renderings and engravings of paintings by his more famous friends. Meanwhile, decade by decade, his art mellowed, the cubist dregs dissolved, and the professorial dryness came to be replaced by a joy in life. At 70, he began to receive the homage of painters young enough to be his grandchildren. Now, at 79, he is among the prides of Paris...