Word: xiv
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...immense space available -- the ceilings are 115 ft. high -- French architect Michel Macary turned two of the courtyards into limestone terraces that show off, among other things, the heroic statues of Pierre Puget and a pair of rearing horses carved in Carrara marble by Guillaume Coustou for Louis XIV. The third courtyard, designed by American architect Stephen Rustow, evokes the palace of the Assyrian King Sargon II (8th century B.C.) at Khorsabad and features two 13-ft.-high winged bulls with human heads...
...Blue, Red and Green rooms were dark and forbidding, what with the stuffed ghosts and goblins guarding the French doors on Louis XIV chairs. As one servant who started with L.B.J. put it, "I've never seen anything like...
Performed in three acts, The Sleeping Beauty opens with a court scene reminiscent of the history of ballet itself. In the palace of King Florestan XIV, fairy upon fairy dance blessings on the new born Princes Aurora. With a stage full of court guests, each fairy dancer bows to the audience as if the audience was a part of the court itself. The history of ballet centers around court culture but the bows in this opening act feel somewhat jarring to the audience--its self-awareness adds a layer of artificiality to the ballet, for the audience witnesses the performance...
...Daumier do this? By fixing his pincer gaze on the theatrics of the law. In the drawing known variously as For the Defense and The Lyric Advocate, the lawyer's court robes puff out in baroque splendor -- one thinks, perhaps not irrelevantly, of Bernini's bust of Louis XIV -- on the hot air of his rhetoric, as he gestures at the man in the dock, a Jean Valjean whose simian face betrays not the slightest comprehension of what is being said on his behalf. Emphasized by the dark mass of the lawyer's sleeve, the short distance between...
...moment, their faith is pinned on Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. He is too much the populist President to take comparisons with King Louis XIV of France very kindly. But anyone who looks at how power is wielded in Russia today cannot help seeing that, to paraphrase the boastful French monarch, l'etat c'est Yeltsin. The Russian leader never aspired to the role of Sun President, around whom everything in the realm turns. But he so dominates the political landscape that it would be no exaggeration to say that as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation...