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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking [...]
She was the perfect beauty. Beloved of prince and painter, Simonetta Vespucci was the Renaissance ideal. … The visage of a ravishing, young woman appears again and again in the art of Sandro Botticelli, Early Italian Renaissance painter. It is a face that is almost as familiar to art lovers all over the world as [...]
After generations of trial and error, mostly error, man’s age old dream of flying was realized near the end of the eighteenth century in the form of the hot air balloon. This was followed by several decades where daring aeronauts gave play to their imaginations by constructing ever more fanciful contraptions and performing increasingly startling [...]
On a narrow, low lying strip of coastal country in Northern Europe, scarcely two hundred miles long, a country so water logged that enemies and rivals spoke of it as mud flat, there arose in the seventeenth century one of the great civilizations of the world. The golden age of the Dutch republic stands out [...]
A macabre gaiety pervaded Berlin like an intoxicating smog. There was no shortageof drink, drugs, or beautiful women. “There are two kinds of places,” wrote a contemporary of Bertolt Brecht, ” those one talks about, and those one doesn’t talk about but frequents just the same”, including such dives as the Eldorado nightclub, “where the [...]
We know a vast amount of what went on in Versailles at the court of the Louis XIV, especially between the years 1691 and 1723, when the French monarchy, having reached the apogee of its power, was descending and slowly wending its way to the murderous French Revolution. Much of what we know comes from [...]
“In its dissected form, the Belles Heures is an immersive look at life, death and devotion in 15th-century France. Its seven picture-book insertions distinguish it from other books of hours and amount to a remarkable cache of well-preserved medieval painting. They look back to Giotto’s 13th-century frescoes and ahead to the Northern Renaissance.” The “Belles [...]
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (Alphonse KARR, Les Guêpes 1849) The more things change, the more they stay the same. Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton examine how French culture in the eighteenth century projected these new attitudes of lavishness and finesse within bourgeoisie and upper class society: The central premise of elite social behavior was [...]
Here lies the man who boldly hath run through More villainles than England ever knew; And ne’er to any friend he had was true. Here let him then by all unpitied lie, And let’s rejoice his time was come to die. ( Colonel Blood Epitaph ) …One day in 1671 Blood, disguised as a ‘parson’ [...]
Marketing and advertising wars are often drawn out, protracted affairs giving credence to the expression “War is hell;but who knew it looked like crap? It is entertaining when no one follows the modern version of the Marquess of Queensbury rules of engagement… At least that’s what you’d conclude if you submitted to a queasy-making new [...]
