From 'Style Bubble': "I've been re-reading (for the gazillionth time) The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy and in the third book 'To Let', there is a passage which has long been noted as one of my many literary costume fantasies..."
The Forsyte Saga also happens to be one of Amy's favorite adaptations.
"Shakespeare's Cleopatra may have been darkened by 'Phoebus's amorous
pinches', but in Tiepolo's magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in
Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into
her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn't
until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent
his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra's exoticism became
once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing
about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller,
dark-eyed and tousle-haired." ("The Most Wicked Woman In History," The Guardian)
Image: Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra
Related from the Archives: Maggie the Cat and Lord Byron
"Perrottet provides a peculiar fusion of the historic grand tour as practiced by foppish 18th-century aristocrats and the extreme vacations taken by Americans who share the author's age and interestst. As the author compares his trip to both the ancient journey and to
contemporary tourism, the reader gets the sense that it's not the
vacation spot so much as the act of packing up and hitting the road —
the timeless attempt to break with the ordinary — that matters." (From the "Escape" issue of Boldtype)
Image: Portrait of a Young Man ca. 1760-65
My homage/contribution to Objectification Thursday.
Image: From my personal refrigerator collection, a Portrait of Baron Joseph Vialetes de Mortarieu by Ingres
Skulls were much in Byron's mind at this time. The Newstead gardener had accidentally dug up what Byron took to be the skull of "some jolly friar or a monk of the abbey, about the time it was demonasteried." He had it polished and mounted as a drinking cup. --p. 19, Byron by Elizabeth Longford.
Image: Proposition for a Posthumous Portrait by Douglas Gordon from the new issue of Artkrush and on view at the Tate Britain.
A first-hand account of Louis XVI's death by guillotine has been unearthed and will be auctioned off by Christie's in June. Charles Henri Sanson, the king's executioner, is the author of the letter, written within a few weeks after the January 21, 1793 beheading. Louis' wife Marie-Antoinette lost her head nine months later. ("Louis XVI was 'brave on the scaffold, wrote executioner")
"I felt I must go out alone and take the air along some paths that were bordered by flowering laurels. I had almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo when I heard behind me a well-known step, short, quick, irregular. I turned about on the instant as Vincent rushed towards me, an open razor in hand. My look at that moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running towards the house." ("When Genius Met Madness," Telegraph)
One of the things he loved best about Paris was the book shopping. He said, "I suffer from the malady of bibliomania," and he spent most of his spare time in Paris perusing the bookshops. By the time he got back to the U.S., he had purchased enough books to fill two hundred fifty feet of shelves. (from The Writer's Almanac)
From the Archives: Library Envy Part III
"Bal donné au Czar", by contrast, is not just inédit but quite unsuspected. These are the notes Flaubert took, in June 1867, after attending a ball at the Tuileries given by Napoleon III for Alexander II of Russia and William I of Prussia. The mock self-importance with which Flaubert reported his invitation in a letter to Caroline – “Their Majesties wish to inspect me as one of France’s more splendid monuments” – indicates that he was well aware of the artist’s status on such occasions: as a minor piece of table-dressing. In any case, the high politics of the “Three Emperors Summit” pass him by; here he is the professional writer hoovering up usable detail at a grand society event. Thus he has an eye for the Tsar’s elastic-sided boots, of which he disapproves, the food offered to below-the-salters like himself (cold salmon and a glass of Saint-Péray), the jewellery, the flirting, and the goody-bags one of the Emperor’s equerries distributes. Some of Flaubert’s more extended jottings – a lyrical description of a night-time parade of bedizened women in the gaslit garden – already have an embryonic fictional feel to them. Their most plausible destination would have been the project known (in one of its many vestigial manifestations) as Sous Napoléon III. ("Lost Fragments from the Life of Flaubert," by Julian Barnes for the Times UK)
Objectification: "Legend has it that the pale, chubby roundness
of tortellini was modelled on the navel of Venus, the goddess of love.
And Marie Antoinette's breasts became the mould for saucer-style
champagne glasses." (The Courier-Mail, "Labour for Love")
Obsession: Colin Firth (In answer to the question, "What does love feel like?") "I think the word is too small for what it is. It is bizarre that you can use the same word for your lover and your firstborn child as for your piece of pizza... (and about "Head over heels love") It's a very dangerous state. You are inclined to reckless
ness and kind of tune out the rest your your life and everything that's been important to you. It's actually not all that pleasurable. I don't know who the hell wants to get in a situation where you can't bear an hour without somebody's company." (Elle magazine)
Decay: Cimitero Acattolico, the final resting place of Keats and Shelley in Rome, is crumbling into ruin and may soon close unless some "sensitive and generous souls" come to its rescue. "'It might make one in love with death, to be buried in so sweet a
place,' Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of the cemetery, just before ending
up buried there himself after drowning off the Italian coast in 1822." (via 
Golden Rule Jones, forwarded by Lauren of Lux Lotus.)
