Word: borgias
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...reigning Sword of Islam wields it only so long as he can keep his enemies at bay. The enemies are many, the proliferation of pretenders spawned by his multi-wived Moslem relatives. But on his side the Imam has absolute powers : Macbeth's castle and the Borgia palaces were holiday resorts compared with present-day Yemen, where ten of the current Imam's brothers and most of his dozen sons have died violently in family infighting and palace intrigues...
...imprisoned in an atmosphere of Renaissance marble contrasting with improvised wooden partitions, inhibited in their talks with each other and especially with their accompanying conclavists (with whom they are forbidden to discuss the balloting). Even their meals, in a temporary refectory set up amid Pintoricchio frescoes in the Borgia apartments, offer little comfort. Cracked one Vaticaner when he heard that the cardinals' cooks would be six sisters from the Order of Santa Marta: "That alone will be a great encouragement to conclude the conclave quickly...
Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara and his wife, Lucrezia Borgia. Bellini had called on the young talent of Titian to help finish the great canvas. After Bellini's death in 1516, Titian-who became the new Venetian master-won the commission to paint three other large, allegorical paintings for the duke's Renaissance study. As an added service, Titian repainted sections of the Feast to make it accord with the more luxury-loving tastes of his time-and, incidentally, to accord more with his own oils...
...with the charm of skilled Actor Jack Lemmon. All the Lemmon twists could not make palatable a character who genially blackmailed his loving mother while planning the death of his brother for the insurance. Lacking either the spoofing playfulness of Kind Hearts and Coronets or the intrigue of the Borgia capers, the play amounted to a catalogue of crime with little more dramatic point or development than the police blotter...
THERE was a Renaissance count named Frederick of Montefeltro who was blind in one eye. This made him nervous, since he was unable to see what was happening on his blind side-his Borgia-minded dinner guests, for instance, might easily drop some poison in his soup. So he had a surgeon cut a notch in his nose for good peripheral vision. This incident is used by Sir Harold Delf Gillies, Britain's famed and famously light-hearted plastic surgeon, to illustrate the infinite challenges to the imagination that are found in his difficult surgical specialty. A massive...