Word: courtiers
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...masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved the lineaments of a world soon to be buried like Pompeii, along with Sargent's own reputation, beneath the ash and rubble of World War I. Of course, he had to be revived. In Reagan's America, you cannot keep a good courtier down. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroiding, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. And the public that...
...combative horses, whose armed riders look dwarfed and almost incidental; a 17th century Deccan woman, jeweled and draped for display rather than mobility, feeding a bird in an imaginary hillside landscape suggestive of the Italian Renaissance; a painfully detailed sketch, Leonardo- like in its medical curiosity, of a shriveled courtier on his deathbed...
...Well; after every ones' hearts are tied for eternity, the fickle finger of dramatic fate (offstage) pushes the King of France off the ledge of mortality. Since the royal good time girl must needs become a regal career women, it's Cupid who gets the shaft; as No. 1 Courtier Berowne (Gregory Welch) exclaims woefully, "our wooing doth not end like an old play, Jack hath not Jill...
Perhaps it is all as simple as that old tale about Christopher Columbus and the egg. The explorer was being mocked at a dinner by a courtier who declared that Spain was full of mariners as bold and adventurous as he. If Columbus had not discovered the new route to the Indies, said the courtier, someone else would inevitably have done so. Columbus asked for an egg and then challenged all the guests to make it stand on end. They passed the egg from hand to hand, some trying in vain to make it stand, some arguing that it could...
...their work and themselves into the world of commerce, celebrity, hostility and jealousy. "Envy, envy, envy!" cries Capote. "The people simply cannot endure success over too long a period of time. It has to be destroyed." Not since Benvenuto Cellini has there been a major talent with such a courtier's view of his art. His social timing and instinct for wounding gossip were displayed in published sections of his controversial work in progress, Answered Prayers. He refers to it as his "big ace up my sleeve," though since his death neither his publisher nor his friends have been...