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Last week in Genoa some 2,000 visitors passed through the austere Villa Doria, examining and occasionally touching 189 graceful and lustrous stringed instruments, including one cello, 16 violas, 171 violins. The oldest was a small, ornamented Gasparo da Salo, dated 1609; the most famous was Paganini's own powerful Guarneri del Gesu, given to him (by a wealthy Leghorn merchant) on the condition that nobody else would ever perform on it; the most prevalent were modern models patterned closely after Stradivari designs. Because of their popularity among wealthy foreign fiddlers, there were no Strads at all available...
Heaven only knows how many women have despairingly practiced the Mona Lisa smile since Leonardo da Vinci painted her around 1505. And what was she smiling about anyway? Sixteen years ago Tiffany...
Cupids for Parade. For victory pageants, knights went all out for display, borrowing the services of such artists as Holbein, Dtirer. Leonardo da Vinci and Cellini for helmet designs and devices that were etched, gilded, embossed and damascened on the steel plate. The best Florentine painters of the day were called on to decorate ceremonial shields and banners. So dazzling were the results that one of Milan's great armorers, Tomaso Missaglia, was not only knighted but exempted from all taxes as well. Such splendid casques as Milan's other great armorer, Philip de Negroli, made for France...
...Stuttgart, U.S. Mezzo-Soprano Grace Hoffman was asked to sing Amneris in Aïda, despite the fact that she had to sing in Italian while the rest of the cast sang in German. She wowed the crowd. In Amsterdam, U.S. Coloratura Soprano Marilyn Tyler accepted a rush call to sing Violetta in La Traviata, although she sang in unpopular German while the rest of the cast sang in Italian. After the first act, a year's contract was offered to her. In Munich, U.S. Tenor Howard Vandenburg arrived unannounced, auditioned and was hired on the spot. All over...
...born four years after Waterloo and died in the year World War I began. He was a high-spirited boy (or what would now be called a delinquent) who matriculated at one of New York's most cultivated households, that of Mozart Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, where he learned a respect for languages and a contempt for bourgeois morality. He was to need both...