Word: feasts
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...born on the feast day of Saint Igor (June 18), at Oranienbaum, on the Gulf of Finland, where his family frequently spent their summers. In his autobiography, he recalls the "sharp resinous tang of fresh cut wood" and an enormous dumb peasant, feared by all the other kids, who sang a song "composed of two syllables, the only ones he could pronounce . . . From beneath [his] red shirt he extracted a succession of sounds [by putting his right hand under his left armpit, then pumping his left arm against it] which were somewhat dubious but very rhythmic ... At home...
...opposition gnashed its teeth, the Dewey camp staged a fashion show. Delegates' wives sat on gilt chairs, an orchestra played lively airs and a squad of models paraded summer and fall clothes. Crooned Mrs. Edward J. MacMullan, arbiter of Philadelphia society and mistress of ceremonies: "Here you may feast your eyes on the world of fashion . . . Her bathing suit is white Lastex which fits like a second skin . . . This delectable creature is wearing the sort of dress of which we ask, 'Do we have a good time...
Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods has long been a puzzle as well as a masterpiece. The gods look more drunk than divine. Vesta, protector of virgins, lies dozing in one corner of the picture while Priapus fiddles with her skirt. A blowsy Ceres helps Apollo hoist cup to lip. Neptune is paired off with Gaea, who holds a quince -the symbol of marriage. Bacchus appears as a child, and his foster father Silenus looks more like a slender ascetic than a roly-poly satyr. Generations of art scholars have wondered...
Smith College Professor Edgar Wind thinks he has found the answer. In a recently published book (Bellini's Feast of the Gods, Harvard University, $7.50), he argues that the key to the riddle is Gaea's symbolic quince. The Feast, he says, is really a wedding party; Gaea is Lucrezia Borgia; Neptune is her husband, Alfonso d'Este, who commissioned the painting...
From contemporary portraits and medallions, Wind has identified Mercury as Alfonso's brother Ippolito, Silenus as Pietro Bembo (who later became a cardinal), Silvanus as Painter Bellini himself. Since the Feast was finished several years after the wedding, Alfonso's son Ercole might have played the barrel-tapping little Bacchus...