Word: ovide
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...learning and his devotion to all vertical and horizontal forms of the chase. In Giulio, this son of Isabella d'Este found a court artist whose libidinousness and intelligence fit his own. Both men moved naturally in the imaginative world of a recovered antiquity -- the world of Apuleius and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the brutal sharp humor of Martial's epigrams, the fantasies of a Golden Age and the pseudo-scientific world view of astrology...
...course the most popular thing in Palazzo Te, now as then, is the Room of the Giants, where Giulio (whose taste for apocalyptic catastrophe may have been sparked by talking to Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre...
...shoots, suggesting that the state is replenished by merciless excision. The Weavers would satisfy anyone as a genre picture of women at work, spinning the woolen yarn for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel; but its meanings unravel far beyond that, back to the fable of Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses, taking in complicated references to Titian and even to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling...
...field without grass is an eyesore," wrote the Roman poet Ovid, "so is a tree without leaves, so is a head without hair." For centuries, bald and balding men have winced at such unkind references to their predicament. Conditioned to regard hairlessness as a male curse second only to impotence, they have historically taken drastic measures to undo their baldness. Some have pretended to own hair, bewigging their shining pates with nylon or natural locks; others have recycled what little thatching they have left, combing a few camouflaging strands across their brows or having "plugs" transplanted from one part...
...what about those poor bald souls for whom Rogaine is not recommended? Ovid's fellow Roman, the epigrammatist Martial, may have had the best advice: "Be content to seem what you really are, and let the barber shave off the rest of your hair...