United States or Niue ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But Gioconda had plans of her own for the afternoon, and declined the proposed discipline; so Austin strolled off by himself, and lay down under the trees with a large book on Italian gardens to console him. His improvised exertions in the water had produced a certain fatigue, and he felt lazy and inert. Gradually he dropped off into a doze, which lasted more than an hour.
A work of art must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work like "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginative and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty, even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes.
There is a scene in which the blood fades out of her cheeks until they seem to turn to dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. When it is all over, and we think of the Silvia of "La Gioconda," of the woman we divine under Magda and under Paula Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of waste; for even Paula can be made to seem something which Fédora can never be made to seem.
It is the one prerogative of virtue that I really envy. The saint always feel like a sinner, and the poor sinner, try as he will, can only feel like a saint. The stars are so unjust. These kidneys are delicious. They are as poetic as one of Turner's later sunsets, or as the curving mouth of La Gioconda. How Walter Pater would love them." Reggie helped himself to a glass of champagne.
For example, it is a fact that the 'Demi-monde' of Dumas, the 'Pillars of Society' of Ibsen, the 'Magda' of Sudermann, the 'Grand Galeoto' of Echegaray, the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' of Pinero, the 'Gioconda' of d'Annunzio are all of them cast in the same dramatic mold; but it is also a fact that the metal of which each is made was smelted in the native land of its author.
Pater took La Gioconda of Leonardo da Vinci to symbolize the difference of modern and ancient art, and to illustrate the intricacy and complication of the former, as compared with the simplicity of the latter. 'Hers is the head, he writes of the Monna Lisa, 'upon which all "the ends of the world are come", and the eyelids are a little weary.
I asked her whither. 'To Milan, she said; for at Turin the Church was even stronger and more bigoted than in Genoa. "A new thought came to me then. I handed down my money to Gioconda, keeping back only a little, and prayed her to go to the woman, her mistress, and bargain with her to carry you out of the city, concealed beneath the furniture.
His immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the Antiope Correggio's masterpiece before Leonardo's Gioconda, Titian's Mistress, Andrea del Sarto's Holy Family, Domenichino's Children Among the Flowers, Raphael's little cameo, or his Portrait of an Old Man Art's greatest masterpieces.
Boito is rather more poet and dramatist than he is musician. He made the book not only of "Mefistofele," but also of "Otello" and "Falstaff," which Verdi composed, "La Gioconda," for which Ponchielli wrote the music, and "Ero e Leandro," which he turned over to Bottesini, who set it with no success, and to Mancinelli, who set it with little.
He finds affinities, relationships, analogies everywhere, but at the same time he condenses and sums up what is elsewhere scattered. He is like the smile of La Gioconda, which seems to reveal a soul to the spectator only to leave him the more certainly under a final impression of mystery, so many different things are expressed in it at once.
Word Of The Day