Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp. In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.
Saxon pondered the opening lines: "I have stolen away from the crowd in the groves, Where the nude statues stand, and the leaves point and shiver At ivy-crowned Bacchus, the Queen of the Loves, Pandora and Psyche, struck voiceless forever." This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it. Bacchus, and Pandora and Psyche talismans to conjure with!
Thus was the sixth day of the Eleusinia, when the ivy-crowned Dionysus was borne in triumph through the mystic entrance of Eleusis, and from the Eleusinian plains, as from our choirs to-day, ascended the jubilant Hosannas of the countless multitude; this was the Palm Sunday of Greece.
Olympian gods to our choice dance, and make your grace to descend thereon and to glorify it, ye who in sacred Athens visit the city's incensed centre-stone, and her famed market-place of splendid ornament; receive ye violet-entwinëd crowns and drink-offerings of spring-gathered herbs, and look on me who am come from the house of Zeus with my bright song a second time unto the ivy-crownëd god, whom we call Bromios, even the god of clamorous shout.
Fancying that it might be cooler in the gallery, she ascended to the organ loft, and while Hero stretched himself at her feet, she sat down on one of the benches close to the open window that looked toward the mass of trees which so completely embowered the parsonage, that only one ivy-crowned chimney was visible.
This was a stranger who had arrived that evening at the monastery, and who intended remaining there for the night a man of distinguished and somewhat haughty bearing, with a dark, sorrowful, poetic face, chiefly remarkable for its mingled expression of dreamy ardor and cold scorn, an expression such as the unknown sculptor of Hadrian's era caught and fixed in the marble of his ivy-crowned Bacchus-Antinous, whose half-sweet, half-cruel smile suggests a perpetual doubt of all things and all men.
Of table decoration of any kind there was no sign. A great walnut monstrosity meagrely equipped performed the functions of a sideboard. The chairs, ten straight-backed, and two easy by the fireplace, of which one was armless, were upholstered in saddlebag, yellow and green. In the bay of the red-curtained window was a huge terra-cotta bust of an ivy-crowned and inane Austrian female.
As he did so, he remembered seeing distinctly, as in a picture before him, the sunlit terrace, the pretty girl in the foreground, an amused spectator of his sacrilegious act, the outlying ivy-crowned wall, the grass-grown ditch, the tall factory chimneys rising above the chestnuts, and the distant poplars that marked the Rhine. The wine was delicious; perhaps a TRIFLE, only a trifle, heady.
Some of the details raise a suspicion that Vasari had before his eyes the transcript en grisaille which he says was made by Aristotele da San Gallo, and also the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. The prominence given to the ivy-crowned old soldier troubled by his hose confirms the accuracy of the Holkham picture and the Albertina drawing.
No one appeared on the walls; the very portals, though locked and barred, seemed unguarded; above, the many domes and glittering crescents pierced heaven; while the old walls, survivors of ages, with ivy-crowned tower and weed-tangled buttress, stood as rocks in an uninhabited waste.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking