Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
So Aaron sat with the others amid the red plush, whilst the train began its long slow climb of the Apennines, stinking sulphurous through tunnels innumerable. Wonderful the steep slopes, the great chestnut woods, and then the great distances glimpsed between the heights, Firenzuola away and beneath, Turneresque hills far off, built of heaven-bloom, not of earth.
Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress.
The old Florentine writer, Firenzuola, commends nut-brown as the loveliest color for a woman's eyes, declaring that it gives to them a soft, bright, clear and kindly gaze and lends to their movement a mysteriously alluring charm.
Not long after the events narrated, while again in the field at the head of a fresh army of Saracens, he was suddenly seized with a mortal illness at Firenzuola, and died there on the 13th of December, 1250, becoming reconciled with the church on his deathbed. He was buried at Palermo.
Sometimes the songs provoked conversation, which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon 'le bellezze delle donne. I remember that once an animated discussion about the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in a quarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of about seventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyes and arms to heaven and crying, 'Tu sei innamorato d' una grande Diana cacciatrice nera, ed io d' una bella Venere bionda. Though they were but village lads, they supported their several opinions with arguments not unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in the treatment of a subject which could scarcely have failed to reveal any latent coarseness.
She was, I thought, the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen, and to one who had read the famous work of Messer Firenzuola on feminine beauty it might seem, at first, that here stood the incarnation of that writer's catalogue of womanly perfections. She was of a good shape and stature, despite her tender years; her face was oval, delicately featured and of an ivory pallor.
To enjoy his power in security and repose, and conquer or resist his enemies at a distance, in the direction of Bologna he fortified the castle of Firenzuola, situated in the midst of the Appennines; toward Sienna he commenced the restoration and fortification of the Poggio Imperiale; and he shut out the enemy in the direction of Genoa, by the acquisition of Pietra Santa and Serezana.
The ultimate principles of beauty, according to which the eye judges 'senza appello, are for Firenzuola a secret, as he frankly confesses; and his definitions of 'Leggiadria, 'Grazia, 'Aria, 'Maesta, 'Vaghezza, 'Venusta, are partly, as has been remarked, philological, and partly vain attempts to utter the unutterable.
Heroic Epic Poetry; Tasso. 5. Lyric Poetry; Bembo, Molza, Tarsia, V. Colonna. 6. Dramatic Poetry; Trissino, Rucellai; the Writers of Comedy. 7. Pastoral Drama and Didactic Poetry; Beccari, Sannazzaro, Tasso, Guarini, Rucellai, Alamanni. 8. Satirical Poetry, Novels, and Tales; Berni, Grazzini, Firenzuola, Bandello, and others. 9. History; Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Nardi, and others. 10.
Moreover, much about the same time as Firenzuola was writing, Botticelli's blonde, angular, retrousse women were breaking every one of that beauty-master's canons, perfect in beauty none the less; and lovers then, and perhaps particularly now, have found the perfect beauty in faces to which Messer Firenzuola would have denied the name of face at all, by virtue of a quality which indeed he has tabulated, but which is far too elusive and undefinable, too spiritual for him truly to have understood, a quality which nowadays we are tardily recognising as the first and last of all beauty, either of nature or art, the supreme, truly divine, because materialistically unaccountable, quality of Charm!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking