In 2009, I trekked to Venice with my dear friend JoAnn Locktov, the founder of Bella Figura Publications whose newest book Dream of Venice Architecture…
View More Peggy Guggenheim Visits Oculus GalleryTag: Groundbreakers
My groundbreakers tag illustrates people throughout history who have made significant contributions in their chosen fields. They are all fascinating souls!
While in Milan, I had the opportunity to visit Leonardo 1452-1519 at the Palazzo Reale, an exhibition devoted to the genius of the Renaissance artist and inventor. The notebooks were as powerful as the paintings on view, and I took my time studying them as I walked through the intimately scaled rooms. I left the museum feeling as if an electrical current was sizzling through me so I decided to have lunch at the quiet café tucked into the palace to process all I had seen.
It was a beautiful spring afternoon so I dined al fresco thinking about how I had a visual frame of reference for the machinations of his mind, which made the act of reading da Vinci’s chapter of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, in which he highlights a large number of art’s groundbreakers, so much more satisfying. The quirky details in the profile had me laughing aloud, unexpected considering how seriously I view the legacy of this mental giant.
The story about da Vinci’s quest to fashion a dragon he could use as a model for a painting, which he’d concocted by combining the body parts of lizards and insects he’d chopped up and reconfigured, concludes with the fact that it took him so long to complete the painting the stench emitting from the dead animals in his studio was unbearable to most visitors, an odor he’d hardly noticed because he was so involved in the creative process! I feature many groundbreakers under this tag so I if you enjoy stories about them, I hope you’ll stop by.
How to Set a Mood
The 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway is a mercurial mélange of masculine and feminine charisma in equal…
View More How to Set a MoodThe Built Legacy of Henry VIII
The 2016 Academy Awards are handed out this coming Sunday so I’m celebrating a film that showcases the built legacy of Henry VIII to delve back into…
View More The Built Legacy of Henry VIIIFind Your Red Carpet Style
“Find Your Red Carpet Style,” urged Currey & Company’s Brand Ambassador Denise McGaha during a presentation in the company’s Manhattan showroom last week. The point…
View More Find Your Red Carpet StyleRenovating During the Tudor Era
Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Looking back to the Tudor Era from this great distance, it’s easy to see how barbaric a sport jousting was.…
View More Renovating During the Tudor EraAn Unsung Hero of Modern Design
Resurrecting pivotal eras in design is irresistible to vanguards who understand that sometimes the best place to begin looking into the future is to take…
View More An Unsung Hero of Modern DesignThe Peacock Room à la Whistler
The most recognizable painting by artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler might lead you to believe he was as Puritan as his upbringing. The fact he…
View More The Peacock Room à la WhistlerThreads With a Soul
A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people —Mahatma Gandhi Soul is one of those words with as many…
View More Threads With a SoulLove Among the Ruins
How would it feel to spend your life so absorbed by crumbling architecture and disintegrating stone you could bring them vibrantly back to life with…
View More Love Among the RuinsMme Cezanne at the Met
“For nearly seventeen years, Cézanne would conceal his affair with Hortense from his father…” —Philippe Cézanne As I studied the sketches and paintings in the…
View More Mme Cezanne at the Met