Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS March 23 2012 from Randall Anderson's review of Franco Mormando's Bernini: His life and his Rome : The explosive exuberance of the Baroque signalled the evolution of Renaissance and Mannerist styles, and through Bernini achieved its greatest heights. For Benedetto Croce, Baroque decadence produced an art of bad taste ( cattivo gusto artistico ), but for Luigi Barzini, Jr it embodied something more liberating: "Baroque is when you can draw a straight line, but you prefer to draw a curve". The "plastic abundance", corporeality and expansive force identified by Wylie Sypher as hallmarks of Baroque style appear in surplus with Bernini, from his ecstatic St. Teresa, afloat on her own garments as much as buoyed by the Holy Spirit, to the yards of fabric, inflated by invisible winds, billowing around his busts of Francesco d'Este and Louis XIV. *** From Commentary "Meaning in the margins: Victoria Lady Welby and significs" by John E. Jose...

TLS May 29 2009 from Brian Vickers' review of Renaissance Figures of Speech , edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber: Sylvia Adamson discusses synonymia, a figure that was central both to classical courtroom eloquence, as a device of vehement emphasis, and to Renaissance writers seeking copia verborum , fertility of utterance. . . . Reading rhetoric depends on recognizing a figure's form and function, and the failure to detect a synonym may have created "one of the notorious oddities of St. Matthew's Gospel," where Jesus is described as riding into Jerusalem on two animals at once: the disciples "brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon" (Mt 21:7). Adamson points out that Matthew had failed to realize that Zechariah, the Old Testament prophet whom he cites as prefiguring the event, used the figure synonymia to emphasize the lowliness of the Messiah: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of...