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“... della Francesca, the other exceptional Italian painter of this period to work largely outside Florence or Venice, Antonello has become a means of justifying and explaining a range of ideas and practices.This process began in the decades after his death. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was the first to suggest that Antonello went to the Low Countries. According ...”

“... city fell in 1453, the text migrated to Europe in the satchels of fleeing Greek scholars, and in Florence in 1474 it became the first book to be printed in Greek, more than a decade before the Iliad and the Odyssey. It soon started circulating in Latin translation as an excellent introductory text for the burgeoning Philhellenes of the Renaissance.Now comes ...”

“... explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could claim to have solved the ‘mystery of the Nile’, a mystery that ...”

“... well imitate, ‘to use a gold and silver coinage and to engage in retail trade.’ (The riches of King Croesus of Lydia are still proverbial.) A little later, gold coins are struck in Iran to the east and mainland Greece to the west. Both regions are conquered and united by Alexander. Thenceforth gold and silver coinages fan out across the world. In modern ...”

“... he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his work is currently on show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (until 1 April). It commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth and will travel across the Atlantic next year to give Friedrich ...”

“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... of Dubai, the Sabahs of Kuwait and the Thanis of Qatar mirror the Borgias of Rome, the Medicis of Florence, the Sforzas of Milan, the Estes of Ferrara. The three pillars of the old order – clans, tribes and clerics – are tumbling down. It is in Saudi Arabia, again, that the transition is most striking. Since 1953, the succession had passed horizontally ...”

“... he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his ...”

“... and Jews. ‘I’m getting to be a dab hand at Arab politics,’ she wrote to her stepmother, Florence Bell, from Baghdad. The military administration published a newspaper in Arabic in June 1917. ‘It is called the Arab,’ Miss Bell wrote, ‘because it is the first paper published under the new order of Arab liberty.’ Its editor was another ...”

“... Sturm from Zierikzee), and Velazquez’s rival ‘Vicente Carducho’ (Vincenzo Carducci from Florence). As for the brothers Juan and Francisco Rizi, they were the Hispanicised sons of an immigrant Italian painter, Antonio Ricci of Ancona. The paintings too became in a sense Hispanicised. Some of Brown’s most interesting pages are concerned with the ...”

“... dismissed is the last in the series, a preposterous mausoleum dedicated to the memory of ‘James King Esq., drowned on June 9, 1776’. King was a companion of Soane’s who had been on a boating party in which Soane (who could not swim) had declined to participate because he was too busy designing his triumphal ...”

“... occurred on the same day as that of the Duke of Clarence, who, had he lived, would have become King of England. Normally the passing of the next heir to the throne would attract much public attention, but it was completely eclipsed by the death of the Cardinal. After the Requiem Mass, despite the poor visibility caused by a London pea-souper, vast crowds ...”

“... ruler to react to this change of location was Henry IV, who in 1400 wrote a letter to the ‘King of Abyssinia, Prester John’. The fascination with Ethiopia did not stop there, for news broke, in 1441, that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend that year’s Council of Florence. The Pope was reportedly much ...”

“... at home he and his family spoke Triestine dialect, while his ambition had always been to live in Florence and become a native speaker of lingua Toscana, the true Italian. His command of English was not good, although he and his wife visited London two or three times a year, residing in a quiet suburban road near Charlton, where a factory for the paint ...”

“... Benvenuto Cellini’s famous account of casting his giant Perseus for the Loggia della Signoria in Florence or Tarkovsky’s terror-stricken bell-maker in Andrei Rublev are not wholly inaccurate testaments to the high stakes involved, but it is also a technique that provides bronze with some surprising flashes of delicacy. On some of Degas’s bronzes, for ...”