Manuscript page with a coat of arms in a laurel wreath held by two winged putti
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The ballet “The Flames of Paris” from its 1932 Leningrad premiere to the Bolshoi and Mikhailovsky stagings
The ballet "The Flames of Paris" was staged in Leningrad for the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The premiere took place on 7 November 1932 at the Kirov Theatre of Opera and Ballet, as the Mariinsky Theatre was then called. The music was written by Boris Asafyev,
Odilon Redon's Head of the Virgin after Da Vinci on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Da Vinci theme is unexpectedly continued by one of the most uncanny of French Symbolists, Odilon Redon, with a head of the Virgin inspired precisely by Da Vinci's unfinished painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (3 photos). I photographed the Redon at the opening of
Leonardo da Vinci, “La Scapigliata”, Head of a Young Woman, around 1508
Head of a young woman, known as La Scapigliata. Leonardo da Vinci. Circa 1508. The work embodies the chief principle of the master's poetics: the conveyance of the movements of the soul through outward features. This sketch demonstrates the summit of Leonardo's sfumato technique
A Kurdish warrior with a spear and a white cat in a photograph of 1870
I have been seized by an unbounded respect for this Kurdish warrior with his cat, in a photograph of 1870