What does being a bit of a plumper have to do with the fiery rhetoric and popular rabble-rousing appeal. Is the gist here that Nasrallah has become rotund and contented, succumbing to bourgeois opulence and a Martha Stewart lifestyle. Or is this Nasrallah as becoming a Falstaff type figure, somewhat comedic, where hedonism replaces heroism and we are left with a caricature of a genius, who in his thirst for glory becomes a fool. Or, is the implication that he is becoming like an American, or what the French would term a “plantureause”. If the tragic hero dies for what is nobler in the mind, then Nasrallah Falstaff lives for what is livelier in the flesh, preferring to live and see his reputation sullied than being dispatched like Hotspur who has issues about troubling intangibles such as “bright honor.”
—John Henry Fuseli/ Johann Heinrich Füssli, Falstaff in the Laundry Basket
Kunsthaus Zürich
Date: 1792—John Henry Fuseli/ Johann Heinrich Füssli, Falstaff in the Laundry Basket
Kunsthaus Zürich
Date: 1792–But when an interpreter said that Mr. Morsi had “learned a lot” in the United States, he quickly interjected a qualifier in English: “Scientifically!”
He was troubled by the gangs and street of violence of Los Angeles, he said, and dismayed by the West’s looser sexual mores, mentioning couples living together out of wedlock and what he called “naked restaurants,” like Hooters.
“I don’t admire that,” he said. “But that is the society. They are living their way.”—Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/world/middleeast/egyptian-leader-mohamed-morsi-spells-out-terms-for-us-arab-ties.html?pagewanted=all
David Schenker:( see link at end) …While his speeches continue to reflect their perennial bravado, in recent appearances Nasrallah clearly isn’t looking himself.
Most striking, the once-svelte, turbaned cleric has ballooned into corpulence. Perhaps the bunker lifestyle with its attendant lack of exercise is catching up with the aging sheikh. Or maybe Nasrallah is stress eating. Regardless, images of the now rotund, almost cherubic Hezbollah leader laboriously ascending the podium in September to deliver a fiery “death to America, death to Israel” speech (posted on the organization’s Intiqad electronic magazine website) do not inspire the same level of terror as before….
—Buck Washing on Datchet Mead (Featuring Shakespeare’s Falstaff) – Painting by John S. Clifton – Yale Center for British Art – New Haven – CT – USA—Image Credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/7097630527/
Today, while the demise of Hezbollah is far from imminent, …Read More:http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/hezbollah-under-pressure#.UIcKHCdfGUs.twitter
Falstaff:Well, ’tis no matter. Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? no. Or an arm? no. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
—Falstaff and Simple
Object:
Oil painting
Date:
ca. 1835 (painted)
Artist/Maker:
Callcott, born 1779 – died 1844 (painter (artist))
Materials and Techniques:
Oil on paper laid on canvas
Credit Line:
Given by John Sheepshanks, 1857
Museum number:
FA.12[O]
Gallery location:
In Storage—Read More:http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O133693/falstaff-and-simple-oil-painting-callcott-augustus-wall/
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