This
hearty Italian soup features both pasta and beans. We also add some
spinach and chicken sausage for more taste while holding down the
calorie count. It is dedicated to perhaps the most famous LGBT artist
in history, Michelangelo.
“When
you mouth starts to drool, just like pasta fazool....That's Amore!”
Keep them warm with a bowl full of flavor! However, if you have leftovers, remember that the pasta will suck up all the liquid, so you may want to add more chicken broth the next time you warm it up.
Ingredients:
1
10oz pkg chicken-apple sausages sliced
1
small yellow onion, finely diced
1
teaspoon dried Italian seasoning
1
cup chicken stock
Two
15-ounce cans cannellini beans with liquid
One
15-ounce can stewed tomatoes with liquid
1
pkg spinach – cooked and drained well
1
cup ditalini or other small pasta like small shells --stay away from
larger pasta or noodles
Parmesan
cheese (about 2 ounces)
¼
cup chopped parsley
Directions:
Cook
the onion and sausages in a Dutch oven over medium heat, stirring
occasionally, until the onions start to turn color, about
5 minutes.
Add Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes and a couple pinches of salt
to the pot and saute, stirring frequently.
Add
the chicken stock, beans, tomatoes with the liquids from both.
Squeeze
out the cooked spinach and stir that in. Simmer until slightly
thickened, about 30
minutes.
Add
the pasta and cook until al dente, 8
to 12 minutes more.
Stir
in the chopped parsley and adjust the seasoning, if necessary.
Garnish
with some parmesan.
If
you like serve with crusty bread from the oven for dipping! What a
treat for my Master Indy.
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes
by Dan White
============================
Michelangelo
(1475
– 1564)
Known
simply as Michelangelo, he was an Italian sculptor, painter,
architect, and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of
Florence, who exerted an unparalleled
influence on
the development of Western art. Considered by many the greatest
artist of his lifetime,
and by some the greatest artist of all time, his artistic versatility
was of such a high order.
Many
of Michelangelo's works of painting, sculpture and architecture rank
among the most famous in existence. His output in these fields was
prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence,
sketches and reminiscences, he is the best-documented artist
of the 16th century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the
Pietà and David, before the age of thirty.
Despite
not liking to paint, he also created two of the most influential
frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on
its altar wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered
Mannerist architecture. At the age of 74, he succeeded Antonio da
Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. He
transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his
design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.
Michelangelo's
work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme
in not one art alone but in all three".
Michelangelo
was born 1475 in Tuscany. For several generations, his family had
been small-scale bankers in Florence; but when the bank failed, and
his father briefly took a government post in Caprese, where
Michelangelo was born.
Several
months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence,
where he was raised. After his mother's death in 1481 (when he was
six years old), Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, a
stonecutter, in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a
marble quarry and a small farm. There he gained his love for marble.
As Giorgio Vasari quotes him:
"If
there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle
atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my
nurse, I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with
which I make my figures."
As
a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar.
However, he showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy
paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters.
The
city of Florence was at that time Italy's greatest center of the arts
and learning. Art was sponsored by the town council, the merchant
guilds, and wealthy patrons such as the Medici and their banking
associates.
The
Renaissance was a renewal of Classical scholarship and arts. It's
first flowering in Florence in the early 15th century.
During
Michelangelo's childhood, he got to work with Domenico Ghirlandaio, a
master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing and
portraiture who had the largest workshop in Florence. At age 13,
Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio.
Cardinal
Raffaele Riario was so impressed by the quality of a Michelangelo
sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome.
Pietà,
St Peter's Basilica (1498–99)
Michelangelo
arrived in Rome in 1496. The next year the French ambassador to the
Holy See, commissioned him to carve a Pietà, a
sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus.
The
subject was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe
and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. Michelangelo was
24 at the time of its completion.
It
was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of
sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of
the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarised by
Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of
stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is
scarcely able to create in the flesh." It is now located in St
Peter's Basilica.
Michelangelo
returned to Florence in 1499. The republic was changing. Michelangelo
was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an
unfinished project begun 40 years earlier: a colossal statue of
Carrara marble portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom to
be placed on the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo responded
by completing his most famous work, the statue
of David,
in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a
sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic
imagination.
In
1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope
Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to
include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the
patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant
interruptions to his work on the tomb to accomplish numerous other
tasks. Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was
never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of
San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central
figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for
the tomb, two, known as the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, are
now in the Louvre.
During
the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512).
Michelangelo
was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the
triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling and to cover the
central part of the ceiling with ornament.
Michelangelo
persuaded Pope Julius to give him a free hand and proposed a
different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the
Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the
genealogy of Christ.
The
work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that
represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The
composition stretches over 500 square meters of the ceiling and
contains over 300 figures. At its center are nine episodes from the
Book of Genesis. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are
The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge,
the Prophet Jeremiah, and the Cumaean Sibyl.
In
1527, Florentine citizens threw out the Medici and restored the
republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the
aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications
from 1528 to 1529. These designs are still studied in military
schools across the world.
Pope
Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of The Last
Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The fresco depicts
the Second Coming of Christ and his Judgement of the souls.
Michelangelo portrayed Jesus as a massive, muscular figure, youthful,
beardless and naked.
Once
completed, the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary naked was
considered sacrilegious, and several officials of the Church
campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope
resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's
death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the
genitals and
Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned
to make the alterations. An uncensored copy of the original, by
Marcello Venuti, is in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples.
Michelangelo
continued to work on several architectural projects, his paintings
and also sculpture.
In
1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica,
Rome. The process of replacing the Constantinian basilica of the 4th
century had been underway for fifty years and in 1506 foundations had
been laid. Many architects had worked on it, but little progress had
been completed. Michelangelo was persuaded to take over the project.
He returned to the original plans, and developed his ideas for a
centrally planned church, strengthening the structure both physically
and visually. The dome, not completed until after his death, has been
called by Banister Fletcher, "the
greatest creation of the Renaissance".
As
construction was progressing on St Peter's, there was a concern that
Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However,
once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting
ring, the completion of the design was inevitable.
Michelangelo
once told an apprentice: "However rich I may have been, I have
always lived like a poor man." He was indifferent to food and
drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and
that he "often slept in his clothes and boots."
When
the gay art historian John Symonds was granted access to the
Buonarroti family archives in Florence in 1863 he
discovered a note written in the margin of the manuscript poems by
Michelangelo's grand-nephew (called Michelangelo the Younger) saying
that the poems must not be published in their original form because
they expressed "amor . . . virile", literally "masculine
love", better translated today as "male/male
desire".
Symonds
thus was able to make public the fact that when Michelangelo the
Younger prepared his great-uncle's poetry for posthumous publication
in 1623 he
had changed all of the masculine pronouns in the love poems to
feminine pronouns. Michelangelo the Younger's action proves that the
hetero/homo divide was not only relevant but important for him and
his Renaissance contemporaries.
The
nature of his sexuality is made apparent in his poetry. He wrote over
three hundred sonnets. The longest sequence displaying a great
romantic friendship was written to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, who was 23
years old when Michelangelo met him at the age of 57. These make up
the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by
one man to another; they predate by fifty years Shakespeare's sonnets
to the fair youth:
I
feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
That
burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;
A
strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
Which
without motion moves every balance.
—
(Michael
Sullivan, translation)
Cavalieri
replied: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man
more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than
I wish for yours." Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo
until his death.
Michelangelo's
contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Benvenuto
Cellini, and Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (Il Sodoma) were publicly charged
with sodomy (Leonardo was even imprisoned for two months), and
Michelangelo, like them, was offered sexual "services" by
the ragazzi or
street boys who worked as apprentices in the art studios.
There
cannot be too much doubt that Michelangelo had sexual relations with
his model Gherardo Perini and his assistant Febo di Poggio. Plus the
poetic theme of struggling to come to terms with himself, in the
context of the guilt of some sort; plus the fact that he was an
inveterate bachelor and non-womanizer – amounts to proof positive
that Michelangelo loved to roll in the hay men.
Michelangelo
in a letter to Niccolo Quaratesi (who was also probably a boyfriend)
jokingly recalls how a father described his son to him in the hopes
of the boy becoming the artist's apprentice: "Once you saw him,
you'd chase him into bed the minute you got home!"
The
handsome model Gherardo Perini came to work for Michelangelo around
1520; their love flourished between 1522–25 and lasted until the
mid-1530s. Michelangelo's affair with Febo di Poggio began in the
early 1530s, ending about 1534. Michelangelo jokingly called him "a
little blackmailer".
Because
of their eroticism, Joseph Tusiani in his edition of
Michelangelo's Complete
Poems (1960)
went out of his way to argue that these poems were addressed to a
woman! It's amazing how homophobically blind scholars were well into
the 1970s.
Most
of the related concepts that we associate with the modern term
"homosexual" were also held in 15th and 16th century
Italy.
In
his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino ("the
divine one"). His contemporaries often admired his ability to
instill a sense of awe.
While
Michelangelo's David is the most famous male nude of all time and
destined to be reproduced to grace cities around the world, some of
his other sculptures like the Pietà works
have had perhaps even greater impact on the course of art.
Michelangelo's dome
of St Peter's was
to influence the building of churches for many centuries as well as
the civic domes of many public buildings and the state capitals
across America.
The Sistine
Chapel ceiling
was a work of unprecedented grandeur, both for its architectonic
forms, to be imitated by many Baroque ceiling painters, and also for
the wealth of its inventiveness in the study of figures. Vasari
wrote:
The
work has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit
to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had
been plunged into darkness. Indeed, this work contains every
perfection possible.
Michelangelo
proved to be superlative in painting, sculpture, and architecture.
His creations still inspire us today. He surely has earned the title
of an LGBT hero.
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