Friday, November 1, 2019

Michelangelo Pasta Fazool


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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