Category Archive:
11/30
Monkeying Around
If I could have any clock ever made, I would probably choose this one—an organ pipe clock with a porcelain monkey orchestra—made by a French clockmaker and goldsmith in the mid-18th century and kept now at Paris’ Petit Palais. The…
05/17
Asperges à la Pompadour
Though the ancient Greeks ate asparagus, which grows wild in the Mediterranean, and the Romans did, too, in the East the vegetable picked up a sexy reputation as an aphrodisiac, one served in Tales of the Arabian Nights. (Asparagus’s success…
03/10
A lofty beginning, thanks to Mme de Pompadour
Diderot worked for twenty-six years as the editor of the monumental French Encyclopédie, producing 17 volumes of text and 11 of illustrations published between 1751 and 1772. It summed up the world’s knowledge, but its writers also challenged the beliefs of…
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