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1496 I Piazzolla ► Pkcolomini
hammer felt
hammer
hammer rest
hammer shank hammer butt
string
damper
catcher
back check
— tape
_- set-off button
escapement spring - support or wippen --capstan screw
jack (escapement)
Each key of a piano actuates a complex mechanical system to strike a taut string and produce a musical tone. Depending on how the keys and pedals are operated, the mechanism may produce a variety of effects on the same note, from muffled to brilliant and from quick to sustained.
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of the 18th century. His art evolved from Italian Baroque traditions of the 17th century to the Rococo style. He had a strong influence on the young Giovanni Battista Tiepolo at the time he painted the finest of his early reli¬ gious works, St. James Led to Martyrdom (1722). His most popular work is the celebrated Fortune Teller (1740). On the founding of the Venetian Academy in 1750, he was made its first director.
Piazzolla \pyat-'so-ta\, Astor (b. March 11, 1921, Mar del Plata, Arg.—d. July 5, 1992, Buenos Aires) Argentine composer. He lived in the Bronx, N.Y., until he was 15; he then returned to Argentina to play ban- doneon (a type of accordion) in a tango band led by Anibal Troilo (1917— 75). From 1944 he led his own groups. His interest in classical music led to study with Nadia Boulanger (1954-55) and the development of his own compositional style, infusing elements of jazz and modern music into tango. Not always initially popular with tango fans, his music is now rec¬ ognized as having revived the genre and greatly expanded its artistic potential.
Picabia \pe-kab-'ya\, Francis (b. Jan. 22, 1879, Paris, France—d. Nov. 30, 1953, Paris) French painter, illustrator, designer, writer, and editor. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole des Arts Dec- oratifs, he painted for a time in an Impressionist and then a Cubist style. Picabia went on to combine the Cubist style with Orphic elements in such paintings as I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (1913-14), to which he gave proto-Dadaist names. About 1916 he began to paint the satiric, machinelike contrivances that are his chief contribution to Dadaism. In 1915 in New York City, Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray together founded an American Dadaist movement. In 1917 Picabia returned to Europe and joined Dadaist movements in Barcelona, Paris, and Zurich. After Dadaism broke up about 1921, he followed the poet Andre Breton into the Surrealist movement. He subsequently painted in Surrealist, abstract, and figurative styles.
Picardy Vpi-ksr-deX French Picardie \,pe-kar-'de\ Region (pop., 2003 est.: 1,869,386), encompassing the northern French departements of Oise, Somme, and Aisne and roughly coextensive with the historical region of Picardy. In the 13th century the historical region included the countships of Amienois and Vermandois, which were united with the French crown by Philip II from 1185. Picardy was joined to Burgundy in 1435 and attached to France in 1477. The province of Picardy from the 16th century to the end of the ancien regime in 1789 comprised the Somme River basin from Saint-Quentin to the English Channel, the basins of the Serre and upper Oise rivers, and Montreuil on the Canche beyond the Authie River. The region was the scene of heavy fighting in both world wars, especially in the First Battle of the Somme (1916). The capital of the French adminis¬ trative region of Picardy is Amiens. Picardy has an area of 7,490 sq mi (19,399 sq km).
picaresque novel Early form of the novel, usually a first-person nar¬ rative, relating the episodic adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish, picaro ). The hero drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in an effort to survive. The genre originated in Spain and had its prototype in Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache (1599). It appeared in various European literatures until the mid-18th century, when the growth of the realistic novel led to its decline. Because of the oppor¬ tunities for satire they present, picaresque elements enriched many later novels, such as Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), Mark Twain’s Huck¬ leberry Finn (1884), and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull
(1954).
Picasso, Pablo (Ruiz y) (b. Oct. 25, 1881, Malaga, Spain—d. April 8, 1973, Mougins, France) Spanish-born French painter, sculptor, print- maker, ceramicist, and stage designer. Trained by his father, a professor of drawing, he exhibited his first works at 13. After moving permanently to Paris in 1904, he replaced the predominantly blue tones of his so-called Blue Period (1901-04) with those of pottery and flesh in his Rose Period (1904-06). His first masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d Avignon (1907), was controversial for its violent treatment of the female body and the mask¬ like faces derived from his study of African art. From 1909 to 1912 Pi¬ casso worked closely with Georges Braque —the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Cubism. The artists presented a new kind of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of per¬ spective and illusion. Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. By 1912 they had taken Cubism further by gluing paper and other materials onto their canvases. Between 1917 and 1924 Picasso designed stage sets for five ballets for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In the 1920s and ’30s, the Surrealists spurred him to explore new subject matter, particularly the image of the Minotaur. The Spanish Civil War inspired perhaps his greatest work, the enormous Guernica (1937), whose violent imagery condemned the use¬ less destruction of life. After World War II he joined the Communist Party and devoted his time to sculpture, ceramics, and lithography as well as painting. In his late years he created variations on the works of earlier artists, the most famous being a series of 58 pictures based on Las Meni- nas of Diego Velazquez. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and par¬ alleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.
Piccard \pe-'kar\, Auguste (b. Jan. 28, 1884, Basel, Switz.—d. March 24, 1962, Lausanne) Swiss-born Belgian physicist and balloon and under¬ sea explorer. He studied and taught physics in Zurich and later at the Uni¬ versity of Brussels (1922-54). In 1930 he designed a balloon with an airtight, pressurized cabin to ascend into the stratosphere to study cosmic rays. In 1932 he ascended over 55,500 ft (16,650 m). The undersea bathy¬ scaphe he designed with his son, Jacques (b. 1922), descended in 1953 more than 10,000 ft (3,000 m). His grandson Bernard Piccard made the first round-the-world balloon flight in 1999.
Piccolomini \,pek-k6-'l6-me-ne\ (-Pieri), Ottavio (b. Nov. 11, 1599, Florence—d. Aug. 11, 1656, Vienna) Italian general. He entered the ser¬ vice of the Habsburgs in 1616 and became a trusted lieutenant to Al¬ brecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein. Overlooked for advancement, he turned against his superior and conspired in his assassination (1634). He served Spain against the French in the Netherlands and won the Battle of Thionville (1639), for which he was created duke of Amalfi. In 1648 Emperor Ferdinand III named him commander in chief, and he conducted
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picker ► Pieman River I 1497
the last campaign of the Thirty Years' War. He represented Austria at the Congress of Niirnberg (1649), which negotiated issues left unsettled by the Peace of Westphalia.