An interesting challenge from Cinephile today with the thematic answers all being Italian Renaissance artists. A couple (Lippi and Mantegna) I had not heard of before but these were easy to determine from the wordplay.
Cinephile has had me wondering, not for the first time, about the wordplay for one of the clues (6d).
Across
1 TITIAN when pa (father) is added to the front it sounds like partition (split) – Tiziano Vecelli
4 GIOTTO GI (soldier) OTTO (engineer – Gustav Otto, German aircraft designer) – Giotto di Bondone
8 IMMERSE I M (one mile) MERSE[y] (river – no unknown)
9 RAPHAEL PH (pub) in LEAR (king) reversed – Raffaello Sanzio
11 TINTORETTO T (model, as in Ford Model-T) INTO OTTER (river dweller) reversed – Jacopo Comin
12 REEL dd
13 LIPPI LIP (sauce) PI[e] (unfinished dish) – Filippo Lippi or his son Filippino
14 LEONARDO LEO (sign) NARD (plant producing unction) O (love) – Leonardo di Ser Piero (or da Vinci)
16 MANTEGNA GET reversed in MANNA (heavenly food) – Andrea Mantegna
18 TOWED cd ‘to wed’
20 MEGA MEG (girl) A (first)
21 BOTTICELLI *(IOBC LITTLE) – Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, also know as Sandro Botticelli
23 CONFUSE CON (study) FUSE (safety precaution)
24 ADULATE A in ADULT (mature person) E (note)
25, 26 MICHELANGELO EL (the, Spanish) in CHANGE (small coins) in MILO (Venus’s place, Venus de Milo) – Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Down
1 TEMPI hidden word in ‘sysTEM PIstons’
2 TREE TOP TREE (genealogy) TOP (spinner)
3 ABSORBING ABS (sailors) OR BING (crooner, Bing Crosby)
5 IDAHO cd ‘I’d a house’
6 TOHEROA is this TO HERO (protagonist) A with the definition simply ‘mollusc’? – an edible shellfish found at low tide buried in sandy beaches in New Zealand
7 OPEN-ENDED OPEN (start) END (finish) ED (journalist)
10 STALWARTS *(LAW) in STARTS (openings)
13 LEAVE ROOM *(OVER A MOLE)
15 OUTBIDDEN *(DOUBTED IN)
17 TRAFFIC dd
19 WHEELIE dd
21 BASTE hidden word in ‘alaBASTEr’
22 LOTTO cd – Lorenzo Lotto
Hi Gaufrid. Thought you’d taken the morning off!! I enjoyed this puzzle immensely. I read 6d as you did. As to ‘Lippi’, it came easily because of the Browning poem, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. If you don’t know it, the full text is on Google. It was taught to me by an enthusiastic and eccentric English teacher, who instilled a love of literature in most of his pupils. Mantegna was new to me however.
Hi Octofem
Morning off? This blog was posted earlier than last week’s! With the darker mornings I tend to sleep for a bit longer so I am now solving the FT a little later than I did a month or two ago.
Thanks for your concurrence with 6d. I spent about half an hour (another reason for the blog being slightly later than usual) trying to see if there was an alternative interpretation for this clue but to no avail.
Hi Octofem,
I too was reminded of Browning’s poem (monologue) when I saw Lippi in the blog.