
Rene Ricard (1946–2014)
RENE: A light fantastic
A week before Rene died, my husband, our fifteen-year-old daughter, and I visited him at Bellevue Hospital. He was sporting a “Van Dyke” beard, as had generally been the case lately, and seemed pretty vigorous, though ashen.
He looked—and I mean literally—like a seventeenth-century, Franco-Iberian grandee: Specifically, the cold and brilliant Cardinal de Richelieu (1585–1642), as represented in several portraits by Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674), and a bust by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). There was an El Greco saintly scholar in there somewhere, as well. A