Word: bier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Raphael suddenly died in 1520 at the age of 37, his last work, the Transfiguration, was acclaimed as a masterpiece by the file of Cardinals and connoisseurs who trooped past his bier and saw the painting near by. The strong, graceful figures, the supple, continuous modeling, the ecstatic vision of a gravity-free Christ rising into the air above Mount Tabor-these struck Raphael's admirers not only as the quintessence of his style but as a climax of the entire Renaissance system of ideal figure painting...
Throughout China, the Great Helmsman was mourned much as he would probably have wished. While hundreds of thousands of Chinese-bureaucrats and party officials, generals, peasants, children-filed past Mao's bier in a somber, emotional ceremony at Peking's Great Hall of the People (see box next page), millions more paid their respects by following the official admonition to "turn grief into strength...
...Chinese funeral dirge seemed to intensify the silence of the mourners and the tomblike coolness of the air-conditioned hall. The chamber was filled with row upon row of white mourning wreaths. At the end of a red carpet 50 yards ahead of us stood Mao's funeral bier, a glass-topped coffin planted in a bed of bright green grasses, layered with formal yellow chrysanthemums and red hibiscuses in full bloom. Dominating that end of the hall, above rows of pine and cypress, was a giant portrait of the Chairman. A white-lettered streamer read, "We mourn with...
Beyond the receiving line was the bier. A red party flag was draped over the Chairman's familiar gray tunic. His face looked old, but also unwrinkled and at rest. Unlike at Chou En-lai's funeral last January, when only an urn containing the late Premier's ashes was displayed, the Chairman's body has been brought before the Chinese people for a final heroic display. Many believed that, like Lenin, Mao would be embalmed and enshrined in a special mausoleum. As they would before an emperor of old -or a father-the Chinese wept...
...leaders of the Soviet Union -Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, Aleksei Kosygin-were downcast as they stood by the flower-covered bier in Moscow's imposing Trade Union House. While a string orchestra played funeral dirges, thousands of workers, soldiers and bureaucrats filed past the medal-bedecked dais for a last look at the jut-jawed countenance of Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, Soviet Defense Minister and architect of the Kremlin's modern-day military might...