Word: circa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...illustrious predecessors: the Greek poet Pindar (circa 500 B.C.) wrote an ode without using the letter sigma. Lewis Carroll, an Oxford mathematician better known for the Alice books, liked to mix the logic of numbers with the freedom of dreams. In this century, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and Vladimir Nabokov all enjoyed the pleasures of arithmetic while exploring the peripheries of language. But it was not until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand...
...unique in being perceived from the woman's eyeline. Heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi's paintings were determinedly "unfeminine," full of darkness, gore and gesticulation: witness the candlelit hand and shadowed face of Judith, like a waning moon, in Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (circa 1625). A few other late-Renaissance women, like Sofonisba Anguissola, got more commissions than the forthright Artemisia; they moved with more ease at court and could play society better. But there is good reason to regard Artemisia Gentileschi as the most distinguished woman painter to have worked between the 16th...
...Metropolitan Museum of Art/Dutton. $45. The seven magnificent tapestries depicting the hunt of the unicorn (on permanent display at the Cloisters in Manhattan) dazzle the eye. Woven into the tapestries' more than 1,000 sq. ft. is a graphic portrait of the medieval mind, frozen at a time (circa 1500) when thought was beginning to shift from heaven to earth. Thus while the tapestries tell the story of a bridegroom brought to the altar and of the death and resurrection of Christ, they also show the realistic hunt of a wholly believable unicorn. Margaret B. Freeman, a former curator...
...literal heir to two cultures. He was born in a suburb of Montreal in 1915, the fourth and last child of Russian Jews who had just emigrated from St. Petersburg. His father, an educated man, became a small-time trader and, in Bellow's phrase, "a sharpie circa 1905 in Russia." In 1924 the family settled on Division Street in Chicago; Bellow thus grew up speaking English, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. Twice-removed from the land of his parents-and a Jew in the predominantly Protestant Midwest -Bellow had good reason to wonder where in the world he belonged...
...Penitent Magdalene, circa 1640, with her pert mouth and enormous dark eyes, is in effect a maja. But the high point of Ribera's career is the great Calvary from Osuna, never displayed before outside Spain (see color opposite...