Word: collector
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...show tries to give an overview of papal commissioning and collecting. The papacy is, in fact, the world's oldest continuous art collector, and the history of its museums goes back to 1503, when Julius II set up a courtyard for connoisseurs, the Belvedere, stocked with a collection of antique statuary. Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts." Turnstile tallies were not a concern of Renaissance Popes. In the past 1,500 years or so, the Vatican has amassed vast amounts of art in a way that...
...biographer, historian, editor and critic, Peter Quennell has been one of England's radiant literary lights for more than half a century. He is also an assiduous collector and chronicler of eccentrics, a pointillist of foible, a raconteur without fear or peer. His latest memoir, drawn mostly from the '20s and '30s, is named Customs and Characters...
...perhaps pained by the long hours his tax-collector father spent doing sums, a 19-year-old French prodigy named Blaise Pascal made an automatic device that could add or subtract with the turning of little wheels. But the clerks who spent their lives doing calculations in those days viewed Pascal's gadget as a job threat, and it never caught on. A short time later, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz added the power of multiplication and division. Said he: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculations...
...filthy garments with clean uniforms and to pen the pigs instead of allowing them to roam in and out of homes. Says she: "It will cost money, but it won't be expensive. I want to prove it's possible to be a clean and dignified garbage collector, and slowly, slowly, we will do it. With God, everything is possible...
...user pottery is a craft; to the collector it is an art. How high an art can be seen in Song Ceramics (Rizzoli; 262 pages; $100) by Mary Tregear. During China's felicitously named Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1278), expanding trade provided the artists of the Middle Kingdom with new sources of income and fresh creative energies. As Oxford Curator Tregear notes, "Every class in society [could be] regarded as a patron, inspiring or encouraging either the growth or selection of a particular style of pottery." The pieces showed continuing variety: white glazes, hard stoneware, porcelain, greenware; dishes...