Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Columbus...
...since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." That sounds like Richard Nixon's blurt on the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it was written in the 16th century by a Spaniard named Lopez de Gomara, after men knew Christopher Columbus had found not Cathay but a wholly new "fourth part of the earth." For centuries, fabled islands populated by demigods, monsters or Arcadians had been part of the imagery of European legend, and the discovery of the South American Indian-lolling in a hammock, innocent of toil and tyranny, naked...
...Honour points out, even Columbus described the Caribbean in phrases taken from Latin poetry describing the mythical Golden Age. It was culturally impossible for him, or his immediate followers, not to do so. The woodcuts and paintings of the time reflect that Arcadian vision, which would duly be modulated into the cult of the Noble Savage. By 1505, only five years after Cabral's discovery of Brazil, the first American Indian had made his way into a European painting: a Tupinamba chief, crowned with feathers, included as one of the Wise Men from the East in a Portuguese nativity...
...fantastical flora and fauna of the New World provoked equal curiosity among artists and their patrons. No European before Columbus had ever seen a red macaw (though Raphael shortly afterward included some...
...COLUMBUS, OHIO is Babbity, stuffy, provincial--no place for would-be artists and full-time innocents like Ruth and Eileen Sherwood. Once ensconced in a basement flat in Greenwich Village, the two sisters--one a stereotypically unattractive, intellectual type, the other a charmingly naive blonde whose every smile fells hordes of men--are all set to have their innocence dispelled and their artistic dreams realized. Along the way, however, they must pay a price in the coinage of musical comedy by exchanging cute quips with picturesque minor characters, whirling across the stage in elaborately choreographed dance numbers and belting...