Word: commonest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...absence of totalizing newness, the strata of the city's building and becoming was testament to a continuity of production on a scale dwarfing the (European) self-construction of the American heartland. My first insight into the possibility of history was appropriately one of the oldest and commonest thoughts in history, while seeming to me both vast...
...sacred and the profane. A beautiful and touching example is De Hooch's Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The little girl kneeling down in that shadowed interior might be engaged in prayer, but in fact she is submitting to one of the commonest hygienic rituals of 17th century childhood --her attentive mother picking through her hair for lice...
...from their being, not the other way around. The Ray, 1725-26, is perhaps his single most imitated work in modern times. Cezanne, Matisse and Soutine all did homage to it in copies. Anyone who has seen the verso, as it were, of a dead ray, or skate, the commonest of sights in a Paris fishmarket, knows that the underside of this fish bears a grisly resemblance to the human face. But that sort of double meaning, with its built-in pathos, would probably have struck the artist as a bit cheap. Diderot, despite his great admiration of Chardin, thought...