Word: cort
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sprawling mural cavalcades of Mexican history, Diego Rivera has painted at least four portraits of Conquistador Hernando Cortés, always as a handsome, broad-shouldered hero. Last week Rivera fans, examining his latest addition to the murals in Mexico City's National Palace, met a new character, a cross-eyed, hunch backed, bowlegged cretin. "It's Sancho Panza," was their immediate reaction...
Nonsense, barked Rivera, "It's Cortes." "I have been a victim of history," explained Rivera, whose lowbrowed Cortés fits current Mexican Nationalist versions of the Spanish adventurer. "All the pictures of Cortés that historians have shown us up to now are really copies of Emperor Charles the Fifth. When Cortés was alive, he never allowed a picture of himself to be made."*Rivera said he based his new Cortés on scientific examination of the Spaniard's cranium and leg bones, discovered in 1947 in a floor crypt of the Mexico...
...ridiculous," replied Dr. Javier Romero, anthropologist at Mexico's National Museum. "True, Cortés' legs were slightly bowed, as are those of most habitual horsemen, but it is impossible to determine from the skull whether the man was balding, whiskered, cross-eyed and humpbacked...
...There are three or four portraits in existence with some claim to having been painted in Cortés lifetime. Bernal Díaz del Castillo described him around 1568 as being "of a good height and body and well proportioned . . . His chest was high and his back of a good shape, and he was lean and of little belly...
...Ruiz Cortínez' friends say that as President he will run his own show and will clean out the fat-contract men who surround the present administration. A middle-of-the-roader in domestic politics, he promises to continue Alemán's foreign policy of close friendship with the U.S. In the PRI tradition, he will not accept victory without putting up a show for it. Between now and July, he will tour the country in what he says will be a "gentlemanly and principally patriotic" campaign...