Word: damping
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Later they marched off for joyous dockside reunions with friends and families. Keynoted one bride: "I felt the damp go right through me, and I said to myself, 'That's old England.' Am I glad to see it again...
...Crystal. Because he can never find his way in the big cinemansions, "idiotic labyrinth of premieres, first runs," etc., Grierson prefers his neighborhood Crystal. ". . . By the time a film gets to the Crystal, the spit & polish have gone, the confidence trick of presentation and ballyhoo is an old damp squib of months ago, and Lost Horizon, Mr. Deeds, and the Hoot Gibsons, they all come even at last on the billboards. They have to talk across the hard floors and waste spaces of the peanuts to be good, with nothing to warm them except what is inside themselves, and that...
Chemically, the Last Slipper had always been a bad risk. The refectory of Milan's convent church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Da Vinci painted the jfresco, was damp to start with. To make matters worse, Da Vinci, the eternal experimenter, invented special tempera pigments for the fresco, and they proved to be less durable than those then commonly in use. Even in Da Vinci's own lifetime the Last Supper had begun to fade, and as early as 1556 Art Historian Vasari complained that it had become "a muddle of blots...
Italian critics insist, however, that despite Allied disclaimers the masterpiece was badly damaged by exposure to humidity after the bombing. They say also that the wall is thick with mold from the rotting of the damp sandbags...
...past the friars of Grazie kept stoves burning day & night behind the wall to drive the winter damp out. This winter they have no coal, and humidity, unchecked, will do more damage. A task force from the Italian Art Monument Department has made plans to rebuild the refectory. Professor Emilio Lavagnino, chairman of the Government committee in charge of the fresco, guessed gloomily that his work "offers a possible guarantee to keep the picture in some recognizable form for another 30 years-not more...