Word: gothically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Midwest showed signs of vigor. Hamlin Garland had begun to portray farm life as something more, or less, than an idyl. In the Far West lived the gnarled misanthrope, Ambrose Bierce, writing creepy Gothic tales that pointed back to Poe and forward to Faulkner. But in general, Brooks acknowledges, it was a time of decidedly minor craftsmen, a dry season between fertile ones in American writing. The turn came as the old century flickered...
Chartres' windows have made the cathedral world-famed. Among the earliest surviving examples of Gothic stained glass, they are also the best. Yet the men who created them were amateurs, who may have had some knowledge of enameling but had little or none of glass. They learned as they worked. Each tiny fragment of glass, averaging an eighth of an inch thick, was chipped with the care and precision that jewels require. Laid flat on a full-scale drawing of the window, the fragments were inserted into the grooves of malleable lead bars that formed the panels. Only after...
...also a one-dimensional effect; the first Gothic glaziers had neither the inclination nor the techniques for achieving a pictorial illusion of space. And, seen close-to, the drawing is childishly crude. The figures are as bodiless as shadows stopped upon a screen; they gesture with puppetlike stiffness. For all that, they look wonderfully alive, shining through the blaze of color like prophets in a fiery furnace...
...Rouault was apprenticed to a stained-glass maker, and his prints, like his paintings, look rather like sketches for stained glass. Joyless though most of them are, they have a little of the power and glory of the first and greatest Gothic cathedral windows...
Soon this sort of writing spread all over Western Europe, and it was not until the 12th Century that the arched and spired letters of Gothic script began to replace it. Minuscule never vanished entirely. In time, Gothic became so intricate that papal bulls were almost illegible, and each was usually sent out from the Vatican chancery accompanied by a duplicate written in another hand. The writing used for the translation was merely a variation on the Carolingian theme-the slanting chancery calligraphy of men like Ludovico degli Arrighi...