Word: greco-roman
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...life, speaking through his realistic effigy; that's the armor he wore when he did the Turk in--and so forth. Lotto's portraits tend to be more complicated than that. Take, for instance, his magnificently assured portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527. Odoni, a rich Venetian, collected Greco-Roman antiquities, and the clue to this painting is the statuette he shows in his hand--an image of Artemis, goddess of the Ephesians, denounced by St. Paul. But his other hand clasps a crucifix to his breast, declaring that despite his passion for the antique, he believes in Christ, not pagan...
Reggio di Calabria, the southern Italian port city where Gianni Versace came of age, isn't the sort of place where enviably tasteful women nibble on lunch and devour the most recent issues of Vogue. A small city with a rich Greco-Roman heritage, it has become increasingly downtrodden during the past decades. Growing up there in the 1950s and '60s, Versace witnessed the miserable postwar poverty that filled the streets, but could find elegance in the turquoise Strait of Messina that lay just beyond them. His was a city where Calabrian Mafiosi thrived in all their cheap glamour...
Those who shy away from too much conversation about heaven can point out that detailed description of its charms has hardly been the historical rule. The two ancient peoples who probably contributed most to the heavenly notion both started out imagining a gray, undifferentiated afterlife, called Hades by the Greco-Roman culture and Sheol by the Jews. By 600 B.C., bodily resurrection had been incorporated into Judaism: the book of Ezekiel describes a field of dry bones, which at God's bidding "came together, bone to bone" and lived again. The motif recurred in the later books of the Hebrew...
...every textural detail: neither beads of water nor grains of sand on the skin's surface escape him, but in fact add textural depth to the picture. Another series of photographs shows models encrusted with white or black paint, turning their living bodies into images reminiscent of classical Greco-Roman statues...
Armstrong's step-by-step march down the years shows how a succession of spiritual decisions and political circumstances passed the city from faith to faith. The rise of Greco-Roman power opened the way for the followers of Jesus to remake Jerusalem into Christendom's holiest place, a development she regards with little sympathy. Christians were taught to worship God's presence in Jesus rather than a specific place, she says; only in the 4th century with the archaeologically suspect "discovery" of Christ's tomb within Jerusalem's walls did the church project ideas of the divine onto...