Word: icon
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...painting-Wyeth reaches and tacks about, fishing for details as if they were really whales. His most ambitious pictures are sometimes the least successful, being too finicky and insistent. But Roasted Chestnuts bids fair to rival Wyeth's famed Young America (TIME, July 16, 1951) as a national icon. Young America shows a boy in G.I. castoffs riding a gaudy bicycle across a limitless plain. Roasted Chestnuts gives new depth to the romance. It looks like the same boy, grown to gangly youth. He stands light and tall beside his homemade chestnut stove, at the edge of a bare...
...pictures and symbols from one culture to fit the religious bias of another. He cites the familiar myth of Europa and the bull as an example of this process: the Greeks developed the patriarchal Zeus cult at the expense of the once sovereign "Moon-goddess" by interpreting a Cretan icon of the "Goddess dominating the Minos Bull by riding on its back, as though Zeus, in bull disguise, were carrying off the maiden Europa to ravish her at his leisure...
Hidden Flames. A major breakthrough in Byzantine art was the rediscovery of the Russian icon, one of the great, traditional art forms. Medieval Russians carried wonderworking icons into battle against the Tartars, held them aloft in religious processions, encrusted church partitions with them. Because pious tradition held that the earliest images were painted-from-life portraits of New Testament figures, the icons were scrupulously copied for some 800 years, repaired when damaged and endlessly varnished...
...Thunderer. Soviet researches, summarized in a handsome outsized volume published this year by UNESCO (Early Russian Icons, New York Graphic Society; $18), establish the medieval stronghold city of Novgorod, southeast of Leningrad, as one of the great centers of icon making. A Constantinople-trained Greek named Theophanes-called by a contemporary the "very excellent book illuminator and painter"-was the artist who brought the secrets of Byzantium's golden age to the cold north in the late 14th century, sparked Novgorod's greatest period...
...Book recommenders cramp my bowels," said the middle-aged cynic, and turned away. But there had been a time when he was young, when the Soon-to-be Lost Generation trooped to the local tavern and lit candles to a literary icon most of us have now forgotten...