Word: lay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Padua in a small chapel completely decorated in powerful renditions of the life of the Virgin Mary and the Passion of Christ. In each panel a few simple figures anchored in the foreground vividly act out the joy, grief, fear and pity of the Christian story. Giotto's gift lay in transforming the viewer into a participant: people felt as if they could touch holy figures Ruskin once called "Mama, Papa and the Baby...
...resemble, in appearance as well as content, the hand-copied manuscripts they were replacing. The dissemination of the writings of Greek and Roman authors led to a revival of the classical learning that spurred the Renaissance. Printed religious texts put the word of God directly into the hands of lay readers. Such personal contacts helped fuel the Protestant Reformation...
Elizabeth's way of escaping gender restrictions and defining herself as a legitimate ruler lay in consummate imagemaking. She stage-managed her own personality cult. She dressed to kill, glittering with jewels in wondrous costumes to bedazzle her subjects. She went on royal progresses--the equivalent of photo-ops--to show off and get to know her people. She had the common touch, able to rouse a crowd or charm a citizen. She had flattering portraits painted and copies widely distributed. She encouraged balladeers to pen propagandistic songs. Her marvelous mythmaking machinery cultivated a mystic bond with the English people...
...know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before...
...nothing to do with illusions or misdirections. An assistant once described the Wizard at work, "displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding." But behind his arcane dexterity lay Edison's exhaustive research and his tenacious unwillingness to quit tinkering until a technical challenge had been met. "Genius," he famously remarked, "is about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration." Or again, as he said in his autobiography, "There is no substitute for hard work...