Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gamble paid off spectacularly. On March 4, 1986, having swung by Venus to drop off scientific probes, Vega 1 trained its camera on the comet, then less than 9 million miles away, and relayed high-quality pictures to earth. Two days later, it came within 5,500 miles of the comet's heart. Although pelted by dust, Vega 1 revealed for the first time the dimensions and dynamics of the ten-mile-long nucleus...
...theirs." Since 1972, for example, the Soviets have been struggling to establish a continuous early-warning launch-detection satellite system. Since these satellites generally have short life-spans, says a Washington analyst, "the Soviets are forever launching those early-warning systems." As a result, the Soviet brass are less prone than their American counterparts to depend heavily on them. Says Johnson: "The military environment will not collapse without those satellites. They are there simply to enhance and increase the efficiency of Soviet ground-based systems...
...cowled monks and saints in meditation seemed to connect with spectacular areas of Romantic fantasy -- the dungeon beneath the cloister, the Grand & Inquisitor's icy hand on the red-hot iron, and an obsession with trance, death and the link between faith and cruelty. This Zurbaran was more or less written into cultural existence by Theophile Gautier in 1840, on a visit to Seville...
Monks, it seems, are as subject to the tides of fashion as less holy men. Zurbaran's Caravaggian intensity started to drop out of favor after 1650. What the Spanish church wanted was the sweetness and emotional flexibility of Murillo, and Zurbaran had turned to producing devotional paintings by the score for the provincial market in Latin America. Some of the late madonnas in which he tried to rival Murillo's sentimental grace are sugary beyond belief, and the swarms of putti that infest them are among the ugliest in Spanish...
...feminine" late Zurbaran, with his fluid daylight effects and graceful, slightly stilted coloring, though less congenial to modern taste, was not by any means a painter to ignore. In any case, one now sees him whole for the first time, and the Met's show speaks with equal meaning to both experts and the general public. At a time when the rattle of turnstiles so often outvotes the voice of scholarship in American museums, such events unfortunately seem rarer than ever...