Word: menhirs
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...inhabitants' spiritual and social life was sufficiently developed so that they indulged in such time- consuming projects as the construction of burial mounds and complexes of standing stones. Some 500 years before Stonehenge, predecessors of the Celts near Locmariaquer in Brittany may have used the 385-ton stone Grand Menhir, now toppled and broken, for astronomical observations. The neatly aligned rows of standing stones at nearby Carnac may have served a similar purpose. Civil engineering existed around this time as well: researchers have found remnants of 5,000-year-old wooden trackways, used as roads through the marshes of southwestern...
Throughout the '30s and '40s, densely academic images of slightly poisoned girlish innocence would become Balthus's stock-in-trade. He did portraits too. His rendering of Andre Derain as a jowly menhir of flesh in a dressing gown is surely one of the great portraits of the century. But the schoolgirls were his preoccupation. Nobody could call them obscene; they have Art written all over them. Yet they have a great deal in common with the higher literary porn of the '40s, in which writers like Georges Bataille or Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues wove faultless...
...prehistoric Corsicans evidently failed to stop the Shardanes, for many menhir fragments are embedded in the walls of Shardane temples. Still, they made gigantic strides in sculpture. Their earliest attempts (around 1800 B.C.) had simply a head separated from the body by a crude neck; their final works depict arms, hands, and what look like facial traits. Most remarkable of all, they were apparently laboriously carved with round, white quartz tools. Nor is their final reckoning complete; Grosjean discovered altogether 72 carved menhirs, of which 30 were finely sculpted. Says he: "I have only scratched the surface. There is enough...
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