Word: motif
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sliced into seven major levels, plus several minor ones. The best-preserved is the second, completed in 1390, a date derived from a plaque inscribed with carvings from the 52-year Aztec calendar. Even the bases of the shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc remain intact, including a strikingly modern motif of parallel lines that may represent rain. By contrast, the large Coyolxauhqui stone was made about a century later, during the reign of Moctezuma I, grandfather of Cortés' victim...
...homes designed for the city's permanent residents are so cozily American as to suggest habitats for Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, or maybe the Cleaver family of TV sitcom fame. Typical of the more lavish structures are three-bedroom ranchettes done in a kind of Arabic Southern California motif, with central air conditioning, parquet floors, and General Electric ranges and Kitchenaid pot-scrubber dishwashers in the kitchen. Prices can range as high as $300,000 each for the dwellings, though much more modest accommodations, including town houses and four-story apartment buildings, are also going...
...lived from 1915 to 1918. Turin's towers, including the eccentric 19th century Mole Antonelliana, regularly appear in his paintings. Another favorite site, Turin's Piazza Vittorio Veneto, is surrounded on three sides by plain, deep-shadowed arcades; these serried slots of darkness are the obsessive motif of De Chirico's cityscape. He may have grasped their poetic opportunities through looking at Böcklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more...
...broken arc of a rainbow, the painterly delight in filling three-quarters of a canvas with high piling clouds. Time and again, one sees images in Constable that might have been lifted straight from Ruisdael. Hadleigh Castle, 1829, with its tall split tower and ruins behind, virtually repeats the motif of Ruisdael's melancholy Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond, painted 170 years before...
...16th century artists from Altdorfer to Leonardo, was echoed by Ruisdael in a small panorama of Amsterdam seen from the scaffolding of the unfinished New Town Hall. He also made his homages to the landscape of symbols. The most spectacular paysage moralisé in his work was the motif for two versions of The Jewish Cemetery, circa 1655. This gloomy landscape pullulates with symbols: the broken tree over the dark brook, suggesting a bridge across the Styx; the wan rainbow; the ruins, the air of desolation, transience and decay; and the crystalline, stony geometry of the tombs. Their purity interested...