Word: mythic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...esteemed as a painter was to be compared with lost and mythic artists: Parrhasios, Zeuxis and Apelles. Mantegna's taste for emblems and learned allegory -- the mark of superior imagination among Italian humanists -- pervades the work he did at Isabella d'Este's prompting, such as the fantastically elaborate scene of Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue...
Over the years the two peoples accomplished a cultural convergence after all: they met on the hard, bright surfaces of consumerism. But in each other's minds they remained mutually uncomprehending presences, like mythic cartoons, action figures: G.I. Joes, Mutant Ninja cultures. They tended to caricature each other, always getting things just a little off. That was all right as long as admiration and deference remained the organizing principles, as long as nervous laughter and bowing smoothed...
...land among three families intertwined by treachery and revenge. Warner Shook's staging vividly mixes ritual and realism. While Schenkkan is far better at incident than character, Charles Hallahan and Tuck Milligan enact just the sort of rogues whom descendants go on talking about. The plays strive for mythic power -- and attain it. W.A.H...
...mythic figures forever identified with the American landscape are the itinerant evangelist and the salesman on the road. Right now, John Bradshaw, 58, is both. It is a Sunday afternoon, and for the second day he stands before an enthralled crowd at Manhattan's main convention center. All of us, he tells them, had traumatic childhoods and from them spring the unresolved anxieties of adulthood. He plays the theme in masterly fashion: the faithful are spellbound...
...stir our souls because we have attached our deepest feelings to the myths and documents of our founding: Paul Revere's ride and George Washington at Valley Forge; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Democracies that lack such myths can be emotionally naked. A constitutional monarch supplies the mythic dimension in a convenient package. Winston Churchill, who was both a partisan pol and an ardent monarchist, believed that if defeated Germany had had a constitutional monarch after World War I, the Weimar Republic might have withstood the seductions of Nazism...