Word: ornamentations
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Salvinia auriculata is a native of tropical America, and no one knows for sure how it got to Africa. One theory is that a 19th century missionary imported it to ornament a pond. The fern's hairy, half-inch-long leaves grow in pairs on a slender stem. Each broken-off bit of stem can start a new colony. Great islands of weed drift around Kariba Lake, entangling boats and clogging harbors. Fishery experts had been counting on Kariba to support an important fishing industry, as other African lakes do, but under Salvinia's thick floating mats...
Treasure Chest. The necklace contained 647 diamonds weighing some 2,800 carats in all, and to duplicate it today would cost $3,855,500-including, Historian Mossiker notes helpfully, the 10% federal excise tax. This grotesque ornament was invented by the crown jewelers to tempt Madame du Barry, who would probably have bought it if her protector, the goatish Louis XV, had not died of smallpox before the diamonds could be assembled. Antoinette, the new Queen, then seemed the ideal purchaser: her husband had the money, and she, possessing a 43½-inch bust, could set off 647 diamonds properly...
...word that breathes life in poetry is the image-not the image as ornament, but the image as analogy. As a superior example of what he means, MacLeish cites an anonymous Chinese poem...
...reign of pudgy Charles IV, King of Spain from 1788 to 1808, was as squalid as it was tragic, but it did boast one supreme ornament. The Painter to the King was Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, who left behind on canvas a royal family album that has dazzled the world ever since. Each year thousands of visitors to the Prado in Madrid have come to know Goya's bumbling old King, his sharp-faced Queen, the sulky heir apparent, and a host of beribboned infantes and infantas, all portrayed with ruthless candor. But one member...
...colonnades-all form and no function except to support the roof. He has planned one towering office structure that looks like giant Tinker Toys studded with pyramid-shaped joints that are used as service areas. "I like my buildings to have knuckles," he explains. "Joints are the beginning of ornament." He has also used daring devices in more down-to-earth buildings. His Yale Art Gallery, for example, uses exposed reinforced concrete tetrahedrons to span the ceilings and incorporate mechanical equipment...