Word: ornamentations
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Profuse with C scrolls and S curves, rococo has often been labeled an interior decorator's art. In courtly architecture, such as Munich's dainty Amalienburg palace, plaster tendrils so slather the rooms that the ceiling is inseparable from the walls. Rococo was ornament become form, rather than the link between forms. It added asymmetry to the earlier style of baroque art, as one would add fantasy to fiction. Where the baroque was epic, rococo was lyric. It had a horror of straight lines, as if such were the symbols of reason and order...
...stirring up these contradictory emotions is a mystical prelate who leads an ascetic personal life. About the only ornament in his bedroom is an icon of Christ on the cross, and his combined salaries as President and archbishop ($21,280) go to charities. Makarios is so compelling a public speaker that Cypriots flock to hear his sermons, described as "full of poetry and light and love...
...everything that happened on the Continent was ascribed to his malign influence. When Richelieu died, a British rival wrote, "He was the torment and the ornament of his age," and added that it was strange that Richelieu "is shut up dead in so small a space, whom, when living, the whole earth could not contain." Richelieu and his successor, Cardinal Mazarin, left Louis XIV so remarkable a diplomatic organization that French gradually displaced Latin as the diplomatic language of Europe...
Apropos of nothing, Illinois' Everett McKinley Dirksen arose in the Senate last week to ornament a dreary debate. "Mr. President," orated Ev, "there is such a word as 'euphemism.' I do not think I have looked it up for years, but I suppose a 'euphemism' is 'something that seems like what it ain't.' Perhaps that is as good a definition as I can give. I am reminded of the man who filled in an application for an insurance policy. One of the questions he had to answer...
...example," he writes, "mid-18th century interiors, and some exteriors, showed a tendency to conceal structure with overlaid flowing ornament which deceived the eye in quite the same way that an overornamented, spuriously structured dress of that period also did. Much building in the 19th century suffered from a kind of romantic eclecticism that brought on a gush of half-baked period revivals, and the history of 19th century costume shows quite the same dependence on the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the rococo period, Catherine de Medici and James II. In the architecture of our own time, the compulsion...