Word: petrarchism
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...lobotomy. "The theft of the Raphael and the Piero della Francesca masterpieces is a loss beyond measurement," said Italy's leading art historian and critic Giulio Carlo Argan. "It's as though all the existing copies of Dante's Divine Comedy and the verses of Petrarch were suddenly to disappear from the face of the earth...
Died. Morris Bishop, 80, author of elegant light verse and urbane literary biographies (Pascal, Petrarch, La Rochefoucauld); of a heart attack; in Ithaca, N.Y. Bishop served 24 years as professor of romance literature at Cornell. In 1948, he persuaded the university to hire his friend Vladimir Nabokov, who settled in to write Lolita...
...quickened in the 20th century. The '40s seem far away and romantic to people growing up in the '70s, while the '20s and '30s are already shrouded in the mists of legend. Viewing them, those who are under 30 might as well be with Petrarch or Leonardo, peering through the murk of a millennium at the wonders of the Caesars...
Partly for this reason, neither of these new histories is satisfactory. Each uses the same contemporary accounts, though each author clearly senses their inadequacy. Deaux, a sometime novelist who now teaches English at Temple University, is useful only for the material borrowed from the past between quotation marks (including Petrarch's moving account of the death of his love, Laura, struck down by the plague). Author Zeigler a former British diplomat confronted with the numbness induced by the contemplation of too much death, simply dives into his papers and surfaces with another forty facts...
...Netherlands, Spain and Greece all have recently undertaken or completed such projects, most of them inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary, whose final volume was published in 1928. Even with the aid of IBM computers, which will record and digest words from such great Italian writers as Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Pirandello, Moravia-and Dante -the job is expected to take 50 years...