Word: romes
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Marcion, probably born around A.D. 85, was a formidable scholar of Scripture and a devotee of the teachings of St. Paul. A wealthy shipowner from what is now the Black Sea coast of Turkey, he made a large contribution to the struggling Christian community in Rome and then proceeded to enunciate his vision of Christ. The kind and good Jesus, he declared, could not possibly be the Son of the implacably just, harshly rational God of the Jewish Prophets. No, that was the wrong God, merely the creator of this world. Jesus was the Son of an unknown and greater...
...complex freshness came as a revelation to younger French artists, including the 28-year-old Corot, who was on the verge of departing for Italy. Today it's hard to imagine the delicious feelings of initiation and surrender with which foreign artists once went to Italy. Each view in Rome, every corner of Naples or Latium, seemed impregnated with meaning--by the memory of artists who had painted them before, by the presence of Antiquity and by the mellow beauty of the light. But to see Nature so authoritatively fused with Culture could also be a misery for a newcomer...
Corot's small oils of subjects like the view from the Pincio across Santa Trinita del Monte and the panorama of Rome below, and his studies of rustic places like Civita Castellana, were never meant to be shown in public. Until 1849 none were. They were intended solely as preparations for larger studio compositions, but these rarely have the elan and directness of his first insights. For him they were triggers of memory. "After my excursions," he wrote, "I invite Nature to come and spend a few days at home with me; brush in hand, I hunt for nuts...
SOMETIMES THE COURSE OF HISTORY IS DICTATED BY OBscure forces at work beneath the surface. One theory, for example, suggests that Rome declined and fell because the lead content in the wine cups of the bibulous power elite made them weak and stupid. In that spirit, it may be time to appreciate the role of passive aggression in turn-of-the-millennium America...
DIED. ELEANOR CLARK, 82, essay writer and novelist whose stylish books on Rome and Brittany used travel as a springboard for evocative explorations of culture and history; in Boston. She was the widow of the novelist Robert Penn Warren...