Word: terrae
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first things the America undertaker changed was the old "wooden overcoat." In an age when the grave robber and the medical student were supposedly working hand in glove, "safe" coffins, made at first of iron, came in vogue. Soon there were models in zinc, glass terra cotta, papier-mâché, hydraulic cement and vulcanized rubber. The coffin torpedo, marketed in 1878, was the final answer to body snatchers-it featured a bomb that was triggered to go off when the coffin lid was lifted. However, the triumph of sepulchral gadgeteering was the "life signal," which offered mechanical surcease...
...skipper the Endeavour. By London's top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus "over the disk of the sun"; 2) he was to search out "Terra Australis Incognita," a vast body of land presumed to extend westward from the tip of South America because it was theoretically necessary to counteract the weight of the Northern Hemisphere and so keep the world on an even keel. French explorers like Bougainville were looking for the same territory...
...Terra cotta was the favorite medium of Vulca of Veii, who lived about 500 B.C., the only Etruscan artist whose name has come down. A head of Hermes, perhaps his masterpiece, is so good that classic scholars once thought it must be Greek. But its smiling features, looking out on a benevolent world with a typically Etruscan expression, are alien both to Roman sternness and Greek idealized classicism. More than anything else, it was this carefree attitude toward life as well as death that gave the Etruscan works their unexpected appeal. Rather than visiting a dead civilization, visitors...
...sixteen works of sculpture shown at the Paul Schuster Gallery, Miguel Gusils tries his hand at a variety of materials: bronze, steel, iron, marble and terra cotta; as well as a number of styles. No. 1 "Torso" is a realistic treatment of the traditional nude. Instead of idealizing the body Gusils prefers to make it very fleshy and animal like. Irregular proportions and a relaxed posture help accomplish this. The same subject is teated in increasingly more abstract styles in three other works. No. 6, a marble nude, approaches a watered down cubism. As in the work of the contemporary...
...play has its merits-some whale-boned wit, metaphysical elegances, aphoristic insights. But Fry is more successful using life as a gymnasium than as a laboratory; theatrically, he is in less danger on a trapeze than on terra firma. He can make words perform all kinds of tricks, but not yet pulse with truth. Shaw, too, loved to send up rhetorical Roman candles. but Shaw's, unlike Fry's, sometimes came down hand grenades...