Word: tothe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Almost a year has passed since a deranged Hungarian-born Australian named Lászlo Toth attacked Michelangelo's Pietà in its chapel at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. With 15 hammer blows Toth knocked off the Madonna's left forearm, dented her veil, smashed her nose and chipped her left cheek (left...
Nobody will ever know what went through the scrambled circuits of Laszlo Toth's brain when he climbed over the guardrail of the chapel of the Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica and started battering with his hammer at the Madonna's resigned stone arm, the folded veil, the nose, the translucent shell of her left eyelid. But one may guess: Toth had lost all power to distinguish between an image and the reality it denotes...
...Laszlo Toth's act may serve one purpose. For decades, the cultural heritage of Italy (or that part of it embodied in architecture, painting and sculpture, urban planning and landscape design) has been deteriorating-rotting or stolen or bulldozed, concreted over in the name of progress, or just strangled in red tape. Last week's attack on the Pieta may direct the world's attention to the urgency of this problem. It is not a matter of one Michelangelo the less but the gradual death of the most complex and exquisite cultural ecology that Europe...
...display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City-put the point no less bitterly: "How can a nation's heritage be saved when her own people fail to recognize it as their own irreplaceable culture?" The overriding threat is not posed by iconoclastic maniacs like Toth but by eminently respectable town mayors, government planners and chairmen of land-development companies, whose greed or laziness is transforming Italy's historic centers into a chaotic urban wilderness, its coastline into holiday camps lapped by a salty chemical soup, and its museums and churches into understaffed, crumbling fermentation chambers where...
...police, led by Frank Lovejoy, are firm of jaw but slow of wit, and lag far behind the audience in solving the transparent mystery. But no matter. Time makes this hokum endearing. Director Andre de Toth comes up with several chilling images-for instance, the faces of the wax effigies being put to flame and melting into mush-and keeps the action moving briskly along its hopelessly illogical course...