Word: tumulus
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...wall, and somewhere under this tumulus of pedantry, is a minor artist with some distinctly good moments and a reliable bag of tricks, whose work can be enjoyed on its own terms without loading it with significance. All his paintings in the show -- with one exception, an inertly sentimental picture of a small black boy in a paper hat -- are still lifes. He was not interested in figures and had no feel for the human face. The best of Harnett is, so to speak, the weak populist end of the best strain in 19th century American art: its adherence...
...been treated like a classified military secret. The current jishuku is just too much." Leftist radicals showed their disgruntlement by setting two tiny bombs at subway stations only a few blocks away from the moated palace where Hirohito lay ill, and spraying red paint near the entrance to the tumulus of the Emperor Jimmu, who may be a mythical figure but is thought by many Japanese to be first in a dynastic line stretching back nearly 2,600 years...
...sharp oddity of tone that look and feel like no one else's. America is not short of banal nature art with worthy moral lessons: Save the whales, admire the mallard, reflect on the moral transformation of the seagull. The boots one sees protruding from this tumulus of Orvis-catalogue kitsch are poor dead Thoreau's. But to bring a whole mode of invention to bear on some aspect of the natural world, to reinvent its emblems within a living tradition of art history-even for a moment, or in a fragmentary way-is rather more difficult...
...archaeologists feel that they have only scratched the surface in the vast central area that was the core of the Middle Kingdom. Even for the Qin tomb, the newly unearthed army is just a beginning. The tomb, girdled by four miles of wall, lies under a 150-ft-high tumulus where excavation has yet to start. It may or may not be as rewarding as the dig for the warriors, who can thank grave robbers for their remarkable preservation. Only four years after the death of Shihuangdi, marauders made off with all the bronze weapons the soldiers carried...
What grave robber could resist a target like that? The tumulus is still there, looming above the flat plain, a beacon and a challenge for China's archaeologists, a possible trove of treasures out-dazzling even those on exhibit at the Met. -A. T. Baker