Word: tympanum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most entertaining discoveries in Kraus's The Living Theatre of Medieval Art (Indiana University Press; $15) concerns the tympanum of the abbey church at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, probably the earliest (circa A.D. 1130) monumental portrayal of the Judgment Day. Until Kraus came along, scholars had assumed that seven little men at Christ's feet represented souls of the blessed and the damned rising from their graves. Kraus, however, noted that they were clothed instead of naked, contrary to customary portrayals of souls, and that all were men (normally, some would be women). While four were either praying...
Stark Mortality. Romanesque art gradually came to express a sense of impending doom. In some works, God became a magistrate of man's fate. The Last Judgment replaced the Crucifixion as a popular subject. In a fragment of a 12th century tympanum, or semicircular panel atop a doorway, the Apostles appear garbed in ordinary robes, looking toward the missing figure of God. The significance lies in the stark mortality of Matthew, Peter, Paul and John, portrayed like any common men before the terror of God. The 13th century Gothic period was more orderly than awestruck. A stained-glass lancet...
...balanced her in a luxus of mind, shimmering, orbicular .... eldetic smells of the sterness yet warmness of rum manufactured themselves somewhere in his brain, an acidotic Juice of eye, tympanum, olfactory endings, paplliae, ran over its pink cortex as from torn fruit flesh...