Word: varnish
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...Columbian mask from the Mixtec culture of Mexico (A.D. 1220) to a bargain Rembrandt, An Old Man Praying. The Rembrandt was picked up for an estimated $500,000 because other buyers were distracted by the painting's murky appearance (Cleveland has since removed the layers of umber-tinted varnish, bringing the Rembrandt back to mint condition, and dumbfounding Dutch experts who had seen it before and after cleaning). Even choicer to the connoisseur's eye are Cleveland's two ivories and, rarest of all, an engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo (see color opposite...
...starch, in some fashion, enhances the production of vernix caseosa, thereby making delivery of their babies easier and quicker. Vernix caseosa is the slippery white stuff that covers the skin of newborn infants. It looks and feels like a thick starch paste, although its Latin name means "cheesy varnish...
...year-round basis, are Riverbank, Calif., Muncie, Ind., Omaha, Neb., Paramus, N.J., Chattanooga and Memphis, Tenn., and Grand Prairie, Texas. But none were quite tidy enough to win the National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau's annual Cleanest Town award, subsidized by paint and varnish manufacturers, and presented by Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman in Washington last week. The cleanest town in the U.S.: San Antonio, Texas...
What attacks Generals fatally and finally is neither its cliché-ridden script nor its miscast stars, but the gemütlich approach of Director Anatole Litvak. The slick editing and the bright, bold colors seem less to polish the picture than to varnish it, and they cannot cover the film's faults. The waifs of German-occupied Warsaw are too plump and well padded, the armies seem too clean and well mannered. And the officers are too self-consciously symbolic of Germany's decadence and decency, grossness and grace. Somewhere beneath it all is a plausible plot...
...faker strips such pieces with lye or paint remover; he refinishes them with stain, oil or varnish, sands their corners, and then "distresses" them with chains and mallets-that is, he gives them a good pounding to lend the battered allure of great age. The suspicious customer should examine the drawers of wooden pieces. Fakes are often hinged together by eight to ten machine-made dovetails; the genuine article has three to five irregularly shaped, hand-carved dovetails...