Word: vergil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Dante Alighieri compiled his great medieval Who's Who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's guide, Vergil. But perhaps the most surprising entry in Dante's catalog of "great-hearted souls" was a figure "solitary, set apart...
...19th century, like Theodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny, or the more recent vision of Monet and the Impressionists. Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were French, and their work still cast a long shadow. But it existed alongside a newer appetite for natural vision, the direct recording of the facts of landscape, whose wellhead...
...Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres, and he was almost incapable of bringing off large biblical or literary compositions: his late painting of Dante and Vergil menaced by the she-wolf at the edge of the Dark Wood has to be one of the most bathetic illustrations for the Inferno ever made--not only the animals but the poets themselves look stuffed...
Clinton was a reconciler in the home and outside it, the responsible one whom other adults treated like their own son. The bandleader Vergil Spurlin became especially important to Clinton, whose major interest at the time was music. Looking back now, Clinton says, "He was a real good man, real religious, spent a lot of time with his kids, cared a lot about them." He was everything Clinton's stepfather was not, and once Clinton startled Spurlin by saying he really did not have a daddy of his own. The inscriptions "Billy" put in Spurlin's yearbooks are eloquent...