Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...World One Knows. In the same tradition, Sculptor Aristide Maillol's woodcuts for a 1924 edition of Virgil's Eclogues reduce the human figure to a flattish, quietly harmonious arrangement of ink lines, yet retain the emotive power of illustration. The observer automatically identifies himself with Maillol's figures; looking at the illustrations, he moves in a world he knows. Villon's new illustrations to the same cycle of poems (see below) employ color and perspective to create an even more recognizable, i.e., convincing, world...
...Jacques Villon, vintage 1875, is a case in point. On view at Manhattan's Lucien Goldschmidt bookstore last week was Villon's latest and perhaps greatest claim to a permanent bin in the wine cellar of art history. His new triumph: a $350-a-copy edition of Virgil's Eclogues, illustrated with 25 superb color lithographs...
...liberate rather than confine the imagination of the reader. He presents no bluntly defined scenes but bathes the pages in storms, mists and sunny fields of color. His tenuous drawing comes through the color only by degrees; then it whispers convincingly of the lofty world and divine forms that Virgil more robustly describes. Whether Villon is picturing the morning sun or a fertile valley at evening (opposite), he excites the observer's memory and imagination to fill out and give weight to the scene. He has the tact not merely to show his meaning but to share...
...rendition of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a glowing exception. A skillful poet himself (Forbid Thy Ravens, The Wind of Time), Humphries, 60, soaked up a love of Latin from his teacher father, who once played baseball for the New York Giants. Four years ago, when his translation of Virgil's Aeneid appeared, critics hailed it as the best since Dryden's. This is only the second time in the last hundred years that the Metamorphoses has been done in English verse, and there has not been one as readable as the Humphries version since the 18th century...
...general coverage of the newly-born American nation he mentioned the quotation from Virgil that is on the Great Seal, and added one from the Eclogues that he thought especially appropriate: "A great cycle of centuries is born anew, and from heaven a new generation descends...