Word: virginals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Through the drab streets of Paris' Red Belt the grim word flashed: "Comrades, to the barricades! The Virgin of Boulogne is coming...
Save France! Up from the vernal south the gold-and-plaster Virgin moved triumphantly. Twentieth-Century France hailed the religious procession, a war-delayed commemoration of the Virgin's 1,300th anniversary. The faithful were as reverent now as on that miraculous Sunday in 638 when the fishermen of Boulogne found the Virgin, then a prow on an unmanned ship that sailed to anchor despite the harbor's shoals. They were as ardent now as when mighty Charlemagne, or splendid Francis I, or Sun King Louis XIV made pilgrimage to her shrine...
...Nice, the Virgin passed through a shower of mimosa, roses and carnations. In Antibes, barefoot sailors escorted her to the parish church. Everywhere provincial roads resounded with the prayers of kneeling suppliants: "Virgin, our hope, save France. . . ." And now, borne forward on a peasant's cart by sweating seminarists, the Virgin of Boulogne came to the Red Belt barricades...
...Opium! Behind the rampart, the Marxists of Ivry truculently cried: "We want no opium for the people! Down with the Church!" Before the rampart, young acolytes swung their censers, priests muttered Ave Marias, the Virgin serenely waited. Suddenly a handful of police appeared, led the Virgin to a safe night's rest in the Church of Ivry...
Sheeler's most recent picture, an oil storage tank surmounted by steel stairs, demonstrated how perfectly his antiseptic style applies to machine-age constructions. The title: It's a Small World (see cut). According to one enthusiast: "If . . . the dynamo has become a 20th-century Virgin, then Sheeler is its Fra Angelico...