Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Soon after the world's best-known painting was finished (1498), rumors got around that it had been painted not in tempera (egg-white base) but in oils. As the years passed, the huge fresco on the refectory wall of Milan's convent church, Santa Maria delle Grazie, mildewed, flaked and scaled. The experts, who kept trying to patch up the painting with secret preparations of glues and varnishes, did it almost as much damage as time and weather...
Last week the Allied Commission announced that Leonardo da Vinci's faded, dusty masterpiece, The Last Supper, had survived time, bungling repairs and bombs. The convent's roof had been destroyed in August 1943, but the wall painting, no longer protected by sandbags and steel scaffolding, was again on view. Only one retouching job would be necessary: a four-inch square in the tunic of St. James the Greater...
Twenty-eight stokers from a British cruiser at Beirut were sent to Damascus, assigned as guards around a French convent. Since the nuns could not venture into the troubled town, the stokers made daily shopping trips for them. In return the nuns washed the stokers' coal-black clothes. When the 28 returned to the cruiser, they were so clean that their own officers did not recognize them...
Enrico Caruso, probably the most popular singer of all time, lived a life as tempestuous, verbena-scented and romantic as any Verdi libretto. He was already a mature (45) and wealthy idol (and the father of two illegitimate sons) when he met convent-reared Dorothy Park Benjamin, courted her under the disapproving eye of her blue-blooded U.S. father, married her and made her one of America's most toasted women. With operatic fervor, he plunged into his new role: the impassioned husband and father...
Eternal Friendship. In his refuge in the convent of the English blue nuns in Rome, where he is now finishing his autobiography and a treatise on Christ in the Gospels, and where he expects to spend the rest of his life, 81-year-old Philosopher Santayana writes...