Word: heroic
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...heroes, not average men; and the world of stoic virtue and exemplary action that unfolds in them is far removed from the reality of the Revolution. The fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive. He rendered this savant, the discoverer of oxygen, in heroic terms, though muted by domesticity; like Homer or Dante, Lavoisier is seen with symbolic appurtenances (the magnificent still life of scientific instruments does duty for the bardic wreath and scroll), presided over by his wife as Muse. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined in the Terror, and the painting was kept from...
...Hand. As an adviser of the Euthanasia Council, Van Dusen in 1967 proposed that the time might come when persons could decide to have their lives ended in cases of "total mental and spiritual disability." But he supported explicitly only the right to die without being kept alive by heroic measures-a view that Pope Pius XII held. This is called "passive" euthanasia, which in law and morality is treated totally differently from active euthanasia, or "mercy killing...
Fuseli had gone to ? Rome to study painting, and there he was swept away by Michelangelo's Last Judgment. From it most of his work stems: the heroic figures bulging against a flat, gloomy space, the hunched or springing poses, the search for an atmosphere of sublime effort. Even the mannish faces Fuseli gave his witches and bizarre courtesans hark back to Michelangelo. So, in fact, did his idea of the artist as hero: Fuseli raised this romantic chimera to a mock-religious pitch by proposing to fresco another Sistine in homage to Shakespeare. Only a few studies...
Nearly everyone has agreed that it is almost impossible to say anything new about the Irish. That may be why so many writers, most of them Irish, keep on trying. English oppression long ago turned the Irish into sophisticated connoisseurs of futility. Trained to revere heroic martyrs, it is hard for them to resist certain vainglorious failure: another fling at explaining their inexplicable countrymen...
...book's most celebrated contributor is Winston Cliurchill (a clever politician-journalist-historian), who in one variant of history did not die of prison fever during the Boer War, but went on to become a heroic brandy drinker and Prime Minister. With double irony in his title, Churchill speculates on what might have happened in If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg. After Lee's victory, Churchill notes, the Confederate general's brilliant stroke of freeing the slaves cut away the moral underpinning of the Union cause. Could Lee actually have forced such a measure...