Word Finder - masterpieces

definition

A piece of work that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career.

definition

A work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship.

example

Masterpieces are not completed, they are abandoned.

definition

A work created in order to qualify as a master craftsman and member of a guild.

The picture gallery, which contains the collection formerly preserved in the Belvedere palace, contains masterpieces of almost every school in the world, but it is unsurpassed for its specimens of Rubens, Dürer and the Venetian masters.

Two are usually reprinted as his masterpieces at the end of his brother's selected works.

The interior contains numerous interesting monuments, including one of Peter Vischer's masterpieces.

It was Aldo's ambition to secure the literature of Greece from further accident by committing its chief masterpieces to type.

The sculptures attributed to Jocho, the founder of the Nara school, although powerful in pose and masterly in execution, lack the truth of observation seen in some of the earlier and later masterpieces.

Before the Alexandrians had begun to produce original works, their researches were directed towards the masterpieces of ancient Greek literature.

The inevitable reaction of the romantic movement made the masterpieces, which had filled the men of the Revolution with enthusiasm, seem cold and lifeless to those who had been taught to expect in art that atmosphere of mystery which in nature is everywhere present.

In the chapel behind the choir is hung one of Van Dyck's masterpieces, "The Erection of the Cross."

On the second abdication of the emperor (June 22nd, 1815) Fesch retired to Rome, where he spent the rest of his days in dignified ease, surrounded by numerous masterpieces of art, many of which he bequeathed to the city of Lyons.

The recumbent statue (1847) of Godefroi Cavaignac on his tomb at Montmartre (Paris) is one of the masterpieces of the sculptor Francois Rude.

They opened the doors of their schools to the Greek and Latin classics, but they represented the ancient masterpieces dissevered from their original historic environment, as impersonal models of taste, as isolated standards of style.

In the interior, which is without transepts or aisles, the roodscreen and the choir-enclosure, which date from about 1500, are masterpieces of delicate sculpture; the vaulting and the walls are covered with paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries.

The proportions of the interior are noble, and in the church are hung three of the masterpieces of Rubens, viz.

When Lysias, in his Olympiacus (spoken here), calls it " the fairest spot of Greece," he was doubtless thinking also - or perhaps chiefly - of the masterpieces which art, in all its forms, had contributed to the embellishment of this national sanctuary.

The Rector's Palace, another noteworthy example of late Romanesque, combined with Venetian Gothic, is one of the masterpieces of Dalmatian architecture.

Her knowledge of life, her sparkling wit and her almost faultless style, make these short stories masterpieces of their kind.

Two or three other technical masterpieces of the engraver's art, the "Coat-of-Arms with the Skull," the "Nativity," with its exquisite background of ruined buildings, the "Little Horse" and the "Great Horse," both of 1505, complete the list of the master's chief productions in this kind before he started in the last-named year for a second visit to Italy.

Like other masterpieces, they suggest much more than they clearly express, and endless meanings have been, rightly or wrongly, read into them by posterity.

Besides these three masterpieces of line-engraving, the same years, 1512-1515, found DUrer occupied with his most important experiments in etching, both in dry-point ("The Holy Family and Saints" and the "St Jerome in the Wilderness") and with the acid bath.

Its church (13th and 16th centuries) is interesting only for the possession of two masterpieces of sculpture of uncertain authorship, executed approximately between 1490 and 1550.

Under Goethe's stimulus he won fresh laurels in that domain of philosophical lyric which he had opened with Die Kiinstler; and in Das Ideal and das Leben, Die Macht des Gesanges, Wiirde der Frauen, and Der Spaziergang, he produced masterpieces of reflective poetry which have not their equal in German literature.

It began by distributing prizes for the best literary productions of the year, then it started the collection and publication of the Hungarian folklore, and lastly undertook the translation into the Hungarian language of the masterpieces of foreign literatures.

Maria Novella, a "Coronation of the Virgin," with a predella in three stctions, now in the Uffizi, - this again is one of his masterpieces.

The Xenien succeeded as a retaliation on the critics, but the masterpieces which followed them proved in the long run much more effective weapons against the prevailing mediocrity.

Hardly less imposing in their calm, placid perfection are the poems with which, in friendly rivalry, Goethe seconded the more popular ballads of his friend; Der Zauberlehrling, Der Gott and die Bayadere, Die Braut von Korintli, Alexis and Dora, Der neue Pausias and Die schone Miillerin - a cycle of poems in the style of the Volkslied - are among the masterpieces of Goethe's poetry.

The Spanish drama, meanwhile, untrammelled by those false canons of pseudo-classic taste which fettered the theatre in Italy and afterwards in France, rose to an eminence in the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon which only the English, and the English only in the masterpieces of three or four playwrights, can rival.

It lay not in the German genius to escape from the preoccupations and the limitations of the middle ages, for this reason mainly that what we call medieval was to a very large extent Teutonic. But on the Spanish peninsula, in the masterpieces of Velazquez, Cervantes, Camoens, Calderon, we emerge into an atmosphere of art, definitely national, distinctly modern, where solid natural forms stand before us realistically modelled, with light and shadow on their rounded outlines, and where the airiest creatures of the fancy take shape and weave a dance of rhythmic, light, incomparable intricacy.

But it was reserved for the 17th century to witness the flower and fruit time of this powerful art in the work of Porbus, Rubens and Vandyck, in the Dutch schools of landscape and home-life, and in the unique masterpieces of Rembrandt.

The masterpieces of antiquity had been interpreted and made intelligible.

It includes a picture-gallery, principally of German works of the 15th and 16th centuries, including masterpieces by Holbein, Dürer, Wohlgemuth and others.

The Frank conquest is represented by the " Crusaders' Tower " at Kolossi, and the church of St Nicholas at Nicosia; and, later, by masterpieces of a French Gothic style, such as the church (mosque) of St Sophia, and other churches at Nicosia; the cathedral (mosque) and others at Famagusta (q.v.), and the monastery at Bella Pais; as well as by domestic architecture at Nicosia; and by forts at Kyrenia, Limasol and elsewhere.

On the 2 ist, a few moments after the estates had assembled, the king in full regalia appeared, and taking his seat on the throne, delivered that famous philippic, one of the masterpieces of Swedish oratory, in which he reproached the estates for their unpatriotic venality and licence in the past.

Under the noble influence of Ferencz Kazinczy he became acquainted with the chief masterpieces of European literature in their original tongues.

Yet as regards the Peninsula, the literatures of Portugal and Castile act and react on one another and if the latter gave much, she also received much, for nearly every Portuguese author of renown from 1450 until the 18th century, except Antonio Ferreira, wrote in Spanish, and some, like Jorge de Montemor and Manoel de Mello, produced masterpieces in that language and are numbered .as Spanish classics.

The way was thus clear for the Jesuits, who, with their Latin tragi-comedies or dramatized allegories written to commemorate saints or for scholastic festivals, succeeded for a time in supplanting both the popular pieces of the old school and the plays modelled on the masterpieces of Greece and Rome.

One of his masterpieces, a bronze statue of Rene of Anjou, stands close by the castle.

What he achieved for the modern world was not merely to bequeath to his Italian imitators masterpieces of lyrical art unrivalled for perfection of workmanship, but also, and far more, to open out for Europe a new sphere of mental activity.

What he lacked was that insight into the best classical masterpieces, that command of the best classical diction, which is the product of successive generations of scholarship. To attain to this, Giovanni da Ravenna, Colluccio Salutato, Poggio and Filelfo had to labour, before a Poliziano and a Bembo finally prepared the path for an Erasmus.

Isabella Gonzaga, who cherished the hope that he might be induced permanently to attach himself to the court of Mantua, wrote about this time to ask news of him, and to beg for a painting from him for her study, already adorned with masterpieces by the first hands of Italy, or at least for a "small Madonna, devout and sweet as is natural to him."

The importunate expectations of a masterpiece or masterpieces in painting or sculpture, which beset him on all hands in Florence, inclined him to take service again with some princely patron, if possible of a genius commensurate with his own, who would give him scope to carry out engineering schemes on a vast scale.

The carved wooden doors of both the north and the south portals are masterpieces respectively of Gothic and Renaissance workmanship. The church possesses an elaborate astronomical clock (1866) and tapestries of the 15th and 17th centuries; but its chief artistic treasures are stained glass windows of the 13th, 14th and 16th centuries, the most beautiful of them from the hand of the Renaissance artist, Engrand Le Prince, a native of Beauvais.

The cabal or clique which attacked the Cid had no effect whatever on the judgment of the public. All his subsequent masterpieces were received with the same ungrudging applause, and the rising star of Racine, even in conjunction with the manifest inferiority of Corneille's last five or six plays, with difficulty prevailed against the older poet's towering reputation.

He has translated Tegner's Frithiofs Saga, several plays of Shakespeare and some other foreign masterpieces.

Wherever the noblest expressions of her mind are honoured, wherever the large conceptions of Pericles command the admiration of statesmen, wherever the architect and the sculptor love to dwell on the masterpieces of Ictinus and Pheidias, wherever the spell of ideal beauty or of lofty contemplation is exercised by the creations of Sophocles or of Plato, there it will be remembered that the spirit which wrought in all these would have passed sooner from among men, if it had not been recalled from a trance, which others were content to mistake for the last sleep, by the passionate breath of Demosthenes.

The two early votive antiphons Ave Dei and Ave Rosa open the disk and it concludes with one of Tallis's masterpieces Salve Intemerata.

We have the largest choice of oriental carpets and rugs in the UK including hand-woven masterpieces from all over the world.

But what if these overlooked masterpieces were playing at your local picture house, in pristine prints with beguiling new advertising?

These allowed him space to hold forth about his favorite topics - the Kray twins, forgotten pulp masterpieces, pit-bull terriers.

He had an immense knowledge and understanding of the repertoire, his favorites being the Russian operatic masterpieces.

It is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of world literature and ought to be known to any graduate claiming an acquaintance with German culture.