An examination of the iconography of seventeenth-century altarpieces highlights a Christcentric focus, concern for the story of the Passion and the key episodes of the Christian epic, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

to vibrate a sword or a staff

"4. In another room below I saw the statue of Seneca bleeding to death. It is of a black stone like jet; than which nothing can be blacker but the crimes of Nero the magistricide, who put this rare man his master to death. […]

When Missy sat in the classroom, exhausted with the lassitudinous warmth of spring and with the painful uncertainty of whether she'd be called to translate the Vergil passage she hadn't mastered, visions of that coming glory would rise to brighten weary hours; and the last thing at night, in falling asleep, as the moon stole in tenderly to touch her smiling face, she took them to her dreams.