新GRE写作名人素材库精选.doc

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1、新GRE写作名人素材库精选 先要GRE写作拿高分，平时需积累新GRE写作名人素材，整理了一些名人素材，我们一起来看看吧，下面就和大家分享，来欣赏一下吧。新GRE写作名人素材库：贞德贞德 Joan of Arc 1412 - 1431Heroine, French resistance leader in the last phase of the Hundred Years War. The life of Joan of Arc must be considered against the background of the later stages of the Hundred Years

2、 War (1339-1453). The war, which had begun in 1339 and continued intermittently till the 1380s, had caused severe hardship in France. In 1392 the insanity of the French king, Charles VI, had provided the opportunity for two aristocratic factions to struggle for control of the King and kingdom. The l

3、eader of one of these, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, finally assumed control, and both factions appealed for help to England. Henry V of England invaded France on the Burgundian side in 1415 and inflicted a shattering defeat upon the French at Agincourt in the same year. The English and Burgu

4、ndians entered Paris in 1418, and the murder of John the Fearless in 1419 strengthened Burgundian hatred for the Armagnac faction.In 1420 Charles VI, Henry V, and Philip the Good of Burgundy agreed to the Treaty of Troyes, according to which Henry was to act as regent for the mad Charles VI, marry C

5、harless daughter, and inherit the throne of France on Charless death. The treaty thus disinherited Charles VIs son, the Dauphin Charles (later Charles VII). Charles VI also implied that the Dauphin was illegitimate. In 1422 both Henry V and Charles VI died, leaving Henry VI, the infant son of Henry,

6、 as king of both kingdoms. Henry VI, through his regent, the Duke of Bedford, ruled uncontested in Normandy and the Ile-deFrance. The Duke of Burgundy followed an independent policy in the territories he was assembling to the north and east of France. The Dauphin was reduced to holding the south of

7、France, threatened with Anglo-Burgundian invasion, and taunted with the title King of Bourges, from which city he ineffectively ruled what was left of his kingdom. He was in perpetual fear that the key city of Orleans, the gateway to his lands, might be captured by the English. In the autumn of 1428

8、 the English laid siege to Orleans. Charles, dominated by the infamous favorite Georges de la Tremoille, naturally apathetic, and lacking in men and money, could do nothing. By the spring of 1429 the city appeared about to fall and with it the hopes of Charles VII.Joan was born (some sources say) Ja

9、nuary 6, 1412 to a peasant family in Domremy, a small town near Vaucouleurs, the last town in the east still loyal to Charles VII. As long as I lived at home, she said at her trial in 1431, I worked at common tasks about the house, going but seldom afield with our sheep and other cattle. I learned t

10、o sew and spin: I fear no woman in Rouen at sewing and spinning.Some time in 1425 Joan began to have visions: When I was thirteen, I had a voice from God to help me govern myself. The voice was that of St. Michael, who, with St. Catherine and St. Margaret, told me of the pitiful state of France, and

11、 told me that I must go to succor the King of France. Joan twice went to Robert de Baudricourt, the captain of Vaucouleurs, asking for an escort to Charles VII at Chinon. The third time she was granted an escort, and she set out in February 1429, arriving 11 days later at Chinon. She was immediately

12、 examined for orthodoxy and two days later was allowed to see the King.A contemporary described her: This Maid . has a virile bearing, speaks little, shows an admirable prudence in all her words. She has a pretty, womans voice, eats little, drinks very little wine; she enjoys riding a horse and take

13、s pleasure in fine arms, greatly likes the company of noble fighting men, detests numerous assemblies and meetings, readily sheds copious tears, has a cheerful face. Joan appears to have been robust, with dark brown hair, and, as one historian succinctly remarked, in the excitement which raised her

14、up from earth to heaven, she retained her solid common sense and a clear sense of reality. She was also persuasive. In April 1429 Charles VII sent her to Orleans as captain of a troop of men-not as leader of all his forces. With the Duke dAlencon and Jean, the Bastard of Orleans (later Count of Duno

15、is), Joan relieved the city, thus removing the greatest immediate threat to Charles and for the first time in his reign allowing him a military triumph.Although Charles VII appears to have accepted Joans mission梐fter having had her examined several times at Chinon and at the University of Poitiers梙i

16、s attitude toward her, on the whole, is ambiguous. He followed her pressing advice to use the respite provided by the relief of Orleans to proceed to his coronation at Reims, thereby becoming king in the eyes of all men. After a series of victorious battles and sieges on the way, Charles VII was cro

17、wned at Reims on July 18, 1429. Joan was at his side and occupied a prominent place in the ceremonies following the coronation. From the spring of 1429 to the spring of 1430, Charles and his advisers wavered on the course of the war. The choices were those of negotiation, particularly with the Duke

18、of Burgundy, or taking the military offensive against English positions, particularly Paris. Joan favored the second course, but an attack upon Paris in September 1429 failed, and Charles VII entered into a treaty with Burgundy that committed him to virtual inaction. From September 1429 to the early

19、 months of 1430, Joan appears to have been kept inactive by the royal court, finally moving to the defense of the town of Compiegne in May 1430. During a skirmish outside the towns walls against the Burgundians, Joan was cut off and captured. She was a rich prize. The Burgundians turned Joan over to

20、 the English, who prepared to try her for heresy. Charles VII could do nothing.Joans trial was held in three parts. Technically it was an ecclesiastical trial for heresy, and Joans judges were Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, and Jean Lemaitre, vicar of the inquisitor of France; both were aid

21、ed by a large number of theologians and lawyers who sat as a kind of consulting and advising jury. From January to the end of March, the court investigated Joans case and interrogated witnesses. The trial itself lasted from April to nearly the end of May and ended with Joans abjuration. The trial wa

22、s both an ecclesiastical one and a political one (because Joan was kept in an English prison rather than in that of the archbishop of Rouen and because the English continually intervened in the trial). Joan was charged with witchcraft and fraud, tested by being asked complicated theological question

23、s, and finally condemned on the grounds of persisting in wearing male clothing, a technical offense against the authority of the Church. Joans answers throughout the trial reveal her presence of mind, humility, wit, and good sense. Apparently Joan and her accusers differed about the nature of her ab

24、juration, and two days after she signed it, she recanted. The third phase of her trial began on May 28. This time she was tried as a relapsed heretic, conviction of which meant release to the secular arm; that is, she would be turned over to the English to be burned. Joan was convicted of being a re

25、lapsed heretic, and she was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, 1431.From 1450 to 1456, first under the impetus of Charles VII, then under that of Joans mother, and finally under that of the Inquisition, a reinvestigation of Joans trial and condemnation was undertaken by eccle

26、siastical lawyers. On July 7, 1456, the commission declared Joans trial null and void, thereby freeing Joan from the taint of heresy. The Joan of Arc legend, however, did not gather momentum, and then only intermittently, until the 17th century. The 19th and 20th centuries were really, as a historia

27、n has called them, the centuries of the Maid. In spite of her legend, Joan was not canonized until May 16, 1920.GRE写作名人素材库：达芬奇da Vinci, Leonardo 1452 - 1519Painter, sculptor, inventor. Born April 15, 1452 near the village of Vinci, Italy. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a prominen

28、t notary of Florence, who had no other children until much later. Ser Piero raised his son himself, a common practice at the time, arranging for Leonardos mother to marry a villager. When Leonardo was 15, his father apprenticed him to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading artist of Florence and a chara

29、cteristic talent of the early Renaissance. A sculptor, painter, and goldsmith, Verrocchio was a remarkable craftsman, and his great skill and passionate concern for quality of execution, as well as his interest in expressing the vital mobility of the human figure, were important elements in Leonardo

30、s artistic formation. Indeed, much in Leonardos approach to art was evolutionary from tradition rather than revolutionary against it, although the opposite is often true of his results.After completing his apprenticeship, Leonardo stayed on as an assistant in Verrocchios shop, and his earliest known

31、 painting is a product of his collaboration with the master. In Verrocchios Baptism of Christ (ca. 1475), Leonardo executed one of the two angels, a fact already recorded in the 16th century, as well as the distant landscape, and he added the final touches to the figure of Christ, determining the te

32、xture of the flesh. Collaboration on a major project by a master and his assistant was standard procedure in the Italian Renaissance. What is special is that Leonardos work is not, as was usual, a slightly less skilled version of Verrocchios manner of painting but an original approach altering it. I

33、t completely possesses all the fundamental qualities of Leonardos mature style and implies a criticism of the early Renaissance. By changing hard metallic surface effects to soft yielding ones, making edges less cutting, and increasing the slight modulations of light and shade, Leonardo evoked a new

34、 flexibility within the figures. This soft union, as Giorgio Vasari called it, is also present in the special lighting and is emphatically developed in the spiral turn of the angels head and body and the vast depth of the landscape.Apparently Leonardo had painted one extant work, the Annunciation in

35、 Florence, before this. It is much nearer to Verrocchio in the stability of the two figures shown in profile, the clean precision of the decorative details, and the large simple shapes of the trees, but it already differs in the creamier modeling of the faces. A little later is Leonardos portrait of

36、 Ginevra de Benci, the young wife of a prominent Florentine merchant, in which her oily face with softly contoured lips is seen against a background of mysteriously dark trees and a pond.About 1478 Leonardo set up his own studio. In 1481 he received a major church commission for an altarpiece, the A

37、doration of the Magi. In this unfinished painting, Leonardos new approach is far more developed. A crowd of spectators, with odd and varied faces, flutters around and peers at the main group of the Virgin and Child, and there is a strong sense of continuing movement. In the background the three hors

38、es of the kings prance among intricate architectural ruins. However, the painting also illustrates Leonardos strong sense of the need for a countervailing order: he placed in the center of the composition the Virgin and Child, who traditionally in paintings of this theme had appeared at one side of

39、the picture, approached by the kings from the other side. Similarly, the picturesque ruins are rendered in sharp perspective.The simultaneous increase in both the level of activity and the organized system which controls it will climax later in Leonardos Last Supper, and it shows us his basically sc

40、ientific temperamentne concerned with not only adding to the quantity of accurate observations of nature but also subjecting these observations to newly inferred physical or mathematical laws. In their paintings earlier Renaissance artists had applied the rules of linear perspective, by which object

41、s appear smaller in proportion as they are farther away from the eye of the spectator. Leonardo joined this principle to two others: perspective of clarity (distant objects progressively lose their separateness and hence are not drawn with outlines) and perspective of color (distant objects progress

42、ively tend to a uniform gray tone). He wrote about both of these phenomena in his notebooks.The Adoration of the Magi was, as noted above, left unfinished. In his later career Leonardo often failed over a period of years to finish a work, essentially because he would not accept established answers.

43、For example, in his project for a bronze equestrian statue he began his work by delving into such matters as the anatomy of horses and the method by which the heavy monument could be transported from his studio to its permanent location. In the case of the Magi altarpiece, however, the unfinished st

44、ate may merely result from the fact that Leonardo left Florence in 1482 to accept the post of court artist to the Duke of Milan. In leaving, Leonardo followed a trend set by the leading Florentine masters of the older generation, Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo, who went to Venice and Rome to exec

45、ute commissions larger than any available in their native Florence.Leonardo presented himself to the Duke of Milan as skilled in many crafts, but particularly in military engineering, asserting that he had worked out improved methods for shooting catapults and diverting rivers. Such inventions, as w

46、ell as the remarkable machinery that Leonardo produced in Milan for stage pageants, point to his profound interest in the laws of motion and propulsion, a further aspect of his interest in living things and their workings. Again, this preoccupation differs from older artists only in degree.Leonardos

47、 first Milanese painting is the altarpiece Virgin of the Rocks. It exists in two versions: the one in Paris is earlier and was executed by Leonardo; the one in London is later, and there is controversy as to whether Leonardo participated in its execution. A religious brotherhood in Milan commissione

48、d an altarpiece from Leonardo in 1483, and it is also a matter of argument as to which version is the one commissioned. Some scholars believe that it is the London work and that the Paris version was painted while Leonardo was still in Florence. But this view requires some remarkable coincidences, a

49、nd the more usual opinion is that the picture in Paris is the original one executed for the Milanese commission and that it was taken away by Leonardos admirer the king of France and replaced in Milan by the second painting.Although the Virgin of the Rocksis a very original painting, it makes use of a venerable tradition in which the Holy Family is shown in a cave. This setting becomes a vehicle for Leonardos interests in depicting nature and in dimmed light, which fuses t