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Landseer ► Langmuir I 1073
parks. Every landscape garden reflects attitudes toward nature and humans, revealing much about a culture and a period.
Landseer, Sir Edwin (Henry) (b. March 7, 1802, London, Eng.—d. Oct. 1, 1873, London) British painter and sculptor. He studied with his father, an engraver and writer, and at the Royal Academy. He specialized in animals and developed great skill in depicting animal anatomy; he sometimes humanized his animal subjects to the point of sentimentality or moralizing (e.g., Dignity and Impudence , 1839). He achieved great professional and social success and was a favourite painter of Queen Vic¬ toria. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1831 and knighted in 1850. As a sculptor, he is best known for his bronze lions at the base of Nel¬ son’s Column in Trafalgar Square (unveiled 1867).
landslide The movement of a mass of rock or soil down a slope. The term is used to describe a variety of phenomena, from rock falls to the gradual downhill flow of soil. Landslides occur when the force of grav¬ ity acting on the materials within a slope overcomes the material’s resis¬ tance to shearing. Among the processes that can lead to a landslide are the steepening of a slope by natural erosion or excavation, the overload¬ ing of the slope by an inflow of water, and the motion caused by an earth¬ quake.
Lane, Burton orig. Burton Levy (b. Feb. 2, 1912, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Jan. 5, 1997, New York City) U.S. songwriter. Lane worked in Tin Pan Alley, where he came to the attention of George Gershwin. His tunes were featured on Broadway from the early 1930s and were later heard in films, including Babes on Broadway (1942). His greatest success came with Finian’s Rainbow (1947; film, 1968), for which he worked with lyricist E.Y. Harburg. He collaborated with Aian Jay Lerner on the film Royal Wedding (1951). Another joint effort with Lerner, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965; film, 1970), gave Lane his last notable success.
Lanfranc Vlan- 1 fraqk\ (b. c. 1010, Pavia, Lombardy—d. May 28, 1089, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.) Archbishop of Canterbury (1070-89). An Italian scholar who settled in Normandy, he joined the Benedictine monastery of Bee and was made its prior. He became a trusted adviser of William I (the Conqueror), who made Lanfranc the first abbot of St. Stephen’s at Caen and nominated him as archbishop of Canterbury after the Norman Con¬ quest of England. Lanfranc reformed and reorganized the English church, asserted the primacy of Canterbury over York, and introduced the moral components of Gregorian reform. He uncovered a conspiracy against the king (1075), and he secured the succession for William II against Robert II (1087). Lanfranc was also a renowned scholar and theologian who was noted for his criticism of Berengar of Tours’s teaching on the Eucharist.
Lanfranco \lan-'fraq-ko\, Giovanni (b. Jan. 26, 1582, Parma—d. Nov. 30, 1647, Rome) Italian painter. He studied with Agostino Carracci. In 1602 he went to Rome to work with Annibale Carracci in the Farnese Palace. After Annibale’s death, he became the leading fresco painter in Rome. His work shows the influence of Correggio’s dynamic illusionism. His masterpiece is the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle (1625-27), which he took over from his rival, Domenichino; with its vigorously painted figures floating in the clouds over the viewer, it is a pivotal work of the Baroque period. He worked in Naples 1633—46; his best-known work there is the dome of the chapel of San Gennaro in the cathedral (1641—46).
Lang, Fritz (b. Dec. 5, 1890, Vienna, Austria-Hungary—d. Aug. 2, 1976, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) Austrian-born U.S. film director. He studied architecture in Vienna and served in the Austrian army in World War I. While recovering from war wounds, he began to write screenplays. He found work at a movie studio in Berlin, where he later directed suc¬ cessful films such as Between Two Worlds (1921 ), Dr Mabuse (1922), the two-part The Nibelungen (1924), the expressionistic Metropolis (1926), and M (1931). After making the anti-Nazi film The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1933), he left Germany for Paris and later Hollywood. His U.S. films, which equal his German films in their intensity, pessimism, and visual mastery, include Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Ministry of Fear (1944), Rancho Notorious (1952), and The Big Heat (1953). Many of his films deal with fate and man’s inevitable working out of his des¬ tiny.
Langdell \'laq-d 3 l\, Christopher Columbus (b. May 22,1826, New Boston, N.H., U.S.—-d. July 6, 1906, Cambridge, Mass.) U.S. legal edu¬ cator. He studied law at Harvard (1851-54) and practiced in New York
City until 1870, when he accepted a professorship and then the deanship at Harvard Law School (1870-95). His case method of teaching law, in which students read and discussed original authorities and derived for themselves the principles of the law, eventually became dominant in U.S. law schools. His Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts (1871) was the first case-method textbook.
Lange \'laq\, Dorothea (b. May 26, 1895, Hoboken, N.J., U.S.—d. Oct. 11, 1965, San Francisco, Calif.) U.S. documentary photographer. She studied photography and opened a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1919. During the Great Depression, her photos of homeless men led to her employment by a federal agency to bring the plight of the poor to public attention. Her photographs were so effective that the government established camps for migrants. Her Migrant Mother (1936) was the most widely reproduced of all Farm Security Administration pictures. She pro¬ duced several other photo essays, including one documenting the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.
Lange, Jessica (b. April 20, 1949, Cloquet, Minn., U.S.) U.S. film actress. She studied mime in Paris and worked as a model in New York before making her movie debut in King Kong (1976). She appeared in All That Jazz (1979) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and became a star with Frances (1982) and Tootsie (1982, Academy Award). Noted for her beauty and her ability to reveal the inner psyche of her characters, Lange won praise for her roles in Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985), and Music Box (1989) and in the televised versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof { 1984) and O Pioneers! (1992). Her later films include Blue Sky (1994, Academy Award), Rob Roy (1995), A Thousand Acres (1997), and Titus (1999).
Longer, Susanne K(nauth) (b. Dec. 20, 1895, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. July 17, 1985, Old Lyme, Conn.) U.S. philosopher. After receiv¬ ing her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1926, she taught at Harvard (1927-42) and at Columbia University (1945-50, 1954-61). In Philoso¬ phy in a New Key (1942), she presented a novel interpretation of the meaning of art. Her Feeling and Form (1953) proposed that art, espe¬ cially music, is a highly articulated form of expression symbolizing intui¬ tive knowledge of life patterns that ordinary language cannot convey. She traced the origin and development of the mind in her three-volume work Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling.
Langerhans, islets of or islands of Langerhans Irregularly shaped patches of endocrine tissue in the pancreas. The normal human pan¬ creas has about one million of them. Beta cells, the most common islet cells, produce insulin to regulate blood glucose. (Inadequate production of insulin is characteristic of diabetes mellitus.) Alpha cells produce an opposing hormone, glucagon, which releases glucose from the liver and fatty acids from fat tissue; these favour insulin release and inhibit glucagon secretion. Delta cells produce somatostatin, which inhibits somatotropin (a major pituitary hormone), insulin, and glucagon; its metabolic role is not clear. Small numbers of another type of cell secrete pancreatic polypeptide, which slows down nutrient absorption. See also endocrine system.