1863 Aleksei
Krylov, mathematician
1862 Adam Emory Albright, US painter who died in 1957.
1854 Laurits Andensen Ring, Danish painter who died on 10 September
1933. — Sommerdag
ved Roskilde Fjord
1845 Walter Crane, English painter and illustrator who died on
15 March 1915 — Crane
the Socialist — MORE
ON CRANE AT ART “4” AUGUST —
LINKS
— full text of The
Cuckoo Clock, with Crane's 9 illustrations — Danseuse
aux Cymbales — Reverend
Henry Parry — The
Marquis of Carabas' Picture Book — The
Hydropult— The Quiver of Love
— The
Yellow Dwarf — Walter
Crane's Picture Book — Don
Quixote and the Windmills — Don Quixote of the Mancha
— The
History of Reynard the Fox — The
Shepheard's Calendar — A Book of Old Songs
1838 Franz Richard Unterberger, German artist who died on 25 May
1902.
1828 Frank Buchser, Swiss painter who died on 22 November 1890.
— Village
Street in Woodstock, Virginia — Landscape
near Scarborough
1803 Eugène-Napoléon Flandin, French painter who died in 1876.
1795 Léger,
mathematician.
1785 Thomas De Quincey Eng, writer. DEQUINCEY ONLINE: Confessions
of English Opium Eater, Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater (another site), Levana
and Our Ladies of Sorrow
1771 Walter Scott.
^top^
He would be a Scottish novelist
and poet, whose work as a translator, editor, biographer, and
critic, together with his novels and poems, made him one of
the most prominent figures in English romanticism. He was born
in Edinburgh. Trained as a lawyer, he became a legal official,
an occupation that allowed him to write.
Early Works
A love of ballads and legends
helped direct Scott's literary activity. His translations of
German Gothic romances in 1796 gained him some note, but he
first achieved eminence with his edition of ballads, The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in 1802-1803. His first
narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805),
brought him huge popularity. Following this success, he wrote
a series of romantic narrative poems, which included Marmion
(1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), The Bridal of
Triermain (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815).
In 1813, he was offered the poet
laureateship of England, and declined, recommending Robert
Southey for the post. He also published editions of the
writings of the English poet John
Dryden in 1808 and of the English satirist Jonathan
Swift in 1814.
Novels
Scott's declining popularity
as a poet, in part caused by the competition of Lord
Byron, led him to turn to the novel. Waverley (1814) began
a new series of triumphs. More than 20 novels followed in rapid
succession, including Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality
(1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Rob Roy
(1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe
(1819), Kenilworth (1821), Quentin Durward (1823),
and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). Although he published
this fiction anonymously, his identity became an open secret.
Scott used his enormous profits to construct a baronial mansion
called Abbotsford. In 1820 he was made a baronet. Scott was
entangled with the printing firm of James Ballantyne and the
publishing house of Archibald Constable, which both failed in
the economic crisis of 1826. Refusing the easy recourse of bankruptcy,
Scott strove for the rest of his life to repay a debt of more
than £120'000. He completed the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte
(1827) and wrote several new novels. After a series of strokes,
he died at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832. By the sale of copyrights,
all of Scott's debts were settled by 1847.
Evaluation
Scott is the first major historical
novelist. In his portraits of Scotland, England, and the Continent
from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense
of political and traditional forces and of their influence on
the individual. Although his plots are sometimes hastily constructed
and his characters sometimes stilted, these works remain valuable
for their compelling atmosphere, occasional epic dignity, and
clear understanding of human nature. James
Fenimore Cooper in America,
Honoré de Balzac in France, and
Charles Dickens and William
Makepeace Thackeray in England were among the many who learned
from Scott's panoramic studies of the interplay between social
trends and individual character. In Great Britain, he created
an enduring interest in Scottish traditions, and throughout
the Western world he encouraged the cult of the Middle Ages,
which strongly characterized romanticism.
Biographies of Walter Scott online: The
Life of Sir Walter Scott by J. G. Lockhart (Comments
by Carlyle on this work) — The
Life of Sir Walter Scott by Sydney Fowler Wright Part I
_ Part
II — Sir
Walter Scott by Richard Holt Hutton
SCOTT ONLINE: |
|
The
Antiquary
Guy
Mannering
Ivanhoe
Ivanhoe
The Talisman
The
Talisman
Waverley
Waverley
|
The
Black Dwarf
The
Black Dwarf
The Keepsake Stories
Kenilworth
A
Legend of Montrose
A
Legend of Montrose
Redgauntlet
Rob Roy
|
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
The Bride of Lammermoor
The Heart of Mid-Lothian
Chronicles of the Canongate
Selections
Contributor to Wright's
The
Siege of Malta
Part I, Part
II
|
1769 Napoleone Buonaparte, in Ajaccio, Corsica, he would grow
up to be the writer of Lettres sur la Corse (1786) and Souper
de Beaucaire (1793), a general (from 22 December 1793), first consul
(1799-1804), emperor of the French (1804-1814/15), resident of St-Helena
Island (15 October 1815 to his death on 05 May 1821).
1702 Francesco Zuccarelli, Florentine landscape painter who worked
principally in Venice and England. He died on 30 December 1788. —
MORE
ON ZUCCARELLI AT ART “4” AUGUST
— LINKS
— Bacchanal
— The
Rape of Europa _ detail
— Women
with a Censer — The
Return of the Holy Family From Egypt
1688 Frederick-William I king of Prussia (1713-1740)
1666 Jean-Pierre Abesch (Joan Petrus von Esch), Swiss painter
who died in 1740, 1741, or 1742.
1613 Jeremy Taylor, Anglican clergyman and devotional writer.
Two of his works became classic expressions of Anglican spirituality:
JEREMY TAYLOR ONLINE: The
Rule and Exercise of Holy Living (1650) and The
Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying. (1651).
1557 Agostino Carracci, Italian printmaker and painter who died
on 22 March 1602. — MORE
ON CARRACCI AT ART “4” AUGUST
— LINKS
— Tobias
and the Angel — Apollo
and the Python — The
Three Graces — Satyr
Whipping a Nymph — Lute
Player — Holy
Family with Saints — A
Headpiece —
St. Jerome —
Omnia Vincit Amor — Head
of a Faun in a Concave — The
Annunciation
1534 Jesuit Order
^top^
In Paris, France, Ignatius de
Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, found the Society of
Jesus, a Roman Catholic missionary organization. The founding
members — Ignatius and six of his students — took vows of poverty
and chastity, and made plans to work for the conversion of Muslims.
However, they were unable to travel to the Holy Lands because
of the Turkish wars, and went to Rome instead.
In 1540, Pope Paul III would
approve the constitution of the Society of Jesus, and under
the charismatic leadership of Ignatius the Jesuit Order began
to expand rapidly. For the rest of the century, the disciplined
and highly educated Jesuit priests played a leading role in
the Counter Reformation, and won back many of the European faithful
that had been lost to Protestantism. Near the end of the seventeenth
century, the Jesuits began in force the work for which their
order was originally founded: the conversion of the infidels
in foreign lands.
The "Black-Robes," as they were
known in native America, had successes all around the globe,
and often preceded European countries in their infiltration
of foreign lands and societies. The life of a Jesuit life was
one of immense risk, and thousands of priests were persecuted
or martyred by foreign authorities hostile to their mission
of conversion. However, in some nations, such as India and China,
the Jesuits were revered as men of wisdom and science. With
the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century, most European
countries suppressed the Jesuits, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV
dissolved the order under pressure from the Bourbon monarchs.
However, in 1814, Pope Pius VII reestablished the Jesuits as
a world order, and they continue their missionary work to this
day. The orders' founder, Ignatius de Loyola, was canonized
as a Catholic saint in 1622. |
1432 Luigi Pulci Italy, poet
(Morgante) ^top^
Appartenente ad una nobile famiglia
decaduta, Luigi Pulci nacque a Firenze nel 1432. Nel 1451, a
soli 19 anni, fu costretto ad assumere insieme ai fratelli la
responsabilità dei debiti accumulati dal padre, morto quell’anno,
e si impiegò come segretario presso un ricco mercante. Nel 1461
entrò a servizio della famiglia Medici e fu particolarmente
caro alla madre di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Lucrezia Tornabuoni,
oltre che amico personale di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Si impose
alla cerchia di intellettuali e artisti che si raccoglieva intorno
al giovane principe grazie al suo temperamento bizzarro e alle
sue prove letterarie.
[< Pulci, small detail of Ghirlandaio's
Conferma
della Regola]
Per conto di Lorenzo svolse numerose
missioni ufficiali guadagnando grande stima e influenza all’interno
della corte medicea. Dopo il 1471 il suo prestigio cominciò
gradualmente a calare; di cultura non vastissima anche se non
superficiale, Pulci era infatti legato al recupero della tradizione
popolare attraverso canoni espressionisti, indirizzo letterario
che aveva attratto inizialmente il giovane Lorenzo ma che era
stato superato ben presto dal più raffinato neoplatonismo ficiniano.
L’opera di maggior spicco nel
corpus di Pulci è il poema in ottave Morgante, commissionatogli
da Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Completato già prima del 1470 venne
pubblicato soltanto otto anni più tardi, in 23 canti; una seconda
edizione del poema, in 28 canti, fu pubblicata nel 1478. Si
tratta di una parodia dei poemi epico-cavallereschi in cui l’attenzione
dell’autore è volta soprattutto a creare una lingua che fonda
tecnicismi e voci dialettali fortemente espressive, a scapito
dell’intreccio molto spesso meccanico e schematico. Altre opere
di Pulci sono l’Epistolario, numerosi sonetti e favole
villerecce, la Giostra di Lorenzo in 160 stanze e un
Vocabolarietto di lingua furbesca. Morì a Padova nel
1484.
PULCI ONLINE: Morgante
(zipped) |
|
On
an August 15:
“Take diplomacy out of a war and the thing would fall
flat in a week.”
