George Frideric Handel was a German Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Born in a family indifferent to music, Handel received critical trainin...

Alexander Pope is considered one of the greatest English poets of the eighteenth century. Born to a Roman Catholic family in 1688, Pope was educated mostly at home, in part due to laws in force at the time upholding the status of the establ...

François-Marie Arouet, better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade. Voltaire was a proli...

Pietro Antonio Locatelli was an Italian composer and violinist. A child prodigy on the violin, he was sent to study in Rome under the direction of Arcangelo Corelli. Little is known of his subsequent activities except that he finally settle...

William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like...

John Baskerville was an English businessman, in areas including japanning and papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer and type designer. Baskerville established an early career teaching handwriting and is known to have offer...

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was a celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, whom critics today rank among the European theatre's greatest authors. His works, along with those of the modernist Luigi Pirandello, include some of Italy's most fa...

Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican...

Mikhail Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistr...

As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his...

Christoph Willibald (von) Gluck was a German composer, one of the most important opera composers of the Classical music era, particularly remembered for Orfeo ed Euridice. He is also remembered as the music teacher of Marie-Antoinette who a...

The second surviving son of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the most innovative and idiosyncratic member of an extremely talented musical family. His music, unlike that of his father or that of the master he influenced, Haydn, did not d...

Lancelot Brown (1716 – 6 February 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect. He is remembered as "the last of the great English eighteenth-century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's grea...

Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet and military officer, but he is most remembered for his involvement in two love affairs. Over the winter of 1747-48, Voltaire and his entourage took up residence in Lunéville. Saint-Lambe...

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Win...