Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality. He is well known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and hist...

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, known for his distinctive paintings of whitewashed church interiors. Saenredam's paintings show medieval churches, usually Gothic, but sometimes late Romanesque, which had been...

Diego Velázquez was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV, and one of the most important painters of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period. In addition to...

John Maurice of Nassau was called "the Brazilian" for his fruitful period as governor of Dutch Brazil. He was count and (from 1674) prince of Nassau-Siegen, and Grand Master of the Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg). He was b...

Ferdinand Bol was a Dutch artist, etcher, and draftsman. Although his surviving work is rare, it displays Rembrandt's influence; like his master, Bol favored historical subjects, portraits, numerous self-portraits, and single figures in exo...

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences...

Cornelis de Witt was the older brother of Johan (Jan), and also a close relative to the great Dutch regents Cornelis and his brother Andries de Graeff and their cousin Andries Bicker. He associated himself closely with his greater brother,...

Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Duchy of Savoy. Cassini is known for his work in the f...

Leopold I, Holy Roman emperor, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, was the second son of the emperor Ferdinand III and his first wife Maria Anna of Spain. His maternal grandparents were Philip III of Spain and Margaret of Austria. He was also...

Feodor III of Russia was the Tsar of all Russia between 1676 and 1682. Fyodor was born in Moscow, the eldest surviving son of Tsar Alexis and Maria Miloslavskaya. In 1676, at the age of fifteen, he succeeded his father on the throne. He was...

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, Italian composer. Born to a wealthy Venetian family, he was not obliged to work for a living and became a highly prolific composer. He had more than 50 operas successfully produced between 1694 and 1741, though few...

Peter the Great ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V. Through a number of successful wars he expanded the Tsardom into a muc...

John Wesley was an 18th-century Anglican clergyman and Christian theologian who was an early leader in the Methodist movement. Methodism had three rises, the first at Oxford University with the founding of the so-called "Holy Club", the sec...

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...

Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, pioneer of political economy, and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature a...