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December 30, 2011 - May 25, 2012
tales cover a range of literary genres, from sermon to allegory, from hagiography to chivalric romance.
language of The Canterbury Tales is Middle English, the bridge between the Old English of Beowulf and the modern English in use today.
All but two of the tales are in verse. Chaucer chose to depart from prevailing French verse forms and use iambic pentameter—a
After the Black Death ravaged England in the late 1340s, Chaucer’s family inherited a fortune from relatives who died in the epidemic. This financial windfall enabled Chaucer to obtain an education rather than become a tradesman or merchant.
painter, architect, poet, and engineer, he considered himself first and foremost a sculptor.
1501, Michelangelo had returned to Florence where he worked on his famous sculpture David.
request from the pope, who wished Michelangelo to paint the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Once the ceiling was done, Michelangelo returned to the pope’s tomb for which he carved the figure of Moses and the Dying Slave between 1513 and 1516.
spent much of the next twenty years working on various projects for the powerful Medici family, most notably their funerary chapel in the basilica of San Lorenzo.
fresco of the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. He signed the work by painting his own likeness onto the flayed skin of the martyr Bartholomew.
redesign the space atop Capitoline Hill, the ancient center of the city. Nine years later, he was appointed chief architect of the new Saint Peter’s, for which he designed the famous dome. Unfortunately, he did not live to see its completion.
Atoms with the same charge are repulsed by each other.
This is why your hair stands up on end. The electrons from your hair rub off onto your brush. Your hair becomes positively charged. Each positive strand of hair wants to move as far away from the other strands as possible, so you get “fly-away” hair.
Lightning is static electricity on a larger scale.
Benjamin Franklin discovered that lightning is static electricity in his famous kite experiment.
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) received a commission from the Viceroy of Ireland to compose a piece for a Dublin charity concert.
Messiah ensured that the composer would be a household name for generations to come.
worked for several years as a military engineer before writing revolutionary works in philosophy, mathematics, and science.
philosophy is known today as Cartesianism or Cartesian philosophy.
Descartes made his famous observation that because he could not doubt he thinks, he could not doubt he exists—“I think, therefore I am,” or, in the original Latin, “Cogito, ergo sum.”
Descartes invented analytic geometry also called coordinate geometry.
Joseph, is rarely mentioned in the Gospels and therefore is believed to have died before Jesus reached his middle-teen years.
Jesus adopted Joseph’s trade, carpentry, before beginning to teach when he reached his thirties.
He befriended and taught women, which was condemned by the religious establishment of the time.
The Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, convicted him of blasphemy and handed him to the Romans on the charge of sedition against the State.
Christ is the Greek term for “messiah.”
century after 1492, Spain became the most powerful country in the world. Spanish conquistadors captured vast territories in the New World,
Galleons laden with gold and other riches returned to Spanish ports, instantly making the crown wealthy almost beyond comprehension.
a domestic campaign for religious purity gained steam. After expelling the Jews in 1492 and ordering Muslims to convert to Christianity, the authorities in Madrid were determined to turn their newly powerful country into a pious Christian kingdom.
Spanish Inquisition aimed to root out heresy and punish the so-called “false converts,” often with a grisly execution.
Today, the Spanish Inquisition is synonymous with the overzealous religious persecutions and bigotry of the medieval period.
particularly targeted Jews, fueling European anti-Semitism.
Roman Inquisition also murdered and imprisoned scientists, like Galileo, whose findings contradicted Church belief.
detailed account of a man’s journey through the afterlife, it has influenced Christian cosmology for centuries and formed the basis of the modern Italian language.
In 1302, he fled into exile after his political stances earned him a death sentence from the Florentine government.
structured in threes, mirroring the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity. It includes three sections—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—each comprised of thirty-three divisions, or cantos.
wrote the entire work in terza rima, a form in which sets of three lines are joined in an interlocking rhyme scheme
protagonist of La Commedia is Dante himself.
legendary inscription Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate—“Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”
Purgatorio, Dante visits purgatory, the holding ground for souls not yet pure enough to meet God.
After this stage, Virgil can go no further, for as a pagan he cannot enter heaven.
Virtually all Italian literature until the 1200s had been written in Latin, so Dante’s decision to use vernacular Italian was a significant change.
The poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.”
the republic of Florence hired Michelangelo to sculpt a figure of David for the facade of its cathedral.
According to legend, Michelangelo received the job because he was the only one willing to work with the “spoiled” stone.
it was considered too extraordinary to be placed high up on the church. Instead, it was placed before the Palazzo Vecchio on the Piazza della Signoria in the very center of Florence.
sculpture was pelted with stones when it was first erected on the Piazza della Signoria,
In 1527, its left arm was broken during a riot. The statue was removed from the Piazza in 1873 in order to rescue it from damage caused by the elements and pollution.
In 1991, a deranged Italian painter attacked the original with a hammer, sm...
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Today David can be seen in the Galleria dell’Accademia along with other sculptures by Michelangelo, such as the four unfinished slaves that he designed for the tomb of Julius II.
