istoryworld
Trial and execution of Charles I
On 2 January 1649 the House of Commons resolves that it is treason for a king to wage war against parliament. At the same time the members pass a bill setting up a High Court to judge Charles Stuart on this charge of treason. The House of Lords rejects the bill, so on January 4 the commons resolve that the House of Commons, assembled in parliament, is the supreme authority in the land and that its enactments have the force of law whether or not ...
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Cranach and Holbein
On this first occasion Holbein stays only two years in England, but he paints a great many portraits during his visit - including the large series of coloured drawings now in Windsor castle. In 1528 he returns to Basel, but he is back in England by 1532. On this second visit, lasting till his death in 1543, he is frequently employed by Henry VIII.The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as ...
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Water mills
In an even simpler version of a water mill, a horizontal water wheel in a stream can turn a millstone above by means of a fixed shaft. Water mills of one kind or the other are certainly known by the 1st century BC in the Hellenistic world. A poem of the time advises young girls that they can now let the nymphs of the stream do the hard work of milling. The Romans adopt the Greek water mill, and Vitruvius in the 1st century BC ...
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The life
The London theatres are closed for fear of the plague during 1592 and 1593 apart from brief midwinter seasons, but in 1594 things return to normal and Shakespeare's career accelerates. He is now a leading member of London's most successful company, run by the Burbage family at the Theatre. Patronage at court gives them at first the title of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. On the accession of James I in 1603 they are granted direct royal favour, after which they are known as the King's ...
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The Sassanians
Near Persepolis, at Naqsh-e-Rustam, Ardashir commissions a great relief sculpted high in the rock face. It depicts him on horseback, with a dead Parthian beneath his horse's hooves, while he receives the royal crown from Ahura Mazda. With the restoration of the first authentically Persian dynasty since the Achaemenids, the cult of Ahura Mazda becomes again the official state religion. There is now a ritual hierarchy throughout the empire, with chief priests for each major district and a supreme priest wielding overall authority.
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Donatello
The larger-than-lifesize St Mark stands in a completely relaxed pose, with his weight on one foot. Folds of loose drapery vividly suggest a projecting knee and jutting hip. The figure has the solid and uncompromising quality of Roman portrait sculpture, even though the beard and long robes seem to echo the saints on the façades of Gothic cathedrals. Donatello's next work for Orsanmichele, probably completed in 1417, has much more openly a classical quality. St George, a clean-shaven young man scantily clad in Roman armour, ...
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A year of high drama AD 1066
Edward the Confessor dies on January 5. He is buried the next day in his new abbey church at Westminster, which has been consecrated only the previous week. On the same day as the funeral there is a coronation, almost certainly carried out in the abbey. Harold, earl of Wessex, named as his successor by the dying Edward, is now king. His reign will last ten months. And it will include a strange omen - a bright long-haired star moving through the sky. The succession ...
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Timur's conquests
Home is Samarkand, the city closest to his birthplace. Timur is busy turning it into a great centre of Muslim architecture and art. Together with the Indian elephants come the best craftsmen of Delhi, who will be set to work in Samarkand - where they join, in 1399, a community of skilled captives from previous expeditions. This is connoisseurship of an unusually violent kind, but it is a genuine passion. Inherited by Timur's descendants, in less rapacious form, it results in a great Timurid tradition ...
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Romanesque
The capitals of columns, carved with nothing more exotic than acanthus leaves in the classical tradition, provide one area in which the Romanesque sculptor lets his imagination run wild. In abbey cloisters of the period (and abbots are among the main patrons of art in the Romanesque centuries) the tops of the pillars are often alive with vivid biblical scenes or endearingly grotesque monsters, cunningly carved to make the most of the available shape. This tradition of sculpture, reaching its peak in the 11th and ...
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Angkor and Pagan
In Cambodia the Khmer dynasty makes its capital, from the 9th century, in the city of Angkor. A series of huge Hindu temples culminates in the great 12th-century Angkor Wat. The temples are engulfed by the jungle, after the fall of the city first to Chams from the east (in 1177) and then to Thais from the west (in 1431). Angkor is rediscovered in the 1860s, to become one of the wonders of the world. To the west, the new Burmese dynasty has its capital ...
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Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta
Ajanta is entirely Buddhist. The great columned cave temple of Elephanta, on an island near Bombay and dating from the 5th to 8th century AD, is exclusively Hindu - devoted to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. But the many cave temples of Ellora, spanning a longer period (from the 4th to 13th century), include shrines sacred to Buddhists, to Hindus and to Jains. Ellora is a sloping site, which offers the opportunity for another architectural element. Open forecourts are carved here from the rock, with gateways ...
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Hinduism in southeast Asia
Traders from India, increasingly adventurous as seafarers from the 1st century AD, carry Hinduism through southeast Asia. On the mainland (Burma, Cambodia, the southern part of Vietnam) and in the islands (Sumatra, Java), Hindu kingdoms are established. In later centuries impressive Hindu temples are built. Angkor Wat is merely the best known. As in India itself, Hinduism and Buddhism coexist in the early centuries. In southeast Asia, Buddhism eventually prevails and Hinduism fades away (except in the small island of Bali). In India, by contrast, ...
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Fatehpur Sikri
In 1571 Akbar decides to build a new palace and town at Sikri, close to the shrine of a Sufi saint who has impressed him by foretelling the birth of three sons. When two boys have duly appeared, Akbar's masons start work on what is to be called Fatehpur ('Victory') Sikri. A third boy is born in 1572. Akbar's palace, typically, is unlike anyone else's. It resembles a small town, made up of courtyards and exotic free-standing buildings. They are built in a linear Hindu ...
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Villa and country seat
The single most imitated aspect of Palladio's style is his use of columns and pediment as a portico in front of a house (his model being the Pantheon in Rome). In broader terms the balance and the relative simplicity of classical design are his hallmark. Palladio's most striking influence is seen in the great houses of 18th-century England. By then part of his appeal is in reaction against a very different and far from reserved style which has intervened during the 17th century - that ...
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Optical signals
This system is finalized during the Napoleonic wars as the Signal Book for the Ships of War, issued by the Admiralty in 1799. This is the code used by Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805, to fly from his masts the message 'England expects that every man will do his duty'. His signals lieutenant later reveals that the admiral told him to transmit 'England confides..', but he suggested the change because 'expects' was in the code as a word whereas 'confides' would have to be spelt ...
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Second Fronts
The assault on the Ruhr is followed by equally intense attacks on Hamburg (July to November 1943, causing a million people to flee the city) and on Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944). The destruction is devastating, but there is also a huge loss of bombers and their crews. And as with Britain in 1940, the Blitz fails to break the morale of the German people. More effective, at minimal cost, is the brilliantly daring and ingenious raid in which two hydroelectric schemes in the ...
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Indian sculpture
The lively traditions of Indian sculpture date back to the first Indian empire, that of the Maurya dynasty. Sculptors begin to carve characters and scenes from the stories of India's three interconnected religions - Hinduism, Buddhism and to a lesser extent Jainism. The presentation tends to be frontal, as though the figures are posing for the camera. From the start, among other themes, there are examples of Hindu art's most abiding image - magnificent young women, nude, full-breasted, and often in some strikingly athletic pose ...
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Wives of Henry VIII
Not many men have six wives. Even fewer execute two. It is not surprising that Henry VIII and his wives have an assured niche in popular history. The king is married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two and a half decades, then fits five more wives into just fourteen years. His marriage to Anne Boleyn, at first passionate, lasts only three years. The king is disappointed that her first child is a girl (the future queen Elizabeth). He is further distressed when she has ...
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Richard II and Bolingbroke
Richard, returning from Ireland, surrenders to his cousin at Conwy without a battle. In London, on 29 September 1399, he is forced to renounce the crown. On the following day a parliament is held in Westminster Hall. The throne is vacant. Bolingbroke is seated in it by the two archbishops, of Canterbury and York, becoming Henry IV. His accession introduces the Lancastrian line on the English throne, because the title which he inherits from his father is duke of Lancaster. Richard is imprisoned in a ...
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Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius
There are two more rulers in a group later known as the 'five good emperors'. Hadrian has no children. He selects as his successor a respected senator, Antoninus Pius, insisting at the same time that Antoninus designate Marcus Aurelius, a talented young member of the ruling class who is as yet only 17, as next in line of succession. Both men assume power without unrest, in AD 138 and 161. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, one of the first of its ...
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