fallen angel
Maria Anna Angelica Kauffmann was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter. She was, along with Mary Moser, one of two female painters among the founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli was an Italian universalist scientist of the 17th century Scientific Revolution, the founder of biomechanics.
He studied mathematics under Benedetto Castelli (1577-1644) in Rome. In the 1640s Borelli was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Messina and at Pisa in 1656. After 12 years at Pisa and numerous disputes with colleagues, Borelli left the university. In 1667 Borelli returned to the University of Messina, where he engaged in literary and historical studies, studied the eruption of the volcano Etna, and continued to work on the problem of muscular movement of animals and other bodily functions according to the laws of statics and dynamics. In 1674 he was accused of participating in a conspiracy to liberate Sicily from Spain and fled to Rome.
Borelli is known primarily for his attempts to explain muscular movement and other bodily functions according to the laws of statics and dynamics. His best-known work is De Motu Animalium (1680-81; "On the Motion of Animals"). Borelli calculated the forces required for balance in the various joints of the human body, long before Newton published his Laws of Motion. Borelli was the first to realize that musculoskeletal levers increase motion, not force, so muscles must produce much greater forces than those that resist motion. He was also one of the first microscopists: he made microscopic studies of blood circulation, nematodes, textile fibers, and spider eggs. Borelli also authored works on physics, medicine, astronomy, geology, mathematics, and mechanics.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet was a British astronomer and son of the Uranus discoverer Wilhelm Herschel. He is credited with the first double star and nebula catalogues of the southern starry sky, which he observed during a five-year stay near Cape Town.
Veit Stoß war ein bedeutender deutscher Bildhauer, dessen Werk den Übergang von der Spätgotik zur nördlichen Renaissance markiert. Der um 1450 in der Nähe von Horb am Neckar geborene Stoß ist für seinen gefühlsbetonten Stil und seine filigranen Schnitzereien, vor allem in Holz, bekannt. Sein Hauptwerk, der 1489 vollendete Veit-Stoß-Altar in der Krakauer Marienkirche, ist ein Zeugnis seines handwerklichen Könnens und gilt als eines der größten Triptychen seiner Zeit.
Nach seiner Rückkehr nach Nürnberg im Jahr 1496 geriet Stoß in Turbulenzen, unter anderem wurde er wegen Fälschung verurteilt, aber schließlich begnadigt. Seine späteren Werke, wie der "Tobias und der Engel", zeigen weiterhin sein außergewöhnliches Talent und wurden sogar von Kritikern wie Giorgio Vasari bewundert.
Für alle, die sich für die Kunst der Bildhauerei und die Geschichte der Renaissance interessieren, bieten die Werke von Stoß einen tiefen Einblick in die Kunst dieser Epoche. Seine Werke, die sich in verschiedenen Museen befinden, geben einen Einblick in eine entscheidende Zeit der Kunstgeschichte.