A French Academy of Sciences (Académie Royale des Sciences) founded by Louis XIV at Paris seeks to rival London's 4-year-old Royal Society. Jean Baptiste Colbert has persuaded the king to begin subsidizing scientists. Christiaan Huygens, along with 19 other scientists, is elected as a founding member. After the French Revolution, the Royale is dropped and the character of the academy changes. It later becomes the Institut de France.

During the break between these speeches, we had the opportunity to enjoy the nice weather at the Parkville Melbourne University campus and to walk by stalls for more insight, information and exciting prizes. After enjoying lunch with our friends, we watched a heartwarming documentary film called ‘One in a Million,’ following the lives of an American gymnast and one of her German fans. This film touched on deep themes of identity, growing up, and courage and dedication that is required to reach for your dreams. Jun. 21, The Peace of Breda ends the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667) and sees the Dutch cede New Amsterdam (on Manhattan Island) to the English in exchange for the island os Surinam. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes: "Vermeer's Hat ... provides not only valuable historical insight but also enthralling intellectual entertainment." Effortless and compelling, Brooks is a wonderful storyteller. I doubt I will read a better book this year.' Sunday TelegraphIn contemporary French and Dutch language, the term "hat" could metaphorically refer to a man, while "coif" was associated with women. The Girl with a Flute exemplifies the popular genre within Dutch painting known as tronie, an antiquated term referring to a specific kind of image popularized by Rembrandt and his followers. tronies were derived from living models, including artists themselves, relatives or colleagues. However, their purpose wasn't to function as formal portraits—such portraits were commissioned exclusively—instead, they were kept in the artist's studio, ready to arouse potential buyers' curiosity. Old men, attractive young women, "Turks," and valiant soldiers were all customary subjects for tronies. Artists favored attire with an especially exotic appearance, offering an avenue to experiment and display their adept technique—an attribute that represented a distinct hallmark of the professional artist. Generally fashioned on a smaller scale and dimension to match a more affordable price range, tronies were eagerly sought by collectors. Laws of gravity established by Cambridge University mathematics professor Isaac Newton, 23, state that the attraction exerted by gravity between any two bodies is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Newton has returned to his native Woolsthorpe because the plague at Cambridge has closed Trinity College, where he is a fellow; he has observed the fall of an apple in an orchard at Woolsthorpe and calculates that at a distance of one foot the attraction between two objects is 100 times stronger than at 10 feet (see Galileo, 1592). Although he does not fully comprehend the nature of gravity, he concludes that the force exerted on the apple is the same as that exerted on Earth by the moon. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary stands as one hallmark of the tronie genre (refer to the Special Topic box below). Irrespective of this, the girl's partially open mouth automatically excludes the work from being classified as a portrait, given that the depiction of teeth or the tongue was consistently avoided in true portraiture, arguably the most traditional facet of 17th-century artistry.

They may be wrong, there are even historians who debate their interpretation of that one village. Methodologically and in terms of the ideas though, this is so influential and so interesting as a book.

Exhibition: Michael Rakowitz

I’m really interested in the figure of Bertrand. It’s easy to extrapolate that she can’t have been particularly happy with the real Martin Guerre, who abandoned her. Mar. 11, A new legal code was approved for the Dutch and English towns, guaranteeing religious observances unhindered. What I really like about this book is that it’s such an intricate story of very ordinary people, and yet Natalie Davis uses it to draw out these big themes about sixteenth-century Europe: about gender relations, about the hardship of peasant life. It’s just a fascinating story. It’s riveting. While you’re following it, you’re wondering how it’s going to end. It’s like a novel. There’s a reason it’s been turned into films and my book hasn’t yet. Despite the National Gallery's findings and their interpretations, the painting was exhibited as an authentic Vermeer at the 2023 Vermeer retrospective. The majority of Vermeer scholars have refuted the Gallery's conclusion as well, with the presumption that it was likely created for study and preceded Vermeer's other three tronies. Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme includes a ballet with music by court composer Jean Baptiste Lully, 38, who has come to France from his native Florence and changed his name from Giovanni Battista Lulli. The ballet is so popular that four performances are requested in the space of 8 days.