May 18, 2007
Isabella d'Este was one of the leading women of the Italian Renaissance and a major cultural and political figure. Known as "The First Lady of the Renaissance," she was well-educated in her youth and was a keen musician and collector of Roman sculpture. Under her auspices, the court of Mantua became one of the most cultured in Europe, drawing many important artists, writers, and thinkers. The portrait of her that hangs at the Louvre in Paris was painted by what famous artist and scientist?
May 17, 2007
Jenner was an English physician and pupil of John Hunter, a pioneer in comparative anatomy and morphology. Jenner's invaluable experiments, beginning in 1796 with the vaccination of eight-year-old James Phipps, proved that cowpox provided immunity against smallpox. His discovery was instrumental in ridding many areas of the world of a dread disease and laid the foundations of modern immunology as a science. He invented the term "vaccination;" what is its etymology?
May 16, 2007
Innocent XI was elected to the papacy because of his great saintliness and desire for reform. His election had been opposed by Louis XIV, with whom he had a long, bitter quarrel over Gallicanism, a Roman Catholic tradition of resistance to papal authority. As Pope, he passed strict ordinances against nepotism among the cardinals and lived very parsimoniously, exhorting the cardinals to do the same. Why did Innocent XI have little sympathy for the Catholic King of England, James II?
May 15, 2007
Curie was a chemist who studied crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. He and his wife Marie worked to isolate polonium and radium and were the first to use the term 'radioactivity,' pioneering its study. He and one of his students discovered nuclear energy by identifying the continuous emission of heat from radium particles. Pierre and Marie were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. What is the atomic weight of the element that is named after them?
May 14, 2007
Lucas is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter famous for his epic
Star Wars saga and the
Indiana Jones trilogy. Lucas has his own studio, Lucasfilm, in northern California. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light and Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, are among the most respected firms in their fields. Lucasfilm Games, renamed LucasArts, is highly regarded in the gaming industry. What was Lucas' first feature-length film?
May 13, 2007
Ole Worm was a Danish physician and antiquary who was the personal physician to King Christian V of Denmark. His chief contributions in medicine were in embryology. A collector of early literature in the Scandinavian languages, he wrote a number of treatises on rune stones and collected texts written in the runic alphabet. What are the Wormian bones?
May 12, 2007
Florence Nightingale was the founder of modern nursing. She organized a unit of 38 women nurses in 1854 for service in the Crimean War, and, by the end of the war, she had become a legend. With the testimonial fund collected for her war services, she established the Nightingale School and Home for training nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. Why was Nightingale called "The Lady with the Lamp?"
May 11, 2007
Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter who studied under Francois Rude. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1854, he moved there and studied the works of Michelangelo, Donatello, and Verrocchio. He obtained a taste for movement and spontaneity, which he joined with the great principles of baroque art. In 1861, he made a bust of Princess Mathilde, which brought him several commissions from Napoleon III. His best known sculpture group is on the facade of what building in Paris?
May 10, 2007
David Oliver Selznick was an iconic Hollywood producer of the Golden Age. He was employed by several Hollywood studios before founding his own Selznick International Pictures in 1936. He is best known for producing the epic blockbuster
Gone with the Wind (1939) which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture. Selznick also won the Irving G. Thalberg award that same year. He made film history the next year, when he won a second consecutive Best Picture Oscar for what film?
May 9, 2007
Sir James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and dramatist best known for creating the character Peter Pan, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn-Davies boys. Educated at Dumfries Academy and Edinburgh University, he became a journalist and, later, a celebrated novelist who counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy amongst his friends and acquaintances. Why was Barrie disappointed with the statue of Peter Pan erected in Kensington Gardens, London?
