Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, more Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, painting, architecture, music, engineering, anatomy, astronomy, writing and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology and architecture, he is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal. Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination", he is considered one of the most diversely talented individuals to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci notes that, while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, although the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox for his time.
Leonardo was born out of wedlock to notary Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina in Vinci in the region of Florence, he was educated in the studio of Florentine painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan, he worked in Rome and Venice, he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France. Leonardo is renowned as a painter; the Mona Lisa is the most famous of his works and the most parodied portrait, The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man is regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, T-shirts, his painting Salvator Mundi sold for $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York on 15 November 2017, the highest price paid for a work of art. 15 of his paintings have survived. These few works compose a contribution to generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary Michelangelo, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, his thoughts on the nature of painting.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, the double hull. Few of his designs were constructed or feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance; some of his smaller inventions, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. A number of his most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci, he made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on science. Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno river in the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence.
He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense—"da Vinci" meaning "of Vinci"; the inclusion of the title "ser" indicated. Little is known about Leonardo's early life, he spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother, from 1457 lived in the household of his father and uncle in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a 16-year-old girl named Albiera Amadori, who loved Leonardo but died young in 1465 without children; when Leonardo was 16, his father married again to 20-year-old Francesca Lanfredini, who died without children. Piero's legitimate heirs were born from his third wife Margherita di Guglielmo and his fourth and final wife, Lucrezia Cortigiani. In all, Leonardo had 12 half-siblings, who were much younger than he was and with whom he had few contacts, but they caused him difficulty after his father's death in the dispute over the inheritance.
Leonardo received an informal education in Latin and mathematics. In life, Leonardo recorded only two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face; the second occurred while he was exploring in the mountains: he discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside. Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters, tells a story of Leonardo as a young man: A local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a
Palladian architecture
Palladian architecture is a European style of architecture derived from and inspired by the designs of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio. What is recognised as Palladian architecture today is an evolution of Palladio's original concepts. Palladio's work was based on the symmetry and values of the formal classical temple architecture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. From the 17th century Palladio's interpretation of this classical architecture was adapted as the style known as Palladianism, it continued to develop until the end of the 18th century. Palladianism became popular in Britain during the mid-17th century, but its flowering was cut short by the onset of the English Civil War and the imposition of austerity which followed. In the early 18th century it returned to fashion, not only in England but directly influenced from Britain, in Prussia. Count Francesco Algarotti may have written to Lord Burlington from Berlin that he was recommending to Frederick the Great the adoption in Prussia of the architectural style Burlington had introduced in England but Knobelsdorff's opera house on the Unter den Linden, based on Campbell's Wanstead House, had been constructed from 1741.
In the century, when the style was falling from favour in Europe, it had a surge in popularity throughout the British colonies in North America, highlighted by examples such as Drayton Hall in South Carolina, the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island, the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City, the Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Poplar Forest in Virginia. The style continued to be popular in Europe throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, where it was employed in the design of public and municipal buildings. From the latter half of the 19th century it was rivalled by the Gothic revival in the English-speaking world, whose champions, such as Augustus Pugin, remembering the origins of Palladianism in ancient temples, deemed it too pagan for Anglican and Anglo-Catholic worship. However, as an architectural style it has continued to evolve. Buildings designed by Palladio are all in Venice and the Veneto, with an rich grouping of palazzi in Vicenza.
They include villas, churches such as Redentore in Venice. In Palladio's architectural treatises he followed the principles defined by the Roman architect Vitruvius and his 15th-century disciple Leon Battista Alberti, who adhered to principles of classical Roman architecture based on mathematical proportions rather than the rich ornamental style characteristic of the Renaissance. Palladio always designed his villas with reference to their setting. If on a hill, such as Villa Capra, facades were designed to be of equal value so that occupants could have fine views in all directions. In such cases, porticos were built on all sides so that occupants could appreciate the countryside while being protected from the sun, similar to many American-style porches of today. Palladio sometimes used a loggia as an alternative to the portico; this can most be described as a recessed portico, or an internal single storey room, with pierced walls that are open to the elements. A loggia would be placed at second floor level over the top of a loggia below, creating what was known as a double loggia.
Loggias were sometimes given significance in a facade by being surmounted by a pediment. Villa Godi has as its focal point a loggia rather than a portico, plus loggias terminating each end of the main building. Palladio would model his villa elevations on Roman temple facades; the temple influence in a cruciform design became a trademark of his work. Palladian villas are built with three floors: a rusticated basement or ground floor, containing the service and minor rooms. Above this, the piano nobile accessed through a portico reached by a flight of external steps, containing the principal reception and bedrooms, above it is a low mezzanine floor with secondary bedrooms and accommodation; the proportions of each room within the villa were calculated on simple mathematical ratios like 3:4 and 4:5, the different rooms within the house were interrelated by these ratios. Earlier architects had used these formulas for balancing a single symmetrical facade. Palladio considered the dual purpose of his villas as both farmhouses and palatial weekend retreats for wealthy merchant owners.
These symmetrical temple-like houses have symmetrical, but low, wings sweeping away from them to accommodate horses, farm animals, agricultural stores. The wings, sometimes detached and connected to the villa by colonnades, were designed not only to be functional but to complement and accentuate the villa, they were, however, in no way intended to be part of the main house, it is the design and use of these wings that Palladio's followers in the 18th century adapted to become an integral part of the building. Palladio's Four Books of Architecture was first published in 1570, This architectural treatise contains descriptions and illustrations of his own architecture along with the Roman building that inspired him to create the style. Palladio reinterpreted Rome's ancient architecture and applied it to all kinds of buildings from grand villas and public buildings to humble houses and farm sheds; the Palladian, Serlian, or Venetian window features in Palladio's work and is a trademark of his early career.
There are two different versions of the motif.
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough FRSA was an English portrait and landscape painter and printmaker. Along with his bitter rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British portrait artists of the second half of the 18th century, he painted and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes, he is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy, he was born in Sudbury, the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods, his wife, the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs. One of Gainsborough's brothers, had a faculty for mechanics and was said to have invented the method of condensing steam in a separate vessel, of great service to James Watt; the artist spent his childhood at. He resided there, following the death of his father in 1748 and before his move to Ipswich.
The original building still is now a house dedicated to his life and art. When he was still a boy he impressed his father with his drawing and painting skills, he certainly had painted heads and small landscapes by the time he was ten years old, including a miniature self-portrait. Gainsborough was allowed to leave home in 1740 to study art in London, where he trained under engraver Hubert Gravelot but became associated with William Hogarth and his school, he assisted Francis Hayman in the decoration of the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, contributed to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. In 1746, Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who settled a £200 annuity on them; the artist's work mostly consisting of landscape paintings, was not selling well. He returned to Sudbury in 1748–1749 and concentrated on painting portraits. In 1752, he and his family, now including two daughters, moved to Ipswich. Commissions for personal portraits increased, but his clientele included local merchants and squires.
He had to borrow against his wife's annuity. Towards the end of his time in Ipswich, he painted a self-portrait, now in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London; the artist's family and self-portrait In 1759, Gainsborough and his family moved to Bath, living at number 17 The Circus. There, he studied portraits by van Dyck and was able to attract a fashionable clientele. In 1761, he began to send work to the Society of Arts exhibition in London, he selected portraits of notorious clients in order to attract attention. The exhibitions helped him acquire a national reputation, he was invited to become a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1769, his relationship with the academy was not an easy one and he stopped exhibiting his paintings in 1773. In 1774, Gainsborough and his family moved to London to live in Pall Mall. A commemorative blue plaque was put on the house in 1951. In 1777, he again began to exhibit his paintings at the Royal Academy, including portraits of contemporary celebrities, such as the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland.
Exhibitions of his work continued for the next six years. About this time, Gainsborough began experimenting with printmaking using the then-novel techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. During the 1770s and 1780s Gainsborough developed a type of portrait in which he integrated the sitter into the landscape. An example of this is his portrait of Frances Browne, Mrs John Douglas which can be seen at Waddesdon Manor; the sitter has withdrawn to a secluded and overgrown corner of a garden to read a letter, her pose recalling the traditional representation of Melancholy. Gainsborough emphasised the relationship between Mrs Douglas and her environment by painting the clouds behind her and the drapery billowing across her lap with similar silvery mauves and fluid brushstrokes; this portrait was included in his first private exhibition at Schomberg House in 1784. In 1776, Gainsborough painted a portrait of Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach's former teacher Padre Martini of Bologna, was assembling a collection of portraits of musicians, Bach asked Gainsborough to paint his portrait as part of this collection.
The portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 1780, he painted the portraits of King George III and his queen and afterwards received many royal commissions; this gave him some influence with the Academy and allowed him to dictate the manner in which he wished his work to be exhibited. However, in 1783, he removed his paintings from the forthcoming exhibition and transferred them to Schomberg House. In 1784, royal painter Allan Ramsay died and the King was obliged to give the job to Gainsborough's rival and Academy president, Joshua Reynolds. Gainsborough remained the Royal Family's favorite painter, however. In his years, Gainsborough painted simple, ordinary landscapes. With Richard Wilson, he was one of the originators of the eighteenth-century British landscape school. William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of him "to his intimate friends he was sincere and honest
Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch draughtsman and printmaker. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important in Dutch art history. Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes and historical scenes and mythological themes as well as animal studies, his contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch art, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was prolific and innovative, gave rise to important new genres. Like many artists of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Jan Vermeer of Delft, Rembrandt was an avid art collector and dealer. Rembrandt never went abroad, but he was influenced by the work of the Italian masters and Netherlandish artists who had studied in Italy, like Pieter Lastman, the Utrecht Caravaggists, Flemish Baroque Peter Paul Rubens.
Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. Rembrandt's portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible are regarded as his greatest creative triumphs, his self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity. Rembrandt's foremost contribution in the history of printmaking was his transformation of the etching process from a new reproductive technique into a true art form, along with Jacques Callot, his reputation as the greatest etcher in the history of the medium was established in his lifetime and never questioned since. Few of his paintings left the Dutch Republic whilst he lived, but his prints were circulated throughout Europe, his wider reputation was based on them alone.
In his works he exhibited knowledge of classical iconography, which he molded to fit the requirements of his own experience. Because of his empathy for the human condition, he has been called "one of the great prophets of civilization"; the French sculptor Auguste Rodin said, "Compare me with Rembrandt! What sacrilege! With Rembrandt, the colossus of Art! We should prostrate ourselves before Rembrandt and never compare anyone with him!" Vincent van Gogh wrote, "Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. It is with justice that they call Rembrandt—magician—that's no easy occupation." Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, now the Netherlands. He was the ninth child born to Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuijtbrouck, his family was quite well-to-do. Religion is a central theme in Rembrandt's paintings and the religiously fraught period in which he lived makes his faith a matter of interest.
His mother was Roman Catholic, his father belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. While his work reveals deep Christian faith, there is no evidence that Rembrandt formally belonged to any church, although he had five of his children christened in Dutch Reformed churches in Amsterdam: four in the Oude Kerk and one, Titus, in the Zuiderkerk; as a boy he attended Latin school. At the age of 14, he was enrolled at the University of Leiden, although according to a contemporary he had a greater inclination towards painting. After a brief but important apprenticeship of six months with the painter Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, Rembrandt stayed a few months with Jacob Pynas and started his own workshop, though Simon van Leeuwen claimed that Joris van Schooten taught Rembrandt in Leiden. Unlike many of his contemporaries who traveled to Italy as part of their artistic training, Rembrandt never left the Dutch Republic during his lifetime, he opened a studio in Leiden in 1625, which he shared with friend and colleague Jan Lievens.
In 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, among them Gerrit Dou in 1628. In 1629, Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens, who procured for Rembrandt important commissions from the court of The Hague; as a result of this connection, Prince Frederik Hendrik continued to purchase paintings from Rembrandt until 1646. At the end of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam rapidly expanding as the new business capital of the Netherlands, began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success, he stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, in 1634, married Hendrick's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburgh. Saskia came from a good family: her father had been a lawyer and the burgemeester of Leeuwarden; when Saskia, as the youngest daughter, became an orphan, she lived with an older sister in Het Bildt. Rembrandt and Saskia were married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandt's relatives. In the same
Émile Zola
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. Zola was born in Paris in 1840, his father, François Zola, was an Italian engineer, born in Venice in 1795, who engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence, his mother, Émilie Aubert, was French. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. Four years in 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1858, the Zolas moved to Paris. Zola started to write in the romantic style, his widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile. Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and in the sales department for a publisher.
He wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had run for the office of president under the constitution of the French Second Republic, only to misuse this position as a springboard for the coup d'état that made him emperor. In 1862, Zola was naturalized as a French citizen. In 1865, he met Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley, who called herself Gabrielle, a seamstress, who became his mistress, they married on the 31 May 1870. She was instrumental in promoting his work; the marriage remained childless. Alexandrine Zola had a child before she met Zola that she had given up, because she was unable to take care of it; when she confessed this to Zola after their marriage, they went looking for the girl, but she had died a short time after birth. In 1888, he obtained a near professional level of expertise. In 1888, Alexandrine hired Jeanne Rozerot, a seamstress, to live with them in their home in Médan. Zola fell in love with Jeanne and fathered two children with her: Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891.
After Jeanne left Médan for Paris, Zola continued to visit her and their children. In November 1891 Alexandrine discovered the affair, which brought the marriage to the brink of divorce; the discord was healed, which allowed Zola to take an active role in the lives of the children. After Zola's death, the children were given his name as their lawful surname. During his early years, Zola wrote numerous short stories and essays, four plays, three novels. Among his early books was Contes à Ninon, published in 1864. With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude attracting police attention, Hachette fired Zola, his novel Les Mystères de Marseille appeared as a serial in 1867. After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin, Zola started the series called Les Rougon-Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire. In Paris, Zola maintained his friendship with Cézanne, who painted a portrait of him with another friend from Aix-en-Provence, writer Paul Alexis, entitled Paul Alexis Reading to Zola.
More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac, who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the start, at the age of 28, had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution; the series examines two branches of a family—the respectable Rougons and the disreputable Macquarts—for five generations. As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they experienced a falling out in life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters in Zola's novel L'Œuvre.
From 1877, with the publication of l'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy. Because l'Assommoir was such a success, Zola was able to renegotiate his contract with his publisher Georges Charpentier to receive more than 14 percent royalties and the exclusive rights to serial publication in the press, he became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, other writers at his luxurious villa in Médan, near Paris, after 1880. Germinal in 1885 the three "cities"—Lourdes and Paris, established Zola as a successful author; the self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola's works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier, notably Louise in the 1890s. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity, social Manicheanism, idealistic socialism, resonate with those of Nadar and subsequently Flaubert, he is considered to be a significant influence on those writers that are credited with the creation of the so-called new journalism.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, regarded by some as among the finest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language, one of the most influential. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley is best known for classic poems such as "Ozymandias", "Ode to the West Wind", "To a Skylark", "Music, When Soft Voices Die", "The Cloud", "The Masque of Anarchy", his other major works include a groundbreaking verse drama The Cenci and long, philosophical poems such as Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, Prometheus Unbound —widely considered to be his masterpiece—Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, his final, unfinished work, The Triumph of Life.
Shelley's close circle of friends included some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin, Leigh Hunt. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for either blasphemy or sedition. Shelley's poetry sometimes had only an underground readership during his day, but his poetic achievements are recognized today, his political and social thought had an impact on the Chartist and other movements in England, reach down to the present day. Shelley's theories of economics and morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx. Shelley became a lodestar to the subsequent three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, W. B.
Yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience was influenced by Shelley's writings and theories on non-violence in protest and political action. Shelley's popularity and influence has continued to grow in contemporary poetry circles. Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Broadbridge Heath, near Horsham, West Sussex, England, he was the eldest legitimate son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament for Horsham from 1790–1792 and for Shoreham between 1806–1812, his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold, a Sussex landowner. He had one much younger brother, he received his early education at home, tutored by the cleric Evan Edwards of nearby Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby, recounted his early childhood in his The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, it was a happy and contented childhood spent in country pursuits such as fishing and hunting. In 1802 he entered the Syon House Academy of Middlesex. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, where he fared poorly, was subjected to an daily mob torment at around noon by older boys, who aptly called these incidents "Shelley-baits".
Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice. This daily misery could be attributed to Shelley's refusal to take part in fagging and his indifference towards games and other youthful activities; because of these peculiarities he acquired the nickname "Mad Shelley". Shelley possessed a keen interest in science at Eton, which he would apply to cause a surprising amount of mischief for a boy considered to be so sensible. Shelley would use a frictional electric machine to charge the door handle of his room, much to the amusement of his friends, his friends were amused when his gentlemanly tutor, Mr Bethell, in attempting to enter his room, was alarmed at the noise of the electric shocks, despite Shelley's dutiful protestations. His mischievous side was again demonstrated by "his last bit of naughtiness at school", to blow up a tree on Eton's South Meadow with gunpowder.
Despite these jocular incidents, a contemporary of Shelley, W. H. Merie, recalled that Shelley made no friends at Eton, although he did seek a kindred spirit without success. On 10 April 1810 he matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but read sixteen hours a day, his first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi, in which he vented his early atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, together with his sister Elizabeth, published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire and, while at Oxford, he issued a collection of verses, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, with Thomas Jefferson Hogg. In 1811 Shelley anonymously published a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism", brought to the attention of the university administration, he was called to appear before the college's fellows, including the Dean, George Rowley, his refusal to repudiate the authorship of the pamphlet resulte
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