- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630): German astronomer; laws explaining planetary movement around the sun.
- Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1571-1610): Italian painter; Conversion of St. Paul, Death of the Virgin.
- Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): Flemish painter; Elevation of the Cross, The Lion Hunt.
- Franz Hals (1580-1666): Dutch painter; favorite subjects were merchants, ministers, common folk.
- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): English philosopher; materialist who advocated authoritarian social system; author of Leviathan.
- Rene Descartes (1596-1650): French mathematician and philosopher of dualism; “cogito ergo sum”;; inventor of analytic geometry.
- Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680): Italian sculptor; David, Ecstacy of St. Terese, design of piazza of St. Peter’s, Rome.
- Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658): English general and statesman; Puritan and political leader during the Commonwealth period.
- Diego Velasquez (1599-1660): Spanish painter of portraits, religious and historical subjects.
- Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641): Dutch painter; portraits of English nobility at court of Charles I.
- Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669): Dutch painter; favored common people as subjects; The Night Watch, self-portraits.
- John Milton (1608-1674): English poet; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained.
- John Dryden (1631-1700): English poet, literary, playwright of satirical dramas.
- Jan Vermeer (1632-1675): Dutch painter; portraits and everyday scenes; Girl with a Pearl Earring.
- John Locke (1632-1704): English philosopher; enlightenment thinker and empiricist.
- Christopher Wren (1632-1723): English architect; St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): Dutch philosopher; enlightenment thinker.
- Louis XIV (1638-1715): king of France 1642 to 1715, known as Le Roi du Soleil (The Sun King); quintessential absolute monarch; builder of Versailles.
- Jean Racine (1639-1699): French poet and playwright; Phedre.
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727): English mathematician and philosopher; experiments on gravitation, motion, and optics.
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716): German rationalist philosopher, mathematician, historian, and jurist.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): English writer and satirist; Gulliver’s Travels.
- Peter the Great (1672-1725): becomes Czar of Russia, 1689.
- George Berkeley (1685-1753): empiricist philosopher and bishop; propounded Idealism against Locke’s common-sense Realism.
Classical enlightenment period: ca. 1750-ca.1820
The term classical, when used in the context of works of art, refers to features such proportion and symmetry that characterize the sculpture and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome and also the art of subsequent periods that display those features. Classicists embrace the notion of universal ideals of beauty and strive in art to achieve universality through the representation of ideal forms.
It is for this reason that the period that followed the Baroque, when the flamboyance and drama were supplanted by emotional restraint and formal balance and symmetry, is called Classical. The 18th century is also called the Enlightenment Period, because of the ideals of reason, objectivity, and scientific knowledge found in the writings of Diderot, Voltaire, and Lessing that permeated all aspects of European society and culture. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin are among the Americans who shared the belief in human progress and natural rights, that is, the rights of the individual as opposed to the rights of the state, as embodied in a monarch. These ideas led to the American Revolution, then the French Revolution, with its slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”
