Browse Items (202 total)

This painting, by Josse Lieferinxe, was completed in 1497 and depicts a group of diseased and injured pilgrims visiting the tomb of St. Sebastian, the patron saint of soldiers and the plague-stricken. Lieferinxe was originally from the Southern…

An item of crucial importance to the Protestant Reformation was the printing press. The Reformation was a popular movement, which meant that people had to know about it and be taught what the reformers stood for. Bringing this information to the…

The University of Salamanca was founded in 1218, and is the oldest University in Spain. The university peaked in 1584, when it had nearly 7,000 students, before declining starting by the end of the 16th century until the early 19th century…

Spanish artist Juan de Mesa created this print in 1610, and it features three images from the life and death of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as part of a larger series on the life of Ignatius. Ignatius experienced a deeply spiritual conversion experience…

Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish humanist who wrote about reforming the church and deepening spiritual life. One of his most prominent works was “Three Books on the Soul and Life,” a collection of writings about the soul and its relationship to the…

Casta paintings were family portraits displaying different Spanish colonial couples and their children that were often crafted around the 1700s. The paintings are important for a number of reasons related to race and status. The first is how they…

This manuscript was an anatomical manual drawn by Juan Valverde de Amusco, a Spaniard born in 1525. Very few of the images were Valverde’s originals, only 4 of 42, but all were corrected to create a more accurate image of the dissected human body…

The Scientific Revolution, often described as lasting from the mid 16th century to the end of the 17th century, brought tremendous changes to Europe and redefined the way that they interacted with and understood the natural world. But, though this…

Santa Maria Novella (New St. Mary) is a famous gothic church in Florence, Italy. The church's construction began around 1278 and was completed in 1350. The early Rennaisance-era façade of the church was completed by Leon Battista Alberti in 1470…

This painting of a Dutch East Indiaman illustrates the prominence of the Dutch Republic in maritime trade throughout the 17th century. Dutch trade interests encompassed a large part of the globe during this time. In the European sphere, the Dutch…

An ambitious project to compile a mass of information into several encyclopedias, Diderot’s Encyclopedia—though of the Enlightenment era and not Classical Antiquity—can be used to identify how ideas have endured throughout history. Specifically, the…

Collège des Quatre-Nations, was one of the colleges of the University of Paris. The building itself was built with baroque influences by Louis Le Vau (1612-1670). The completion of the college, its construction, and its opening in 1688 all happened…