...Scicli, and ...

China having claimed control of Taiwan in 1683, the Qing government has become open to encouraging foreign trade.

Guangzhou has quickly emerged as one of the most adaptable ports for negotiating commerce and before long, many foreign ships are coming here to procure cargos.

Portuguese in Macau, Spanish in Manila, and Armenians and Muslims from India are already actively trading in the port by the 1690s, when the French and English British East India Company's ships begin frequenting the port.

China in 1693 concentrates all its foreign trade to Guangzhou, forbidding European ships to land anywhere else.

Saikaku, at his death in 1693 at the age of fifty-one, is one of the most popular writers of the entire Tokugawa period, yet his work will not at this time be considered high literature because it has been aimed towards and popularized by the chonin ("townsmen"), a social class that had emerged in Japan during the early years of the Tokugawa period. (The majority of chōnin are merchants, but it also includes craftsmen.Nōmin—farmers—are not included.)

Saikaku’s work is today celebrated for its significance for developing Japanese fictional literature.

The Baroque appears in Russia toward the end of the seventeenth century.

The Russians imaginatively transform its modes into a clearly expressed national style that becomes known as the Naryshkin Baroque, a delightful example of which is the church of the Intercession of the Virgin at Fili (1693) on the estate of Boyarin Naryshkin, whose name has become identified with this phase of the Russian Baroque.

Pope Innocent in 1693 extends the ban on money-lending to Ferrara and other Jewish ghettos under his authority.

He breaks the politico-religious deadlock between King Louis XIV of France and the Holy See by influencing Louis to disavow the four Gallican Articles of 1682 issued against him.

In exchange, Innocent agrees to extend the king's right to administer vacant sees.

Claudio Coello, the son of a famous Portuguese sculptor, Faustino Coello, had studied painting under Francisco Rizi and was at first dominated by a newly popular exaggerated style.

Through the friendship of Juan Carreño de Miranda, he had secured access to the royal collections, in which he studied the works of Titian, Rubens, and other masters.

Josef Donoso probably taught him fresco painting, and they collaborated in the painting of churches and palaces in Madrid.

Coello decorated the ceiling of the vestry in Toledo cathedral Iin 1671; in 1683 he painted frescoes in the Augustinian church at Saragossa; and in 1684 he became painter to King Charles II.

Coello's masterwork is the altarpiece for the sacristy in El Escorial, “Adoration of the Holy Eucharist” (1685–90).

A fine arrangement of space in the Baroque style, it contains about fifty portraits, including that of Charles II.

A remarkable mixture of profound religious feeling and realistic portraiture, closely allied to the work of Velázquez and Carreño, it shows strong color and fine draftsmanship.

This last great work of the school of Madrid has been called a devotional picture, a historical scene, and a marvelous portrait gallery.

Appointed painter to the cathedral of Toledo in 1691, his success has been counterbalanced by the preference shown by the court to the Italian painter Luca Giordano, who had arrived in Spain in 1692 to decorate El Escorial.

Coello has attempted to halt the decline of Spanish art.

He dies in 1693 a disappointed and disheartened man.

Florent Carton Dancourt, born into an established bourgeois family, had been educated in Paris by Jesuits and studied law.

He had married an actress, Thérèse de La Thorillière, in 1680.

In spite of string opposition from his family, they debuted with the Comédie-Française in 1685, beginning an association that will flourish for thirty-three years.

Dancourt's skill as a comic actor and playwright has brought him the favor of Louis XIV and established him as the successor to Molière.

Like Molière, Dancourt is expert at portraying current social types, and his comedies often seize on recent scandals to ridicule the decadence and social pretenses of the period.

Written in prose and never assuming artistic greatness, they are peopled by characters whose vices are made hilarious by Dancourt's witty, effortless dialogue and his ability to make the most of a comic situation.

His best-known work, Le Chevalier à la mode (1687; “The Knight à la Mode”), deals with a fortune hunter's simultaneous courtship of three women.

Other plays are Les Bourgeoises à la mode (1693), in which middle-class women ape the nobility, La Désolation des joueuses (1687), on the current gambling rage, and La Maison de campagne (1688; “The Country House”), making fun of crude provincial manners.

One of the most popular of French dramatists, Dancourt is the creator of the French comedy of manners.

Antoine Coysevox, of Spanish descent, had become a sculptor to King Louis XIV in 1666 and by 1679 was engaged at Versailles, enriching the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) and the Ambassador's staircase and carving the brilliant equestrian relief of the King (c. 1688) for the Salon de la Guerre.

Other important works are the tombs of the finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1685–87; Saint-Eustache, Paris) and Cardinal Mazarin (1689–93; Louvre) and the votive group of Louis XIV on the high altar of Notre-Dame.

These, like his formal portrait busts, have a marked Baroque character.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the most important French composer of his generation and the outstanding French composer of oratorios, had gone to Rome in about 1667, where he is believed to have studied composition, perhaps with Giacomo Carissimi.

On his return to France about three years later he had become chapelmaster to the dauphin but had lost that position through Jean-Baptiste Lully's influence.

He had composed the music for a new version of Molière's The Forced Marriage, first performed 1672, and collaborated with him again in 1673 in The Imaginary Invalid.

After Molière's death, Charpentier had continued to work for the Théâtre Français until 1685.

From perhaps 1670 to 1688, he had as his patron Marie de Lorraine, known as Mademoiselle de Guise, and from 1679 he composed music for the dauphin's chapel (Lully died in 1687).

He had in 1692 become composition teacher to the Duke d'Orleans.

He produces his greatest stage work, Médée, to Thomas Corneille's text, in 1693.

French satiric moralist Jean de La Bruyère is best known for one work, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (1688; The Characters, or the Manners of the Age, with The Characters of Theophrastus), which is considered to be one of the masterpieces of French literature.

He had studied law at Orléans, and through the intervention of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the eminent humanist and theologian, had become one of the tutors to the Duke de Bourbon, grandson of the Prince de Condé, and remained in the Condé household as librarian at Chantilly.

His years there were probably unhappy because, although he was proud of his middle-class origin, he was a constant butt of ridicule because of his ungainly figure, morose manner, and biting tongue; the bitterness of his book reflects the inferiority of his social position.

His situation, however, afforded him the opportunity to make penetrating observations on the power of money in a demoralized society, the tyranny of social custom, and the perils of aristocratic idleness, fads, and fashions.

The portrait sketches are expanded because of their great popularity; eight editions of the Caractère will appear during La Bruyère's lifetime.

Readers begin putting real names to the personages and compiling keys to them, but La Bruyère denies that any is a portrait of a single person.

Topical allusions in his book—La Bruyère attacks the extravagance and warmongering of the king himself—make his election to the French Academy difficult, but he is eventually elected in 1693.

Edmond Halley has the ability to reduce large amounts of data to a meaningful order.

His map of the world, showing the distribution of prevailing winds over the oceans, had in 1686 been the first meteorological chart to be published.

His mortality tables for the city of Breslau, published in 1693, comprise one of the first attempts to relate mortality and age in a population; as such, it influences the future development of actuarial tables in life insurance.

Henry Purcell is constantly employed in writing music for the public theaters.

These productions include some that gave scope for more than merely incidental music—notably music for Dioclesian (1690), adapted by Thomas Betterton from the tragedy The Prophetess, by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger; for King Arthur (1691) by John Dryden, designed from the first as an entertainment with music; and for The Fairy Queen (1692), an anonymous adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the texts set to music are all interpolations.

In these works, Purcell shows not only a lively sense of comedy but also a gift of passionate musical expression that is often more exalted than the words.

The tendency to identify himself still more closely with the Italian style is very noticeable in the later dramatic works, which often demand considerable agility from the soloists.

Kettledrums had been introduced into the orchestra about 1675–90 by, among others, Jean-Baptiste Lully in Thésée (first performed 1675) and by Purcell in his Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1692).

With the development of new playing techniques, modified drumstick heads, and the possibility of notating their music (hitherto prohibited by the rules of secrecy imposed upon guild members), kettledrums, henceforth called timpani, triumphantly enter orchestra, opera, and church, soon becoming the most important percussion instrument in the orchestra.