The imperial court in Beijing, upon hearing…

The work of Dong Qichang, a painter, scholar, calligrapher, and art theorist of the later period of the Ming Dynasty, favors expression over formal likeness.

He also avoids anything he deems to be slick or sentimental.

This leads him to create landscapes with intentionally distorted spatial features, butl his work is in no way abstract, as it takes elements from earlier Yuan masters.

His views on expression are to have importance to later "individualist" painters.

Dong Qichang considers there to be a Northern school, represented by Zhe, and a Southern school represented by literati painters.

This name is misleading as it refers to Northern and Southern schools of Chan Buddhism thought rather than geography.

Hence, a Northern painter could be geographically from the south and a Southern painter geographically from the north.

In any event, he strongly favors the Southern school and dismisses the Northern school as superficial or merely decorative.

Godunov has encouraged English merchants to trade with Russia by exempting them from duties.

He has built towns and fortresses along the northeastern and southeastern borders of Russia to keep the Tatar and Finnic tribes in order.

These include Samara, Saratov, Voronezh, and Tsaritsyn, as well as other lesser towns.

He has colonized Siberia with scores of new settlements, including Tobolsk.

During Gudonov’s rule, the Russian Orthodox Church has received its patriarchate, placing it on an equal footing with the ancient Eastern churches and freeing it from the influence of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

This pleases the Tsar, as Feodor takes a great interest in church affairs.

Boris's most important domestic reform is the 1597 decree forbidding the peasantry to go from one landowner to another, thus binding them to the soil.

The object of this ordinance is to secure revenue, but it leads to the institution of serfdom in its most oppressive form.

Kepler's first major astronomical work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery), is the first published defense of the Copernican system.

As he indicates in the title, Kepler thinks he has revealed God’s geometrical plan for the universe.

Much of Kepler’s enthusiasm for the Copernican system stems from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself is an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit.

His first manuscript of Mysterium contains an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seem to him to support geocentrism.

With the support of his mentor Maestlin, Kepler had received permission from the Tübingen university senate to publish his manuscript, pending removal of the Bible exegesis and the addition of a simpler, more understandable description of the Copernican system as well as Kepler’s new ideas.

Mysterium was published late in 1596, and Kepler receives his copies and begins sending them to prominent astronomers and patrons early in 1597; it is not widely read, but it establishes Kepler’s reputation as a highly skilled astronomer.

The effusive dedication, to powerful patrons as well as to the men who control his position in Graz, also provides a crucial doorway into the patronage system.

Though the details will be modified in light of his later work, Kepler will never relinquish the Platonist polyhedral-spherist cosmology of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

His subsequent main astronomical works are in some sense only further developments of it, concerned with finding more precise inner and outer dimensions for the spheres by calculating the eccentricities of the planetary orbits within it.

Bartholomeus Spranger, on completing his training with Cornelis van Dalem, Jan Mandijn, and Frans Mostaert, had traveled to Paris and Italy in 1565, when he was about nineteen.

The Flemish Mannerist has worked on wall paintings in various churches.

At Rome, he had become, like El Greco, a protégé of Giulio Clovio.

Pope Pius V had appointed him court painter in 1570.

He had been summoned to Vienna by Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, who died soon after his arrival in 1576, but his successor Rudolf II had ben even more keen to employ him, and in 1581 he had been appointed court painter, the court having by then moved its seat to Prague, where he has remained.

Aegidius Sadeler, who lived in his house in Prague for some time, and Hendrik Goltzius have made engravings of his paintings, spreading Spranger's fame around Europe.

Spranger's paintings for Rudolf mostly depict mythological nudes in various complex poses, with some connection to the Emperor's esoteric Late-Renaissance philosophical ideas.

His paintings are the most characteristic of the final phase of Northern Mannerism; by far the best collection is in Vienna.

His drawings have great energy, in a very free technique.

Superior sugar colonies in the western hemisphere have begun to hurt the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe.

The large enslaved population also proves difficult to control, with Portugal unable to invest many resources in the effort.

Sugar cultivation thus declines as the Dutch take their fight overseas, attacking Spanish and Portuguese colonies and shipping, allying in turn with rival local leaders, and dismantling the Portuguese trade monopoly in Asia.

The Portuguese Empire, consisting primarily of exposed coastal settlements vulnerable to being picked off one by one, proves to be an easier target than the Spanish Empire.

The Dutch–Portuguese War begins with an attack on São Tomé and Príncipe in 1597.

Sarsa Dengel campaigns twice in Ennarea, in southwest Ethiopia, the first time in 1586, and the second time in 1597.

On the final campaign against the Oromo, his Chronicle records, a group of monks tried to dissuade him from this expedition; failing that, they warned him not to eat fish from a certain river he would pass.

Despite their warning, when he passed by the river the monks warned him about, he ate fish taken from this river and grew sick and died.

Sarsa Dengel had intended to make his nephew Za Dengel his successor, but under the influence of his wife Maryam Sena and a number of his sons-in-law, he instead chose his son Yaqob, who is seven when he comes to the throne, with Ras Antenatewos of Begemder as his regent.

Za Dengel and the other rival for the throne—Susenyos, the son of Abeto Fasilides—are exiled, but Za Dengel escapes to the mountains around Lake Tana, while Susenyos finds refuge in the south among the Oromo.

I Modi (The Ways), also known as The Sixteen Pleasures or under the Latin title De omnibus Veneris Schematibus, is a famous erotic book of the Italian Renaissance in which a series of sexual positions were explicitly depicted in engravings.

While the original edition was apparently completely destroyed by the Catholic Church, fragments of a later edition survive.

This new series of graphic and explicit engravings of sexual positions is produced, probably from copies of the originals, by Agostino Carracci (or, less likely, by Camillo Procaccini) for the reprint of Aretino's poems.

The second edition is accompanied by sonnets written by Pietro Aretino, which described the sexual acts depicted.

Their production is in spite of their artist’s working in a post-Tridentine environment that encourages religious art and restricted secular and public art.

They are best known from the 1798 edition of the work printed in Paris as “L`Aretin d`Augustin Carrache ou Receuil de Postures Erotiques, d`apres les Gravures a l`eau-forte par cet Artiste celebre” (“The ‘Aretino’ of Agostino Carracci, or a survey of erotic poses, after Carracci’s engravings, by this famous artist”—this famous artist was Jacques Joseph Coiny, who lived from 1761 to 1809).

Agostino’s brother Annibale Carracci also has begun work the elaborate fresco of Loves of the Gods for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (where the Farnese Hercules, which influences them both, is housed).

These images are drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and include nudes, but (in contrast to the sexual engravings) are not explicit, intimating rather than directly depicting the act of lovemaking.

Caravaggio's realism returns with his first paintings on religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality.

One of the first of these is the Penitent Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at the moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels scattered around her.

It is understated, in the Lombard manner, not histrionic in the Roman manner of the time.

It is followed by others in the same style, including a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted around 1597.

Jacopo Peri, born in Rome, had studied singing in Florence with Cristofano Malvezzi, and gone on to work in a number of churches there, both as an organist and as a singer.

He subsequently began to work in the Medici court, first as a tenor singer and keyboard player, and later as a composer.

His earliest works were incidental music for plays, intermedi and madrigals.

Peri had become associated with Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in Florence.

Feeling that contemporary art is inferior to classical Greek and Roman works, they decide to attempt to recreate Greek tragedy, as they understand it.

Their work adds to that of the Florentine Camerata of the previous decade, which produced the first experiments in monody, the solo song style over continuo bass which will eventually develop into recitative and aria.

Peri and Corsi bring in the poet Ottavio Rinuccini to write a text, and the result, Dafne, though today thought to be far from anything the Classical Greeks would have recognized, is seen as the first work in a new form, opera.

Maurice’s capture of such Ems valley cities as Groenlo, ...