1640s · Skopia

Showing 56 works across all media from the 1640s

The Night Watch

1642 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A militia company surges out of the shadow with a dog barking and a girl glowing among the men. Varnish, not night, made it dark.

★ 9.2

Nonfiction · Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy

Rene Descartes

1641 · 59 pages

Descartes sits by a fire and doubts everything, down to whether a demon feeds him the world. What survives is the thinking, and philosophy has argued from there ever since.

★ 7.5

Cityscape · Classicism

Seaport with the Embarkation of St. Ursula

Claude Lorrain

1641 · National Gallery, London

Saint Ursula is on the quay somewhere, but the real subject is the light coming up the water between the palaces at dawn.

★ 7.3

Cityscape · Classicism

Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

Claude Lorrain

1648 · National Gallery, London

The sun sits low over a glassy harbor and floods everything. Turner admired it so much he insisted his own work hang beside it.

★ 7.3

Religious painting · Tenebrism

Saint Mary Magdalen with the Smoking Flame

Georges de la Tour

1640 · Louvre, Paris

One oil lamp, one skull in her lap, and a flame she does not take her eyes off. Everything else is dark.

★ 7.1

Poem

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick

1648

★ 6.9

Portrait · Baroque

Mars

Diego Velazquez

1641 · El Prado, Madrid

Mars sits naked and deflated in a plumed helmet with his armor on the floor, looking more like a tired old soldier.

★ 6.8

Religious painting · Tenebrism

Christ with St. Joseph in the Carpenter's Shop

Georges de la Tour

1642 · Louvre, Paris

Christ as a boy holds a candle for his father and the flame glows red through his fingers, which is the whole subject.

★ 6.5

Religious painting · Baroque

The Coronation of the Virgin

Diego Velazquez

1641 · El Prado, Madrid

Father and Son lower the crown together while the group curves into a soft heart shape. Painted for the Spanish queen's private oratory.

★ 6.3

Philosophical literature

I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Rene Descartes

Meditations on First Philosophy · 1641

★ 6.3

Portrait · Baroque

Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu

Philippe de Champaigne

1642 · National Gallery, London

Richelieu appears three times on one canvas so that a sculptor in Rome could carve a bust without ever meeting him.

★ 6.3

Nonfiction · Philosophy

Wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness: six primitive passions from which Descartes builds every feeling you have, located in the body's machinery rather than condemned as sins the soul must defeat.

★ 6.3

Scientific literature

Yet I doe seriously, and upon good grounds, affirme it possible to make a flying Chariot. In which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall convey him through the aire. And this perhaps might bee made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with foode for their viaticum, and commodities for traffique. It is not the bignesse of any thing in this kind, that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swimmes as well as a small corke, and an Eagle flies in the aire as well as a little gnat... So that notwithstanding all these seeming impossibilities, 'tis likely enough, that there may be a meanes invented of journying to the Moone; And how happy shall they be, that are first successfull in this attempt?

John Wilkins

A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet · 1640

★ 6.0