St Matthew Passion
1727
Two choirs and two orchestras face each other across the church and answer one another, while a boys' choir cuts through both from above.
★ 9.6
Browse by time · decade
1720s
1720 – 1729
Showing 39 works across all media from the 1720s
The Four Seasons
1725
Vivaldi spent most of his career teaching at a Venice orphanage for girls, whose orchestra became famous enough that travelers came to hear it.
★ 8.3
Gulliver's Travels
1726 · 511 pages
Swift's ship's surgeon washes up among people six inches tall, then among giants, then among rational horses who find humans repulsive. Each voyage is funnier than the last and angrier about us.
★ 8.2
★ 7.0
A Modest Proposal
1729 · 59 pages
No other satire cuts this cleanly. A reasonable gentleman proposes that the infants of the Irish poor be fattened and sold as food to landlords, and calculates the savings to the shilling.
★ 7.0
Mezzetin
1720 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
He sings up at a window and nobody comes, while behind him a stone statue has its back turned.
★ 6.8
The New Science
1725 · 520 pages
History can be known, Vico argues, because men made it. He reads myth and law as the record of every nation passing through ages of gods, heroes, and men, then collapsing into barbarism.
★ 6.4
Persian Letters
1721 · 341 pages
Two Persian travelers in Paris write home about a king who conjures money from paper and a pope who makes bread into flesh. In Isfahan, the harem one of them left is collapsing.
★ 5.9
Moll Flanders
1722 · 480 pages
Born in Newgate prison, five times a wife, once to her own brother, Moll totals her thefts and marriages in pounds and shillings. English fiction had never let a woman talk this way.
★ 5.9
Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent as when they are at stool.
Gulliver's Travels · 1726
Gulliver's Travels · 1726
Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.
Moll Flanders · 1722
Gulliver's Travels · 1726
Gulliver's Travels · 1726
That action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue · 1725
If triangles were to make to themselves gods, they would give them three sides.
Persian Letters · 1721
Women and wine should life employ. Is there ought else on earth desirous?
The Beggar's Opera · 1728
If the heart of a man is depressed with cares, The mist is dispelled when a woman appears.
The Beggar's Opera · 1728