Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 October 9

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From today's featured article

Camille Saint-Saëns (9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His works include Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886). Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy who made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris, and from 1858 at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. As a young man, he was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and dodecaphonic schools of music, and by the time of his death, he was often regarded as a reactionary. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

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... that to receive a work permit to play in Luxembourg, Bosnian footballer Sanel Ibrahimović had to pretend to be a specialist in his country's cuisine?
... that in his 1994 opera La Belle et la Bête, Philip Glass wrote dialogue and music for soloists and ensemble to match the 1946 film by Jean Cocteau?
... that architect Rose Connor found in 1958 that only one percent of registered architects in the U.S. were female, and seven states had no female architects at all?
... that the mitochondrial DNA molecules of Medusozoa are linear rather than circular as in almost all other animals?
... that in 2015, Maya Krishna Rao became the first artist to return the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award?
... that Soulard Farmers Market is reputed to be the oldest public market in the US west of the Mississippi River?
... that "Beatles-ologist" Kolya Vasin proposed a 210-foot (64 m) tall "temple" be constructed in Saint Petersburg in honour of John Lennon?

In the news

Paul Romer

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer (pictured) for integrating climate change and technological innovation, respectively, into "long-run macroeconomic analysis".
Meng Hongwei resigns as President of Interpol, while being detained by China's National Supervisory Commission.
The 43rd Chess Olympiad concludes with China winning both the open and women's events.
Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict".

On this day

October 9: Leif Erikson Day in the United States

Washington Monument

1594 – Sinhalese–Portuguese War: Portugal had almost conquered the island of Sri Lanka when its army was essentially annihilated, ending the Campaign of Danture.
1708 – Great Northern War: Russia defeated Sweden at the Battle of Lesnaya on the Russian–Polish border in what is now Belarus.
1888 – The Washington Monument (pictured) in Washington, D.C., at the time the world's tallest building, officially opened to the general public.
1914 – World War I: The civilian authorities of Antwerp surrendered, allowing the German army to capture the city.
2016 – Militants attacked a border police post in Myanmar, killing nine people and triggering a period of intense persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority.

Henry Constable (d. 1613) · Benjamin Banneker (d. 1806) · Mona Best (d. 1988)

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Today's featured picture

The Haller Madonna and Lot and His Daughters are a pair of oil paintings on two sides of the same canvas. They were painted by Albrecht Dürer, and date to between 1496 and 1499. They are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The painting on the obverse depicts Mary and an athletic-looking Jesus, with a window looking out to a distant view. This scheme is similar to that of Giovanni Bellini's works, which Dürer had seen in his first sojourn in Venice (1494–95). It features coats of arms in the lower corners, both representing prominent families from Dürer's home town of Nuremberg, Germany. The left-hand arms are those of the house of Haller von Hallerstein, while the right-hand arms are for the Koberger family.

The reverse of the painting features a picture known as Lot and His Daughters, showing a Biblical scene of Lot's flight from Sodom, with a landscape including explosions of fire in the background. Since the two scenes are unrelated, it has been suggested that the paintings are intended as private devotional images, each depicting one example of a just life and God's grace.

Painting: Albrecht Dürer

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