Phidias:

(480–430 BC) Athenian sculptor, painter & architect of the Classical Age of Greece; famous for his statue of Zeus at Olympia (one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World) as well as the statues of the goddess Athena on the Athenian Acropolis (the Athena Parthenos) and the Athena Promachos, a colossal bronze which stood between the Parthenon and the Propylaea.

 

Rembrandt:

(1606-1669) Dutch draughtsman, painter & print maker, active during the Dutch Golden Age; the most important painter in Dutch art & one of the greatest artists of Western art.  Unlike his contemporaries he had a wide range of styles & subjects (from portrait & self-portrait, landscape, genre scenes, allegorical & historical, biblical & mythological as well as animal studies).  Although not part of the Baroque age style, Dutch art at this time was prolific and very creative.

 

Russian: * see Endnote 38

Spengler saw Russia as a distinct culture that had yet to fulfill her destiny (at the same time as the Faustian West begins its Winter stage).  He regarded Russians as formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as innately antagonistic to the Machine, as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and ‘primitive’.  

 

Bacon:

(1561-1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, author, served both as Attorney General & as Lord Chancellor.  He remained extremely influential, especially as a philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution & has been called the father of empiricism.  He argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning & careful observation of events in nature and that this could be achieved by use of a sceptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves.