Today is Saturday, April 15, the 105th day of 2023. There are 260 days left until the end of the year.
1452. – Birth of Leonardo da Vinci (pictured), Italian painter, sculptor and builder. Leonardo was one of the most outstanding minds of the Renaissance who combined medieval encyclopedic knowledge with the exact modern method of observation. He studied painting with Verocchi, painting a kneeling angel on his “Baptism of Christ”. Then followed: the unfinished compositions “The Adoration of the Kings” and “Saint Jerome”, the paintings “The Virgin in the Cave” and the wall painting “The Last Supper”, the first monumental work of the High Renaissance, in which the figures in motion are perfectly connected, with an expression of dramatic excitement. The portrait of “Mona Lisa Gioconda” belongs to Leonardo’s Florentine period, and the paintings “St. Anne with the Virgin and Jesus” and “St. John the Baptist” were created in the second, Milan period. None of Leonardo’s sculptural works have been preserved, so their appearance can only be judged from drawings and studies. As a builder, Leonardo carried out engineering, regulation and fortification works and created urban foundations and plans for the ideal cities of the future. The field of his scientific research also includes mathematics, physics, mechanics and anatomy, and in the science of art his main work is the “Treatise on Painting”, which contains his observations, conclusions and lessons on painting.
1764 – Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, known as Madame de Pompadour, extremely influential mistress of the French King Louis XV, died. From 1754, she strongly influenced state politics and led the king to enter the Seven Years’ War in which France lost its colonial empire, but contributed to the rise of French culture, helping encyclopedists, philosophers and artists. Before she died in 1764, she influenced the king to abolish the Roman Catholic Jesuit order in France.
1765 – The Russian scientist Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov, a world-renowned encyclopedist and creator of epoch-making discoveries in the natural sciences, died. He studied in Russia, Germany and the Netherlands. His education and scientific activity were diverse: from classical languages to astronomy and technology. He initiated the scientific field of physical chemistry, created the theory of the constancy of the composition of chemical compounds and the theory of light and combustion, which was ahead of the science of his time. He explained the nature of the aurora borealis and floating icebergs. He significantly reformed Russian science and wrote the first grammar of the Russian language.
1843 – American writer Henry James was born, a subtle and penetrating psychologist, who accurately analyzed the customs, actions and habits of American and European society in a realistic manner, always in search of moral values. He carefully constructed the composition of the work, striving for artistic perfection, while adhering to the principles of unity and economy of means, but his stylistic expression occasionally lacked clarity. Towards the end of his life in 1915, he became a British citizen. Works: novels “Roderick Hudson”, “The American”, “Daisy Miller”, “Portrait of a Lady”, “Tragic Muse”, “Bostonians”, “Dove’s Wings”, “Ambassadors”, “Golden Works”.
1865 – The American statesman Abraham Lincoln died, one day after the assassination in Washington’s “Ford Theater”, where he was shot by an actor who was bribed by rich people from the south of the USA, supporters of the defeated states of the Confederacy in the just ended American Civil War. Before his election as President of the USA in 1860, he was a farmer, lumberjack, boatman, postmaster, lawyer, congressman. He belonged to the Republican Party, the party of the industrial bourgeoisie which was in favor of the abolition of slavery. From 1861 to 1865, he waged war against the southern states of the USA, where plantation owners wanted to keep black slaves in order to have free labor.
In 1888, the English writer and literary critic Matthew Arnold died, a significant aesthetician, professor of poetry in Oxford, who fiercely challenged the barbarism, philistineism and provincialism of English literature of the 19th century from the point of view of classical literature. Works: collections “Poems”, “New Poems”, essays “Culture and Anarchy”, “Literature and Dogma”, “Critical Essays”.
1912 – On the first trip from Great Britain to the USA, the then largest and most luxurious passenger ship “Titanic” ran into an iceberg in the North Atlantic at high speed and the “unsinkable ship”, as it was considered, sank in just two hours and 20 minutes. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew members, 1,523 died.
1912 – Birth of Korean dictator Kim Sung Ju, known as Kim Il Sung, who ruled North Korea with unlimited personal power from the founding of the country in 1948 until his death in 1994. The death of the “great leader”, as his subjects officially called him, ended the longest absolutist rule in the 20th century.
1923 – Insulin, discovered by the Canadian physician Frederick Grant Banting, became available to patients suffering from previously incurable diabetes.
1941 – The Government of Yugoslavia, with King Peter the Second Krađorđević, left the country during the Second World War, flying to London from the improvised airport in Nikšić.
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1949 – American film actor Wallace Beery, who became famous for his roles as ordinary people, drunkards, cowboys, gold diggers, and boxers, died. He played in about 250 films. Movies: “Grand Hotel”, “Viva Vilja”, “Dinner at eight”, “Champion” (“Oscar”), “Man from Dakota”, “Gold from Singapore”.
1968 – Two unmanned Soviet satellites “Kosmos 212” and “Kosmos 213” joined in orbit around the earth.
1974 – In Niger, President Hamani Diori, who ruled since the country’s independence in 1960, was overthrown by the army commander, Colonel Sejni Kunce.
1979 – In an earthquake on the Montenegrin coast, more than a hundred people died, around 600 were injured, and more than 80,000 were left homeless.
1980 – The French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the creators of the philosophy of existentialism, who refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, died. He thematized the idea of individual freedom, choice and existential project, the point of view on the inevitability of engagement and responsibility of the writer and man, existential psychoanalysis. He tried to create a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism, and in literature the concept of “engaged literature”. Works: philosophical writings “Being and Nothing”, “Imaginary”, “Existentialism is Humanism”, “Critique of Dialectical Mind”, novels “Nausea”, “Paths of Freedom”, plays “Dirty Hands”, “Unburied Dead”, “Devil and Mr. God”, “Behind Closed Doors”, “A Whore Worthy of Respect”, “Prisoners of Altona”, essays “On Baudelaire”, “What is Literature”, autobiography “Words”.
1986 – The US Air Force bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, ten days after an explosion in a disco in Berlin that killed two American soldiers, for which Washington blamed Libya. 41 Libyans were killed in the bombing, including a little girl adopted by Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi.
1989 – Chinese politician Hu Jaobang, head of the Communist Party of China from 1981 to January 1987, when he was dismissed on charges that he had allowed the ideas of “bourgeois liberalism” to penetrate, died. On the day of his death, students in Beijing and Shanghai filled the streets to mourn, marking the beginning of major protests that ended in bloodshed in early June 1989 in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square.
1989 – 108 people died and more than 200 were injured during the demolition of the stands at the stadium of the English football club “Sheffield”, because thousands of fans were allowed into the already packed stadium.
1990 – Swedish actress Greta Garbo, the most popular star of world cinema, died. Spontaneous and highly intelligent, she was a symbol of femininity and played from 1921 to 1941 when she retired. Movies: “Kiss”, “Mata Hari”, “Anna Kristi”, “Queen Kristina”, “Anna Karenina”, “Lady with Camellias”, “Maria Valevska”.
1994 – The army of the Republika Srpska near Goražde hit the French “Etander” plane, which, badly damaged, managed to return to the aircraft carrier “Clemanso” in the Adriatic. On April 10, 1994, NATO aircraft began bombing military and civilian Serbian targets near Goražde.
1997 – 343 people died in a fire that engulfed a tent settlement of Muslim pilgrims near Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
1998 – The former Cambodian Maoist dictator Pol Pot died, one of the most cruel leaders in history, during whose rule of Cambodia in less than four years between one million and two million people were killed. Leading the “Khmer Rouge” guerrilla army, he defeated the pro-American regime of General Lon Nol in April 1975, or “Year Zero,” as the new rulers called it. “Brother Number One”, as his supporters called him, immediately emptied the capital Phnom Penh and other cities by force, driving even the sick from their beds, the elderly, women and children into labor camps throughout the country. In these torture camps, known as the “death fields”, people were liquidated en masse daily or died of hunger and disease until the end of December 1978, when the Maoist regime of the “Khmer Rouge” was overthrown by the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.
2000 – In the village of Bijelo Polje, near Peć, Albanians burned and bulldozed 250 Serbian houses.
2002 – The crash of an “Air China” Boeing 767 with 166 passengers and crew members near the South Korean city of Pusan - which was the first accident of an aircraft of the Chinese carrier in 47 years – 38 people survived.
2005 – In a fire that broke out in the center of Paris in a hotel intended mainly for immigrants, 24 people, including ten children, lost their lives, and around 50 were injured. This was the first of a series of fires that would follow in Paris in the following months in buildings inhabited by immigrants: August 26 – 17 dead, August 30 – seven dead, September 3 – 18 dead.
2013 – The bombing of the Boston Marathon killed five people and injured a total of 280. Extremists of Chechen origin were behind the attack.
