Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 May 6

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From today's featured article

Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large 15th-century panel painting, oil and tempera on oak, attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden and usually dated between 1435 and 1440. Housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it shows Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of artists, sketching the Virgin Mary as she nurses the Child Jesus. The figures are positioned in a bourgeois interior which leads out towards a courtyard, river, town and landscape. The enclosed garden, illusionistic carvings of Adam and Eve on the arms of Mary's throne, and attributes of St Luke are amongst the painting's iconographic symbols. The face of Luke is accepted as van der Weyden's self-portrait. The painting's historical significance rests on both the skill behind the design and its merging of earthly and divine realms. By positioning himself in the same space as the Madonna, and showing a painter in the act of portrayal, Van der Weyden brings to the fore the role of artistic creativity in 15th-century society. The panel became widely influential with near copies by the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula and Hugo van der Goes. (Full article...)

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Dura-Europos fresco

... that the earliest visual depiction of the Finding of Moses is a fresco c. 244 AD (pictured) in the Dura-Europos synagogue?
... that in 1950, Hans Grischkat compiled and conducted a concert Vom Reiche Gottes from single Bach cantata movements to celebrate the bicentenary of the composer's death?
... that Frederick Wiseman intended his 1969 documentary Law and Order as "a chance to do in the pigs", but as he made the film he came to understand the "fear that cops live with"?
... that professional wrestler King Kaluha was the hand-picked opponent for Dr. Death's comeback match after battling throat cancer?
... that over 60,000 pieces of stained glass were used to create the Roots of Knowledge installation at Utah Valley University?
... that the population of the endangered sea snake Aipysurus fuscus is thought to have declined by at least 70% between 1998 and 2013?
... that African-American mathematics professor Thyrsa Frazier Svager and her physics professor husband Aleksandar Svager lived on one salary to build a scholarship fund?
... that Morrison-Knudsen built four Popsicles for the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1978?

In the news

Mark Selby

The maiden flight of the Chinese Comac C919 airliner takes place.
Puerto Rico files for debt restructuring, the largest ever de facto municipal bankruptcy in the United States.
Mark Selby (pictured) defeats John Higgins to win the World Snooker Championship.
China launches its first domestically built aircraft carrier.
In the London Marathon, Mary Keitany and Daniel Wanjiru win the women's and men's races, respectively.
A Taliban attack on an Afghan National Army base kills 140 soldiers.

On this day...

May 6

Hindenburg disaster

1757 – English poet Christopher Smart was admitted into St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London, beginning his six-year confinement to mental asylums.
1801 – French Revolutionary Wars: The outmanned and outgunned HMS Speedy captured the 32-gun Spanish frigate El Gamo.
1937 – The German zeppelin Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed (pictured) during an attempt to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, killing 36 people.
1954 – At Oxford's Iffley Road Track, English runner Roger Bannister became the first person to run the mile in under four minutes.
2013 – Amanda Berry escaped from the Cleveland, Ohio, home of her captor Ariel Castro having been held there with two other women for ten years.

Henry David Thoreau (d. 1862) · Rosemary Cramp (b. 1929) · George Clooney (b. 1961)

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Today's featured picture

A yellow-headed caracara (Milvago chimachima) on the back of a capybara (Hydrochoeris hydrochaeris) in the Pantanal in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Caracaras are a type of falcon that typically scavenge for their food, while capybaras are the largest rodents in the world.

Photograph: Charles J. Sharp

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