Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 February 24

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From today's featured article

The Portrait of a Musician is an unfinished painting widely attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. His only known male portrait painting, it was probably painted between 1483 and 1487 while Leonardo was in Milan. It has been in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan since at least 1672. Perhaps influenced by Antonello da Messina's introduction of the Early Netherlandish style of portrait painting to Italy, the work marks a shift from the profile portraiture that predominated in 15th-century Milan. It shares many similarities with other paintings Leonardo executed there, such as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine. Most current scholarship attributes at least the portrait's face to Leonardo, based on stylistic resemblances to his other works. Uncertainty over the rest of the painting is due to the stiff and rigid qualities of the body, which are uncharacteristic of Leonardo's work. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam

... that Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam (pictured), Governor of Anguilla, attended her own swearing-in ceremony remotely due to quarantine restrictions?
... that Ismith Khan's novel The Jumbie Bird explores the transformation of immigrants from India into Indo-Trinidadians?
... that translator and journalist Frederika Randall, who moved from the United States to Italy, identified as a "dispatriate" to distance herself from her homeland?
... that New York City's Western Union Telegraph Building was built on land once owned by Thomas W. Evans, dentist to French emperor Napoleon III?
... that with compositions such as Con brio, clarinetist Jörg Widmann was ranked the third-most-performed contemporary composer in 2018?
... that Tailors' Hall, a surviving guildhall of Dublin, hosted fencing and dancing classes, the United Irishmen and a British Army garrison, Dublin Corporation and an insolvency court?
... that the UConn student body voted 169–7 to fire the basketball coach after he benched Harrison Fitch because a rival team refused to play against an African American?
... that Troy, Montana, has flying squirrels?

In the news

Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic

In tennis, Naomi Osaka wins the women's singles and Novak Djokovic wins the men's singles at the Australian Open (both winners pictured).
Porfirije is enthroned as the 46th Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
NASA's Perseverance rover, carrying the Ingenuity helicopter, successfully lands on Mars.
A winter storm in North America leaves at least 70 people dead and several million others without clean water or power.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala becomes the first woman and the first African to be appointed Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

On this day

February 24: Independence Day in Estonia (1918)

Japanese-Canadian internment camp in British Columbia

1803 – In Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional for the first time, forming the basis of judicial review in the United States.
1826 – The Treaty of Yandabo was signed, ending the First Anglo-Burmese War, the longest and most expensive war in the history of British India.
1942 – World War II: The Canadian government ordered the removal of "all persons of Japanese origin" to internment camps (example pictured).
1968 – Vietnam War: South Vietnamese forces led by Ngô Quang Trưởng recaptured the citadel of Huế.
1989 – United Airlines Flight 811 experienced uncontrolled decompression after leaving Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii, blowing seats out of the aircraft and killing nine passengers.

Properzia de' Rossi (d. 1530)
Leo von Caprivi (b. 1831)
Denis Law (b. 1940)

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Today's featured picture

The Bathers is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Paul Cézanne, first exhibited in 1906. The painting is the largest of a series of paintings of bathers by the artist, and is considered a masterpiece of modern art. He worked on the painting for seven years, and it remained unfinished at the time of his death. Often considered Cézanne's finest work, it is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Painting credit: Paul Cézanne

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