1656
Velazquez Paints Las Meninas
In his studio in the Alcazar of Madrid, the Spanish court painter Diego Velazquez produced an enormous canvas showing the five-year-old Infanta Margarita surrounded by attendants, with himself, palette in hand, looking out of the painting. It is perhaps the most philosophically slippery picture in European art, a meditation on seeing and being seen that has fascinated artists and theorists ever since.
Narai Crowned King of Ayutthaya
Prince Narai ascended the Siamese throne at Ayutthaya after a brief succession crisis. His reign would open the kingdom to European merchants and missionaries to an unprecedented degree, and his Greek adventurer favorite Constantine Phaulkon would briefly direct court policy in a wildly cosmopolitan experiment. The era ended abruptly when a palace revolution overthrew foreign influence and sealed Siam's borders.
Huygens Builds Pendulum Clock
Christiaan Huygens, applying Galileo's observation of isochronism, patented a weight-driven clock regulated by a pendulum. It was accurate to within fifteen seconds a day, twenty times better than anything before. Timekeeping at last became scientific, and the first step toward navigational longitude had been taken. The pendulum clock would remain the world's most precise timekeeper for nearly three centuries.
First Jews Return to England
Oliver Cromwell, after a conference at Whitehall with the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, quietly allowed Jews to return to England for the first time since their expulsion in 1290. A small Sephardic community established a synagogue in London. English public Judaism had resumed after three hundred and sixty-six years.