1598 Dafne, one of the first operas, is performed at Florence. Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel hears 14-year-old Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) sing at his family's inn...

1597 The Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci begins his ceiling frescoes at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, a key work in inspiring a new monumental and heroic style of history painting during the Baroque era....

1598 The Edict of Nantes establishes a limited degree of religious toleration for Calvinist Huguenots in France. 1606 Jacob Arminius, a Dutch Calvinist theologian, rejects predestination and...

1598 The Chamberlain's Men, the acting troupe of which William Shakespeare is an important member, takes up residence in the Globe Theatre in London. King Philip II dies in Spain. During...

1599 Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene—an heroic work praising Protestantism and an ideal of chaste marriage—dies. The poet's brilliance will continue to produce many admirers and imitators during the early...

1603 Carlo Maderno's influential façade for the Church of Santa Susanna is completed at Rome. 1606 Work begins on the façade of St. Peter's Basilica at Rome along designs...

1596 René Descartes, who will try to raise philosophy into a science, is born near Tours, France. 1601 The French thinker Pierre Charron publishes his De la sagesse (On Wisdom), a work...

c. 1600 In Spain, a fondness for somber colors and restrained but opulent decoration reigns. Elsewhere in Europe these elements of Spanish design often meld with native traditions to produce imaginative, but sometimes distorted and bizarre...

1600 Fabritio Caroso's The Nobility of Ladies is printed at Venice. The work treats the rules dancers must master for success on the ballroom floor and includes a number of choreographies for popular dances of the day. It will be...

In the arts, the Baroque was a Western cultural epoch, commencing roughly at the turn of the 17th century in Rome, that was exemplified by drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music.. In music, the term...