Son of Night

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, Joseph Wright

These paintings represent a high point in scientific enquiry that began to undermine the power of religion in Western societies. ... Some ten years later, scientists would find themselves persecuted in the backlash to the French Revolution of 1789. ... The politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), tied natural philosophers, and specifically Priestley, to the French Revolution; he later wrote in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) that radicals who supported science in Britain "considered man in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump". In light of this comment, Wright's painting of the bird in the air pump, completed more than twenty years earlier, seems particularly prescient.

Il Sodoma

Saint Sebastian

Baker Oostwaert and his wife, 1658, Jan Steen