Domingo Fontán Rodríguez Biography

Domingo Fontán Rodríguez

(Santa María de Portas, Pontevedra, 1788-Santiago de Compostela, 1866) Spanish geographer and mathematician, author of the Geometric Letter of Galicia (1845 ).

Trained at the University of Santiago, during the War of Independence (1808-1814), he temporarily held the chair of Logic and Metaphysics of this institution.After the absolutist restoration of Fernando VII, he was persecuted for his liberal ideas, but a few years later he taught again at the University of Santiago, where Fontán was professor of Experimental Physics (1818) and Mathematics (1819).

During the Constitutional Triennium (1820-1823), Domingo Fontán acted as Secretary of the Provincial Board of La Coruña, and after the return of the absolutists to power he was removed from his chair, although a Royal Order of 1826, in which he was considered "purified", allowed him to recover it.From 1835 he directed the Special School of Geographical Engineers and the Astronomical Observatory of Madrid (1835-1840).Deputy to the Cortes for Pontevedra between 1836 and 1843, in his last years he gave technical advice on the construction of the Galician railway network, especially in the works of the Santiago de Compostela-Betanzos-Ferrol railway line (1863).

Domingo Fontán Rodríguez's main geographical work was the Geometric Carta de Galicia , a physical map of the Galician region that consists of twelve plates at a scale of 1: 100,000.Completed in 1834, it was presented that year to the regent María Cristina de Borbón, although its final publication was delayed until 1845 due to difficulties in finding letter engravers.

Comments

Isabel de Farnesio Biography

Isabel de Farnesio (Parma, present-day Italy, 1692-Aranjuez, Spain, 1766) Queen of Spain (1714-1746).Daughter of Edward III, Duke of Parma, in 1714 she became the second wife of Philip V.Endowed with great culture and undoubted attractiveness, despite suffering the consequences of smallpox, she knew how to win the king's will and impose his own criteria in court.Thus, he managed to exert great influence on Spanish politics: he removed pro-French elements from the court and sponsored the rise of Giulio Alberoni and Johan Willem Ripperdá.His foreign policy was centered, above all, in Italy, where he struggled to locate his children.In this way, Carlos (the future Carlos III of Spain) obtained Naples, and Felipe, Milan and Parma.After the death of her husband, she managed to maintain her influence in Italian politics, and came to exercise the Spanish regency when her stepson Fernando (Fernando VI) died without succession in 1759, waiting for her son Carlos to arrive from Naples to ...

Characteristics of the National States

Next we want to talk to you in Overhistory of what are National States, what they mean and how they were formed and what consequences this formation brought to those who are modern states of today. Characteristics of National States During the second half of the 19th century, the National States will be brewing, after a long evolutionary process that dates back to the rise of the Modern States in the 15th and 15th centuries XVI. We will now see what are the main characteristics of these political systems. In the National States, as the name implies, the idea of the "Nation" will be vital. We could describe the "nation" as a large community of individuals "united by a history, a culture, an ethnic composition and a language in common." But, as we explained in the article dedicated to the modern states and the national states , in practice many states included several nations within their borders.In other cases, such as the American count...

Albert I of Belgium Biography

Albert I of Belgium (Brussels, 1875-Marche-les-Dames, 1934) King of Belgium (1909-34), nephew and successor of King Leopold II of Belgium.Son of Philip, Count of Flanders, and Princess Maria de Hohenzollern, from childhood he received a careful education and entered the prestigious École Militaire de Bruxelles.In 1900 he married Princess Isabel de Baviera, with whom he had two children: Leopoldo Felipe Carlos, future King Leopoldo III, and Carlos Teodoro Enrique. Albert I of Belgium That same year he made a long trip through the Belgian Congo in which he examined the hardships and needs that the territory demanded, so that, On his return, he recommended to the government the need to build a railway network in the colony, in addition to demanding a radical change in the treatment of its indigenous inhabitants, treated as slaves. In 1913, already as King of Belgium, Albert I made a diplomatic visit to Berlin, where he was informed by the German Emperor himself, Wilhelm II, of th...

Giuseppe Arcimboldo Biography

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Milan, 1527-id., 1593) Italian painter.He was the first designer of cardboard for tapestries and stained glass window for the Cathedral of Milan.He lived in Prague, and in Vienna he worked for the Habsburg court.Arcimboldo was the creator of a type of portrait in which the face was made up of groups of animals, flowers, fruits and all kinds of objects.In them there is a mixture of satire and allegory, as in La Primavera and El verano .His works were seen in his time as an example of curious painting but lacking in artistic value.In recent times, the Surrealists placed great value on the visual interplay of their compositions and the grotesque nature of their allegories. He began his career at the age of 22, as a designer of the stained glass windows of the Milanese cathedral, together with his father, Biaggio, who would be his first teacher.He combined his work with the study of Leonardo da Vinci's engravings, especially those with a caricatural vein, w...

Carlo Levi Biography

Carlo Levi (Turin, 1902-Rome, 1975) Italian writer and painter.With a degree in Medicine, he soon devoted himself to cultivating broader cultural interests.As a painter, he stood out for the first time in 1923, and six years later he joined the "Gruppo dei Sei" in Turin.He was one of the young people gathered around Pietro Gobetti, and later joined "Giustizia e Libertà". He was confined to politics in 1935-1936, and later moved to Paris.From 1943 on he participated in the Resistance movement, and was director of newspapers in Florence and Rome.Later, he combined his work as a journalist and painting (in 1945 he exhibited in his own room at the Venice Biennale).In 1963 and in 1968 he was elected senator of the Republic, as an independent, on the list of communists. His first literary work, Christ stopped at Eboli ( Cristo si è fermato a Eboli , 1945), evokes his experiences during confinement, when discover, in a passionate and lacerating way, the peasant w...

The Church in the Middle Ages: influence and power

In a previous post we talked about Christianity and how I influence during the Middle Ages .Time of greater prominence and both political and economic power.We will tell you what exactly this power consisted of and how it was held ideologically. Index of the article The Middle Ages The Middle Ages is one of the most fascinating stages in history, a period that is strongly characterized by the existence of the Feudal System or Feudalism .A world of nobles, peasants, tributes, vassals, feuds, and weakened monarchies.But beyond this, the medieval world was dominated by the Catholic Church or Christian.that is essential that in order to understand the development of the middle ages, we investigate in depth the importance of Medieval Church . D In fact, we can say that the Catholic church had an influence on all the orders of life of the medieval age, and no sector of society remained oblivious to these influences. Various circumstances explain this extraordinary ecclesi...

The colonial cast of Africa

The colonial cast of Africa by European powers was the product of the imperialism generated after the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century.The distribution and appropriation of African lands was done, at first in disorder, and then, at the end of the 19th century, arbitrarily. When a little attention is paid to the political map of Africa it is not difficult to feel that there is something strange, something too tidy, in the borderline provision of the countries. The limits determine regions of approximately similar sizes, and in similar ways.The reason for this, it is not a coincidence, or some romantic agreement between the nations that today make up the continent. The political map of Africa , like so many others in the world, is the p roduct of the European colonization .But in the African case, the colonial cast was made without considering any kind of cultural, social, or economic factors of the region. Africa was geographically divide...

Eleanor Watling Biography

Leonor Watling (Leonor Ceballos Watling; Madrid, 1975) Spanish actress and singer who has combined an already solid film career with her dedication to music, an area in which she has also gained notoriety as a vocalist and lyricist for the Marlango group.The daughter of a Cadiz father and a British mother, when she was little she wanted to be a dancer, but had to abandon dance due to a knee injury and decided to change her tights for acting.After taking his first steps in amateur theater in various cultural centers, in 1993 he made his film debut with a small role in Hanging Gardens , by Pablo Llorca, a film starring Féodor Adkine and Icíar Bollaín that was very well received by specialized critics.That same year, the death of her father plunged her into a deep sadness and she decided to change of scene.She moved to London and, while studying secretarial work to please her mother, she perfected her training as an actress at the Actors Center. Leonor Watling Upon his return to M...

Edmund halley Biography

Edmund Halley (Edmund or Edmond Halley; London, 1656-Greenwich, Great Britain, 1742) English astronomer.He was the first to catalog the stars in the southern sky, in his work Catalogus stellarum australium .In 1682 he observed and calculated the orbit of the comet that bears his name, and announced his return at the end of 1758, according to a theory of his that defended the existence of elliptical path comets associated with the solar system.In the most important of his works, Synopsis astronomiae cometicae (1705), he applied Newton's laws of motion to all available data on comets.Among other contributions in the field of astronomy, he demonstrated the existence of proper motion in stars, which reduced the validity of the oldest observations, and studied the complete revolution of the Moon over a period of eighteen years.His Astronomical Tables , on which he worked until his death, were valid for many years. Edmund Halley Contributor From Newton in his works on the grav...

History Today Online

Search This Blog