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The representation of battle panoramas was a widespread genre in 17th-century painting when skilled artists became sought-after specialists working for many courts in Central Europe. Throughout the 17th century, continual Otto- man aggressions gave a new actuality to the battle genre. Stephan Kessler, a late 17th-century artist from the South Tyrolean town of Brixen, who lived far away from the great artistic centres, but was well informed of developments there, successfully made his way in this field, depicting the liberation of Vienna in 1683 on colourful, multi-figured canvasses in the tradition of 16th-century ‘Wimmelbilder’. As an artist of modest talents, Kessler regularly referred to Rubens, whose compositions came to new life through well-known reproductive prints. A representation of the Vienna battle from 1683 held at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna, was attributed to Kessler, as well as a stylistically closely related painting of the same motif at Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha. Recent research of the Viennese canvas confirmed this hypothesis when Kessler’s monogram came to light.

Literature mechanical relaxation data of amorphous selenium are interpreted in terms of the soft potential model and its extension to higher temperatures, the Gilroy-Phillips model. At the crossover temperature from tunneling states to thermally activated relaxation, one finds a stronger decrease of the barrier density f(V) with increasing barrier height V than in silica. On the high barrier side, f(V) is determined by the Kohlrausch t^β-tail of the viscous flow, with β = 0.31. In longitudinal ultrasound absorption data, one finds weak oscillations of the Kohlrausch barrier density, similar to those found recently in metallic glasses, consistent with an increase of the barrier by V1 = S1 Tg/β for the addition of one selenium atom to the rearranging domain, where S1 is the structural entropy per atom at the glass temperature Tg.

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The present focus on “postcolonial studies” in cultural anthropology is attributing a growing interest to the Italian occupation in Ethiopia (1935–1941). Whereas a considerable amount of “mainstream” information has been collected about the war of conquest and colonial rule by Fascist Italy, the indigenous views and attitudes at the grassroots of Ethiopian people have largely remained outside consideration. Because of the harsh exploitation by the ruling elites of the empire, large parts of the inhabitants in the south readily collaborated with the foreign occupants. Resistance against the Italians could most efficiently be counteracted by a policy of “divide and rule”. Although the effects of Italian occupation are a sensitive issue of research involving highly controversial views and emotions, it seems to be due time now to approach it in an unbiased scholarly discourse.

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