Short life of princess Infanta Margarita of Austria, 1660, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Short life of princess Infanta Margarita
The marriages of the royal daughters – a matter of national importance, and for whom to marry Margaret, when she grows up, was known almost from her birth – for the future Roman Emperor Leopold I. That is why the court painter Diego Velazquez painted portraits of Infanta every few years: they were sent to Vienna, so that future husbands relatives could see how the bride grows. She married him on Easter 1666 at the age of fourteen years old. Leopold was twenty-six. He was her maternal uncle and cousin on her father’s side. Margaret called her husband uncle, even after marriage, but he called her Gretl.
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Unique Amish people

Amish people
Walking into an Amish community is like going back in time. You’ll see girls in long dresses, horses, pulling buggies, and homes lit by kerosene lamps. There are about 145,000 Amish people in the United States. Amish people can be found in 22 American States. In Amish communities, many modern things, like TVs and computers, are nowhere to be seen. That’s because Amish people live by a set of beliefs that’s more than a religion – it’s a simple way of life centered around faith and family. They even speak a language called Pennsylvania Dutch, or Amish, which sounds like German.
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Retro celebrity. The Beauty queen Helena Rubinstein

The Beauty queen Helena Rubinstein
In 1950, Helena Rubinstein was one of the richest women in the world. She started with nothing. She had no money, no education, and no one to help her. All she had were 12 jars of face cream and a lot of energy and ambitions. She turned these into a multi million-dollar cosmetics empire. Her statement – “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones”. Helena Rubinstein was born Chaya Rubinstein, just on Christmas, December 25, 1870 in Krakow, Poland. She was the oldest of eight girls. Helena’s mother thought that beauty was very important. She used a special skin cream that a Hungarian chemist made for her. Helena’s mother made all of her daughters use it too.

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Popular depiction of a sati (from an icon shop at the gates of the gates of the Ekling Ji temple). Self-immolation of widows in India

Self-immolation of widows in India
Called sati (suttee), it is a funeral ritual tradition in Hinduism, once widespread in India. According to it, the widow should be burned along with her late husband on a specially built pyre. As of today the tradition of sati is rare and forbidden. The adjective sati means good woman. The name comes from the name of the goddess Sati, also known under the name of Dakshayani that brought a sacrifice, not being able to carry the indignities of her father Daksha’s humiliation of her husband Shiva. The ritual of Sati existed in India for centuries, until in 1829. The British occupied the country declared it illegal. However, it did not help much – the self-immolation continues to this day. Last time the authorities banned the tradition of self-immolation of widows in 1956 and 1981.
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Queen of Pinups Bettie Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)

Queen of Pinups Bettie Page
Bettie Page’s life was filled with cult myth, mystery and sadness. The Girl with the Perfect Figure Betty Mae Page was born on April 22, 1923 in Nashville, Tennessee. Betty’s parents divorced when she was 10 years old. She had to take care of her sisters. During the year, she and her sisters lived in an orphanage until their mother had earned money to support the family. With the success of graduating from school, Betty went to college. She was going to be a teacher. But in the fall of 1940 Betty changed the decision and began to engage in acting school. In 1947, Bettie Page moved to New York. Here she was trying to become an actress, but it did not bring any results, and she works as a secretary.
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Beautiful ballerina Michaela DePrince

Beautiful ballerina Michaela DePrince
This story is simply heart touching. Michaela DePrince, born Mabinty Bangura, was orphaned in war-torn Sierra Leone at the age of three, when her father was shot dead and her mother died of starvation. In the orphanage the three-year-old girl had to face tough life. She remembers being called “the devil’s child” and being ill-treated by the orphanage’s carers because she had vitiligo – a skin condition that causes blotches of lightening skin. Children in the orphanage were given numbers ranking them from the most favored to the least. DePrince was ranked 27th out of 27 children. Michaela DePrince was just three years old when she saw a ballerina for the first time. “I was just so fascinated by this person, by how beautiful she was, how she was wearing such a beautiful costume,” she remembers. “So I ripped the cover off and I put it in my underwear.” The girl was told – ‘Black dancers can’t be ballerinas’
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Faiyum portraits first realistic painting on Earth

Faiyum portraits first realistic painting on Earth
These wonderful portraits by unknown artists painted more than 2 thousand years ago, not for viewers and museums, were in fact, a kind of passport photo for afterlife. Egyptians were afraid very much that the gods in the afterlife would not be able to identify them because of the failure of embalming. Such realistic portraits were to be buried with the dead. Currently, there are about 900 funeral portraits found in the necropolis of Faiyum. Thanks to the dry Egyptian climate, many portraits are very well preserved, and, in most cases, even the paint looks still fresh.
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