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Gutenberg produced what is considered to be the first book ever printed: a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany.
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Lorenzo de’ Medici was born in Florence, Italy.
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Michelangelo was only 26 years old in 1501, but he was already the most famous and best paid artist in his days. He accepted the challenge with enthusiasm to sculpt a large scale David and worked constantly for over two years to create one of his most breathtaking masterpieces of gleaming white marble.
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Oil painting on a poplar wood panel by Leonardo da Vinci, probably the world’s most famous painting. It was painted sometime between 1503 and 1519, when Leonardo was living in Florence, and it now hangs in the Louvre Museum, in Paris, where it remained an object of pilgrimage in the 21st century. The sitter’s mysterious smile and her unproven identity have made the painting a source of ongoing investigation and fascination.
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Thomas More published a work describing an ideal island state – he called it Utopia. The name derives from the Greek but has a double meaning 'eutopia' (good place) or 'outopia' (no place).
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Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation.
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Henry VIII broke ties with the Pope in the 1530s after the Catholic church wouldn’t allow him to annul his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who failed to produce any male heirs.
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De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres), written by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and published just before his death, placed the sun at the center of the universe and argued that the Earth moved across the heavens as one of the planets.
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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era.
