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1374
Francisco Petrarch
Italian humanist and poet;referred to as the father of the Renaissance dies -
1397
Giovanni de Medici
Wealthy Italian banker establishes the Medici Bank in Florence, who's wealthy family goes on the fiance a century's worth of artists and projects -
1400
Renaissance
Term means "rebirth" of ancient Greece and Rome -
1450
Johann Gutenberg
Inventor of the printing press -
1492
Christopher Columbus
Columbus reaches the Bahamas for Spain -
1495
Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza—the Duke of Milan and a longtime patron of the artist—to paint a 15 by 29-foot mural for the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan as a part of a renovation project. -
1512
Michelangelo
Completes ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City -
1513
Machiavelli
Completes his book, The Prince, that argues in favor of a strong monarchy government system -
1517
Martin Luther
Martin Luther challenges the Catholic Church by nailing 95 Theses, initiating the Protestant Reformation -
1522
Ferdinand Magellan
First to circumnavigate the world. Trip financed by King of Spain who was only 18 years old at the time of Magellan's exploration. -
1543
Nicolaus Copernicus
One of the most important contributions of Copernicus was to the field of astronomy. Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the universe, rather than the earth. -
1543
Andreas Vesalius
Flemish physician and anatomist who wrote the book “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” on human anatomy. He dissected corpses and examined them, after which he detailed human anatomy. -
1545
Council of Trent
Prompted by the Reformation, the Council of Trent was highly important for its sweeping decrees on self-reform and for its dogmatic definitions that clarified virtually every doctrine contested by the Protestants. -
1570
Map Making
First modern Atlas is completed -
End of the Reniassance
Italy became a battleground for the first time in centuries.[This was to have a negative impact on the Renaissance. In 1527, the Spanish army sacked Rome and caused widespread loss of life and devastation. -
Johannes Kepler
Responsible for creating Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. These laws include that the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci, that a line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time, and that the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of a semi-major axis of its orbit. -
William Harvey
First doctor to ever describe properly how the human circulatory system properly worked. He also described the blood properties and how the heart worked to circulate the blood around the body. -
Galileo Galilei's The Starry Messenger
Reported his discoveries of four of Jupiter’s moons, the roughness of the Moon’s surface, stars invisible to the naked eye, and differences between the appearances of planets and fixed stars, observations on the full set of phases of Venus, and wrote regarding the tides. -
Peter Paul Ruben's The Elevation of the Cross
Painting illustrating the new Renaissance painting technique called chiaroscuro, use of the strong contrast of light and dark -
Mrs Jane Sharp's book, The Midwives Book
The first English handbook on midwives written by a woman
