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It opens the door to learning
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The most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture
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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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The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci that has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world".
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This astonishing Renaissance sculpture was created between 1501 and 1504. It is a 14.0 ft marble statue depicting the Biblical hero David.
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Nicolas Copernicus 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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Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. The work was written in Latin and it was published in Louvain (present-day Belgium). Utopia is a work of satire, indirectly criticizing Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. More was a Catholic Humanist.
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The priest and scholar 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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According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-on-Avon on April 23, 1564. It is impossible to be certain the exact day on which he was born, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptizing a newborn.
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Under King Henry VIII in the 16th century, the Church of England broke with Rome, largely because Pope Clement VII refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Upon Henry's death, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer began changes that allied the Church of England with the Reformation.
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Galileo invented a thermometer, called Galileo's air thermometer (more accurately termed a thermoscope), in or before 1603. Galileo Galilei discovered that the density of liquids (how much they contract and expand) reacts predictably to changes in temperature.
