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The Gutenberg Bible was among the earliest major books printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe. It marked the start of the "Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of printed books in the West.
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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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Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina. On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas.
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Lorenzo de' Medici was an Italian statesman, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy.
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It's 5.16 meters (almost 17 feet, a shy short at 16 feet and 11.15 inches). It's made up of one single block of marble from the quarries in Carrara in Tuscany, one of the whitest in the world.
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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.
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On this day in 1517, 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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The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus.
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The Jesuit movement was founded by Ignatius de Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, in August 1534. The first Jesuits–Ignatius and six of his students–took vows of poverty and chastity and made plans to work for the conversion of Muslims.
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Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's seminal work of Protestant systematic theology.
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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist.
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Although named after the 16th–17th-century physicist Galileo, the thermometer described in this article was not invented by him. Galileo did invent a thermometer, called Galileo's air thermometer (more accurately termed a thermoscope).
