St. Peters, the realistic statue of David, and the magnificent paintings on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel are outstanding examples of Renaissance art. He also sculpted the famous Pieta, a statue of the Virgin Mary, grieving over the body of dead Christ. It was carved out of a single marble stone from Carrera in Central Italy.
Michelangelo Raphael ( – ) Raphael’s famous work is Madonna and Child , where Virgin Mary and child Jesus are portrayed. Raphael painted the library walls of Pope Julius II with various religious themes. One such theme was School of Athens that highlighted the classical influence on the renaissance art. He painted himself along with the paintings of Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Science and Technology During the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, science also developed rapidly leading to a Scientific Revolution. Scientists of this period had to antagonise the Church, for the Church did not like people to think and experiment, and question god. Nicolas Copernicus ( – ), a Polish scientist, propounded the theory that the Sun was at the centre of the solar system and all the planets including the earth revolved around the sun (heliocentric). This was the opposite view of the Church which propagated the earth-centric (geocentric) view.
Any views that opposed the Church’s ideas were considered heresy. Copernicus postponed the publication of his work on the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres almost till the end of his life. Giordano Bruno, an Italian, was burned in Rome by the Church in for insisting that the earth went round the sun. The most important astronomical evidence for the heliocentric theory was furnished by the great of astronomer Galileo Galilei ( – ).
With a telescope, he discovered the satellites of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and the spots on the sun. He was Raphael Nicolas Copernicus Last Supper Mona Lisa Modern World: The Age of Reason made the professor of Medicine and Maths by the Medici family at the University of Padua (Republic of Venice). He made efforts to make science stay detached from religion. He