Page 127 - Key to Social Studies 6

Let’s Learn More Michelangelo

Another in uential and famous Renaissance

gure was Michelangelo, a painter and sculptor,
Who Were Some of the Key Figures of the Renaissance?
who also came from Florence. Michelangelo is

Leonardo da Vinci known as one of the greatest artists who ever

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and lived. Even today, we celebrate his sculptures,

engineer. Born in 1452 in the Vinci area of Florence, Leonardo’s including the Pietà and the Figure of David, and

beginnings were humble, but he would soon become one of the paintings, most notably the enormous image on

greatest scienti c and artistic innovators, or people who come up the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took him

with new and exciting ideas, of all time. four years to paint.

Though he is most famous as the painter who gave the world the

Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo was

also a pioneer in science, and some of his ideas, including early

forms of the helicopter, armored tanks, and even calculators, were

so far ahead of their time that no one could make them using the Galileo Galilei

materials of the time. Leonardo also studied human anatomy, and In the eld of science, the Renaissance gave us the
his drawings of the human body have proven useful even at work of the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. He built

present time. on the work of other astronomers, or scientists who

study the stars and planets, and popularized the

idea that the Earth and the other planets of our

solar system rotated around the sun. Until then,

Copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting most people believed that Earth was the center of

the universe, but Galileo’s work challenged that

idea. His work was so controversial that the church

ordered him to take back his ideas, and he spent
the last nine years of his life under house arrest.

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