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manufacturing center.

Religion

The dominant religion of Italy is Roman Catholicism, the faith of

about 84 percent of the people. However, the Catholic church s role in

Italy is declining; only about 25 percent of Italians attend mass regularly,

and a law ratified in 1985 abolished Roman Catholicism as the official

state religion and ended mandatory religious instruction in public

schools. The constitution guarantees freedom of worship to the

religious minorities, which are primarily Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish.

Renaissance, period of European history that saw a renewed interest in

the arts. The Renaissance began in 14th-century Italy and spread to the

rest of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period, the

fragmented feudal society of the Middle Ages, with its agricultural

economy and church-dominated intellectual and cultural life, was

transformed into a society increasingly dominated by central political

institutions, with an urban, commercial economy and lay patronage of

education, the arts, and music.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine artist, one of the great

masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a painter, sculptor,

architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and

research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His

innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art

for more than a century after his death, and his scientific

studies particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and

hydraulics anticipated many of the developments of modern science.

The Last Supper

One of the most famous religious paintings of all time, Leonardo da

Vinci s The Last Supper (about 1495-1497) decorates the walls at Santa

Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. This mural depicts the moment

immediately following Christ s dramatic announcement to his

disciples that One of you shall betray me. Unfortunately, much of

the mural has deteriorated because Leonardo painted with an

oil-tempera mixture that did not stick well to the wall. A 15th and

early 16th century Italian artist and scientist, Leonardo ranks as one of

the great creative figures of the European Renaissance (1300-1600).

Early Life in Florence

Leonardo was born in the small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near

Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant

woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where

Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, a major

intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced

socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation,

and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 he was apprenticed as a

garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine

painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio’s workshop Leonardo was

introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel

pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and

bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painter’s guild of Florence, and in

1476 he was still considered Verrocchio’s assistant. In Verrocchio’s

Baptism of Christ (1470?, Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel at the left

of the painting is by Leonardo.

In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first commission,

to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the

Florentine town hall, was never executed. His first large painting, The

Adoration of the Magi (begun 1481, Uffizi), left unfinished, was ordered

in 1481 for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence. Other

works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Benois Madonna (1478?,

Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), the portrait Ginevra de’ Benci (1474?,

National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and the unfinished Saint Jerome

(1481?, Pinacoteca, Vatican).

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