religious items
Attavante degli Attavanti, also Gabriello di Vante, is the best known and most representative artist of Italian miniature painting.
Attavante's elegant, expressive style was influenced by the work of Domenico Ghirlandaio and Antonio Pollaiuolo. His first recorded work, dated 1483, is a missal created for Thomas James, bishop of the Dol-de-Bretagne. He subsequently created several manuscripts for Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and the Medici family, among whom was Pope Leo X. The workshop of Attavante also produced the Jerome Bible, one of the finest bibles created during the Italian Renaissance, now in the Portuguese National Archives.
Antonio Canova was an Italian sculptor of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is known as a bright representative of neoclassicism in European fine art. Canova was a follower of traditions of artists of antiquity and Renaissance. Among admirers of his creativity there were many representatives of ruling dynasties of Europe.
Antonio Canova himself created more than 50 statues, and together with his assistants - about 180 works. He gained influential patrons and had a reputation as the most important European sculptor of his time. Among his customers was Napoleon Bonaparte, whose statue Canova carved from marble, depicting the emperor as Mars.
Most of Canova's works today decorate the expositions of the world's leading museums, such as the halls of the Louvre and the Hermitage.
Thomas Aquinas (Italian: Tommaso d'Aquino, also called Aquinas, alias Doctor Angelicus) was an Italian poet and theologian, philosopher, and major medieval scholastic.
Thomas Aquinas is one of the most important theologians in the history of Western civilization, given the extent of his influence on the development of Roman Catholic theology since the fourteenth century. As a theologian, in his two masterpieces, Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles, he created the classical systematization of Latin theology, and as a poet, he wrote some of the most serious and beautiful Eucharistic hymns in the church liturgy. Thomas Aquinas is recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as the foremost Western philosopher and theologian and canonized as a saint.