On March 6, 1475, Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists, is born in Caprese. His most important early work was the Pieta (1498), a traditional type of devotional sculpture that showed the body of Christ in the lap of the Virgin Mary. On March 5, 1815, Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician who pioneered the medical field of hypnotic therapy, dies in obscurity in Meersburg, Swabia (now Germany). His process of mesmerism, as it came to be known, produced hypnotic states that had an extraordinary influence on his patients' physical illnesses. On March 4, 1888, Knute Rockne is born ...