Curated category
15th-century people from the Republic of Florence
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci left behind 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, and almost none of it was written the way you would expect.
- MichelangeloMichelangelo carved one of his most famous works, the Pietà, before he turned 30, then sculpted David before the same milestone.
- Matteo PalmieriMatteo di Marco Palmieri was born in Florence in 1406 into a middle-class family that already knew how to navigate the city's corridors of power.
- Niccolò de' NiccoliNiccolò de' Niccoli was born in Florence during the year 1364. He lived and died within the same city walls on the 22nd of January 1437.
- Francesco FiorentinoFrancesco Fiorentino appeared in the city of Kraków during February 1502. Prince Sigismund summoned this Italian architect from Florence to his court.
- Niccolò MachiavelliNiccolò Machiavelli wrote a slim book of advice for rulers around 1513, and it has unsettled readers ever since. He called it De Principatibus.
- Lorenzo GhibertiLorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine sculptor who spent most of his working life making two sets of bronze doors for a single building.
- MasaccioMasaccio died in the summer of 1428, twenty-six years old and barely six years into his career as an independent painter.
- Amerigo VespucciAmerigo Vespucci was born in Florence on the 9th of March 1454, and two continents bear his name. That fact alone is extraordinary.
- DonatelloDonatello, born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi around 1386 in Florence, made a statue so audacious that nothing in the art of his time seemed to predict it.
- Filippo BrunelleschiFilippo Brunelleschi looked up at a hole in the sky. Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral of Florence, had stood unfinished for more than a century.
- Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' MediciLorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici entered the world on the 4th of August 1463 in Florence. His father Pierfrancesco de' Medici died when Lorenzo and his…
- Lorenzo de' MediciOn Sunday, the 26th of April 1478, Lorenzo de' Medici stood in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore when a group of assassins turned on him and his brother.