Curated playlist
Artist authors
- MichelangeloMichelangelo said he lived like a poor man, yet he was worth about 50,000 gold ducats.
- William BlakeNear death, William Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil. He drew his wife's portrait before he died.
- William MorrisWilliam Morris despised industrial capitalism yet decorated the homes of the rich.
- Eugène DelacroixTalleyrand privately considered himself the real father of the painter Eugène Delacroix.
- Rabindranath TagoreAt sixteen, Rabindranath Tagore fooled experts with poems he called lost classics.
- William HogarthHogarth's 1751 print Gin Lane shows a mother letting her baby fall to its death. The prints supported the Gin Act 1751.
- Lorenzo GhibertiMichelangelo named the second set of Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze doors the Gates of Paradise.
- Leon Battista AlbertiAt twenty, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a comedy that fooled a famous printer.
- Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros he had never seen. His 1515 woodcut still appeared in some German school textbooks.
- Giorgio VasariGiorgio Vasari's word rinascita, meaning rebirth, became the name of the Renaissance.
- Nicholas HilliardNicholas Hilliard, miniature painter to Elizabeth I, was jailed for debt in 1617.
- Benvenuto CelliniA thief climbed scaffolding in Vienna in 2003 and stole Benvenuto Cellini's gold salt cellar.