Curated category
Italian Renaissance humanists
- 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.
- 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.
- Antonio BonfiniAntonio Bonfini arrived at the Hungarian royal court with a scholar's restlessness and a humanist's ambitions, and what he produced there would shape how…
- Lorenzo CampeggioLorenzo Campeggio arrived in England in 1528 with a task that would have tested any diplomat. He was to sit in judgment on whether the most powerful king in…
- Giovanni BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio was known by his contemporaries simply as "the Certaldese", named for the small Tuscan town of Certaldo where his family came from.
- Leon Battista AlbertiLeon Battista Alberti once boasted that he could stand with his feet together and spring clean over a man's head. He claimed he could throw a coin so high…
- PetrarchPetrarch was born in Arezzo on the 20th of July 1304, and by the time he died seventy years later, he had reshaped what it meant to be a thinking, feeling…
- Leonardo BruniLeonardo Bruni sat in one of Florence's highest political offices. Still, historian Arthur Field has identified him as an apparent plotter against Cosimo de'…
- Lorenzo VallaLorenzo Valla, born in Rome around 1407, did something that no one else in the Christian world had dared to do: he proved, using the tools of grammar and…
- 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.
- Filippo BuonaccorsiFilippo Buonaccorsi was born in San Gimignano on the 2nd of May 1437, in the hill town of Tuscany that tourists still flock to today for its medieval towers.
- Flavio BiondoFlavio Biondo was born in 1392 in Forlì, the capital of the Romagna region, and he spent much of his life trying to rescue a city from its own forgetting.
- Giovanni Pico della MirandolaGiovanni Pico della Mirandola was 23 years old when he announced a challenge to the entire intellectual world. In December 1486, he published 900 theses…
- Pietro RanzanoPietro Ranzano was born in Palermo in 1428, and by the time he died in Lucera in 1492, he had lived exactly long enough to witness the end of the world he…
- Poggio BraccioliniGian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini arrived in the village of Terranuova near Arezzo on the 11th of February 1380. His father took him to Florence to pursue…