Curated playlist
Italian Renaissance humanists
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci wrote most of his notes in mirror-image cursive, right to left.
- Matteo PalmieriMatteo Palmieri served Florence for more than four decades, yet an effigy of him was burned.
- Niccolò de' NiccoliNiccolò de' Niccoli was born in Florence in 1364 and died there on the 22nd of January 1437. He was an Italian Renaissance humanist, and he sat near the center of the scholars whom Cosimo de' Medici supported. He left almost no writing of…
- Antonio BonfiniA king hired an Italian scholar, Antonio Bonfini, to write Hungary's history.
- Lorenzo CampeggioCardinal Lorenzo Campeggio judged Henry VIII's divorce case while suffering from gout. He reached England in 1528.
- Giovanni BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio hated banking and disliked law just as much. He became a poet who wrote The Decameron.
- Leon Battista AlbertiAt twenty, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a comedy that fooled a famous printer.
- PetrarchPetrarch climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336, then closed his book angry at himself for admiring the view.
- Leonardo BruniLeonardo Bruni was the first to split the past into three ages. He named Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern age.
- Lorenzo VallaLorenzo Valla, a priest, proved a famous papal land grant was a fraud. He used grammar and history.
- Lorenzo de' MediciLorenzo de' Medici survived a cathedral ambush in 1478 that killed his brother. The assassins had a pope's blessing.
- Filippo BuonaccorsiScholars credit a 1490 letter by Filippo Buonaccorsi as the first Western use of the word Balkan.
- Flavio BiondoWhen Flavio Biondo reached Rome in 1433, the Forum was a cow pasture. He set out to recover the lost city.
- Giovanni Pico della MirandolaAt 23, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola offered to pay any scholar's way to Rome to debate his 900 theses.
- Pietro RanzanoPietro Ranzano built part of his history of Palermo on an inscription that turned out to be a forgery.
- Poggio BraccioliniPoggio Bracciolini, an Italian scholar born on the 11th of February 1380, once bribed a monk to take books out of a monastery. The monastery was Hersfeld Abbey. The books were a Livy and an Ammianus. When a codex could not be had by fair…