Curated playlist
Italian Roman Catholics
- MichelangeloItalian artist and architect (1475–1564)
- TitianIn 1590, the painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo called Titian "the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world". The man behind that praise was Tiziano Vecellio, born in Pieve di Cadore…
- Carlo MadernoCarlo Maderno arrived in Rome in 1588 as a young man from the marble quarries of Capolago, a town in today's Ticino, Switzerland. He came with four of his brothers to work under his uncle, the architect Domenico Fontana. Few would have…
- TintorettoTintoretto placed an inscription over his studio door that announced his entire ambition in seven words: Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano. Michelangelo's drawing and Titian's colour. For a young painter working in…
- RaphaelRaphael died on the 6th of April 1520, which was, by some accounts, his 37th birthday. Four cardinals dressed in purple carried his body through Rome. The Pope kissed his hand. The inscription placed on his marble sarcophagus in the…
- Marie de' MediciMarie de' Medici scaled a forty-meter wall on a rope ladder on the night of the 21st to the 22nd of February 1619. She was 43 years old, and her prison was the Château de Blois. Her own son had put her there. Riders sent by the Duc…
- Victor Emmanuel IIVictor Emmanuel II rode into Rome on the 20th of September 1870, entering a city that no Italian king had controlled since the fall of the Western Roman Empire over thirteen centuries before. He was not a romantic figure. A British…
- Filippino LippiFilippino Lippi was born probably in 1457 at Prato, Tuscany, under circumstances that would have seemed to doom him before he ever picked up a brush. His father was a painter who had also taken holy orders, and his mother was a nun. Both…
- Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus believed the Canary Islands lay only about 2,400 nautical miles from Japan. The real distance is more than 10,000. He had underestimated the size of the Earth by roughly a third, leaning on Ptolemy's figures and an…
- Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of UrbinoLorenzo di Piero de' Medici was born on the 12th of September 1492 into one of the most powerful families in Italy, and he died at just twenty-six years old. In that brief span, he ruled Florence, fought a war for a dukedom, married a…
- Joséphine de Beauharnais"France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Joséphine." These were the last words Napoleon spoke on his deathbed at Saint Helena. The woman he named had not been his wife for eleven years by then. He had annulled their marriage, remarried,…
- Lorenzo GhibertiLorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine sculptor who spent most of his working life making two sets of bronze doors for a single building. That building was the Florence Baptistery, known formally as the Battistero di San Giovanni. The doors he…
- Paolo VeronesePaolo Veronese stood before the Venetian Holy Inquisition on the 18th of July 1573 and told his interrogators that painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen. It was not the response the tribunal expected from an artist defending…
- GiottoGiotto di Bondone died on the 8th of January, 1337, and left behind a question that scholars have never fully resolved: who exactly was he? His banker contemporary Giovanni Villani called him "the most sovereign master of painting in his…
- MasaccioMasaccio died in the summer of 1428, twenty-six years old and barely six years into his career as an independent painter. When word reached Filippo Brunelleschi, one of the most formidable architects in Florence, his response was simple:…
- Amerigo VespucciAmerigo Vespucci was born in Florence on the 9th of March 1454, and two continents bear his name. That fact alone is extraordinary. What makes it stranger still is that Vespucci may not have written the letters that put his name on the…
- 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. When his bronze David was recorded in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici in…
- 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. Its octagonal drum gaped open, waiting for a dome that no one in Europe knew how to build.…
- Sandro BotticelliSandro Botticelli was buried, as he had requested, at the foot of a tomb in the Ognissanti Church in Florence. The woman in that tomb was Simonetta Vespucci, a celebrated beauty who had died in 1476 at the age of twenty-two. Botticelli…
- Luciano PavarottiLuciano Pavarotti hit nine high Cs during the aria "Ah! mes amis" at New York's Metropolitan Opera on the 17th of February 1972, then returned for seventeen curtain calls. That night in La fille du régiment earned him a nickname that stuck…
- CaravaggioCaravaggio died on the 18th of July 1610 in Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany, alone and on the run, with three paintings in his possession intended as gifts for a cardinal who might have saved him. He was thirty-six years old. He had…
- Giorgio VasariGiorgio Vasari coined a word that historians still reach for five centuries later. Writing about Giotto's fresh way of painting, he called it a rinascita, a rebirth. In 1835, the French author Jules Michelet borrowed that idea for his…
- Giovanni Pierluigi da PalestrinaGiovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was buried on the same day he died, in a plain coffin fitted with a lead plate. The inscription read Ioannes Petrus Aloysius Praenestinus Musicae Princeps. He was laid to rest beneath the floor of St.…
- 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. Giuliano was stabbed to death. Lorenzo escaped with a wound to the neck,…
- CimabueCimabue, born Giovanni around 1240 in Florence, was a painter whose name translates as "ox-head" - or, more pointedly, "one who crushes the views of others." That nickname tells you something important about the man before you hear a…
- Antonio SalieriAntonio Salieri died in Vienna on the 7th of May 1825, and at his memorial service six weeks later, the music played was his own Requiem in C minor, a piece he had composed two decades earlier but never heard performed. He was 74, had…
- Salvatore SchillaciSalvatore Schillaci was born on the 1st of December 1964 in Palermo, Italy. He grew up in a poor family within that Sicilian city. His first steps into football began with Amat Palermo, an amateur team run by the local bus company. This…
- Giovanni Battista TiepoloGiovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on the 5th of March 1696, the youngest of six children in a household without noble blood but bearing a prestigious name. His father was a small shipping merchant who died about a year after…
- Alcide De GasperiAlcide De Gasperi was born on the 3rd of April 1881 in Pieve Tesino, a small town in Tyrol that had been part of Austria-Hungary for more than five centuries. He died on the 19th of August 1954, reportedly with almost no means of his own,…
- Andrea MantegnaAndrea Mantegna was born around 1431 in Isola di Carturo, a small settlement near Padua, the son of a carpenter named Biagio. By the age of eleven he was already apprenticed to a painter. By the time he died in Mantua on the 13th of…
- Gianluigi BuffonGianluigi Buffon was born on the 28th of January 1978 in Carrara, Tuscany, into a family that treated sport as a way of life. His mother was a discus thrower, his father a weightlifter, and both became physical education teachers after…