Curated category
Italian Roman Catholics
- MichelangeloMichelangelo carved one of his most famous works, the Pietà, before he turned 30, then sculpted David before the same milestone.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Marie de' MediciOn the 26th of April 1575, Maria de' Medici was born inside the Palazzo Pitti of Florence. Her father Francesco I ruled Tuscany as Grand Duke while her…
- 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…
- 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.
- Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus believed the Canary Islands lay only about 2,400 nautical miles from Japan. The real distance is more than 10,000.
- 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.
- 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.
- Lorenzo GhibertiLorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine sculptor who spent most of his working life making two sets of bronze doors for a single building.
- 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…
- 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?
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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."…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- Andrea MantegnaAndrea Mantegna was born around 1431 in Isola di Carturo, a small settlement near Padua, the son of a carpenter named Biagio.
- 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.