THE ARTICLE · 17 MIN
Twelve people born between 1404 and 1564 who worked across several fields. For each one, this page gives the dates the sources give, what they did, one popular claim about them, and what the record says about that claim.
Our page on what a Renaissance man is, and where the idea comes from covers the ideal itself. This one is about the people.
Leonardo da Vinci, born in Vinci in 1452 and dead at Amboise in 1519, is often the first name that comes to mind. His range, and how much he left unfinished, are covered in the Leonardo section of that page, so he is not one of the twelve here.
The quick verdicts are in the summary table. Where sources give different dates, both are shown.
Twelve lives
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
Dates. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives 1475–1564. Giorgio Vasari, who knew him and received letters from him, gives his birth as 6 March 1474. He gives his death as 1563 by the Florentine reckoning, which he says would be 1564 by the Roman one.
Both of Vasari’s years are Florentine. In Florence the new year began on 25 March, so his 6 March 1474 is 6 March 1475 by our reckoning. That is the same year the Met gives.
Across fields. The Met calls him a painter, draftsman, sculptor and architect of the highest skill. Vasari, in Gaston du C. de Vere’s translation, says that after the sack of Rome, when Florence rebuilt its fortifications, the city made him commissary general over all the work.
Late in life, Vasari adds, he was bound to finish the building of St Peter’s in Rome. He also wrote poetry. His pupil and biographer Ascanio Condivi says he had given himself up to reading poets and authors who wrote in Italian, and to writing sonnets for his own pleasure.
The claim: he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling lying on his back.
Doesn't hold up The early accounts describe him looking up, not lying down. Vasari says he worked in great discomfort, because he had to labour with his face turned upwards. Condivi says he had painted for so long with his eyes turned up towards the vault.
Michelangelo’s own comic sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia describes a body bent backwards. In John Addington Symonds’s translation of 1878: “My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in”, and “Crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow”.
In 1988 the art historian William E. Wallace concluded, as reported at the time, that he worked standing on scaffolding of a new design.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)
Dates. Born in Genoa on 14 February 1404 and dead in Rome in April 1472, according to Italy’s national biographical dictionary.
Across fields. Our page on the Renaissance man covers his self-portrait in the Latin Vita. The same dictionary entry records more:
- He took a degree in canon law at Bologna in 1428.
- He turned to physics and mathematics, studied the ruins of ancient Rome for his interest in architecture, and made optical experiments with mirrors that amazed his friends.
He later wrote De re aedificatoria, a treatise on architecture.
The claim: Alberti invented linear perspective.
Doesn't hold up He was the first to write about it, not the first to use it. Linear perspective for painters was first worked out by the Florentine craftsman Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). His demonstration panel has been lost since the mid-fifteenth century.
The first written link between art and the science of optics came in 1435. That year Alberti wrote his book on painting, in Latin as De pictura and in Italian as Della pittura.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)
Dates. Born on 24 February 1463 and dead on 17 November 1494, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Across fields. A philosopher who gathered 900 propositions from dozens of authorities: ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian, Muslim and Jewish. He had them printed in Rome at the end of 1486, and challenged anyone to debate them in public.
The pope, Innocent VIII, indicted 13 of the 900 theses. Pico later wrote the Heptaplus (1489), a Kabbalist reading of the Bible, and Disputations against Predictive Astrology, which he left unfinished at his death.
The claim: Pico delivered a famous speech called the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”.
Doesn't hold up He never delivered it, and the famous title isn’t his. He wrote the speech to introduce the debate, but the debate never happened.
The Stanford Encyclopedia says he never gave the speech or had it published. After he died in 1494, the entry adds, others mistakenly called it an Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico never gave it a title.
The entry’s author, the historian Brian Copenhaver, goes further and argues that the speech is not really about human dignity at all; that part is his reading.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Dates. Born on 19 February 1473. He received a printed copy of his book On the Revolutions on his deathbed on 24 May 1543, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Across fields. Astronomy was one job among several. He held a doctorate in canon law and served as a canon of the cathedral chapter of Warmia. From 1507 he worked as his uncle’s attending physician. He also wrote an essay on coinage. In it he deplored the debasement of the currency and suggested reforms.
His Latin translation of the letters of Theophylactus Simocatta, printed in 1509, was his only publication before On the Revolutions.
The claim: Copernicus was the first person to say the Earth moves around the Sun.
Doesn't hold up The idea is much older. Archimedes reports in The Sand-Reckoner that Aristarchus of Samos put forward hypotheses including “that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle” (T. L. Heath’s translation, 1897). In them, the fixed stars and the sun stay still.
MacTutor dates Aristarchus to about 310–230 BC. What Copernicus added was a book that made the case at length. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that he came to be seen as the one who began what is commonly called the Scientific Revolution.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
Dates. Born in Pisa on 15 February 1564. He died on 8 January 1642, a date the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says has problems.
Across fields. He was the son of a court musician who wrote on music theory. Galileo enrolled to study medicine at Pisa in 1580, never finished the degree, and turned to mathematics.
He held the chair of mathematics at Padua from 1592 and produced a calculating instrument of his own design. In 1609 he improved the newly invented telescope, and in March 1610 he announced what he saw with it in Sidereus nuncius.
A 1757 London book on Italian authors adds that Galileo was a poet too, a light, comic one. In June 1633, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s words, the Inquisition convicted him of “vehement suspicion of heresy”, and his sentence was commuted to perpetual house arrest.
The claim: after his trial, Galileo muttered “Eppur si muove”, “And yet it moves”.
Can't confirm No record from his lifetime has it. The earliest known printing is in Giuseppe Baretti’s The Italian Library, published in London in 1757, more than a century after Galileo died.
Baretti writes that as soon as he was set free, Galileo stamped his foot and said “Eppur si move” (the scan reads the old long s as an f). The same passage says he was held by the Inquisition for six years. That does not match the record: he travelled to Rome in January 1633, and his hearings ran from April to June.
A painting bearing the words was once said to date from 1643 or 1645. In 2007 its auction house judged it to be from the 19th century, according to the astrophysicist Mario Livio, who traced it. He concludes that the motto is “much more likely to be apocryphal”. Unlikely, then, but not provably never said.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466 or 1469 – 1536)
Dates. His birth year is uncertain. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Erasmus gives 28 October 1469, following a 2019 study; its entry on Pico gives 1466. He died in 1536.
Across fields. The Stanford Encyclopedia says he found success in four kinds of writing: literature, education, religion and theology. His bestsellers included The Praise of Folly (1511) and the Adagia, a collection he expanded to more than 4000 proverbs.
In 1516 he published an edition of the Greek New Testament, the first to reach the market. He also took a doctorate in theology at Turin.
The claim: Erasmus said, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
Partly There is a real letter behind it, and the popular version changes it. He wrote to James Batt from Paris on 12 April 1500. The key sentence reads, in his Latin: Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque vt pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
Francis Morgan Nichols’s 1901 translation reads: “I have been applying my whole mind to the study of Greek; and as soon as I receive any money I shall first buy Greek authors, and afterwards some clothes.” Greek books came first, then clothes. Food is not in the letter.
Thomas More (1478–1535)
Dates. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives 1478–1535; he was executed for high treason on 6 July 1535.
Across fields. He was a lawyer, judge, member of Parliament and ambassador. The Stanford Encyclopedia also calls him a leading supporter of education for women. He became Speaker of the House of Commons and then, for three years, Lord Chancellor of England.
His Utopia was first printed at Louvain late in 1516. Erasmus called him, in Latin, omnium horarum homo, a man for every hour (our translation). In English, a contemporary, Robert Whittington, called him “a man for all seasons” in 1520.
The claim: Thomas More was a tolerant humanist.
Still argued The evidence points both ways, and historians still disagree.
Utopia points one way. In Gilbert Burnet’s translation of 1684, the island’s founder “made a law that every man might be of what religion he pleased”. But he also made a solemn and severe law against anyone who thought the soul dies with the body.
These are the laws of an imagined island, described by a character, Raphael Hythloday. At the end, the character More says that many of the Utopians’ manners and laws seemed very absurd, both in how they made war and in their ideas of religion. So how far the book speaks for More is itself part of the argument.
His record points the other way. As Lord Chancellor, More swore to uphold England’s heresy laws. While he was in office, six people were convicted of heresy by church courts and then executed under secular law.
In 1533 he wrote to Erasmus about his own epitaph, which declares that he had been troublesome to heretics (haereticis me fuisse molestum). He explained why. He so hated that kind of people (illud hominum genus) that, unless they changed their minds, he wished to be as hateful to them as anyone could be (our translation).
The Stanford Encyclopedia sums up: whether he stayed the humanist of Utopia or grew repressive in outlook and action “remains a topic of controversy”. How to weigh those facts is a judgement each reader makes.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Dates. Born on 22 January 1561 at York House in London; died at Highgate on 9 April 1626, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Across fields. He was a lawyer, a member of Parliament from the age of twenty until sixty, an essayist and a historian. He became Lord Chancellor in January 1618.
In 1621 Parliament impeached him for taking bribes, and he confessed. The Stanford Encyclopedia sees him as a victim of a political campaign against the king’s chief favourite, the future Duke of Buckingham.
In philosophy, his Novum Organum came out in October 1620. New Atlantis, his imagined society centred on a community of researchers, was published after he died.
His most quoted Latin aside, “for knowledge itself is power”, comes from his meditation “Of Heresies”, published in 1597. There it is about God. Our page on information and power traces it in James Spedding’s 1859 edition, which gives this English. Our page on quotes that get cut short gives the rest of the sentence.
The claim: Bacon died from stuffing a chicken with snow.
Partly The experiment is real; that it killed him is a later account.
In his last letter, to the Earl of Arundel, Bacon wrote that he had wanted to try an experiment or two on preserving and hardening bodies. “As for the experiment itself,” he wrote, “it succeeded excellently well”. On the journey he fell ill, and he did not know why. It might be the stone, he wrote, or eating too much, or cold, or a touch of all three.
The snow and the hen come from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, set down between 1669 and 1696. Aubrey says Thomas Hobbes told him that Bacon bought a hen and “stuffed the bodie with snow”. Even Aubrey adds a second cause: Bacon was put into a damp bed that no one had slept in for about a year.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
Dates. The Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art both give 1471–1528; he was from Nuremberg.
Across fields. A printmaker, painter and theorist. The Library of Congress notes that he was a goldsmith’s son with little formal education. Yet in 1525 he published a Treatise on Measurement, a German manual summing up classical writing on geometry and perspective.
He presented it as useful not only to painters but to goldsmiths, sculptors, stonemasons, carpenters and anyone who needs to measure. In 1527 came a treatise on fortification. He also travelled to see new animals, according to the Cooper Hewitt museum, which lists a baboon and a lion among them.
The claim: Dürer drew his famous Rhinoceros from life.
Doesn't hold up He never saw one. London’s Natural History Museum says he made the woodcut in 1515 without ever seeing a rhino. He worked instead from a description in a letter and a sketch by an unknown artist who had seen the animal.
The Cooper Hewitt says the same: he had never seen one. The armour-like plates and the extra horn on its back are the result.
Isabella d’Este (1474–1539)
Dates. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna gives 1474–1539.
Across fields. A daughter of the Duke of Ferrara and Modena, she married Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, in 1490. The Vienna museum calls her one of the greatest female art patrons in history. It says she made the court at Mantua a centre for the leading scholars and artists of the Renaissance.
Her studiolo, a private room for study, took more than twenty years to decorate, according to the Louvre. She asked Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco Francia for paintings for it, in vain. In the 1530s Titian painted her idealised as a much younger woman.
The claim: Leonardo painted her portrait.
Doesn't hold up He drew it. No painted version by him is known. The Louvre holds his cartoon, made in Mantua between the last months of 1499 and the first months of 1500. It lists several drawn copies, but no painted version.
The Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp writes that once Leonardo was back in Florence, Isabella pestered him for six years for a painted version. The letters, Kemp says, suggest she did not get one.
A painting was attributed to Leonardo in 2013. Kemp rejected it: in his view, the documents and the surviving drawings rule out that it can be by Leonardo.
Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 or 1535 – 1625)
Dates. The National Museum of Women in the Arts gives her birth year as 1532 or 1535; she died in 1625. Our page on the Renaissance man covers her years at the Spanish court.
Across fields. A portrait painter whose self-portrait at the easel dates from 1556. In 1579 she married a ship captain, Orazio Lomellini, and around 1615 she moved with him to Palermo, according to the art historian Julia K. Dabbs.
There, in July 1624, the young Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck visited and drew her. In the translation Dabbs quotes, he noted her advice: “not to hold the light too high, so the shadows aren’t too deep in the lines of an old person’s face”.
The claim: she was 96 when van Dyck drew her.
Doesn't hold up Ninety-six is van Dyck’s figure, not her age. His note, dated 12 July 1624, says, in the translation Dabbs quotes, that “at ninety-six she still has all her memory and is very quick-witted”.
With a birth year of 1532 or 1535, and her birthday unknown, she was between 88 and 92. The writer Jennifer Higgie takes the later birth year: she has Sofonisba at eighty-nine, while noting that van Dyck records ninety-six.
Mimar Sinan (about 1490 – 1588)
Dates. He died in 1588. The sources we read give no birth year; the epitaph on his tomb gives his age at death, as described below.
Across fields. The historian Gülru Necipoğlu summarises his own autobiographical accounts. He was recruited as a Christian boy from a village of Kayseri and trained first in carpentry. He rose through the Janissaries as a foot soldier, building several bridges and warships along the way, before serving as chief architect to three sultans from 1539 to 1588.
UNESCO says he thought the Selimiye Mosque complex in Edirne was his best work. It calls the bridge he built over the Drina at Višegrad the work of one of the greatest architects and engineers of the classical Ottoman period. He was, UNESCO adds, a contemporary of the Italian Renaissance.
Necipoğlu adds that his autobiographies show a proud sense of individualism and a new self-awareness, of the kind usually linked with the Renaissance idea of the artist.
The claim: Mimar Sinan lived to be 100.
Partly By the calendar his epitaph used, yes; by ours, not quite. Necipoğlu writes that according to the epitaph composed for his tomb, “he died at over a hundred years of age (over ninety-seven in the solar calendar)”.
The hundred years are counted in a different calendar from ours; in solar years, Necipoğlu’s figure is over ninety-seven, which puts his birth around 1490 or a little earlier.
What the twelve have in common
Read together, these lives suggest two things. This is our reading, not a finding.
First, much of their range came with their jobs. Copernicus’s medicine, law and coinage were his work as a church administrator. Michelangelo’s fortifications and Sinan’s bridges were commissions from the state they served. Isabella d’Este’s collecting was part of running a court. Breadth was often what the position demanded.
Second, some of the most famous stories about them were added later:
- Galileo’s motto first appears more than a century after his death.
- The title of Pico’s speech was given after he died.
- Bacon’s chicken comes from a writer reporting what someone else told him.
- Van Dyck’s age for Sofonisba was several years too high.
The fake-quote guide shows how to check a line like these in a few minutes.
Why it matters
A famous life tends to collect neat stories. Two questions help sort them: who first wrote the story down, and how long after the person died? Michelangelo’s sonnet comes from the man himself; Galileo’s motto surfaced more than a century later, and Bacon’s chicken reached Aubrey second-hand.
Sources
Michelangelo
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (publication page).
- Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 9, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, Life of Michelagnolo (Project Gutenberg #32362).
- Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michael Angelo, trans. in Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti (1903; Project Gutenberg #19332).
- The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, trans. John Addington Symonds (1878), sonnet V (Project Gutenberg #10314).
- William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo’s uncelebrated birthday and uncertain death”, OUPblog, 3 March 2017.
- “Researcher says Michelangelo did Sistine standing up — and with help”, Deseret News, 15 May 1988.
Alberti
- Cecil Grayson and Giulio Carlo Argan, “Alberti, Leon Battista”, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1 (1960).
- Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Brunelleschi’s mirror, Alberti’s window, and Galileo’s ‘perspective tube’”, História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 13 (supplement, 2006).
Pico, Copernicus, Galileo, Erasmus, More, Bacon
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola”, “Nicolaus Copernicus”, “Galileo Galilei”, “Desiderius Erasmus”, “Thomas More”, “Francis Bacon”.
- Archimedes, The Sand-Reckoner, in The Works of Archimedes, ed. and trans. T. L. Heath (Cambridge, 1897); MacTutor History of Mathematics, “Aristarchus of Samos”.
- Giuseppe Baretti, The Italian Library (London, 1757); Mario Livio, “Did Galileo Truly Say, ‘And Yet It Moves’? A Modern Detective Story”, Scientific American, 6 May 2020.
- P. S. Allen (ed.), Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1906), Ep. 124 (archive.org scan); Francis Morgan Nichols (trans.), The Epistles of Erasmus, vol. 1 (1901) (archive.org scan).
- Center for Thomas More Studies, “A Man for All Seasons” (Whittington, 1520; Erasmus to Budé, 1521).
- Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Gilbert Burnet, with Henry Morley’s introduction (Project Gutenberg #2130); More to Erasmus, 1533, in Allen & Garrod (eds), Opus Epistolarum, vol. 10, Ep. 2831 (archive.org scan).
- James Spedding (ed.), The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, vol. VII (London, 1874), letter to the Earl of Arundel (archive.org scan); John Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives’, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1898), “Francis Bacon” (archive.org scan).
Dürer
- Library of Congress, “Art and Math: The Unusual Shape in Melencolia I” (14 December 2023).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Last Illustration from Dürer’s “Treatise on Fortification”.
- Natural History Museum, London, “The Legacy of Dürer’s Rhinoceros” (2023); Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Introducing the Rhinoceros” (2013).
Isabella d’Este
- Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: Titian, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua and Rubens, Isabella d’Este.
- Musée du Louvre, Portrait d’Isabelle d’Este, MI 753, and Mantegna exhibition: Isabella d’Este’s Studiolo.
- Martin Kemp, “Leonardo and the supposed portrait of Isabella d’Este” (2013).
Sofonisba Anguissola
- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Sofonisba Anguissola: A Renaissance Woman (exhibition page, 1995).
- Julia K. Dabbs, “Vision and Insight: Portraits of the Aged Woman Artist, 1600–1800”, Occasion, Stanford Humanities Center (translation of van Dyck’s note after Susan Barnes et al., 2004).
- Gareth Harris, “The day Anthony van Dyck received ‘wise advice from the words of a blind woman’”, The Art Newspaper, 7 April 2021 (extract from Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette).
Mimar Sinan
- Gülru Necipoğlu, preface to Howard Crane and Esra Akın, Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts (Leiden: Brill), via Archnet.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Selimiye Mosque and its Social Complex” and “Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad”.
We read the primary texts in public-domain editions and translations on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive; where the English is ours, the page says so. Van Dyck’s sketchbook and Kemp’s sources were read through the scholars named, not in the original. Dates follow the sources named for each person.
Checked October 2026.
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