The Renaissance

Entire decades of Gutenberg's life pass without a single surviving record, and the fullest evidence of his famous invention comes from a lawsuit accusing him of misusing borrowed money.

Leonardo's most famous biographer wrote thirty years after his death and is now known to have invented, or at least dressed up, some of the best stories, including, probably, the one about how he died.

Michelangelo's grandnephew rewrote the pronouns in his love poetry after his death, and it took a nineteenth-century translation to restore what he had actually written.

Petrarch's own famous account of climbing a mountain just for the view turns out to claim a novelty earlier medieval climbers had already managed, which says something about how carefully he built his own legend.

Raphael ran the largest painter's workshop of his era, which means a fair share of what carries his name was finished by other hands under his direction.

1439

No complete record survives of how the Gutenberg Bible was financed or exactly how many copies were printed, only physical clues in the roughly two dozen complete copies that remain.

Historians still argue whether the Renaissance was a genuine break from the medieval world or a later label pasted onto centuries that were never as separate as the name implies.

Nobody called it a revolution until a century after it supposedly happened, which is one reason historians still argue about whether it was one.