← Fame through time1500-1599
The 16th century
Whose working lives fell in the 16th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 16th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Galileo Galilei22 decades - 2
Michelangelo22 decades - 3
Raphael22 decades - 4
Giordano Bruno22 decades - 5
Titian22 decades - 6
Lucrezia Borgia22 decades - 7
Cesare Borgia22 decades - 8
Pope Gregory XIII22 decades - 9
Pope Sixtus V22 decades - 10
Giorgio Vasari22 decades - 11
Pope Paul V22 decades - 12
Pope Pius V8 decades - 13
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina16 decades - 14
Tintoretto22 decades - 15
Andrea Palladio22 decades - 16
Torquato Tasso22 decades - 17
Ludovico Ariosto22 decades - 18
Charles Borromeo22 decades - 19
Giuseppe Arcimboldo4 decades - 20
Pope Julius III22 decades - 21
Robert Bellarmine22 decades - 22
Pope Pius IV22 decades - 23
Aloysius Gonzaga22 decades - 24
Paolo Veronese22 decades - 25
Matteo Ricci22 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.