← 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
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina16 decades - 2
Thomas Tallis9 decades - 3
William Byrd22 decades - 4
John Dowland13 decades - 5
Tomás Luis de Victoria14 decades - 6
Tansen7 decades - 7Giovanni Gabrieli17 decades
- 8
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck0 decades - 9
Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich of Russianot measured- - 10
Vincenzo Galilei22 decades - 11
Jacopo Peri22 decades - 12
Giulio Caccini22 decades - 13
Orlande de Lassus3 decades - 14
Thomas Morley22 decades - 15
Anacaona12 decades - 16
David Rizzio11 decades - 17
Purandara Dasa0 decades - 18Clément Janequin10 decades
- 19
Hans Leo Hassler12 decades - 20
John Taverner3 decades - 21
John Bull22 decades - 22
Barbara Blomberg13 decades - 23
Adrian Willaert0 decades - 24
Margaret Roper14 decades - 25
Hayyim ben Joseph Vital22 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.