← Fame through time1600-1699
The 17th century
Whose working lives fell in the 17th 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 17th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Caravaggio22 decades - 2
Gian Lorenzo Bernini13 decades - 3
Artemisia Gentileschi18 decades - 4
Pope Benedict XIII20 decades - 5
Claudio Monteverdi14 decades - 6
Antonio Stradivari15 decades - 7
Pope Clement XI22 decades - 8
Pope Innocent XI22 decades - 9
Pope Clement IX20 decades - 10
Pope Alexander VII22 decades - 11
Pope Innocent XIII0 decades - 12
Pope Innocent X3 decades - 13
Tommaso Campanella22 decades - 14
Evangelista Torricelli22 decades - 15
Arcangelo Corelli20 decades - 16
Mary of Modena21 decades - 17
Guido Reni22 decades - 18
Carlo Gesualdo20 decades - 19
Giovanni Domenico Cassininot measured- - 20
Alessandro Scarlatti21 decades - 21
Joseph of Cupertino22 decades - 22
Guercino22 decades - 23
Bartolomeo Cristofori0 decades - 24
Pope Innocent XII8 decades - 25
Pope Alexander VIII0 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.