Florence

On 23 May 1498, Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burned in Florence. His rise as a democratic theocrat and his fall under a corrupt pope expose the dark populist currents of the Renaissance and the birth of modern realpolitik.

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.