“Renaissance Italy”: the words evoke figures like Botticelli, Raphael, and Leonardo; Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Monteverdi. These are the one-named “giants” we have come to associate with the Renaissance, the era that produced some of history’s best-known works of art, literature, and music.

Maybe we think of Petrarch, the great scholar and poet who mined the human psyche in his love lyric, or Galileo, the astronomer who jolted the earth from its position at the center of the cosmos. The Renaissance was an epoch of seismic shifts in art and culture, science and religion, politics and philosophy—in how people thought about the world and their place in it.