The superstars of this age are men like Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, Pico della Mirandola and Machiavelli, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Albrecht Dürer. Filelfo does not belong in the first rank of these figures, and maybe not even in the second. Yet there is something in his little-known story that sums up the nature of the times.
