Using Google’s new Ngram viewer to plot the popularity of the Renaissance artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello.

What surprised me is the immense popularity of Raphael for most of the past five hundred years, which only really declined a century ago between 1900 and 1920. Michelangelo get a spike in popularity in the late 1950s for some reason, whereas Leonardo is enjoys a steady-state of interest.

Having been interested in Leonardo for twenty years, I would have thought there would have been more spikiness to his line: the discovery of his lost Madrid Codices seems to have caused a spike in popularity and publishing in the 1970s, mirrored by the past decade’s spike due to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Of course, if I turn off the smoothing, the graph immediately gets a lot spikier. Here is the overview for the past five hundred years:

Leonardo clearly enjoyed the majority of his fame in the 18th Century

And here is the 20th Century:

Which shows that despite my intuition, Da Vinci’s popularity declined between 1960 and 1980, and there was no real spike in the past ten years.