Prominent figures of the Renaissance included philosopher and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, known for the political treatise The Prince; Francis Bacon, a statesman and philosopher considered the master of the English tongue; the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who developed the theory that the solar system was centred on the Sun; the poets Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, who laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance; William Shakespeare, considered the greatest dramatist of all time; astronomer and mathematician Galileo, who helped disprove much of the medieval thinking in science; and the explorers Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernán Cortés.