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I'm thinking that the thematic words point to a famous Renaissance Italian (I could be wrong) but I cannot see how to complete the blanks in the grid.

The instructions say we should fill each with another feature of the relevant clue. Each what? Cell I assume but it could be word. And how can we fill them with features and not letters?

Feel free to hint as heavily as you like!

Hi orson,
I assume you have the same number of group A extra letters as empty spaces.
If on a separate sheet of paper you use these to make real words "filling" the spaces starting with the unusual "prefixes" you'll quickly come down to few possibilities. If you then read the rows top to bottom you'll get the "creator" followed by the creation. Googling quickly alerts you to an item in the creation that has drawn a lot of speculation (appropriately shaped).
This should get you to the endgame but if not post again and I'll be more specific should you wish.
A great puzzle imho.

orson - I agree with ginge re the quality of the puzzle but ifor's preambles are always too cryptically worded for my liking. I had a pretty good idea of the endgame long before I could justify it via the preamble and the title (there must be many much more helpful titles for this theme than the one ifor hit on - which, I think, only alludes to the creator's monogram).
Your second paragraph shows that you're on the right track - 'features not letters' - take a look at the range of the clues in question.

You probably know by now he was not Italian.

Thanks, ginge and drxx. I did try googling some of the thematic words in various combinations but nothing came up that covered them all. But if I googled one of them with the Italian, it seems he had some involvement. I'll give it more thought.

Please explain the wordplay of 36a

Doh! I understand 36a now.

I seem to be the only person who hasn't sailed through this. One problem is that I only have 15 of the extra letters and I am not entirely confident they are correct. I have:

A, C, D, E, E, G, I, I, L, L, N, O, R, R, U

Then to find words to complete the below:

OUT????
H????OP
????SON

The middle one could be HILLTOP if I had a T. And I thought of OUTRODE and COUGARS but there's never anything left for the fourth one. Am I getting warm? Otherwise I'm stumped!

And I missed out C????S !

Hi orson, of the 15 letters you've shown I agree with 14 but no G plus another E and M.
This should allow you to complete the words thus allowing you to get to the endgame as I mentioned earlier. This should then allow you to backtrack and source the correct letters otherwise I can give the clues where the extra letters come from if you wish.
Hope this helps.