Renaissance

LATINI, BRUNETTO To LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN (Renaissance)

LATINI, BRUNETTO (ca. 1220-1294). Florentine notary, poet, and political leader. He is best known from his appearance in Canto 15 of Dante’s Inferno as one of those punished for sodomy. Despite his condemnation to eternal punishment, Dante treats him with great respect as an admired master. His principal literary work, written in French rather than […]

LILY, WILLIAM To LUTHER, MARTIN (Renaissance)

LILY, WILLIAM (ca. 1468-1522). English humanist and teacher, first grand master of the reorganized St. Paul’s school founded by John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s cathedral. After graduation from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1486, Lily went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, stopped on Rhodes to study Greek, and then spent several years perfecting his skills as […]

LYLY, JOHN To MANNERISM (Renaissance)

LYLY, JOHN (ca. 1553-1606). English dramatist and author of a prose romance, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), which was his first and most influential published work. This moralizing and allegorical tale was important for its elaborate and highly artificial prose style, which dominated the English prose literature of his time. The book was immensely […]

MANTEGNA, ANDREA To MAXIMILIAN I (Renaissance)

MANTEGNA, ANDREA (1431-1506). North Italian painter, trained at Padua but also influenced by Florentine artists, especially the sculptor Donatello, who worked in Padua while Mantegna was an apprentice, and by the treatise Della pittura by Leon Battista Alberti, who provided the earliest clear description of the principles of vanishing-point perspective. Mantegna must also have closely […]

MELANCHTHON, PHILIPP To MILTON, JOHN (Renaissance)

MELANCHTHON, PHILIPP (1497-1560). German humanist, Reformation leader, and educational reformer. He was born at Bretten in the Rhenish Palatinate. His original German name was Schwarzerd, hellenized to create his classical surname. He was the great-nephew of the famous humanist Johann Reuchlin, who closely supervised his education and prepared him for a scholarly career. A precocious […]

MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE To MUTIANUS RUFUS (Renaissance)

MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE (1533-1592). French moral philosopher and author, commonly regarded as the inventor of the personal essay as a literary genre. His father was a wealthy lawyer who had risen to the minor nobility. The father was himself attracted to classical and humanistic learning but was not very skilled in Latin. He devised a […]

NANNI DI BANCO To NICHOLAS OF CUSA (Renaissance)

NANNI DI BANCO (ca. 1384-1421). Florentine sculptor of the early 15 th century. He was contemporary with the pioneering Renaissance sculptor Donatello but showed a strong classicizing tendency that is much more closely linked to the Gothic sculpture of the 13 th and 14th century than to the new style that was beginning to emerge. […]

NOGAROLA, ISOTTA To PAPAL STATES (Renaissance)

NOGAROLA, ISOTTA (1418-1488). One of the earliest female humanists. The daughters of a noble family of Verona, she and her sister Ginevra were given a humanistic education on orders of their widowed mother. In their youth, both sisters won praise from northern Italian humanists associated with the famous teacher Guarino Guarini, himself a native of […]

PARACELSUS To PETRARCH (Renaissance)

PARACELSUS (1493-1541). Swiss-born physician, known for his rejection of the practices, theories, and authorities of traditional academic medicine. Born at Einsiedeln, the son of a physician, he may never have regularly attended any university or received a medical doctorate, but both his reputation among contemporaries and his many surviving writings show that he had a […]

PETRARCHISM To PIRCKHEIMER, WILLIBALD (Renaissance)

PETRARCHISM A style of lyric poetry modelled on the poems of Petrarch and his Italian disciples, particularly on the love poetry of his Canzoniere / Book of Songs. Influenced by the late medieval Italian poetry of Dante and the dolce stil nuovo that dominated early Italian lyric, it was consciously embraced by major poets of […]

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