The Italian Language

Prose writers of this period in Florence are Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and in Naples Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) and Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457/8-1530).

Under Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), himself a poet, all arts flourished. A new conception of life was formed, a conception which involved a deeply-felt love for an idealised reality, faintly tinged by melancholy born of the awareness of the transience of life, youth and beauty.

Politan’s (Angelo Ambrogini) (1454-1494) verse expresses the need to escape everyday life, seeking refuge in an ideal world of beauty and harmony. His verse has an elevated literary tone and uses Classical forms and images. His most famous poem is the Stanze per la Giostra, dedicated to Giuliano de' Medici.

Another author of XV century Italian chivalric literature was Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano (1434-1494). He too subverted traditional models: in his unfinished Orlando innamorato he brings the force of love into the Carolingian world, using it as the starting point for his stories. The courtly tradition is divested of its original religious and moral content, reflecting instead the values and ideals of XV century society.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) were both geniuses whose wide interests embodied the ideal of the Renaissance. More than any other, Leonardo is the model of the Renaissance man: versatile and curious. He was a painter, inventor, architect, musician, sculptor, philosopher, mathematician, scientist and writer. Alberti too had a manifold talent: architect, mathematician and physicist, as well as author of treatises on sculpture and architecture, written in both the vernacular and Latin.