ABSTRACT
"Problem" and "fact" are the names of the two great poles between which all human intellectual activity moves. The historical conception of the Renaissance has been greatly confused by the haphazard application of the name to a series of cultural tendencies which have little more in common than the fact that they were contemporary. There are, of course, many arguments against the assumption that the Italian Renaissance set in so early, especially when the arguments are based exclusively on its art history. It is in fact quite as easy to include Giotto and the Giottesques in the Middle Ages. Petrarch was the first great propagandist for the Classical Age. In most cases the pseudo-Classical Renaissance authors were less concerned to assimilate the ancient writers inwardly than to plagiarize a stereotyped stock of phrases in a rough schoolboy-like manner. The Italian Renaissance possesses a great similarity to the age of Pericles, which should really be called the age of the Sophists.
