ABSTRACT
Historical scholarship has increasingly tended to focus on local developments - especially Florentine - when searching for the roots of the Renaissance. In principle, this is of course a wholesome trend: From the vast panoramas of the Burckhardtian view we have narrowed our focus to the Florentine streets, with their petty politics and family rivalries, their social tensions, their tangle of limited self-interest and abiding art. It is the distinct merit of the present generation of historians to have pursued Renaissance scholarship to the level of detailed archival evidence, filling more and more gaps in our picture of the fourteenth and fifteenth century scene.2 Somewhere in that rapidly expanding mosaic - or, to use a more appropriate image, in that fascinating fresco that is being restored - we may yet hope to find important clues to the historical roots of the Renaissance phenomenon. Perhaps Renaissance culture - as life style, literary expression, or art - did indeed arise from the streets of Medieval Florence like Botticelli’s Venus from the sea...
