ABSTRACT
Like other literary forms, autobiography has its history. A full history necessarily includes autobiographical documents that cannot properly count as autobiographies, and the purpose is only to indicate the qualities of the outstanding examples of autobiography in order to delineate its possibilities and its full emergence. In reviewing the history of the autobiography, however, one is forced to admit what a startling change came over men's thought in this period with regard to themselves. Ghiberti's, the first autobiography of an artist, speaks first of the history of art in Italy, then very sparsely of his own life in terms of his works, and finally of his theory of art. In Cellini and Cardano has two extremes of autobiography: Cellini presents himself, Cardano analyses himself. The pietistic autobiographers to the slightest shades of religious feeling, illustrate a trend to give a new importance to the details of personal life, and there is evidence of the same trend in the secular autobiography.
