ABSTRACT
The great Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74) wrote of the ‘slumber of forgetfulness’ and predicted that ‘after the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past’. From a similar eminence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) specifically praised Giotto for restoring art to the light of antique reason. And humanists were obsessed with the revival of antique learning, indeed the reorientation of history.The word ‘rinascita’ itself followed later but was certainly current by the middle of the 16th century when the Florentine artist Giorgio Vasari wrote his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.
