ABSTRACT
The consequences were enormous. Cimabue and Arnolfo, reaching maturity just about the time when Bonaventure’s ideas came to be spread and preached, turned their life into an artistic quest for beauty, extending to all three major arts, and incorporating the suggestions both of Nicola Pisano concerning the use of classical techniques and of Giunta Pisano in reaching new powers of dramatic emotivity. Their work was developed further, reaching a certain kind of perfection, in Florence by the narrative painting of Giotto and in Siena by the lyrical painting of Duccio. The same renewal took place in literature, also reaching perfection in the narrative poetry of Dante, an exact contemporary of Giotto, and the lyrical poetry of Petrarch. While Dante’s Divine Comedy is universally considered as the quintessential expression of the medieval world view, it is much less known that his work was much more influenced by the thought of Bonaventure than that of Aquinas, just as its Marian component is underplayed. Misunderstanding also surrounds the work of Petrarch. Often credited as being the first humanist, supposedly dreaming about a revival of pagan Antiquity, an opposition of Christianity and classical Antiquity had no place in his spirit, revealed particularly well in his Sonnets to the Virgin, though his work was indeed much influenced by the nostalgia of the exile. Thus, at least as far as art is concerned, the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries indeed reached a kind of Golden Age.
