CHAPTER VI

THE VANGUARD OF THE RENAISSANCE (_ca._ 1250-1400 A.D.) 178

European culture in general, 181. The universities and nascent scholarship, 183. Latin and the vernacular, 184. The master poet, and his theme, 186. Dante the man, 187. Lesser contemporaries of Dante, 190. Petrarch, 191. Early Italian prose, 194. Boccaccio, 198. Lesser contemporaries of Petrarch and Boccaccio, 202. Art in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, 203. The Tuscan school of painters, 207. Ruskin’s estimate of Giotto’s tower, 209.