Who is the representative of the Italian Renaissance?

It is generally believed that the first representative is Dante. His works criticized and exposed the corruption and stupidity of medieval religious rule in an implicit way for the first time, and were written in local dialect instead of Latin, the official literary language of medieval Europe.

Another representative figure is Petrarch, who believes that ancient Greece and Rome were the most perfect times of human nature, and it was against nature to suppress human nature in the Middle Ages. Although he studied Latin literature deeply and extensively, he wrote a large number of lyric poems in the form of sonnets in Italian dialect, which were warmly welcomed by the rulers of various cities and countries.

Thought of works

Renaissance works embody humanism: advocating individual liberation and opposing asceticism and religious views in the Middle Ages; Advocate scientific culture, oppose obscurantism, and get rid of the shackles of the church on people's thoughts; Affirm human rights, oppose theocracy, and abandon all authority and traditional dogma as the basis of theology and scholasticism.

Supporting centralization and opposing feudal separatism are the main ideas of humanism. Among them, the representative works are Dante's Divine Comedy, Boccaccio's decameron, Petrarch's Song, Machiavelli's The Prince, and rabelais's Biography of the Giant.

Renaissance art praised the beauty of the human body, claiming that the proportion of the human body is the most harmonious in the world, and applied it to architecture. Although a series of paintings and sculptures still focus on religious stories, they all show the scenes of ordinary people and pull God to the ground.

Humanists began to study the Bible by studying classical literature and translated it into the national language, which led to the rise of the Reformation.

Humanism praises the secular and despises the heaven, flaunts rationality rather than the revelation of God, affirms that "man" is the creator and enjoyer of secular life, requires literature and art to express people's thoughts and feelings, scientifically seeks for the welfare of people, educates and develops people's personality, and requires people's thoughts, feelings and wisdom to be liberated from the shackles of theology. Advocating individual freedom has played a great role in historical development.