Ancient Works Become Popular

(Francesco Petrach has been called the Father of Italian Renaissance Humanism)

The Italians began studying the early Roman and Greek works in the 1300s. They first knew very little about Ancient Greek and Roman writings. When they started studying the Crusades, however, they started trading with the Middle East and collected information from the Arabs. Arab scholars knew classic Greek and Roman works very well. An interesting fact is that when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, many Byzantine scholars left and moved to Venice or Florence.

One famous scholar was Petrarch. His real name was Francesco Petrarch. He was a poet and scholar who lived in the 1300s. He also wrote biographies on famous Romans and studied Roman writers, like Cicero. Petrarch encouraged Europeans to search for manuscripts in monasteries all over Europe. After a while, his searching paid off and new libraries were built to keep the manuscripts. The Vatican Library was the largest in Rome. The Italians studied more than just ancient books. They studied the old buildings, and books. All over Rome, you could see people rubbing dirt off a statue and cleaning off broken debris from a statue. The Italian artists eagerly studied the proportions. If they could find out how long a statue's arms was compared to its height, they would know why it looked so perfect.