Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) spent long hours searching for classical Latin manuscripts in dusty monastery libraries and wandering around the many ruins of the Roman Empire remaining in Italy. He became obsessed with the classical past and felt that the writers and artists of ancient Rome had reached a level of perfection in their work that had not since been duplicated. Petrarch believed that the recovery of classical texts would bring a new golden age of intellectual achievement, an idea that many others came to share.

Petrarch clearly thought he was witnessing the dawning of a new era in which writers and artists would recapture the glory of the Roman Republic. Around 1350, he proposed a new kind of education in which young men would study the works of ancient Roman authors, using them as models of how to write clearly, argue effectively, and speak persuasively. The study of Latin classics became known as the studia humanitates (STOO-dee-uh oo-mahn-ee-TAH-tayz), usually translated as “liberal studies” or the “liberal arts.” People who advocated it were known as humanists and their program as humanism. Humanism was the main intellectual component of the Renaissance. Like all programs of study, humanism contained an implicit philosophy: that human nature and achievements, evident in the classics, were worthy of contemplation.

In the fifteenth century, Florentine humanists became increasingly interested in Greek philosophy as well as Roman literature, especially in the ideas of Plato. Under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), the scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) began to lecture to an informal group of Florence’s cultural elite. Ficino regarded Plato as a divinely inspired precursor to Christ. He translated Plato’s dialogues into Latin and wrote commentaries attempting to synthesize Christian and Platonic teachings. Plato’s emphasis on the spiritual and eternal over the material and transient fit well with Christian teachings about the immortality of the soul. The Platonic idea that the highest form of love was spiritual desire for pure, perfect beauty uncorrupted by bodily desires could easily be interpreted as Christian desire for the perfection of God. For Ficino and his most gifted student, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), both Christian and classical texts taught that the universe was a hierarchy of beings from God down through spiritual beings to material beings, with humanity, right in the middle, as the crucial link that possessed both material and spiritual natures.

Humanity’s divinely bestowed nature meant there were no limits to what people could accomplish. Families, religious brotherhoods, neighborhoods, workers’ organizations, and other groups continued to have meaning in peoples’ lives, but Renaissance thinkers increasingly viewed these groups as springboards to far greater individual achievement. They were especially interested in individuals who had risen above their background to become brilliant, powerful, or unique. (See “Individuals in Society: Leonardo da Vinci.”) Such individuals had the admirable quality of virtù (vihr-TOO), which is not virtue in the sense of moral goodness but instead is their ability to shape the world around them according to their will.