Allegri Dante (1265- 132 1) was a pioneer of the Italian Renaissance, and Engels called him "the last poet in the middle ages and the first poet in the new era".
His masterpiece The Divine Comedy marked the beginning of the Italian Renaissance.
Dante was born in a declining aristocratic family in Florence, received a good education, and was familiar with ancient Greek and Roman works since childhood. When he was young, he studied in Padua, Bologna and Paris, and made in-depth research on art, music, poetry, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, theology, astronomy, history and geography, which laid a solid foundation for his literary creation. 1300 was elected consul of Florence. 1302 lost in the political struggle and was exiled. After that, he lived in exile for nearly 20 years and finally died in Lavaine.
Dante wrote many academic works and poems in his life, among which the famous ones are "New Life" and "Divine Comedy". Fresh is the first collection of poems and songs written by Dante in memory of his girlfriend Bedric on1291-1292, including 3 1 lyric short poems. With his love for Bedric as the theme, these short poems express the poet's pursuit of lovers and longing for beautiful love. Although they have a strong mystery, they reflect the strong desire of the civil class to get rid of asceticism. This is the first work in the history of European literature to reveal the author's secret thoughts and feelings to readers, which has the tendency of humanism and realism. Divine Comedy is an immortal poem written by Dante during his exile. It consists of 100 songs, including hell, purgatory and heaven. The main plot is to describe the poet's sleepwalking in hell, purgatory and heaven under the guidance of Virgil and Bedric. The author described the social reality, politics, ideology and culture at that time by metaphor and symbol, profoundly exposed the dark corruption of the church and the evil of papal rule, and criticized the cruelty and tyranny of the feudal ruling class and the disaster brought by the feudal separatist regime. At the same time, it also severely condemns some people's greed, selfishness, usury and pursuit of money. The author also puts forward the political proposition that separation of church and state and autocratic monarchy should unify Italy, people should fully enjoy real life and pursue rationality, freedom and knowledge with humanistic tendency. Therefore, The Divine Comedy is a great poem with profound social significance and strong political inclination. Divine Comedy was written in Tuscany dialect, which initiated the writing of national languages.
Dante is an inter-generational poet, and his thoughts have two obvious tendencies, the old and the new. Therefore, The Divine Comedy not only has the bud of humanistic thought, but also does not completely get rid of the shackles of medieval religious views. On the one hand, it praises real life, and at the same time advocates the concept of immortality and afterlife; While attacking the evils of the Pope and the church, they did not completely deny the Pope and the church. Criticize asceticism, send martyrs to hell and so on.
Francesco Petrarca (1304— 1374) is the founder of humanism and is known as the "father of humanism". He was born into a noble family in Florence. When he was a child, he and his father moved to avignon. Later, he served as the papal secretary for a long time at the Vatican in avignon and witnessed the darkness and corruption of the church. He read a lot of classic works, roamed many European countries and gradually formed a humanistic world view. He was the first to call for the revival of classical culture and put forward the idea that "humanism" opposed to "theology", so he was the first humanist scholar. In the early 1940s, he wrote a long narrative epic "Africa" and won the title of "Poet Laureate". In the early 1950s, he was invited to give a lecture at the University of Florence, and has lived in Italy all the time.
The main achievement of Petrarch's life is to write many beautiful poems. This masterpiece is a collection of lyric poems and songs. The collection of songs is written in Italian, with a total of 366 lyric poems, most of which are love poems, praising the poet's love for his girlfriend Laura. Petrarch's love poems break through the fetters of asceticism, break through the implied meaning and mysterious symbols in medieval poems, directly describe love, praise life, praise nature, portray beautiful characters, have fresh styles and strong artistic appeal. There are also political satires and patriotic poems in the song, which attack the Catholic Church and the Holy See and express patriotic thoughts of hating feudal separatism and longing for the peaceful reunification of Italy. Petrarch's lyric poetry created sonnets, an important poetic style in European poetry, paving the way for the development of European lyric poetry, and was honored as a "poet saint" by later generations.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is the founder of Italian national literature. He was born into a merchant family in Florence. When he was a teenager, he did business with his father and traveled all over France and Italy. Later, I went to the University of Naples to study law and literature and started literary creation. Since 1350, he has served in the Florence government and has been sent to Italian States and France many times. In his later years, he taught The Divine Comedy at the University of Florence and wrote Dante's first academic work, The Biography of Dante.
Boccaccio wrote many excellent poems and novels, among which decameron, a collection of short stories, was his masterpiece. This book, written in Tuscan dialect, describes that 10 young men and women came to a country villa to escape the plague during the epidemic in Florence in 348. In order to kill time, each of them tells a story in turn every day, 10 * * * tells 100 stories. These stories are based on a wide range of materials, including folklore, historical events, court rumors and real people. Boccaccio processed these materials and injected humanistic thoughts into them, making them masterpieces reflecting the real life in Italy. Decameron first pointed the finger at the Vatican and the Catholic Church, boldly exposed the corruption and greed of the church, attacked the hypocrisy and ugliness of priests, and mercilessly exposed and attacked the ignorance and cruelty of the ruling class. The author enthusiastically praised the wit and courage of the citizens and the lower classes, praised the love of young men and women, praised real life, and affirmed life, human value and human dignity. Decameron describes the secular life completely, so it is called Renqu. It is the first masterpiece of realistic literature in the history of European literature, which has had a great influence on European realistic literature in later generations, and also created a genre precedent for modern European short stories. There are also many negative and unhealthy factors in decameron, such as praising bourgeois individualism, exaggerating lust, and some descriptions are vulgar.