art historians the first Renaissance painter, by long-established convention, is Giotto (Giotto di Bondone,
ca. 1266–ca. 1337), a Florentine whose primary medium was the church fresco, or wall painting. In
literature, it is Dante and Boccaccio, both Florentines, who for historians mark the great Renaissance
divide.
The concept of the Renaissance in general historiography centers on three main considerations:
secularism, humanism (sometimes conflated as “secular humanism”), and the rebirth—in French,
renaissance—of interest in the art and philosophy of pre-Christian antiquity and its adoption as a
“classical” model. All three concepts depend on the prior (and implicitly repudiated) notion of a
medieval world that was sacred and inhuman in its outlook and shut off from the classical past.
(“Essential” concepts can only originate as comparative ones: if we did not know “hot” we would not
know “cold.”) Applying them to the fourteenth-century Florentines, moreover, is done in hindsight, a
hindsight that casts them as anticipators of trends that reached fruition later. (“Anticipations,” being
“progressive,” are value-enhancers.)
Even though Giotto’s output is almost entirely sacred in its subject matter and intent, he is regarded as
an incipient secularizer because his figures, to the modern eye (and even to his contemporaries), have
seemed more realistic—more “of this world”—than those of his predecessors. (Boccaccio: “he painted
anything in Nature, and painted them so like that they seemed not so much likenesses as the things
themselves.”^6 ) That greater realism, moreover, can be attributed to Giotto’s adoption as a model for
emulation of the artistic remains of ancient Roman culture in preference to the more immediate legacy of
Christian (Byzantine) art. (Boccaccio: “He brought back to light that art which for many centuries had lain
buried under errors.”) Dante’s status as a proto-Renaissance figure depends above all on his being the
first great Italian poet to use the vernacular, that is, a living language of this world, even as he adopted a
pre-Christian classical poet, Virgil (who actually figures in Dante’s Divine Comedy as the author’s guide)
as his model for emulation. And Dante is a protohumanist despite his divine (that is, inhuman) subject
matter because of his passion for introspection, for analyzing and reporting his own physical and
emotional reactions to the visions and events that he portrayed. Putting himself so conspicuously into the
picture meant putting a man there, which ultimately meant putting Man there. Or so the periodizing
narrative insists. Boccaccio’s status as a proto-Renaissance figure is much easier to account for, given his
realistic subject matter, his prose medium, and his irreverent style. Historians differ as to Dante’s position
with respect to the medieval/Renaissance divide. All agree on Boccaccio’s place. But Dante and
Boccaccio were contemporaries. Could they then belong to different periods?
It is not at all difficult to relate the proto-“Renaissance” indicators to the music of the trecento. Its
secularism is self-evident; with the possible (and, for periodization, possibly troublesome) exception of
the troubadours, on whose legacy the trecento poets and musicians so zealously built, no artists were ever
so fully preoccupied with the inventory, and the pleasures, of this world. Its intimate connection with the
rise of “the vulgar eloquence,” to use Dante’s term, is likewise a demonstrable fact. The special
relevance of Landini, the foremost exponent of “ballata-culture,” to Boccaccio’s world could hardly be
more conspicuous.
Landini’s output can be related just as effectively as Dante’s or Boccaccio’s to what the literary
historian Leo Spitzer called the shift from the poetic to the empirical “I”—from the poet as impersonal
observer to (in Michael Long’s words) “the poet as individual engaged in self-analysis.”^7 This shift came
about in response to the tastes of the Florentine public—an audience of self-made men—and can easily be
viewed as a shift from the God-centered worldview of “The Middle Ages” to the Man-centered view of
“The Renaissance.”
Since the view of trecento music as a harbinger of the Renaissance turns it into a “progressive”
repertory, hence extra-valuable for teleological history, the trecentoas-Renaissance view has won many