Leonardo Bruni 1370 – 1444

Leonardo Bruni was an Italian Renaissance humanist, historian, and statesman, chancellor of the Florentine Republic for two long terms in the early fifteenth century and one of the foremost civic humanists of his age. He produced elegant Latin translations of Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, and Demosthenes that reopened Greek philosophy and history to the Latin West, and his History of the Florentine People applied the methods of classical historiography to modern republican history. His Panegyric of the City of Florence, Life of Petrarch, and Life of Dante shaped the Renaissance vision of culture as a humane and civic discipline.