Published 01-11-2005
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Abstract
Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406) was the most sensible inheritor of Petrarch's doctrine in Florence. An example for this is the continuity from Petrarch's Vires illustres to Salutati's Famosi cives, that is, to illustrate paintings depicting famous people with verses. Filippo Scolari (1369-1426), better known as Pippo Spano or Ozorai Pipó, spent a major part of his life in Hungary. The paper considers an unsigned official state letter sent to Scolari in 1405 from Florence to have been written by Salutati. It signals the first step towards the Scolarian myth as a devoted statesman, eventually immortalized by Andrea del Castagno in his frescos of Florentine figures. Many other of Salutati's state letters offer similarly interesting material to study the onset of humanism in Europe and the relationship between Florence and the Hungarian Kingdom.