link them, creating an intellectual and verbal rationale for what was happening in the visual arts, for example, and elsewhere.

From the last part of Cicero's De oratore, too, humanists drew the ideal of the orator as responsible citizen using his skills of forensic argument for the good of the state. This is equally important, and brings us back to the fact that humanists continued to have close connections with government, either through employment or through membership of the patrician class. So it is not surprising that an early manifestation of this scholarly activity was the propounding of fresh ideas about the ideal state and ideal civic conduct. Florence in particular saw a growth of 'civic ideology', closely allied to the interests of the ruling oligarchy, in the decades following the political crisis caused by the Visconti threat around 1400. This civicism, drawing on classical sources, was not new; it can be found in the writings of Remigio de' Girolami, Dominican and teacher of Dante, in the late thirteenth century, while in the fourteenth century Marsilius of Padua had elaborated ideas of republican or at least representative government that were surprisingly modern for their time. The novelty was perhaps the extent to which parallels with classical models were invoked, and the extent to which civic ideas were elaborated as a 'programme', including the exaltation of the active over the contemplative life, the definition of the desirable conduct of the private individual, the definition of the historical role of the republic, the idealization of the city. All this was a phase. Classical models could equally be produced to exalt the role of the prince--and were, especially later in the century.

Classical models also had a powerful influence on the writing of history. They transformed it into a more literary, prescriptive discipline but also into one more organized and more penetrating. It is also possible to detect a new sense of perspective on the past. Lorenzo Valla's final proof that the Donation of Constantine--in which the emperor had allegedly given temporal control of his dominions to the pope, a source of much controversy in the Middle Ages--was a forgery, was based on philological principles; that specific words and notions in the text simply could not have been used at the time when it

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