17th&18th c.
Maître François was a French illustrator who worked in Paris in the 1460s-1480s.
The identity of Maître François as an artist is first mentioned in a letter written by Robert Gauguin in 1473. Most of the prestigious commissions from the court and leading ecclesiastical figures of the time were carried out in François' studio. In Paris in the second half of the fifteenth century, one can trace the predominant style of illumination by the works of Master Jean Rolin, Maître François, and Master Jacques de Besançon. Bibliophiles close to the royal court encouraged the work of miniaturists through private commissions. In particular, Jacques d'Armagnac owned six manuscripts of Maitre Francois and his entourage.
Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium was very popular in the 15th century, where the author retells the fates and downfalls of famous personalities from the Bible, antiquity and medieval history, ending with Boccaccio's own contemporaries in 14th-century Florence. For a long time this book was even more famous and successful than Boccaccio's Decameron. The text was translated into French in 1409 for Jean, Duke de Berry, by his secretary Laurent Premieffe. And the illustrations for the book were later created in the workshop of the then respected Maître François.
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems as dubious.
Virgil's work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Virgil appears as the author's guide through Hell and Purgatory.
Virgil has been traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. His Aeneid is also considered a national epic of ancient Rome, a title held since composition.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics. He is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC.
His influence on the Latin language was immense. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime, and it has been said that subsequent prose was either a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but in European languages up to the 19th century. Cicero introduced into Latin the arguments of the chief schools of Hellenistic philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary with neologisms such as evidentia, humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia, distinguishing himself as a translator and philosopher.
