Abstract

From the first beginnings of the printing press, humanist writers showed active interest in the new technology and saw it as a means to disseminate the texts of ancient and modern literature and learning. It was in this context that proponents of the Petrarchan philosophy of history first use the term “Middle Ages”. In Nuremberg, Hartmann Schedel employed advanced printing technology to produce a universal history which is aware of standing on the threshold between the Middle Ages and a new dispensation, and which acknowledges printing as a driver of a humanist cultural dynamic. Schedel's chronicle has direct links with Albrecht Dürer's exploitation of the printing press in his graphic art forms. It is Dürer who coins the first term, in either Latin or a vernacular, for the idea of a Renaissance aesthetic. For his contemporaries, it was specifically his achievement as printmaker which earned him the title of modern Apelles.

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