Suetonius, Nepos (the 'viri illustres'),
and Plutarch,-so far as he was known and translated; for sketches of
literary history, the lives of the grammarians, rhetoricians, and
poets, known to us as the 'Appendices' to Suetonius, seem to have
served as patterns, as well as the widely-read life of Virgil by
Donatus.
It has already been mentioned that biographical collections --lives of
famous men and famous women--began to appear in the fourteenth century.
Where they do not describe contemporaries, they are naturally dependent
on earlier narratives. The first great original effort is the life of
Dante by Boccaccio. Lightly and rhetorically written, and full, as it
is, of arbitrary fancies, this work nevertheless gives us a lively
sense of the extraordinary features in Dante's nature. Then follow, at
the end of the fourteenth century, the 'vite' of illustrious
Florentines, by Filippo Villani. They are men of every calling: poets,
jurists, physicians, scholars, artists, statesmen, and soldiers, some
of them then still living. Florence is here treated like a gifted
family, in which all the members are noticed in whom the spirit of the
house expresses itself vigorously. The descriptions are brief, but show
a remarkable eye for what is characteristic, and are noteworthy for
including the inward and outward physiognomy in the same sketch.
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