Leonardo Bruni

The dates Bruni used to define the periods are not exactly what modern historians use today, but he laid the conceptual groundwork for a tripartite division of history.

Bruni was the pupil of political and cultural leader Coluccio Salutati, whom he succeeded as Chancellor of Florence, and under whose tutelage he developed his ideation of civic humanism.

[2] The foundation of Bruni's conception can be found with Petrarch, who distinguished the classical period from later cultural decline, or tenebrae (literally "darkness").

[4] It was Bruni who used the phrase studia humanitatis, meaning the study of human endeavors, as distinct from those of theology and metaphysics, the source of the term humanists.

Bruni's translations of Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the pseudo-Aristotelean Economics, were widely distributed in manuscript and in print.