"Anthropocentricity and individualism. . . . Humanism and Italian art were similar in giving paramount attention to human experience, both in its everyday immediacy and in its positive or negative extremes. . . . The human-centredness of Renaissance art, moreover, was not just a generalized endorsement of earthly experience. Like the humanists, Italian artists stressed the autonomy and dignity of the individual.""Humanism,"Encyclopædia Britannica.
"The leading intellectual trait of the era was the recovery, to a certain degree, of the secular and humane philosophy of Greece and Rome. Another humanist trend which cannot be ignored was the rebirth of individualism, which, developed by Greece and Rome to a remarkable degree, had been suppressed by the rise of a caste system in the later Roman Empire, by the Church and by feudalism in the Middle Ages." "The history guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History."
