<P> The Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511--1574) first used the term rinascita retrospectively in his book The Lives of the Artists (published 1550). In the book Vasari attempted to define what he described as a break with the barbarities of gothic art: the arts (he held) had fallen into decay with the collapse of the Roman Empire and only the Tuscan artists, beginning with Cimabue (1240--1301) and Giotto (1267--1337) began to reverse this decline in the arts . Vasari saw antique art as central to the rebirth of Italian art . </P> <P> However, only in the 19th century did the French word Renaissance achieve popularity in describing the self - conscious cultural movement based on revival of Roman models that began in the late - 13th century . French historian Jules Michelet (1798--1874) defined "The Renaissance" in his 1855 work Histoire de France as an entire historical period, whereas previously it had been used in a more limited sense . For Michelet, the Renaissance was more a development in science than in art and culture . He asserted that it spanned the period from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo; that is, from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century . Moreover, Michelet distinguished between what he called, "the bizarre and monstrous" quality of the Middle Ages and the democratic values that he, as a vocal Republican, chose to see in its character . A French nationalist, Michelet also sought to claim the Renaissance as a French movement . </P> <P> The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818--1897) in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), by contrast, defined the Renaissance as the period between Giotto and Michelangelo in Italy, that is, the 14th to mid-16th centuries . He saw in the Renaissance the emergence of the modern spirit of individuality, which the Middle Ages had stifled . His book was widely read and became influential in the development of the modern interpretation of the Italian Renaissance . However, Buckhardt has been accused of setting forth a linear Whiggish view of history in seeing the Renaissance as the origin of the modern world . </P> <P> More recently, some historians have been much less keen to define the Renaissance as a historical age, or even as a coherent cultural movement . The historian Randolph Starn, of the University of California Berkeley, stated in 1998: </P>

Who is considered to be the grandfather of the renaissance