<P> Petrarch encouraged the study of the Latin classics and carried his copy of Homer about, at a loss to find someone to teach him to read Greek . An essential step in the humanist education being propounded by scholars like Pico della Mirandola was the hunting down of lost or forgotten manuscripts that were known only by reputation . These endeavors were greatly aided by the wealth of Italian patricians, merchant - princes and despots, who would spend substantial sums building libraries . Discovering the past had become fashionable and it was a passionate affair pervading the upper reaches of society . I go, said Cyriac of Ancona, I go to awake the dead . As the Greek works were acquired, manuscripts found, libraries and museums formed, the age of the printing press was dawning . The works of Antiquity were translated from Greek and Latin into the contemporary modern languages throughout Europe, finding a receptive middle - class audience, which might be, like Shakespeare, "with little Latin and less Greek". </P> <P> While concern for philosophy, art and literature all increased greatly in the Renaissance the period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness . The reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe . Humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics . At the same time philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion . </P> <P> According to some recent scholarship, the' father of modern science' is Leonardo da Vinci whose experiments and clear scientific method earn him this title, Italian universities such as Padua, Bologna and Pisa were scientific centres of renown and with many northern European students, the science of the Renaissance moved to Northern Europe and flourished there, with such figures as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Descartes . Galileo, a contemporary of Bacon and Descartes, made an immense contribution to scientific thought and experimentation, paving the way for the scientific revolution that later flourished in Northern Europe . Bodies were also stolen from gallows and examined by many like Vesalius, a professor of anatomy . This allowed them to create accurate skeleton models and correct previously believed theories . For example, many thought that the human jawbone was made up of two bones, as they had seen this on animals . However through examining human corpses they were able to understand that humans actually have only one . </P> <P> In painting, the false dawn of Giotto's Trecento realism, his fully three - dimensional figures occupying a rational space, and his humanist interest in expressing the individual personality rather than the iconic images, was followed by a retreat into conservative late Gothic conventions . </P>

Which group in renaissance italy emerged as art patrons