La antigüedad como modelo: tradición clásica en <i>generaciones</i> y <i>semblanzas</i> del humanista Fernán Pérez de Guzmán

Abstract

The Greco-Roman historiography converts biography into a genre whose subject: the life and deeds of an exemplary personage, was inseparable from the form and the requirements of rhetoric. Biography, while being backed by the prestige of classical antiquity and its tradition, experienced in Renaissance a major boost due to its double moralizing and propagandistic character in a historical context in which aristocrats and monarchs fought for preeminence with weapons and letters. In this paper we study the influences of ancient biography as well as the use and function of the motifs from the classical world in Fernán Pérez de Guzman’s Generaciones y semblanzas, one of the most important writers in the first Spanish humanism, author who has been considered a model of spontaneity and originality