ideals of justice and beauty.5 Renaissance humanists looked back on this ancient civilisation of Greece and Rome as the golden age of human culture, the perfect expression of the human spirit and its highest values; this golden age, they believed, must be reborn in the present if humankind was to fulfil its true potential. There was an awakening of interest in humanity itself and the human world, a fresh and excited optimism about the possibilities of human achievement in art, music, literature,
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