Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, a collection of prose stories which may perhaps be regarded as the foundations of the modern novel, was a contemporary and a friend of Petrarch. Our own poet Chaucer, born a quarter of a century later, was indebted to him for some of the stories which he told in verse form. Boccaccio, even more than Petrarch, was a lover of the classical literature of Greece, of the Iliad and the Odyssey. [Sidenote: The Renaissance] In this revival of a love for the ancient literature, and in the works in verse and prose which these great artists created, we cannot trace that they were influenced by the troubadours and trouvères of more than a century earlier. They went back further, to the best models of antiquity. Therefore we have to regard these wonderful Italians as the true originators of that new interest in learning and in all the arts which received the name of the Renaissance, or new birth. For its full growth and development it had to wait until the dawn of the sixteenth century. By that time the art of printing had been invented. Learning in all its branches had received a great impetus at all the universities in every country in Europe. The first English printing press was set up by Caxton, who brought it from Flanders in 1476. Though the new birth of literature was thus delayed, some of the greatest of the Italian painters {230} were hard at work during the fifteenth century. Cimabue, indeed, who may be said to have been the first of the real Italian painters, since all before him had followed the stiff Byzantine style, dates back to the latter half of the thirteenth. Ghirlandajo, his pupil, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, the great Venetian painter, and many more of great fame, were at work before the fifteenth century closed.