This seemingly sudden efflorescence of genius had its origin, as has been intimated, in a gradual development, which now for the first time produced tangible results. If, on the one hand, it may be urged that these great men were spontaneously creative, it must not be forgotten that their genius was nurtured in a bed of classicism. Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio were all classical scholars, the last named being a student of Greek as well as of Latin. All of them harked back to the great Roman writers as their models of style, and founded their culture on a study of ancient literature. But each of them in turn broke away spontaneously from these ancient models when he came to his really creative efforts, and each put forth in the vernacular the works that were destined to give him perpetuity of fame. In their own day, to be sure, their Latin works were regarded as having great importance. Boccaccio never dreamed of placing his Italian writings on a par with his learned treatises on mythology, geography, and biography; and we are assured that for two centuries his name was famous all over Europe on account of these scientific works, while the _Decameron_ was hardly known north of the Alps. “Petrarch himself,” says Burckhardt,[c] “trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tells us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the memory of man.” Yet these would-be forgotten poems became a standard of taste for all the world, and have kept their position in the estimate of critics of each succeeding generation. This sudden outburst of creative genius of a high order in Italy, while the rest of the western world was bound by uncreative traditions, has been variously explained. Burckhardt finds the explanation in circumstances that led, in Italy earlier than elsewhere, to the emancipation of the individual.[a]