Leonardo Bruni, also known as Leonardo Aretino (1370-1444), was an Italian humanist, initiate, historian and statesman, often recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. He has been called the first modern historian and was the earliest person to write using the three-period view of history: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern. The dates Bruni used to define the periods are not exactly what modern historians use today, but he laid the conceptual groundwork for a tripartite division of history.

The Life of Dante by Leonardo Bruni (1436) is one of the earliest biographies of the great Florentine writer, poet and initiate, father of the Italian language, Dante Alighieri. Since the Proemio, it is proposed as a real correction of the biography of Dante traced by Giovanni Boccaccio in the Trattatello in laude di Dante. It is one of the most important historical documents in Italian literary history.