Sacred and Profane in the Quattrocento

On the basis of a semantic and lexicographic (N. Perotti, Cornu copiae ; L. Valla, Elegantie) study of the words sacer and profanus, it is showed that in the latin poetry and in the thought of the Quattrocento, the sacred can pass to the (latin) linguage, to the poetry, to a kind of paganism and principally to a laicization of the sacred (sacralisation of the body and of the man himself) which announces our modern time.