trecento · noun — the fourteenth century AD; particularly, the style of Italian art associated with the 1300s.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Why “trecento” is a great word
The fourteenth century, particularly as a period of Italian artistic and cultural achievement. Borrowed from Italian trecento, a shortening of mille trecento ('one thousand three hundred'), used to denote the 1300s. Unlike "quattrocento" (which looks forward to the fifteenth century's Renaissance flowering) or "Middle Ages" (that lumbering span of half a millennium), trecento isolates a single century with the precision of a jeweler's lens. It is the frescoed silence of Giotto's Arena Chapel, the angular elegance of Duccio's gold backgrounds, and the skeletal reach of Arnolfo di Cambio's cathedral façades—a numbered age that contained, like a reliquary, the first tremors of a world waking from dogma into light.
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Etymology
Borrowed from Italian trecento.
noun
- The fourteenth century AD; particularly, the style of Italian art associated with the 1300se.g.“This seems simplistic, as […] his oeuvre is as obsessed with death as a museum full of trecento paintings.” — 2007 February 6, Martha Schwendener, “Believers and Doubters, Inspired by the Word”, in New York Times:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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