 Petrarch is popularly defined as the first humanist, however, figures such as Albertino Mussato, and his teacher Lovato Lovati are argued by many scholars to have preceded Petrarchan humanism in their use of classical works.Humanism, or "pre-humanism", began in Padua in the 1260s with Lovati modeling poems based on Ovid and Horace, followed by his pupil, Mussato, classicizing prose and modeling his play, "Ecerinis", after the Senecan tragedy.The interest in classical works by the Northern Italians, is argued by Nicholas Mann to originate in the study of Roman Law, the Corpus Juris Civilis.