The development of the contrapposto pose in Renaissance art depends, as is well known, on ancient discussions of the rhetorical figure of antithesis. Such philological associations, however, have drawn attention to the pose as a motif of style, notable only for its gracefulness of form. This essay considers how the turning pose in Raphael's work, rather than merely referring to the rhetorical figure of antithesis, evokes the thematic and structural significance of the trope. The discussion focuses on the turning female in his Transfiguration as a figuration of the antithetical event of revelation, where the unknown becomes known.

Founded in 1540 as the Accademia degli Umidi, the Accademia Fiorentina quickly assumed a central role in the renewed language debate in Italy. Three Florentine protagonists of the debate, Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Giovambattista Gelli, and Carlo Lenzoni, all penned treatises in defense of contemporary Florentine as a language model, in opposition to solutions advocated by others, particularly Pietro Bembo and his followers, and Giovan Giorgio Trissino. Their writings variously support the expansionist political program of Duke Cosimo de' Medici, while at times contesting his more egalitarian domestic politics and his attempts to limit intellectual freedom.

Federico Barocci (1535-1612) has always held a special place in studies of the patronage of Filippo Neri's Roman Congregation of the Oratory. The problem is how to quantify the affinity between artist and patron without slipping into zeitgeist historicism. A close chronological examination of documents surrounding Barocci's commissions to Oratorians and other patrons like Cardinal Federico Borromeo and Pope Clement VIII shows a coordinated effort within a larger orbit.

This essay analyzes the skeptical ideas of one of the most notorious works of the French Baroque, Le Moyen de parvenir. Its author, Béroalde de Verville, described his anti-novel as "une Satyre universelle," and one of his noteworthy accomplishments was to provide his troubled age with a relatively complete and innovative skeptical language based on both esoteric and exoteric alchemy. Conceiving of his text as a critical athanor, Béroalde conducts numerous experiments in transmutation that would turn Paracelsus' concepts into a kind of prima materia. Out of this reversion to the primordial emerges a general critique of ideas and social institutions through such alchemical notions as prime and ultimate matter, quintessence, astrosophy, the arcanum, the Archeus, and the Cagastrum.