Few are the records in the Florentine archives which allow us to reconstruct the life and activities of the merchant and humanist Marco Parenti. Few documents have been found regarding his dealings in the silk business, and those touching on his interests in letters and philosophy are more laudatory than substantial. Marco was deeply interested in the intellectual movements of his time. He participated in Landino's Disputationes Camaldulenses as one of the Aristotelians, and also was a member of the Chorus Achademiae Florentinae established by Alamanno Rinuccini in the mid-1450's. He was known for his erudition by humanists much more illustrious than he. Leon Battista Alberti was Marco's close friend, even employing him as his business manager.

The private letters of Annibal Caro (1507-66) collectively offer numerous insights into the literary, scholarly, artistic, and political life of mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Even if it were not for the sheer bulk of Caro's correspondence, and its even distribution throughout the years of his maturity, it would constitute an important historical source simply because he had such a broad range of interests and such a wide circle of friends. As a personal secretary, first to Monsignor Giovanni Gaddi, then to Alessandro and Pier Luigi Farnese, and as a friend of both Marcello Cervini (Marcellus II) and Giovanni Antonio Fachinetti (Innocent IX), Caro had extensive inside knowledge of the political and ecclesiastical activities of the Roman curia at its highest levels.

The terms of Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones about the rival claims of poet and architect have been clear ever since D. J. Gordon's discussion of the matter in 1949. The problem, as Professor Gordon explains, was far more significant than a temperamental clash between two ambitious artists vying for royal favor. Unfortunately, while they could probably agree about the inevitably intellectual origins of all artistic invention and about the important distinctions to be made between invention and expression, they could not help but come into conflict over the relative importance of poetry, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. A passage from Vives translated in The Discoveries (160-167) indicates that Jonson knew and probably endorsed those divisions between the liberal and mechanical arts which placed architecture in the inferior group.