There has never been much doubt among Renaissance scholars about the leading role played by Marsilio Ficino and Neoplatonic philosophy in the cultural life of the High Renaissance. From the time of his first biographer, Giovanni Corsi, Ficino's work of recovering and disseminating Platonism was held to be one of the great achievements of Medici patronage. The publication history of his translations and other writings during the early modern period attests to the widespread interest they aroused, not only among professional philosophers, but also among educated persons in general.

I in the Mid-Sixteenth Century Venetian writers, artists, scholars, and musicians came increasingly to play out their cultural ideals within informal academies. These academies made no bylaws or statutes, nor did they keep the sorts of membership lists, minutes, and systematic records that were to become commonplace by the end of the century. In essence they were regular gatherings, chiefly in private homes, for discussion, debate, and performance. The diffuse demography of the republican city-state made it well-suited to the dynamic processes of artistic and intellectual interchange that such gatherings provided.

This is an Essay About Reading. Though my central texts are visual ones, with what we might now regard as journalistic or anthropologic aims, the thrust of my argument extends beyond any one medium of communication, specific subject, or genre of inquiry. My framing concern here is to examine a historically specific structure, one that Tony Bennett has called a "reading formation": "a set of discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers and reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be read in particular ways.