Previously unpublished X-ray images prove that in the portrait commissioned for Giovio's museum, Bronzino painted Andrea Doria holding an oar, not a trident. The article interprets the portrait in its original form. Examination of the portrait together with the eulogy Giovio attached to it shows that Doria is painted as Odysseus, not as Neptune, and explains the incongruous oar. Erotic insinuations in the portrait suggest that, like Bronzino's burlesque poetry, it has a hidden meaning. Further analysis in the context of Giovio's historiography and a precise dating unveil a meaning that criticizes Doria's incompetence in a recent crucial naval battle.

At first glance, salutation and salvation could hardly be farther apart: the one ephemeral and everyday, the other eternal, of supreme importance. How should one understand the link, often insisted upon by Christian theologians, between the transience of a salutation and the transcendence of salvation? My argument in this essay is bifold: I first demonstrate that early modern writers, and especially Protestant theologians, regarded salutations as profoundly linked to salvation. I then argue that at the heart of this close association is an issue of temporality—a matter of infusing mundane, mortal time with the extra-temporal, ineffable quality of eternity.

In 1636, the Spanish Inquisition tried María de la Cruz for heresy and having made a pact with the devil. Examination of her trial in light of information about sexual misconduct on the part of Catholic clerics, however, reveals that what drove María to the emotional and behavioral extremes that her accusers described was neither heresy nor the devil the authorities had in mind. Theologians who evaluated her case and also met with María discerned what those who only read the accusations against her were unable to know: María's devils were human men taking advantage of a poor, illiterate woman for sex.

This study employs network analysis and microhistory to challenge the standard narrative about architecture and patronage in Baroque Rome, that of celebrity patron-artist relationships. It investigates the artists and artisans below this elite team and the plurality of relationships that developed among them. The subject is Innocent X Pamphilj's monumental works of art and architecture, at the Vatican, Piazza Navona, Campidoglio, Lateran, and Janiculum Hill, commissioned for the 1650 Holy Year. It argues that competent artisans and their relationships influenced the operation of building sites and presents Innocent X as the patron of an industrious architectural enterprise.

In the mid-seventeenth century, as the first full atlas of East Asia became available on the European book market, a dramatic shift took place in textual and visual representations of the Far East. The atlas, titled “Novus Atlas Sinensis” (1655), was the product of a cooperation between Joan Blaeu, who headed one of Europe's foremost commercial publishing houses, and Martino Martini, a prominent Jesuit missionary to China. This study shows how the Martini-Blaeu atlas thoroughly challenged the worldview of late Renaissance audiences by tracing and reconstructing a series of displacements that facilitated its production process.