This paper studies the group of men on the lower right side of Raphael's School of Athens. While the portrayal of Euclid is undisputed, the figures who are attached to him have not yet been firmly identified. In studying these figures as part of the intellectual fabric of the painting as a whole, it becomes clear that each of these figures has a meaningful role that cannot be deduced by mere guessing. The figure with his back to us is quite clearly the great mathematician-cosmographer Ptolemy of Alexandria. Not only because he wears a particular crown, but more importantly because the globe he holds is terrestrial - a symbol of his scientific contribution to the humanist curriculum - can we be certain of his presence. The man who faces him is most likely Strabo, the most famous geographer known throughout medieval times and one who was also appreciated by humanists, especially for his consideration of the sphere and the celestial aspects of the universe in his Geography. Both Ptolemy and Strabo are well placed next to Euclid, for both are concerned with geometry. The two men to the far right are, it is suggested here, two famous painters of Greek antiquity, Apelles (in the guise of Raphael) and Protogenes (in the guise of Timoteo Viti?), whose presence reflects the interests of artists in the early Cinquecento. All these heroes are appropriately placed on Aristotle's side of the painting.

This essay shows how scholarship on fifteenth-century Flemish panel painting became intertwined with efforts at national identity-building in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. Paintings such as Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece were not only dispersed across regional and national boundaries, but were intellectually appropriated for competing national programs. The paintings consequently became a site of conflict between the Latin and Germanic traditions. These conflicts are clearly visible through the shifting terminology of this art, variously claimed as “Flemish” and “Netherlandish.” Such nationalist discourses shaped future scholarship on Flemish painting and contributed to its perceived inferiority vis-à-vis the Southern artistic tradition.

This study weighs the evidence for Leonardo Bruni's estrangement from the emerging Medici party (from the 1420s) and the Medici regime (from 1434). Bruni had ties to both the Mediceans and their oligarch opponents, although ties with the latter appear to be stronger, particularly in terms of Bruni's humanist relations. While Bruni stayed on as Chancellor of Florence when the Medici took over in 1434, some recent studies suggest that the Medicean government was making things difficult for him. The study finally reproduces a report from the Milanese Chancery of 1437 stating that Bruni will support a rebellion in Arezzo against Florence, which will result in the "destruction and ruin of the Florentines."

This article examines Leonardo Bruni's ideas on history writing, tracing their evolution from 1404 down to the latter half of 1443. It establishes that Bruni saw history writing as a textual activity closely related to, if not identical with, translation. The various implications of this discovery are explored in relation to several of Bruni's major historical works, including the Cicero novus (1415), the Commentarii de primo bello punico (1419), and the De bello italico (1441). The article concludes by showing how Bruni's views - in their final, extreme formulation - were challenged by his younger rival, Biondo Flavio, in the early 1440s.

This article presents previously unpublished data from the Archives of the Duke of Candia (Crete) pertaining to the economic activities of Greek, Latin, and Jewish women in the Venetian colony of the fourteenth century. While trends over time are difficult to discern in the notarial registers examined for this study, they are none the less suggestive of a lively participation by women in moneylending, investment, and production, as well as in the local distribution of the island's products.

Machiavelli's Art of War contains an unexplored and unexplained paradox: the dialogue's chief interlocutor is Fabrizio Colonna, a condottiere in the employ of Ferdinand of Aragon, who played a critical role in the Spanish conquest of northern Italy and in the collapse of the Florentine republic led by Piero Soderini, in which Machiavelli worked as a civil servant. Yet, Machiavelli chooses Fabrizio to defend the superiority of the citizen militia, which he associates with republican civic virtue, over mercenary troops. This paradox has remained unaccounted for because literary scholars have ignored the historical background underlying the text's assorted political subtexts, while historians have ignored the nature of Quattrocento dialogue, as a literary genre, in contextualizing the work. Once these historical and literary dimensions of the Art of War are brought together, it can be seen why Fabrizio Colonna would have been perceived, by Machiavelli and his audience, as the ideal representative of a military position which he espoused neither in theory or in practice.

The Vatican Map Gallery (1579-81) contains fifty-one historical paintings in its vault and twenty-three historical vignettes on its monumental maps of Italy. Inspired by an early-Christian conception of the past, the vault paintings illustrate a "perfect" history, typified by saints' miracles. The contrasting vignettes demand more painstaking interpretation. Embedded in geography, they appear to exemplify a terrestrial history (reminiscent of Orosius) that, when not bathed in blood, teaches the vanity of earthbound strivings. Maps for history did not again take this form.

This paper is generated by the widespread opinion that Renaissance patrons usually kept creative control over works they commissioned. It analyzes two of the few instances usually cited and adds many more, some involving single works and some implicating a wide spectrum. A considerable range emerges. At one end artists, not only famous ones, can be deferred to as better experts on how themes are shown. At the other, patrons retain tight control of such unique themes as their family histories. A conclusion speculates on possible reasons for the strength of this opinion, in view of its fairly limited basis.

The standard medieval view of New Testament Apocrypha was that they were Christian writings (related to matters treated in the canonical books of the Bible), which had to be treated with caution and often dismissed as heretical. A list of the Apocrypha figured in the [Pseudo-]Gelasian Decree. In the Renaissance, for authors such as Lèfevre d'Etaples, Nicholas Gerbel and many others, the term assumed a multiplicity of meanings, both positive and negative. This article shows that although no attempts were made in the early 16th century to bring N. T. Apocrypha together into a corpus, the editors' ambivalent and complex attitude to texts such as the Laodiceans or Paul's Correspondence with Seneca led to their definitive marginalisation and encouraged their subsequent publication (by Fabricius and others) as corpora of dubious writings.

This essay is a prolegomenon to the general study of Ovid's relations to Renaissance art and art theory. As is well known, the Metamorphoses determined the subjects of numerous works of art during the Renaissance. What is not sufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent to which the ancient poet's sense of "metamorphosis" as a figure of poesis, making or "poetry," helped shape Renaissance notions of poetic transformation in the visual arts. The emergent taste for the non finito in the Renaissance, most notably in the work of Michelangelo, had important roots in Ovidean aesthetics.

This article examines the Casa delle Zitelle, a charitable institution for young women at risk of falling into prostitution, in early modern Venice. Founded by a group of deeply religious noblewomen, the Casa reflected the social anxieties of the time that linked social ills to prostitution, as well as a new spirit of social activism inspired by religious conviction on the part of the city's elite. The Casa also created a new type of female community that drew both on familial structures and the traditional female networks that were characteristic of Venetian neighborhoods.

Titian's drawing called Pastoral Scene or Landscape with a Sleeping Nude and Animals is no ordinary landscape, its unordinariness underscored by an unusual combination of elements, which I maintain reveals a new and unique version of Lot and His Daughters. I contend that the large, naked woman in the right foreground is one of Lot's daughters; the two small figures resting or sleeping beneath the trees are Lot and his other daughter; the thatched houses in the middle left represent the little town of Segor where Lot first fled; the sheep represent livestock that Lot brought out of Sodom, as do the boar and goat; the boar and goat, however, also serve as symbols of lust and lechery; and the distant city with burning buildings in the city's right quarter is Sodom. Titian's inventiveness created an iconographic variation of an ancient theme.

This article discusses the authorship and content of a number of marginal annotations made to a copy of Ascanio Condivi's 1553 Life of Michelangelo. The annotations are shown here to be the work of the artist's last assistant, Tiberio Calcagni, and were probably written into the book c. 1563-64, some of them predating and some postdating the master's death. They record Michelangelo's reactions to mistakes in Condivi's account, as well as confirm the veracity of some of the "tall stories" found in the biography.

A growing appreciation for the physiological dimensions of human behavorial problems is evident in Renaissance therapeutics. Both physicians and moral philosophers came to admit that passionate impulses like blasphemy and fist-fighting frequently erupted prior to conscious thought. Instead of relying exclusively on ascetic discipline and rational reflection as means to subdue undesirable emotions, post-medieval therapeutics added a number of mood-altering techniques such as music, dance, conversation, baths, and meditation on graphic images. The psychological premise of the new morality of the Renaissance was not flight from the body but respectful acceptance of its passionate interests.

In his voluminous Moral Discourses Against the Displeasure of Dying (1596), the Venetian physician Fabio Glissenti describes the tenacious revolt against death that permeates virtually all of society. Though important in itself as a major humanistic treatment of death in the vernacular, Glissenti's treatise has an unusual significance that lies not so much in its patent purpose - to recommend the acceptance of death - but rather in its countervailing undercurrent - to probe the psychology of work. In novellas and dialogues among interlocutors drawn from the gamut of professional types in Venice, Glissenti presents testimonials of professional art or pride, exchanges concerning professional morality, and Dantesque catalogues of punishments for professional sins. This study examines the professional ethos suffusing the Discorsi morali as a reflection of moral and psychological attitudes toward work in early modern culture.

This paper is an attempt to answer the riddle set up by Malvolio's cryptic question which occurs in the box-tree scene (2.5) of Twelfth Night. The essay surveys a number of alternative solutions proposed by critics, editors, and actors. All are found, in their own ways, to be wanting: some are exposed as literal minded, too arcane, reliant upon language games that are unavailable to a theater audience or flawed by chronology. As the first step in decoding the puzzle, the paper rehearses a Renaissance view of semantics, according to which sense arises from utterances quintessentially — not, as modern linguistics would have it, approximately. Language, that is, is shown to signify inherently rather than conventionally. This linguistic veracity is shown to condemn Malvolio as he repeats an acrostic which he doesn't perceive, even while he utters it. The paper proposes that M.O.A.I. alludes to Sir John Harington's The Metamorphosis Of A Iax.

The rise of antiquarianism in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean England posed a threat to the common and traditional notion of continuity through time of British institutions and culture, including the transmission of historical texts. This threat was a major preoccupation for the poet Michael Drayton, and his response to it can be examined in his depictions of bards and druids in Poly Olbion. Conservatives in the historiographical debate put forth these ancient British poet/priests as an explanation for how ancient British history could have been transmitted through the centuries. But while Drayton in the Poly Olbion certainly uses bards and druids in a concerted attempt to imagine continuity, he reveals some latent suspicions of the truth - that ancient British culture was irretrievably lost.

The Jew available to be known in England in the 1590s is a Marrano - a covert figure whose identity is self-created, hard to discover, foreign, associated with novel or controversial enterprises like foreign trade or money-lending, and anxiety-producing. By and large, non-theatrical representations of Jewishness reveal less ambivalence than does Marlowe's Barabas. In the plays of Marlowe and then of Shakespeare, the Jew becomes a figure which enables the playwright to express and at the same time to condemn the impulse in both culture and theatre to treat selfhood and social role as a matter of choice. By becoming theatrical, the anxiety about identity and innovation implicit in the Marrano state gains explicitness and becomes available to the culture at large. Marlowe and Shakespeare play a central role in creating - not imitating - the frightening yet comic Jewish figure which haunts Western culture. But the immediate impact of their achievement is felt in the theatre, and is barely visible in non-theatrical discourse about Jews in the decades after their plays.

Despite the common practice of reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in relation to the cultural politics of the first year of the Stuart monarchy, politically-oriented criticism has largely neglected the play's connection to the politics of one of King James's most ambitious undertakings: the new biblical translation first announced in January of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference. While maintaining that the play cannot be reduced to a simple allegory of James's effort to link his new political authority to the "authorizing" power of scripture, this essay examines how the "topicality" of that effort might be registered in the play's complex pattern of biblical allusion. We argue, finally, that with its staged conflict between ethical ideal and social practice, Measure for Measure offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying religious rhetoric in secular political contexts.

Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a wealthy Spanish noblewoman, lived as a missionary in London preaching, teaching, and doing charitable work on behalf of the Catholic underground from 1605 to 1614. Although the early loss of her parents and other close family members in rapid succession and the abuses she suffered at the hands of her guardian uncle might appear to have disadvantaged her, Carvajal transformed her misfortunes into advantages by using them to intensify her embrace of penitential piety and traditional Catholic virtues as exemplified by saints' lives. Her manifestation of those virtues inspired religious authorities to accept her as a missionary, against substantial odds. She thus provides evidence of how Counter-Reformation practices and beliefs facilitated some exceptional women's achievements.