Histories and dictionaries of Italian literature continue to assign the comedy Ortensio to Alessandro Piccolomini, the Sicnese writer of the sixteenth century who, in his day, enjoyed a wide reputation as a philosopher and playwright. The authorship of the Ortensio was sporadically but unsubstantially doubted in the past and, in more recent years, was challenged seriously in at least two important articles. Apparently, few writers have taken cognizance of these articles or have taken into consideration the conclusions of Maria Rossi and Ireneo Sanesi, who proved that the comedy was written collectively by the members of the Accademia degl'Intronati of Siena. Perhaps one of the reasons why these articles have not been incorporated in subsequent studies on Piccolomini is that they do not deal specifically with the problem. Both M. Rossi and I. Sanesi treat the authorship of the Ortensio in an incidental manner, since the concern of the former is an appraisal of all the literary works of Piccolomini, while that of the latter is the establishment of the correct date of two letters.

In a recent book, Dante poeta veltro (Florence, 1953), Leonardo Olschki discussed the statues of Castor and Pollux that stand at the top of the ramp leading onto the Capitoline hill in Rome. He showed that these representations of the Dioscures were brought to the heart of the Renaissance city not merely as works of art, but as symbols: symbols of heavenly protection (they are the Gemini of the Zodiac) and of Liberty (to Dante they stood for popular resistance to tyranny), in which roles they had been the guardians of Rome since ancient times. In addition, Olschki discovered an attribute appended for political reasons by a sixteenth-century Pontiff, Clement VII, that made the twins respectively the Pope and the Emperor—co-rulers of the modern Roman Empire.

It is often difficult to remember that Andrew Marvell the poet was also a polemical Puritan and practical politician, so little do his surviving poems reflect his public activity. Least of all, one would think, could his Garden poems, where his private intentions seem most highly developed and his general Neoplatonism most sharply particularized, yield up any reference to his Puritan life. But when we examine his ‘Bermudas’, one of Marvell's subtlest shorter poems and strikingly close to ‘The Garden’ in both its imagery and its implications of paradise, we cannot fail to realize its background of English expansion into the New World and of the religious drives that sent Englishmen oat from their island into harsher climates in the expectation of some sort of practical Eden. Marvell's song is the song of praise of his mariners to the God that led them ‘through the watry Maze’ to another island, long hidden from their knowledge and far kinder than England itself.

Most of our performances of Renaissance ensemble music mirror only too exactly the blank appearance of the original parts. The normal reaction of the conscientious instrumentalist who has been brought up on scores sprinkled with signs indicating just how each note is to be played—as well as what tone is be to sounded and for how long—is to conclude that, if no ‘expression’ signs are present, then the composer was concerned only with pitch and duration, and that to produce anything more would be to mispresent his intentions. The resulting ‘abstract’ performance is inadvertently encouraged by those musical scholars who stress the new emphasis on expression of emotion found in the Baroque period (always in contrast to the music of earlier periods) and by the many musicologists who look at early instrumental music primarily to search for traces of its liberation from the tyranny of vocal style.