The architectural program outlined by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) in De re aedificatoria (1452) has been described by Richard Krautheimer as an effort ‘to create dignified surroundings for the dignified actions of dignified people.’ The contribution of sculptural ornamentation to this vision of a ‘dignified’ humanist paradise has escaped adequate critical attention. Sculpture, I believe, is an essential formal and iconographic element in Alberti's conception of the city as an ideal of order, of peace, and of unity.

Discussion of Alberti's ideas on sculpture has heretofore dealt almost exclusively with De statua. Such emphasis has led to the rather widespread assumption that his work as a theorist on sculpture was limited to an interest in the achievement of naturalism and ideal proportion in the representation of the free-standing human figure.

The renewed enthusiastic interest in the classical world in the quattrocento brought about a shift of taste which affected all cultural activity, including writing both in its calligraphic and epigraphic styles. Poggio Bracciolini is now generally recognized as the innovator in this area; inspired by the manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he initiated the elegant, clear and pleasant-toread humanistic script. At the same time a change took place in the inscriptions that painters, sculptors, and architects inserted in their works. Because of increasing attention paid to Roman monuments and inscriptions, Gothic letters, often casually chosen and squeezed one against another in an inappropriate and insufficient space, gradually disappear from paintings, sculptures, and monuments of the quattrocento.

Although I am not an expert in French History and Literature, I have been occasionally prompted to touch the borders of this field when studying the history of philosophy and of learning. This paper, in spite of its somewhat pretentious title, deals in fact with a group of minor bibliographical data that are not even completely unknown. Since in my opinion bibliography, although a modest tool of research, is in a way the skeleton or scaffolding of literary and of intellectual history, I shall try to add some flesh to the bones of those data, and to use them for gaining a broader perspective. I have now been encouraged to look more closely at some facts and questions of which I had been aware for a long time, but which I had not really faced.

The date of John Colet's birth is of interest not only for his own biography but for that of his friend Erasmus. In the long letter of June 13, 1521 in which he describes at length the life and career of Colet, Erasmus mentions that when the two men first met Colet was ‘about thirty years old, two or three months younger than I.’ Erasmus celebrated his birthday on the Feast of Sts. Simon andjude (October 28), but thanks largely to his own mystifications on the subject there is no agreement among his biographers as to the year of his birth. The twenty-three direct statements about his age which have been noted in his writings, point in many different directions, from 1464 to 1472 or even later.