Donatello designed a lavish high altar for the Santo (S. Antonio) in Padua in the 1440s. This article considers how the interests and concerns of the altar's original beholders may have affected its design and reception. Specifically, pilgrims drawn to the Santo by Saint Anthony's tomb probably would have been impressed by the altar's general magnificence; elite Paduan citizens may have been most interested in the civic associations of the statues displayed on the altar; and the Santos Conventual Franciscan friars may well have interpreted the Antonine narrative reliefs and the altar's overall splendor in light of their growing rivalry with Observant Franciscans.

This article discusses the manner in which Ficino employs the figure of Pythagoras and various aspects of the Pythagorean tradition in the philosophical areas of psychology, moral philosophy, and ontology. It also argues that the figure of Pythagoras as prophet was particularly appealing to a Ficino situated in the cultural environment of late fifteenth-century Florence. Text, culture, and ideology interacted in a complex way: spurred on by his early appreciation of Iamblichus's soteriological presentation of Pythagoras, Ficino helped create an ideology in Florence which was receptive to a prophetic figure. The piece thus suggests that Ficino viewed a certain segment of the history of thought through late ancient, Iamblichean eyes.

Marsilio Ficino's philosophy altered the canon of beauty to include gracious laughter. This significant detail invented a positive, spiritual reflection of the human joy of participation in the cosmic circuit, toward the love of God. It transcended the negative, moralistic denunciation of laughter in the classical and Christian traditions. His contemporaries virtually ignored this genius.

Lotto's Lucretia is posed in a way that Renaissance viewers would have recognized as masculine and therefore inappropriate for a lady. Moreover, Lucretia holds a fictive drawing, representing the suicide of her Roman namesake. The depiction of a fictive drawing was quite exceptional in the 1530s. Lottos reasons for posing his Lucretia in such an unexpected, masculine way, and his representation of her predecessor's death as a fictive drawing are the means whereby he asserts her virtue. Doing so, Lotto seems to question the traditional patriarchal definitions of woman, female chastity and female sexuality that Lucretia herself had come to embody.

Imprecision appears to be the intended effect of the thematic plan of Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée, especially where signs of sexual identity are concerned. This study proposes a reading which, on two bases, accommodates the romance's semiotic vagueness. First, the ideological context of Neoplatonism clarifies the work's ongoing "Symposium" on love. The roots of this dialogue may be traced to Plato's Symposium and magnetic theory which foreshadow L'Astreé's tendency toward character self-representation on a middle ground between male and female. Second, evidence of a structure of ambiguity in other areas of the romance's composition corroborates the argument.

In the Renaissance there were close similarities between the static choreography of the formal gardens of the nobility and the moving choreographies performed by the members of the court. The principles of order and proportion, the expression of splendour, the geometrical forms, were all fundamental principles of both Renaissance court dance and the formal garden. The patterns in both these art-forms were meant to be viewed from above. This close similarity in design principles between the horticultural and kinetic arts existed right through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continued into the seventeenth century.