Bramante's illusionistic apse for Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan has long been understood as a triumph of Renaissance rationality. This essay shifts attention to the votive and cult contexts of the space and the miraculous image it enshrines. The coro finto efficaciously enhanced the authority of the Madonna and her sponsors—the Sforza dynasty and a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin—by dramatically framing and amplifying the image's potency. Santa Maria presso San Satiro thus flourished as one of Milan's most intensely contested ecclesiastical arenas, in which devotees and institutions maneuvered for access to the potent cult image.

In June 1498, the Florentine government publicly punished and exiled the Piagnona, the lone bell of the church of San Marco, for its role in defending Girolamo Savonarola during the April siege that led to the preacher's execution. Drawing on new evidence, this essay offers the most complete account of this still poorly understood chapter in Renaissance history, examining its complex and conflicting motives. At the same time, the punishment of the Piagnona, and struggle for its return, affords uncommon insight into the culture's deepest structures of thinking about what bells were, and who had the legal authority to adjudicate their fate.

Painted in 1508, Raphael's “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” is animated by innovative pictorial techniques using light, shadow, and color. Yet scholars have scarcely discussed its dazzling palette or sought to explain the image's meaning. I argue that Raphael's “Saint Catherine” exemplifies the artist's thematic interpretation of divine revelation in optical terms. Aristotelian theories of vision illuminate new dimensions of Raphael's engagement with scientific and theological sight. From this examination, new criteria for identifying the painting's patron emerge. By reframing the “Saint Catherine” within the rubric of contemporary optics, color's role as an allegory for Raphael's subject comes increasingly to light.

This article uses the life and writings of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen, to explore the methods and tools of early modern ethnographers. For decades Crusius recorded contemporary Greek life under Ottoman rule by investigating a broad array of visual, material, textual, and oral evidence and by mustering various scholarly methods. The documentary record that Crusius compiled demonstrates that early modern ethnography was one among many period forms of knowledge making in which tropes and techniques from several fields and disciplines came together fruitfully.

Milton's youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady's movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton's understanding of virginity's poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise Regain'd.”