Recent years have seen a growing body of literature on relations between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire. One of the major lacunae in this research concerns the role of the Jews in the transmission of Italian humanist ideas. In order to address this topic, this article will focus on the “Crónica de los reyes otomanos” by the Sephardi polymath Moses ben Baruch Almosnino (ca. 1515–ca. 1580). My goal is to identify a shared set of themes present in Almosnino's thought and key fifteenth-century Italian sources on the correlation between magnificence and good government, and also to shed new light on the influence of Italian humanism in the Ottoman world.

Painted in Rome around 1615, Jusepe de Ribera's series of half figures personifying the five senses invites a diplomatic audience associated with the Lincean Academy to a performance of prudence, a virtue meant to characterize the judgment of both art and of sensory experience. Ribera's series is new evidence for how the demonstration of prudence in conversation motivated ownership and display of art and shaped art's contribution to natural philosophy. Ribera's “Five Senses” articulates the distinction between sense and prudence, and reveals the importance of discussion, dissimulation, and social performance to the way early Seicento art was produced and consumed.

In seventeenth-century Lisbon, Jesuit mathematicians taught their students how to build blood-ejecting crucifixes and similar religious devices. Together with the activities of experts in the canonization of Isabel of Portugal and in other contexts, these situations represent rare instances in which religious devotion interacted directly with science. Informed by the histories of science, art, and religion, this essay argues that a piety centered on materiality fostered these scientific practices, which became religious ministries in themselves. This analysis brings new light to lasting debates on science and religion and to the purpose of practicing science in the early modern period.

This article offers a new interpretation of the concept of wonder in early modern Europe by focusing on large collections. It shows that many princely Kunstkammern were located above stables, and argues that the horses downstairs and the curiosities upstairs performed similar roles in the courtly display of power. The size and design of stables shaped how curiosities were exhibited and viewed. These majestic buildings facilitated cursory viewing experiences of the assemblage of a great number of animals and objects. They did not necessarily encourage the detailed examination of particular and unique exhibits.