The Infamous Black Death of 1348 signaled the reappearance of bubonic plague in Europe after long centuries of absence. Contemporary accounts vividly describe the shock and horror of universal and indiscriminate mortality. From Tournai, Gilles Li Muisis observed that “no one was secure, whether rich, in moderate circumstances or poor, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord.” In any given area, between one third to half of the population would die. Worse still, the Black Death was only the beginning of a worldwide pandemic, or cyclical series of epidemics, recurring at intervals of two to twenty years throughout Europe until well into the seventeenth century.

In a Paper Published in 1977 I introduced a carton of documents called Dispute di Scolari (1462-1527), preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna, Italy. These documents constitute the most important surviving witness to student disputations held in the Bolognese Studio (in our terms, university), which enabled poor, young, foreign senior degree-candidates upon successful completion to be eligible for one-year lectureships in their respective subjects. After explaining the nature, structure, and legal requirements of the disputation notices and their relevance to student academic performance, the primary purpose of the paper was to illustrate them by examining a few notices in which Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512), professor of philosophy and medicine appeared, either as a disputing master or as a respondent.

An Unusual Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola has gained new prominence from its illustration in color in a recent publication. In her Women, Art, and Society (1990), Whitney Chadwick claims of the portrait in question, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (fig. 1), that in presenting herself in the guise of a portrait being painted by her teacher, Anguissola produced “the first historical example of the woman artist consciously collapsing the subject-object position.” Chadwick's succinct observation opens up the possibility of understanding the painting in a new way, for she points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object that uniquely befell women artists in the Renaissance and complicates their art, especially their self-portraits. From this starting point, I will here explore the form of self-presentation offered by Anguissola in the Siena portrait and several other works in the context of what was a fundamental problem for the Renaissance female artist: the differentiation of herself as artist (the subject position) from her self as trope and theme for the male artist (the object position).