In his prefatory letter to Cristoforo Landino's commentary to the Comedy, Marsilio Ficino presents a dramatic encounter between Dante and Florence. The city's lament over Dante's long absence moves Apollo to command Mercury to possess the “pious“ mind of the “divine poet” Cristoforo Landino. Mercury then assumes Landino's countenance, arouses Dante from his sleep with a life-giving wand, and transports him to Florence. There, Dante is gloriously crowned as he prophesied in Paradiso 25.1-12. The significance of this elaborate mythological sequence is obvious: through the merits of Landino's commentary, Dante is honorably restored to Florence after an exile of almost two centuries.

Ficino's high expectations of the commentary's favorable reception were not unfounded. Presented to the Florentine Signoria on 30 August, 1481 in a sumptuous edition with engravings now attributed to Botticelli, Landino's commentary rapidly won the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries.

A few years ago, Felix Gilbert, after a brief survey of various studies on Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentitte (1520-24), noticed the need to focus on the work's historical significance, and proposed a reading that goes beyond the mere narrative account of the rise and development of the city of Florence. Having shown that the work's structure follows the cyclical theory of history prevalent in Renaissance historiography, Gilbert goes on to suggest that Machiavelli anticipates Florence's rise from its present decline: “It would seem possible to suggest therefore that Machiavelli intended to represent the situation in which Italy found itself in the early sixteenth century as carrying with it the possibilities of a new ascent. “ The book, he argues, contains the same political message conveyed in his earlier works, such as the Prince (1513), which appropriately ends on the optimistic note that a redentore will come to lead the peninsula out of its ruinous downfall and back to glory and prosperity.

The rarest figural view is that involving a protagonist seen from behind, not directing a look outward toward the spectator. One such example is Giulio Campagnola's engraving of a solitary woman in a landscape, seen in a three-quarters rear view (fig. i). Radically stripped of iconographic attributes as it is, this print is less narrative, or even lyrical, in its presence than many pastoral compositions. Here there is no warm, atmospheric, and mellow world of wish-fulfillment as in the Dresden Venus. Giulio offered no paper Giorgione but rather a place in which lush vegetation clashes against sharp turrets, and no Cupid attends upon dormant, soft female flesh. Giulio distanced the image from predigested literary conventions. Yet the art historical inclination is to assimilate Giulio's work to Giorgione's, and furthermore to understand Giorgione's importance as consisting in his visualization of the hitherto literary world of pastoral. Ut pictor poe'sis can be too handy an axiom.

With all the insights recent works on the history of homosexuality and culture have given us, the best, Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England and Eve K. Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, have also made us aware of what we do not know of earlier periods. While some areas of the tabooed subject will forever be closed to us, others are still amenable to patient labor in the vineyard of scholarship. My present focus is on the three final volumes of what in its French edition has come to be called the Amadis de Gaule, probably the most monumental (twenty-one volumes) and popular romance in the Renaissance. Strictly speaking, only the first four volumes, the ones Don Quixote's curate agreed to preserve for their literary merit, are the Amadis de Gaule; the other volumes are continuations by other hands.

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“

As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.