This article investigates four widely studied versions of the biblical story of the Feast of Herod produced by Florentine artists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Giotto’s fresco from the Peruzzi Chapel at Santa Croce (ca. 1320), Andrea Pisano’s panels on the south doors of Florence’s baptistery (ca. 1335), Donatello’s relief for the baptismal font at Siena (ca. 1425), and Filippo Lippi’s fresco in the main chapel at the cathedral of Prato (ca. 1465). The study explores how the narrative is interpreted by each artist and suggests social messages that contemporary audiences might have drawn from each interpretation by examining the actions of the figures in light of the teachings of late medieval and early Renaissance didactic literature. Conduct literature allows one to interpret what the works reveal about the story, but also suggests that they could function didactically, in and of themselves. In such a reading, Herodias and Salome are treacherous women: dangerous not only to John the Baptist, but also to Florentine society of the period.

This essay explores the role that the eighteenth-century Uffizi gallery played in the invention of the Renaissance. Under the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers, and especially during the reign of Grand Duke Peter Leopold (r. 1765–90), changes to the Medici collections and the gallery’s organization transformed an early modern cabinet of curiosities, paintings, and antiquities into a space in which a historical narrative of art, inspired by rereadings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, became visible in a building he designed. A succession of Uffizi personnel was increasingly preoccupied with how to see renaissance, and more specifically Tuscan rinascita, in the collections. The struggles between the director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and his vice-director Luigi Lanzi highlight how different understandings of the Renaissance emerged in dialogue with antiquarianism and medievalism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Uffizi would definitively become a museum of the Renaissance to inspire new forms of historical writing in the age of Michelet and Burckhardt.

While the anonymous Viaggio da Venetia al Sancto Sepolchro et al Monte Sinai, first published in Venice in 1518, was the most popular Holy Land guidebook in Renaissance Italy, the historical origins of the book have never been fully understood. From four illustrated versions of an earlier manuscript guide, the Libro d’Oltramare (1346–50), one can hypothesize about both the text and its author. The ultimate prototype for the Viaggio da Venetia was very likely one or more of these illustrated manuscripts, and the original author of both the text and illustrations was the Franciscan pilgrim Niccolò da Poggibonsi. Despite the eventual erosion of his name from the printed versions of the guidebook, the assertiveness and originality of the author parallels the production of other vernacular literature in mid-fourteenth-century Italy. Unlike Latin guidebooks of previous centuries, the intent to include illustrations that re-create the pilgrimage experience and the unprecedented descriptiveness of the prose together suggest that the book can be considered the foundational text for the genre of the illustrated pilgrimage guidebook.

A number of longstanding questions have surrounded the early life of the fifteenth-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516), generally believed to have been the son of Jacopo Bellini (ca. 1400–70/71) and the younger brother of Gentile Bellini (1429/35–1507). The artist’s year of birth and the legitimacy of his birth have been the subjects of debate for well over a century. By reevaluating Bellini-related legal documents under the relevant fifteenth-century Venetian civil laws, this article makes a case that Giovanni Bellini was not Jacopo Bellini’s son, but rather his half-brother, and that they were both sons of Nicolò Bellini; that Giovanni was therefore Gentile Bellini’s uncle rather than his brother; and that he was born legitimate between the late summer of 1424 and 13 September 1428, several years earlier than the birth year of ca. 1435 (or later) favored by many contemporary Bellini specialists. The ramifications of situating Bellini’s birth year in the mid- to late 1420s are then considered.

This essay examines the role of ancient Egypt in courtly masquerades under François Ier (r. 1515–47). It opens with an analysis of the iconography of a sphinx costume that was designed by Francesco Primaticcio (1504/05–1570) and worn by the king and one of his favorite courtiers, Cardinal Jean de Lorraine (1498–1550), at a wedding celebration held in 1546. Two other costume drawings by the same artist are discussed next, and the first printed French translation of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, which was published in Paris in 1543, is identified as their source. In examining their strange aesthetic and multiple layers of meaning, this study considers how these costumes were symptomatic of a broader French Renaissance fascination with concealed truth and how, as conveyors of veiled messages, they were meant to spark lofty discussions and demonstrate the French court’s sophistication.

In 1550 Bernardo Segni, a member of the Florentine Academy, published an Italian translation of and commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Practically unstudied, Segni’s work represents an important moment in the evolution of vernacular Aristotelianism (and philosophy more generally) in the Renaissance. This essay examines Segni’s approach to the text, his familiarity (or not) with the Greek and Latin traditions, and his discussion of a philosophical problem, the freedom of the will. It shows that in all these areas Segni was well aware of Latin interpretations. The essay thus argues that studies of Renaissance Aristotelianism need to abondon their longstanding concentration on the Latin tradition alone and consider the complex and multilevel interactions of Latin and vernacular philosophy.

In his portrait of an unidentified man (Vienna, 1529), Barthel Beham portrays the sitter paused in the midst of a math problem. As has been discovered, the numbers and symbols belong to the vocabulary of numerical calculation. This finding first raises the question of why a patron would want to be shown doing computation with Arabic numerals in a portrait. In 1529, numerical calculation was a commercial tool, not a field with humanistic/social cachet such as geometry. Further, the depicted computation does not make sense: the symbols and numbers are arranged in the form of a problem without actually being one. Yet the patron either did not notice or care. This article argues that the incomplete computation is not only a reflection of the contemporary status of mathematics using Arabic numbers, but also provides a way of understanding how the painting functioned as a portrait in the social milieu of the sixteenth-century Munich court.

This article contributes to the study of the early sub-Saharan African diaspora in Europe by analyzing both visual and documentary evidence relating to black gondoliers in Renaissance Venice. Gondolas and gondoliers were iconic features in fifteenth-century Venice, yet most gondoliers were not Venetian. Although black Africans were highly visible in a predominantly white society, naming practices and linguistic usages rendered them virtually invisible in the documentary sources. It is now possible not only to investigate representations of black gondoliers in paintings, but also to identify black gondoliers in the lists of gondoliers’ associations and in criminal records. Slavery was an accepted institution in late medieval Italy, and nearly all black Africans arrived in Venice as slaves, yet usually ended their lives free. Being a gondolier gave a few black Africans a niche occupation that allowed them to manage their transition to freedom, and to integrate successfully into Venetian society.

The relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.

Focusing on two painted Pietàs, this essay examines the means by which the artists Giulio Clovio (1498–1578) and Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547) simultaneously copied Michelangelo’s figures and made claims about their own pictorial mastery. Within the context of concerns about sacred images articulated in the Diálogos em Roma (1548) of Francisco de Holanda (1517–84), Clovio’s and Sebastiano’s painting techniques are discussed for their ability to approximate divine and semi-divine archetypes while signaling ontological difference and the authority of Rome. The metaphoric potential of Clovio’s and Sebastiano’s technical innovations, one invoking a Lucretian veil of atoms according to Holanda and the other a pictorial touchstone, also reveal the extent to which these artists ambitiously tied theory to practice.

Long neglected and misunderstood, Michelangelo’s Noli me tangere (ca. 1531–32) features a puzzling figuration of its biblical subject, wherein Christ, rather than withdrawing from Mary Magdalene, touches her left breast with his finger. Following Augustine’s interpretation that Christ at this moment sows the seed of faith in the Magdalene’s heart, this article explains this unprecedented motif as a dissemblant sign for the implantation of faith in the soul, while arguing, on account of the gesture’s resonance with issues of spiritual and sensual touching, that the painting makes an original theoretical statement about the making and viewing of devotional images more generally.

This essay examines how Dutch and English vernacular writers portrayed the Moor in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when their respective governments were engaged in diplomatic and trade discussions with Morocco. It aims for a better understanding of the difference in religious attitudes and cultures between these two Protestant realms by arguing that their respective approaches to internal religious toleration significantly influenced how their residents viewed Muslims. Dutch writers adopted a less hostile tone toward the Moor than English writers due to the republic’s principled defense of freedom of conscience, its informal system of religious toleration in the private sector, and its merchant Realpolitik. Unlike in England, Dutch conversos were allowed to be Jews. A number of Moroccan Muslims also resided in Holland, lobbying on behalf of the Muslim King of Morocco. The Moroccan Jewish Pallache family played prominent roles with the government and in two of the pamphlets examined here, including one that interprets a Moroccan civil war through the lens of demonic sorcery. So too did Jan Theunisz, a liberal Mennonite of Amsterdam who collaborated with both Jews and Muslims in his home. As Dutch citizens were adapting to a new religious environment that effectively privatized religious practice, they were better equipped than their English counterparts to acclimatize to Jews inside and the Moor outside their borders.

Scholarship on Italian women’s secular writing of the sixteenth century has illuminated the remarkable success female authors enjoyed in print, as well as the complex and ambivalent responses they evoked as a group. This article argues that the more shadowy praxis of ordinary female letter-writing, an obligation for most elite wives and widows, required a baseline level of literacy that enabled more eminent literary women to flourish in print. The essay studies the unpublished letters of the Roman noblewoman Costanza Colonna, the Marchesa of Caravaggio (ca. 1556–1626), to demonstrate her development as a self-taught, competent writer, familiar with the terms of Renaissance debates on the epistolary genre. Colonna exemplifies the hidden world of female literacy that helps explain both the extraordinary flourishing of women’s publishing in sixteenth-century Italy, and the hostility it encountered from some elements of society.

In the early 1500s, a genre of portraiture emerged in Northern Europe that combines bust portraits of humanistic intellectuals and patrons with elegant Latin and Greek epigraphs. While the likenesses have long had the benefit of expert attention, the same cannot always be said of the inscriptions. In consequence, many questions still go begging. It remains unknown, for example, who wrote these anonymous texts; whether the artists composed any of them and (if not) whether they got the wording right; and what exactly the epigraphs intend to say, or what models and conventions they follow. This article aims to supply some answers for the earliest and most influential of the collaborative portraits: Burgkmair’s two woodcuts of Konrad Celtis; Metsys’s medallion of Erasmus; Cranach’s painting of Christoph Scheurl and his three Luther engravings; Dürer’s engravings of Albrecht of Brandenburg, Frederick the Wise, Willibald Pirckheimer, and Philip Melanchthon; and Holbein’s paintings of Bonifacius Amerbach, Erasmus, and Melanchthon.

Luis de Góngora’s Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea (1612) and The Solitudes (1613) have inspired comparisons to painting ever since they first appeared in manuscript form at the Court of Philip III. Engaging the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, which notes the kinship between painting and poetry, Góngora creates pictorial conceits modeled in color as if using a painter’s palette, and thus his poems read like imaginary art galleries. By way of both plastic and discursive references to the Venetian school, Góngora inserts his poetry into one of the most salient polemics of his time, the paragone tra colore e disegno, the debate over the supremacy of Venetian color versus Florentine draftsmanship. This essay seeks to provide a reading of Góngora’s major poems in light of the paragone as it played out in seventeenth-century Spain among art theorists and painters such as Francisco Pacheco and Domenico Theotocopoulis (El Greco), and intertwined with related discourses pertaining to artistic progress and innovation, including the link between aesthetics and religious reform.

The Venetian poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652) spent much of his career glorifying the Serenissima through a series of theatrical pieces. His only epic poem, the Venetia edificata (1621, 1624), while ostensibly a celebration of the republic, shows a level of commitment to Galileo Galilei (1564–1643) and to Galileo’s science that is unique among poets of the time, Venetian or otherwise. It is the apex of Strozzi’s artistic project to incorporate Galileo’s discoveries and texts into poetic works. The Venetia edificata also represents the culmination of a fifteen-year effort to gain patronage from the Medici Grand Dukes in Florence. While the first, incomplete version is dedicated to the Venetian Doge, the second, finished version is dedicated to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici of Florence. More than a decade after Galileo’s departure from the Veneto to Florence, Strozzi cites from Galileo’s early works, creates a character inspired by Galileo, incorporates the principles of Galileo’s science into the organizing structure of the poem, and answers one of Galileo’s loudest complaints about Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581). Strozzi’s strategies both in writing the Venetia edificata and in seeking patronage for it underscore the ambivalent response to Galileo in contemporary poetry.