This essay examines visitors’ experiences in the antiquity collections of Rome between 1550 and 1600. It argues that access to private collections was not as casual as has previously been thought, but that, in fact, it is possible to identify changes in the reception of visitors in this period as the city’s collections became increasingly public and institutionalized. Particular pressures on ecclesiastical collectors and parallels elsewhere in the development of the display of objects can explain the change at Rome: because of the city’s centrality, its collections serve as an important case study for a wider phenomenon, the growth of the museum.

There was an ongoing controversy in seventeenth-century England about the ten lost tribes of Israel. The debate centered on the theoretical question of whether or not the lost tribes continued to exist as a distinct ethnic group. Surprisingly little attention was paid to what might seem to be the first order of business in any national referendum about the lost tribes: determining where they were. Fletcher’s book, which argued that the lost tribes survived as (and not merely lived among) the Tartars of central and northeastern Asia, was one of the few statements written in seventeenth-century England about the location of the missing people.

This article centers on two images from the life of Hercules and a border painting modeled after Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Das Meerwunder (ca. 1498) in a Kyriale produced ca. 1500 for a Dominican convent in Toledo, Spain. It discusses the cultural significance of Hercules in Spain, and Toledo in particular, then presents a contextually sensitive reading of the image derived from Dürer’s enigmatic engraving, whose subject has yet to be identified. The image in the Kyriale appears to represent Hercules’ once-famous rescue of the Trojan princess Hesione from a sea monster.

This essay addresses the significance of the Assumption of the Virgin fresco in the Baptistery of Siena and the existence of an adjacent tunnel that connects the Baptistery to the Cathedral above. The traditional celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin in Siena is described; previously unpublished documents stating that a play of the Assumption was performed add new details to the picture. Other contemporary Sienese religious dramas, some little-known to modern scholars, are discussed to illustrate what the play of the Assumption could have entailed. It is proposed that the tunnel, or trapdoor, was used to conceal ropes that raised an effigy of the Assunta during the feast-day Mass.

This paper is an examination of the civic government of Genoa from 1435 to 1464, and of the principles that underlay how it was conducted. Despite the political instability caused by contenders for the dogeship, and the division of offices between Guelfs and Ghibellines and between nobles and popolari, the civic government generally operated on a consensual basis. The principles and practices of the civic government restricted the power of the doges and prevented them from turning their position into an effective signoria.

Emperor Maximilian I was intensely engaged with material relics of the ancient Roman and medieval German past. Maximilian’s historical imagination, creative and participatory rather than objective and distancing, guided his own monumental projects. This essay analyzes, among other episodes, the quest for the bones of the historical Siegfried in Worms and an apparently archeological drawing by Albrecht Dürer.

The Virgin of the Seafarers (1531–36) by Alejo Fernández was designed as the central panel of an altarpiece for the chapel in the House of Trade’s Hall of Audiences in Seville. Little attention has been paid to the central panel and almost none to the four side panels, yet they are crucial to our understanding of how the Spanish monarchy defined its mission overseas. The iconography of the altarpiece as a whole made visible Spain’s self-image as the creator and guarantor of a militant, evangelical Christian empire, dedicated to spreading the Gospel as well as fomenting trade and colonization.

Sixteenth-century history may have been recorded most spectacularly in prestigious folio chronicles, but readers had more ready access to printed books that conveyed this history in epitome. This essay focuses on how Edmund Spenser (1552?– 99) appropriated the rhetoric and form of such printed redactions in his rendition of fairy history found in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1596). Through his abridged fairy chronicle, Spenser connects to a broadly defined reading public, emphasizes the deeds not only of kings but their imperial and civic deputies, and provides an alternative interpretive pathway through his poem.

This study examines the role that Michelangelo’s letters have played in biographies of the artist. It focuses on two periods — the Renaissance and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter witnessing an outpouring of biographies on Michelangelo. The first section of the study examines the way in which Giorgio Vasari edited the letters he received from Michelangelo in his 1568 vita of the sculptor. In the second section I analyze how the availability of the letters, through a long and fitful process, influenced the way in which biographers from John S. Harford to Giovanni Papini characterize Michelangelo and his world.

This article follows a young Thomas Wyatt (ca. 1503–42) — the Henrician poet and courtier —on his journeys to France and especially to Italy in 1526–27. It finds him at the greatest courts of Europe at a climacteric in European affairs, during which, by default, he had a part to play. It discovers the dramatic circumstances of his kidnap, ransom, and release. The article conjectures upon the ways in which Wyatt's Italian journey was formative for his political and poetic career, and upon the brilliance with which he transmuted the events of a life lived so intensely, so restlessly, into art.

This essay proposes a new reading of the famous passage comparing the devotional value of Flemish and Italian painting in Francisco de Holanda’s (1517-84) Portuguese treatise Da pintura antigua. My purpose is to demonstrate that the polarizing and divisive claims made about Flemish painting are unmade in the text itself. The major grounds upon which Flemish art is attacked in the first of the four Roman dialogues are upheld for admiration in the second. The strongly misogynistic character of the passage on Flemish painting has obscured the more complex and shifting treatment of gender identity in the text.

This article examines a central narrative and ethical motif of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene —the golden chain —in the context of Spenser’s broader debts to Homeric epic. While largely neglected in favor of more immediate sources, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is profoundly felt in Spenser’s mythography of strife. In its representation of the consequences of cosmological and spiritual strife, The Faerie Queene realizes the classical and late antique allegorical tradition of interpreting Homeric epic as illustrative of the doctrines of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Empedocles. Its moral landscape structured according to the oppositional yet complementary forces of love and strife, Spenser’s epic enacts the Homeric-Empedoclean epic of the allegorists so as to offer its own etiology of discord, one sympathetic with, but also distinct from, that of Homer.

Beginning with several tales in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the early fourteenth-century Florentine painter Buonamico Buffalmacco was often portrayed as a carefree, funloving trickster. As this paper demonstrates, that image has obscured the deeper significance that Buffalmacco and his works held for Giorgio Vasari in the second edition of The Lives of the Artists (1568). That significance is especially apparent in his account of the eccentric painter and his dealings with the nuns of Faenza. In two humorous anecdotes about the nuns and Buffalmacco, Vasari poetically reveals the aesthetic and theological significance of the painter’s art. In spite of Buffalmacco’s less-than-diligent character, Vasari praises his ability to “transubstantiate” paint, an ability that placed him among the primi lumi.

Commentators on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — perhaps mesmerized by the play’s reputation as an exemplar of pure love — have overlooked its references to the most notorious rapists of classical culture: Tereus, Hades, Tarquin, and Paris. Our point is not to accuse Romeo, but instead to demonstrate that Shakespeare characteristically hints at crimes that only flicker through the minds of potential perpetrators and victims, who must draw on a collective cultural legacy to judge, articulate, and control those possibilities. Reducing the play’s spectrum of sexual aggression (including voyeurism, insincere seduction, displaced phallic violence, angry possessiveness, and forced marriage) into a neat binary of rape and consent may be socially desirable, but it erases the ethical and psychological complexity of adolescent courtship. Ignoring the ancient specter of rape haunting this story also precludes recognizing what Juliet does heroically to exorcise it.

This article examines the frameworks of artistic competition embodied in a 1534 contract for a contest of medalmaking between Benvenuto Cellini and Giovanni Bernardi, and in descriptions of other competitions, especially in Cellini’s autobiography. Strategies, decorum, and rhetoric of such competitions were embedded in notions of honor. In addition to personal and professional honor, court status and patronage were also at stake. By means of his competition with Bernardi and his medal of Pope Clement VII, Cellini hoped to recoup lost standing and favor, along with concomitant commissions and emoluments at the papal court — specifically, it is argued, an appointment at the Roman mint, where Cellini had been replaced by Bernardi in 1534. Cellini, however, was never rehabilitated at Clement’s court, and within days of the death of his patron, he murdered Pompeo de’ Capitaneis, the rival goldsmith whom he blamed for his loss of honor and profit.