Broadening the interdisciplinary base of study on Renaissance Homer, this essay looks to cassone (wedding chest) painting in the Quattrocento to explore how the textual reception of the “Odyssey” was enriched by the visual arts. As artifacts, wedding chests had a role in the public sphere, though they were destined for the private, and they made the epic available to audiences of nonelites. Nausicaa is a key figure, merging the vernacular courtly love tradition and romance. In working across the fields of literary study and art history, this essay introduces new critical concepts to account for the complexities of Renaissance reception of Homer.

In focusing on Michelangelo’s signature, recent scholarship on his “Pietà” in St. Peter’s has separated the sculpture from its spiritual intent. In contrast, this article will consider how the sculpture group spoke to its original religious context, principally as the funerary monument of Michelangelo’s powerful French patron, Cardinal Lagraulas. The Rome “Pietà” was an important part of the funeral rites for the cardinal that mirrors and amplifies the liturgy surrounding death, particularly the hour of vespers. Reconstructing the sculpture’s relationship to its liturgical and funerary ensemble will highlight Michelangelo’s iconographic and artistic ingenuity in the service of religion and his patron.

This article examines the treatise on the general council (the “Tractado”) published in 1536 by a Spanish jurist serving in the imperial administration in the Kingdom of Naples. It analyzes the content and the context in which it was conceived and argues that the treatise legitimated Charles V’s call for a general council in the political context of 1535–36, which meant supporting the political aims of the Ghibelline faction of Charles V’s court in Naples. The analysis of conciliarist doctrine in this treatise sheds new light on the relations between church and Crown in the context of the imperial policy of Charles V.

Humanists seeking to defend the classics in Christian-dominated Europe often reframed ancient philosophers as virtuous proto-Christians. This is particularly visible in the biographical paratexts written for printed editions of ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras, Epictetus, and Democritus, whose humanist editors’ Christianizing claims grew stronger over time. Pious humanists intended and expected the classics to strengthen and reaffirm Christian orthodoxy, but humanists’ own claims that pre-Christian sages, by the light of reason alone, had deduced the central truths of theology and surpassed Christians in the exercise of virtue inadvertently undermined the necessity of scripture and paved the way for later deism.

The English word tiger has an uncertain etymology and a curious history of use. Probably first seen in Europe in the fourth century BCE, the tiger, by the early modern age, had acquired a long history of folkloric associations. This article examines early modern uses of the word tiger in the context of the period’s linguistic debates about natural and conventional meaning. It seeks to present a history in which the word, through use, develops closer (if not necessarily natural) associations with the qualities of its referent.