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.

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.

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.

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.