In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari had heard that Landino would lecture on Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares during the academic year 1465-6. “I am an eager student,” he wrote to Guidetti on 14 September, “and I would be grateful to know what Landino said when he explained the first letter. For in my view it is quite hard because of the historical questions involved, and few have the ability to tackle so great an enterprise.“

Dürer's portrait of Erasmus is an image so familiar that for most of us it has become the quintessence of the scholar portrait (Fig. 1). In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—few have thought about this famous engraving with any precision. It comes as a surprise, moreover, when one examines the literature, to find that the encounter between such a notable pair of personages has produced a strangely limited and unsatisfying body of commentary. What emerges is basically the critical dilemma summed up in one writer's assessment of Dürer's effort: “Il a fait une admirable gravure, mais un mauvais portrait.“ Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky found certain commendable traits in the Erasmus engraving. But these and other scholars reach consensus principally in their negative judgment of how Dürer's print functions as a likeness of Erasmus.

It is no novelty to stress the paradistic aspects of Rabelais's style. As early as 1915, Emile Besch had described Gargantua and Pantagruel as “une parodie des romans de chevalerie,” and this broad critical assessment has not really been seriously challenged ever since. Yet most of the studies devoted to Rabelais's comical imitations seem to concentrate either on what he owes to the ancient, medieval or humanistic tradition, or on the specific techniques through which he mocks or distorts various genres, modes or styles. More specifically, very little attention has been paid so far to Rabelais's attitude vis-à-vis art works of his time, although we know very well that, like many other contemporary writers, he had a keen interest in pictorial compositions.