In book one, chapter two of his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio Machiavelli's rehearsal of the commonplace that every city must undergo a natural cycle of political permutations is interrupted by the specter of inexorable decline: “This is the cycle [cerchio] within which all states that have governed themselves and now govern themselves revolve; but only rarely do they revert to the same form of government because almost no state can repeatedly undergo these mutations and remain afoot.” The circle—figure of sameness, continuity, and conservation in Plato's ontology and Aristotle's politics—will nearly always be broken and spun out into a descending line—figure of difference, discontinuity, and loss. And this near certainty, as is revealed by the anthropomorphism of the closing metaphor (“rimanere in piede“), is in turn rooted in the deeper human reality of death and intergenerational flux.

During his sojourn in Rome from 1524 to 1527, Rosso painted a panel of a dead Christ with angels for his friend Leonardo Tornabuoni, bishop of Borgo San Sepolcro. Vasari saw the painting in the house of Giovanni della Casa at mid-century, but subsequently it was lost from general sight until the 1950s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 1). The panel has been assessed by art historians as one of signal importance, at once a high water mark in Rosso's own work and masterpiece of the early Roman maniera, a painting remarkable for its great beauty and artfulness, composed after long study of Michelangelo and the antique. The first considered estimation of the work emphasized its sculptural qualities, its formal tensions in pose and color, and its artistic virtuosity, suggesting that the subject was a version of the imago pietatis, reworked into a resurrecting Christ, emblematic of the patron's titular see. Although still impressed with the suavity of the panel in relation to Rosso's previous work, a subsequent critic was more conscious of its ambivalences, discerning a continuity with the young Rosso's individualistic and eccentric sensibilities, finally identifying the subject as an assertion of the eucharistic real presence. Analogies with language have been advanced, among them an allusion to the intensely equivocal nature of the painting. For one scholar the artfulness of the panel and Rosso's artistic attitudes were separate from their religious purpose; for another, they were absolutely at odds.

The fame of Giorgio Vasari's Vite de’ eccellcnti pittori satltori ed architettori, both as a masterpiece of Italian literature and the model of modern biography, has perhaps slighted our awareness of the degree to which this author was also a publicist of his own artistic persona. Actually the documentation Vasari left of his professional and domestic affairs is probably more copious than the research he compiled for the lives of his fellow artists. Yet Vasari must have come to the idea of an autobiography relatively late in life. At the end of the second edition of the Vite published in 1568, he devoted “alcune cose degli artefici della nostra Accademia di Firenze,” followed by a “descrizione” of his own career up to the present. Rather than an expression of self-effacement, here the distinction between description and biography seems to be a question of genre. Why Vasari found the scheme of the vita suitable for some contemporaries and not for others is difficult to explain. As for his own life, the prospect of writing the definitive version at this stage no doubt would have seemed a bit premature.

Following the death of Marsilio Ficino on i October 1499 the Ufficiali dello Studio discussed whether they should attend his funeral in view of Ficino's ties with the Studio fiorentino, the University of Florence. These ties dated back to at least 1451 when Ficino was a student of logic at the Studio. He continued to study philosophy and medicine there throughout the 1450s, acquiring a good knowledge of Aristotle and Averroes. Ficino was still described as a student of philosophy in 1462. In 1466 he was amongst the witnesses to a doctorate granted by the Studio. Even though no more has been known of the ties between the young Ficino and the Studio, there has long been a debate over whether he taught there. This debate can now be settled. New documentary evidence proves that he was hired by the Ufficiali to lecture on philosophy in 1466.

We are now, in 1992, searching to find the meaning of an event 500 years distant in time. For us as Americans the importance of the Columbian voyages is obvious. In the past ten years the great wealth of research, publication, and debate on ancient American cultures has made the impact on the Americas abundantly clear.

For Europe the impact is much less clear. We say that the old world ended almost immediately, that a new world came into being when Europe ended its isolation from America. By this we mean that European perceptions of world geography began to change as early as 1498 —not just dotting the map of the Ocean Sea with more islands, but perceiving that South America was a continent whose existence was never imagined by the ancients. We also mean that the natural world began changing from the old world of two separate ecologies into a new world-wide environment.

Adistinctive feature in the new directions I have selected for this presentation is what I call the “darker side” of the European Renaissance, which could be condensed in “the discontinuity of the classical tradition.” Such discontinuity becomes apparent in the fractured cultural products which do not conform to the aesthetic norms of the early modern period, and they are, consequently, marginalized from histories of ideas, art or literature. I have also used elsewhere the expression “colonial semiosis” to distinguish the fractured semiotic practices in the colonial periphery resulting from the clash between hegemonic norms and values guiding semiotic practices in metropolitan centers, their extension to the colonial periphery, and the resistance and adaptation to them from the perspective of the native population to whose historical legacy the European Renaissance was quite meaningless. I have selected, therefore, those scholarly works which have in the past fifteen years introduced a new perspective by looking at the European Renaissance from the New World colonial periphery.