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.

Travelers in Florence around the year 1500 who happened on Piazza San Marco toward evening might well, if they listened carefully, have caught the muffled strains of a lauda sung by the Dominican friars beyond the walls of the convent of San Marco. And if any of the words had been audible, chances are good they would have been “Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum habitare fratres in unum” (“Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” Ps. 132:1). Only a few years before, the streets of Florence had echoed with the singing of laude such as Ecce quam bonum as thousands of children —the Savonarolan fanciulli processed through the city on their way to the duomo. But now, in the aftermath of Savonarola's execution in 1498, his revolutionary movement had gone underground, and his adherents had retreated from the streets to the relative safety of cloisters such as San Marco.

Whatever the poem's ambiguities, the Orlando Furioso's ending has always seemed allusively unproblematic: in the words of Ariosto's sixteenth-century English translator, Sir John Harington, “in the death of Rodomont, to shew himself a perfect imitator of Virgill, [Ariosto] endeth just as Virgil ends his Aeneads with the death of Turnus.”

In his prefatory letter to Cristoforo Landino's commentary to the Comedy, Marsilio Ficino presents a dramatic encounter between Dante and Florence. The city's lament over Dante's long absence moves Apollo to command Mercury to possess the “pious“ mind of the “divine poet” Cristoforo Landino. Mercury then assumes Landino's countenance, arouses Dante from his sleep with a life-giving wand, and transports him to Florence. There, Dante is gloriously crowned as he prophesied in Paradiso 25.1-12. The significance of this elaborate mythological sequence is obvious: through the merits of Landino's commentary, Dante is honorably restored to Florence after an exile of almost two centuries.

Ficino's high expectations of the commentary's favorable reception were not unfounded. Presented to the Florentine Signoria on 30 August, 1481 in a sumptuous edition with engravings now attributed to Botticelli, Landino's commentary rapidly won the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries.

In a recent essay on new historicism Louis Montrose is concerned that “the terms in which the problem of ideology has been posed and is now circulating in Renaissance literary studies—namely as an opposition between ‘containment’ and ‘subversion’—are so reductive, polarized, and undynamic as to be of little or no conceptual value. A closed and static, singular and homogeneous notion of ideology must be succeeded by one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual.“ Montrose's critique and recommended solution seem both valid and commonsensical, yet they are infrequently practiced, perhaps nowhere more hegemonically than in discussions of Renaissance elite ceremonies.

A few years ago, Felix Gilbert, after a brief survey of various studies on Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentitte (1520-24), noticed the need to focus on the work's historical significance, and proposed a reading that goes beyond the mere narrative account of the rise and development of the city of Florence. Having shown that the work's structure follows the cyclical theory of history prevalent in Renaissance historiography, Gilbert goes on to suggest that Machiavelli anticipates Florence's rise from its present decline: “It would seem possible to suggest therefore that Machiavelli intended to represent the situation in which Italy found itself in the early sixteenth century as carrying with it the possibilities of a new ascent. “ The book, he argues, contains the same political message conveyed in his earlier works, such as the Prince (1513), which appropriately ends on the optimistic note that a redentore will come to lead the peninsula out of its ruinous downfall and back to glory and prosperity.

In traditional Europe, social reproduction rested in good part on inheritance. Property and status passed from generation to generation according to varying schemes of transmission tied to notions of blood descent, filiation, lineage, and affinity. Tracing changes in these schemes has been one of the central concerns of social history. Much of Renaissance social history has also gravitated around inheritance. By establishing magistracies like the Ufficiali dei Pupilli to oversee legal guardianship of minors and providing a public fund for dowries, the Monte delle doti, such cities as Florence indicated how important familial continuity was. Thanks to the work done by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, William Kent, and others for Florence; of Stanley Chojnacki and others for Venice; and of yet other scholars for other cities, we are in a much better position to understand how important and complex inheritance was, how generally successful it was in preserving property in the hands of a narrow elite, to what degree marital and other practices were geared to inheritance strategies, and how difficult those strategies could be to carry out in the face of demographic and economic realities.

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.

In 1564 Titian traveled to Brescia to discuss a commission for a set of three allegorical paintings for the ceiling of the Council Hall. While there, according to a hitherto unnoticed reference in Ascanio de’ Mori's Giuoco piacevole, he presented a Brescian noblewoman, Barbara Calina, with a painting or drawing representing the mythological figure Helle.

Ascanio Pipino de’ Mori da Ceno (1533—1591) is most often remembered today for his fourteen stories which are said to epitomize the adjustment of novellieri to the new moral climate of the Counter Reformation. In his own day, however, this Mantuan courtiersoldier- turned-author was perhaps best known for his Giuoco piacevole, which was popular enough to warrant three editions, in 1575, 1580, and 1590.

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.

The rarest figural view is that involving a protagonist seen from behind, not directing a look outward toward the spectator. One such example is Giulio Campagnola's engraving of a solitary woman in a landscape, seen in a three-quarters rear view (fig. i). Radically stripped of iconographic attributes as it is, this print is less narrative, or even lyrical, in its presence than many pastoral compositions. Here there is no warm, atmospheric, and mellow world of wish-fulfillment as in the Dresden Venus. Giulio offered no paper Giorgione but rather a place in which lush vegetation clashes against sharp turrets, and no Cupid attends upon dormant, soft female flesh. Giulio distanced the image from predigested literary conventions. Yet the art historical inclination is to assimilate Giulio's work to Giorgione's, and furthermore to understand Giorgione's importance as consisting in his visualization of the hitherto literary world of pastoral. Ut pictor poe'sis can be too handy an axiom.

Like Youth and Age or Reason and Passion, War and Peace was one of those polarities that Renaissance writers persistently thought about as well as with. Reflection upon war and peace was at the heart of the Humanist movement, just as the conduct of war and peace was at the foundation of the European state system during the early modern period. This concern with war and peace arose from Humanism's defining traits: its exaltation of fame, its fascination with the military cultures of Greece and Rome, its emphasis on human dignity and freedom, its pursuit of secular knowledge in history and psychology, and its political commitment to improving the quality of institutional and personal life.’

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.

With all the insights recent works on the history of homosexuality and culture have given us, the best, Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England and Eve K. Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, have also made us aware of what we do not know of earlier periods. While some areas of the tabooed subject will forever be closed to us, others are still amenable to patient labor in the vineyard of scholarship. My present focus is on the three final volumes of what in its French edition has come to be called the Amadis de Gaule, probably the most monumental (twenty-one volumes) and popular romance in the Renaissance. Strictly speaking, only the first four volumes, the ones Don Quixote's curate agreed to preserve for their literary merit, are the Amadis de Gaule; the other volumes are continuations by other hands.

Because rationalism and logocentrism have no eternal political essences, … they can be put to different political uses in different historical contexts. This is not to say that epistemological claims (or literary styles, or any other symbolic structures) are ideology-free and impervious to ideological analysis, only that the relation between the epistemological claim or other symbolic structure and the interests it serves is a contextual one that can change as the historical context changes.

Bacon's Only Piece of fictional writing, in addition to the masques he wrote for a Christmas entertainment at Gray'sjnn in 1594, was published posthumously by Rawley. Most commentators assume that he wrote New Atlantis at the time he hoped to become provost of Eton in 1623. Bacon's death in 1626 meant that, apart from the last edition of the Essays in 1625, this was his last major work written in English. Many critics have discussed Bacon's stylistic methods, and several have speculated that his view and practice of linguistic representation in the 1620s had become rigorously non-metaphoric for the purpose of imparting scientific knowledge.

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“

As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.

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.