The usual origin-story of the Palazzo Vecchio as a security measure for the city's executives taken in response to civic unrest does not hold up under a close analysis of the historical record and the architectural evidence. The original project of 1299, as distinguished from the building as modified 1306-1310, was not heavily fortified; and by contemporary standards the late 1290s was a comparatively peaceful interval. It is proposed that rather than fear, the immediate motivation for the decision to build was a crisis in civic honor. If so, the palace would have been initially an expression less of the core values of the mercantile class, officially at the helm of the republic, than of the excluded nobility, as represented by the arch-enemy of the regime, Corso Donati.

Donatello designed a lavish high altar for the Santo (S. Antonio) in Padua in the 1440s. This article considers how the interests and concerns of the altar's original beholders may have affected its design and reception. Specifically, pilgrims drawn to the Santo by Saint Anthony's tomb probably would have been impressed by the altar's general magnificence; elite Paduan citizens may have been most interested in the civic associations of the statues displayed on the altar; and the Santos Conventual Franciscan friars may well have interpreted the Antonine narrative reliefs and the altar's overall splendor in light of their growing rivalry with Observant Franciscans.

The subject of my lecture is the phenomenon of masking in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici. I begin with an overview of the evidence in favor of the early claims that Lorenzo himself invented the modern masquerade, and continue with an examination of images of Triumphs in art, showing how these evolved into quasi-theatrical displays with masqued participants. I then turn to the phenomenon of masking in the high art of Lorenzo himself Botticelli and Politian. My lecture ends with a consideration of Politian's Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, claiming that the poem commemorates and interprets the death of Giuliano by showing him to have been deluded by Cupid and by his mother Venus hidden behind the false masks of Pallas and Glory.

This essay examines short narrative (the Decameron, the Heptameion, the histoire tragique, and Till Eulenspiegel) as reflections of different models of justice within the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition. The exchanges among characters, and the conclusion of these exchanges, are patterned in ways that provide justice without requiring the virtuousness of any one character. The link between short narrative and justice illuminates the more general relationship between literature and more language in the Renaissance.

Marriage between Venetian patricians in the early decades of the sixteenth century was a matter of considerable moment. The process of joining two families — as narrated by a contemporary diarist—involved a choreography of events and a level of display in rituals more public than private in import: the lavish style of entertainment paralleled civic rituals in arguing the power of the Venetian city-state, and the strengthening of familial political and economic ties betokened the effectiveness of the city's urban polity and economic status. When private ceremonies went awry, the subsequent opprobrium underscored the community's interest in more proper procedures.

This article analyzes the intellectual content of civic humanism in the specific context of Medici power, asking the question: what ideological role did civic humanism play in Medicean Florence? It argues that there is no contradiction between the ideals of civic humanism and support for the Medici regime. On the contrary, civic humanism could be used to justify and legitimate Medici power. The article analyzes the writings of principal humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Francesco Filelfo, showing that Hans Baron's republican “civic humanism “ was compatible with different constitutional forms and different distributions of power.

Christophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.

This article discusses the manner in which Ficino employs the figure of Pythagoras and various aspects of the Pythagorean tradition in the philosophical areas of psychology, moral philosophy, and ontology. It also argues that the figure of Pythagoras as prophet was particularly appealing to a Ficino situated in the cultural environment of late fifteenth-century Florence. Text, culture, and ideology interacted in a complex way: spurred on by his early appreciation of Iamblichus's soteriological presentation of Pythagoras, Ficino helped create an ideology in Florence which was receptive to a prophetic figure. The piece thus suggests that Ficino viewed a certain segment of the history of thought through late ancient, Iamblichean eyes.

This essay argues that Shakespeare drew on Plutarch's and Plato's representations of the Greek general Alcibiades in his representation of Prince Hal/King Henry V, and on classical and Renaissance representations of Socrates for his representation of Prince Hal's "tutor," Falstaff. Crucial to Shakespeare's adaption of these classical "characters" were the writings of Erasmus and Rabelais, which represented Socrates as both sophist and jovial Silenus. Shakespeare was also influenced by the association Symposium makes between Alcibiades and Dionysus, god of wine and of the theater. Consequently Hal/Henry emerges as a Dionysian Alcibiades, trained in sophistry by his Silenic Socrates, Falstaff, and able to dazzle his subjects with mystical rhetoric and to convert war to Dionysian play.

This essay explores how contemporary depictions of Anne Askew's examination and execution serve as textual sites of contested power between the Henrician conservatives and Protestant reformists who vied for control of English religion and politics during the mid-sixteenth-century. Both the Anglo-Catholics who prosecute Askew as a heretic and the Protestants who vindicate her as a saint attempt to shape and exploit her identity as a woman who has been tortured and burned at the stake. Amid the inquisitional voice of the state officials and the reformist discourse of the Protestant hagiographers, Askew's own text provides yet a third version.

The Venetian printmaker Giacomo Franco produced several engravings for the 1597 coronation of Morosina Morosini, the wife of doge Marin Grimani (1595-1605). Focusing on three of these prints in which a bird's-eye view of the city is framed with illustrations of the festivities, this essay explores relations between space, gender, allegory and costume as they were manifested in this rare female procession. An examination of the pictorial conventions used by Franco and other artists to depict the event suggests that Morosina's coronation functioned both to resist existing codes of gender but also to reassert female patrician status.

Marsilio Ficino's philosophy altered the canon of beauty to include gracious laughter. This significant detail invented a positive, spiritual reflection of the human joy of participation in the cosmic circuit, toward the love of God. It transcended the negative, moralistic denunciation of laughter in the classical and Christian traditions. His contemporaries virtually ignored this genius.

At first sight, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seems to be the only one of Ford's plays that is not pointedly and openly concerned with sexual deviation; in contrast to his other plays, it presents a cast of characters who are models of sexual rectitude. Sometimes, however, dogs that do not bark can be as significant as ones that do. This paper argues that Perkin Warbeck actually encodes a trangressive sexuality so subversive that its traces are hidden deep within the fabric of the play, visible only to a reading that historicizes Ford's work within very specific contexts and connects the play with the Buggery Statute.

It is my contention that the poetic collection Les Regrets by Joachim Du Bellay is a product of the humanist epistolary heritage. This essay attempts to demonstrate not only the importance of the epistolary and secretarial traditions for our understanding of Les Regrets, but also how Du Bellay uses them to elaborate a new poetics. Specifically, beginning with the epistolary and secretarial traditions in Europe, this study then moves to a discussion of the epistolary genre in French literary history and subsequently to the figure of the secretary in Renaissance poetry before focusing on Du Bellay's correspondance with Ronsard.

This essay interprets the question of subjectivity in Hamlet by reappraising Renaissance skepticism and by reexamining the medieval debate concerning the misery of man's existence, and the Renaissance celebration of man. A central concern is the significance of the commonplace in humanist rhetoric and dialectic, by which Stoic and Christian thought depreciates passion. In his anguish Hamlet discovers a unique subjectivity as he attempts to reject the wisdom of tradition. But the nature of thought cannot be separated from the nature of the mind that thinks, and Hamlet's selfhood capitulates to the role.

Lotto's Lucretia is posed in a way that Renaissance viewers would have recognized as masculine and therefore inappropriate for a lady. Moreover, Lucretia holds a fictive drawing, representing the suicide of her Roman namesake. The depiction of a fictive drawing was quite exceptional in the 1530s. Lottos reasons for posing his Lucretia in such an unexpected, masculine way, and his representation of her predecessor's death as a fictive drawing are the means whereby he asserts her virtue. Doing so, Lotto seems to question the traditional patriarchal definitions of woman, female chastity and female sexuality that Lucretia herself had come to embody.

The iconography of Bolsover Castle is much appreciated but little understood. This is because we have not recognized its dynamic, theatrical character, which centers on — indeed, implies the presence of its seventeenth-century owner, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Read in terms of Cavendish's self-conception as a figure of patriachal authority and Herculean passions, the castle emerges as a witty apologia for its owner — and perhaps even as a site for the pursuit of his amours. This reading sheds new light upon the relationship between Cavendish, Bolsover, and Ben Jonson, who provided the text for a royal visit to Bolsover in 1634.

The Renaissance was a period in which the honor code underwent a significant metamorphosis. The medieval, chivalric code of honor, with its emphasis on lineage, allegiance to one's lord and violence, evolved into an honor code that was both more moral and political in that it began to emphasize the individual conscience and allegience to the state. Analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and in particular its characters' use of promise, provides new and revealing insights into the evolving Renaissance codes of honor, for Shakespeare creates characters in Hamlet that represent various stages in the evolution of a changing honor system.

Imprecision appears to be the intended effect of the thematic plan of Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée, especially where signs of sexual identity are concerned. This study proposes a reading which, on two bases, accommodates the romance's semiotic vagueness. First, the ideological context of Neoplatonism clarifies the work's ongoing "Symposium" on love. The roots of this dialogue may be traced to Plato's Symposium and magnetic theory which foreshadow L'Astreé's tendency toward character self-representation on a middle ground between male and female. Second, evidence of a structure of ambiguity in other areas of the romance's composition corroborates the argument.

The important early Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526-1611) has the distinction of having been a biographer of men, a biographer of women, an autobiographer, and the subject of biography. As such he and his texts seem particularly apt subjects for study given the current interest by scholars in a number of disciplines in the various forms of “life-writing“ produced so abundantly in the early modern period. In this essay I briefly examine Ribadeneyra's most famous biography, that of his mentor Ignatius Loyola, as well as two little-known and virtually unstudied texts: his Life of the pious laywoman Estefanía Manrique de Castilla and his autobiography or Confessions. I focus upon the ways in which he treated issues of authority and obedience in constructing as exemplary the lives of these three Spanish nobles and explore his strategies for enlisting life-writing in the campaign for a renewed, activist Catholicism.