This article centers on two images from the life of Hercules and a border painting modeled after Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Das Meerwunder (ca. 1498) in a Kyriale produced ca. 1500 for a Dominican convent in Toledo, Spain. It discusses the cultural significance of Hercules in Spain, and Toledo in particular, then presents a contextually sensitive reading of the image derived from Dürer’s enigmatic engraving, whose subject has yet to be identified. The image in the Kyriale appears to represent Hercules’ once-famous rescue of the Trojan princess Hesione from a sea monster.

This paper is an examination of the civic government of Genoa from 1435 to 1464, and of the principles that underlay how it was conducted. Despite the political instability caused by contenders for the dogeship, and the division of offices between Guelfs and Ghibellines and between nobles and popolari, the civic government generally operated on a consensual basis. The principles and practices of the civic government restricted the power of the doges and prevented them from turning their position into an effective signoria.

This study examines the role that Michelangelo’s letters have played in biographies of the artist. It focuses on two periods — the Renaissance and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter witnessing an outpouring of biographies on Michelangelo. The first section of the study examines the way in which Giorgio Vasari edited the letters he received from Michelangelo in his 1568 vita of the sculptor. In the second section I analyze how the availability of the letters, through a long and fitful process, influenced the way in which biographers from John S. Harford to Giovanni Papini characterize Michelangelo and his world.

Commentators on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — perhaps mesmerized by the play’s reputation as an exemplar of pure love — have overlooked its references to the most notorious rapists of classical culture: Tereus, Hades, Tarquin, and Paris. Our point is not to accuse Romeo, but instead to demonstrate that Shakespeare characteristically hints at crimes that only flicker through the minds of potential perpetrators and victims, who must draw on a collective cultural legacy to judge, articulate, and control those possibilities. Reducing the play’s spectrum of sexual aggression (including voyeurism, insincere seduction, displaced phallic violence, angry possessiveness, and forced marriage) into a neat binary of rape and consent may be socially desirable, but it erases the ethical and psychological complexity of adolescent courtship. Ignoring the ancient specter of rape haunting this story also precludes recognizing what Juliet does heroically to exorcise it.