The civic-historical sweep of Padua – from late 1200s republican commune through Carrara domination in the 1300s to final subjugation by Venice in 1405 – delivered a cultural revival in classical text and pedagogy. As humanism would affect art, so Alberti would give that lexicon to an erudite audience. Examining Alberti’s education in Padua reveals the context of what he read that became the source for De pictura and how antique and medieval texts began to inform its vocabulary. Illustrious teachers imbued Alberti, firsthand, with humanism: his instructor from about 1412 to 1420, Gasparino Barzizza, and his exceptional school, as well as dynamic associates Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre attended to the classical literature, mathematical precepts, monuments, and painting that would engender De pictura.

Alberti never mentions Florence in De pictura. This is intentional as the tract not so much ignores as merely suggests previous periods of art, and Alberti’s refusal to specify those interludes, such as Romanesque, Gothic, or medieval, reflects the need for a humanist audience to have all precepts couched in the domain of antiquity. His cryptic indication of sources consequently demands forensic scrutiny of his visual paradigm before Florence. The text itself invites this. In the face of no hard evidence or documentation, Alberti’s claim in De pictura to be an ostensible painter begs the query as to where or with whom he began his study of draftsmanship, either in the studio or in practice. Although he had left Padua for Bologna by 1420, conjecture suggests that while in Padua he may have seen and even studied the art of genius before and contemporary to his age.

This chapter describes challenges of proposing a different understanding of a well-known phenomenon, imitation (and its development in young children). The first challenge was to study imitation as a shared motor activity in a two-person perspective, instead of as a solitary tool for learning or forming mental images. A related challenge was to analyse imitation as a multifaceted phenomenon involving a hierarchy of mechanisms according to what, when, and how you imitate. This led to challenging the assumption that people with autism spectrum disorder cannot imitate and claiming, “Yes, they can!” Finally, hyperscanning two brains during synchronic imitation allows assessment of interbrain synchronization. From this an ultimate challenge emerges: to see imitation in its substitutive role as a multiplier of symbolic creations in a two-person generative mind. More generally, I explain how such a perspective builds on the philosophical framework of Henri Wallon that I encountered early in my career and that stood in opposition to the then-prevailing Piagetian paradigm.

The conclusion summarises the main argument of the book: that the mirror-image, as an object and as a metaphor, was critical to the mimetic definition of painting that we recognise as the key pictorial development of Renaissance art. If perspective was painting’s means, the mirror was its exemplum. Tracing the conceptual elaboration of the reflective image, it concludes that the prolific representation of the inset-mirror motif within early modern painting was both the rebus and matrix of its own pictorial representation.

Almost immediately after its publication in 1770, writers recognized The Deserted Village as a politically radical poem. This view is reflected in several imitations published in Britain in the decades immediately following. Writers in the British colonies in North America and the early United States adapted the poem to other ends, replacing the temporal relationship between the two Auburns in Goldsmith’s poem with a spatial relationship. This substitution allowed them to read The Deserted Village as a description of England and the Auburn of old as a representation of the promise of the emerging nation. This chapter traces the afterlife of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, his only poem to have had a considerable influence on other poets, from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reworkings in Britain and America through to contemporary reimaginings by Irish poets.

This chapter first addresses the question of whether latecomer firms will catch up with and eventually overtake the incumbent by merely imitating the incumbent or by initiating innovation different from those of incumbents. Section 3 deals with the coevolution of firms and surrounding institutions in the context of post-reform China where firms with diverse ownership have emerged. Productivity of locally owned enterprises is shown to eventually catch up with foreign-owned enterprises, because institutions developing over time were better exploited by the former than the latter. It suggests that private firms cannot prosper without sound institutions, and institutional development may be useless unless there are private firms that can benefit from this institutional development. Section 4 will elaborate the case of one region, Hsinchu City, in Taiwan to show that its long-term trajectory of upgrading is driven by the rise of a leading big business, namely TSMC. The final section finds that the behavior of Korean firms earlier corresponded with that of typical catching-up firms (e.g., prioritizing growth over profitability, borrowing and investing more, and specializing in short-cycle technologies) but currently show radical changes in their behavioral pattern to show signs of convergence toward the behavior of mature firms in the US.

In this chapter, we explore the intricate relationship between early social interactions and the development of social cognition in humans. We address how imitation lays the foundation for subsequent social learning and how humans process information about themselves and others. Beginning with a discussion of our innate social nature, we emphasize the bidirectional influence of social and cognitive processes from birth, highlighting the pivotal role of social interaction in shaping childrens understanding of actions and interpersonal attention. Key topics covered include early biases supporting social cognition, such as contingency awareness and the progression toward understanding physical and psychological causation. The chapter also examines the development of mental state reasoning in individuals, exploring the significance of interest in faces, eyes, biological motion perception, and the differentiation between animate and inanimate objects. Finally, we discuss the impact of atypical social cognition in neurodevelopmental disorders like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), exploring diagnostic and intervention techniques, contributing to a deeper understanding of the developmental underpinnings of social cognition in humans.

Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

This chapter examines the poems of Juvencus, Prudentius, and Ausonius, not primarily as specimens of a late-antique aesthetics, but as instruments for the propagation of religious knowledge and the consolidation of Christian hegemony through the appropriation of pagan tools of art. The poems will be considered both as vehicles of acculturation and as objects of culture in their own right, expressing and fostering a new sense of moral and political ascendancy. It will be argued that where Juvencus appropriates the hexameter form and tropes and images from classical epic, Prudentius seems to invent new forms with the purpose of superseding classical culture and adapting its imagery to a Christian world-view. In Ausonius, Christian imagery is subliminal, betokening his own certitude that the victory of the church is unassailable; it will be argued that in his crucifixion of Cupid, subliminal use of Christian images hastens the dissolution of the pagan sensibility from within.

I argue that moral intuitions are guided by social heuristics, which are not distinctive from other heuristics in the adaptive toolbox. One and the same heuristic can solve problems that we call moral and those we do not. That perspective helps explain the processes underlying moral intuition rather than taking it as an unexplained primitive. While moral psychologists debate over whether our moral sense is reflective and rational, as in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory, or intuitive and nonrational, as in Jonathan Haidt’s theory, I believe that any assumed opposition and ranking is a misleading start. Both intuition and deliberation are involved in moral behavior, as they are in decision-making in general. The result of deliberation may become automized over a lifetime or generations, or intuitive judgments may be justified post hoc. If Darwin is right that the function of morality is to create and maintain the coherence of groups, then social heuristics are the tools towards that goal. This adaptive view explains apparent systematic inconsistencies in moral behavior and takes the phenomenon of moral luck seriously. Virtue is found not only in people, but also in environments.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.

The epilogue considers the afterlives of “matter” and “making” in the Elizabethan period. Through brief readings of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, the epilogue demonstrates that both ideas continue to guide literary practice during this period. At the same time, however, the economic and political position of the Elizabethan poet differs markedly from the place that earlier court writers had occupied in the sphere of cultural production, and this shift in position motivates a gradual turn, in Elizabethan literary theory, away from notions of “making,” which draw attention to the material process by which literature is constructed, and towards notions of “authorship,” which hold instead that literature is produced by an autonomous figure whose type of work is categorically distinct from other kinds of labor. “Authorship” thus emerges from an ideological shift predicated, not upon a fundamental difference in literary technique, but upon a change in the conditions under which early modern poets worked.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.

Given the apparent importance of exempla to Cicero’s project in De Officiis, any account of Cicero’s philosophical method in this work is forced to grapple with the question of how these historical insets function within the text. Yet understanding how, exactly, they contribute to the reader’s moral progress is an interpretative challenge: Cicero’s treatment warns us against taking them simply as models for imitation. Instead, I argue, Cicero focuses on three different, but related, functions for his exempla within De Officiis. First, looking at the behaviour of others can help us to develop the analytical skills necessary to correctly deliberate about our own actions. Secondly, exempla work to verify the theoretical claims of the text. Finally, they show the beneficial outcomes of following the teachings of the text, in terms of the glory and praise that accrues to those who engage in correct action – though, as we shall see, this strategy is only effective because of Cicero’s radical redefinition of the concepts of glory and praise.