This article reconsiders Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Triton Fountain and Fountain of the Bees, both commissioned by Pope Urban VIII Barberini. Modern scholarship, citing a Renaissance emblem in which Triton represents “immortality acquired by literary study,” has asserted that the Triton Fountain is a statement on the literary achievements of Urban, who was a poet of some note. In classical...
Conjuring the Concept of Rome
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This essay sets forth a nuanced interpretation of Baldassare Peruzzi’s stage design for La Calandria (1514) that addresses the spatial disassociations found in the drawing in relation to active modes of visual engagement.Eschewing traditional and overarching generalizations about scenography in the sixteenth century, like the pictorial manifestation of Aristotle’s theory of unity...
Parental Authority & Freedom of Choice
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After a long debate the Council of Trent decided against the validity of marriages contracted informally, without a public ceremony.Marriages without parental consent, however, remained valid. These decisions are frequently described as a pragmatic compromise, where one controversial reform was rejected in favor of another, equally controversial. Yet there was, as this article will show, a...
Vergilianism in Early Cinquecento Rome
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This article discusses the centrality of Vergilianism in the neo-Latin literature of High Renaissance Rome. Poets and intellectuals in Rome appropriated the themes, language, and episodes of Vergil’s texts to articulate a vision for papal Rome in the early sixteenth century. The works of the Roman humanist Egidio Gallo, situated within the framework of the texts of more notable poets...