In the tumultuous time preceding the French Wars of Religion, one innovative partisan author infused his anti-Protestant rhetoric with nationalistic discourse based in the myth of rural virtue. Drawing on existing anxieties regarding urbanization, Artus Désiré depicted Geneva as a festering slum teeming with corruption and debauchery. He contrasted this with an idyllic French countryside ...

The placement of powerful figures within a nocturnal landscape in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Viterbo Pietà (ca. 1512–16) is commonly explained as a stylistic union of Michelangelo’s Tuscan disegno and Sebastiano’s Venetian colorito. Yet this dialectic became a concern to art theorists only later in mid-century. As this essay shows, Sebastiano’s work can be situated within a more immediate context...