Francesco Sansovino’s highly popular sixteenth-century dialog on Venice is yet to be recognized as a key moment in the connection of artistic style to geography as was increasingly promoted by early modern art criticism. Close examination of Sansovino’s changes to his dialog over its first three editions show that Sansovino (a Tuscan who made his career in Venice) chose to frame his discussion of art (sculpture, especially) as a juxtaposition of Tuscan and Venetian character. The essay argues that Sansovino’s dialog was instrumental for the highly influential, however artificial, binary oppositions (Florence/Venice; Michelangelo/Titian; design/color) that are central to Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 Lives of the Artists, a book that shaped art-historical discourse for centuries.

During the plague of 1576–77, medical ideas and practices assumed a central role in Archbishop Carlo Borromeo’s (1538–84) Counter-Reformation thought. This article argues that, amid the outbreak, Borromeo intervened in the medical sphere in order to advance his religiopolitical program. Through his cooperation with the civic authorities, the archbishop enforced public health measures of separation and confinement. These measures, which he promoted by enmeshing religious and medical reasoning, reflected the Counter-Reformation ethos of purification and facilitated social disciplining. Simultaneously, the archbishop advanced a model of pastoral and medical care that emphasized touching the sick. By doing so, he endorsed another significant aspect of post-Tridentine Catholicism: the construction of channels of proximity with the believers. In the aftermath of the epidemic, this model was used by the Capuchin Friar Paolo Bellintani (ca. 1530–90) to claim superiority in medical issues. His position exhibits the extent to which the medical sphere became a site for fortifying the church’s authority in Borromeo’s Milan.

Condivi’s brief report about Michelangelo’s service as the chief architect of the Saint Peter Basilica in his 1553 biography is largely dedicated to Michelangelo’s reluctance in accepting the commission and his recalcitrance in refusing payment for his service. Surprisingly, Condivi prescinds from giving the expected reason why Michelangelo declined remuneration, namely, that his work is done purely for the love of God. In this article, I propose that Michelangelo’s behavior in St. Peter (as described by Condivi), as well as the cancellation of the fresco of Christ donating the keys to St. Peter in the Pauline Chapel and its replacement with the crucifixion of St. Peter, are explicable in view of a religious crisis experienced in the second half of 1546 by the artist and his mentor Vittoria Colonna, a leading member of the reform group known as the spirituali, when it became apparent that the Council of Trent is going to declare justification by faith as heresy. This led him to follow Vittoria Colonna and renounce the authority of the Roman Church in favor of a Protestant-like belief in sola fide and become a Nicodemite. The new religious outlook of the artist was incompatible with the painting of the originally planned Donation of the keys and with the construction of the Saint Peter Basilica, both symbolizing the authority of the Roman Church and papal power of the keys. This incompatibility provides an explanation for the reluctance of the artist to accept the assignment of St. Peter, his refusal to gain financial benefit from the job, as well as his decision to cancel the Donation of the keys. According to the epistolary evidence, this period endured until around 1554, at which point Michelangelo reconciled with the Catholic Church and began to view his work in the Saint Peter Basilica as his greatest service to Christianity, done solely for the love of God.

This article takes a book culture studies approach to Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisnero’s interpretation of his Bible’s layout by comparing it to the layouts of other multilingual books from Origen’s Hexapla (ca. 240) down to Brian Walton’s Polyglot Bible of 1652–57. Heretofore, scholars have studied Jiménez de Cisneros’s Bible almost exclusively for the development of humanism in sixteenth-century Spain, but this research strives to understand this Bible within the context of shifting political paradigms during the period that functioned in concert with ongoing developments in European educational philosophies. Archbishop Jiménez de Cisneros’s Bible project took significant measures to wrest the Hebrew word from its originators and asserted Spain’s superiority in competition with other Christian states, but in doing so, it provided a location for Jewish endurance and adaptation as well as fuel for the Protestant Reformation.

In his poetry, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) explored the eye from both a physiological and a psychological perspective. This essay demonstrates that for him the organs of vision constituted a gateway to the intellect-soul, the eyes were a means by which lover and beloved, beholder and beheld touched, and the mind was their place of encounter and negotiation. Analyzing descriptions of the eye and the gaze in Michelangelo’s verse and elucidating the roots of his phenomenology of love in theories of Platonic intromission, Galenic-Mondinian anatomy, and Aristotelian-Avicennian psychology, this essay reveals that he subscribed to a nondualist, nonmaterialist worldview and understood humans as divinely created entities dependent upon the immaterial ground of their being.

The importance of history in the debates that emerged in the aftermath of the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots, has been long acknowledged, although efforts in support of the Queen remain less well studied than those of her opponents. This article takes as its focus the pro-Marian Histoire of David Chalmers of Ormond. This was written in 1572 and printed in 1579 in the immediate context of Anglo-French marriage negotiations, which brought with them a fashionable Anglophilia at the French court, including the increased circulation of English historical myths that suggested England enjoyed suzerainty over Scotland. Chalmers’s Histoire firmly rejected these, emphasising fissures in the English royal line in contrast to stability in the Scottish succession. This led him to a more radical position surrounding Mary’s place in the English succession than those espoused by his fellow Marians; more than a potential heir, Mary held a greater right to the English throne than the entire Tudor dynasty. Chalmers’ vantage point of the relative safety of the French court not only facilitated his adoption of a more radical position than his fellow Marians, but also necessitated such a stance: to make his case for Mary’s sovereignty in England, he first needed to establish Scotland’s status as an ancient “imperial” realm.

This article examines the marginalia of three annotated Bibles from the early Reformation, two belonging to a lay noblewoman and friend of Luther’s, Felicitas von Selmenitz, and one to her son Georg. Most striking in these Bibles are the marginal drawings. Combining approaches from the history of reading, the history of devotional practice and the history of communication, the article analyses how the laity integrated the new media of print into traditional devotional practices and shows how modes of visual reading shaped the formation of Lutheran identities on an individual and communal scale. The article argues for the centrality of the hybridity of word and image to Lutheran devotion. Secondly, it argues that women were able to participate actively in reform in ways that may not have been public, but nevertheless promoted new ideas through engagement with material culture and through influence over the religious life of their households.

In 1659, an English Benedictine nun with breast cancer interpreted her pain as a form of atonement for sin, but she also likened the ulcerating tumors to the five wounds of the crucified Christ. Without effective analgesics, early modern people sought alternative remedies to manage physical trauma and they invariably turned to their religious beliefs and practices. Scholarship on British Protestant attitudes to sickness and treatment is strong, but there is little on Catholic approaches. This article explores experiences of British Catholic women in childbirth and terminal illness. It analyses their management of suffering within contemporary medical ideas about the body, disease, and recovery, arguing that women interpreted extreme pain within a spiritual matrix that provided psychological and somatic relief. Although Protestants and Catholics employed similar Christological and martyrological tropes, the paper reveals how personal devotional preferences might curate and narrate trauma. Drawing upon recent medical research, it concludes that the narratives, objects, and rituals used by Catholic women provided useful coping mechanisms for ameliorating discomfort.

The Fall of the Giants (1530–33), a ceiling fresco by Perino del Vaga (1501–46), has always been understood as an allegory glorifying Emperor Charles V (1500–1556). I argue that it may also be read conversely as a carefully veiled expression of criticism. Although any denigration of the emperor is surprising at the hand of the painter who served as court artist for Andrea Doria, the emperor’s admiral, Perino nonetheless inserted subversive elements of criticism into the ceiling painting. Perino employed the technique of rhetorical paradox, which was common in the literature of the time and widely used in courtly games. Just like in the verbal rhetorical paradox, in which multiple disjunctive strands of meaning are presented to the reader/listener simultaneously, the spectators of this painting can decipher hints of contradicting significance in myriad details of the fresco’s iconography that have multivalent meanings. Perino was thereby able to achieve plausible deniability, and any criticism of the emperor or of Doria that the astute observer might have glimpsed in the fresco would have stayed unspoken. Acknowledging this subversive dynamics might shed new light on the artist–patron relationship in the sixteenth century.

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), the Dominican moral reformer, is notorious for his bonfires of the vanities, but his inventive use of spectacle is known only to specialists. For the celebration of Epiphany 1498, he transformed Florence’s Feast of the Magi, a civic ritual, into a private, mystical spectacle choreographed to the original floorpan of San Marco’s convent church. By analyzing this spectacle, the article reveals St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s unacknowledged influence on Savonarolan reform, uses puppet theory to explain Savonarola’s paradoxical devotional use of a Jesus doll, traces out his theory of spectacle, and makes a case for Savonarola’s fantasia (power of invention).

During the sixteenth century, cavalry organizations across Europe transformed in different ways. This article examines the development of a new type of cavalry in Sweden during the first decades of the reign of King Gustav Vasa. It focuses on the methods of recruitment and examines to what extent and on what conditions foreign cavalry served in Sweden during this period, how they were organized, and what role they arguably played in the formation of a new domestic cavalry organization. Building on novel findings the study provides a detailed example of the transformation of the cavalry organization with rare glimpses into the service conditions of the German petty cavalry contractor. In Sweden, there was no uniform type of contract and several categories of foreign horsemen served in parallel, mostly on annual contracts. The king seems to have valued the expertise provided by the foreign professionals. Many were integrated into the Swedish military organization and provided military expertise in the creation of a new domestic Swedish cavalry organization. Unlike Denmark and Poland where a modernized cavalry gradually grew within existing organizations, in Sweden, Gustav Vasa created entirely new units of enlisted domestic cavalry on the model of the German mercenary cavalry.

This paper challenges the popular opinion that it was the revenue-seeking government that imposed low-cost and highly addictive spirits on Muscovites in mid-sixteenth century. In reality, the development of vodka in Russia was very similar to what was happening elsewhere in Europe: at first used in therapeutic purposes, distilled alcohol gradually started to be consumed purely for enjoyment. But the pivotal moment in the growth of spirits in Muscovy was the influx of foreign experts, who obtained an exclusive right to make and sell “burnt wine.” Among those, the key role was played by German expatriates brought to the Russian capital during the Livonian War. They have quickly abused the distilling privilege to such an extent that Ivan IV ordered to destroy Moscow’s German quarter and withdrew all the previously granted freedoms, suggesting that the Russian authorities at the time were trying to curtail the consumption of spirits rather than foster it.