Tullio Lombardo’s Adam (ca. 1493; Fig. 154) and Antonio Rizzo’s sculpture of the same subject (ca. 1470s; Fig. 155) visualize a discourse about technical audacity in late fifteenth-century Venice, one left largely unarticulated by the conventions of humanist critique, which focused on mimesis, expression, and style. Sculptors – and viewers – however, were also attentive to, and enthralled by, feats of virtuosic and difficult carving. The interest in sculptural facture and risk appears in an increasing drive to sever figure from block, and to create ever-larger voids, damage-prone projecting elements, and complex interplays between positive and negative space in stone sculpture – to challenge, in other words, the structural limitations this material imposes. Some of the strongest echoes of these priorities are to be found not in the era’s artistic treatises or poetry, but rather in the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The tome was published by the Aldine press in Venice in 1499, by which time the rival workshops of Rizzo and the Lombardo family (Pietro [ca. 1430–1515], and sons Tullio [ca. 1455–1532] and Antonio [ca. 1458–1516]) had transformed the city’s architectural and sculptural landscape with their respective oeuvres. Modern scholarship has certainly not overlooked either of the two sculptures of Adam or the Hypnerotomachia, but it has tended to focus on questions of their iconography, on their relation to the antique, and, in the case of the two sculptures, on comparing their differing physiognomies and styles.1 This essay considers the two works as manifestations of a competition centered upon technical prowess and ambition – that is, as sculptural performances.