Travelers in Florence around the year 1500 who happened on Piazza San Marco toward evening might well, if they listened carefully, have caught the muffled strains of a lauda sung by the Dominican friars beyond the walls of the convent of San Marco. And if any of the words had been audible, chances are good they would have been “Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum habitare fratres in unum” (“Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” Ps. 132:1). Only a few years before, the streets of Florence had echoed with the singing of laude such as Ecce quam bonum as thousands of children —the Savonarolan fanciulli processed through the city on their way to the duomo. But now, in the aftermath of Savonarola's execution in 1498, his revolutionary movement had gone underground, and his adherents had retreated from the streets to the relative safety of cloisters such as San Marco.

In traditional Europe, social reproduction rested in good part on inheritance. Property and status passed from generation to generation according to varying schemes of transmission tied to notions of blood descent, filiation, lineage, and affinity. Tracing changes in these schemes has been one of the central concerns of social history. Much of Renaissance social history has also gravitated around inheritance. By establishing magistracies like the Ufficiali dei Pupilli to oversee legal guardianship of minors and providing a public fund for dowries, the Monte delle doti, such cities as Florence indicated how important familial continuity was. Thanks to the work done by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, William Kent, and others for Florence; of Stanley Chojnacki and others for Venice; and of yet other scholars for other cities, we are in a much better position to understand how important and complex inheritance was, how generally successful it was in preserving property in the hands of a narrow elite, to what degree marital and other practices were geared to inheritance strategies, and how difficult those strategies could be to carry out in the face of demographic and economic realities.

In 1564 Titian traveled to Brescia to discuss a commission for a set of three allegorical paintings for the ceiling of the Council Hall. While there, according to a hitherto unnoticed reference in Ascanio de’ Mori's Giuoco piacevole, he presented a Brescian noblewoman, Barbara Calina, with a painting or drawing representing the mythological figure Helle.

Ascanio Pipino de’ Mori da Ceno (1533—1591) is most often remembered today for his fourteen stories which are said to epitomize the adjustment of novellieri to the new moral climate of the Counter Reformation. In his own day, however, this Mantuan courtiersoldier- turned-author was perhaps best known for his Giuoco piacevole, which was popular enough to warrant three editions, in 1575, 1580, and 1590.