The architectural program outlined by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) in De re aedificatoria (1452) has been described by Richard Krautheimer as an effort ‘to create dignified surroundings for the dignified actions of dignified people.’ The contribution of sculptural ornamentation to this vision of a ‘dignified’ humanist paradise has escaped adequate critical attention. Sculpture, I believe, is an essential formal and iconographic element in Alberti's conception of the city as an ideal of order, of peace, and of unity.

Discussion of Alberti's ideas on sculpture has heretofore dealt almost exclusively with De statua. Such emphasis has led to the rather widespread assumption that his work as a theorist on sculpture was limited to an interest in the achievement of naturalism and ideal proportion in the representation of the free-standing human figure.

The Horatian formula holding that a poem should instruct and delight raises two obvious questions: what is ‘instruction’ and what is ‘delight’? These are difficult questions, since they seem too broad to be answerable and too central to be dismissed. They are difficult, also, because they refer to paired terms. Are we to see instruction and delight related in some kind of sequence? And what of the cases where only one term appears and the other not at all?

These are the basic questions generated by a consideration of the Horatian formula as it occurs in medieval and Renaissance critical texts and it is the purpose of this paper to show that the formula in these texts can be coherently interpreted through the use of the then dominant faculty psychology.

Historians of early opera have occasionally noted the appropriateness of Orpheus’ appearance as artistic spokesman for the new art form. Poet-singer par excellence of antiquity, whose music shook the very depths of the universe as he retrieved Eurydice from the Underworld, Orpheus surely appealed to the early opera composers and their humanist program—to recreate the moving power of an entirely sung drama by forging a new union of poetry, music, and gesture.

In the history of opera, however, primacy of place must be given to the god Apollo, for the legend of Apollo and Daphne was the subject of the first favola per musica, La Dafne, written by Ottavio Rinuccini, with music composed by Jacopo Corsi and Jacopo Peri, and first performed in 1598 at Corsi's home in Florence.

The narrative of the Libro del Cortegiano involves at once subdued drama and slightly risky play. It begins with a game whose purpose is to propose a second game which will occupy the company at Urbino for the rest of the evening. This elaborately two-tiered pastime suggests immediately the centrality and formality of play for this group, and throws the dramatic focus on the question of a given proposal's suitability. The reader doesn't know what criteria will determine the excellence of the winning invention, but he is allowed to participate in the consideration of each. Thus in this preliminary contest, Gasparo Pallavicino makes a proposal, and then Cesare Gonzaga another; then the buffoon Fra Serafino and the poet, the Unico Aretino, each makes a kind of non-proposal in bad faith, which has to be dealt with by the arbitress, Emilia Pia.

Marvell has long been recognized as a poet who enjoys play. One of the games he likes is to highlight the human habit of thinking in terms of purpose—what today would be called a teleological habit of thought. The most notable Renaissance form of this was to regard the world as made for a purpose, which as far as the human point of view was concerned, was man himself. ‘This worldly stage was purposely prepared, that God the father might secretly behold us.’ The teleological approach argued that the sun existed to shine on man, that the silkworm labored in order to provide man with silk, and so forth—an outlook shared by the ‘Suttle Nunns’ of ‘Upon Appleton House,’ who take their solipsism so far that they claim ‘These Walls restrain the World without, / … These Bars inclose that wider Den / Of those wild Creatures, called Men.’

In his far-ranging study, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin describes Erasmus’ Praise of Folly as the most complete expression in the Renaissance of Medieval Latin humour and as ‘one of the greatest creations of carnival laughter in world literature.’ For all Erasmus's wit and comic irony, the Praise of Folly might seem an unlikely embodiment of the comic spirit central to Carnival and other popular festivals such as New Year's, May Day, Midsummer, and the Twelve Days of Christmas. In the light of Bakhtin's remarks, however, I will here explore the importance of popular traditions of Carnival and other holiday celebrations for understanding the spirit and structure of Erasmus’ work.

The renewed enthusiastic interest in the classical world in the quattrocento brought about a shift of taste which affected all cultural activity, including writing both in its calligraphic and epigraphic styles. Poggio Bracciolini is now generally recognized as the innovator in this area; inspired by the manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he initiated the elegant, clear and pleasant-toread humanistic script. At the same time a change took place in the inscriptions that painters, sculptors, and architects inserted in their works. Because of increasing attention paid to Roman monuments and inscriptions, Gothic letters, often casually chosen and squeezed one against another in an inappropriate and insufficient space, gradually disappear from paintings, sculptures, and monuments of the quattrocento.

The theme of the Haywain, Hieronymus Bosch's great allegory of avarice (Fig. I), seems to have enjoyed a certain vogue in Brabant during the third quarter of the sixteenth century. Two manifestations of its influence were published and extensively analyzed some years ago by Lebeer, Grauls and Keyser. One of these is an etching by Frans Hogenberg, issued in 1559 by the Antwerp print publisher Bartholomeus de Mompere (Fig. 2). It depicts a broad plain crowded with figures whose acts of folly are epitomized by the large hay cart dominating the middle distance. The cart unmistakably shows Hogenberg's debt to Bosch, although he replaced the music-making lovers seated on Bosch's wagon with a devil triumphantly displaying two tufts of hay.

Although I am not an expert in French History and Literature, I have been occasionally prompted to touch the borders of this field when studying the history of philosophy and of learning. This paper, in spite of its somewhat pretentious title, deals in fact with a group of minor bibliographical data that are not even completely unknown. Since in my opinion bibliography, although a modest tool of research, is in a way the skeleton or scaffolding of literary and of intellectual history, I shall try to add some flesh to the bones of those data, and to use them for gaining a broader perspective. I have now been encouraged to look more closely at some facts and questions of which I had been aware for a long time, but which I had not really faced.

These pages continue the inventory of Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries published in Studies in the Renaissance, XXI (1974), 228-289; Renaissance Quarterly, XXVIII (1975), 689-741; XXIX (1976), 714-745; XXX (1977), 681-741; XXXI (1978), 532–603. The commentaries have been arranged alphabetically according to the author's family name, with a brief biobibliographical note and indication of the manuscripts and printed editions.

The date of John Colet's birth is of interest not only for his own biography but for that of his friend Erasmus. In the long letter of June 13, 1521 in which he describes at length the life and career of Colet, Erasmus mentions that when the two men first met Colet was ‘about thirty years old, two or three months younger than I.’ Erasmus celebrated his birthday on the Feast of Sts. Simon andjude (October 28), but thanks largely to his own mystifications on the subject there is no agreement among his biographers as to the year of his birth. The twenty-three direct statements about his age which have been noted in his writings, point in many different directions, from 1464 to 1472 or even later.