This essay examines visitors’ experiences in the antiquity collections of Rome between 1550 and 1600. It argues that access to private collections was not as casual as has previously been thought, but that, in fact, it is possible to identify changes in the reception of visitors in this period as the city’s collections became increasingly public and institutionalized. Particular pressures on ecclesiastical collectors and parallels elsewhere in the development of the display of objects can explain the change at Rome: because of the city’s centrality, its collections serve as an important case study for a wider phenomenon, the growth of the museum.

This essay addresses the significance of the Assumption of the Virgin fresco in the Baptistery of Siena and the existence of an adjacent tunnel that connects the Baptistery to the Cathedral above. The traditional celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin in Siena is described; previously unpublished documents stating that a play of the Assumption was performed add new details to the picture. Other contemporary Sienese religious dramas, some little-known to modern scholars, are discussed to illustrate what the play of the Assumption could have entailed. It is proposed that the tunnel, or trapdoor, was used to conceal ropes that raised an effigy of the Assunta during the feast-day Mass.

This article follows a young Thomas Wyatt (ca. 1503–42) — the Henrician poet and courtier —on his journeys to France and especially to Italy in 1526–27. It finds him at the greatest courts of Europe at a climacteric in European affairs, during which, by default, he had a part to play. It discovers the dramatic circumstances of his kidnap, ransom, and release. The article conjectures upon the ways in which Wyatt's Italian journey was formative for his political and poetic career, and upon the brilliance with which he transmuted the events of a life lived so intensely, so restlessly, into art.

This article examines the frameworks of artistic competition embodied in a 1534 contract for a contest of medalmaking between Benvenuto Cellini and Giovanni Bernardi, and in descriptions of other competitions, especially in Cellini’s autobiography. Strategies, decorum, and rhetoric of such competitions were embedded in notions of honor. In addition to personal and professional honor, court status and patronage were also at stake. By means of his competition with Bernardi and his medal of Pope Clement VII, Cellini hoped to recoup lost standing and favor, along with concomitant commissions and emoluments at the papal court — specifically, it is argued, an appointment at the Roman mint, where Cellini had been replaced by Bernardi in 1534. Cellini, however, was never rehabilitated at Clement’s court, and within days of the death of his patron, he murdered Pompeo de’ Capitaneis, the rival goldsmith whom he blamed for his loss of honor and profit.