The magnificence with which the Florentine Renaissance is synonymous derived its power from a virtue elucidated and disseminated by influential preachers as early as the 1420s. Most notably, Sant’ Antonino Pierozzi O.P. — preacher, reformer, confidant of Cosimo de’ Medici, and eventually the city’s archbishop — drew on and creatively adapted the language of Aquinas and others to forge a public theology of magnificence apposite to the needs of his city and consonant with its republican values. This was well before the mid-1450s and the treatise of Timoteo Maffei which thus far has been the focus of scholarly attention.

Printed commemorations of Renaissance pageantry have been used as important sources of knowledge about the people and circumstances surrounding key political events, with less attention paid to the internal structure and original function of the printed works themselves. This essay explores a particular commemorative book and its illustrations as a case study of the collaborative construction of civic identity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. It considers the growing conception of print as a space for communal definition and political diplomacy, functioning not as a replacement for civic ritual, but an analog to it.

The Grottenhof is a small garden surrounded by painted loggias in the Munich Residence, a palace that served as the seat of the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria beginning in the sixteenth century. Completed between 1582 and 1589, the garden contains an elaborate grottoed fountain, sculpture, and paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The pictorial program of the painted loggias combines images of mythological ardor with illusionistic interlopers from everyday court life who make punning references to the pursuit of love. The sources for the garden can be found in Italian and French prototypes, yet the program of decorations creates a variety of associations that were unique to the patron, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria. The material and subject matter also reflect contemporary theories about art, nature, and the ordering of knowledge that informed the earliest cabinets of curiosities, where collections of art and natural objects were brought together in the so-called Kunstkammer. The garden was meant to engage all of the senses in a sanctuary that stimulated sensual thoughts while provoking broader contemplation about creativity and art.

This article examines how the experience and critique of their country’s decline led Spaniards to craft a distinct discourse of masculinity in the seventeenth century. As they self-consciously examined Spain’s crisis and offered political and economic solutions, these same writers also offered a scathing critique of standards of masculinity. Using the figure of the ideal nobleman as a case study, the article examines how moralists, arbitristas, and hagiographers constructed a dynamic code of manhood linked to questions of productivity, male chastity, and military performance. Further, it argues that this discourse was ultimately nostalgic and failed to adapt itself to the circumstances of the seventeenth century.