The terms of this enquiry emerge from the text of a patent issued by the Duke of Parma on 30 January 1562. It appoints a new architect to act in association with Giacomo Vignola, the distinguished master who had long been in charge of his building activities. The new appointee is Giacinto Vignola, son of Giacomo and previously his father's assistant. One can think of several reasons why such a step might be taken, then or now, but in any case it indicates that the Duke wanted to keep Vignola, make him content, and continue the same style of work.

The view of the fifteenth century as an age of transition rather than as a period of decline, even in northern Europe, has made considerable progress in recent years, but there is still much to be learned about the various means by which the transition took place, especially how it came about in the minds of men. Too often investigations in this direction have been limited by the practice of studying the intellectual life of a given period almost exclusively through what men wrote rather than through what they read or what they saw about them. Besides this, sufficient importance has not always been given to the international and multilingual nature of the culture in the more civilized parts of Europe during both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Sigismund's marriage to Bona Sforza in 1518 is perhaps the most familiar event in Polish Renaissance history. Bona's journey to Cracow with a retinue of 287 persons, followed by that of her adviser Prosper Colonna with an added company of fifty-eight Italians, suggests something on the order of an Italian invasion of the Polish court. The construction of the Sigismund Chapel and the completion of the remodeling of the royal residence at Wawel by Italian architects and sculptors in the years following the Sforza union strengthen the association between Sigismund's enthusiasm for Italian art and his Italian marriage.

In a letter of 26 August 1523 Thomas More writes to Wolsey about a Franciscan friar, Thomas Murner, who while in Germany has written a book against Luther in defense of the king and recently has been I brought to England under false pretenses. More explains that the king has pitied this friar in his plight and would now have Wolsey reward Murner with £100 to enable him to return home where his presence is very necessary. More continues:

Without entering into controversy over the term, we might recall that style in its most comprehensive sense (that is, inasmuch as distinguished and distinguishable from content) would include (i) More's conception of Utopia as both useful and entertaining, (2) his formulation of the theme and its structurization, so to speak, by use of a frame and other devices, (3) his choice of dramatic dialogue as his special medium and its consequent effect upon characterization and setting, and (4) his adaptation of the various elements, especially the comic, to the audience. These broader aspects of style have been treated recently in the Yale Utopia. The present article proposes to supplement—and to complement—the discussion by analyzing More's style in the more usual and narrow sense: the selection and the arrangement of words and phrases which betray the intellectual, emotional, and artistic cast of the author.

Christians of the Middle Ages did not respond favorably to Jewish thought; what they did learn with the assistance of prominent Jews, they used to develop a Christian typology. Apart from Nicholas of Lyra and Andrew of St. Victor, by and large commentators ignored the rabbinical discussions of the Bible. Intensive Hebraic scholarship had to await Renaissance philological techniques, printing presses, and the Reformation, before it came to full flower. The philological study of Hebrew by a grammarian such as Politian and the study of the Christian Cabala undertaken by men like Pico gave interest to this little-known language. Type faces were set up for Hebrew grammars, lexicons, and Bibles during the early development of printing. But it was the Reformation, with its emphasis on the two founts of religion—sola fidei, sola scriptura—which brought about the great dissemination of Hebrew learning.

Modern European languages reached full development in their spoken and written forms during the middle ages, but it took centuries before the languages of the people became the languages of ‘the books'— those books which are indispensable to serious learning and intellectual progress. Today an intelligent person who can read and write can get a liberal education either in schools or on his own. Yet during the late Renaissance, in Italy and elsewhere, a thorough knowledge of one's mother tongue was hardly enough for one to become literate. There were love lyrics, epic poems, legends, fables, but aside from some legal documents and a few compilations, very little recorded knowledge was available in the vernacular.

Few documents relevant to the history of literary criticism during the early seventeenth century have escaped the searching eyes of scholars of the period. Edmund Bolton's The Cabanet Royal (British Museum MS. Royal 18A. LXXI.) is, however, one of those rarities. Written in 1627 as an attempt to interest King Charles I in the ‘Academ Roial’ which Bolton first proposed during the reign of James, the manuscript has previously been noted only by historians of England's learned societies. Yet it is less a prospectus for that academy than a discourse on the arts, including, most importantly, a substantial comparison of history and poetry clearly designed as a corrective to Sir Philip Sidney's harsh treatment of historians in his Apology for Poetry.

The two standard works on the government of Venice in the Renaissance were published nearly simultaneously close to the middle of the sixteenth century. And almost up to the present day they have been the classic works on this topic. In 1540 Donato Giannotti's Libro dela Republica de’ Vinitiani appeared, and in 1543, Gasparo Contarini's De magistratibus et republica Venetorum libri quinque. The manuscripts of these two works were completed some years before the books were printed. But in both cases the exact date when the manuscripts were composed and completed has not been settled. Because of the importance of the books and their authors, it seems worthwhile to take another look at this question of the date of the composition of these two treatises on the Venetian government and to see whether it can be settled.

Coluccio Salutati, along with Petrarch, is generally looked upon as one of the principal founders of Italian humanism and the Renaissance movement. Professor Berthold Ullman states in his excellent and latest work on Salutati that the renowned chancellor of Florence ‘was second to Petrarch in the humanistic movement, but not far behind'; he points out that Coluccio was the acknowledged leader of this movement for some thirty-two years, from the time of Petrarch's death in 1374 until the chancellor's own in 1406. Vergerio hails Salutati as the leading philosopher of the age; for Antonio Loschi he was the outstanding Latin writer of his time. His reputation as a Latin stylist and moralist, already in the fourteenth century, had spread far beyond the borders of Italy.

Raphael's small painting, depicting St. George Killing dragon with his sword, was the first Italian painting to enter the English Royal Collection. It was given to the King of England in 1506 by the Duke of Urbino, and it is the most tangible evidence that exists today of a connection between the English and Urbino Courts.

At its longest this connection lasted two generations. The dates which help to define it are: from 1474, when Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino was elected Knight of the Garter, to 1508, the year of the death of Duke Guidobaldo, Federigo's son, likewise Knight of the Garter. This is approximately Urbino's ‘Golden Age'. Federigo received a considerable stipend as a military captain, and had few responsibilities, so that he could dispense patronage on a scale which rivaled the Duke of Milan, or even the Pope. Urbino for a short time, about 1468 to 1476, was the center of artistic creativity in Italy, when Federigo was completing his splendid Palace in Urbino.