In its Visual Acuity, the Arnolfini double portrait (fig. 1) is so beguiling that few have been able to resist its spell: "a simple corner of the real world has suddenly been fixed on to a panel as by magic." But in what ways can we speak of this portrait as a realistic image? How closely, for instance, does it portray a single moment or specific event in these people's lives? Was it meant to be viewed as a marriage document or contract? The Arnolfini double portrait is unique. It is the only fifteenth–century Northern panel to survive showing presumably identifiable contemporaries engaged in some sort of dialogue in a carefully rendered contemporary interior

During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean the lusus naturae, or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science.

New paths into the vast and intricate forest of ways in which Renaissance texts use or respond to their literary antecedents have emerged from numbers of recent studies such as those of Thomas Greene and David Quint. Here I should like to suggest an extension of that concern with the originary beyond the strictly literary relations of text to subtext or imitation to authorizing model. A sense of the living presence of the source is manifest in the Renaissance treatment of words, things, individuals, and institutions.

References to the Magi whose veneration of the infant Christ is recorded in the second chapter of the gospel of Matthew are frequent in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, especially his letters. The clearest expressions of his interest and faith in the Magi can be found in the Apologia, accounting for the more magical elements in the De vita, and in a praedicatio on the topic of the star that guided the Wise Men.

Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-98), whose busy bookstore brought together most of the great minds of Florence, was a life-long friend of Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli. This essay will examine their relationship. It was in his capacity as merchant that Vespasiano's association with Donato began, but over time it developed into a true friendship. Their correspondence covers the period from 1446 to 1463 with the bulk of the surviving letters dating from the year 1448-49.