In his famous “essay” of almost 150 years ago, Jacob Burckhardt articulated the single most fruitful idea about the Renaissance — that it was epitomized by “the discovery of the individual.” This discovery was double-sided: Man became a geistiges Individuum and recognized himself as such; and, as a consequence of this recognition, he also came to perceive die Fülle des Individuellen in the world around him. In other words, with the self-conscious perception of one's own uniqueness came the perception of the world as being full of unique entities.

This discovery was for Burckhardt not an unalloyed blessing. His auf sich selbst gestellten Persönlichkeit (so liberally translated as “free personality“) is the individual stripped bare of all traditional defenses, standing naked before the world, with only his own wits to rely on — hardly a comforting prospect.

Leonardo da Vinci studies are in effect two different—almost antagonistic—domains: a narrowly defined field that is so specialized that it scares scholars away (it takes years of dedicated work to learn how to deal with Leonardo's legacy), and a phenomenon of popular culture that is so massive that news about the artist's works makes headlines worldwide. Both aspects of Leonardo studies—the specialized scholarship and the vast public interest—grew exponentially in the past few decades and exploded in 2019, the year that marked the 500th anniversary of the artist's death. Although they only rarely come together, their convergence may offer the best hope for the future of Leonardo studies. Indeed, the recent anniversary provided a reminder that Leonardo da Vinci still touches the imagination of scholars and the general public in ways that force us to ask what is it that connects to our current age. Why is the study of this master of visualization, who made visible what could not be seen—vessels, muscles, water vortexes, wind, the intentions of people's minds—in diagrams, maps, sketches, figurative images, and paintings, significant for the current historical moment? Can we learn something from Leonardo studies—and, more broadly, from Renaissance studies, of which Leonardo studies are a part—as we struggle to find new frameworks to teach, research, innovate, and communicate with one another, or, to quote the mission statement of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive”?

The documents relating to Giordano Bruno's eight-year long trial for heresy at the hands of first the Venetian and then the Roman Inquisition, and to his execution in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February 1600, have been gradually coming to light since Bruno's first Italian biographer, Domenico Berti, started to publish them in 1876. They were finally gathered together over a number of years in the second half of the twentieth century, and expertly edited, by one of Italy's most prestigious historians, Luigi Firpo, who did not live to see the results of his work in print.