This article examines Leonardo Bruni's ideas on history writing, tracing their evolution from 1404 down to the latter half of 1443. It establishes that Bruni saw history writing as a textual activity closely related to, if not identical with, translation. The various implications of this discovery are explored in relation to several of Bruni's major historical works, including the Cicero novus (1415), the Commentarii de primo bello punico (1419), and the De bello italico (1441). The article concludes by showing how Bruni's views - in their final, extreme formulation - were challenged by his younger rival, Biondo Flavio, in the early 1440s.

This paper is generated by the widespread opinion that Renaissance patrons usually kept creative control over works they commissioned. It analyzes two of the few instances usually cited and adds many more, some involving single works and some implicating a wide spectrum. A considerable range emerges. At one end artists, not only famous ones, can be deferred to as better experts on how themes are shown. At the other, patrons retain tight control of such unique themes as their family histories. A conclusion speculates on possible reasons for the strength of this opinion, in view of its fairly limited basis.

This essay is a prolegomenon to the general study of Ovid's relations to Renaissance art and art theory. As is well known, the Metamorphoses determined the subjects of numerous works of art during the Renaissance. What is not sufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent to which the ancient poet's sense of "metamorphosis" as a figure of poesis, making or "poetry," helped shape Renaissance notions of poetic transformation in the visual arts. The emergent taste for the non finito in the Renaissance, most notably in the work of Michelangelo, had important roots in Ovidean aesthetics.

This article discusses the authorship and content of a number of marginal annotations made to a copy of Ascanio Condivi's 1553 Life of Michelangelo. The annotations are shown here to be the work of the artist's last assistant, Tiberio Calcagni, and were probably written into the book c. 1563-64, some of them predating and some postdating the master's death. They record Michelangelo's reactions to mistakes in Condivi's account, as well as confirm the veracity of some of the "tall stories" found in the biography.

The rise of antiquarianism in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean England posed a threat to the common and traditional notion of continuity through time of British institutions and culture, including the transmission of historical texts. This threat was a major preoccupation for the poet Michael Drayton, and his response to it can be examined in his depictions of bards and druids in Poly Olbion. Conservatives in the historiographical debate put forth these ancient British poet/priests as an explanation for how ancient British history could have been transmitted through the centuries. But while Drayton in the Poly Olbion certainly uses bards and druids in a concerted attempt to imagine continuity, he reveals some latent suspicions of the truth - that ancient British culture was irretrievably lost.

The final books of The Old Arcadia rewrite two episodes from Livy's History: the rape of Lucrece and the execution of Brutus's sons. These episodes, which dominate Livy's account of the birth of the Roman republic, provide early modern republicanism with its foundational narrative, one that associates monarchy with aristocratic sexual license, and republicanism with the impartial rule of law. Sidney's plot hinges on this conflict between "unbridled desire" and "never-changing justice," and yet in flat contrast to both ancient and Renaissance republicanism, the work seems to privilege equity over law, clemency over justice, noble natures over impersonal codes. In what follows, I have tried to recover the unfamiliar politics - not republican and yet scarcely absolutist - structuring The Old Arcadia.

This article argues that, so far from being occasional or gold-greedy, Sidney's involvement with the New World was lifelong and more concerned with geopolitical strategy than with personal advantage. It traces his involvement through people such as Hakluyt, Eden, Willes, Gilbert, and Duplessis-Mornay, whose Vérité de la religion chrestienne (which Sidney had begun to translate when he died) contains a major theoretical defense of colonization as a means of saving the Reformation. It also offers a new explanation of Sidney's aborted voyage to the Americas with Drake.