A short dialogue in Angelo Decembrio's De politia litteraria (1462) describes the reception accorded by Leonello d'Este and his courtly literary circle to Ugolino Pisani, writer, comedian, and wellknown entertainer in the 1430s and ‘40s. The dialogue is a unique and valuable resource. It is perhaps the earliest document of its kind to disclose so vividly how an eager dramatist of the time hoped his work would find favor with a discriminating and influential audience, and it dramatizes an encounter that we know actually took place between the writer and an audience whose patronage he sought, showing the audience's ideas and tastes on the spot and in motion, so to speak.

In the dedicatory letter to the first printed edition of his Adulescentia, Baptista Mantuanus (“Mantuan” in England since the Renaissance) asks all readers holding manuscript copies of the earlier, unprinted version of his collection to destroy them—a request in effect so discouraging that, despite publication in the twentieth century of several important works by Mantuan, no manuscript copies of early versions of his eclogues have ever come to light. We are therefore indebted to Paul Oskar Kristeller for recording six manuscripts—five in Italian libraries and one at the Bodleian Library, Oxford—containing copies of what I have discovered to be early versions of Mantuan's ninth and tenth eclogues. Examination of these manuscript copies reveals new information as to the date and circumstances of composition and initial publication of the two eclogues.

In accounts of Rome's “Golden Age of the Renaissance,” the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (1466-1520) has never quite faded from notoriety. His proverbial wealth and flamboyant personality survive in scattered anecdotes as a glittering sideshow to the grander enterprises of Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Indisputably the richest man in Rome between 1500 and 1520, he is best known today for three artistic commissions connected with Raphael: a chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, his mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the suburban villa known since 1579 as the Farnesina.