1 Walcher Casotti, M., Il Vignola (Trieste, 1960) 1, 265.Google Scholar

2 I October 1507, the date which has ever since been accepted as Vignola's birth date, first appears in the first biography of him, written by Ignazio Danti and published some thirteen years after the subject's death. Danti got most of his information from Giacinto Vignola, and this item is hardly likely to belong to the minority that he got elsewhere; since sixteenth-century biographers did not go to archival birth records, family knowledge or record is the only normal source of such facts, and, since most people did not know the year of their birth with assurance, it rarely appears in lives. It is hardly ever mentioned in Vasari's Lives, nor, interestingly enough, in the lives of artists by Baglione (1642). Baglione had an active feeling for chronology, arranging his biographies under the pontificates when the artists came to Rome, and nearly always giving age at death. But he seems to give birth dates only for Vignola (taken from Danti) and for Pietro Bernini, whose son was available to be asked, suggesting that he liked to have them when he could. From this it seems probable that Giacinto knew his father's birth date, which his father had told him, and that their interest was unusual. If their date was wrong, the relationship to the 1562 patent is not affected, since all concerned presumably thought it was right.

3 Vasari, G., Le vite de’ piit eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Milanesi, G. (Florence, 1881), VII, 39.Google Scholar (All further references to Vasari are to this edition, and cite volume and page only.) ‘Fu la morte di Francesco di grandissima perdita all'arte, perchè se bene aveva cinquantaquattro anni, ed era mal sano, ad ogni modo continuamente studiava e lavorava.'

4 VII, 36.

5 By an odd quirk, Vasari's feeling that Salviati's continued work at fifty-four is unusual has a parallel when, at other points, he records his birth as in 1510, his death as in 1563. Thus Salviati would have died a year before he reached this age beyond the usual working span (VII, 5, 40). This is a minor instance of the inconsistency on reports of age that will be explored below, and no conclusions should be drawn from it. In any case it does not affect Vasari's expressed view of what it meant to be fifty-four, our concern at the moment.

6 de Hevesy, A., Jacopo de’ Barbari (Paris-Brussels, 1925), p. 37.Google Scholar

7 P. Kfristeller], article ‘Barbari’ in Thieme-Becker Kunstlerlexikon, between 1440 and 1450; A. de Hevesy, op. cit., p. 8, ‘vers le milieu du siecle'; L. Servolini, Jacopo de' Barbari (Padua, 1944), p. 45, about 1440. All others have accepted the statements of these standard works, except that I anticipated the present expression of doubt briefly in the article ‘Barbari’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (1964), VI, 44-46.

8 Buonarroti, M., Le lettere, ed. Milanesi, (Florence, 1875), p. 384 Google Scholar; The Letters of Michelangelo, tr. and ed. E. H. Ramsden, (Stanford, 1963), 1, 105-107, gives the annotation cited infra.

9 Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Pertile (Milan, 1959), III, Pt. One, 105. ‘La vecchiaia m'impigrisce l'ingegno… .'

10 The Poems of Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Reedijk, C. (Leiden, 1956), pp. 280-290.Google Scholar Reedijk and those citing him translate the title rather freely as ‘On the Approach of Old Age’ which perhaps reflects an unwillingness to believe it can be meant literally. Yet neither the title, Carmen de Senectutis Incomodis, nor the text is cast in an anticipatory mode.

11 CM. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 78, 82. By 'agricultural society' Cipolla means everything between the neolithic age and the industrial revolution, an approach well-based but not familiar to students of Renaissance thought. This stimulates the question whether the small minority of city dwellers might have a different life span; the artists discussed infra died on average in the mid-fifties, which does not suggest a significant variation.

12 The present study is assuming that people today begin old age at sixty-five, though it is surprisingly hard to confirm this by a formal statement. Yet our habit may be most striking when it emerges accidentally, even in a sociological work based on statistics. Thus Tartler, R., in Das Alter in der modernen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1961)Google Scholar, does not fix the year when old age begins because, he says, it is variable and intangible (p. 11); then he specifies (p. 19) that his tables are based on persons sixty-five and up!

13 The Castel of Helthe, First Book, sigs. lob-na. Professor Mark Eccles kindly located this passage for me.

14 The reader who, like myself, has thought Shakespeare's seven ages were the standard number in the Renaissance, may wonder about the prevailing patterns. Happily Cesare Ripa (Iconologia, 1630 ed., pp. 224-226) analyzes this matter with all the fullness and references that could be desired in a modern study. He cites ancient authors who divide life into: three parts (Aristotle De Caelo); four (Hippocrates, Avicenna); five (Fernel, the French medical and cosmological writer of the early sixteenth century); six (Isidore of Seville); and seven (apparently Piero Valeriano). He prefers four, which he calls the most frequent and attributes to medical tradition. This sounds like Elyot, but does not use the same four parts, listing instead adolescence, youth, manhood, and old age. Only the fivefold division divides old age in two. The six- and seven-fold divisions are obtained by subdividing youth, and Ripa rightly says the various schemes do not conflict. He does not directly offer ages in years for each part of life. He does say, in the sevenfold division, that infancy lasts seven years, boyhood fourteen, and so on, but this produces absurdities if it is translated back (youth changes to manhood at forty-eight) and Ripa evidently does not do so. Indeed he says that the ages are not measured by years. But elsewhere in his book he does offer such measurements; see below, n. 65. On the other hand Elyot's system is identical with Dante's in Convivio, iv, 24.1 am very grateful to Professor Allan H. Gilbert for calling my attention to this passage. Dante's four ages are adolescence, youth, old age (senettute), and senility (senio). While this is like Elyot further in the age when youth begins, twenty-five, the other ages differ; old age begins at forty-five and senio at seventy. If we now find forty-five a rather late point to begin old age, Dante offers several reasons. He first says opinions differ, and then that he will disregard the views of the media and the filosqfi (scientists or the learned generally) and give his own reason. It is that life comes to a peak at thirty-five, because Christ died just before decline might have begun, and that further youth must rise and decline symmetrically, ten years before and after thirty-five. Since this abstract schema consciously rejects medical ideas, it seems no special pleading to suppose that Dante's year for starting old age does not reflect contemporary social attitudes. Yet it probably did influence later literature, and so might be reflected by Elyot with modifications influenced by the medici.

15 The same result, making a rare ‘middle age’ equal iuventute and the span from twenty-five to forty, results from the one explicit text offered by the largest Italian dictionary (Tommaseo, s.v. età). Boccaccio writes:'He was a youth of middle age', ﹛Era un giovane di mezza eta). Rather oddly Tommaseo attaches to this citation a definition of mezza eta as ‘between old and young'. As shown by the previous note, Dante's mezzo del cammin di nostra vita at thirty-five is for him the midpoint of youth; whether this concept influences the somewhat separate concept of middle age cannot be explored here. A set of four paintings of the ages of man by the seventeenth-century painter Pietro della Vecchia (Paul Ganz Collection) on loan to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is there labeled: Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, Old Age. The third of these titles, natural to our outlook, is wrong, as is obvious from its content, dominated by black-bearded soldiers in encampment. It should be Manhood (virilità), consistent with the scheme favored by Ripa for his preferred four-part pattern.

16 Further instances, pro or con, are of course solicited. The present enquiry, not merely cutting across standard disciplines but hardly related to them, seems to evince vividly the worth of a journal concerned with Studies in the Renaissance. The problem also seems to belong to that epoch rather than to later ones (when the better documentation of birth dates undercuts the problem) or to earlier ones in which data seem to be too sparse to combat any false assumptions or even to develop them. See M. Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago, 1964), pp. 72, 74, on the absence there of any birth dates or ages for any persons except rulers, and the unreliability even of those. Bloch's remarks on shortness of life and on the fact that ‘old age seemed to begin very early, as early as mature adult life with us’ are of special interest.

17 The New York Times, 3 September 1966, quoting President Truman: ‘The untimely death of Howard McGrath, an old colleague and friend … .'

18 VI, 16 (Torri); v,93 (Santacroce); v, 316 (Cavazzola); v, 333 (Libri); VI, 130 (Vinci).

19 V, 234 (Parmigianino); VII, 104 (Zuccaro).

20 IV, 383-386.

21 However, this appears in a rhetorical contrast between him and a ‘senex … homo octogenarius.’ ( Golzio, V., Raffaello ... nelle testimonianze del suo secolo, Vatican, 1946, p . 281.Google Scholar) Of later references to Raphael's death the most interesting is by a Brabanter humanist who says it occurred when he was about forty and adds that he would have gone still further had he lived usque ad senectam. Among many later comments, two call his death untimely, but neither shows knowledge of his age. (Op. tit., pp. 282,285, 294.) Golzio's rich assemblage of allusions to Raphael, who for us is perhaps the best example in the Renaissance of early death, may be large enough to permit the generaUzation that such a viewpoint about him then existed distinctly but only to a slight extent.

22 VI, 374.

23 v, 198. The recurring introductory -woidjinally may sound more as if Vasari thinks he is reaching the end of long lives than is actually the case. It should probably be read less as ‘at the end of a long list of events’ than as ‘this is the last item to report.'

24 v, 55 (Sarto); v, 71 (Lombardi); v, 248 (Palma); v, 630 (Perino); VI, 330 (Genga); VI, 334 (Sanseverino).

25 V , 173 (Rosso); v, 152 (Polidoro).

26 VII, 582; for the report of his dying young, see the text infra.

27 v, 132; ‘in poor health’ is mal complessionato.

28 v, 212.

29 v, 179 (Bagnacavallo); v, 555 (Giulio); VI, 532 (Benedetto); VII, 70 (Daniele); v, 295 (Torbido).

30 v, 100. Vasari had said that Dosso's birth was almost simultaneous with Ariosto's (in 1474) and that he was supported until he died by Duke Alfonso, so that he must have died before the Duke died in 1534. Yet he also reports (loc. cit.) a painting being completed in 1536.

31 VI, 255 (Rondinelli); v, 375 (Bernardi); v, 469 (Sangallo, ‘pur vecchio e cagionevole’); v, 184 (Girolamo); VI, 564 (Giovanni da Udine); v, 252 (Lotto).

32 These corrections were made by Milanesi in his edition of Vasari, VI, 53 3 (Benedetto Ghirlandaio); VI, 55, 98, 99 (Tribolo; Vasari's source for the correct birth year was Tribolo's father); VI, 244 (Gherardi). The large error about Benedetto Ghirlandaio, who lived in the late fifteenth century, may exemplify Vasari's greater vagueness about more remote figures. On this ground Benedetto should have been excluded from the set here assembled, but he is retained in it because his biography appears in a later place attached to that of a younger relative. Having once set out to use all the data offered in the later volumes, it seemed best in such an ambiguous case to include him, keeping to the most mechanical criteria of choice and thus perhaps enhancing the statistical value of the results.

33 VI, 557. Again (vn, 6) Vasari says an event took place in 1523, when he was nine. He was twelve in 1523, but the event took place in 1524 when he was thirteen. It is a turning point in his life, the cause of his going to Florence, but he had it four years too early. This either illustrates a downward exaggeration for the sake of drama, or a lack of a sense of one's age as we know it, or perhaps both.

34 The Rosselli and Baldovinetti reports are in documents pub. by R. G. Mather, Art Bulletin xxx (1948), 45, 26; the old lady of forty-five in S. Orlandi, Beato Angelico (Florence, 1964), pp. 176-177, the second old lady in R. G. Mather, art. tit., p. 54. R. G. Mather's reports contain errors and must be used with caution; this lady appears in them as the result of an interesting mistake. She and her son are a family group; he is a painter named Francesco di Stefano, born c. 1424 and still living c. 1469. Mather not surprisingly took these records to be those of Pesellino, a painter born in 1422 whose real name was Francesco di Stefano and who lived alone with his mother. He therefore wrote ‘I have proved the statement that he died in 1457 to be inaccurate.’ But if he had checked the statement that Pesellino died in 1457, he would have found it to be a firm document, and would probably then have realized that there are two men sharing these factors of name and circumstances, with two sets of tax records, Pesellino who died in 1457 and the second obscure painter who was living in 1469. This cautionary coincidence will be mentioned further.

35 R. G. Mather, art. tit., 52-53 (Brunelleschi); Vasari, vn, 509 (Sansovino); Mather, art. tit., 27 (Baldovinetti). Brunelleschi possibly advanced his age in an attempt to evade the head tax, from which men over sixty were exempt.

36 Cf. F. Hartt, ‘The Earliest Works of Andrea del Castagno', Art Bulletin XLI (1959), 160, and F. Hartt with G. Corti, ‘Andrea del Castagno, three disputed dates', Art Bulletin XLVIII (1966), 228. Hartt cites a tax record showing Castagno aged six in 1427, which fixes his birth more precisely than before. But he then suggests he may have been born earlier, because ‘it was customary for parents to understate the age of their offspring in order to prolong as much as possible the happy period when they could deduct for them as bocche rather than having to pay for them as teste’ (1959, p. 160), that Castagno must have been born two years earlier because he appears as a testa, or adult over eighteen, in 1437 (1966, p. 229) wrongly altering his 1959 report that the adult tax began at fifteen, and that ‘the one contention that no one is likely to advance is that a close-fisted Tuscan montanaro would ever have paid 3 soldi unnecessarily,’ i.e. that the date may be too late but certainly cannot be too early. Although this hypothesis would make many wrong records seem consistent or rational and is therefore attractive, it is not tenable. Dependents remain bocche at all ages, and qualify for an unchanging deduction of 200 florins from capital worth. The head tax or testa is paid only on male dependents, between the ages of fifteen and seventy in the country and eighteen to sixty in the city (this double system is the source of Hartt's change, wrong for Castagno's father, a countryman). It is indeed a respectable amount, but is evidently conceived as paid out of the income of wage-earning sons living at home. What makes the hypothesis of understated age without any demonstrated cases most questionable is that the mistaken age declarations which it would explain (boys shown too young) appear mingled with others showing to the same extent girls shown too young, boys and girls shown too old, people of other ages with errors either way, and (as with Vasari cited above) boys shown too young when this explanation is not possible. Thus the hypothesis requires explaining the phenomenon in one way for some of the instances, which will not explain its identical pattern for the other instances. Rather than seeking a second explanation for the other cases of girls, etc., we must evidently abandon the theory which only explains boys shown too young, to evade the head tax, and with it the certainty that the age is positively a minimum and likely too young. A classic case of the omnidirection of the errors appears in Benozzo Gozzoli's tax record of 1480. His oldest son is shown thirteen years older than in his last report ten years before, making him eighteen and thus just barely subject to tax (the pattern which in Hartt's concept could not occur) while his oldest daughter has aged only nine years! (Mather, art. cit., 41-42.) Pure error at some stage seems the best explanation. For a guide to the tax rules, see R. de Roover, The Rise and Fall of the Medici Bank (New York, 1966), pp. 21-31, ‘The Florentine Catasto'; for the distinction of head tax in the country, see G. Poggi in Rivista d'Arte VII (1929), 43 ff.

37 H. Joffioy, Le Dossier Caravage (Paris, 1959), pp. 21 Google Scholar,216,217, surveys the history of this research. Although since 1930 the old date 1569 has generally given way to the wellproven 1573, a writer in 1958 could still give it as 1565 without remark (G. Bazin, A History of Art, New York, 1958, p. 301). On Angelico see C. Gilbert, review of S. Orlandi, op. cit., Art Bulletin XLVII (1965), 273.

38 T. Pignatti, ‘Proposte per la data di nascita di Vittore Carpaccio,’ Venezia e VEuropa (1955), p . 224 f.; L. Puppi, ‘Dosso al Buonconsiglio', Arte Veneta XVIII (1964), 19.

39 C. Gilbert, ‘The Earliest Work of Pordenone', Arte Veneta XVI, (1962), 153, briefly lists some eight cases. Others whose signatures, commissions, or the like show them independent and recognized at nineteen or twenty are Girolamo dai Libri, Domenico Campagnola, Correggio, Parmigianino, Moretto, Veronese, Perino del Vaga, Pierino da Vinci, Vasari, Muziano. When Pierino da Vinci died at twenty-three, according to Vasari, attention was paid to his untimely death but no one remarked that he had been exceptional in developing a career at such an age, nor have modern scholars, who seem to have entered unconsciously into Renaissance attitudes in a way that will be discussed below. (Milanesi rejected the birth date as too late, perhaps for this reason, but has not been confirmed by later specialists.) The broad question, parallel to the present study, is: when could a boy in the Renaissance be called a man? An answer may be suggested by two texts already cited. The fifteenth-century laws of Venice used by Pignatti to alter Carpaccio's birth date (loc. cit.) make a male responsible for buying and selling real estate without supervision at fourteen, and Elyot in 1534 (op. cit., f. 41) speaks of boys and then of'Yonge men, exceeding the age of xiiii yeres.’ Apprenticeships of painters most often ended at fourteen or fifteen, and Vasari, consistent with that, tells of a work painted at fifteen (though he may not have had that right) by an artist in competition with another who had ‘been his competitor already in boyhood’ (già nellà eth puerile; v, 596). Pending full study, we must certainly avoid the common remark that so-and-so must have been more than the reported twenty-two or so to receive such an important commission.

40 But Goya wrote to a friend in 1787 T have become old,’ although he ‘was no more than forty-one’ as a recent observer noticed ( Levey, M., Rococo to Revolution, New York, 1966, p. 208 Google Scholar). By now the modern observer's hesitancy may be as familiar as the statement itself. Professor Robert W. Berger kindly called this text to my attention.

41 Pope-Hennessy, J., Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Greenwich, 1958), p. 318 Google Scholar; Seymour, C., Sculpture in Italy 1400 to 1500 (Baltimore, 1966), p. 259.Google Scholar

42 Carli, E., Pittura pisana del trecento, la seconda meta (Milan, 1961), pp. 80-81.Google Scholar

43 C. Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo ([diss.], University Microfilms, 1956), p. 14 ff.

44 Vasari, Van Mander and Sandrart, the earliest sources, all begin when Calcar is adult, as does Baldinucci in the late seventeenth century, not a primary source. In his life the missing birth date is actually marked by a dash, at least in a later edition (F. Baldinucci, Notizie de’ Professori di Disegno, 1811, vn, 336: ‘nato— morto 1546’). The modern specialized articles ignore not only the birth date, but the assertion of it in reference works: J. Wolff in Zeitschriftfuer bildende Kunst xi (1876), 375-379; H. Hymans in L'art, XXXIII (1883), 60-65.

45 The birth date is still absent in the pioneering dictionary of artists by Orlandi, often printed in the eighteenth century. But it appears, surely not for the first time, in the anonymous dictionary issued in London in 1785, and always thereafter. A minority of early nineteenth-century dictionaries, beginning with the outstanding archivist Ticozzi in 1818, offer the more intelligent guess ‘born c. 1510,’ but this current has died out.

46 How unrealistic such a concept would be appears from the fact that the giver of the commission, the great anatomist Vesalius, was himself twenty-five at the time. A vivid explanation for his choice of the unknown Calcar is suggested by the fact that Vesalius, as his name reveals, came from Wesel, while Calcar came from Calcar, twenty miles downriver from Wesel on the Rhine. The meeting with his Landsmann in Padua can well be imagined.

47 ‘When was Titian Born?’ Art Bulletin xx (1938), 12 ff.

48 A. de Hevesy, Jacopo de’ Barbari (Paris-Brussels), 1925, p. 37.

49 P. Kristeller in Thieme-Becker (II, 1908, 461) says that Jacopo was assuredly (zwar) born between 1440 and 1450 because (da) in 1511 he was provided with a pension as being old and feeble. While keeping close to the wording of the document, this use of it leaves no doubt that Kristeller assumed the pension to reflect old age in the sense of retirement, and thus discounted the later clauses anticipating Jacopo's future work.

50 On Raphael see Golzio, op. cit., p. 29. In Florence in 1417 a will assigns a monk a salario overo provisione of twenty florins a year for saying masses, more than the annual earnings of a servant (Orlandi, op. cit., p . 180). A clerical income from a clerical source would probably be a pension; see below. Ghiberti was required by his contract to work all day on every working day, as one does who is a provisione (Vasari, ed. K. Frey, Vite,I i, 354)- Vasari offers many examples of the provisione as a regular salary: the four hundred scudi a year paid Girolamo da Treviso by Henry VIII (V, 138), the ‘usual stipendio e provisione’ paid to Salviati (VII, 30), a gran provisione offered Vasari by the King of France (VII, 33), other cases (v, 554; vi, 366; VII, 86) and perhaps most vividly an anecdote about Antonio da Sangallo. He was annoyed because he did all the work as architect of St. Peter's but had the same provisione as one Melighino, a dull-witted old retainer who had been given the title to ‘provide’ for him. When the Pope asked Melighino for a sketch to compare with Antonio's and others, Antonio thought he was being teased and complained: ‘Holy Father, Melighino is only an architect in jest,’ but was told: ‘We wish him to be an architect in truth, and you see that from the provisione.’ As this neatly implies, the word does not mean salary for a job done but for a job held, a regular stipend for any cause, among which a pension after retirement can be included (v, 471).

51 D. Bertolotti, ‘Notizie intorno alia vita … dell'Ab. Lanzi,’ in: Lanzi, Storiapittorka della Italia (6th ed., Milan, 1823), p. viii.

52 Sammlung ausgewaehlter Briefe an Michelagniolo, ed. K. Frey (Berlin, 1899), pp. 201, 204. The provisione was fifty ducats a month.

53 Pope Sixtus iv gave the painter L'Ingegno a provisione when he became blind (Vasari, ni, 595), and the Duke of Ferrara gave one to Dosso when, in his fifties, he was living out his last years without working, as noticed above, although in the same passage Vasari contradicted himself by mentioning work done then. An intermediate case is Aristotile da Sangallo, who in his sixties was given a. provisione often scudi a month by the Duke of Florence and told he would be called for when needed, but was never asked to work (vi, 449). The patron's gracious gesture is to say it is not charity but a post with a provisione; this story seems very similar to Jacopo de’ Barbari's case. Thus the text about Jacopo does not indicate that he was working or retired, but the latter has always been supposed.

54 The existence of two Jacopos requires the following assumptions, partly summarized from the preceding, usually made without considering them: (i) one appears for the only time at twenty in 1495, and the other first appears at an older age in 1497; (2) both belong to the same subgroup of the painters in Venice (where Pacioli was in 1495); (3) both are superior exponents of that style, successful in their contact with mathematical intellectuals, Pacioli in one case and Duerer in the other; (4) only one appears in documents. An interesting ‘control’ is provided by the proved existence of two Florentine painters named Francesco di Stefano, cited above, of the same age, and both the only sons of widows. While Francesco and Stefano are very common names, ‘Bar.’ may not stand for ‘Barbari', so that the two cases may have an equal likelihood of coincidence as to names. But two factors found in the Francesco case do not reappear in the other: (1) of the two Francescos one was notable, the other a completely obscure artisan, while both Jacopos were successful, so that the field within which we must look for two similar men is much smaller; (2) the problem of the two Francescos was fully solved by finding two sets of documents in the same archive, but only one set of Jacopo documents exists.

55 Bernard Berenson, who believed that there were two painters involved, provides a striking suggestion of their closeness to each other in style. His Venetian Painters of the Renaissance includes reproductions of the largest number of artists of this school ever collected, arranged in a continnum from artist to stylistically related artist. In the maximum inventory, ‘Jaco. Bar.’ and Jacopo de’ Barbari are adjacent. Thus they are two men but have virtually the same way of working as well as the same name. In general, criticism has found ‘Jaco. Bar.’ a Venetian in the late tradition of Antonello da Messina, and Barbari a slightly later Venetian in the orbit of Alvise Vivarini, who had been an imitator of Antonello da Messina. Thus with a known blank of some five years between their paintings, the difficulty of blending the two persons seems not very great; elsewhere I have discussed two paintings that seem to me this personality's intermediate works. See ‘Alvise e Compagni', Studi in Onore di L. Venturi (Rome, 1956), I, 284 ff.

56 The previous survey suggests three ways in which a twenty-year-old might become an old man in seventeen years, (i) Literally following those figures, he was old at thirtyseven. This is not an absurdity, since it is stated by Erasmus, a Rotterdamer writing in 1506, who presumably held the same views as a Brabanter clerk in 1512. (2) Vigennisdocs not mean twenty-year-old in the exclusive sense of a single year, but might mean say twenty-three, a noun for which there is apparently no Latin adjective. (3) Jacopo was mistaken about his age to the same extent as Vasari and Cosimo Rosselli. Both in their twenties misstated their ages by six years, one too old and one too young. He would then be twenty-six in 1495, and a respectably old forty-three in 1512. These suggestions reach the edge of what the evidence permits, but not beyond it. (The traditional view, old age as a minimum of sixty, does that.) Perhaps most plausibly, a partial presence of two factors would make Jacopo vigennis twenty-three (either by a three-year error or because Vigennis means that) and old at forty.

57 The phrase of the anonymous editor of Shakespeare's Historical Plays (Everyman Edition, eleventh repr., London, 1927), p . vii.

58 In Sonnet Two, beginning ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,’ the thirteenth line with the phrase ‘when thou art old’ is certainly a recapitulation of the first, with the same meaning.

59 When a poet died in 1966 at fifty-three a fellow writer said he ‘died youngish,’ and the word strikes us as reasonable, but has probably never been applied to Shakespeare, who died at fifty-two. The contrast suggests that we consider Shakespeare old and thus adopt the Renaissance attitude which, when we are conscious of the age of even a Renaissance person, we exclude. (Dwight Macdonald, ‘Delmore Schwartz', New York Review oj Books, 8 September 1966, p. 16.)

60 D. Delia Terza, ‘Tasso's Experience of Petrarch', Studies in the Renaissance, x, 175.

61 But the ages of rulers too could be exaggerated as they receded only slightly into the past. Duke Frederick of Urbino died at sixty, but Castiglione, who lived at the court of his son, said he had died at sixty-five. (Cortegiano, 1, iii.)

62 The phrase is quoted without remark in the article on Charles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

63 Of fifteen Renaissance Popes, only two lived beyond seventy-two. (For this purpose the Renaissance runs from the Council of Constance to the Council of Trent, 1415-1550.) This casts an interesting sidelight on what must have seemed fantastic in Michelangelo's survival, for instance in 1550 when he was seventy-five and was the only living man included in the first edition of Vasari's Lives. Of course Vasari put him there in admiration, but his patriarchal status must have made it seem more natural. Paul m, elected as one of the oldest Renaissance Popes at sixty-six (beyond the average age at death of the others) lived to be the oldest at eighty-one, which would be normal today. His unique longevity also illuminates a passage in Vasari's life of Michelangelo that has seemed peculiar. When Paul was elected Michelangelo resisted his attempts to employ him, saying he was ‘so old’ that perhaps he could put him off with words. But twelve years later he was working for him.

64 A. Wandruszka, The House ofHabsburg (New York, 1964), pp. 98-99.

65 A large shift halfway toward our patterns may possibly have occurred in the seventeenth century. The twelve seventeenth-century Popes were on average elected at sixtysix and died at seventy-five, but this may also be a matter of post-Tridentine policies. Perhaps more interesting is the statement of Cesare Ripa that virilita runs from age thirty-five to fifty, and old age from fifty to seventy. (Iconologia, Padua, 1630, p . three, pp. 176, 146.) This statement can be pinpointed to the year 1603; it does not appear in Ripa's first edition of 1593, nor the second of 1602 which is a reprint, but does appear in the much altered third of 1603. (Professor Allan H. Gilbert kindly made this collation for me.)