In her discussion of Imitatio, Julia Haig Gaisser describes how humanist scholars and poets justified their light, titillating compositions, based on Catullus, Martial, and The Priapea, by invoking the ancient literary defense, whose purpose was essentially to ward off potential critics or else to justify their oeuvre by making a sharp distinction between their life and their art. One locus classicus is Catullus 16.5-6: “Nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est” (The devoted poet ought to be chaste himself, his verses need not be so). Another is Martial, Epigrams 1.4.8, which, modeled as it is on Ovid, Tristia 2.354, speaks not of poets in general but of Martial himself: “Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba“ (My writing is lascivious, my life pure). The classical defensio or apologia was thus revived and given new meaning by the humanists as they sought to justify their literary endeavors in light of an emerging and ultimately puritanical sense of decorum.

In his “Capitolo in Lode Del Dappoco,” a facetious tribute to the worthless person, the painter Agnolo Bronzino (1503-72) muses to his cat Corimbo about how he likes to spend his evenings: “Tu sai Corimbo, che tal volta io leggo/ così nel letto, per adormentarmi,/ o quando, com'or teco al fuoco seggo;/ e hai veduto anche scombiccherarmi/ qualche foglio e compor qualche cosetta/ per passar tempo e ‘1 cervel ricriarmi (You know Corimbo that I read like this in bed in order to fall asleep, or when as now, I sit with you at the fire; and you have seen me scribbling on some papers and composing some little thing in order to pass the time and refresh my mind) (“Capitolo in lode del dappoco,” 3 7-42).

The Massive Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola looms over its plain, a mute witness to the former power of the family (fig. 1). The rocca was initiated by the first Cardinal Alessandro (Pope Paul III) and fully and magnificently developed by the second Cardinal Alessandro, his grandson. Inside, its decoration boasts of family deeds and silently eliminates family failures. Much of the decoration was minutely described by contemporaries, and documents and decoration have been carefully studied by modern scholars. However one of the major halls, that which evoked the greatest contemporary admiration, the Sala della Cosmografia, can profitably be looked at again (figs. 2-4, 8, 9).

In 1576, the year after she married the aspiring architect Francesco da Volterra and moved to Rome, a Mantuan engraver named Diana (known in the twentieth century as Diana Scultori) produced a large, single-sheet engraving of an Ionic volute, richly decorated with a chain of stylized acanthus leaves and flowers, and a slightly abbreviated version of the egg-and-dart and bead-and-reel moldings that adorned the capital (fig. 1). In its size, its attention to decorative detail, and its pictorial character, Diana's print differed quite a bit from the model-bookish profiles of the classical orders previously in circulation (fig. 2). Most unusual, though, was the signature of a woman under several lines of Latin text engraved beneath the image, explicitly dedicating it to students of architecture: “This volute from an ancient capital of a Numidian stone column of the composite order, in St. Peter's in the Vatican, was drawn by Francesco da Volterra and Baptista di Petra Santa for the common use of students of this art. Diana Mantuana, wife of the same Francesco, engraved [it] in Rome. 1576.”

The systems of perspective first produced during the fifteenth century and subsequently treated by mathematicians and artists in later centuries have been exhaustively discussed and analyzed by art historians. While many have focused on the technique's geometric and scientific history, beginning with Panofsky and his remarkable treatment of perspeaive as symbolic form in 1927, a number of art historians have attempted to analyze the metaphorical and allegorical aspects of perspective. Although varying greatly in tone and focus, there is one assumption that links all of these accounts. It is generally taken for granted that perspective somehow stands paradigmatically for Descartes's rationalism — for his search for ontological and epistemological certainty.