Putative textual proof for Titian's central involvement in producing illustrations for Vesalius's anatomy book De fabrica (1543) requires reexamination. On the basis of orthographic, literary, and historical evidence, a phrase in Annibal Caro's after-dinner speech, here dated to 1536, is shown instead to refer ironically to a surgeon's notorious execution in 1517. Anatomia was a word in the satirical as well as the medical lexicon. It is important to understand the satirical tone of Caro's speech about a priapic statuette. Delivered during Carnival to the Roman Academy of Virtue, the speech respects neither antiquities nor artists like Michelangelo in its obscene humor.

This article investigates the relationships between hydraulic engineering and antiquarian studies in Rome in the long decade between the devastating Tiber River flood of 1557 and the completion of the repair of an ancient aqueduct, the Acqua Vergine, in 1570. The essay focuses on the physician Andrea Bacci (1524–1600), the engineer Antonio Trevisi (d. 1566), the jurist and Roman magistrate Luca Peto (1512–81), and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (ca. 1510–83). These individuals from both learned and practical backgrounds approached urgent problems of hydraulic engineering by studying ancient texts and artifacts, and they proposed solutions that were influenced by their study. This confluence of antiquarian study and engineering contributed to the development of empirical methodologies in the late Renaissance by making engineering part of a learned discourse.

This article looks at Irish attempts to fashion Gaelic elites as members of a European-wide aristocracy. Historiographical consensus holds that a modern Ireland, defined by a confessionalized sense of national consciousness, emerged from the ashes of the Gaelic political system's collapse ca. 1607. Central to that process was the exile experience of Irish nobles in Counter-Reformation Europe. This article reads two Irish texts — Tadhg Ó Cianáin's Imeacht na nIarlaí and Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh's Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill — to argue that inclusion in a pan-European nobility was not antithetical to traditional Gaelic cultural norms. In doing so, it attempts to soften the contrast between medieval and modern Ireland, to study the relation between provincial elites and central authority in this period of European state formation, and to explore the interplay between new international identities and traditional local authority.

This article explores the intellectual foundations for the development of princely art collections, and of Italian picture galleries in particular, as spaces for combined physical and mental exercise and recreation. This study then establishes the relationship between the therapeutic function of picture galleries and the manner in which landscape paintings produced for princely collectors at this moment in Italy embodied ideals of both exercise and repose.