From the time of their courtship until death parted them forty years later, Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-1592) and Laura Battiferra (1523-1589) nurtured a loving relationship with reciprocal support for complementary careers. Their childless union generated two bodies of art, vast and beautiful. Renaissance contemporaries esteemed the Ammannati as a rarity, creative peers in a close marriage, but history has indifferently divorced them, dropping Bartolomeo to the ranks of second best and pushing his accomplished wife into obscurity. Reunited, the couple can return as they deserve, in the entwined lives that enriched their joint corpus and enhanced the fame each won as an individual — she for her poetry, praised by the most prominent men and women of culture in Counter Reformation Italy; he in his dual activity as sculptor and architect for projects ordered by popes in Rome, leaders of the new Society of Jesus, and three generations of Medici rulers in Florence.

Boccaccio's first work, the Caccia di Diana, is generally considered a playful allegory of ‘courtly’ love. Although the poem's literal content cannot be reconciled with its allegedly amorous message, critics have cited the discrepancy as a characteristic example of the youthful author's failure to appreciate the importance of narrative unity. There is, however, reason to believe that we have been mistaken both in our understanding of the Caccia's meaning and in our evaluation of its artistic merit. Like Dante's Commedia, Vita nuova, and lost sirventese, Boccaccio's primary models for this early narrative, it is, in fact, a carefully planned numerical composition. The symbolic implications of the numbers hidden in the text suggest, moreover, that Diana's hunt and the miraculous triumph of her rival, Venus, form a fictional veil designed to conceal an emblematic victory of virtue over vice and an allegory of conversion from bestial lust to Christian love.