Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.
The most famous speech of the Italian Renaissance was never delivered, was not published in its author's lifetime, and did not receive its famous title from him. Looking at what Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote after the celebrated opening shows why one leading scholar argues that the "dignity of man" the speech is remembered for is not quite what it recommends.
Andrea Alciato's *Emblemata*, first printed in 1531, founded a genre in which a motto, a picture, and a short poem are read together; yet the evidence suggests the pictures in that first edition were not his doing. This introduction explains what an emblem is, how the three parts work on one another, and how to read one, using two emblems from the earliest editions.
Montaigne retired to give his mind some leisure and found it bolted like a riderless horse, which spoils my theory that all I need in order to think well is more free time.
Marsilio Ficino turns “Know thyself” into an uncomfortable practical demand. Self-examination matters only when it redirects attention, desire and conduct toward a standard higher than the self’s passing appetites.
Alberti’s surprising suggestion that Narcissus invented painting turns Ovid’s reflecting pool into a compact theory of images. Narcissus eventually knows that he sees himself, yet recognition cannot free him from desire. Alberti’s painter likewise attends to appearances on a surface, but turns that fascination into measured, composed work. The comparison illuminates painting’s power to make absent bodies seem present, while only plausibly—not definitively—casting Narcissus as a warning about illusion.
Marsilio Ficino’s advice that melancholy scholars should sing arose from a Renaissance physiology linking moving air, bodily spirit, imagination, and emotion. His more ambitious astrological songs sought affinities with celestial qualities, placing music at the contested boundary between medicine, Platonic philosophy, and natural magic.
