The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts.
Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts.
Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

Overlooking Lago di Orta in the foothills of the Northern Italian Alps, the Renaissance-era Sacro Monte di Orta (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is spectacle and hagiography, theme park and treatise. Sacro Monte di Orta is a sacred mountain complex that extolls the life of St. Francis of Assisi through fresco, statuary, and built environment.…[Read more]

Overlooking Lago di Orta in the foothills of the Northern Italian Alps, the Renaissance-era Sacro Monte di Orta (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is spectacle and hagiography, theme park and treatise. Sacro Monte di Orta is a sacred mountain complex that extolls the life of St. Francis of Assisi through fresco, statuary, and built environment.…[Read more]

Going to the theater was one of the most distinctive-as well as conspicuous-cultural activities to take place regularly in early modern european cities. Precisely because so many people from all walks of life partook of this highly visible pastime, public theaters became spaces wherein social and cultural boundaries between spectators were easily…[Read more]

This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of depicting distress on the early modern stage. During his early years as a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote plays filled with violence and death, but language did not lose its composure at the sight of blood and destruction; it kept on marching to the beat o…[Read more]

This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of depicting distress on the early modern stage. During his early years as a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote plays filled with violence and death, but language did not lose its composure at the sight of blood and destruction; it kept on marching to the beat o…[Read more]

One of the major differences between the otherwise very similar commercial theatrical cultures of early modern Spain and England was that, whereas in England female roles were performed by young, cross-dressed boys, in Spain female performers were prominent in their industry. indeed, actresses in Spain played an active role in the creative process…[Read more]

This article presents the collation map, a diagrammatic method for visually mapping the texts of complex medieval Western manuscripts against their material structures. Beginning with an overview of collation formulae – currently the most frequently used method of representing collation – the article argues that the collation map is a more use…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]

Mary Stuart’s Bouncing Head
Execution scenes reveal the links between the spectacular and the punitive (Michel Foucault), but they are difficult to stage, even more so when the topic is the decapitation of Mary Stuart, whose execution divided Catholics and Protestants, forcing playwrights to adopt several mediation strategies. Taking plays by J…[Read more]