Kristen Lippincott

Given that Piccolomini’s two astronomical treatises were republished and reprinted together or independently in Italian at least eighteen times over a period of 55 years (including at least two putative pirate editions), that De la Sfera del Mondo was translated into French in 1550 and both treatises were translated into Latin (1568), it seems safe...

In 1960, Florindo Cerreta published what remains the definitive intellectual biography of Alessandro Piccolomini’s life and works, describing him in the title as a letterato e filosofo senese del cinquecento (‘a sixteenth-century Sienese man of letters and philosopher’). Cerreta introduced his subject by quoting two highly laudatory passages that h...

From the fifteenth century onwards, the men and women of the educated European élite often turned to the visual and literary conceits of the impresa and emblem as a means for communicating those ideas, desires and aspirations that they wished to express to their closest colleagues, but keep hidden from all but those who were initiated members of th...

As with many authors of the period, Piccolomini tended to use the dedicatory prefaces to his works to fulfil several different functions: to praise his dedicatee, to explain to why he has decided to write the following volume and to set out some of the intellectual parameters of the work, including acknowledging some of the authors to whom he is in...

There is no definitive edition of Piccolomini’s two astronomical treatises. Although first published in 1540, both texts underwent major transformations during the periods of their greatest popularity. As has been discussed in Chap. 2, the contents of De la Sfera were enlarged by over a third in 1561, and the whole text was completely rewritten in...

The small northern cities of Renaissance Italy did not necessarily share a common “courtly culture.” The epics produced by Francesco Filelfo (the Sforziad), Basinio Basini da Parma (the Hesperis), and

Globes appear in works of art from antiquity onwards. In most instances, they are used for a specific iconographic purpose — to help in the identification of the figure they accompany. This figure may be an allegorical representation of an abstract concept or the personification of one of the arts or sciences. In portraiture, the globe is used as a...