Iain Fenlon

If Scipione Gonzaga is remembered at all today, it is most likely to be for his friendship and patronage of Torquato Tasso; as the dedicatee of the poet's youthful Discorsi dell'arte poetica and one of his dialogues, the transcriber (in the crucial year 1575) of all the stanzas of the Liberata then available to him, and the editor of the celebrated edition of the full text of the poem brought out by the Mantuan printer Osanna in 1584. Of his own literary efforts little remains. A handful of poems in a respectable if conventional Petrarchesque idiom appeared during his lifetime; on the other hand the Commentam, evidently inspired by classical precedent and a rare example from the period of a prelate's autobiography, was not published until the end of the eighteenth century when it appeared in an elaborate edition with annotations by Giuseppe Marotti.

... XVII secolo', in Viller Masoni (ed.), Correggio: Identità e storia di unà città (Parma, 1991); and for Bozzolo those in Irma Pagliari, Il ... and decoration, see, inter alia, Amedeo Belluzzi, Il palazzo dei lucidi inganni: Palazzo Te a Mantova (Mantua, 1976); Egon Verheyen, The Palazzo ...

This wide-ranging study vividly presents the major events that took place in Venice in the 1570s, culminating in a deadly outbreak of the plague that claimed one-quarter of the Venetian population. Analyzing reactions to this dramatic decade, Iain Fenlon throws fresh light on the historical machine that produced the distinct civic and cultural ethos of the city and uncovers new aspects of its urban topography, ceremony, and cultural life. At the heart of the book is a detailed account of four historical events: the formation of the Holy League, a coalition that brought the Republic into conflict with the Ottoman Empire; the victory of that League against the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto; the ceremonial welcoming of Henry III of France to the city in 1574; and the devastating plague of 1575--77. The author considers how these events, above all the victory at Lepanto, were reconfigured in the realms of memory and myth, and he describes in detail a religious matrix that provides the key to the civic ethos of the city in this era.