[1] Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 100.
[2] This approach was favored by Raphael, who created his figure of Galatea through this process of selection by synthesizing various depictions of Nereids from ancient sarcophagi. Raphael’s employment of the process, as well as his expert knowledge of classical antiquities, suggests that the artist would have been a great resource and possible contributor for Equicola. See David Rijser, Raphael’s Poetics: Ekphrasis, Interaction and Typology in Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 66.
[3] Allyson B. Williams, “Le Donne, i Cavalier, l’Arme, Gli Amori: Artistic Patronage at the Court of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara,” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), 3.
[4] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 3.
[5] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 3.
[6] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 6.
[7] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 7.
[8] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 8.
[9] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 12.
[10] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 14-15.
[11] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 155.
[12] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 164.
[13] Williams, “Court of Alfonso I d’Este,” 164.
[14] Stephen D. Kolsky, “Mario Equicola: a Biographical Reappraisal” (PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London, 1981), 2.
[15] Kolsky, “Mario Equicola,” 2.
[16] Kolsky, “Mario Equicola,” 120.
[17]Anthony Colantuono, Titian, Colonna, and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 13.
[18] Kolsky, “Mario Equicola.” 200-215.
[19] “National Archaeological Museum.” Ferrara: Terra e Acqua. Last modified April 26, 2021. https://www.ferraraterraeacqua.it/en/ferrara/discover-the-area/art-and-culture/museums-and-galleries/national-archaeological-museum.
[20] “National Archaeological Museum.”
[21] Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este, 1471-1505, and the Invention of a Ducal
Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.
[22] Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 3.
[23] Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 4.
[24] Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 2.
[25]Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Toward a Reinterpretation of the Renaissance in Ferrara,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme Et Renaissance 30, no. 2 (1968): 268.
[26] Gundersheimer, “Toward a Reinterpretation,” 269-270.
[27] Gundersheimer, “Toward a Reinterpretation,” 270.
[28] Gundersheimer, “Toward a Reinterpretation,” 270.
[29] John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 124.
[30] Igor Candido, Petrarch and Boccaccio: The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017), 226.
[31] D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome, xiv.
[32] It was then that humanism began to evolve, as so many movements due, with the rise of civic humanism. Rooted in the study of classical democracy, civic humanism valued participation in society and governance above the contemplation and learnedness of Petrarchan Humanism, and was used mainly as a political tool in Florence.
[33] Rijser, Poetics, 21.
[34] Leon Battista Alberti and John R. Spencer, On Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 93.
[35] Marcus Tullius Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952), 168-69; Pliny, Natural History (London: Wernerian Club, 1848), 308-9. See Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis. (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19.
[36] Alberti, On Painting, 24
[37] “Ut Pictura Poesis” is a Latin phrase that translates to “as is painting so is poetry” from Horace’s “Ars Poetica.” During the classical period when Horace coined the phrase, painting was viewed as the highest form of artistic creation, and by associating poetry with it, Horace wished to elevate the written word to the same level. In the Renaissance, “Ut Pictura Poesis” was no longer about trying to elevate poetry through association with painting, but was about the elevation of painting through the association with poetry. See Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; the Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 196.
[38] Anthony Colantuono, “Estense Patronage and the Construction of the Ferrarese Renaissance, c. 1395-1598,” in Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 204.
[39] Tim Shepard, Echoing Helicon: Music Art and Identity in the Este Studioli, 1440-1530 (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), 100.
[40] Shepard, Echoing Helicon, 102.
[41] Shepard, Echoing Helicon, 102.
[42] Anthony Colantuono. “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods,” The Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): 237-56.
[43] Charles Hope, “The ‘Camerini D’Alabastro’ of Alfonso D’Este-II,” The Burlington Magazine 113, no. 825 (1971): 644.
[44] Hope, “The ‘Camerini D’Alabastro,’” 644-645.
[45] Hope, “The ‘Camerini D’Alabastro,’” 644-645.
[46] Hope, “The ‘Camerini D’Alabastro,’” 644-645.
[47] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 241.
[48] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 237.
[49] Phillip Fehl, “The Worship of Bacchus and Venus in Bellini’s and Titian’s Bacchanals for Alfonso D’Este,” Studies in the History of Art 6 (1974): 43.
[50] David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (Washington D.C: National Gallery of Art, Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006), 172.
[51] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae” 237.
[52] Susan Nalezyty, “Giovanni Bellini’s ‘Feast of the Gods’ and Banquets of the Ancient Ritual Calendar,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 3 (2009): 748.
[53] Nalezyty, “Banquets of the Ancient Ritual,” 751.
[54] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 24.
[55] Nalezyty, “Banquets of the Ancient Ritual,” 747.
[56] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 237-253.
[57] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 237.
[58] Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae,” 237.
[59] In his book, Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation, Anthony Colantuono expands on his analysis of the pedagogical qualities of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods by arguing that Mario Equicola’s design scheme was inspired by Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Colantuono posits that the paintings in the Camerino and Colonna’s text were connected by the shared themes of sexual health and reproductive physiology, both of which were of major concern for Duke Alfonso and his dynastic future.
[60] Colantuono, Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation, 13-14.
[61] Wendy Stedman Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs for Alfonso D’Este’s Studio Di Marmi: Their Significance and Impact on Titian,” Studies in the History of Art 45 (1993): 317.
[62] Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” 317.
[63] Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” 317.
[64] Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” 317.
[65] Nonnus, Dionysiaca (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 40.
[66] Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” 317.
[67] Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” 317.
[68] Fehl, “The Worship of Bacchus and Venus,” 43.
[69] Luba Freedman, Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 82.
[70] Leonardo Barkan, “The Beholder’s Tale: Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives,” Representations 44 (1993): 138.
[71]Ingo Gildenhard, and Andrew Zissos, “The Set Text: Pentheus and Bacchus,” in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.511-733, (Cambridge, UK 2016), 39-64.
[72] Charles McNelis, “Bacchus, Hercules and Literary History in Statius’ Achilleid,” The Classical Journal 115, no. 3-4 (2020): 442-455.
[73] McNelis, “Bacchus, Hercules and Literary History,” 442-55.
[74] Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 33.
[75] Neil Hopkinson, Studies in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1994), 1–4.
[76] Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 40.
[77] Nonnus, Dionysiaca, 45.
[78] Nonnus Dionysiaca 13.
[79] Colantuono, Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation, 116-117.
[80] Anna M. McCann, “Two Fragments of Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Illustrating the Indian Triumph of Dionsyus,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 36 (1977): 127-129.
[81] Raphael was certainly not the only Italian artist to draw inspiration from classical sarcophagi. In fact, his assistants Perino del Vaga and Polidoro de Caravaggio both went on to create paintings during the Mannerist period with similar formal qualities clearly taken from classical sarcophagus relief. Though Raphael is not especially known for his flat, sarcophagus-esque paintings, the parallels between his drawing and the Walters’ sarcophagus, as well as the work of his former assistants, suggest a greater interest in sarcophagi relief than is popularly believed.
[82] Kolsky, “Mario Equicola,” 210-215.
[83] Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and Salvatore Settis, Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 97.
[84] Leon Battista Alberti, Intercenales, edited by Franco Bacchelli, and Luca d’Ascia, Intercenales (Bologna: Pendragon, 2003), 34-38.
[85] Ciammitti, Dosso’s Fate, 97.
[86] Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
[87] Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique.
[88] Felton Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi; Court Painters at Ferrara (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1968).
[89] Lucian and Matthew D. Macleod, Lucian. (Cambridge, Mass, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 309.
[90] Lucian and Macleod, Lucian. 309.
[91] Marcin Fabianski, “The Iconography of Jupiter Butterfly Painter Dosso Dossi, or the Dream of Spring by Alfonso d’Este,” Artibus et Historiae, no. 71 (January 1, 2015): 113–124, 324, 327.
[92] Verity Platt, “Re-Membering the Belvedere Torso: Ekphrastic Restoration and the Teeth of Time,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 1 (2020): 62.
[93] Platt, “Re-Membering the Belvedere Torso,” 68.
[94] Platt, “Re-Membering the Belvedere Torso,” 58.
[95] David Summers, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art,” The Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (1977): 336–361.