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The complex panorama of the Mediterranean area in the fourteenth century compelled Venice to modify its economic patterns. The city started to pay attention to the Italian mainland, developing its agriculture and other industries. But the Veneto was marshy and needed to be drained and improved. The Venetian and mainland aristocracy gradually abandoned commerce for agriculture and land reclamation. Andrea Palladio built many villas for them from which they could administer their estates, transforming the marshes of the Veneto into sites for the villas. Those villas became the perfect place for retirement and contemplation.

The following thesis is a meditation on the drawings of Michelangelo that are connected to his three projects at San Lorenzo and a series of 'gift' drawings for Tomasso de'Cavalieri. The drawings offer a glimpse of his radically inventive imagination that calls for an architecture rooted in the soul and based on the appearance of a 'live' and an emotive body. Engaged within a holistic fabrication of architecture, both the recto and the verso of the sheet are constructed as palimpsests comprised of design sketches, figurative studies, poetic fragments and pragmatic calculations. As instruments of communication, Michelangelo's paper templates are intermediaries between the 'Divine One's' mindful hand and the scarpellini's chisel. A line can be traced from the outline of his disegno , the profillo of a face and the cut line of his modani. Poetry and profiles cross-pollinate in a poiesis of architecture that culminates at a threshold---the hinge between being and becoming---the place where Love tosses in his sleep.

This thesis relates the aspirations (examined in political treatises, literary programs and scientific treaties) of Pope Urban VIIIth with the allegorical spaciality of the architecture of Francesco Borromini. The projects initiated under the patronage of the Pope are particularly related to the Pope's election. Urban's personal impressa, the Angelic Sun is an emblem of this election, a reborn sun, a second personal birth and the elevation of the Angelic Pope (the leader of the age of the Holy Spirit). This is allegorically a metamorphosis like the re-birth of Daphne into Laurel; the Tree of Aeneas and Rome and the principal Barberini impressa. As a dynastic emblem the Laurel unites the cosmic territories of the sun and the moon, the traditional emblems of cosmic kingship and world domination. The metaphysical marriage to Rome (coronation and marriage are ritually linked, like the union of the sun and the moon) metaphorically appropriates the capacity of giving birth through construction, to a new city, an intellectual city in the image of Urban, the threshold for spirit. The architecture 'contains' this intellectual body (city), a dynastic emblem of the Angelic Pope.

Renaissance art historians concur that women were characteristically depicted as ideal types in Renaissance portraiture. Nonetheless, the historiography of portraits of women in Renaissance Italy reveals generational shifts between scholars. Male scholars writing in the nineteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century applied formalist and cultural historical methodologies. Recent scholars raise issues that were previously neglected, such as social historical and feminist concerns. Following this rationale, I argue that the changing interests of scholars have altered the interpretations of portraits of Renaissance women. Moreover, this historical difference is split along gender lines in the historiography of Titian's La Bella. A critical review of the literature on this painting shows that male scholars, such as John Pope-Hennessey, Harold E. Wethey, and Charles Hope define the work in formal terms, such as "charming" and "pretty," whereas female scholars such as Elizabeth Cropper, Patricia Simons and Rona Goffen concur the work to be a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself. A historiography of Titian as a portrait painter confirms that recent scholars have shifted focus from formal studies to an assessment of the social context, conditions of patronage and the feminist issues surrounding the artist's portraits.

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This thesis maps out the roles of cosmetic use in Renaissance Italy from the period c.1450-1540, using books containing cosmetic recipes as the primary source material. Their content, dissemination, and use is explored as a means of creating a new understanding of a practice central to daily life and integral to ongoing arguments about the body. Recent scholarship has seen a rise in interest in books of recipes and secrets in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, but there has yet to be a full-length study exploring cosmetic recipes as a significant source of information, leaving a considerable gap in the understanding of how ‘high’ cultural discussions of beauty ideals related to popular culture and everyday practice. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Focusing on the formative period of 1450-1540, when both the written and artistic interests in cosmetics were developing, this thesis draws together a large body of previously unpublished primary source material from printed and manuscript recipe books relating to the making and use of cosmetics, and is the first in-depth analysis of the material and visual culture of Italian cosmetic practice during this period. A major component of this project was to establish what practices, materials and products constituted Renaissance cosmetic practice. The way in which recipes for beautification are identified within recipe books is carefully considered, and recipe ingredients and methods are examined, with comparisons made to the representation of cosmetics in non-recipe sources (written and visual). The goal was to describe cosmetics as they were defined in Renaissance terms, so recipe ingredients have been considered largely in context of Renaissance medicine rather than modern pharmacy, in contrast to most extant studies on the topic. A further major aim of this study was to create a detailed reconstruction of the social values attached to cosmetic use during the Renaissance period. This has been investigated both through an examination of how cosmetics are represented in written and visual sources, and also through a critical investigation of the people involved in the making and use of cosmetics and cosmetic recipe collections. Throughout, a range of material sources have been examined in consideration with each other—recipe books, behavioural advice, moral arguments, printed and painted image, inventories, and household objects such as mirrors and combs—demonstrating that cosmetics had a wide ranging and significant presence in daily Renaissance life. The first chapter examines the moral discourses directed at cosmetic use, establishing the place of these discourses within broader concerns about the control of women’s behaviour. Chapter 2 begins to place the ideals of beauty in a social context, examining how cosmetics are represented in recipe books, and discussing what activities and practices Renaissance ‘cosmetics’ consisted of, with particular attention given to their relationship with medicinal recipes. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the people who made and used cosmetic recipes, broadly addressing themes of accessibility, and the connections between a beautified appearance and social status. The authors of recipe books, the books’ cost, audience literacy, markets for medicine, and cost and effectiveness of cosmetic recipes are all taken into account to illustrate a lively economy surrounding the use of makeup. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 address cultural representations of cosmetic use in art and literature, re-examining key examples within the context of the material culture of cosmetics to demonstrate the significance of makeup use in formulations of Renaissance femininity.

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Leon Battista Alberti wrote with a sense of irony that separated his works from his humanist contemporaries and linked him to the tradition of fourteenth-century vernacular writers, particularly Petrarch and Boccaccio. His irony was characterized by his encouragement to look for virtue beneath appearances and his distrust of equating virtue with humanist learning.