This special issue of NeMLA Italian Studies offers ten essays on Renaissance dialogue and related topics, plus two nonrelated book reviews. The introduction, by the editors Roberta Ricci and Simona Wright, summarizes the essays in the volume, noting that one of them deals with Ariosto, whose first edition of Orlando Furioso had been printed exactly 500 years ago. The essays are grouped in three sections, beginning with two that deal with “Questions on Language: Method and Culture.” In “Umanesimo letterario, riforma grafica: Poggio Bracciolini editore, filologo e copista,” Roberta Ricci sketches the transition from Scholastic culture to humanist philology, and highlights Poggio’s central role in the development of humanistic script, illustrated in nine color plates. Lorenzo Sacchini’s “Tra latino e volgare nei Dialoghi piacevoli di Stefano Guazzo: Una questione di ‘fedeltà’” examines two of the Piedmontese academician’s twelve “pleasant dialogues” (1586) in which interlocutors negotiate the competing literary merits of Italian and Latin, debating such topics as the correct form of fideltà/fedeltà, the vernacular noun cited in Sacchini’s title.

The second section offers five essays on “Literature, Theater, and the Arts.” In “Questioning Poetry in Ariosto’s Negromante,” Antonella Ansani analyzes Ariosto’s depiction of the sorcerors Atlante (Orlando Furioso) and Iachelino (Il Negromante) as nuanced and skeptical “figures” of poetic power. Andrea Gazzoni’s “L’operazione e il repertorio. Due categorie barocche tra retorica e commedia dell’arte” draws an analogy between the Baroque notions of rhetorical creativity (here termed “teatralità dell’ingegno”), as formulated in Emmanuele Tesauro’s 1654 Cannocchiale aristotelico, and the theater improvisation of the emerging commedia dell’arte, as outlined in Flaminio Scala’s 1611 Teatro delle Favole Rappresentative. In “On Maniera, Moral Choice, and Truth,” David Cast examines Vasari’s concept of maniera using a moral perspective inspired by reflections of the Romantic English artists William Gilpin and John Constable, and ponders how an artist’s stylistic consistency must avoid mere repetition while achieving truthful representation. Alison Fleming’s “Experiencing the Chapterhouse in the Benedictine Abbey at Pomposa” discusses the style and iconography of a series of frescoes attributed to Riminese artists active between 1310 and 1318—a Crucifixion, four saints, and twelve prophets, shown in six color plates—and interprets them in the historical context of the monastic order. Alessandro Giardino’s “Beheading: The Lesson of Caravaggio” contextualizes the artist’s three late paintings of Giovanni Decollato—the Maltese Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and his two Neapolitan versions of Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist—with a brief note on the decapitations depicted by women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Cindy Sherman, and Adriana Varejão.

The third section, “Considerations on Philosophy and Sciences: Logic and Medicine,” offers three essays. Stephanie Jed’s “Renaissance Dialogue: Humanities and Science” surveys how early modern thinkers like Galileo conceptualized the human hand, and posits a correlation between the sensorimotor physicality of writing in calligraphers like Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi (whose handwriting manual Operina was published in 1522) with that of reading as theorized by educators like John Amos Comenius (1592–1670). In “Wholesome or Pestilential? Giovanni Battista Doni (1594–1647) and the Dispute on Roman Air,” Sara Miglietti situates the Florentine polymath’s De Restituenda Salubritate Agri Romani (On restoring healthiness to the Roman countryside, ca. 1630) within the ecological debates of his time, and contrasts his antiquarian work to contemporary scientific treatises on the subject. Grace Allen’s “Addressing the Reader: Lodovico Dolce’s Somma della filosofia d’Aristotele and the Audience for Vernacular Philosophy in Sixteenth-Century Italy” describes the authorial strategies employed by the famed Venetian poligrafo in promoting his compendium of Aristotelian thought for a lay readership. The volume concludes with two book reviews: Louis Bayman, The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama (Elda Buonanno Foley), and Gino Tellini, Alle origini della modernità letteraria (Paola Quadrini).

Despite the misleadingly simplistic title of this volume, the essays it contains employ a robustly flexible notion of dialogue in discussing a wide range of important artists and thinkers. The reader will welcome its rich panorama of the literature and the arts in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque.