Two Renaissance Friends: Baldassarre Castiglione, Domizio Falcone, and Their Neo-Latin Poetry. Rodney Lokaj. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 466. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. xii + 372 pp. $70.
could provide. He used imagery to explain where coins were struck: he interpreted the arrow on the reverse of a coin from Crete, for example, by using various ancient Roman sources to demonstrate that the Cretans were famously proficient archers. Chatzidakis follows his analysis of these various types of objects with a richly illustrated catalogue of the inscriptions and monuments that Ciriaco recorded, along with photographs of those that survive today. This will prove invaluable for classical archaeologists tracing the fate of the pieces, and for art historians examining how sixteenth-century architects such as Giuliano da Sangallo and Giovanntonio Dosio used his copies. With his commitment to detailed observation and recording, Ciriaco is more easily comparable with the antiquarian scholars who worked a century after him than with his contemporaries, who seem very text-based in comparison. Similarly, his interest in physical remains distinguishes him from other early fifteenth-century Hellenists who pondered the ideal of ancient Greece. Of those around him, Chatzidakis suggests that Ciriaco’s interests in building and architectural terminology place him closest to Alberti. Chatzidakis also reminds us that in other ways—e.g., his distrust of the Ottomans, and belief in Italian superiority—he was very much of his time. This book goes a long way in making sense of Ciriaco’s achievement, and will remain fundamental to understanding his place in fifteenth-century humanism.