Female head

~LORENZO de’Medici wrote his...

In October 1462 Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, ordered three dozen pairs of eyeglasses from Florence, “because there are many who request of us eyeglasses that are made there … since it is reputed that they are made more perfectly [there] than in any other place in Italy” He had previously ordered eighteen pairs, and soon after he died his successor, Galeazzo Maria, ordered fifty more, “perfectly made according to the ages specified in the list.” The picture of the bespectacled court with …

If Armenini’s Precepts is notable for circumscribing the discourse of mobility within an autobiographical framework, it certainly was not without precedent. As an event instrumental in providing commissions and extending knowledge of the world beyond the confines of one’s patria, travel was a recurring theme in artists’ first-person narratives. We might hazard that the first-person narration of mobility would generate straightforward reportage, of distances covered shorn of the rich figurative …