Della Rovere family
A Ligurian family of obscure origins which acquired wealth, power, and status during the papacy of Francesco della Rovere (Pope sixtus iv; 1471-84). An enthusiastic nepotist, Sixtus generously bestowed cardinal’s hats and lordships on his nephews. Giovanni della Rovere (1457-1501), whom Sixtus made lord of Senigal-lia, married the daughter of the last Montefeltro duke of Urbino; their son succeeded to the duchy in 1508 and the della Rovere family ruled Urbino until the extinction of the line in 1631. Sixtus made his nephew Giuliano a cardinal (1471); as julius ii (pope 1503-13), Giuliano proved to be one of the ablest and most efficient Renaissance popes and further enhanced his family’s prestige. He was known for his opposition to simony and nepotism.
Della Scala family
The rulers of Verona from 1259 to 1387. Mastino I (died 1277) was the first to control Verona. Della Scala power in northeast Italy reached its highest point under Cangrande I (1311-29), who conquered Vicenza (1312-14), Padua (1317-18), Bellino, and Feltre and was imperial vicar of Mantua (1327). The family’s fortunes declined when Mastino II (died 1351) provoked a hostile Florentine-Venetian coalition and lost all his territories except Verona and Vicenza. The visconti family defeated the della Scala and annexed their territories in 1387. The della Scala were admired for their public works and patronage of scholarship and letters; dante was sheltered by them in Verona in the early 14th century.
Della Valle, Pietro
(1586-1652) Italian traveler Delle Valle was born in Rome to aristocratic parents. From 1606 to 1614 he lived at Naples, before starting his travels in Istanbul (1614-15). From there he went to Egypt and Jerusalem, then Damascus and Baghdad (1616). In Baghdad he married a Syrian Christian girl. They traveled on to Isfahan, where he spent five years (1617-21) near the court of Shah Abbas, of whom he would write favorably in his Delle conditioni di Abbds re di Persia (1628). Leaving Persia, he headed for India; when his wife died en route he added her embalmed body to his luggage. From Goa he traveled around southern India before heading home (1624) via the Middle East and Sicily. Wherever he went delle Valle studied and became proficient in the local languages, copied inscriptions, collected manuscripts, researched the indigenous culture, and sent back meticulous reports to his Neapolitan friend Mario Schipano. However, only the first part of his Viaggi was published during his lifetime (1650) and then only partially.
Delorme, Philibert (Philibert de l’Orme)
(c. 15101570) French architect
The son of a master stonemason in Lyons, Delorme became acquainted with contemporary Italian works, as well as with the antiquities, while living in Rome (c. 1533-36), where he executed work for Pope Paul III. Delorme returned to Lyons in 1536 and the same year designed the Hotel Bullioud there for the finance minister of Brittany. In 1540 he was appointed controller of fortifications at Lyons and subsequently embarked (1541-47) upon his first major building, the chateau of St-Maur-des-Fosses near Paris for Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, whom Delorme had met in Rome. Appointed superintendent of buildings under Henry II in 1548, Delorme built for him the Chateau-Neuf at St. Germain-en-Laye (1557), and for Henry’s mistress diane de poitiers, the Chateau d’Anet (1547-52) and the bridge at chenonceaux (1556-59). Although Delorme fell from favor after Henry’s death in 1559, he was later commissioned by Catherine de’ Medici to build the palace of the tuileries in Paris (1564), his last major work.
Noted for his success in combining Italian humanist ideas with traditional French achitecture, Delorme also wrote two books on architectural theory, Nouvelles Inventions pour bien bastir (1561) and LArchitecture (1567); of the latter only the first part of a projected nine appeared. He designed the tomb of Francis I at St-Denis (1547), and also undertook additions to the palace of Fontainebleau (1548-58) and work on Notre Dame. Most of his buildings are now destroyed.
Deschamps, Eustache
(c. 1346-c. 1406) French poet Born at Vertus and educated by Guillaume de machaut, Deschamps went on to study law at Orleans and served Charles V and Charles VI in a variety of diplomatic and administrative offices, including that of maitre des eaux et forets in Champagne and Brie. He wrote poetry in his spare time and after his retirement, producing over 1000 ballades and nearly 200 rondeaux on patriotic and moral as well as traditional themes; one of his ballades is addressed to the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, "grant translateur" (great translator). Deschamps’s other writings include an important treatise on versification, Art de ditier (1392); a satire on women, Miroir de mariage; and a number of dramatic works, notably the Farce de Maitre Trubert et d’Antroignart.
Desiderio da Settignano
(c. 1430-1464) Italian sculptor Few facts are known about this precocious and brilliant, but shortlived, sculptor. Born in the stone-quarrying village of Settignano, near Florence, he probably learned to carve from his family and later collaborated closely with Antonio rossellino. He was influenced by donatello, but cannot have been trained by him, for the master was in Padua during the relevant decade. Desiderio was a successful imitator of Donatello’s shallow-relief carvings (schiacciato), which he used specially for Madonna reliefs. He was not interested in the darker, dramatic side of Donatello, but excelled in sweeter subjects, such as portraits of women and children. His two main commissions, both in Florence, were: the Marsuppini monument in Sta. Croce (c. 1453), which was an elaboration on the theme of Bernardo rossellino’s Bruni monument, and the altar of the sacrament in San Lorenzo (finished 1461).
Des Periers, Bonaventure
(c. 1510-c. 1544) French writer and humanist
He was born at Arnay-le-Duc and after collaborating with olivetan on his translation of the Bible and with Etienne dolet on the Commentarii linguae latinae, Des Periers became valet de chambre and secretary to marguerite de navarre, whom he assisted with the transcription of her Heptameron. In 1537 he produced the controversial Cym-balum mundi, a satirical attack on Christianity in the form of four allegorical dialogues, which was banned soon after publication. Des Periers is believed to have committed suicide in 1544. His Nouvelles Recreations et joyeux devis, a collection of short stories providing a lively and realistic picture of 16th-century society, was published posthumously in 1558.
Desportes, Philippe
(1546-1606) French poet Born at Chartres, Desportes entered the French court during the reign of Charles IX and enjoyed the patronage of the duke of Anjou, with whom he traveled to Poland. After the latter’s accession to the French throne as Henry III, Desportes superseded ronsard as court poet and received a number of lucrative benefices, including the abbacy of Tiron. Desportes’ love poetry, stylistically influenced by petrarch, ariosto, and other Italian poets, consists largely of sonnets and elegies commissioned by his patrons for their mistresses: his Premieres Oeuvres appeared in 1573 and his Dernieres Amours in 1583. In the latter part of his life Desportes produced a series of translations of the Psalms, which brought adverse and perhaps unmerited criticism from his enemy malherbe.
Des Pres, Josquin
(c. 1440-1521) French composer First mentioned as a singer at Milan cathedral in 1459, he was in the employ of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza by 1474. After the duke’s assassination (1476) Josquin joined the service of his brother, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, with whom he traveled to Rome in 1484. From 1486 Josquin sang in the papal choir. Around 1501 he appears to have been in France, possibly as unofficial court composer to King louis xii. His five-part De profundis clamavi may have been written for Louis’s funeral in 1515. From 1503 to 1504 he was maestro to Duke Ercole d’Este. In 1505 Josquin was back in France, at Conde-sur-l’Escaut, where he was provost at the cathedral, and where he died.
Josquin is generally regarded as the greatest composer of the High Renaissance. In the last two decades of his life his music was disseminated through printing, and his fame is partly due to the work of the Venetian printer petrucci. Josquin was a prolific composer; about 20 Masses, 100 motets, and 75 secular works survive. He developed the techniques of Mass composition, notably the canon, paraphrase, and parody styles. In the late Missa Pange lingua the hymn melody underlies all the movements of the work, but it is subtly paraphrased rather than being employed as a cantus firmus. Josquin’s motets are less conservative in style. For his many chansons he elaborated on melodies from popular music of the time. The compositional techniques he employed are similar to those found in his sacred works; through abandoning the formes fixes in his secular music he opened the way for greater stylistic variety.
Deutsch, Niklaus Manuel
(c. 1484-1530) Swiss artist, poet, soldier, and statesman
Born in Berne, Deutsch popularized many of the concepts of the Italian Renaissance in northern Europe and adopted them himself in portraits, drawings, and paintings, mostly executed between 1515 and 1520. Many of his works dwell on the morbid subjects of ghosts and death, as in the case of his best work The Dance of Death, painted for the Dominican monastery at Berne and, having been destroyed in 1660, now only known by copies. Other works include a Judgment of Paris, a Pyramus and Thisbe, and a Beheading of John the Baptist. Deutsch was also an active member of the Berne city councils, a proponent of the Reformation, and author of such satires on ecclesiastical affairs as Der Ablasskramer (1525) and Testament der Messe (1528).
Devotio Moderna (Latin, "Modern Devotion")
A religious movement that emerged in the Netherlands in the late 14th century under the influence of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293-1381). His ideas were put into practice by his disciple Gerard (Geert) Groote (1340-84), whose lay followers were known as the Brothers and Sisters of the common life. Their aim was to keep religion simple, devout, and charitable, and they played an important part in restoring monastic virtues among the laity and in the monasteries themselves. Devotio Moderna laid strong emphasis on individual spirituality, structured meditation, and moral regeneration; its leaders tended to take a skeptical view of the intricacies of scholastic philosophy and of ecclesiastical practices such as pilgrimage. Lay adherents lived together under one roof and worked for a living, without taking monastic vows, but the same ideals of simple, practical Christianity also permeated certain religious houses, among which the lead was taken by the Augustinian house of Windesheim, founded in 1387 at the instigation of Groote’s disciple Florentius Radewyns (1350-1400) near Zwolle in Holland. Other Dutch monasteries that associated themselves with Devotio Moderna joined "the Congregation of Windesheim," and the movement spread in the 15th century to Germany and Switzerland. It was immensely influential in the development of a powerful spiritual literature in the 15th-century Netherlands, usually written in Latin but immediately translated into Middle Dutch. The 16th-century reformers in their zeal against monasticism did not spare the Devotio Moderna houses, destroying Windesheim itself in 1581. Devotio Moderna has been criticized as anti-intellectual and antitheological, but has also been praised as the source of all religious reforms during the 16th century.
Diana In Roman antiquity, the virgin goddess of the hunt, frequently identified with the Greek goddess Artemis, sister of Apollo. Diana was endowed by medieval and Renaissance iconographers with many of the attributes of Artemis, in particular the latter’s association with the moon. As patroness of chastity, Diana was often evoked by artists and writers who wished to compliment a lady, and in the case of elizabeth i of England the eulogizing of the queen as Diana, under a variety of names, became a cult, strongly promoted by the cult object herself. She appears for instance as Cynthia (one of Artemis’s names) in ralelgh’s poem The Ocean to Cynthia and as Belphoebe in Spenser’s faerie queene (Phoebe was another of Artemis’s names).
The myth of Actaeon, who surprised Artemis/Diana bathing with her nymphs and was turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds, is the subject of a fine painting by Titian (c. 1560; Harewood House). A marble statue of Diana in the character of a huntress, with stag and bow (c. 1549), which formerly stood in the grounds of diane de poitiers’s Chateau d’Anet, is attributed to Jean goujon, the subject a compliment to his patroness.
Diana, La (1559)
A Spanish pastoral romance by Jorge de montemayor. It was an immense success, especially among the courtly audiences previously devoted to the romances of chivalry. The prose narrative, in seven chapters with interspersed lyrics, essentially concerns the love of Sereno for Diana, who is married to Delio. The meandering story, with passages of rich descriptive detail, involves an enchantress and magicians, a magic potion, nymphs, and a number of other complications, marvels, and relationships. Love is portrayed as irrational and painful but ennobling. Though a lesser work than sannazaro’s Arcadia, which it imitates, it was frequently reprinted and widely translated; it influenced a number of later pastoral-ists, in Spain notably Gaspar Gil Polo (Diana enamorada, 1564) and cervantes (La Galatea, 1585). In England it influenced Sir Philip Sidney’s arcadia.
Diane de Poitiers
(1499-1566) French noblewoman Beautiful and talented, Diane married Louis de Breze, grand seneschal of Normandy, in 1515. As mistress of henry ii from the mid-1530s, she exerted considerable influence at the French court, forcing Queen catherine de’ medici to accept second place. Taking advantage of court rivalries between montmorency and the guise family she played a decisive role in the allocation of positions of power and profit. She also patronized the architect de-lorme, who built her Chateau d’Anet (1547-52), and the sculptor Jean goujon. After Henry Il’s death (1559) the widowed queen took her revenge and drove Diane from court.
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal
(c. 1492-c. 1581) Spanish historian and soldier
Born at Medina del Campo, he sailed to Central America with Pedro Arias de Avila in 1514. Subsequently he joined several expeditions, serving cortes during the invasion of Mexico (1519) and the expedition to Honduras (1524-26). In 1568 he wrote, from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (The true history of the conquest of New Spain; 1632). It contains vivid eyewitness accounts of personalities, events, and places involved in the conquest of Mexico and was intended to counterbalance Cortes’ self-promotion in his own letters and the eulogistic account of the conquest by Cortes’ secretary, who had not even been in the New World.
Diaz de Novaes, Bartholomeu
(died 1500) Portuguese navigator and the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope (1488)
Diaz was of noble parentage, although the date and place of his birth are unknown. His first major voyage was to the Gold Coast as navigator in 1481. King John II was impressed by Diaz and in 1487 sent him with three ships to chart the African coast and explore possible routes to India. A prolonged storm forced him southwards and by the time he sailed north again, he had unknowingly rounded the Cape of Good Hope. He followed the coast eastwards as far as the Great Fish River before discontent among his crew forced him to turn back, but he did not return before ascertaining the north-eastwards trend of the coast. This confirmed the feasibility of a route round Africa to India. Diaz was received enthusiastically when he arrived back in Lisbon, but with Vasco da gama established as court favorite he was never given independent command again. He was lost at sea off the Cape of Good Hope on cabral’s expedition.
Digges, Leonard
(c. 1520-1571) English mathematician Little is known of Digges’s early life other than that he was born in Kent, trained as a lawyer, and was caught up in the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Sentenced to death in 1554, he was later reprieved. Digges belonged to the first generation of English mathematicians who sought to apply their newly acquired skills to the practical arts. To this end he produced some of the earliest surviving English texts on surveying (Tectonicon, 1556), geometry (Pan-tometria, 1571), and, as augmented by his son Thomas Digges (died 1595), the application of the "Science of Numbers" to military matters (Stratioticos, 1579).
Dijon
A city in eastern France, formerly the capital of Burgundy. Dijon’s heyday was under the 14th- and 15th-century dukes of Burgundy until the union of the duchy with the French Crown in 1477. Parts of the ducal palace survive, also a number of important churches from the 15th and 16th centuries, including St. Michel with a remarkable Renaissance facade and sculptures by Hugues Sambin (1515/20-c. 1601), a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci who ran a workshop in Dijon. The nearby Chartreuse de Champmol was founded (1383) by philip the bold as the burial place of his dynasty. It was wrecked in 1793 and only fragments of the Puits de Moise, the masterpiece of his sculptor, Claus sluter, survive, with further fragments in Dijon’s museum.
Leonard Digges Woodcut illustrations appearing in his Pantometria (1571), an early treatise on surveying according to the principles of geometry. The surveyor in the top picture is using a theodolite, an instrument first described in Digges’s work.
Diplomacy
The practice of diplomacy in the modern sense—the maintaining by a state of permanent representatives abroad—was a Renaissance development that went hand-in-hand with the older practice of exchanging ambassadors on an ad hoc basis. Such exchanges routinely took place when matters such as trade agreements, political pacts, royal marriages, or religious issues were under discussion. Aenea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope pius ii, who traveled extensively on Church business in the 1430s, included an account of his embassy to King James I of Scotland in his autobiographical Commentarii; his reception in Scotland is also recorded in the series of frescoes on his career painted by pinturicchio for the Piccolomini Library in Siena. In the years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Byzantine emperors sent numerous ambassadors to Catholic Europe to attempt to achieve a religious accommodation that would enable Western and Eastern Christendom to present a united front against the advancing Ottoman Turks, with Emperor John VIII Paleologus himself leading the Orthodox delegation at the Council of Florence in 1438. Prestige was also an important motivator, particularly where principals were involved, as at the field of the cloth of gold. The youthful French ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII in 1533 dignified their mission on behalf of francis i with a commemorative double portrait by Hans holbein the Younger.
Ambassadors often left valuable accounts of the countries they visited: the German Sigmund von Herberstein, an envoy to Russia in 1517 and 1526, wrote Rerum Mus-coviticarum commentarii. Others who left descriptions of this then little-known country were the Englishmen Sir Jerome Horsey, Elizabeth I’s envoy to tsars Ivan the Terrible and Feodor I in the 1580s, and Giles Fletcher, English ambassador to Moscow in 1588. Roger ascham, who accompanied Edward Vl’s ambassador to charles v through Germany in 1551, kept a journal in English during his travels, the bulk of which, sent home as a letter to a friend, was published as A Report … of the Affaires and State of Germany (1553).
Envoys also traveled beyond the bounds of Christendom. The accession of Sultan Mehmet II in 1451 brought a flurry of embassies to his then court at Adrianople, among them envoys from Venice, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the Knights Hospitaler on Rhodes, Serbia, and Constantinople. The importance of contact with the sublime porte (as the Ottoman seat of government was called) grew in the 16th century as the sultan’s power spread across the Mediterranean and menaced the eastern European heartlands. The suburb of Pera, north of the Golden Horn, became an established diplomatic quarter. One particularly well-documented embassy was that of Ogier Ghislain de busbecq, the envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1555-62. At the end of the 15th century John II of Portugal sent Pero da covilha as his ambassador to Africa with letters for the legendary Christian ruler Prester John. In 1615 Sir Thomas Roe (c. 1581-1644), who might be accounted one of the earliest career diplomats, was sent as envoy to the Moghul emperor Jahangir to consolidate a commercial treaty on behalf of the east india company, following up that successful mission with an equally successful embassy to the Ottoman Porte in 1621-28. Another early career diplomat was Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), famous for his punning witticism "An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."
The usefulness of having a permanent representative abroad was first demonstrated by the consuls who were maintained by the Italian city-states with trading interests in the Levant to act as the eyes and ears of their paymasters there. Venice in particular took the lead in setting up an organized diplomatic service; the reports (relazioni) made by its representatives at the end of their term of office were formally read out in the Senate and provide an invaluable record of the evolution of European diplomacy. In the second half of the 15th century similar arrangements began to be made by other Italian states, and the practice later spread to Spain and northern Europe, a process accelerated by the outbreak of the Wars of Italy in 1494. One condition of the 1521 treaty between Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Henry VIII was that they should mutually appoint ambassadors. The professional diplomat Eustache Chapuys spent 16 eventful years from 1529 as imperial representative in London, while on the English side credit for the development of a formal diplomatic service is mainly due to Cardinal wolsey. Although the legal position of diplomats resident in foreign courts was at first sometimes ambiguous, and they could be vulnerable to accusations of spying, there were such clear advantages to all parties in having someone to keep an eye on other princes while working to maintain a peaceful and mutually satisfactory status quo that the system was steadily formalized from the early 16th century onward.
Dissection
Little dissection of human cadavers took place before the Renaissance. Consequently, much of the anatomical knowledge of antiquity was derived mislead-ingly from the study of Barbary apes, domestic animals, and the occasional human corpse. The main source of bodies for Renaissance students were those presented for autopsy. Outside this, anatomists were forced back on their own resources. As a result medical students, as in Bologna in 1319, found themselves prosecuted for grave robbing. Although arrangements were made in 1442 to allow the medical school to receive two executed corpses annually, the supply remained quite inadequate. Consequently, vesalius could still be found a century later haunting cemeteries and competing with marauding dogs for skeletal remains. In his entire career he seems to have seen no more than six female corpses, although it is a female corpse on the dissecting table in the crowded theater depicted on the woodcut title page of the first edition of his De humanis corporis fabrica (1543; see illustration p. 491).
Even when corpses were available, the anatomical custom of the day did little to advance knowledge. The actual dissection itself was often conducted by an illiterate demonstrator while the anatomist himself merely read from a supposedly authoritative text. Given the conditions under which they had to work, it is hardly surprising that few Renaissance anatomists could feel sufficiently confident in their work to challenge the authority of their dissecting manuals.
