The opening lines of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy provide the starting point for a consideration of the ways that artists inscribed themselves within their works during the Renaissance. This is a matter both of signatures and of authorial complicity. This article examines how signatures were defined in the period and how they were used in a process of artistic definition. Conventions of inscription are outlined, and four particularly inventive instances (Fra Filippo Lippi, Donatello, Michelangelo and Titian) are considered in greater detail to show how artists' names could be used to direct the viewer's experience of their works and appreciation of their authorship.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.