At the beginning of the sixteenth Century, the scholarly community all around Europe assumed the name respublica litteraria—the Republic of Letters. It had no land, no capital or borders, and its citizens, considering themselves all equal, originated from many and distant lands. For the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example, the Republic of Letters is the community of students, whose teachers are books of science, antiquity and the Holy Scriptures. In that first imaginary republic, the glory of its citizens depended on their intellectual achievements such as, for example, the invention of new literary genres, such as the Utopia and Emblem books, as well as numerous Medical, Nature and Science books.

What was the artists’ and art’s position in the Republic of Letters? Were they ‘naturalized citizens’ as Alberti had hoped? Was art, whose craft-tools are the brush, the chisel and the construction bar, an active participant in its enterprises? Or were the artists and their work only secondary and used merely to illustrate the texts which the ‘real’ citizens had produced?

We will seek to answer these questions through the investigation and analysis of canonical artists and works of art. Whereas Art History had them investigated mainly in context of their local cultural, historical and stylistic developments, we will try and see them within the unseen universal boundaries of this new republic.