English, Italian, and Latin.

The illuminated ms., De obitu Valerii ..., which is discussed in this work is located in the University of Glasgow Library.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 425-461) and index.

ILLUSTRATIONS; ABBREVIATIONS; PROLOGUE; CHAPTER ONE The Death of a Child; CHAPTER TWO The Birth of a Book; CHAPTER THREE Marcello in Word and Image; CHAPTER FOUR Marcello in War and Peace; CHAPTER FIVE Father and Son; CHAPTER SIX In Sympathy; APPENDIX ONE Marcello Family and Monuments; APPENDIX TWO Chronology; APPENDIX THREE Texts; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX.

Margaret King shows what the death of a little boy named Valerio Marcello over five hundred years ago can tell us about his time. This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account, richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the feelings of his brothers and sisters, the str.