Editor’s Note

The painting from the Berenson collection for this issue’s cover offers a discomfiting image: Bonifacio’s Head of Hasdrubal Brought to Hannibal (fig. 1). Based on Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, the work, painted in Venice in the 1540s, alludes to a dramatic moment in the Carthaginians’ Italian campaign. Hannibal retreated to southern Italy while his brother Hasdrubal continued the fight to the east, where he is defeated and decapitated by victorious Roman troops near theMetauro river in the Marche. The victorious general orders two captives to carry the head to Hannibal’s camp in Puglia, and Bonifacio portrays the arrival of the prisoners, still in chains; in the fantastic geography of the panel, the Romans’ camp is situated improbably nearby, and amountain looms in the background that seems better suited to the Alps than the Appenines around Metauro. While a messenger describes the battle that cost Hasdrubal his life, Hannibal raises his arms in horror and surprise as he and his soldiers gaze at the head that lies unceremoniously on the ground before them. As Vincenzo Mancini notes in his description of the painting for the Berenson catalogue, the Carthaginians are dressed in distinctively Turkish armor—a rather common motif in a period when conflict was high between the Ottomans and the Venetian republic where Bonifacio was painting. But the sixteenth century was hardly the first time that a depiction of the historical conflict of Carthage and Rome was mediated through hostilities closer to home. In the opening essay to this issue, Ronald Martinez focuses on Petrarch’s epic Africa, the poem that earned Petrarch his laurel wreath from Robert of Naples in 1341, despite its unfinished state. Its hero is the Roman general Scipio Africanus, who battled both Hannibal and Hasdrubal during the Second Punic War. Suggesting that we should read the poem’s multifaceted themes through the prism of envy, Martinez observes that Petrarch’s Carthaginians, envious of Rome’s prosperity, aremodeled in part on contemporary Muslims envious of the Christian nations to their west—and are perennially concerned lest their holdings in Jerusalem and the Middle East slip from their hands. Hasdrubal appears only fleetingly in Petrarch’s epic, but it’s surely not insignificant that he’s the very first character to appear after a lengthy proem. Scipio has just driven