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In his 1553 paper Giovan Battista Bellaso presented his first polyalphabetic cipher, writing that this was an improved reprint of a previous cipher of 1552 that had been printed in Venice on a loose leaflet without instructions. There was much speculation about this early cipher, since no print of that cipher was reported to have been found. Now a printed copy of that leaflet has been found in Venice by the author, and this paper is a report of that finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emblem books are the result of conscious work to mediate messages using combinations of words, images, and forms. It seems that some of the early work during the Renaissance is in good concert with aesthetic and functional principles of contemporary information design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cicco Simonetta has been described as an important cryptanalyst (and perhaps the encipherer of the Voynich Manuscript) in consideration of his famous rules for solving medieval ciphers. His work is in reality a collection of hints for solving ciphers that were rather old-fashioned at that time. Examples of 15th century ciphers confirm that contemporary cipher clerks were well equipped to defy the tricks described by Simonetta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leonardo Bufalini's plan of Rome (1551) was the first printed map of the Eternal City and a landmark in the history of city plans. This article fills several lacunae in the scholarship on the map by reconsidering its intended function and audience and by situating it at the intersection of technical and antiquarian endeavour in sixteenth-century Rome. At issue are Bufalini's methods for making the map, along with the distinctive combination of practical and scholarly interests that motivated him. The anomalous status of Bufalini's plan in the realm of popular printed imagery of the city signals, moreover, that the Renaissance audience had a marked preference for pictorial city views over maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]