In 2010 Marco Mendogni (engineer, novelist, and IT expert) generously funded a scholarship to find new  documents on  Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti under the supervision of ISI Florence Director and Renaissance specialist Stefano Baldassarri. The recipient of that grant, Vieri Mazzoni,  eventually published the outcomes of his innovative research in an article titled “Nuovi documenti su Giannozzo e la famiglia Manetti,” which appeared in the prestigious “Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo” (n. 117, 2015, pp. 339-356).

Three years later Mendogni subsidized a new grant (once again under the aegis of ISI Florence and with Prof. Baldassarri serving as academic advisor) to promote further archival research on the many cultural, economic, and political activities of this Renaissance polymath. Both grants further stimulated Mendogni’s interest in Manetti. This led him to conduct his own original research, focusing on Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of Christ” in the Ducal Palace of Urbino. This fifteenth-century masterpiece has elicited a flurry of controversial interpretations. Mendogni believes that Manetti was involved in its making, as a number of elements seem to suggest.

Hence the title of his detailed, engaging essay “Giannozzo e il rebus della tavola di Urbino” (Florence: Maschietto Editore, 2013) of which we offer here several excerpts in English.