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Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe, c. 1450-1700 presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.

Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe, c. 1450.1700 presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.

Jones provides an introduction to the topic of women artists in the Early Modern courts, considering issues of historiography, terminology, and the state of related literature. She also addresses the value of the digital humanities - and network mapping/visualizations in particular - to the study of the topic, introducing the multi-faceted project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts.

In 1559, the young noblewoman Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) travelled from her native Cremona to the court of Philip II of Spain, where she was appointed lady-in-waiting (dama della reina) to the monarch’s new bride, Isabel of Valois. The Italian seems to have charmed the court from the first, dancing with Ferrante Gonzaga during the wedding celebrations. But it was Anguissola’s skill as an artist that distinguished her amongst the Queen’s ladies and upon which contemporaries consistently remarked (fig. 1.1).¹ Indeed, by the time she arrived in Spain, Anguissola was already famed as a painter; her skill was appreciated by

Held at the Frick Collection (September 2019–January 2020), the exhibition featured more than twenty free-standing sculptures, medals, and reliefs attributed to the artist, including the Frick's Shield Bearor (cat. no. 3). [...]Noelle emphasizes the import of recognizing Bertoldo's diverse works—created across a wide variety of media—as manifesting a collaborative practice in which “he was often designer and modeler, envisioning the motifs that he then employed others to render” (43). With an attentiveness to historical context and sculptural processes, consideration of a range of media and forms, and sustained emphasis on the collaborative nature of the works considered, this book emerges as essential reading for those seeking a better understanding not only of Bertoldo di Giovanni but also of early modern sculpture itself.

This study examines the formal and ideological origins of the earliest Renaissance cast portrait medals, created by the artist Pisanello (Antonio di Puccio, c. 1394-1455). It focuses on three courts and objects produced at each that are central to understanding the emergent sculptural form. Chapters are devoted to the Constantine and Heraclius medallions created for the Valois prince Jean, Duc de Berry (r. 1360-1416); Pisanello's first medal, dedicated to the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, produced c. 1438 at the Este court in Ferrara; and the series of four medals that Pisanello produced for Ludovico Gonzaga of Mantua (r. 1444-1478). Frequently marginalized in art-historical analyses, studies of the earliest cast medals traditionally approach the objects individually, celebrating their form and iconography as manifesting humanist interest in the individual and the revival of ancient modes of personal commemoration. Through references to the wider historical context and the contemporary visual culture of the courts, this analysis demonstrates that the origins of the new sculptural form lay in synthesizing a series of visual models previously overlooked. These included a class of Byzantine sacred objects, enkolpia, identifiable with successful military endeavors in the East; prophetic literature; French chivalric romances; and genealogical imagery. An equally important contribution of this analysis resides in demonstrating that, from its inception, the cast portrait medal was aligned with one of the most pressing political and religious concerns of the period, the protection of Eastern Christendom from Ottoman incursion. The small, portable, and reproducible objects studied responded to the shared religious and political aspirations of their French and Italian court patrons, each of whom was, to a greater or lesser extent, identified with the call for crusade. Each patron utilized the emergent form of the medal to promote his personal or dynastic rule, employing a form identified with a distinguished tradition of Christian military triumph, traced to ancient Rome, but including as well Byzantine imperial and French royal models. The combination was especially appealing to Pisanello's signorial patrons, professional military leaders eager to legitimize their authority. This study redefines understanding of the form and hence the political and religious function of the objects considered and offers a model for expanded analysis of Pisanello's wider medallic oeuvre. It also demonstrates that the ideological origins of Pisanello's medals and their antecedents resided in the same concerns that motivated production of monumental works of art commissioned by the same patrons, including altarpieces, frescoes, and architecture, thereby situating analysis of the earliest medals centrally within the study of visual culture in the early modern courts.

The development of biological markers of aging has primarily focused on adult samples. Epigenetic clocks are a promising tool for measuring biological age that show impressive accuracy across most tissues and age ranges. In adults, deviations from the DNA methylation (DNAm) age prediction are correlated with several agerelated phenotypes, such as mortality and frailty. In children, however, fewer such associations have been made, possibly because DNAm changes are more dynamic in pediatric populations as compared to adults. To address this gap, we aimed to develop a highly accurate, noninvasive, biological measure of age specific to pediatric samples using buccal epithelial cell DNAm. We gathered 1,721 genome-wide DNAm profiles from 11 different cohorts of typically developing individuals aged 0 to 20 y old. Elastic net penalized regression was used to select 94 CpG sites from a training dataset (n = 1,032), with performance assessed in a separate test dataset (n = 689). DNAm at these 94 CpG sites was highly predictive of age in the test cohort (median absolute error = 0.35 y). The Pediatric-Buccal-Epigenetic (PedBE) clock was characterized in additional cohorts, showcasing the accuracy in longitudinal data, the performance in nonbuccal tissues and adult age ranges, and the association with obstetric outcomes. The PedBE tool for measuring biological age in children might help in understanding the environmental and contextual factors that shape the DNA methylome during child development, and how it, in turn, might relate to child health and disease.

Antibiotic resistance is spreading faster than the introduction of new compounds into clinical practice, causing a public health crisis. Most antibiotics were produced by screening soil microorganisms, but this limited resource of cultivable bacteria was overmined by the 1960s. Synthetic approaches to produce antibiotics have been unable to replace this platform. Uncultured bacteria make up approximately 99% of all species in external environments, and are an untapped source of new antibiotics. We developed several methods to grow uncultured organisms by cultivation in situ or by using specific growth factors. Here we report a new antibiotic that we term teixobactin, discovered in a screen of uncultured bacteria. Teixobactin inhibits cell wall synthesis by binding to a highly conserved motif of lipid II (precursor of peptidoglycan) and lipid III (precursor of cell wall teichoic acid). We did not obtain any mutants of Staphylococcus aureus or Mycobacterium tuberculosis resistant to teixobactin. The properties of this compound suggest a path towards developing antibiotics that are likely to avoid development of resistance. From a new species of β-proteobacteria, an antibiotic called teixobactin that does not generate resistance has been characterized; the antibiotic has two different lipid targets in different bacterial cell wall synthesis components, which may explain why resistance was not observed. Teixobactin, a robust dual-action antibiotic Most antibiotics in clinical use were discovered by screening cultivable soil microorganisms, a much depleted resource that has not been adequately replaced by synthetic approaches. Hence the widespread alarm at the spread of antibiotic resistance. This paper presents some welcome good news, in the form of the isolation and characterization of a new antibiotic active against a range of bacterial pathogens including Staphylococcus aureus , and apparently untroubled by the evolution of resistance. Kim Lewis and colleagues use a recently developed system for in situ cultivation of previously uncultured soil bacteria and identify a β-proteobacterium, Eleftheria terrae sp. that produces a depsipeptide they call teixobactin. Teixobactin is active in vivo and separately targets precursors in the biosynthetic pathways for each of two major components of the bacterial cell wall, peptidoglycan and teichoic acid. Screens for mutants resistant teixobactin were negative, perhaps a consequence of this novel two-target mechanism.

Mixed phenotype acute leukaemia (MPAL) is a high-risk subtype of leukaemia with myeloid and lymphoid features, limited genetic characterization, and a lack of consensus regarding appropriate therapy. Here we show that the two principal subtypes of MPAL, T/myeloid (T/M) and B/myeloid (B/M), are genetically distinct. Rearrangement of ZNF384 is common in B/M MPAL, and biallelic WT1 alterations are common in T/M MPAL, which shares genomic features with early T-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. We show that the intratumoral immunophenotypic heterogeneity characteristic of MPAL is independent of somatic genetic variation, that founding lesions arise in primitive haematopoietic progenitors, and that individual phenotypic subpopulations can reconstitute the immunophenotypic diversity in vivo. These findings indicate that the cell of origin and founding lesions, rather than an accumulation of distinct genomic alterations, prime tumour cells for lineage promiscuity. Moreover, these findings position MPAL in the spectrum of immature leukaemias and provide a genetically informed framework for future clinical trials of potential treatments for MPAL. A large-scale genomics study shows that the cell of origin and founding mutations determine disease subtype and lead to the expression of multiple haematopoietic lineage-defining antigens in mixed phenotype acute leukaemia.