Between 1484 and 1490, Michele di Bartolomeo alias “Tifi” Odasi, a man of letters who gravitated around the most distinguished humanistic circles of Padua, gave to the press a booklet that was destined to earn him a modest place in the history of Italian literature. Almost exclusively remembered today as one of the earliest examples of macaronic poetry, the humorous genre whose defining feature was an incongruous contamination of Latin language structures with vernacular words and inflections, his Macaronea nonetheless holds a certain interest for art historians. Along with the compositions by the Venetian Andrea Michieli, Odasi’s text marks the…