The sixteen erotic engravings at the heart of Bette Talvacchia’s Taking Positions have inspired outrage, delight, a recent popular novel (Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures), a salacious translation of the Italian sonnets (by Lynne Lawner) that accompanied the prints, and now, Talvacchia’s fine essay, subtitled On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. I modi, “The Ways,” first surfaced in 1524 as a series of drawings by Giulio Romano, the artist who was the prize pupil of Raphael and, after the master’s sudden death at thirty-seven in April of 1520, his chief artistic heir. Shortly thereafter, another of Raphael’s associates, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, put I modi into a form that Raphael had made an indispensable feature of the sixteenth-century art market: the published print. The engravings of I modi were conceived and marketed in Rome (bcbg max azria jacket), a city whose chi