several types of Marian icons, inside and outside Egypt. Elizabeth Bolman says these early Egyptian images of Mary nursing Jesus were meant to emphasize his divinity, much as images of nursing goddesses did in ancient Egyptian iconography. Higgins argues that such similarities prove that images of Isis influenced those of Mary, but not that Christians deliberately adopted Isis's iconography or other elements of her cult. Influence in later cultures The memory of Isis survived the extinction of her worship. Like the Greeks and Romans, many modern Europeans have regarded ancient Egypt as the home of profound and often mystical wisdom, and this wisdom has often been linked with Isis. Giovanni Boccaccio's biography of Isis in his 1374 work De mulieribus claris, based on classical sources, treated her as a historical queen who taught skills of civilization to humankind. Some Renaissance thinkers elaborated this perspective on Isis. Annio da Viterbo, in the 1490s, claimed Isis and Osiris had civilized Italy before Greece, thus drawing a direct connection between his home country and Egypt. The Borgia Apartments painted for Annio's patron, Pope Alexander VI, incorporate this same theme in their illustrated rendition of the Osiris myth. Western esotericism has often made reference to Isis. Two Roman esoteric texts used the mythic motif in which Isis passes down secret knowledge to Horus. In Kore Kosmou, she teaches him wisdom passed down from Hermes Trismegistus, and in the early alchemical text Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus, she gives him alchemical recipes. Early modern esoteric literature, which saw Hermes Trismegistus as an Egyptian sage and frequently made use of texts attributed to his hand, sometimes referred to Isis as well. In a different vein, Apuleius's description of Isiac initiation has influenced the practices of many secret societies. Jean Terrasson's 1731 novel Sethos used Apuleius as inspiration for a fanciful Egyptian initiation rite dedicated to Isis. It was imitated by actual rituals in various Masonic and Masonic-inspired societies during the eighteenth century, as well as in other literary works, most notably Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1791 opera The Magic Flute. From the Renaissance on, the veiled statue of Isis that Plutarch and Proclus mentioned was interpreted as a personification of nature, based on a passage in the works of Macrobius in the fifth century CE that equated Isis with nature. Authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ascribed a wide variety of meanings to this