On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy
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In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not deny the strong cultural and historical constraints that placed limits on identity formation in the early modern period. Still, as he contends in this witty, reflective, and generously illustrated book, the category of the individual was important and highly complex for a variety of men in this particular time and place, for both those who belonged to the elite and those who aspired to be part of it. Biow explores the individual in light of early modern Italy's new patronage systems, educational programs, and work opportunities in the context of an increased investment in professionalization, the changing status of artisans and artists, and shifting attitudes about the ideology of work, fashion, and etiquette. He turns his attention to figures familiar (Benvenuto Cellini, Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari) and somewhat less so (the surgeon-physician Leonardo Fioravanti, the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio). One could excel as an individual, he demonstrates, by possessing an indefinable nescio quid , by acquiring, theorizing, and putting into practice a distinct body of professional knowledge, or by displaying the exclusively male adornment of impressively designed facial hair. Focusing on these and other matters, he reveals how we significantly impoverish our understanding of the past if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the Italian and the broader European Renaissance.
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ON THE IMPORTANCE
OF BEING AN INDIVIDUAL
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I close with a reflection, but this time not a personal one.
The year is 1510. Paolo Cortesi’s De cardinalatu (On Being a Cardinal) appeared in print, shortly after the author’s death, in a still incomplete state. Roughly three years later Machiavelli composed Il principe, and then, in 1521, he published his less well-known but still seminal L’arte della guerra (The Art of War), the only book he wrote that ever appeared in print in his own lifetime.10 Broadly speaking, these three books, so different in outlook, rhetorical strategies, and style, addressed two key areas of interest in the Italian Renaissance that this study does not examine in any detail but that we would do well to consider briefly before turning to matters related to techne, ars, and arte in Part I. For two extremely important ways that men made themselves into conspicuous individuals in the period while also participating in male group identities that they sought to exceed was by rising in the church hierarchy and being great military leaders. Cardinals, to be sure, sought to enrich themselves, acquire honor, and assist the papacy in creating the state—in this instance the church—as a major temporal power that would endure in time, while condottieri sought to excel in the art of military affairs, which was one of the great master arts of the Italian Renaissance and certainly a foundational art that Machiavelli deemed absolutely necessary for the prince to master in order to succeed.11 Visual artists, of course, were routinely employed to highlight not only the corporate but also the individual achievements of great cardinals and military men. They pictured these men in a manner that revealed how their accomplishments, honor, status, wealth, and power depended upon their affiliations with all sorts of activities that men typically and collectively engaged in. But they also characterized them as lone, sometimes heroic individuals, even as we are made cognizant of their indebtedness to various communities, customs, and sodalities.
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