Читать книгу On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy - Douglas Biow - Страница 10

Introduction

I BEGIN WITH A REFLECTION, AND A DECIDEDLY PERSONAL ONE AT THAT. Some time ago, in the late 1970s, long before I embarked on a career in the humanities or even ventured to imagine doing so, when a host of fascinating topics of highly specialized scholarly interest were not even remotely on my mind or, for that matter, in some cases even circulating as topics of widespread interest in the academy, I began working my way through Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas in bucolic Bennington, Vermont, doing the best I could on my own with those complex pieces of music. One day, thinking I had sufficiently mastered the opening adagio of the first sonata, I performed it as a surprise for my teacher, a remarkable and generous violist—the late Jacob Glick—who sat in his office with his oversized hands drooping over the ends of his armchair, as if he were wearing worn, leathery baseball mitts that didn’t quite fit. No sooner had I finished playing than he rose, shaking his head, and told me in so many words that it was a mess. I could play the notes well enough, which was no small achievement given that there were a lot of challenging chords to try to master, but I was not keeping time. Worse, my refusal (or inability) to adhere to what was written on the score, to play metrically what Bach wanted and not what I somehow felt should rhythmically be played, bothered him to no end. It was then that he asked me a question, arguably more aptly framed by a social scientist than a classical musician, as he walked over to the piano and put on the metronome. “What,” he inquired, “is your definition of freedom?”

His question went to the heart of the matter of not just classical music but, it dawned on me, much of life itself, for we all ultimately have to deal with the various constraints that bind us and constitute us, whether we are always entirely aware of this fact or not. And as I dutifully redoubled my efforts to work my way through the challenging notes yet again, with the ticktock, ticktock of the metronome now beating out time in precise, equal measure and the prison bars of the musical score oppressively facing me, it occurred to me—years before I had ever learned about the sociological concepts of “structure,” “agency,” and “habitus”—that what we do within the limits of those constraints in our everyday lives and practices directly speaks to how we are able to locate some measure of freedom and find the means to express and explore our own “individuality”; exhibit our personal mode of phrasing given our deeply ingrained, acculturated dispositions; and experience and enact in our bodies our peculiar habit of addressing the world through whatever instruments we possess. Then, a few months later, when I was about to graduate from college and the same teacher was encouraging me to think, with generous but misplaced optimism, of pursuing a career as a classical musician, he said something else that seemed particularly relevant. He insisted that if I ever joined an orchestra that I should play at least one hour a day on my own so that, as he put it, I would continue to hear my own individual voice—or at least the distinctive voice of my violin—and not lose it in the all-encompassing and seductive mass of orchestral sound.

Both these observations strike me as noteworthy, particularly in a period in which we have made some serious scholarly investment within the humanities in dismantling the notion that we each have a core, individual identity, some essential, distinctive character and personal style that make us who we are, often enough taking grim delight in the intellectual thrill of sawing through the branch, as David Lodge once wryly put it, on which we sit.¹ In large measure—according to this somewhat dire vision—selfhood was, is, and always will be purely a dynamic cultural and discursive construct that we must constantly and endlessly deconstruct in all our blindness and insight precisely because it was, is, and always will be just that: a construct. But my former teacher’s observations also seem to me germane to some of the concerns covered in this book as we turn back the clock to the Italian Renaissance in six chapters, leaving as best we can the (post)modern world for the largely early modern one and laboring to understand that distinct and distant world on its own terms, although occasionally pausing to gauge in the process how the past relates to, yet still dramatically differs from, the present.

For this book is in part (and I should reiterate that it is only in part) about the mystery that lies at the heart of individual identity, a mystery that remains steadfastly and resiliently “there” even when, or precisely when, we think as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern presumptuously did that we can securely pluck out someone’s mystery, play people as if they were mere empty wooden pipes with apparently simple stops to them, as if they possessed no intrinsically distinctive, individual quality—a special tone or timber all their own, as it were—that makes them at times unfathomable and impossible to pin down by even the most inquisitive and perspicacious minds. Because if I am not altogether mistaken in reflecting on my own life experiences, this really isn’t the case about people once we take into consideration the many and varied constraints within which we all operate and that shape us in a host of extremely complex ways. For there is, I contend, something mysterious that makes people who they are, both now, in twenty-first-century America, and back then, in the period covered in this book, when a host of entirely different historically determined constraints fashioned people and enabled some of them to try to figure out who they and others—both in practice and in essence—were.

Hence this book, the broad aim of which is to examine through the disciplines of art, literary, intellectual, medical, and cultural history how male identities were conceptualized in Renaissance Italy, where the European Renaissance is conventionally thought to have begun. This is by no means a new topic in contemporary Renaissance studies generally. Both Stephen Greenblatt and John Jeffries Martin, for instance, have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt’s famous, although justly contested, notion that a free, untrammeled, “individual” self emerged in Renaissance Italy in contradistinction to the constrained, collective, “corporate” self of the Middle Ages. Albeit in strikingly different ways, both Greenblatt and Martin have construed identity—for the most part a distinctly male identity—as a dialectic between, on the one hand, a self formed by historically determined cultural constraints and, on the other hand, a self formed in reaction against those powerful cultural forces (forces, to be sure, that both enable it to come into being and always condition it). The interests of both scholars have been largely on the first side of the dialectic. They have thus tended to focus on the cultural factors that shaped the self, such as institutions, rituals, and sodalities, even though Greenblatt has discussed at length the period’s growing interest in the values of self-reflection, wonder, and privacy, while Martin has explored in detail such things as the values of sincerity, emotional transparency, and interiority, along with varying notions of intimacy and inner character in ways that resonate felicitously with my own manner of thinking.²

To some extent, then, my book is a polemic, taking issue with Greenblatt and (to a far lesser degree) Martin, as well as with a variety of scholars, by examining the other, oppositional side of the dialectic without denying the centrality of Renaissance culture in both shaping and constraining individual male identities.³ More specifically, I want to look at (1) how certain men emphasized that a special mysterious quality—an “I don’t know what” (nescio quid)—defined extraordinary male individuals and underwrote their ability to succeed brilliantly as professionals applying an art (ars/arte) as a form of highly specialized knowledge; (2) how they asserted themselves as individuals through an intensely aggressive, personalized voice and/or signature style in the practical and productive arts; and (3) how they highlighted the particularity with which they or others performed their identities as individuals in the context of a broad cultural fashion. In distinctly different ways, then, this book explores the significance of the notion of the individual for an understanding of the Italian Renaissance conception of male identity without, however, subscribing to Burckhardt’s widely discredited (and for him, as it turns out, deeply pessimistic) view that the individual in the period was an autonomous agent operating freely in the world, much less Burckhardt’s equally discredited argument that the modern individual emerged for the first time more or less in fourteenth-century Italy as a radically new phenomenon.⁴ At the same time, in focusing on men and male identities, my aim in this book is not to gainsay the fact that women offered both impressive and often novel ways of expressing their identities within collectivities in the Italian Renaissance, as the studies of a number of literary and cultural historians have increasingly and amply demonstrated in the past few decades.⁵ Quite the contrary, my aim, as announced in the preface, is to enhance our understanding of how male identities were conceived, and could be conceived, with the hope that some of my observations may be of use to scholars working more exclusively on women, along with the hope that perhaps some of those observations may indirectly contribute to our understanding of how the notion of the individual itself in the period was gendered in complex ways.

To examine these issues, I have divided this book into three parts, each of which contains two chapters centered on a single topic that is explored from different, yet complementary, angles. My focus in these parts has been principally on the sixteenth century because during that period, for reasons that will become evident as the book unfolds, we witness in Italy a marked increase in the investment in the individual among men in a broad array of activities—an investment that will flower in the seventeenth century in the visual arts, for instance, in the cult of the individual. Moreover, as we move from one part to another of this book, we should bear in mind the following: Although the word “individuo” was broadly understood in the Italian Renaissance to mean “indivisible,” as it is defined in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Lexicon of the Academy of the Crusca, 1612) in light of standard usages of the word as a “dialectical term” in, say, theological argumentation,⁶ during the same period the word “individuo” also began to acquire the more familiar modern meaning, which first gained currency in England in the mid- to late 1600s, of “distinguished from others by attributes of its own,” “marked by a peculiar and striking character,” and “pertaining or peculiar to a single person or thing or some one member of a class” (Oxford English Dictionary). In this regard, it is worth noting that the word “individuo” is also furnished with the meaning of “cosa particolare” (“a particular/specific/identifying thing”) in the Vocabolario della Crusca and eventually provided with apposite examples from the sixteenth century in later editions,⁷ all of which suggests that sometime in the late Renaissance the word “individuo” in Italy began to acquire the meaning we might roughly associate with it today, at least in a very generic way.⁸ In any event, it is hardly necessary for a word to have been actively and pervasively used in a period in order for it to serve as a placeholder for scholars talking about a concept that otherwise possessed meaning in some measure for people in the past. We customarily employ the words “selfhood,” “agency,” “interiority,” and “subjectivity,” for instance, to talk about matters related to identity in the European Renaissance generally, even though those particular words were hardly current in the period either, at least as we are accustomed to conceptualizing them today. That said, one of the principal burdens of this book is to demonstrate that some men in Renaissance Italy thought in terms of the concept of the “individual,” that it was a concept that thus had significant cultural force in the period, and that a number of men expressed themselves as individuals through the verbal and visual means that they had at their disposal. It is not a burden of this book to argue for the notion that the concept of the individual in the Enlightenment, Romantic, or post-Romantic sense of the term as it has been explored in the modern disciplines of philosophy and sociology emerged for the first time in Renaissance Italy, a period that runs, I take it, from roughly 1350 to 1600. Nor is it a burden of this book to trace a genealogy of the concept of the individual from the Italian Renaissance to the modern era, however much it occasionally draws comparisons between the present and the past in an effort to articulate salient convergences and differences.

Part I focuses on a topic of broad cultural interest of the period: professionalism. It shows how a few men primarily in the sixteenth century deliberately mystified the success of masterful individuals in a profession—a profession that was, to be sure, collectively defined by, as, and for a male group. In Chapter 1, “Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne,” I examine both Baldassare Castiglione’s landmark Il cortegiano (The Courtier) and Benvenuto Cellini’s Due trattati di oreficeria e scultura (Two Treatises on Goldsmithing and Sculpture) as complex discourses written by practitioners who appear to invite everyone interested in the profession to participate in it by openly disclosing the rules of their arts. At the same time, however, Castiglione and Cellini reveal that only a privileged group of unique men, a select few who already somehow possess a certain mysterious, innate quality (effectively a nescio quid), can successfully master the art of the profession in question so that they emerge as not just exemplary individuals but inimitable ones worthy of admiration and wonder. In Chapter 2, “Reflections on Professions and Humanism in Renaissance Italy and the Humanities Today,” I examine principally Ermolao Barbaro’s De officio legati (On the Duty of the Ambassador), Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince), Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections), Torquato Tasso’s Il secretario (The Secretary), and, once more, albeit briefly, Castiglione’s Il cortegiano. My aim here is to demonstrate how five different men who were either humanists or greatly indebted to humanism engaged the topic of professional identity in their writings. They did so, I argue, to reveal how certain individuals, thanks in large measure to that enigmatic nescio quid, manage to succeed in a profession while others prove only moderately adept at it or else fail miserably in it. In this way the authors here examined mystify the very process by which a person can acquire the skills necessary to achieve professional mastery through the diligent application of an art.

Part II focuses on the topic of “mavericks” in the context of issues related to professional self-definition, concentrating more exclusively on test cases of individuals in the paired chapters: one test case focuses on a doctor working in the practical arts, the other a painter working in the productive arts. Specifically, this part of the book examines how two men—the surgeon/physician Leonardo Fioravanti and the painter Jacopo Tintoretto—embedded themselves in Venetian culture and owed their identities in great measure to their strong associations with the institutions, customs, and sodalities of that city while, at the same time, they worked hard to stand out from it as individuals in their chosen professions. In the process, they often challenged the professional or local cultures in which they labored and to which they were indebted for their sense of themselves as individuals. Fioravanti did so in the process of fashioning an aggressive and highly personalized voice in print, Tintoretto in the process of fashioning an aggressive and highly personalized style in painting. In Chapter 3, the first chapter of the two in this part, “Constructing a Maverick Physician in Print: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Leonardo Fioravanti’s Writings,” I examine how a radical empiric openly challenges the institutionalized practices of medicine and its elite, bookish, Latin-based culture. Fioravanti does so by taking advantage of the thriving book industry of Venice and aggressively presenting himself through the medium of print culture and in the popularizing language of the vernacular as a unique—indeed, a rather defiant and iconoclastic—individual operating within his chosen profession of medicine. In Chapter 4, “Visualizing Cleanliness, Visualizing Washerwomen in Venice and Renaissance Italy: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Jacopo Tintoretto’s Jews in the Desert,” I turn to a male painter who incorporates into a large religious canvas the prominent image of washerwomen as gendered symbols of Venetian refinement, purity, and piety. At the same time, he aggressively asserts his individuality in the unique manner in which he renders those washerwomen by placing them conspicuously in the center of his canvas. In this way, they function not only as symbols of the myth of Venice (that is, of the uniqueness of Venice as a harmonious republic in which the individual is ideally suppressed in favor of an all-embracing social and religious collectivity) but also as symbols of the uniqueness of Tintoretto himself—a uniqueness that defines him within Venetian culture as a maverick artist who stands out from the collectivity and feels free to assert his individuality through a signature style, in particular by focusing on the lower classes in a novel way.

In the first two parts we move from a matter of broad cultural concern for a variety of men (“professionalism”) to specific, individual cases of two male professionals in the practical and productive arts (the “mavericks” Fioravanti and Tintoretto). In the third and final part we concentrate more narrowly on a single distinguishing physical sign associated strictly with men as we also move from matters that are primarily intellective in nature (humanism and theories of knowledge underpinning the arts, for instance, in Part I) to those that have to do more conspicuously with the body (anatomical dissections and the physical work of a painter, for instance, in Part II). To this end, Part III focuses on the topic of “beards” in order to explore the performative practices of certain individuals as they both assert and define themselves within collectivities by claiming to have specific identities unequivocally rooted in the male body. In particular, Part III focuses on the dominant, widespread fashion among elite men in sixteenth-century Italy of wearing beards, examining how that particular fashion took hold and was coded in a variety of imaginative works, both visual and verbal. That encoding, I argue, allowed men a way of bodily marking through their self-presentations not just their group identities but also individual ones. In Chapter 5, the first chapter of Part III, “Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard,” I examine a series of portrait paintings, including those by Agnolo Bronzino of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, to demonstrate how certain elite men yearned to conform to and distinguish themselves from collectivities as they fashioned their beards on their faces, choosing from and manipulating a dazzling array of designs and shapes. Through beard design, in other words, they asserted their own particularity as individuals, in carefully crafted, public self-presentations, within the context of a fashion that was widely accepted by collectivities and that aligned them with them. In Chapter 6, “Manly Matters: Reflections on Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio, and the Theatrical and Social Function of Beards in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” I turn to a bawdy comic play to examine how the numerous beards worn in it reinforce male collective identity, particularly as the male characters act out stock roles in the very moment that they adopt a fashion that marks them bodily as men. At the same time, the appropriation of someone else’s identifying beard as a form of disguise by one male character within the play only serves to remind us that at least one man has—or, more important, feels he has—a specific identity that separates him from everyone else and is rooted in his particular, individual body—a distinctly singular corporeal identity that is nevertheless always at risk of being stolen and then counterfeited in a highly social public performance.

Now if a primary focus of this book is to explore the importance of being an individual in the Italian Renaissance, another focus—a less dominant yet still prevalent one rendered evident in the book’s subtitle—is to reflect on male identities in the period. To do so, I examine writings and works of visual art produced by and for men who belonged to the cultural elite or aspired to be part of it. To this end, two general guiding presuppositions underlie this book when it comes to thinking about masculinity in Renaissance Italy.⁹

First, although maleness was conventionally associated with such things as war, dominance, politics, reason, order, form, testicular fertility, heat, stability, and restraint, whereas femininity, conversely, was associated with such things as love, submissiveness, domesticity, emotions, excess, matter, vaginal receptivity, cold, instability, and intemperance, both male writers and visual artists of the period consciously toyed with these and other logical oppositions as they explored issues of gender. Visual and verbal art in this way not only reflected male identities but also gave shape to them as part of an ongoing process of definition and redefinition in a world that was, for all intents and purposes, economically, socially, politically, and ideologically male dominated and male centered. As a result, we witness throughout the Italian Renaissance a wide range of codifications of what constituted maleness in visual and verbal forms, thereby offering men a variety of ways of responding to the tacit injunction that a man should indeed behave as a man.

Second, as represented within the context of a variety of verbal and visual forms, men were performing their maleness not only for women but also for each other. Sometimes they did so to coerce one another into behaving in a certain way, sometimes to redefine the norms of masculinity, sometimes to forge a group identity as men, and sometimes to stand out as individuals among men. To this end, women could function as enablers in a variety of verbal and visual forms, effectively allowing men through their presence to be men and act as men, to engage one another as men, and, last but not least, to distinguish themselves from one another as men and as different sorts of men—as well as, to be sure, from women. In this regard, the calculated presence of women in visual and verbal forms at times allowed men to exhibit the origins of their own originality through a process not just of group male identification but also of heightened self-individuation. Furthermore, if in visual and verbal forms it was often imagined that maleness had to be actually manifested (by wearing armor, say, or by producing hairs/heirs, by engaging in duels, or, for that matter, by ejaculating the generative fluid of semen), it was also imagined that maleness was something that inhered in the person’s character and could be construed as something that did not, in fact, always need to find continuous material expression. Men, that is, could be men just by refusing to reveal what they thought, by remaining silent, by dissimulating, by being, in a sense, surreptitious, duplicitous, and coy.

These two presuppositions are certainly not intended to embrace everything that has to do with male identity in the Italian Renaissance, and they are neither uniformly nor systematically examined in this book. But they do inform it, and they surface with differing degrees of emphasis in the chapters that follow. Both these presuppositions, moreover, address a fundamental concept that underpins this book in various ways as we think about masculinities as a plurality as opposed to a tightly bracketed, singular concept of masculinity: maleness in the Italian Renaissance existed across a broad spectrum of possibilities. Maleness was thus understood to be a fluid and dynamic concept, as well as something that could be conceived at times as elusive.

There are, in addition, a variety of other issues that structurally and thematically hold this book together and collectively enrich it as the three parts unfold. They include such issues as how rhetoric, imitation, and exemplarity played a key role in identity formation; how certain human body parts were shaped and adjusted as a matter of self-fashioning; how decorum in the Italian Renaissance was aggressively codified yet repeatedly and purposely breached; how rivalries in the arts played themselves out in a variety of ways and powerfully shaped identities; how social mobility was realized and fantasized about; how marveling and wonder pervaded Italian Renaissance culture; how the concept of politia (politeness, cleanliness, elegance, polish) functioned in defining personal and communal boundaries; how terribly vulnerable elite men felt in court culture; and how sexual desire was routinely performed. But the core issues outlined earlier, particularly in the paragraphs providing a breakdown of the three parts, are for the most part the crucial ones that constitute the overriding argument of the book, which is largely about the importance of being an individual in light of the period’s conceptualizing of male identities, as well as the importance of thinking about the value of the term “individual” in literary and historical studies generally.

Finally, a word about men, or rather how I refer to them in this book. Often enough I refer to them, not surprisingly, as “men,” pure and simple. But more often than not I refer to them as “writers,” “painters,” “goldsmiths,” “practitioners,” “artists,” “artisans,” “scholars,” “physicians,” “surgeons,” “anatomists,” “humanists,” “professionals,” “functionaries,” “lawyers,” “secretaries,” “ambassadors,” “architects, “engineers,” “cooks,” “barbers,” “soldiers,” “the cultural elite,” “entrepreneurs,” “leaders,” “charlatans,” “quacks,” or, for that matter, just “people,” without necessarily employing the defining modifier “male” to identify them as strictly men. My aim in doing so is not to reduce everyone tout court in the Italian Renaissance, however they are identified or labeled, to a single gender category. Rather, my aim was to avoid belaboring a fact abundantly clear to anyone reading this book, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is all about men and male identities in an unquestionably maledominated and paternalistic culture and society. Moreover, it seems to me that to emphasize over and over again through various mechanisms that men and male identities are indeed the focus of this book would only potentially undercut the ways in which we can all be drawn to envision through identification how the past occasionally relates to the present and thus obliquely touches our own lives, as both men and women. For the concept of the individual, even if centered on men in this book, still matters to us today. And by extension the Italian Renaissance treatment of that concept as it pertains to men still raises issues important to us in our own time and place, whether we happen to be male or female “people” curious about how others in the past thought about and experienced their identities in light of the varied constraints within which they operated.

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.

Now no one in the Italian Renaissance—not the most adept man of arms adhering to Machiavelli’s strategy of innovation in military matters or the most adept cardinal pursuing Cortesi’s strategy of self-promotion in religious matters—should or could be construed as possessing an absolutely “pure, unfettered subjectivity,” in Greenblatt’s memorable phrase.¹² I take this as a given, a “finding,” to borrow and adapt from the language of the social sciences, that we can consider “robust” in that it holds up to scrutiny whatever prior variables we seem to introduce into our discussions. Hence even when the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze sculpture of him (figs. 1 and 2) is presented in heroic isolation, we can readily recognize that Colleoni—his manliness emphasized through the motif of testicles incorporated into the statue in light of his family name (Colleoni/“Coglioni”)—wears an armor that links him not only to military activities generally but also to culturally normed conceptions of how armor functioned in shaping and representing male identities. In addition, Colleoni is singled out and glorified because he putatively led his soldiers to protect and serve a community, just as he owes his ascent to the Venetian senate (or so we are led to believe), which collectively approved of the sculpture and inscribed itself onto the pedestal with the initials “s.c.” (senatus consulto; by decree of the senate). Furthermore, with his fierce, bronze face fashioned to recall the Emperor Galba, Colleoni is meant to serve, in a distinctly classical mode, as an inspiration for other like-minded leaders to take up the Venetian cause, just as other statues of military leaders were expected to serve as such honorific, exemplary monuments. And, to be sure, he fits into a traditional type of the ancient equestrian figure, such as the most famous extant one of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio in Rome (fig. 3), even as Verrocchio deviates from that foundational classical model by putting the horse much more conspicuously than ever before into a twisting, energetic motion.¹³ Similarly, even when the cardinal Pietro Bembo is pictured sitting in pensive isolation in Titian’s portrait of him (fig. 4), we can readily recognize that the scarlet biretta and mozzetta Bembo wears tie him to religious activities generally and the community of cardinals in particular. Likewise, his beard signals, as beards were wont to do, his manliness in a profession so blatantly defined by and for men, while the book he holds, regardless of what he happens to be reading, inevitably alludes to his role as a sophisticated and famous humanist within the broader community of a res publica litterarum (republic of letters). Finally, the pose he strikes, including the decorous gestures he adopts, presents him with culturally approved modes of comportment for the male elite.¹⁴ These men have “attributes,” in other words, that signal who they are within a broad set of group classifications, much as saints bear attributes identifying them as specifically who they are, while linking them all along to the broader community of the blessed of which they are always a part. Moreover, the images themselves were fashioned not by artists operating freely and independently, crafting works on spec in an impersonal, wide-open market, but within a workshop, guild, and patronage system in which consumers dictated how things should appear and works of art were contractually and collaboratively produced.

FIGURE 1. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Detail of Colleoni’s highly delineated and particularized face in profile.

FIGURE 2. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Mauro Magliani. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Colleoni statue seen from below.

FIGURE 3. Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, erected 176 CE. Campidoglio, Rome. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 4. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576), Cardinal Pietro Bembo, 1545. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Reproduced by permission of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

All this, I take it, is true. Yet however much Verrocchio has idealized him as an equestrian hero with facial figures resembling those of the Emperor Galba, and however much Colleoni is represented as a stalwart, rugged figure whom we are implicitly meant to measure over and against an imperial classical type (as well as over and against modern, competitive revisions of that very same classical type brilliantly designed, for instance, by Donatello in his sculpture of Gattamelata in nearby Padua, fig. 5), we are also no doubt meant to recognize Colleoni as a distinctive and singular condottiere who is celebrated because he protected and preserved Venice, leading his soldiers to victory in military affairs. Similarly, however idealized the portrait of Bembo may be as Titian has captured a stern yet “sublime” vision of him, and however much we are meant to situate the imperious and slightly frowning Bembo within a set of broad classifications that define him and make him who he is as a model figure commanding profound respect for anyone gazing at his portrait, we are also no doubt meant to recognize Bembo as specifically Bembo, as that distinctive and singular humanist patrician within the church who proved to be such a seminal figure of religious affairs.

FIGURE 5. Donatello (ca. 1386–1477), Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata, 1453. Piazza del Santo, Padua. Reproduced by permission of Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY.

Needless to say, I have no hard evidence to back up these assertions. I possess no letter from Bembo indicating that he wanted to appear as distinctly and singularly him and no one else when it came to fashioning an accurate, up-to-date likeness of him that would somatically register his own peculiar, individual “motions of the mind.”¹⁵ Similarly, I can find no injunction from Colleoni insisting in his last will and testament that the statue crafted with the money appropriated by the state should capture him as specifically and individually him and no one else, although Colleoni did indeed request that the statue be placed in Piazza San Marco, which in fact it was not, precisely because the Venetian senate deemed it to be too bold and individualistic a gesture to erect it in such a uniquely privileged spot (fig. 6). Nevertheless, as we reflect on the various forces that shaped men and male identities in the Italian Renaissance, from economic forces to social, cultural, and artistic ones, it seems to me that we need to be far more attuned to the importance of the individual in the period—not the Burckhardtian individual that anticipates modernity with a free, untrammeled, and socially untethered self but the individual as someone “distinguished from others by attributes of its own,” “marked by a peculiar and striking character,” and “pertaining or peculiar to a single person or thing or some one member of a class.” It is to this end, then, that this book examines how some men in the Italian Renaissance possessed—or were represented as possessing—a mysterious quality that rendered them inimitable within the context of professional life; an aggressive, personalized voice and/or signature style in the practical and productive arts; or a particular mode of addressing the world through the performative staging of something so seemingly insignificant, and physically superficial, as the distinctive, identifying beard. And it is in this context that the concept of the individual matters and is explored in this book, both in terms of how a variety of men advocated that something “else” accounted for singular, masterful success and in terms of how they took concrete steps to be at once like and unlike others, as they exercised their agency and searched for a particular mode of distinguishing themselves by strategically manipulating roles, styles, cultural scripts, and widespread fashions.

FIGURE 6. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Colleoni’s commemorative statue was finally placed directly in front of the Dominican basilica, where the funeral services celebrating doges took place and so many illustrious doges were buried—not Piazza San Marco but still a prominent position, to be sure.