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CHAPTER 1

Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne

LET ME BEGIN A REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF ARS AND ARTE IN RENAISSANCE Italy, the first such reflection of this book, by sketching out the history of the concept of techne in classical antiquity. By doing so, we will be in a position to see how the Italian Renaissance treatment of it rehearses as well as revises elements that were originally embedded in the classical notion of techne itself. To this end, I examine in the first section of this chapter the general significance of the term “techne” (pl. “technai”) in ancient Greece and then how that term changed, and in many respects did not change, as it evolved into ars from ancient Rome through the European Middle Ages. Readers not particularly interested in the complex evolution of the concept of techne over almost two thousand years, which I try to compress into as few pages as reasonably possible, may jump directly to the second section, where I provide an overview of the role and value of ars and arte as forms of knowledge in Renaissance Italy, exemplifying some of the issues explored in my discussion by examining briefly the writings of three very different sixteenth-century practitioners of arts: Leonardo Fioravanti, Vannoccio Biringuccio, and Giorgio Vasari. In the third section, having furnished a broad context for an understanding of the concepts of techne, ars, and arte from classical antiquity to the sixteenth century (devoting in the process special attention to the Italian Renaissance), I offer a more focused and extended reading of two very different treatises written at roughly the same time by two very different practitioners versed in two very different arts: Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise on the art of the courtier and Benvenuto Cellini’s on the art of the goldsmith. In the fourth and final section, I explore what I take to be both significant and new about the Italian Renaissance treatment of the arts and then investigate some salient aspects of Jacob Burckhardt’s famous claim that the very concept of art (in his terms “Kunst”) lay at the heart of what defined the Italian Renaissance—a claim that still resonates in scholarly literature today and undergirds discussions about Renaissance self-fashioning, although in a manner that elicits serious qualifications on the part of a variety of literary, intellectual, art, and cultural historians when it comes to thinking about the notion of the individual, be it a male or female individual, in the period.

Before turning to these matters, however, I should clarify a few points about terminology. Because the term “techne” evolves not only conceptually but also linguistically as we move from ancient Greece to ancient Rome (when the term “ars” is used) to the European Middle Ages (when both the terms “ars” and “arte,” among others, are used) to finally sixteenth-century Italy (when, again, both ars and arte are used), I typically employ the three terms selectively in the context of the period examined at any given point in my discussion. It seemed to me perverse and historically inaccurate to do otherwise, to use the term “techne,” for instance, when speaking of the Italian Renaissance or, inversely, to speak about ars or arte when talking about ancient Greece. Moreover, when talking about guilds, which were, of course, “arts” (artes/arti), I refer to them directly as guilds so as to avoid, I hope, confusion in terminology. Furthermore, where it seems to me clear from the general discussion that I do not need to employ the terms “techne,” “ars,” and “arte” over and over again to make it evident to readers that the terms were used in specific periods and places, I have adopted the English “art” and “arts,” with the understanding throughout my discussion, however, that I am not referring to the fine arts or visual arts, which is how we conventionally tend to think of the word “art” today, but all the practical and productive arts generally. Finally, I distinguish from time to time between the practical arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at doing something) and the productive arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at making something) where it seemed to me necessary and appropriate to do so, but the distinction between the two should always be borne in mind as a significant and durable one during the longue durée covered in this chapter, even when the distinction is not always fully articulated in my discussion, and even when the distinction itself changed over time and can be perceived as blurry in the periods themselves.¹

The ancient Greek term “techne” ranged widely in meaning.² As a matter of epistemological concern, techne could evoke the notion of shrewdness and trickery, thus making it conceptually akin to metis (cunning intelligence) and its clever ruses. On some occasions it could be used interchangeably with episteme (a body of ideas deemed to be intellectually certain) and consequently taken as a model for the type of superior knowledge toward which the philosopher aspired. More typically, techne meant productive or practical, rather than theoretical or speculative, knowledge. For the most part it was conceived as the authoritative but not always absolutely dependable knowledge required to make or do something limited, precise, and clearly defined with acknowledged expertise. Along these lines, the term “techne” was used as a synonym for the special know-how of some skill. It could be a basic manual skill: house building and carpentry, for instance—the sort of routine, lower-order, banausic (vulgar) skill that Plato repeatedly holds up to prefigure, by way of analogy, the clear, purposive, and goal-oriented knowledge that deals with abstractions and speculative philosophy.³ It could also be a complex demanding skill: rhetoric, medicine, military strategy, and statecraft, for instance—the sort of higher-order, open-ended, and refined skill that Aristotle identifies both with the practical knowledge of phronesis (prudence) and with the act of “doing,” praxis, rather than “making,” poiesis.⁴ Furthermore, while on the one hand techne is often associated with hard-and-fast rules and handbooks, on the other hand it could also demand an acumen for improvisation, require an exquisite sensitivity to the contingency of opportunity, assume an ability to apply general principles to the particulars of an occasion, and presume a talent receptive to extensive training and professional development. Additionally, there are some fundamental assumptions about a techne worth emphasizing from the outset. A techne as a form of specialized knowledge linked the particular to the universal, whereas the knowledge garnered from only experience dealt just with particulars. A techne served as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. It was never used, say, for its own sake or appreciated as such. A techne was process- and goal-oriented in a manner that was conceived as organic, ordered, and purposive. For this reason it was sometimes likened to the workings of Nature in the very moment that it allowed people to acquire some control over Nature and independence from it, as well as, ideally, from the gods and fate. And the persons possessing a techne could provide a rational account of the techne itself. Those very persons, that is, could cogently explain the techne’s subject matter, its causes and ends, the nature of the knowledge associated with it, and why certain decisions were made to achieve predetermined results by adhering to a correct, calculated course of action.

There were two dominant but related strands of thought about techne operating in ancient Greece, although both strands developed and found expression at different times as they evolved, and the distinction between the two depended primarily on the nature of the techne in question. According to one strand of thought, someone with a techne possessed for the most part completely dependable knowledge about something very specific. He or she could therefore produce whatever was made or done and reliably guarantee that it would be effective and the same over time. A builder, whose craft was associated with the concept of techne from the outset (a view still captured in the notion of the “architect” as an “arch-technician”),⁵ could confidently construct a house that would not fall down, barring accidents of nature or unanticipated acts of human destruction, and the house could be readily duplicated, assuming the materials and geographies of the locations remained the same or similar in nature. According to another strand of thought, someone with a conjectural (stochastic) techne, as opposed to an “exact” one such as that involved in building houses, did not possess infallible knowledge but relied on educated yet still precarious guesswork—rules of thumb that allowed for flexibility, openness, and an ability to adapt to the nuances of the materials employed and the unpredictability of coping with particulars in a world of constant flux.⁶ He or she therefore could not absolutely guarantee that the result of applying a techne would always be effective or the same over time, even if the body of knowledge associated with the techne was viewed as complete and certain with respect to the assigned task. A physician could prescribe drugs for patients with the same diagnosed illness, but in no way could the physician assure all of them that they would survive, much less guarantee that patients with life-threatening ailments would be cured. Similarly, a general could never absolutely guarantee that his strategy for a military campaign would always succeed, any more than a rhetor could promise that he would always persuade and move the audience toward an anticipated and desired goal by appealing simultaneously to people’s occasionally unreceptive hearts and minds. Either way, whether we are talking about a techne conceived as an “exact” or “stochastic” form of knowledge, which is to say as one that is presumed to be completely or just dependably reliable, possessing a techne for the ancient Greeks allowed them to have a significant measure of control over chance (tuche) through the conscious application of reason in a precise manner to a determinate subject matter.

Since the body of knowledge of a techne had to be realized in some form or manner, a techne was associated with accomplished performance (actually playing Bach well over and over again, say) rather than just imagined competence (thinking one can always play Bach well but consistently failing to keep time). It had to be put into action, its potentiality made manifest so that it could be verified as effective applied knowledge. Additionally, what made a techne a techne—whether the outcome of exercising it was viewed as absolutely reliable or not—is that the form of knowledge associated with it was communicable. A techne was therefore teachable in a rational, but not necessarily always systematic, way: sometimes through rules and precepts, sometimes through examples or experience, sometimes through a process of imitation, sometimes in a direct, intimate, and highly personal manner. Furthermore, the persons who possessed a techne needed to be viewed as authoritative and masterful. In sociological terms, they enjoyed a jurisdictional claim over a clear, distinct, and conceptually circumscribed field of knowledge. Thus the persons who possessed a techne potentially held a privileged position in society, particularly within the city-states of ancient Greece, because they could explain the rational content of a techne and actualize it as only an expert dependably could. People possessing a techne in this respect were “professors” insofar as they could “profess” credible knowledge that was publicly valued, that ostensibly fulfilled a social need through the reliable and reproducible services performed, that they could take some pride in as they made use of their acknowledged expertise as a form of worthy work, and that functioned in a practical way as an “invitation for work.”⁷

There are also some noticeable limitations associated with the concept of techne, and they raise important issues about ancient Greek thought and life generally. A techne as a form of specialized knowledge was viewed as useful and beneficial to society, but more often than not it was taken to be neither moral nor immoral but amoral. In a phrase, it was ethically limited in that it was morally ambiguous. It all depended on not only the nature of the techne in question but also how the techne was used and thus on the underlying, predetermined character of the person applying it. Additionally, some people putting into practice a techne ineluctably found themselves in a precarious position within the polis. Even in the most favorable of times, some remained vulnerable to attacks of quackery since in many instances there were no formal schools for accrediting them and thus no socially accepted mechanisms either for policing the jurisdictional boundaries of what they claimed they knew how to do or for assuring institutional longevity and support for what they did.⁸ Furthermore, discussions as to whether some activities were or were not technai, such as those dedicated to medicine and rhetoric, only served to highlight the inherent risks involved in attempting to do anything with real confidence in an uncertain, vulnerable world governed by chance and fate, even as those discussions sought to assert some control over the contingency of occasion through the mastery afforded by possessing a techne. What is more, discussions about techne also revealed much about the limits of educability—issues that will reappear, as we shall see, in various guises in the Italian Renaissance. Can all people possess a techne? What are the prerequisites? Should it be inculcated through precepts, through imitation, through examples, through handbooks, abstractly, intimately? How much of the knowledge pertaining to a techne was determined by hard-and-fast rules, how much was derived from improvisational learning, how much was instead the product of intuition, how much was just somehow passed on from parent to child? Did someone, in point of fact, need some kind of primary ur-knowledge—a sort of innate shrewdness or acumen—to recognize instinctively how to adapt the acquired knowledge associated with a specific techne to the particulars of the moment and the unpredictability of occasion?

Lastly, there is an underlying sociopolitical dimension to the classical Greek notion of techne. On the one hand, we can detect significant expressions of democratic unease at the claims of sophists to have access to an art of political virtue and rhetoric—an art that could be taught for vast sums of money and therefore challenged the egalitarian claim that the poor majority can have as much civic virtue and knowledge as the wealthy. On the other hand, and in critical terms more important for this present study, people possessing and applying a techne could be viewed in ancient Greece as dangerous to the prevailing aristocratic social order. An alluring yet threatening aspect to the possessor of a techne was that the persons making use of it could potentially challenge persons of higher social position through applied specialized knowledge. In this context, persons putting into practice a techne might be deemed ambitious social climbers seeking to advance themselves through their “careers,” potential Promethean upstarts who could adopt outsized ideas about themselves through their position as experts in a society that had a keen demand for what they dependably offered through their skills.⁹ Because they possessed a knowledge that serviced real social needs within the polis (and because they exercised skills that at times were much admired and held in prestige within city-states, as in fifth-century Athens), they could potentially exercise that knowledge for self-aggrandizing change. Because they had managed to lift themselves up through education and transform themselves by acquiring authority and legitimacy through their techne, they necessarily undercut, by virtue of that specialized knowledge that allowed them to become acknowledged masters, the aristocratic presumption that nature, rather than nurture, defined who one already always was and that one only had to cultivate a character inescapably ascribed to someone from birth through family line. Therein lay the menace of techne, its edgy rebellious side in ancient Greek thought. A techne held out the possibility of “unregulated mobility” in an aristocratic social world, with the people applying a techne taking advantage of and thriving on change, and it could thus “compensate,” as Serafina Cuomo has succinctly put it, “for the lack of noble birth by producing honor via alternative routes.”¹⁰ In this respect, much as the definition of techne ranged widely in ancient Greece, so too did the sociopolitical value of techne, not least when framed within the broader context of the history of work.¹¹ Mastering a techne in the end represented potentially possessing not just a form of productive and practical knowledge but also a threatening form of sociopolitical power. And this shifty and shifting aspect of techne, which reconfigured such knowledge as a sociopolitical strength, could be viewed as a boon or a bane, depending on where you stood within the polis and depending on what sorts of work you were engaged in.

The Greek concept of techne remained largely identical in ancient Rome, reflecting the same broad range of meanings as it was translated into Latin as ars, even if there were significant differences governing the social structures within which practitioners exercised their skills.¹² Like Greek writers thinking about techne, Roman writers, or at least those aligned with what we can call, following Cuomo, an “aristocratic” approach to the issue of techne and ars, were interested in activities associated with arts that developed character and thus activities that made men virtuous as leaders, such as agriculture and military strategy. A general did not win a war, for example, because he had better fighting equipment or technical virtuosity but because he possessed superior moral qualities needed for ruling and leadership, such as courage, temperance, fortitude, loyalty, persistence, reasonableness, moderation, piety, and the like. A techne/ars, by contrast, undercut the aristocratic ethos and made men weak, morally lacking, or uninvested in civic virtue. A techne made men soft, as Xenophon had earlier put it, rendering them lax from laboring indoors, although his denigration of such arts, we should bear in mind, occurs in a highly rhetorical and didactic speech by Socrates arguing with some comic—and characteristically ironic—exaggeration for the superiority of husbandry in an attempt to make the ne’er-do-well son of Crito take more seriously his household duties as a landowner and, consequently, exert himself through toil, with toil here understood as a stylized form of labor that legitimated aristocratic virtue and defined elite status.¹³ Still, by and large, the aristocratic concept of techne had far more openly negative than positive associations attached to it, not just in Greek but also in Roman thought generally. An ars debased men, Cicero avers, if it is manual, banausic, servile, the product of the workshop or in any way deemed remunerative.¹⁴ It was not uniformly taken as a badge of honor, for instance, that Gaius Fabius, who was given the cognomen Pictor for painting the temple of Salus (Health) in about 304 BCE, was in fact a painter: for Cicero, unlike for Pliny, it degraded his dignity within an illustrious line.¹⁵ For this reason, arguably, when Cicero and Quintilian talked about whether or not rhetoric was an art, they were quick to moralize it and socially enhance it, thereby ensuring that a rhetor was truly a rhetor if, and only if, he was a “good man” (vir bonus), meaning not just a morally upright man but also a citizen of elevated social standing, an optimate.¹⁶

In Greek and Roman antiquity, then, certain arts as forms of specialized knowledge were or could be viewed as edifying and character enhancing in nature, depending on who said what about whom and where and under what circumstances. Architecture, husbandry, rhetoric, and medicine were key in this regard. And they could be elevated to the level of “liberal arts” (artes liberales)—arts pursued by free men to liberate the spirit, without any aim for personal gain and without any concern that the person involved in the art would be engaged in physical, sensuous pleasures or was occupationally dependent on others. Those liberating arts could thus be cast as building virtues and character, the very virtues and character that certain freemen within the aristocratic social order already necessarily possessed from birth and merely needed to enhance and perfect through training.¹⁷ Moreover, when it came to the banausic crafts, the user, rather than the producer, of the durable material good was privileged: the aristocratic wearer of the shoe rather than the shoemaker himself was of far greater cultural interest and, naturally enough, enduring social value. Additionally, one typically appreciated the material produced (the art on the Parthenon, the sculpture on a frieze) and not, albeit with the exceptions of such men as Phidias, Apelles, and Lysippus, the producer (the artist who sometimes toiled in the vulgar grime of his sweat), a point synthetically captured by Plutarch when he pithily observed in his Lives that “while we delight in the work, we despise the workman.”¹⁸ Finally, for those arts that belonged to or were elevated to the level of being considered one of the liberal arts or placed in a sort of limbo category of semiliberal arts, a general precondition for ensuring that they continued to be viewed in that manner was that they not be practiced for remuneration or pursued strictly for pleasure.

In this way, much as a good deal of ambivalence lay at the heart of the classical concept of work itself as various people articulated the merits and demerits of different forms of labor in a period that “abounded” in a “polyphony” of voices on the subject,¹⁹ so, too, a deep ambivalence lay at the heart of the classical concept of the arts themselves. And this is especially true with regard to the productive arts. On the one hand, Greeks and Romans valued the productive arts and took great pride and pleasure in their notable advancements achieved through them. The lasting monuments from antiquity bear witness to this fact and often broadcast it, perhaps most famously in Trajan’s magnificent column, which both represents and enacts the civilizing process and glories of the productive arts as a form of valued, specialized knowledge. Rome can not only build a spectacular pontoon bridge across the Danube to enable the emperor Trajan and his troops to succeed in their military campaign, as is evident in the panels as they unfold from the bottom and spiral upward. Rome can also construct an innovative, freestanding, intricately designed, and hollowed-out column with slender vertical windows and a narrow winding staircase incorporated into it, carving out an entire hillside to accomplish the extraordinary architectural feat, while placing Greek and Latin libraries on either side of the richly adorned column as lasting symbols of the complete appropriation and assimilation of all knowledge (both techne- and non-techne-oriented knowledge) on the part of imperial Rome (fig. 7).²⁰ Some philosophical positions, such as Stoicism and Cynicism, scholars have pointed out, also viewed the productive arts somewhat positively by recognizing the social value of paid banausic occupations, although certainly not, it bears stressing, typically the practitioners of those occupations themselves.²¹ Or as Harry W. Pleket encapsulated the issue some time ago, “there is a good deal of evidence that some Greeks”—and indeed some Romans, it is safe to say—“were by no means hostile to techne.”²²

FIGURE 7. Trajan’s Column, 106–113 CE. Rome. Reproduced by permission of Gianni dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Detail with reliefs showing victorious Dacian campaigns, including detail of soldiers crossing the impressive pontoon bridge.

On the other hand, as much as ancient Greeks and Romans took seriously the knowledge associated with certain productive arts and valued their sometimes sublime achievements, they also recognized the threat that the possessors of such knowledge theoretically posed to the aristocratic social order and its ethos of entrenched privilege as people involved in those arts potentially asserted themselves, acquired social power, and thrived on, as well as brought about through their activities, change. In the end, as much as they could and did serve the polis, and as much as they tangibly expressed pride in their work and how it sustained themselves and others (perhaps most memorably in Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces’ remarkable, still largely extant, funerary monument dedicated to his profession as a baker), people involved in the productive arts were typically viewed as bound to, or ineluctably associated with, physical matter and/or material gain (fig. 8).²³ To paraphrase Plutarch, one can admire the product and still despise the producer, even though the producer can be credited with benefiting society in manifold ways and, by the same token, can feel entitled to recognition and, at least in some cases, win esteem, such as the visual artists praised by Pliny the Elder.²⁴ Some of this ambivalence, at least with regard to specifically the productive arts, is perhaps captured mythopoeically in the figure of the Olympian god Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan): his status among the gods may be deemed decidedly ambiguous insofar as he is an ugly, cuckolded cripple, but the banausic arts, insofar as they are divinized through him as a master craftsman capable of shaping such magnificent objects as Achilles’ shield, are not unambiguously demoted. In a similar vein, we are no doubt meant to ascribe a positive ideological and moral value to the exertion of Hercules’ virtuous and onerous labors, some of which, such as his cleansing the Augean stables of an enormous quantity of dung, were certainly intended to be viewed as base, degrading, and menial in nature.²⁵

FIGURE 8. Tomb of the Baker Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, late first century CE. Rome. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The loss in some instances of a thoroughgoing understanding of classical thought proved to contribute to a more positive appraisal of the arts generally in the Middle Ages, although it is important to stress that we should not overstate the magnitude of the historical change. As the content of much classical thought became inaccessible or unintelligible in the early Middle Ages, even though the organizing principles and underlying social and moral hierarchies of antiquity remained largely in place, writers occasionally responded in a pragmatic manner to the concept of the arts and revealed in the process some enthusiasm for them. In thinking about the arts, these writers responded often enough not to philosophical interests but practical needs and hence, in their putative ignorance of the content of classical culture, were somewhat liberated from prior prejudices and could alter classifications in an unfettered manner.²⁶ In other instances, as classical thought became increasingly accessible in the later Middle Ages and as more and more thinkers appreciated it and adopted both its content and categories, the profound ambivalence of classical culture toward the arts as a concept—its “flexible and ambiguous” treatment of it, as Elspeth Whitney has astutely put it—allowed for a “creative, positive revision and development by medieval writers.”²⁷ As a result, even the productive arts—or, more precisely, the “mechanical arts” (a term only adopted in the ninth century in John the Scot’s commentary to Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury])—became more extensively examined and cast in a somewhat more positive light than they had been in the classical period. Nevertheless, we still need to recognize that when it comes to evaluating the concept of the arts over the long run, we can ultimately trace as much continuity as change between periods as we move from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Middle Ages. Overall, as Birgit Van Den Hoven has cogently cautioned, much remained the same regarding basic attitudes about the arts as the concept fit into moral and social hierarchies within the broad and sometimes elaborate classifications of knowledge crafted during those periods.²⁸

To be sure, we find many of the old ambivalences about the arts intact throughout the Middle Ages, albeit infused with matters of religious concern. For the key church father Augustine of Hippo, “ars” in the De civitate Dei (City of God) constitutes a mark of the superiority of humankind because it revealed our “natural genius” to transform the environment. And Augustine does indeed wax eloquent about this fact in a long, inspiring, and influential passage praising the arts, much as he does in a number of his writings when he talks about all sorts of honorable forms of work. Yet in the very same passage from the De civitate Dei, Augustine also deems “ars” to be “superfluous, perilous, and pernicious,” presumably because it potentially binds us to worldly matters rather than automatically directing us on an upward and uplifting path toward spiritual enlightenment and thus toward God.²⁹ In the Augustinian framework familiar to many modern readers of medieval literature, particularly those indoctrinated into his seminal De doctrina christiana (On Christian Teaching), the arts needed to be used (uti), we can say, not enjoyed (frui)—a notion certainly not lost on Dante’s edified wayfarer as he journeys through the other-world. Other medieval thinkers, including those indebted to Augustine, approached the productive arts in particular with more hostility, perpetuating the longstanding hierarchies that privileged intellectual work (the so-called liberal arts, whose features could change in antiquity) over physical labors (the artes sordidae, vulgares, and illiberales). And yet gradually thinkers in medieval culture worked to soften some aspects of the harshness of much of classical culture toward the productive arts in particular, especially in and after the Carolingian renaissance, when philosophers and theologians developed new and more positively inflected categories for thinking about crafts and manual labor. And by the twelfth century, especially with the writings of Domingo Gundisalvo, Hugh of St. Victor, Albertus Magnus, Vincent of Beauvais, and Robert Kilwardby, we seem to witness, if only haltingly at times, a more comprehensive exploration of the virtues of the productive arts generally, even if we cannot always attribute to this period a completely innovative recalibration of the value of them as a full-fledged expression of the dignity of man or, for that matter, attribute to the period a radical reconfiguration, much less social upscaling, of certain forms of work and the arts underpinning them.³⁰

In the end, then, by the thirteenth century, thinkers in the Middle Ages had at one time or another reconceptualized the arts generally in more positive terms. They had validated the productive arts in particular as expressions of reason and as valuable forms of knowledge. They had justified them as integral parts of elaborate and comprehensive systems of thought. They had awarded them prominence within their systems of thought, thus partly breaking down the ancient classical opposition between, on the one hand, unworthy productive and practical arts that served the body, financial gain, and pleasure and, on the other hand, worthy intellectual arts that nourished the soul and enhanced virtue. They had legitimated them as vehicles contributing to salvation, while still placing a number of them, such as the productive arts, at the bottom of a conceptual ladder on an ascending hierarchy that elevated humans step by step from matter to spirit. They had, in keeping with many from the classical period, designated some of them as occupying a middle ground between illiberal and liberal arts (such “semiliberal” arts as medicine, husbandry, architecture, navigation, painting, sculpture, gymnastics, and the like). They had assigned them a positive moral value by envisioning them as part of God’s plan for humankind to both recapture a prelapsarian state through applied specialized knowledge and take advantage of an opportunity for humans to perfect nature and care for themselves through their ingenuity. They had deemed them conducive to the virtuous life in a variety of ways, much as they embraced them as part of an overall theology of work. They had secularized them by lauding their utilitarian and exploitative value for humankind generally insofar as they furnished humans with the means to use available natural resources for positive practical ends. And, finally, they had articulated a model for them to be integrated into, and viewed as interdependent with, the theoretical sciences.

A number of contributing socioeconomic and religious factors, it has been argued, led to this treatment of the arts—especially the productive arts—in the Middle Ages. Monasticism, and more broadly a variety of institutionalized Christian religious practices, proved influential—a number of scholars have contended—by exploring and configuring work as crucial for spiritual development, perhaps most vigorously beginning in the eleventh century with the seminal writings of Peter Damian.³¹ Serious scholarly pressure, however, has nevertheless been applied to crediting the culture of cenobitism with fundamentally redefining the perceived value of work generally and thus with reevaluating the various forms of knowledge underpinning different manifestations of specialized work. Certainly there is little evidence that monasticism constituted the seedbed for the eventual growth of capitalism in the West.³² Another important factor, scholars have also maintained, was the increased mechanization of Europe in the Middle Ages and thus the concomitant value placed on technology as people invested in and modified all sorts of inventions, from watermills to windmills, and in the process innovated technologically in order to find better and more efficient ways to exploit their environment and existing natural resources. However, technological innovations, we should bear in mind, did not in and of themselves lead philosophers or theologians in the Middle Ages to alter how they ranked, in their sometimes elaborate classificatory systems, the productive arts that in fact led to such innovations. Yet another key factor, it is generally assumed, was the intensified reurbanization of Europe in the high Middle Ages, the accompanying positive value placed on the accumulation of wealth in a money and credit economy during the commercial revolution, the positive value placed on urban professions in a period of greater social mobility, and the shifting perceptions about the ideology and meaning of work itself. Significantly, however, thinkers in the Middle Ages do not seem to have ever revealed in their writings an intimate, hands-on knowledge of the nature of the work involved in the varied productive and practical arts they so freely classified, although at times they did explore the arts, as Jacques Le Goff has argued, in the context of economic and social changes taking place, particularly in the twelfth century. And, as Le Goff further maintains, they did indeed expand the purview of the arts to incorporate into their writings and classifications a number of those technological changes.³³

All things considered, then, it is supremely difficult to gauge precisely what socioeconomic factors can be said to account for the change in sensibilities about the arts as a form of specialized knowledge as we move from the classical period to the Middle Ages, just as it is extremely difficult in many instances to determine if indeed there was historically much of a significant change in overall sensibilities. For while many thinkers had managed in one way or another to frame the arts as “an essential kind of knowledge which shared in the ultimate aims of natural philosophy or theology,”³⁴ and while many had come to think of them as essential, morally valuable, and conducive to the good life within an overall “theology of work,”³⁵ social hierarchies still largely mapped themselves onto the classificatory rankings of the arts, much as they did in the earlier classical period.³⁶ Certainly a number of forms of work long associated with specific denigrated arts came to be viewed as inherently sinful, or else, almost as bad, they rendered the practitioner all the more susceptible to sin.³⁷ Consequently, in the Middle Ages as in antiquity, it was impossible to dispel entirely the pejorative connections linking social place with certain arts, particularly those that required manual labor and were thus perceived as demanding physical effort that dulled the senses as opposed to the mental effort that nurtured the soul, even if, to be sure, monastic culture, as well as the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, profoundly elevated the value of all honest labor generally, even the most menial labor, as an important vehicle for serving the glory of God in an overall theology of work.

This, then, was the broad intellectual and cultural framework within which Italian Renaissance authors wrote about both the productive and the practical arts and considered issues related to work and professional identity.

As we move from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Italy, something quite extraordinary seems to take place outside the ambit of the intellectual elite who produced commentaries on, for instance, Vitruvius’s first-century BCE book on architecture and who, in the process of generating these and other writings, raised various issues about the arts.³⁸ For, strikingly, practitioners themselves started composing discourses about arts in significant numbers, beginning in the fifteenth century but with a veritable outpouring of them in the sixteenth century.³⁹ These discourses ranged widely in nature and quality, and they appeared in print and manuscript form. They constituted what the historian of science Pamela O. Long has aptly dubbed, borrowing from the Aristotelian categories dominant from antiquity to the Renaissance, discourses about “praxis” and discourses about “techne,” which is to say, discourses dedicated to inculcating the practice of doing something, along with the knowledge required to build the moral character prepared to fulfill the practice in question, and discourses dedicated to inculcating the craft of making something, along with the knowledge required to fulfill the specific skill in question.⁴⁰ These discourses about arts—which for the purposes of this study constitute both of Long’s categories of praxis and techne, since the terms “ars” and “arte” encompassed both categories in the Italian Renaissance—also varied substantially in formal and conceptual complexity. At one end of the spectrum, we find sophisticated, “dialogic,” humanist treatises written in Latin or in a polished volgare, with models of imitation and emulation calculatingly underpinning them and a host of erudite allusions enriching the rhythmic, periodic prose. At the other end of the spectrum, we find practical, unembellished, “monologic” manuals that are fundamentally instructional in nature. Either way, the fact that a substantial number of practitioners with extremely different backgrounds and levels of schooling turned to authorship and wrote so many discourses about the productive and practical arts covering so many different fields in just under two centuries is indeed new. And it speaks to a large-scale cultural shift in attitudes taking place in Renaissance Italy regarding the value of the arts specifically, the value of professional life more generally, and, as some historians have argued even more expansively in the context of early modern Europe, the ideological and moral value of work itself.

Practitioners of specific arts who turned to authorship in Renaissance Italy wrote these discourses in a period when political leaders recognized the need to make use of the productive and practical arts in order to legitimate themselves and succeed as rulers.⁴¹ It was not enough to have character, build character, train character, and possess virtue in order to govern, as was traditionally believed to be the case in the classical period when an aristocratic ethos of social privilege prevailed and virtue and superior character were viewed as largely the distinct right of birth and family lineage. To succeed in governance, one also needed—leaders in the Italian Renaissance soon came to understand—the most skilled artisans capable of creating advanced weaponry and defense systems so that the state could remain secure and potentially grow (the most up-to-date and effective guns, cannons, forts, and the like), as well as the best-trained functionaries capable of engaging their skills so that the state could run as smoothly as possible (the best secretaries, ambassadors, courtiers, and the like). Not surprisingly, in writing these discourses about arts, practitioners turning to authorship sought to take advantage of manifold opportunities potentially available to them, from bureaucratic to artisanal ones. In this respect, a host of what we might call broadly “professional” reasons can be said to account historically for why a significant number of practitioners became authors of discourses about their arts.

Some practitioners turning to authorship were undoubtedly seeking to enhance the art underpinning their profession, endowing it with prestige and making a spirited claim for its cultural value as sophisticated and teachable with a determinate, rational, rule-bound, communicable, and reliable knowledge underlying it. In the process these practitioners were promoting themselves and seeking to elevate their own position, readily inviting readers to acknowledge their achievements and, in some instances, those of like-minded professionals in the author’s own field. In rhetorical terms they were establishing their exemplary “ethos,” or character, in the context of their expertise as professionals and, to be sure, as men worthy of recognition. They thus presented themselves as authorities who could legitimately hold forth about an art and, at the same time, reliably and masterfully apply the art in question to achieve a clearly defined and purposive end. We certainly find these strategies of professional self-definition employed in a broad variety of discourses about arts, from those dedicated to the art of being a secretary to those that concentrate on multiple sectors of the economy devoted to the visual arts.

Within the productive arts, one particularly interesting example of a technical treatise devoted to mechanics that addresses such issues is Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia (The Pirotechnia, 1540).⁴² This early exoteric treatise on metallurgy, composed in a period when Europe experienced a growth in exploitative capitalist enterprises in general and a mining boom in particular, not only serves the important economic and social function of providing potential wealthy investors and established practitioners in Italy with the means to imitate the Germans and make a substantial profit (fig. 9). Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia also serves to expand the opportunities of the author himself, who has labored in the profession and is taking advantage of a thriving market for minerals and metals in the sixteenth century by positioning himself as an authority on the art in question and, above all, by championing the social and cultural value of the art he professes to teach. As a form of specialized knowledge, the art of metallurgy—Biringuccio asserts from the outset—investigates the lifeblood of minerals coursing through the veins of the earth (13). Accordingly, it yields up to a well-trained and experienced eye such as Biringuccio’s—which is thoroughly versed in the art of reading manifold surface signs spread out across creeks, ditches, riverbeds, valleys, hills, plains, and mountains—where all the longed-for riches lie hidden deep within, ready for eager entrepreneurial spoil (14–15). In professional terms, then, Biringuccio, like so many other practitioners writing about their arts, takes up authorship to present himself with a highly specialized expertise and thus as a “professor,” in essence, professing knowledge. His art, like the art of other practitioners making a case publicly for themselves, is worthy of esteem and therefore should be culturally, socially, and economically valued.

FIGURE 9. Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1539), De la pirotechnia (Stampata in Venetia per Venturino Roffinello. Ad instantia di Curtio Navo. & fratelli, 1540). Reproduced by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Frontispiece.

Along with defining their own exemplary professional status as they sought to enhance, and in many instances socially elevate, the value of their art, some practitioner authors were attempting to pass on or expand a critical vocabulary related to their art and engage in competitive rivalries, debating the pros of their art and its specialized knowledge in relation to the cons of others, as well as making all sorts of jurisdictional claims within—to borrow the terms of the sociologist Andrew Abbott—a “system of professions.”⁴³ In doing so, they were also occasionally engaging in more personal rivalries and advocating for certain traditions of making or doing things in the productive and practical arts. Biringuccio does something of this sort when he provides an extensive vocabulary to understand every aspect of mining and repeatedly takes on alchemists, defining that particular, well-established esoteric art, which he finds to be suspect, fanciful, obscure, and charlatan-like, over and against the reliable, open, and highly useful art of the metallurgists, which he contends consistently yields positive results for the avid and patient investor. Similarly, the maverick surgeon/physician Leonardo Fioravanti, often considered something of a charlatan himself, takes on entrenched members of the medical community in a number of his writings, competing with them for a jurisdictional claim within a highly stratified, hierarchical profession.⁴⁴ Nor is it difficult to imagine why Fioravanti, whose writings we will examine at length in Chapter 3, would have attacked the established university-based medical community so vigorously. Who, after all, possessed the “secrets” of Nature and understood so profoundly its language? Surely it had to be the traveling surgeon Fioravanti, the radical empiric who went out into the world and, turning his back on arcane bookish learning, accumulated those secrets of medicine from common folk in order to cure people. He, Fioravanti would have us know, discovered this coveted and useful information, not the established doctors who relied on institutionally transferred knowledge.⁴⁵ In this light, Fioravanti’s hostility toward much of the medical profession arose over a competition within the medical community regarding who in fact had access to and possessed hidden knowledge, the mysteries of the medical misterium, with the term “misterium” here understood to signify a craft, occupation, trade, or calling—in a word, an “art.”⁴⁶ For Fioravanti surely felt that tracking down and learning medical secrets was his job and the province of expertise of his art. Collecting, testing, and then eventually divulgating through print those medical secrets in a language accessible to all was indeed a principal way Fioravanti aimed to make his mark in the medical community, following in the path of not only the classical empirics of the ancient world but also the peripatetic Don Alessio Piemontese, the fictional author of the best-selling Secreti (Secrets, 1555).⁴⁷

As a number of practitioners advocated the virtues of one art over another, engaging in a competitive system of professions, they were also—in a far more mundane manner—simply trying to make a profit during a period that witnessed an increased interest in professions and professionalization in the intensely urban world of the Italian Renaissance—an interest that found expression in a number of cultural forms, as George McClure has demonstrated, and culminated in Tomaso Garzoni’s massive and often quirky encyclopedic La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (The Universal Piazza of All the Professions in the World, 1585/1587). In the process these practitioner authors were capitalizing as best they could on a widespread demand for their expertise in the “market” and court culture.⁴⁸ In crudely materialistic terms, they were trying to “cash in.” Hence some practitioner authors, such as once again Fioravanti and Biringuccio, wrote in some measure to advertise their skills and/or products so as to capture a broad-based consumer demand. Biringuccio, for instance, enthusiastically urges investors to take advantage of his expertise so that they can reap rich rewards from the mining boom of mid-sixteenth-century Europe. His book, which guarantees wealth for the bold and adventurous entrepreneur, is in one sense an invitation for work as he implores Italians in particular to turn away from the untold risks and endless drudgery of mercantile labor and encourages them to invest their energies and capital in looking for such rare yet valuable minerals as gold in, oddly enough, Italy (34–35)—not, to be sure, a geographically resource-rich region of Europe. Far more bluntly, Fioravanti, who was always keen on selling himself and his services, even provides readers in a few of his discourses with the addresses of selected apothecaries in Venice where the products of his labor can be readily purchased by mail order.⁴⁹ Other practitioners, including those discussing the art of being a secretary, courtier, painter, sculptor, architect, or goldsmith, wrote to win over members of a cultural elite that needed assistance in governing and had developed a passion to possess durable objects of all kinds and sizes as a way of fashionably expressing their own social position and distinction but also as a way of creatively constructing culture and distinction itself.⁵⁰ In sum, functionaries and artists had services and products to sell, and practitioners eagerly sought to sell them and themselves as they turned to authorship through the writing of discourses about their arts.

Additionally, a number of practitioners wrote discourses about arts to puzzle over problems related to their particular skill and explore avenues for expanding their own understanding of the art in question, both as a practice and as a form of knowledge. These discourses can be seen as functioning as a cognitive act. A few of them even unfold as essays in the root sense of the word, as the staging of an attempt to come to terms with a serious intellectual problem through an ongoing process of reflection. Leonardo da Vinci’s remarkable writings about the art of painting, for example, which never finally cohered into a formal printed treatise during his lifetime, would fall into this particular category. His surviving writings on painting in manuscript form, accompanied by his dazzling sketches about ideal proportions and the like (fig. 10), do more than engage us in a characteristically Renaissance paragone (competition) about the relative value of the art in question within a system of professions defined by established hierarchies of the arts (painters, of course, belong to the loftier major guild, “arte,” of apothecaries in Florence, for instance, whereas sculptors belong to the minor guild of stonemasons). Nor do Leonardo’s scattered remaining writings on the art of painting only serve to pass on information about the language of painting or, for that matter, only seek to elevate socially the art of painting by characterizing the painter as a distinguished, clean, and elegant gentleman leisurely applying his skill in his well-ventilated, dust-free studio with musicians all the while fashionably entertaining him. Leonardo’s writings about painting also function as ongoing explorations into the nature of the world and the human form, linking the work of the painter to the insights of the natural philosopher, the particulars of the experience of applying the art in question with the episteme of mathematical principles, optics, and universal harmony. Painting and examining the world closely as a unified—indeed fused—coordinated practice in Leonardo’s writings consequently engage him in epistemological inquiry, making the art of the painter a veritable science that is creative and fundamentally divine in nature.⁵¹

More broadly, a distinctive feature about a number of these sorts of writings—writings by practitioners, that is, in which the arts are viewed as having an important cognitive function—is that for the first time since the classical period we witness a sustained, full-fledged theorizing about the practices in question in significant discursive form. This process of theorizing takes place not only in writings that remained inchoate in manuscript form, such as Leonardo’s on painting, but also in those that were fully fleshed out and appeared in print, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s on architecture and painting and Biringuccio’s on metallurgy. As Paolo Rossi long ago observed in his seminal Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts, “the medieval technical writings gave ample and detailed instructions on the way ‘to work.’ They offered themselves as a compilation of rules, recipes, and precepts. They were completely devoid of ‘theory’ understood as an attempt to derive the precepts from general principles and then to base them on a totality of verifiable facts.” Moreover, even if we apply some pressure to Rossi’s allembracing assertion that medieval technical writings were absolutely devoid of theory, this strategy of theorizing about the arts by practitioners certainly seems to have found its greatest impetus and most sustained development discursively in the postclassical period in the Italian Renaissance, where “for perhaps the first time a fusion had been effected between technical and scientific activities, and manual labor and theory.”⁵² As a result, the workshop in which visual artists were apprenticed became in Renaissance Italy not just a place for the construction of objects but also a space of reflection—a laboratory of sorts, in which the particulars of experience were linked to the universals of broader fields of knowledge, such as geometry, anatomy, optics, and perspective (fig. 11).⁵³ In this way the Italian Renaissance resuscitated the classical concept of techne as not just the specialized knowledge of how to make or do something with expertise but also the specialized knowledge about the making or doing of something with expertise. This theoretical knowledge in its turn allowed the experts in question to understand in depth why something was done or made in a particular way and thus, by extension, allowed those experts to be in a position to explain in their varied discourses the underlying causes that made the art possible in the first place. Furthermore, these discourses became viewed as learned subjects and the province of interest of patrons curious about different aspects of the world, above all in a period “fueled by a growing appreciation for novelty and new inventions,” revitalized by the conspicuous consumption of large- and small-scale objects by the cultural elite, and increasingly invested in the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the arts.⁵⁴

FIGURE 10. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Head of a Man with Scheme of Its Proportions. Accademia, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY. Leonardo’s examinations into the perfect proportions of the human body, here developed in the context of an examination of a head, dovetail with Piero della Francesca’s and Albrecht Dürer’s similar mathematically grounded reflections on such matters, also conceived as a science, an “art.”

As practitioners turned to authorship, some of these discourses about arts can also be construed as ego documents, it is important to stress. This appears to be a somewhat new phenomenon as well in the Italian Renaissance, a period when there is a notable rise not just in autobiographical modes of writing but of artisanal autobiographies themselves—a rise that continues well into the early modern period in Europe.⁵⁵ These discourses about a particular art ranged from full-fledged “lives,” which draw on classical models and eventually figure into the development of the genre of biography and autobiography in the early modern period, to treatises that purport to inform us about specific skills but end up effectively functioning equally well as ego documents, at times offering up examples of some of the most egregious forms of aggressive self-fashioning of the entire European Renaissance. In the first group we could readily place such works as Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, both the 1550 Torrentiniana and 1568 Giuntina editions), as well as Castiglione’s masterpiece Il cortegiano (printed in 1528 but certainly in circulation, and therefore “published,” earlier), even if Castiglione purports not to be representing himself in the process of fashioning the perfect courtier and deliberately absents himself from the conversations that putatively took place over four days in spring 1507 in the ducal palace of Urbino. In the second group we would place everything from Benvenuto Cellini’s treatises on goldsmithing and sculpting (1568) to a number of Fioravanti’s varied treatises on medicine, such as his Il tesoro della vita humana (The Treasury of Human Life, 1570), published while he worked in the ambit of the combative, industrious, and financially strapped writers closely associated with the print industry in Venice, the so-called poligrafi (polygraphs).⁵⁶ There is a notable range, then, to the sorts of discourses that practitioners composed that are dedicated to their arts and, at the same time, function in one form or another as ego documents.

FIGURE 11. Agostino dei Musi (Agostino Veneziano, ca. 1490–ca. 1540), The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli, 1531. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence. Reproduced by permission of © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. Baccio Bandinelli’s academy, in some ways a forerunner of the Accademia del Disegno, here represents the artist’s workshop established not only as a place of training but also as a space of intellectual inquiry in the teaching of disegno.

The authors of these discourses about arts that function as ego documents are performing a number of important cultural functions. What is perhaps most significant is that they are often seeking to elevate their art in some measure as a form of specialized knowledge built on rational rules rather than just experience, as well as rational rules derived from extensive experience, in the very moment that they promote themselves and seek status, occasionally with the aim of securing work and patronage. Put differently, if in the classical and medieval periods, to paraphrase Plutarch once again, we are meant to admire the product but not the producer, in the Italian Renaissance the authors of many of these discourses about particular arts would have us admire not only the knowledge associated with the specialized work they do with such evident expertise but also themselves as masterful practitioners who have defined, assimilated, communicated, and, at times, surpassed through their practices those very same rules discussed in their writings.⁵⁷ In this context a key operative word or concept underpinning some of these discourses about arts that function as ego documents is “admire,” along with its variants in the vernacular (ammirazione, meraviglia, ammirare) derived from the Latin “miror,” with its concomitant emphasis on gazing and the privileging of vision as a vehicle for understanding the world. Indeed, often enough there is a language of marveling associated not only with the work produced or performed but also the workers themselves, whether we are talking about Cellini’s and Fioravanti’s over-the-top, self-aggrandizing representations of themselves as near miracle makers in their stupefying ability to accomplish certain feats of labor with dazzling skill or, inversely, Vasari’s and Castiglione’s far more tempered selfpresentations as they showcase their complete command of their art as indeed admirable yet still, in keeping with the dominant behavioral codes of the cultural elite in the period, subtly represent their achievements with the appropriate decorum and restraint.⁵⁸

Moreover, in the course of writing about themselves as they write about a specific art, these practitioners who turned to authorship in the Italian Renaissance are often redefining the value of work and by extension the cultural value of an art itself as a form of specialized knowledge as it is embodied in their own spectacular achievements or the achievements of other remarkable practitioners. Bear in mind that from classical antiquity to the medieval period, work was not deemed in discourse to be done for one’s own personal selfdevelopment, reward, and growth, although some practitioners did indeed occasionally express exceptional pride in their accomplishments achieved through work. Modern historians examining the ideology and meaning of work have driven home this point in a variety of ways, perhaps none more effectively than Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly in their comprehensive historical survey Worthy Efforts: Attitudes Toward Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe. In classical Greece and Rome, work, to be sure, could sometimes be conceived unfavorably, as the negation of a privileged, productive otium (leisure), as neg(not)-otium. In the intervals when one was temporarily and mercifully freed from the tedium and tyranny of work, the very work that could render one captive to either one’s own or someone else’s ongoing bodily needs and desires, one could exercise and enhance one’s powers, nourish oneself spiritually, dedicate oneself intellectually, say, to the liberal arts or, for that matter, the semiliberal arts through a certain rarefied otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity). More generally, however, work was immensely valued in a period that “abounded in [a] polyphony” of voices on the matter.⁵⁹ For some thinkers advocating its distinct moral and social benefits, work made life more tolerable for individuals and families: most people needed to work to survive much less thrive. At the same time, and perhaps most important of all, work itself served to reinforce social hierarchies, inculcate discipline, and serve the community. It was certainly preferred to idleness, the dark side of otium as a form of slothful “inertia.” And it could enhance virtuous behavior, particularly such work as husbandry in antiquity but also, for Cicero and other elite classical authors, such essential activities as statecraft and public service broadly conceived. Work also generally made life more tolerable for others in the community. Some people through work, such as physicians, demonstrably improved the lot of those around them, while others, such as large-scale merchants engaged in socially accepted forms of legitimately acquiring wealth through commerce, could benefit society by being charitable, by proving themselves magnanimous, and by ensuring that goods flowed freely from one place to another. And, of course, work inevitably served in so many occasions as a palliative to life’s uncertainties and onslaughts. Some treated work, we might say to borrow from the pervasive language of modern therapy, as a coping mechanism.

Even in the monastic environment where work was codified and championed both as a necessary part of cenobitic life and as a virtuous activity that commanded respect (beginning with the earliest formative rules of Basil, Augustine, Pachomius, and Benedict),⁶⁰ the specialized knowledge associated with any given particular art served not as an end unto itself. One did not go to Heaven, that is, because one possessed an art or was an expert in any one specific art. Rather, the specialized knowledge associated with any given art served to ward off the sluggishness of accidia (spiritual apathy and desperation), to eschew sloth, to suppress the appetite of carnal desire and chasten the body, to provide for a self-sufficient monastic community by taking care of what was necessary for everyone involved to survive in a mutually reinforcing collectivity, to prepare oneself spiritually and eschatologically for the Second Coming, to engage in penitence, to inculcate obedience, to be one with the sacred, to bear witness in word and deed to the Truth, to practice more efficiently asceticism, to adhere more rigorously to the vita apostolica (apostolic life), to promote charity, to ensure that idle hands do not become the devil’s workshop, to make oneself useful socially, to discourage evil thoughts and encourage patience and obedience, to aid in prayer and transform work into prayer, to practice humility, to take personal responsibility for caring for the world, to develop the spiritual self through useful endeavors, to do God’s work by participating in creation, to exalt God, even to produce material sweat itself as a divine offering.⁶¹ Hence, as James R. Farr summarily puts it, “work was, in short, a spiritual discipline. Medieval theologians … did not think about work in terms of the economic calculation or the material value of production, that effort would somehow create wealth and better one’s position in life. Instead, they conceived of work in moral terms, a distinctly premodern notion.”⁶² What mattered, in brief, was social utility, not modern notions of economic productivity, when it came to thinking about the value of work.

There is some reason to believe, however, that during the Italian Renaissance—beginning in the mid-fifteenth century but intensifying above all in the sixteenth century—professional identity associated with the knowledge of a certain art mattered also as an end unto itself, at least as the work associated with that art was defined and configured in discourse outside the context of the monastic environment. Consequently, having a profession and applying the art underpinning it in the form of work was seen not just as a means of acquiring recognition and even honor in a status-conscious, hierarchical society bound by an ideology of discipline, utility, service, and obedience but, as McClure has argued, as a source of personal, nonspiritually determined happiness and fulfillment. Or, to frame the matter in terms more congenial to this study, in the Italian Renaissance the happiness and self-satisfaction derived from work, as it is voiced in a number of discourses about arts written by practitioners, seems to grow increasingly out of the sorts of direct, personal, self-serving—in Marxist terms, “unalienated”—connections that practitioners made with the product created or the act done. In such discourses one could actually revel in, and indeed feel good about reveling in, the “self-indulgence of personal labor” in a manner that we do not at all find typically expressed in the literature of the classical period, in the elaborate classifications of the arts composed in the Middle Ages, or, for that matter, within the confines of writings connected to or emerging out of monasticism and the mendicant orders.⁶³ As “polyphonic” as the notion of work was in classical Greece and Rome and the European Middle Ages, work was principally valued because it served some end goal larger than the individual person exerting “worthy effort”: something such as the family, a secular or ecclesiastical community, the state, the social and political order conceptualized according to the presumed hierarchical functions of the individual parts of the human body, corporatism, or the divine.⁶⁴ Put differently, if, as Lis and Soly have emphasized, from classical antiquity through the preindustrial period in Europe “the standard universal command was that one must exert oneself,” a notion of exertion that the Greeks captured “with the term ponos” understood as a form of “tireless activity, work,” one was still always expected to toil in a virtuous way for something larger than the individual self.⁶⁵

We do, however, find powerful expressions about the intense, personal, selfserving rewards of labor voiced in the writings of the above-mentioned Cellini and Fioravanti, for example, although other practitioners who turned to authorship from the period could be adduced in support of this claim.⁶⁶ In Cellini’s exuberant autobiography, which is not a discourse strictly about an art but nevertheless details exhaustively the habits and attitudes of an artisan and his extensive, onerous labors, we are presented with a glorified image of the artist so passionately absorbed in his work that he simply cannot find the time to write down the story of his life and must therefore dictate it to an assistant while keeping his hands busy with all sorts of taxing projects and competitive commissions. And the intense self-satisfaction Cellini feels in the process of “doing” (il fare) as opposed to just “talking” (il dire), to use terms from his treatises on goldsmithing and sculpting, can transform Cellini within his narrative into a demonic demiurge with a brazenly outsized sense of his place as a professional in society. As he transforms objects, shaping them with his hands so that they become works of arresting beauty, so, too, Cellini transforms himself into a wondrous figure for all to admire. Emblematic of this selftransformation is the key moment when Cellini boasts with characteristic fustian bravado how he masterfully crafted a large, multifigured statue of Perseus and Medusa in bronze in a single casting, thereby achieving (even though he did not in fact achieve it) something through his art never done before in the ancient or modern era. In this highly dramatic self-portrayal, Cellini presents himself as a heroic Perseus figure who can grant life and defy death through his creative energies, while he also emerges as a terrifying Medusa figure petrifying others who gaze, transfixed with astonishment in the public square, at the extraordinary expertise embodied in his monumental sculpture. Cellini’s heroic and demonic efforts as a maker are one, we are invited to believe, with the statue he daringly crafts and puts on display for all to see and appreciate with such amazement, while the severed Medusa head held aloft and designed with such astonishing artistry transfixes with her transmogrifying gaze the surrounding statues in the square—according to a play of allusions within the context of Cellini’s paragone as a goldsmith turned sculptor—by petrifying those very hardened lapidary statues, the famous works of art of Cellini’s Florentine rivals with whom he vies, into so many isolated pieces of stone (figs. 12 and 13).⁶⁷

FIGURE 12. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Side view with Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus in the background, both conceptually “petrified” from the Medusa’s gorgonizing gaze.

Similarly, fantasies about self-satisfaction derived from work, as well as the self-importance and honor associated with work, abound in Fioravanti’s writings, so much so that he characterizes himself over and over again as a wonder with a sort of thaumaturgic touch to him, stunning others in his highly theatrical performances and gradually acquiring—thanks to his complete command over his art—status, recognition, honor, wealth, and, last but not least, a title of knight that he is only too happy to flaunt. Not entirely unlike the charlatans of his time, Fioravanti was something of a spectacle wherever he went, a sort of curiosity figure in an age that possessed an insatiable appetite for exhibiting and collecting curiosities.⁶⁸ His ability to appear as a marvel to so many people perhaps explains in some measure the enmity he aroused from some in the medical community, the persecution he felt he endured in Rome, Venice, Milan, and Madrid.⁶⁹ A number of physicians no doubt felt threatened by his success in putting on such a good show and, perhaps, competing with them all too successfully for coveted clients. In this regard, Fioravanti may have been something of an irritating and obnoxious gadfly within the medical community of the period, especially as he overtly challenged and rebuked well-ensconced authorities, but he was a popular gadfly, he emphasizes, and one, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 3, who took great satisfaction in his accomplishments, his social advancement, and his mastery over his art as a highly specialized and rewarding form of knowledge. Time and again, Fioravanti’s sense of identity, like Cellini’s and that of so many other practitioners of arts who turned to authorship, was intimately bound up in the specialized knowledge that underpinned his art and in the final realized products of his labor. Professional identity, then, mattered. And it mattered because it allowed such exemplary practitioners as Cellini and Fioravanti to feel not only socially enhanced in relation to others but also positively about themselves and their relationship to their art as self-proclaimed and acknowledged professionals.

FIGURE 13. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Archive Timothy Mc-Carthy/Art Resource, NY. Detail of the head of Medusa, with blood spewing from the severed neck.

Given the deep personal investment that practitioner authors sometimes made in their work, at least as they characterized themselves and their relationship with their work in their writings, as well as the associations often assumed in the period between the personalities of people (Raphael, for instance, is deemed by Vasari to be full of grace) and the products of their labor (Raphael’s paintings are likewise deemed by Vasari to be full of grace), some of the discourses by practitioners inevitably find themselves tied to more broad-based cultural issues related to creativity, character, and conduct. This is particularly true in the sixteenth century, when Italians exhibited an intensified interest in etiquette and a keen concern for how men should behave with one another in a variety of homosocial situations, as well as how they should and should not behave in relation to a variety of social superiors, both men and women.⁷⁰ On the one hand, in the sixteenth century anyone applying an art who aspired to be accepted by the cultural elite should behave in some measure, we are often led to believe, with decorum, exercising prudence, control, caution, and discretion at every turn. To this end, some of the practitioners who have taken up the role of authorship as they write about their art as a form of specialized knowledge occasionally spend time trying to indoctrinate others, who might well aim to put into practice the art they write about in their discourses, into the pleasantries of polite social conventions. Don’t be a slob, Vasari is repeatedly teaching visual artists through edifying examples, if you aim to succeed in a career as an artist in a society increasingly dominated by court culture and complicated patronage relationships. Please, he seems to plead when writing about such people as the bizarre Piero di Cosimo, try not to eat only boiled eggs cooked all at once, as well as by the dozens, in a filthy bucket, if you want to be taken seriously by the cultural elite and be invited to interact with them on an ongoing, if not even intimate, basis. Don’t be abrasive, obnoxious, difficult, offensive, obsessive, recalcitrant, spacey, vulgar, dirty, overly taciturn, eccentric, uncouth, or even, in the case of the otherwise perfectly apt Raphael, excessively libidinous.⁷¹ Castiglione similarly reprimands courtiers for engaging in all sorts of boorish habits, from bragging too much to acting out brashly like impudent schoolchildren.

On the other hand, in the sixteenth century in Italy, the self-importance some practitioners of an art arrogated unto themselves within their discourses allowed them at times to reject all the accepted pleasantries of polite comportment and pose alternative modes of interacting with the cultural elite—modes that fly directly in the face of everything espoused by such men of distinction as Monsignor Giovanni della Casa in his influential etiquette treatise Il Galateo overo de’ costumi (The Galateo or a Book on Comportment, 1558), much less Stefano Guazzo in his equally influential book of manners designed for gentlemen of the court, La civil conversazione (Civil Conversation, 1574). Both Cellini and Fioravanti are emblematic of the more aggressive, assertive, and at times even uncouth practitioner who emerges in sixteenth-century Italy. This sort of abrasive practitioner presents himself occasionally exercising his art with such dazzling mastery that he feels, by virtue of his talents that render him one of a kind, that he can get away with behaving in all sorts of indecorous ways, at times even egregiously transgressing the norms of polite behavior, particularly when it comes to interacting with social superiors. Cellini, for instance, even goes so far as to tell us in his life story how he snubbed his patron the king of France—an ill-advised move, Vasari would have surely declared. Fioravanti casts himself in the role of the upstart upsetting social conventions with superiors within the medical community wherever he went, both up and down the peninsula as well as from Italy to Spain.

At one level, these distinctly opposing yet still related strategies of behavior explored by practitioner authors in their discourses about the arts can be seen to disclose competing conceptions of manhood emerging above all in sixteenth-century Italy, a period that featured some exceedingly powerful, larger-than-life male rulers of both decorous and indecorous comportment.⁷² On the one hand, one conception of manhood in the period required a person to be deferential, prudent, and highly rational. It owed much to classical rhetorical and contemporary poetic strategies. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were then perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male strategies of self-discipline and self-control over the emotions. On the other hand, another conception of manhood in the period entitled one to be abrasive, imprudent, and occasionally highly irrational. It owed much to longstanding codes of chivalric honor and patterns of aggressive, violent behavior long associated with feudal aristocratic privilege. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male habits of responding to people and events with forcefulness, aggression, and assertiveness as a way of both defending and affirming collective and individual honor. Either way, some of the male practitioners in question who turned to authorship clearly wanted to level out the social playing field in their discourses and envision themselves through their varied modes of temperate or intemperate comportment as near equals in a highly stratified world of extremely competitive men, precisely when their relationship with their (typically, but not exclusively, male) superiors was, and always would remain, hierarchically arranged rather than laterally configured in society. To this end, they occasionally pictured themselves in a primarily male-dominated professional world collaborating with their social superiors in the spirit of mutually reinforcing processes of exchange. So configured, they occasionally idealized their relationships with their male superiors as reciprocal, perhaps most blatantly in Filarete’s (Antonio Averlino’s) treatise on architecture, which, as Long has thoughtfully posited, establishes a sort of conceptual “trading zone” where ideas could be fruitfully exchanged in a manner that perhaps looks ahead to the sorts of interactions that formally took place within the scientific communities of the seventeenth century.⁷³

Along with teaching and thinking about character and conduct, as well as instructing us on how to interact with the cultural elite in the context of applying an art as a form of specialized knowledge, some of these discourses are both reflective and instructive of burgeoning aesthetic values and address what we might broadly call, partly in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “taste.” Consider in this context Vasari’s monumental Le vite, which offers us not only a host of exemplary biographies of visual artists, replete with colorful tales about their sometimes fascinating personalities, along with abundant information—both accurate and erroneous—about the products of their labors, but also a lengthy introductory section, expanded in the second edition, on highly technical matters related to the three principal arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. As a result, when we come to Le vite we readily presume, on the one hand, that many of the rules that define the art of the painter, sculptor, and architect—the very same rules that define a knowledge about and rational ability to represent a variety of concepts, such as grace, harmony, sweetness, and urbanity—spoke to desirable qualities that constituted part of the shared vocabulary aimed at describing and evaluating visual art in the period. Hence Vasari’s Le vite can be taken, as it so often is, as a document that reflects a broad-based horizon of expectations. In part it provides us retrospectively with an understanding of what constituted the period eye of the Italian Renaissance.⁷⁴ Consequently, as scholars we regularly consult Le vite to get an historicized understanding of how some people collectively viewed visual art at the time and thereby learn some of the critical terms they applied to it as the product of a supremely rational techne.

On the other hand, when we come to Vasari’s Le vite, we can also envision it as a book of instruction that taught readers of the period how to appreciate visual art so that they might better know what they, as nonpractitioners, should value when they looked at visual art, unpacked its formal construction, and situated artifacts in a broader historical development. In this regard, Vasari was not just defining accepted rules of a certain community related to a particular art as a form of specialized knowledge worthy of respect. He was also consciously fashioning how we, as potential viewers and consumers, are expected to make careful distinctions, thereby teaching us what to look for in assessing whether a painter, sculptor, or architect is indeed “excellent” in his art—if he knows the rules of the art, if he adheres to them too slavishly, or if he transcends them by liberating himself from those very same rules through years of rigorous training. In this respect, Le vite is an edifying book about the very discipline of looking at visual art. It not only trains readers to understand how art is made in the introductory section, thereby reminding us all the more emphatically that the author is indeed a broadly trained artisan fully qualified to talk about the matters at hand—that he has, in rhetorical terms, ethos in the context of his profession and the art underpinning it as a form of specialized knowledge. Vasari’s Le vite also trains its readers to value certain kinds of visual art and, what is more, certain trends in art. And in this respect Le vite taught its readers and potential consumers in the sixteenth century—and thus teaches us today—“taste.” Read Vasari, for instance, and you are led to privilege Florentine and Tuscan art over other “regional” forms of art, as well as, of course, “disegno” (“design” understood as primarily an intellectual practice realized through diligent preparatory drawing before actually applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for hard, defined edges) over “colorito” (“design” understood as more of an intuitive practice realized through coloring as a way of creating forms in the act of applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for soft, blurry edges). Those visual distinctions mattered to Vasari, presumably they mattered to his readers in search of marking themselves with distinction and in search of understanding visual art, and they still matter to us now—or at least the “us” that makes up an ever-dwindling community of readers still interested in Vasari and the Italian Renaissance.⁷⁵

Moreover, within the context of thinking about Le vite as a book that edifies by performing for its readers a discipline of looking, Le vite offers us—and offered its readers over four centuries ago—two very different but still interrelated master narratives about the development of visual art in the context of the arts themselves as forms of specialized knowledge.⁷⁶ One narrative—the narrative we have all grown most accustomed to over the years—is fundamentally heroic in nature. It is grounded in the achievements of primarily exceptional Florentine and Tuscan artists over time, from Cimabue to Giotto to Masaccio to Leonardo and the like. These heroic individuals within Vasari’s discourse gradually uncover, disclose, and make use of the universal rules underpinning the knowledge that makes up their art. That core master narrative, familiar to anyone who has read through even an anthologized version of Le vite, has its ultimate flowering in Michelangelo, particularly in the first Torrentiniana edition of 1550 but also still very much so in the enlarged Giuntina edition of 1568. In this regard, it is crucial that Michelangelo, the telos of this heroic narrative and providential process of artistic awakening, is viewed as inimitable so that his achievements are not readily transferable and always remain historically specific to his hand, his particular, individual, awe-inspiring terribilità, most divine nature, and enviable talent.⁷⁷ Another core narrative, by contrast, is fundamentally institutional in spirit. It is grounded, as Marco Ruffini has perceptively observed, in a corporate structure of artistic production that goes all the way back to the medieval guild system, finds expression in such exemplary artists as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, and Raphael with their extensive workshops, and has its great flowering in the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Design), of which Vasari was such a vital and inspirational participant. The climax of one master narrative of historical artistic development—the heroic life work of the individual Michelangelo at the service of single patrons—in fact prepares for the upswing of the other—the rise of institutional visual art produced by an impersonal collectivity at the service of a bureaucratic “state.”⁷⁸ Hence Michelangelo becomes an even more exceptional figure for Vasari within Le vite as these two master narratives—one valuing and privileging individuals, the other valuing and privileging collectivities—strategically dovetail at the end. Accordingly, Michelangelo is viewed not only as the heroic master of the three major visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as Vasari makes plain, but also as the mythical foundational hero whose providential and timely death, mourned in an elaborate funeral staged by the Accademia, makes possible the new professionalizing corporate structure of visual art of Vasari’s time—an impersonal, discipline-bound, transhistorical, and rigorously rule-governed art that will be fashioned by and through an academy, so much so that it will become, as Ruffini has elegantly phrased it, “an art without an author.”

Read this way, Le vite is not just about promoting rules for a certain type of visual art based on a form of specialized knowledge that Vasari values and seeks to elevate socially as an accomplished practitioner. Nor is it just about promoting a discipline of looking at works of visual art and understanding how they are skillfully made. Nor is it just about promoting a particular group of exemplary artists, or about promoting primarily Florentine and Tuscan artists. Nor is it just about promoting the author as a learned practitioner with a thorough command of his art within a book that ineluctably comes off as a self-reflexive ego document in the very moment that it talks primarily about other people’s lives. Nor is it just a book about promoting a heroic conception of the development of visual art with individual artists contributing to the punctuated evolution of the artist’s craft presented as possessing a form of specialized knowledge. Nor even, as I have argued elsewhere, is it just a book about promoting rules of behavior for artists (and allowing for exceptions to those rules for exceptional artists) in a period so feverishly committed to codifying conduct and civility yet so clearly peopled by larger-than-life, aggressive male personalities from Cesare Borgia to Julius II. Le vite, as Ruffini has brilliantly demonstrated, is also very much about promoting an institutional approach to an art and, as a result, a certain institutionalizing of taste as a marker of distinction. This strategy of shaping what we would probably call today a sort of “corporate taste” within a discourse about an art by a practitioner writing about the art in question is new, and it finds its first forceful and most seminal expression in the Italian Renaissance in Vasari’s Le vite.⁷⁹

Finally, many of these discourses composed by practitioners about their arts address matters connected to issues of educability and the possibility (or fantasy) of social mobility. Framed in terms of our contemporary belief systems, knowledge creates opportunities for both employment and social access, and a key way of acquiring knowledge, we readily assume (and we are invited to assume today by publishers and educators alike through all sorts of pedagogical hype), is through books (or electronic versions of books on an ever-changing array of inventive platforms). Want to be a goldsmith? Learn the lessons in Cellini’s treatise.⁸⁰ Want to be an architect? Learn from Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, or Andrea Palladio.⁸¹ Want to be a metallurgist to meet a demand for the exploration and exploitation of minerals for a variety of commercial and productive ends, including the fabrication of armaments and the minting of coins? Read Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia, which displays multiple designs of how that art can be profitably put into practice, beginning with the very border of the frontispiece (fig. 9). Want to be a builder of forts, an inventor of war machines and armaments, a military leader, a soldier? There are a host of informative printed books to enjoy on the topic, too many to even begin to list, but they are certainly there to edify you.⁸² Want to be a visual artist? Learn from Cennino Cennini, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, and, up to a point, Gian Paolo Lomazzo.⁸³ Want to be a courtier, a surgeon, a secretary, an ambassador—even a cook or steward? Learn from Baldassare Castiglione, Leonardo Fioravanti, Andrea Nati, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Angelo Ingegneri, Giambattista Guarini, Bartolomeo Zucchi, Tomaso Costo, Benedetto Pucci, Ermolao Barbaro, and Cristoforo Messisbugo, among others.⁸⁴ An art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly explored in the Italian Renaissance through an unprecedented flourishing of discourses written by practitioners invested in a variety of professions. What is more, a host of nonpractitioners—not to be outdone—contributed to the outpouring of discourses about arts in Renaissance Italy, from a mere handful of authors who remain well-known in academia (Niccolò Machiavelli writing on princes and the work of military leaders, Leon Battista Alberti writing on painters, and Torquato Tasso writing on secretaries and ambassadors),⁸⁵ to those who are reasonably well-known by specialists within subdisciplines (Francesco Sansovino writing on secretaries, Roberto Valturio writing on military science, and Paolo Cortesi writing on cardinals),⁸⁶ to those who remain obscure even for academics occasionally toiling away in what Herman Melville would have no doubt called sub-sub-subdisciplines (Gabriele Zinano, for instance, writing on secretaries, Ottaviano Maggi writing on ambassadors, and a plethora of authors writing about soldiery and related military tasks).⁸⁷

Collectively and individually, these discourses serve to edify, and at face value the knowledge purveyed in them about a particular art is presented not secretively but openly, offering up information in the spirit of full disclosure.⁸⁸ People eager to pursue or perfect a career as a painter, architect, medic, surgeon, ambassador, sculptor, engineer, goldsmith, soldier, ambassador, or secretary—even, to be sure, as a new prince terrorizing his subjects in order to secure his position and state or a worldly cardinal climbing the social food chain by building and running the household of a magnificent palace in Rome—can, it would seem, begin at the very least by reading these edifying discourses, which often enough reveal how one can go about trying to succeed in a particular profession grounded in an art with its distinct knowledge. In the Italian Renaissance, mastery of an art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly presented in these discourses as something to be desired, in which the ability to transform objects or people’s minds and abilities symbolized the artists’—understood as the makers’ or doers’—protean capacity to potentially change themselves in society by becoming acknowledged, exemplary masters through discipline and self-control as well as, at times, masters over others by giving shape to other people’s lives and by directing them toward purposive ends. Moreover, acquiring mastery over an art can be viewed as the source of no small self-satisfaction on the part of practitioners who have actively pursued professional life and can take personal pleasure in it and the specialized knowledge necessary to succeed in it.

And yet the crucial, underlying issue about how to go about actually acquiring the specialized knowledge of an art and then apply it masterfully, thereby becoming through some calculated process of inculcation and training a firstrate practitioner, can turn out to be exceedingly complex in some of these discourses—far more complex than it may at least at first glance seem to be. As these books divulge information openly about an art as it is configured as necessary for success in a profession, they often lay claim to the value of a particular profession so that people will want to enter it and admire it, and they make the profession and the art underpinning it appear accessible by presenting the knowledge related to it as eminently learnable. But in at least a few cases, the authors of these books adopt a strategy of enticing and openly edifying readers only—in truth—to close off access to the profession they want everyone to admire and learn about by mystifying the very process by which one can actually acquire the ability to become a true acknowledged master over the art in question. It is therefore essential that some of these discourses function as ego documents. We must admire the practitioners and their mastery over the specialized knowledge of their art so that we will want to be like them, laboring to imitate them through exemplarity in good Renaissance fashion. And in our admiration we must trust that we can be taught by them, likewise disclosing in good Renaissance fashion our faith in our own educability and consequently our sustaining belief, in Erasmus’s terms, that humans are “made,” not “born,” at least when it comes to the belief that we are made, and not born, to make or do certain defined things in life.⁸⁹ It is equally essential that some of these discourses frame the work or knowledge of the authors themselves as something that is to be admired or wondered at within the text itself. For these remarkable practitioners who have turned to authorship, we are led to believe, have the capacity to edify us, so that by following them we, too, can learn, succeed, and be admired, even if, as I shall argue in the following section, some of the practitioners who turned to authorship lay claim to a position that is decidedly at odds with what the discourse in practice actually does. Put differently, the writers of these discourses may indicate that the art they teach as a form of knowledge requisite for a profession is learnable through the diligent application of rules, thereby rendering the art accessible to professional aspirants as they disclose its specialized knowledge. But in truth they surreptitiously reveal that the art itself can only be applied with real success by a precious few who somehow possess the “right stuff,” thereby effectively closing off access to the profession in question for many while rendering the practitioner authors themselves all the more exquisitely exceptional in light of their obvious, yet still mystifying, achievements as professionals who have so brilliantly mastered their art as a form of useful specialized knowledge that benefits the community at large.

Consider in this context Castiglione’s Il cortegiano as a discourse that brilliantly deploys a strategy of simultaneously disclosing and withholding information necessary to succeed in applying a specific art—in this particular case a practical, as opposed to productive, art.⁹⁰ First of all, we should bear in mind that Castiglione (fig. 14) in Il cortegiano characterizes courtiership as indeed an art, with it possessing all the characteristics of a techne in classical antiquity. The knowledge associated with it, Castiglione underscores, is determinate, it has an end, it is teachable, it allows us to move from the particular to the universal, it has rules (even if Castiglione is quick to point out that he is not writing a typical catechistic-style, rule-bound manual),⁹¹ it is communicable, it is reliable (or so he contends, even if it is certainly far more stochastic than exact in nature), it is performative (one must put courtiership into action so that it can be verified as an art), and it is supremely rational. It is not, for instance, the product of a knack but of calculated reasoning and practice honed through extensive training. Or so we are told with some insistence.

FIGURE 14. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520), Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515. Louvre, Paris. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Moreover, Castiglione would have us believe, at least at first glance, that we are made into courtiers, not born into being them. Hence the “grazia” (grace) that is required of all of us to be a courtier—the “grazia” that not only renders us full of grace in our comportment but also wins the gratitude of the prince as we ingratiate ourselves to him as dutiful and delightful courtiers—is not the sort of grace that is divinely bestowed upon someone from on high, any more than it can be conceived in Alexander Pope’s terms as a sort of transcendent “grace beyond the reach of art.”⁹² Quite the contrary, Castiglione is concerned with a grace that is well within our reach if we just put our minds to it: it is secular in nature, learnable, practical, purposive, and decidedly explicable. It is also a grace that can be readily acquired through rules—or, above all, by heeding one all-encompassing, universalizing rule: we must avoid “affettazione” (affectation) and practice in everything we say and do a certain “sprezzatura” (a crucial term that for the moment we shall leave undefined). There are, to be sure, other rules to courtiership that we learn along the way, most of them fairly obvious to modern habits of etiquette: don’t throw food around the dining table, for instance, and don’t be a bore, braggart, or brute. But the general rule that we must act with sprezzatura in all that we say and do is undeniably the most important one within Il cortegiano. Without sprezzatura we will not have the grace needed to “season” all that we say and do (“che mettiate per un condimento d’ogni cosa, senza il quale tutte le altre proprietà e bone condicioni sian di poco valore” [that you require this in everything as that seasoning without which all the other properties and good qualities will be of little worth], 1.24). And without grace we will fail in our ultimate professional goal, which is to please the prince so that we may gain access to him, counsel him regarding what course to take from day to day as a ruler, and thus strategically work our way into having influence over the course of events. We need to follow this rule of sprezzatura, then, not only for our own benefit (the courtier, realistically, is always looking out for his own hide as he strives to advance in a profession and seek honor and recognition in the process) but also for all those people who have anything at all to do with the princedom in general and its harmonious workings in a truly complex and dangerous world fraught with tensions and widespread conflicts (the courtier, not unlike cheerful Miss America competitors, is idealistically supposed to be interested in such niceties as “universal peace”).

Now the key term “sprezzatura” coined by Castiglione and drawn from the verb “disprezzare” (to scorn, diminish, disdain, reduce in value) suggests that at any given moment, if you have difficulty locating the exact mean between extremes as you seek that perfect Horatian aurea mediocritas (golden mean) in all that you say or do, you should always offer up less rather than more, particularly since the mind for Castiglione is quick to draw a complete picture from the part. What is more, this overarching rule holds true about a whole range of matters. It dictates how much time one should dedicate to fixing up one’s hair: don’t spend too much time on it lest you appear a fop. It suggests how one should speak with friends at court and in public ceremonies: understatement, the privileged strategy of the ironist, is preferred to overstatement, it would seem, so one should theoretically employ litotes rather than hyperbole as a figure of speech and thought. It dictates how much specialized knowledge one needs to possess on any given subject: one should know just enough to convince everyone that you do indeed know what you calculatingly hint at knowing even if you lack, and are expected to lack, any real studied expertise in the subject so that your measured, decorous performance masks at best an amateurish ability and at worst a true underlying incompetence. And, to be sure, it even identifies how physically tall the ideal courtier should be: a bit shorter is always better than a bit taller if it is tough locating the perfect mean in a given culture where you happen to be seeking employment as a courtier (1.20).

At the same time, the term “sprezzatura” by its very nature suggests something about the ideal emotional state of the courtier, if we can be allowed for the purposes of this argument to gauge his temperament in terms of literally temperature. For the ideal mean between someone who is hotheaded (someone, that is, who is easily inflamed and overemotional and perhaps just a bit too effusively sympathetic) and someone who is cold-hearted (someone who is unemotional, indifferent, excessively detached, insensitive, or unsympathetic) is presumably someone who is “warm” or “warm-hearted.” And yet, because it is so very difficult in practice to know exactly what constitutes “warm” for everyone we meet as we interact with a variety of people in a wide array of social circumstances on a daily basis and are forced to behave differently according to the ravages of occasion in different settings and contexts, we should shave off a bit—scorn and thus diminish the potential excess—and act just a bit colder if we are ever in doubt as to what constitutes the perfect degree of emotional “warmth” warranted in our behavior in all that we say and do. Or, rather, to adopt the language of the 1950s still current today, we should “be cool.” But then again, we must be careful never to be too cool. If you’re “too cool for words,” to be prosaic about the matter yet again, you’re still affected. And if you’re affected, you’ve simply made a horrible mess of it and will never prove to be a good, much less perfect, courtier.

Ideally, then, the courtier who has mastered the “virtue” of sprezzatura can espouse convincingly the specialized knowledge associated with a whole host of arts, even if he knows only a smattering of any one of them and is consequently clueless as to the real rational, communicable, determinate, and reliable knowledge underpinning the very arts he pretends to know so well as he seeks to impress everyone—and in particular the prince—with his grace. Anyone who stands in admiration of the courtier’s ability, who thinks the courtier as a practiced dilettante can in fact do or know all these things with some credible mastery (dance, sing, paint, and the like), is clearly not part of the professional club. That person as an onlooker has sadly mistaken the appearance for the reality and has thus failed to realize that the courtier’s performance is completely studied and mannered, even as it comes off as supremely natural and the product of real, rather than feigned, expertise. The truly accomplished courtier has worked hard, with all due “labor, industry, and care [fatica, industria e studio]” (1.24), at appearing not to work at all, in convincing people that the part can stand in for the whole. For there is labor involved in dancing and singing, as well as even just standing about the court with a seemingly natural pose in elegant choice apparel, yet that labor is artfully—as in cleverly—hidden.

In professional terms, then, sprezzatura functions within the court as a “signaling device.” All the courtiers looking on with the requisite sprezzatura know that the person is merely acting, that it is a performance that dupes others, and that the courtier, at best sometimes an informed amateur, is clueless about the specific arts in question in a manner that would render him a master in so many things he only hints at being able to do with some reliable and credible expertise. What the exemplary courtiers collectively observing the performance in the know discreetly admire, however, is instead the illusion created, the courtier’s calculated ability to act with a like-minded sleight of hand. They astutely and instinctively grasp the trick of the trade as an essential part of their own collective profession of courtiership and commend him for what the Greeks would have no doubt called his metis. In this respect, they admire his professionalism and they recognize him as one of their own. He’s “in.” He’s an “insider.” He’s one of “them.” He is part of the select closed circle of the group with its finely tuned strategies for success. And he is decidedly secretive about it. Or, rather, what he conveys is an “open secret” whose core truth—that the courtier doesn’t know as an expert does the various arts in question as he seeks to apply them in his clever, studied performances—is available only to those initiated into the specialized form of knowledge underpinning the profession of courtiership and, needless to say, to all those courtiers who apply that specific art in practice with seemingly perfect aplomb.⁹³

But this only begs the question. How exactly can one really go about acquiring sprezzatura in order to become part of this “new profession,” as it is so defined in the first, but then eventually discarded, preface to Il cortegiano,⁹⁴ so that one’s mastery of sprezzatura in all that one says or does can indeed function as a substitute for a mastery over the forms of specialized knowledge of a host of other arts that the courtier feigns to know in some measure and that are the province of expertise of other professionals, from musicians to painters to dancers, who likewise periodically sought to attach themselves to courts? We know, to be sure, that we must work hard in order to appear to do so many different things without any work whatsoever—something that would no doubt have pleased the cultural elite in classical antiquity since the very concept of work often carried with it the lingering odor of vulgarity. But what exactly are we supposed to do by way of preparatory “labor, industry, and care” so that we may acquire sprezzatura and thus perform in a manner that conceals all work and, at the same time, convinces people that we possess the requisite knowledge associated with those different things that we appear to be, but indeed are not, masterful practitioners of when all is said and done? How, moreover, do we practice acquiring sprezzatura, since there is no school of courtiership that can show us how to develop and refine this strategy of locating the perfect mean in all that we say and do? Or at least there is no formal institutionalized adult school that can train us in these matters, since the humanist classroom did to varying degrees of success inculcate poetry, grammar, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy and was ideally intended to prepare the cultural elite for success in leadership but certainly had no specific professional bent to it and, of course, served to educate boys rather than full-grown men. Nor is there a formalized guild system—a system, that is to say, of “artes”—whose primary function was to serve as “a device designed to organize and order society” but through which one could also be indoctrinated into the practices of the profession of courtiership and the art underpinning the very mysteries of that particular misterium.⁹⁵ Nor, directly related to this, is there an extensive workshop structure that would-be courtiers can take advantage of as visual artists can when they link themselves to a master, such as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, or Raphael, and are apprenticed to him until such time as they have thoroughly absorbed all the lessons of the art and can then ideally emerge at the end, after years of diligent practice and hard “labor, industry, and care,” as an adult master on their own within the chosen profession, if indeed they choose to pay the dues and enter and belong to the guild as a recognized master.⁹⁶ Nor, of course, does the university system prepare anyone for courtiership.

Surely, moreover, it is not enough to borrow from accepted poetic practice, as Castiglione indirectly insists we should, and tell would-be courtiers to rely simply on their “bon giudicio” (good judgment), go out into the world, choose the best qualities of courtiers who exhibit grace, and then, after deftly mixing all those admirable qualities together in one’s own behavior, somehow, magically, become a figure of grace for others to imitate, so that the process of inculcation productively repeats itself in an endless, regenerative feedback loop.⁹⁷ For how do we acquire good judgment in the first place unless we are born with it? Castiglione never tells us how to acquire this requisite ur-knowledge of good judgment, which indeed remains something of a puzzle in a book that sets out to provide an underlying rational basis to account for success in all sorts of behaviors and skills related to this “new profession” of courtiership. Worse, how do we put into practice the process of imitation itself? Surely it is one thing for a poet to sit in a room as the laureate Francesco Petrarca did and scribble away with ponderous classical models in mind, then cross out some of his writings that did not satisfy him, then rewrite them, then return to them hours, days, or years later and revise it all over yet again with increased critical detachment until it is just right, so that the power of the classical allusion underpinning the writing and lending it authority and gravitas is not too obtrusive and has been thoroughly absorbed into a signature style after much “labor, industry, and care.”⁹⁸ But it is really quite a different matter altogether, for a host of practical reasons, for an eager aspirant to try to adopt the same strategy of poetic imitation and continuous revision as he seeks to become a courtier with the requisite grace that will win him the desired favor of the prince. For, unlike being a poet, being a courtier means you are involved in a constantly interactive, often spontaneous, improvisation-based, and oratory-bound profession. And that means you are consequently engaged in an essentially theatrical, relational, and conversational activity that you just cannot simply put into practice in solitude or revise in private through an act of calculated withdrawal and reflection.⁹⁹ At any given time, you—as a dutiful functionary whose job is to serve—stand on the stage before others and you must act, come what may. You are out there, vulnerable and visible. And when you are called upon to talk or act, which for Castiglione a courtier is constantly called upon to do on a daily basis, and if, alas, you happen to fail at talking or acting properly at any given moment, you potentially fail in a shame culture in which, we can readily glean from Il cortegiano itself, a variety of people took great pleasure in seizing upon the slightest blemish of rivals to discredit them. Being a courtier, in sum, was extremely risky business in a culture so thoroughly steeped in the widespread trafficking of gossip.¹⁰⁰

Now, at first glance it would seem that if Castiglione fails to tell us how to exert all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care,” much less show us how to do so, it would be because the universal rule that one must flee affectation and in all things practice sprezzatura is teachable as a rule but only as a rule. That is to say, it would appear that Castiglione cannot provide us with clear-cut mechanisms for learning sprezzatura and thus for systematically acquiring grace. He can name what we need: we need to act and be full of grace and possess good judgment. He can shrewdly, and with some performative nonchalance of his own, invent words to name what we need to do: we need to act, as he suavely puts it through an interlocutor in a casual, offhand manner, with sprezzatura. He can draw on standard rhetorical and poetic practice to suggest how we acquire grace: we need to be like a bee—Seneca’s bee, Petrarca’s bee, any fine, roaming, clever, industrious bee¹⁰¹—gathering the best nectar of courtiership from the choice flowers of the finest courtiers whom we can ever hope to meet and then busily mix all that precious courtly nectar together to come up with our own exemplary signature style of graceful comportment. Castiglione can also rely on classical rhetoric—particularly Cicero’s De oratore, which is the most obvious classical model underlying Il cortegiano—to articulate an overall strategy for success: we need to be persuasive in all that we say and do by choosing our words carefully, by being apt, by understanding the role of wit, by learning all the figures of speech and thought, and the like. Castiglione may even presume that the studia humanitatis, with its focus on grammar, poetry, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history, will inculcate good judgment and grace, although there is some question that it ever achieved such a goal, much less aimed at inculcating it. Finally, Castiglione can show us what the finished product of all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care” might well look like by nostalgically presenting a group portrait of accomplished courtiers interacting in a conversational mode in Urbino and by assuming that the examples presented will adequately instruct us all on how to become accomplished courtiers. But Castiglione cannot really systematically teach us how to go about acquiring this grace and sprezzatura, much less go about learning how to possess good judgment, through preparatory “labor, industry, and care.” Or at least, more important, he doesn’t do so.

Nor, for that matter, does Castiglione point to some other edifying book that he wrote that would teach us about all the preparatory work we need to do in order to succeed in the profession of courtiership, some sort of companion volume that lays it all out practically and methodically as a basic training manual for professional success and the art underpinning it. Nor does Castiglione tell us what informative books we should read to become at least moderately adept in a host of productive or practical arts that we may need to be versed in as courtiers, or tell us where and how we may hope to get the requisite preparatory training in those arts, so that we can in fact apply ourselves with “labor, industry, and care” to any particular task at hand that is required of us when the occasion arises for us to do so in this “new profession” of the courtier. If Cicero, for instance, the classical author whose works most obviously influenced the shape of Il cortegiano, does not furnish us with all the rules of what it means to be an orator in his “surprising” and “innovative” De oratore (although he does indeed provide us with so many of those rules, particularly in the second and third books), we can at least look to one or two of his other rhetorical treatises—his (youthful, by his own admission) De inventione (On Invention), for instance.¹⁰² Some of Cicero’s books, including the influential first-century BCE textbook Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was taken by some to be genuinely Ciceronian in Castiglione’s time and was typically paired with De inventione in printed editions, do indeed rather meticulously and systematically provide us with some of the ins and outs of rhetoric, so that we can practice our oratorical skills and learn how to become accomplished public speakers through dutiful preparation in the process of consulting and working through these more technical, prescriptive, manual-structured books.¹⁰³ But nothing of the sort exists in Castiglione’s dialogue, which, far from being catechistic, instead leaves us high and dry, with no formal method of practical training to adopt and methodically follow. In sum, Il cortegiano tells us that we must work at being a courtier, but it does not systematically show us at all how to work at it.

In this sense Il cortegiano functions as a discourse that appears to be open as it purports to tell us what we need to do to succeed in learning a specific art as a form of specialized knowledge but is indeed secretive and mystifying in providing us with the real, viable means for success in the profession of courtiership. Read this book and you are edified about what it means to be an exemplary courtier but not so much about how to actually become such a courtier by acquiring the art underpinning the profession through careful preparation and training. The artfulness of Il cortegiano, in the sense of its strategic cleverness as cunning intelligence (metis), is to make people reading it believe from the outset that there is in fact an art underpinning the profession of courtiership—that courtiership possesses a distinct techne in the classical sense of the term as a rational, communicable, rule-bound, and reliable form of highly specialized, determinate knowledge that one can learn through some sort of training, as Cicero would seek to offer us, for instance, in his likewise dialogue-structured De oratore. But in truth, Castiglione does not systematically teach us how to acquire that specialized knowledge, and he does not tell us how to acquire the requisite training to develop into a masterful courtier. Or rather, to frame the matter slightly differently, Castiglione’s book overtly says that grace can be acquired, but then Castiglione’s contention conveyed as an assertion turns out to be, at least upon closer examination, somewhat at odds with what the book actually does insofar as Castiglione never teaches us really how to acquire grace through preparatory training, either by instructing us systematically within his book itself how to do so, by pointing to some other book he wrote that will show us how to do so, or by pointing to other people’s books that will authoritatively show us how to do so. We may therefore initially be willing, at least at first glance, to concede that grace—as Castiglione envisions it—is not beyond the reach of art, that it is indeed something that can be acquired through “labor, industry, and care,” and that it is therefore something that is not enigmatic or transcendent in form, a sort of ineffable nescio quid. But upon further reflection as we progress through the book we may also legitimately wonder, since we are never actually indoctrinated into a practical method of training to acquire grace, if people are not in fact “born” rather than “made” to be courtiers—if, in the end, contrary to what we were led to expect from the outset of Il cortegiano, there is simply a mysterious quality bestowed on people that allows one person to succeed in the profession of courtiership while another is condemned to fail at it no matter how hard that individual person works at it with “industry, labor, and care” and no matter how much that person seems, for all intents and purposes, to possess a natural inclination to succeed as a courtier and thus seems to have precisely the right stuff to become an exemplary one.¹⁰⁴

In the most obvious sense, this “ruse,” as I see it, of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully allows Castiglione to persuade the ruling elite that courtiership itself is a socially valuable profession with a specialized knowledge underpinning it as an art. After reading this book with its sweeping nostalgia, its elegant, periodic prose suavely expressed in the vernacular, its classicizing models so thoroughly absorbed into a signature style, and its colorful cast of (for the most part) delightful male characters populating it, what eager, ambitious man aspiring to be part of the cultural elite in sixteenth-century Italy wouldn’t have wanted to become a courtier, value courtiership, and hang out in a court exercising sprezzatura all day long? Who wouldn’t have wanted to applaud these courtiers who charm each other, as well as the delightful elegant ladies of the court, for so many hours of the day? Who wouldn’t have wanted to learn how to be like them by trying to follow their examples (or those of other praiseworthy courtiers) and then in turn be conceptually applauded by others when one finally becomes after years of practice an esteemed courtier too? Who wouldn’t, to borrow the still persistent language of the 1950s in our own culture, have wanted to be so damn cool? But at the same time, this ruse of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully permits those very same professionals who somehow already mysteriously possess sprezzatura to close ranks and actually control social mobility, not enhance it, by effectively winking at one another from across the room as they recognize who belongs, who doesn’t, who is a boor, who isn’t, who is “cool,” who isn’t. What is more, this ruse of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully allows Castiglione to define taste for the prince, much as Vasari teaches taste for potential collectors and consumers of visual art as he clarifies what to look for when viewing “excellent” painting, sculpture, and architecture. In this way, Castiglione’s book serves once more as a signaling device, defining who is “in,” who is “out.” He, like Vasari, is articulating “excellence,” both as an aesthetic quality and as a marker of social and cultural distinction.

Put differently, if in the classical period the ruling elite might potentially fear the Promethean upstarts seeking to advance themselves through the acquisition of a techne as a form of specialized knowledge, thus opening up fantasies of “unregulated mobility” in the minds of those who occupied a secure, privileged station in society, here it is the professionals themselves who are fearing upstarts within their ranks, the very upstarts Castiglione seems to invite into his ranks as he reveals so openly the putative rules by which one can become a courtier in the spirit of full disclosure yet effectively excludes from the ranks of courtiership by making it virtually impossible, at least through a reading of Il cortegiano, for those aspiring newcomers who lack grace and good judgment from the outset to acquire the reliable mechanisms to prepare them to become, through “labor, industry, and care,” just like all those admired and exemplary courtiers portrayed together in Urbino as they ever so fashionably entertain each other for four festive evenings in a row. Castiglione’s book in this way functions less to inculcate a precise art that allows for access to his “new profession”—it can hardly be construed in this respect as a full-fledged prescriptive how-to book or primer for social mobility¹⁰⁵—and more to establish “taste” by informing a prince what behavioral qualities he should look for in a courtier when he recognizes at any given moment in his lifespan as an autocratic ruler that he needs to surround himself with distinctive, qualified, professional functionaries in order to more efficiently run the ever-growing and increasingly complicated bureaucracy of his expanding princedom. Needless to say, the prince, we are told, should look for someone who possesses grace and all the delightful, ingratiating attributes associated with people who have grace. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, the enlightened prince should look for someone just like Castiglione and his exemplary humanist friends, all of whom can write and speak beautifully but were largely clueless about the one thing a courtier—whose declared primary “profession,” after all, was that of “arms”—was expected to do in Castiglione’s treatise as a hangover from a defunct feudal period in northern Italy: fight in a war, defeat enemies in battle, and prove victorious in combat. Truth be told, the best most of these fashionable, well-dressed, witty, and garrulous men gathered together in Urbino could possibly do when it came to war, I’d wager, was talk their opponents to death—or at least charm them all the way through the night until sunrise. In the final analysis what most of Castiglione’s characters possess—and this is fairly obvious but nevertheless still warrants being stressed—is rhetorical, not military, prowess. Elegant talking, not heroic military fighting, was their principal “manly” activity, which in the context of Il cortegiano becomes the source of no small anxiety on the part of some of the men who find themselves engaged in activities that risk making them appear effeminate in the eyes of others, from caring about how much time they should or should not dedicate to dancing before the prince to how much time they should or should not devote to coiffing their hair and beards.¹⁰⁶

How, we might therefore ask, does Castiglione’s strategy as a practitioner author compare to that of Cicero’s, whose De oratore serves as the dominant classical model of a discourse about an art underpinning Il cortegiano? In the middle of the first century BCE, two significant pressures were arguably being exerted against oratory at the time Cicero was writing, each coming from different directions.¹⁰⁷ On the one hand, the rise of the First Triumvirate and the silencing and censoring of Cicero in the period certainly made his own position as orator vulnerable in the face of generals, and so he presumably felt that oratory by and large was threatened, although it does not appear to be quite so endangered in the De oratore as in his late works, notably the Brutus, where the end of oratory seems to haunt the scene and where the notion of the orator is significantly expanded to stand in for some broader category like “statesman” or even, perhaps, “citizen.” On the other hand, the core members of the aristocracy, of which Cicero was indeed not a part, always directed significant hostility toward oratory itself insofar as they preferred to appeal more directly to naturalized forms of entitled authority instead of having to labor to persuade on every occasion. In any event, while Cicero unquestionably needed to defend both “oratory” and “rhetoric” in his writings (indeed, rhetoric was always in need of some sort of defense ever since Plato leveled a series of savage charges against it),¹⁰⁸ in his De oratore he was not particularly concerned with fundamentally redefining the nature of the art of rhetoric he was discussing as he fashioned a perfect orator in dialogue form, even if, all things considered, he certainly did moralize it and thus, like Quintilian, helped transform it in a number of significant and lasting ways.¹⁰⁹ By contrast, Castiglione instead very much aimed to do precisely that—namely fundamentally redefine the art he was investigating in his treatise—as he transformed the courtier from being a boorish soldier of the feudal past versed in accomplished equestrian fighting tactics to a cultured classicist of the humanist schoolroom versed in being stunningly eloquent, from someone who performs in a belligerent manner that is conventionally taken as embodying a male virtue of swashbuckling epic force (of engaging in violent tournaments or heroically thrusting a sword into someone’s gut and taking great personal pleasure in watching the victim squirm) to one who performs in a stylized way that risks being construed as effeminate in light of lavishing undue attention on ephemera (of thinking about hairdos, dancing, table manners, choice apparel, and, more generally, how to please the prince and everyone else associated with the court—especially taciturn, elegant women in the evening—with colorful talk, wry humor, biting gossip, and playful language games).

Unlike Cicero, then, Castiglione, who was precisely one of those well-trained and well-mannered humanists with primarily linguistic rather than military skills to offer a prince through service, composed his discourse about the art underpinning courtiership in a period when interest in professionalization was keen and intensifying for a variety of social and political reasons, not the least being the development of a host of competitive courts in need of male functionaries to service their complex daily workings. Moreover, unlike Cicero, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of validating its profession with an art as a specialized form of knowledge as it staked out its jurisdictional claim in competition with other rising professions for men within the growing bureaucracies of sixteenth-century Italian courts, such as the profession of the secretary and the specialized art underpinning secretaryship. Rulers, to be sure, always needed letter writers within their chanceries, whereas it was arguably questionable whether they really needed these courtiers attending to them all day long if all they were good for (at least until we get to the fourth book of Il cortegiano) was to look great, talk well, crack good jokes, play coy games, and charmingly entertain each other and some elegant ladies in a sort of fashionable evening salon.¹¹⁰ Furthermore, within this competitive system of professions, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of making a case for the value of courtiership as an essential profession that the prince must be coaxed into believing he wants to make use of in order to succeed as a ruler. And, finally, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that appreciated the threat posed by the social mobility of upstarts potentially infiltrating their ranks and displacing entrenched members who may have viewed their position as secure when indeed it was not. The value of the courtier in sixteenth-century Italy was not, in sum, a given, any more than the value of the orator was in Cicero’s time. Indeed, the courtier’s position, somewhat like Cicero’s orator, was not secure. It was, instead, decidedly vulnerable.

Consequently, Castiglione adopts a rather convoluted strategy to validate courtiership as a critical profession worthy of respect and, at the same time, to close off access to the “new profession” of courtiership while securing a position for some of its entrenched members, such as himself. First and foremost, he makes courtiership appear so endearing as an exemplary profession that everyone reading the book would ineluctably want to practice it and admire it. Hence he adopts the language of marveling throughout the book, rendering the courtier something of a wonder worthy of intense, discriminating admiration (admiratio). At the same time, he initially makes courtiership appear to be so accessible that all those aspiring individuals seduced into the profession will believe they can indeed be part of a group identity by following some “apparently”—and I use the adverb advisedly—straightforward rules. To this end, in the course of assuring his readers that the profession of courtiership has an art to it and is therefore something they can readily acquire through instruction and training, Castiglione proceeds to provide his readers with a seemingly foolproof set of reliable rules by which they can learn how to be a courtier, above all the universal rule they should act with sprezzatura and seek the mean between extremes (or just a bit less than the exact mean between extremes) in all that they say and do, as well as the general rule that they should learn through example by imitating masterful courtiers. Along with this, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very necessary for the prince that the ruler will want to employ these people so that he might be surrounded by them, benefit from their advice, and, indeed, be charmed by them in the very moment that he is instructed by them and counseled to be a good ruler. Accordingly, if at first glance these courtiers seem to have a purely ornamental function as decorative and decorous window dressing (much as the late fifteenth-century courtiers appear in Andrea Mantegna’s The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, fig. 15), finally, in the fourth book, Castiglione’s courtiers are at long last given a goal-oriented political and ethical function as teachers of wisdom to the prince and counselors of good policies. Indeed, without these courtiers as counselors, we are led to believe, things will lamentably fall into ruin both in the prince’s state and in the world at large. Hence Castiglione configures courtiership as a profession that ultimately has a necessary and exemplary ethical and political service to offer the prince within the court (the courtier in his service can give sound advice that will allow the prince to rule well and with dignity), and he holds courtiership up as a model profession that will please the prince and everyone else within the court (the courtier as an educated functionary confers distinction upon the prince and his court through his fine manners and elegant, fashionable, humanist-style talk). Finally, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very simple to learn—read this book and you’re off and running—but in truth he makes it so difficult to practice in reality that in the end the vast majority of all those competitive would-be courtiers, even as they are openly instructed into the art underpinning the profession as a form of specialized knowledge, will inevitably fail at it because they will lack what it takes—the good judgment, the sprezzatura, the grace—to guide them properly in all that they say and do. Hence Castiglione may seem to prescribe how to become a courtier as he provides us with apparently infallible rules, but in fact he only describes how to be a courtier and, in the final analysis, never shows us how to become a masterful one through a rigorous program of preparatory training.¹¹¹

FIGURE 15. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, 1465–1474. Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY. The theatrically poised and stylish courtiers make up virtually half of the “famiglia”—to the right of the Gonzaga family—within the decoratively framed “window” of Mantegna’s ingeniously frescoed image.

There is no mistaking it. Il cortegiano, one of the great prose masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the European Renaissance generally, was—and remains—an especially sophisticated text written by a smart and gifted humanist who could readily draw on a variety of erudite sources to build a nuanced argument as he strategically engaged in a rivalry with classical culture, particularly Cicero’s De oratore. In doing so, he constructed a profession for his own time, cognizant of the distance that historically separated his world from Cicero’s, his profession of the courtier from that of the classical Roman orator, his art underpinning courtiership from the art of rhetoric espoused in Cicero’s varied treatises, his “new” profession of the courtier, who is an expert in polite comportment and advice giving in a “stylish style,”¹¹² from the long-established but (for Castiglione) now no longer desirable profession of the courtier in sixteenth-century Italy who was an expert in fighting and could be viewed as something of an aggressive, swaggering bore/boor. We should hardly be surprised, then, that Il cortegiano, written by such a talented practitioner and discriminating humanist writer, is more complex in structure than any other discourse about arts composed in the Italian Renaissance as practitioners turned to authorship and sought to define the art underpinning a profession. Nevertheless, some aspects of the overall complex strategy Castiglione shrewdly employs to legitimate the “new profession” of the courtier and the art underpinning it—in particular of presenting the specialized knowledge underlying courtiership openly yet mystifying the very process by which one can truly succeed as a master in acquiring and applying the art in question—can also be found to varying degrees in some other writings composed by practitioners as they talked about arts in sixteenth-century Italy, including discourses about the productive, as opposed to the practical, arts.

A case in point is Cellini’s treatise on goldsmithing, the work of a near contemporary who lived and labored just a generation after Castiglione.¹¹³ Like Castiglione, Cellini (fig. 16) aims to impart a knowledge that is determinate, rule-bound, rational, reliable, and communicable. Since Cellini is writing this discourse with the aim of instructing us about what goes on in the finest possible goldsmithing workshops (fig. 17), we can only assume that Cellini presumes his knowledge is teachable. In a word, he is inculcating an “art” in the classical sense of it as a “techne,” much as Cennino Cennini emphatically did before him when writing about painting in the visual arts.¹¹⁴ And Cellini is transparently open about what he will teach us, undertaking, as he puts it in the preface, “to write about those loveliest secrets and wondrous methods of the great art [arte] of goldsmithing” (1). This is patently the case. If you happen to wake up one morning with a hankering to know everything about goldsmithing in the Italian Renaissance, from how to do complicated filigree work to how to tint a diamond, Cellini is your man. He is open to a fault in providing us with details about his art as a specialized form of knowledge, carrying on for thirty-seven chapters (some fairly long, some quite short) so that in the end we can have a full and informed grasp of the technical ins and outs of goldsmithing. Moreover, if any of the information he is conveying can at all be considered secretive, either because it is the sort of information that might be viewed as constituting the intellectual property of a closed group of highly specialized artisans or because it can be construed as the sort of information that appeared in so many self-styled books of secrets containing the mysteries of a misterium, Cellini in his treatise is repeatedly letting the cat out of the bag as he unveils the “secrets” of his craft. Or at least he is divulging a good portion of those secrets, having, he tells us in the context of talking about just the art of niello alone, “not even said half of what is needed” (9) in order to understand and appreciate fully the nature of that particular branch of goldsmithing as a form of darkened engraving. And as Cellini talks about these matters so openly, he seems to be having a good time of it, taking pleasure in broadcasting so much of what he knows and has learned over his fifty-three years as an exemplary goldsmith, from the year he entered into apprenticeship (1515) to the year the book appeared in print (1568). Yet again like so many practitioners who turned to authorship before him, Cellini is here establishing in rhetorical terms his ethos, his character as an expert within the context of his profession and the form of specialized knowledge of the art underpinning it.

FIGURE 16. Francesco Ferrucci del Tadda (1497–1585), Portrait of Benvenuto Cellini, ca. 1555–1570 (probably after a design by Cellini). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Photo courtesy of Louis A. Waldman.

FIGURE 17. Alessandro Fei (1543–1592), The Goldsmith’s Workshop, ca. 1570. Studiolo of Francesco I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy. Reproduced by permission of Scala/ Art Resource, NY.