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