On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow

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.