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

in Italy began to acquire the meaning we might roughly associate with it today, at least in a very generic way.⁸ In any event, it is hardly necessary for a word to have been actively and pervasively used in a period in order for it to serve as a placeholder for scholars talking about a concept that otherwise possessed meaning in some measure for people in the past. We customarily employ the words “selfhood,” “agency,” “interiority,” and “subjectivity,” for instance, to talk about matters related to identity in the European Renaissance generally, even though those particular words were hardly current in the period either, at least as we are accustomed to conceptualizing them today. That said, one of the principal burdens of this book is to demonstrate that some men in Renaissance Italy thought in terms of the concept of the “individual,” that it was a concept that thus had significant cultural force in the period, and that a number of men expressed themselves as individuals through the verbal and visual means that they had at their disposal. It is not a burden of this book to argue for the notion that the concept of the individual in the Enlightenment, Romantic, or post-Romantic sense of the term as it has been explored in the modern disciplines of philosophy and sociology emerged for the first time in Renaissance Italy, a period that runs, I take it, from roughly 1350 to 1600. Nor is it a burden of this book to trace a genealogy of the concept of the individual from the Italian Renaissance to the modern era, however much it occasionally draws comparisons between the present and the past in an effort to articulate salient convergences and differences.

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

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

      In the first two parts we move from a matter of broad cultural concern for a variety of men (“professionalism”) to specific, individual cases of two male professionals in the practical and productive arts (the “mavericks” Fioravanti and Tintoretto). In the third and final part we concentrate more narrowly on a single distinguishing physical sign associated strictly with men as we also move from matters that are primarily intellective in nature (humanism and theories of knowledge underpinning the arts, for instance, in Part I) to those that have to do more conspicuously with the body (anatomical dissections and the physical work of a painter, for instance, in Part II). To this end, Part III focuses on the topic of “beards” in order to explore the performative practices of certain individuals as they both assert and define themselves within collectivities by claiming to have specific identities unequivocally rooted in the male body. In particular, Part III focuses on the dominant, widespread fashion among elite men in sixteenth-century Italy of wearing beards, examining how that particular fashion took hold and was coded in a variety of imaginative works, both visual and verbal. That encoding, I argue, allowed men a way of bodily marking through their self-presentations not just their group identities but also individual ones. In Chapter 5, the first chapter of Part III, “Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard,” I examine a series of portrait paintings, including those by Agnolo Bronzino of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, to demonstrate how certain elite men yearned to conform to and distinguish themselves from collectivities as they fashioned their beards on their faces, choosing from and manipulating a dazzling array of designs and shapes. Through beard design, in other words, they asserted their own particularity