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

aligned them with them. In Chapter 6, “Manly Matters: Reflections on Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio, and the Theatrical and Social Function of Beards in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” I turn to a bawdy comic play to examine how the numerous beards worn in it reinforce male collective identity, particularly as the male characters act out stock roles in the very moment that they adopt a fashion that marks them bodily as men. At the same time, the appropriation of someone else’s identifying beard as a form of disguise by one male character within the play only serves to remind us that at least one man has—or, more important, feels he has—a specific identity that separates him from everyone else and is rooted in his particular, individual body—a distinctly singular corporeal identity that is nevertheless always at risk of being stolen and then counterfeited in a highly social public performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      I close with a reflection, but this time not a personal one.

      The year is 1510. Paolo Cortesi’s De cardinalatu (On Being a Cardinal) appeared in print, shortly after the author’s death, in a still incomplete state. Roughly three years later Machiavelli composed Il principe, and then, in 1521, he published his less well-known but still seminal L’arte della guerra (The Art of War), the only book he wrote that ever appeared in print in his own lifetime.¹⁰ Broadly speaking, these three books, so different in outlook, rhetorical strategies, and style, addressed two key areas of interest in the Italian Renaissance that this study does not examine in any detail but that we would do well to consider briefly before turning to matters related to techne, ars, and arte in Part

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