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

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