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

ways, perhaps none more effectively than Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly in their comprehensive historical survey Worthy Efforts: Attitudes Toward Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe. In classical Greece and Rome, work, to be sure, could sometimes be conceived unfavorably, as the negation of a privileged, productive otium (leisure), as neg(not)-otium. In the intervals when one was temporarily and mercifully freed from the tedium and tyranny of work, the very work that could render one captive to either one’s own or someone else’s ongoing bodily needs and desires, one could exercise and enhance one’s powers, nourish oneself spiritually, dedicate oneself intellectually, say, to the liberal arts or, for that matter, the semiliberal arts through a certain rarefied otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity). More generally, however, work was immensely valued in a period that “abounded in [a] polyphony” of voices on the matter.⁵⁹ For some thinkers advocating its distinct moral and social benefits, work made life more tolerable for individuals and families: most people needed to work to survive much less thrive. At the same time, and perhaps most important of all, work itself served to reinforce social hierarchies, inculcate discipline, and serve the community. It was certainly preferred to idleness, the dark side of otium as a form of slothful “inertia.” And it could enhance virtuous behavior, particularly such work as husbandry in antiquity but also, for Cicero and other elite classical authors, such essential activities as statecraft and public service broadly conceived. Work also generally made life more tolerable for others in the community. Some people through work, such as physicians, demonstrably improved the lot of those around them, while others, such as large-scale merchants engaged in socially accepted forms of legitimately acquiring wealth through commerce, could benefit society by being charitable, by proving themselves magnanimous, and by ensuring that goods flowed freely from one place to another. And, of course, work inevitably served in so many occasions as a palliative to life’s uncertainties and onslaughts. Some treated work, we might say to borrow from the pervasive language of modern therapy, as a coping mechanism.

      Even in the monastic environment where work was codified and championed both as a necessary part of cenobitic life and as a virtuous activity that commanded respect (beginning with the earliest formative rules of Basil, Augustine, Pachomius, and Benedict),⁶⁰ the specialized knowledge associated with any given particular art served not as an end unto itself. One did not go to Heaven, that is, because one possessed an art or was an expert in any one specific art. Rather, the specialized knowledge associated with any given art served to ward off the sluggishness of accidia (spiritual apathy and desperation), to eschew sloth, to suppress the appetite of carnal desire and chasten the body, to provide for a self-sufficient monastic community by taking care of what was necessary for everyone involved to survive in a mutually reinforcing collectivity, to prepare oneself spiritually and eschatologically for the Second Coming, to engage in penitence, to inculcate obedience, to be one with the sacred, to bear witness in word and deed to the Truth, to practice more efficiently asceticism, to adhere more rigorously to the vita apostolica (apostolic life), to promote charity, to ensure that idle hands do not become the devil’s workshop, to make oneself useful socially, to discourage evil thoughts and encourage patience and obedience, to aid in prayer and transform work into prayer, to practice humility, to take personal responsibility for caring for the world, to develop the spiritual self through useful endeavors, to do God’s work by participating in creation, to exalt God, even to produce material sweat itself as a divine offering.⁶¹ Hence, as James R. Farr summarily puts it, “work was, in short, a spiritual discipline. Medieval theologians … did not think about work in terms of the economic calculation or the material value of production, that effort would somehow create wealth and better one’s position in life. Instead, they conceived of work in moral terms, a distinctly premodern notion.”⁶² What mattered, in brief, was social utility, not modern notions of economic productivity, when it came to thinking about the value of work.

      There is some reason to believe, however, that during the Italian Renaissance—beginning in the mid-fifteenth century but intensifying above all in the sixteenth century—professional identity associated with the knowledge of a certain art mattered also as an end unto itself, at least as the work associated with that art was defined and configured in discourse outside the context of the monastic environment. Consequently, having a profession and applying the art underpinning it in the form of work was seen not just as a means of acquiring recognition and even honor in a status-conscious, hierarchical society bound by an ideology of discipline, utility, service, and obedience but, as McClure has argued, as a source of personal, nonspiritually determined happiness and fulfillment. Or, to frame the matter in terms more congenial to this study, in the Italian Renaissance the happiness and self-satisfaction derived from work, as it is voiced in a number of discourses about arts written by practitioners, seems to grow increasingly out of the sorts of direct, personal, self-serving—in Marxist terms, “unalienated”—connections that practitioners made with the product created or the act done. In such discourses one could actually revel in, and indeed feel good about reveling in, the “self-indulgence of personal labor” in a manner that we do not at all find typically expressed in the literature of the classical period, in the elaborate classifications of the arts composed in the Middle Ages, or, for that matter, within the confines of writings connected to or emerging out of monasticism and the mendicant orders.⁶³ As “polyphonic” as the notion of work was in classical Greece and Rome and the European Middle Ages, work was principally valued because it served some end goal larger than the individual person exerting “worthy effort”: something such as the family, a secular or ecclesiastical community, the state, the social and political order conceptualized according to the presumed hierarchical functions of the individual parts of the human body, corporatism, or the divine.⁶⁴ Put differently, if, as Lis and Soly have emphasized, from classical antiquity through the preindustrial period in Europe “the standard universal command was that one must exert oneself,” a notion of exertion that the Greeks captured “with the term ponos” understood as a form of “tireless activity, work,” one was still always expected to toil in a virtuous way for something larger than the individual self.⁶⁵

      We do, however, find powerful expressions about the intense, personal, selfserving rewards of labor voiced in the writings of the above-mentioned Cellini and Fioravanti, for example, although other practitioners who turned to authorship from the period could be adduced in support of this claim.⁶⁶ In Cellini’s exuberant autobiography, which is not a discourse strictly about an art but nevertheless details exhaustively the habits and attitudes of an artisan and his extensive, onerous labors, we are presented with a glorified image of the artist so passionately absorbed in his work that he simply cannot find the time to write down the story of his life and must therefore dictate it to an assistant while keeping his hands busy with all sorts of taxing projects and competitive commissions. And the intense self-satisfaction Cellini feels in the process of “doing” (il fare) as opposed to just “talking” (il dire), to use terms from his treatises on goldsmithing and sculpting, can transform Cellini within his narrative into a demonic demiurge with a brazenly outsized sense of his place as a professional in society. As he transforms objects, shaping them with his hands so that they become works of arresting beauty, so, too, Cellini transforms himself into a wondrous figure for all to admire. Emblematic of this selftransformation is the key moment when Cellini boasts with characteristic fustian bravado how he masterfully crafted a large, multifigured statue of Perseus and Medusa in bronze in a single casting, thereby achieving (even though he did not in fact achieve it) something through his art never done before in the ancient or modern era. In this highly dramatic self-portrayal, Cellini presents himself as a heroic Perseus figure who can grant life and defy death through his creative energies, while he also emerges as a terrifying Medusa figure petrifying others who gaze, transfixed with astonishment in the public square, at the extraordinary expertise embodied in his monumental sculpture. Cellini’s heroic and demonic efforts as a maker are one, we are invited to believe, with the statue he daringly crafts and puts on display for all to see and appreciate with such amazement, while the severed Medusa head held aloft and designed with such astonishing artistry transfixes with her transmogrifying gaze the surrounding statues in the square—according to a play of allusions within the context of Cellini’s paragone as a goldsmith turned sculptor—by petrifying those very hardened lapidary statues, the famous works of art of Cellini’s Florentine rivals with whom he vies, into