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

figs. 12 and 13).⁶⁷

      FIGURE 12. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Side view with Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus in the background, both conceptually “petrified” from the Medusa’s gorgonizing gaze.

      Similarly, fantasies about self-satisfaction derived from work, as well as the self-importance and honor associated with work, abound in Fioravanti’s writings, so much so that he characterizes himself over and over again as a wonder with a sort of thaumaturgic touch to him, stunning others in his highly theatrical performances and gradually acquiring—thanks to his complete command over his art—status, recognition, honor, wealth, and, last but not least, a title of knight that he is only too happy to flaunt. Not entirely unlike the charlatans of his time, Fioravanti was something of a spectacle wherever he went, a sort of curiosity figure in an age that possessed an insatiable appetite for exhibiting and collecting curiosities.⁶⁸ His ability to appear as a marvel to so many people perhaps explains in some measure the enmity he aroused from some in the medical community, the persecution he felt he endured in Rome, Venice, Milan, and Madrid.⁶⁹ A number of physicians no doubt felt threatened by his success in putting on such a good show and, perhaps, competing with them all too successfully for coveted clients. In this regard, Fioravanti may have been something of an irritating and obnoxious gadfly within the medical community of the period, especially as he overtly challenged and rebuked well-ensconced authorities, but he was a popular gadfly, he emphasizes, and one, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 3, who took great satisfaction in his accomplishments, his social advancement, and his mastery over his art as a highly specialized and rewarding form of knowledge. Time and again, Fioravanti’s sense of identity, like Cellini’s and that of so many other practitioners of arts who turned to authorship, was intimately bound up in the specialized knowledge that underpinned his art and in the final realized products of his labor. Professional identity, then, mattered. And it mattered because it allowed such exemplary practitioners as Cellini and Fioravanti to feel not only socially enhanced in relation to others but also positively about themselves and their relationship to their art as self-proclaimed and acknowledged professionals.

      FIGURE 13. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Archive Timothy Mc-Carthy/Art Resource, NY. Detail of the head of Medusa, with blood spewing from the severed neck.

      Given the deep personal investment that practitioner authors sometimes made in their work, at least as they characterized themselves and their relationship with their work in their writings, as well as the associations often assumed in the period between the personalities of people (Raphael, for instance, is deemed by Vasari to be full of grace) and the products of their labor (Raphael’s paintings are likewise deemed by Vasari to be full of grace), some of the discourses by practitioners inevitably find themselves tied to more broad-based cultural issues related to creativity, character, and conduct. This is particularly true in the sixteenth century, when Italians exhibited an intensified interest in etiquette and a keen concern for how men should behave with one another in a variety of homosocial situations, as well as how they should and should not behave in relation to a variety of social superiors, both men and women.⁷⁰ On the one hand, in the sixteenth century anyone applying an art who aspired to be accepted by the cultural elite should behave in some measure, we are often led to believe, with decorum, exercising prudence, control, caution, and discretion at every turn. To this end, some of the practitioners who have taken up the role of authorship as they write about their art as a form of specialized knowledge occasionally spend time trying to indoctrinate others, who might well aim to put into practice the art they write about in their discourses, into the pleasantries of polite social conventions. Don’t be a slob, Vasari is repeatedly teaching visual artists through edifying examples, if you aim to succeed in a career as an artist in a society increasingly dominated by court culture and complicated patronage relationships. Please, he seems to plead when writing about such people as the bizarre Piero di Cosimo, try not to eat only boiled eggs cooked all at once, as well as by the dozens, in a filthy bucket, if you want to be taken seriously by the cultural elite and be invited to interact with them on an ongoing, if not even intimate, basis. Don’t be abrasive, obnoxious, difficult, offensive, obsessive, recalcitrant, spacey, vulgar, dirty, overly taciturn, eccentric, uncouth, or even, in the case of the otherwise perfectly apt Raphael, excessively libidinous.⁷¹ Castiglione similarly reprimands courtiers for engaging in all sorts of boorish habits, from bragging too much to acting out brashly like impudent schoolchildren.

      On the other hand, in the sixteenth century in Italy, the self-importance some practitioners of an art arrogated unto themselves within their discourses allowed them at times to reject all the accepted pleasantries of polite comportment and pose alternative modes of interacting with the cultural elite—modes that fly directly in the face of everything espoused by such men of distinction as Monsignor Giovanni della Casa in his influential etiquette treatise Il Galateo overo de’ costumi (The Galateo or a Book on Comportment, 1558), much less Stefano Guazzo in his equally influential book of manners designed for gentlemen of the court, La civil conversazione (Civil Conversation, 1574). Both Cellini and Fioravanti are emblematic of the more aggressive, assertive, and at times even uncouth practitioner who emerges in sixteenth-century Italy. This sort of abrasive practitioner presents himself occasionally exercising his art with such dazzling mastery that he feels, by virtue of his talents that render him one of a kind, that he can get away with behaving in all sorts of indecorous ways, at times even egregiously transgressing the norms of polite behavior, particularly when it comes to interacting with social superiors. Cellini, for instance, even goes so far as to tell us in his life story how he snubbed his patron the king of France—an ill-advised move, Vasari would have surely declared. Fioravanti casts himself in the role of the upstart upsetting social conventions with superiors within the medical community wherever he went, both up and down the peninsula as well as from Italy to Spain.

      At one level, these distinctly opposing yet still related strategies of behavior explored by practitioner authors in their discourses about the arts can be seen to disclose competing conceptions of manhood emerging above all in sixteenth-century Italy, a period that featured some exceedingly powerful, larger-than-life male rulers of both decorous and indecorous comportment.⁷² On the one hand, one conception of manhood in the period required a person to be deferential, prudent, and highly rational. It owed much to classical rhetorical and contemporary poetic strategies. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were then perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male strategies of self-discipline and self-control over the emotions. On the other hand, another conception of manhood in the period entitled one to be abrasive, imprudent, and occasionally highly irrational. It owed much to longstanding codes of chivalric honor and patterns of aggressive, violent behavior long associated with feudal aristocratic privilege. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male habits of responding to people and events with forcefulness, aggression, and assertiveness as a way of both defending and affirming collective and individual honor. Either way, some of the male practitioners in question who turned to authorship clearly wanted to level out the social playing field in their discourses and envision themselves through their varied modes of temperate or intemperate comportment as near equals in a highly stratified world of extremely competitive men, precisely when their relationship with their (typically, but not exclusively, male) superiors was, and always would remain, hierarchically arranged rather than laterally configured in society. To this end, they occasionally pictured themselves in a primarily male-dominated professional world collaborating with their social superiors in the spirit of mutually reinforcing processes of exchange. So configured, they