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

within a discourse about an art by a practitioner writing about the art in question is new, and it finds its first forceful and most seminal expression in the Italian Renaissance in Vasari’s Le vite.⁷⁹

      Finally, many of these discourses composed by practitioners about their arts address matters connected to issues of educability and the possibility (or fantasy) of social mobility. Framed in terms of our contemporary belief systems, knowledge creates opportunities for both employment and social access, and a key way of acquiring knowledge, we readily assume (and we are invited to assume today by publishers and educators alike through all sorts of pedagogical hype), is through books (or electronic versions of books on an ever-changing array of inventive platforms). Want to be a goldsmith? Learn the lessons in Cellini’s treatise.⁸⁰ Want to be an architect? Learn from Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, or Andrea Palladio.⁸¹ Want to be a metallurgist to meet a demand for the exploration and exploitation of minerals for a variety of commercial and productive ends, including the fabrication of armaments and the minting of coins? Read Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia, which displays multiple designs of how that art can be profitably put into practice, beginning with the very border of the frontispiece (fig. 9). Want to be a builder of forts, an inventor of war machines and armaments, a military leader, a soldier? There are a host of informative printed books to enjoy on the topic, too many to even begin to list, but they are certainly there to edify you.⁸² Want to be a visual artist? Learn from Cennino Cennini, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, and, up to a point, Gian Paolo Lomazzo.⁸³ Want to be a courtier, a surgeon, a secretary, an ambassador—even a cook or steward? Learn from Baldassare Castiglione, Leonardo Fioravanti, Andrea Nati, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Angelo Ingegneri, Giambattista Guarini, Bartolomeo Zucchi, Tomaso Costo, Benedetto Pucci, Ermolao Barbaro, and Cristoforo Messisbugo, among others.⁸⁴ An art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly explored in the Italian Renaissance through an unprecedented flourishing of discourses written by practitioners invested in a variety of professions. What is more, a host of nonpractitioners—not to be outdone—contributed to the outpouring of discourses about arts in Renaissance Italy, from a mere handful of authors who remain well-known in academia (Niccolò Machiavelli writing on princes and the work of military leaders, Leon Battista Alberti writing on painters, and Torquato Tasso writing on secretaries and ambassadors),⁸⁵ to those who are reasonably well-known by specialists within subdisciplines (Francesco Sansovino writing on secretaries, Roberto Valturio writing on military science, and Paolo Cortesi writing on cardinals),⁸⁶ to those who remain obscure even for academics occasionally toiling away in what Herman Melville would have no doubt called sub-sub-subdisciplines (Gabriele Zinano, for instance, writing on secretaries, Ottaviano Maggi writing on ambassadors, and a plethora of authors writing about soldiery and related military tasks).⁸⁷

      Collectively and individually, these discourses serve to edify, and at face value the knowledge purveyed in them about a particular art is presented not secretively but openly, offering up information in the spirit of full disclosure.⁸⁸ People eager to pursue or perfect a career as a painter, architect, medic, surgeon, ambassador, sculptor, engineer, goldsmith, soldier, ambassador, or secretary—even, to be sure, as a new prince terrorizing his subjects in order to secure his position and state or a worldly cardinal climbing the social food chain by building and running the household of a magnificent palace in Rome—can, it would seem, begin at the very least by reading these edifying discourses, which often enough reveal how one can go about trying to succeed in a particular profession grounded in an art with its distinct knowledge. In the Italian Renaissance, mastery of an art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly presented in these discourses as something to be desired, in which the ability to transform objects or people’s minds and abilities symbolized the artists’—understood as the makers’ or doers’—protean capacity to potentially change themselves in society by becoming acknowledged, exemplary masters through discipline and self-control as well as, at times, masters over others by giving shape to other people’s lives and by directing them toward purposive ends. Moreover, acquiring mastery over an art can be viewed as the source of no small self-satisfaction on the part of practitioners who have actively pursued professional life and can take personal pleasure in it and the specialized knowledge necessary to succeed in it.

      And yet the crucial, underlying issue about how to go about actually acquiring the specialized knowledge of an art and then apply it masterfully, thereby becoming through some calculated process of inculcation and training a firstrate practitioner, can turn out to be exceedingly complex in some of these discourses—far more complex than it may at least at first glance seem to be. As these books divulge information openly about an art as it is configured as necessary for success in a profession, they often lay claim to the value of a particular profession so that people will want to enter it and admire it, and they make the profession and the art underpinning it appear accessible by presenting the knowledge related to it as eminently learnable. But in at least a few cases, the authors of these books adopt a strategy of enticing and openly edifying readers only—in truth—to close off access to the profession they want everyone to admire and learn about by mystifying the very process by which one can actually acquire the ability to become a true acknowledged master over the art in question. It is therefore essential that some of these discourses function as ego documents. We must admire the practitioners and their mastery over the specialized knowledge of their art so that we will want to be like them, laboring to imitate them through exemplarity in good Renaissance fashion. And in our admiration we must trust that we can be taught by them, likewise disclosing in good Renaissance fashion our faith in our own educability and consequently our sustaining belief, in Erasmus’s terms, that humans are “made,” not “born,” at least when it comes to the belief that we are made, and not born, to make or do certain defined things in life.⁸⁹ It is equally essential that some of these discourses frame the work or knowledge of the authors themselves as something that is to be admired or wondered at within the text itself. For these remarkable practitioners who have turned to authorship, we are led to believe, have the capacity to edify us, so that by following them we, too, can learn, succeed, and be admired, even if, as I shall argue in the following section, some of the practitioners who turned to authorship lay claim to a position that is decidedly at odds with what the discourse in practice actually does. Put differently, the writers of these discourses may indicate that the art they teach as a form of knowledge requisite for a profession is learnable through the diligent application of rules, thereby rendering the art accessible to professional aspirants as they disclose its specialized knowledge. But in truth they surreptitiously reveal that the art itself can only be applied with real success by a precious few who somehow possess the “right stuff,” thereby effectively closing off access to the profession in question for many while rendering the practitioner authors themselves all the more exquisitely exceptional in light of their obvious, yet still mystifying, achievements as professionals who have so brilliantly mastered their art as a form of useful specialized knowledge that benefits the community at large.

      Consider in this context Castiglione’s Il cortegiano as a discourse that brilliantly deploys a strategy of simultaneously disclosing and withholding information necessary to succeed in applying a specific art—in this particular case a practical, as opposed to productive, art.⁹⁰ First of all, we should bear in mind that Castiglione (fig. 14) in Il cortegiano characterizes courtiership as indeed an art, with it possessing all the characteristics of a techne in classical antiquity. The knowledge associated with it, Castiglione underscores, is determinate, it has an end, it is teachable, it allows us to move from the particular to the universal, it has rules (even if Castiglione is quick to point out that he is not writing a typical catechistic-style, rule-bound manual),⁹¹ it is communicable, it is reliable (or so he contends, even if it is certainly far more stochastic than exact in nature), it is performative (one must put courtiership into action so that it can be verified as an art), and it is supremely rational. It is not, for instance, the product of a knack but of calculated reasoning and practice honed through extensive training.