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

mystifying the notion of the individual in the period actually was. Nor have they always sufficiently recognized how that notion permeated simultaneously so many different areas of expertise, from the visual arts to the medical arts to the intellectual arts of the humanists, and how it pervaded so many different visual and verbal forms, from works of imaginative literature to treatises to paintings to fashion.

      The overriding concern of this book, then, has been not to resuscitate in any form or manner a Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance individual. Rather, it has been to reconsider how valuable the notion of the individual was for some men who lived and worked in Renaissance Italy and, at the same time, to reassess the value of thinking about the notion of the individual in the period generally. This notion, it is important to emphasize from the outset, has largely, if not at times completely, fallen out of favor when we talk about identities in the period. And it has come under serious attack over the past few decades. A good deal of that attack has come from the so-called New Historicists, primarily literary-trained scholars associated with Stephen Greenblatt and his project of “cultural poetics,” which is deeply invested in a variety of anthropological, Marxist, and postmodern critical theories but principally those that locate identity as a cultural product endlessly constructed and performed in light of a person’s historically determined subject position. However, some of the reason that the notion of the individual has fallen out of favor over the past decades has to do, in part at least, with the work of scholars engaged in social history. Social history itself, which is still for every good reason a significant force in the academy even with the formidable rise of cultural history, does not per se call into question the importance of the individual or deny the existence of individuals in periods. Indeed, one key, vital aim of social history, which is dedicated to examining and tracing macro structures, has been to comprehend better the limits within which individual agency may or may not occur, for many social historians—of various liberation movements, for example—actually see agency as a crucial category at the individual as well as collective level. And yet as social historians have labored hard to explain large-scale trends and developments, drawing on the insights and methodologies of sociologists, they have also nevertheless offered generalizations at the macro level that tend to break down at the individual level. As a result, the individual has virtually disappeared from their narratives and consequently, in time, faded from view. This is even true, up to a point, with respect to microhistory, which focuses on the individual less as an individual, and certainly not as a means for investigating the notion of the individual itself, and more as a vehicle for understanding different sorts of interwoven intellectual, cultural, legal, and social trends that macrohistorians have neglected, shown little interest in, or traditionally had difficulty accessing in their studies.

      As this book works to rehabilitate the notion of the individual, it also seeks to provide an historical explanation for why certain things took place in the period, in particular why certain momentous changes concerning the individual took place when and where they did, especially as these matters are addressed in the first chapter of this book, which is by far the lengthiest of them all. Yet the historian’s task, it is also fair to say, is not always to explain why something took place in the past, although that is always a desirable and ultimate goal. A good deal of the historian’s task is to just try to document that something had taken place, to disclose its complexities, unveiling them as deftly as possible for the reader, and to make a case for its overall importance. Surely scholars of the Italian Renaissance have to face that sort of issue over and over again. For a host of strong explanatory models that historians have put forth to try to account for why the Renaissance itself emerged in Italy when it did, in roughly the mid-1300s, have fallen to the wayside over the years or have been found wanting in one way or another. Scholars, to be sure, will continue to debate and debunk each other’s explanatory models. Yet scholars of the Italian Renaissance still persist in documenting and arguing that there was in fact a Renaissance in Italy and that it differed from “renaissances” elsewhere, both before and after, even though to this day it remains such a vexing issue for scholars to try to explain convincingly why the Italian Renaissance happened when and where it did in Europe. So, mutatis mutandis, it is with this book: the notion of the individual did indeed have cultural force in the period for many men, it did matter to them, and it did manifest itself in extremely complex and often novel ways. To that end, if this book has successfully documented that fact as indeed a fact (despite the claims of many historians—as well as literary scholars—to the contrary), then On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy has done its main job, even if it cannot always provide a satisfactory, strong explanatory model to account for all historical changes.

      Finally, to adopt a much more personal mode of address, I feel compelled to say something in this preface about the book’s focus strictly on men—an issue significant enough to warrant frank discussion here. For a host of scholarly studies dedicated in great measure to the notion of the individual in the Italian Renaissance, much less the European Renaissance, were written principally by men about men. And those books were written often enough, as in the case of Burckhardt’s key essay, with the presumed, and somewhat anachronistic, identification of male authors with their male subjects. Consequently, for some readers, those books inevitably shaped a view that the notion of the individual in the Renaissance was and should be associated strictly with men. For the record, I do not share this view. There were, as I see it, male and female individuals in the period, each operating within a variety of gendered and institutional constraints and power relations that determined and conditioned agency. Were I looking at primarily or uniquely women in this book, for instance, I’d be forced to engage in a serious manner the history of domesticity along with, among other areas, the history of letter writing and the like. However, even if I do not endorse a male-inflected view of the notion of the individual, I may well seem to do so just by writing this book because its focus is exclusively on men. And that is an objection to this book that no position statement placed in a preface can ever preemptively forestall, even as it exercises self-conscious critical detachment about matters of gender and authorial identification. In any event, if this book achieves anything, it demonstrates that we should not shy away from embracing the notion of the individual when it comes to looking at either men or women in the Italian Renaissance. More important, it shows that if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the European Renaissance in general, as so many scholars have done over the past few decades, we do so at the peril of significantly impoverishing our understanding of the past.

      Introduction

      I BEGIN WITH A REFLECTION, AND A DECIDEDLY PERSONAL ONE AT THAT. Some time ago, in the late 1970s, long before I embarked on a career in the humanities or even ventured to imagine doing so, when a host of fascinating topics of highly specialized scholarly interest were not even remotely on my mind or, for that matter, in some cases even circulating as topics of widespread interest in the academy, I began working my way through Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas in bucolic Bennington, Vermont, doing the best I could on my own with those complex pieces of music. One day, thinking I had sufficiently mastered the opening adagio of the first sonata, I performed it as a surprise for my teacher, a remarkable and generous violist—the late Jacob Glick—who sat in his office with his oversized hands drooping over the ends of his armchair, as if he were wearing worn, leathery baseball mitts that didn’t quite fit. No sooner had I finished playing than he rose, shaking his head, and told me in so many words that it was a mess. I could play the notes well enough, which was no small achievement given that there were a lot of challenging chords to try to master, but I was not keeping time. Worse, my refusal (or inability) to adhere to what was written on the score, to play metrically what Bach wanted and not what I somehow felt should rhythmically be played, bothered him to no end. It was then that he asked me a question, arguably more aptly framed by a social scientist than a classical musician, as he walked over to the piano and put on the metronome. “What,” he inquired, “is your definition of freedom?”

      His question went to the heart of the matter of not just classical music but, it dawned on me, much of life itself, for we all ultimately have to deal with the various constraints that bind us and constitute us, whether we are always entirely aware of this fact or not. And as I dutifully