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

now beating out time in precise, equal measure and the prison bars of the musical score oppressively facing me, it occurred to me—years before I had ever learned about the sociological concepts of “structure,” “agency,” and “habitus”—that what we do within the limits of those constraints in our everyday lives and practices directly speaks to how we are able to locate some measure of freedom and find the means to express and explore our own “individuality”; exhibit our personal mode of phrasing given our deeply ingrained, acculturated dispositions; and experience and enact in our bodies our peculiar habit of addressing the world through whatever instruments we possess. Then, a few months later, when I was about to graduate from college and the same teacher was encouraging me to think, with generous but misplaced optimism, of pursuing a career as a classical musician, he said something else that seemed particularly relevant. He insisted that if I ever joined an orchestra that I should play at least one hour a day on my own so that, as he put it, I would continue to hear my own individual voice—or at least the distinctive voice of my violin—and not lose it in the all-encompassing and seductive mass of orchestral sound.

      Both these observations strike me as noteworthy, particularly in a period in which we have made some serious scholarly investment within the humanities in dismantling the notion that we each have a core, individual identity, some essential, distinctive character and personal style that make us who we are, often enough taking grim delight in the intellectual thrill of sawing through the branch, as David Lodge once wryly put it, on which we sit.¹ In large measure—according to this somewhat dire vision—selfhood was, is, and always will be purely a dynamic cultural and discursive construct that we must constantly and endlessly deconstruct in all our blindness and insight precisely because it was, is, and always will be just that: a construct. But my former teacher’s observations also seem to me germane to some of the concerns covered in this book as we turn back the clock to the Italian Renaissance in six chapters, leaving as best we can the (post)modern world for the largely early modern one and laboring to understand that distinct and distant world on its own terms, although occasionally pausing to gauge in the process how the past relates to, yet still dramatically differs from, the present.

      For this book is in part (and I should reiterate that it is only in part) about the mystery that lies at the heart of individual identity, a mystery that remains steadfastly and resiliently “there” even when, or precisely when, we think as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern presumptuously did that we can securely pluck out someone’s mystery, play people as if they were mere empty wooden pipes with apparently simple stops to them, as if they possessed no intrinsically distinctive, individual quality—a special tone or timber all their own, as it were—that makes them at times unfathomable and impossible to pin down by even the most inquisitive and perspicacious minds. Because if I am not altogether mistaken in reflecting on my own life experiences, this really isn’t the case about people once we take into consideration the many and varied constraints within which we all operate and that shape us in a host of extremely complex ways. For there is, I contend, something mysterious that makes people who they are, both now, in twenty-first-century America, and back then, in the period covered in this book, when a host of entirely different historically determined constraints fashioned people and enabled some of them to try to figure out who they and others—both in practice and in essence—were.

      Hence this book, the broad aim of which is to examine through the disciplines of art, literary, intellectual, medical, and cultural history how male identities were conceptualized in Renaissance Italy, where the European Renaissance is conventionally thought to have begun. This is by no means a new topic in contemporary Renaissance studies generally. Both Stephen Greenblatt and John Jeffries Martin, for instance, have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt’s famous, although justly contested, notion that a free, untrammeled, “individual” self emerged in Renaissance Italy in contradistinction to the constrained, collective, “corporate” self of the Middle Ages. Albeit in strikingly different ways, both Greenblatt and Martin have construed identity—for the most part a distinctly male identity—as a dialectic between, on the one hand, a self formed by historically determined cultural constraints and, on the other hand, a self formed in reaction against those powerful cultural forces (forces, to be sure, that both enable it to come into being and always condition it). The interests of both scholars have been largely on the first side of the dialectic. They have thus tended to focus on the cultural factors that shaped the self, such as institutions, rituals, and sodalities, even though Greenblatt has discussed at length the period’s growing interest in the values of self-reflection, wonder, and privacy, while Martin has explored in detail such things as the values of sincerity, emotional transparency, and interiority, along with varying notions of intimacy and inner character in ways that resonate felicitously with my own manner of thinking.²

      To some extent, then, my book is a polemic, taking issue with Greenblatt and (to a far lesser degree) Martin, as well as with a variety of scholars, by examining the other, oppositional side of the dialectic without denying the centrality of Renaissance culture in both shaping and constraining individual male identities.³ More specifically, I want to look at (1) how certain men emphasized that a special mysterious quality—an “I don’t know what” (nescio quid)—defined extraordinary male individuals and underwrote their ability to succeed brilliantly as professionals applying an art (ars/arte) as a form of highly specialized knowledge; (2) how they asserted themselves as individuals through an intensely aggressive, personalized voice and/or signature style in the practical and productive arts; and (3) how they highlighted the particularity with which they or others performed their identities as individuals in the context of a broad cultural fashion. In distinctly different ways, then, this book explores the significance of the notion of the individual for an understanding of the Italian Renaissance conception of male identity without, however, subscribing to Burckhardt’s widely discredited (and for him, as it turns out, deeply pessimistic) view that the individual in the period was an autonomous agent operating freely in the world, much less Burckhardt’s equally discredited argument that the modern individual emerged for the first time more or less in fourteenth-century Italy as a radically new phenomenon.⁴ At the same time, in focusing on men and male identities, my aim in this book is not to gainsay the fact that women offered both impressive and often novel ways of expressing their identities within collectivities in the Italian Renaissance, as the studies of a number of literary and cultural historians have increasingly and amply demonstrated in the past few decades.⁵ Quite the contrary, my aim, as announced in the preface, is to enhance our understanding of how male identities were conceived, and could be conceived, with the hope that some of my observations may be of use to scholars working more exclusively on women, along with the hope that perhaps some of those observations may indirectly contribute to our understanding of how the notion of the individual itself in the period was gendered in complex ways.

      To examine these issues, I have divided this book into three parts, each of which contains two chapters centered on a single topic that is explored from different, yet complementary, angles. My focus in these parts has been principally on the sixteenth century because during that period, for reasons that will become evident as the book unfolds, we witness in Italy a marked increase in the investment in the individual among men in a broad array of activities—an investment that will flower in the seventeenth century in the visual arts, for instance, in the cult of the individual. Moreover, as we move from one part to another of this book, we should bear in mind the following: Although the word “individuo” was broadly understood in the Italian Renaissance to mean “indivisible,” as it is defined in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Lexicon of the Academy of the Crusca, 1612) in light of standard usages of the word as a “dialectical term” in, say, theological argumentation,⁶ during the same period the word “individuo” also began to acquire the more familiar modern meaning, which first gained currency in England in the mid- to late 1600s, of “distinguished from others by attributes of its own,” “marked by a peculiar and striking character,” and “pertaining or peculiar to a single person or thing or some one member of a class” (Oxford English Dictionary). In this regard, it is worth noting that the word “individuo” is also furnished with the meaning of “cosa particolare” (“a particular/specific/identifying thing”) in the Vocabolario della Crusca and eventually provided with apposite examples from the sixteenth century in later