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

and artistic ones, it seems to me that we need to be far more attuned to the importance of the individual in the period—not the Burckhardtian individual that anticipates modernity with a free, untrammeled, and socially untethered self but the individual as someone “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.” It is to this end, then, that this book examines how some men in the Italian Renaissance possessed—or were represented as possessing—a mysterious quality that rendered them inimitable within the context of professional life; an aggressive, personalized voice and/or signature style in the practical and productive arts; or a particular mode of addressing the world through the performative staging of something so seemingly insignificant, and physically superficial, as the distinctive, identifying beard. And it is in this context that the concept of the individual matters and is explored in this book, both in terms of how a variety of men advocated that something “else” accounted for singular, masterful success and in terms of how they took concrete steps to be at once like and unlike others, as they exercised their agency and searched for a particular mode of distinguishing themselves by strategically manipulating roles, styles, cultural scripts, and widespread fashions.

      FIGURE 6. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Colleoni’s commemorative statue was finally placed directly in front of the Dominican basilica, where the funeral services celebrating doges took place and so many illustrious doges were buried—not Piazza San Marco but still a prominent position, to be sure.

      PART I

      PROFESSIONALISM

      CHAPTER 1

      Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne

      LET ME BEGIN A REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF ARS AND ARTE IN RENAISSANCE Italy, the first such reflection of this book, by sketching out the history of the concept of techne in classical antiquity. By doing so, we will be in a position to see how the Italian Renaissance treatment of it rehearses as well as revises elements that were originally embedded in the classical notion of techne itself. To this end, I examine in the first section of this chapter the general significance of the term “techne” (pl. “technai”) in ancient Greece and then how that term changed, and in many respects did not change, as it evolved into ars from ancient Rome through the European Middle Ages. Readers not particularly interested in the complex evolution of the concept of techne over almost two thousand years, which I try to compress into as few pages as reasonably possible, may jump directly to the second section, where I provide an overview of the role and value of ars and arte as forms of knowledge in Renaissance Italy, exemplifying some of the issues explored in my discussion by examining briefly the writings of three very different sixteenth-century practitioners of arts: Leonardo Fioravanti, Vannoccio Biringuccio, and Giorgio Vasari. In the third section, having furnished a broad context for an understanding of the concepts of techne, ars, and arte from classical antiquity to the sixteenth century (devoting in the process special attention to the Italian Renaissance), I offer a more focused and extended reading of two very different treatises written at roughly the same time by two very different practitioners versed in two very different arts: Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise on the art of the courtier and Benvenuto Cellini’s on the art of the goldsmith. In the fourth and final section, I explore what I take to be both significant and new about the Italian Renaissance treatment of the arts and then investigate some salient aspects of Jacob Burckhardt’s famous claim that the very concept of art (in his terms “Kunst”) lay at the heart of what defined the Italian Renaissance—a claim that still resonates in scholarly literature today and undergirds discussions about Renaissance self-fashioning, although in a manner that elicits serious qualifications on the part of a variety of literary, intellectual, art, and cultural historians when it comes to thinking about the notion of the individual, be it a male or female individual, in the period.

      Before turning to these matters, however, I should clarify a few points about terminology. Because the term “techne” evolves not only conceptually but also linguistically as we move from ancient Greece to ancient Rome (when the term “ars” is used) to the European Middle Ages (when both the terms “ars” and “arte,” among others, are used) to finally sixteenth-century Italy (when, again, both ars and arte are used), I typically employ the three terms selectively in the context of the period examined at any given point in my discussion. It seemed to me perverse and historically inaccurate to do otherwise, to use the term “techne,” for instance, when speaking of the Italian Renaissance or, inversely, to speak about ars or arte when talking about ancient Greece. Moreover, when talking about guilds, which were, of course, “arts” (artes/arti), I refer to them directly as guilds so as to avoid, I hope, confusion in terminology. Furthermore, where it seems to me clear from the general discussion that I do not need to employ the terms “techne,” “ars,” and “arte” over and over again to make it evident to readers that the terms were used in specific periods and places, I have adopted the English “art” and “arts,” with the understanding throughout my discussion, however, that I am not referring to the fine arts or visual arts, which is how we conventionally tend to think of the word “art” today, but all the practical and productive arts generally. Finally, I distinguish from time to time between the practical arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at doing something) and the productive arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at making something) where it seemed to me necessary and appropriate to do so, but the distinction between the two should always be borne in mind as a significant and durable one during the longue durée covered in this chapter, even when the distinction is not always fully articulated in my discussion, and even when the distinction itself changed over time and can be perceived as blurry in the periods themselves.¹

      The ancient Greek term “techne” ranged widely in meaning.² As a matter of epistemological concern, techne could evoke the notion of shrewdness and trickery, thus making it conceptually akin to metis (cunning intelligence) and its clever ruses. On some occasions it could be used interchangeably with episteme (a body of ideas deemed to be intellectually certain) and consequently taken as a model for the type of superior knowledge toward which the philosopher aspired. More typically, techne meant productive or practical, rather than theoretical or speculative, knowledge. For the most part it was conceived as the authoritative but not always absolutely dependable knowledge required to make or do something limited, precise, and clearly defined with acknowledged expertise. Along these lines, the term “techne” was used as a synonym for the special know-how of some skill. It could be a basic manual skill: house building and carpentry, for instance—the sort of routine, lower-order, banausic (vulgar) skill that Plato repeatedly holds up to prefigure, by way of analogy, the clear, purposive, and goal-oriented knowledge that deals with abstractions and speculative philosophy.³ It could also be a complex demanding skill: rhetoric, medicine, military strategy, and statecraft, for instance—the sort of higher-order, open-ended, and refined skill that Aristotle identifies both with the practical knowledge of phronesis (prudence) and with the act of “doing,” praxis, rather than “making,” poiesis.⁴ Furthermore, while on the one hand techne is often associated with hard-and-fast rules and handbooks, on the other hand it could also demand an acumen for improvisation, require an exquisite sensitivity to the contingency of opportunity, assume an ability to apply general principles to the particulars of an occasion, and presume a talent receptive to extensive training and professional development. Additionally, there are some fundamental assumptions