placing a number of them, such as the productive arts, at the bottom of a conceptual ladder on an ascending hierarchy that elevated humans step by step from matter to spirit. They had, in keeping with many from the classical period, designated some of them as occupying a middle ground between illiberal and liberal arts (such “semiliberal” arts as medicine, husbandry, architecture, navigation, painting, sculpture, gymnastics, and the like). They had assigned them a positive moral value by envisioning them as part of God’s plan for humankind to both recapture a prelapsarian state through applied specialized knowledge and take advantage of an opportunity for humans to perfect nature and care for themselves through their ingenuity. They had deemed them conducive to the virtuous life in a variety of ways, much as they embraced them as part of an overall theology of work. They had secularized them by lauding their utilitarian and exploitative value for humankind generally insofar as they furnished humans with the means to use available natural resources for positive practical ends. And, finally, they had articulated a model for them to be integrated into, and viewed as interdependent with, the theoretical sciences.
A number of contributing socioeconomic and religious factors, it has been argued, led to this treatment of the arts—especially the productive arts—in the Middle Ages. Monasticism, and more broadly a variety of institutionalized Christian religious practices, proved influential—a number of scholars have contended—by exploring and configuring work as crucial for spiritual development, perhaps most vigorously beginning in the eleventh century with the seminal writings of Peter Damian.31 Serious scholarly pressure, however, has nevertheless been applied to crediting the culture of cenobitism with fundamentally redefining the perceived value of work generally and thus with reevaluating the various forms of knowledge underpinning different manifestations of specialized work. Certainly there is little evidence that monasticism constituted the seedbed for the eventual growth of capitalism in the West.32 Another important factor, scholars have also maintained, was the increased mechanization of Europe in the Middle Ages and thus the concomitant value placed on technology as people invested in and modified all sorts of inventions, from watermills to windmills, and in the process innovated technologically in order to find better and more efficient ways to exploit their environment and existing natural resources. However, technological innovations, we should bear in mind, did not in and of themselves lead philosophers or theologians in the Middle Ages to alter how they ranked, in their sometimes elaborate classificatory systems, the productive arts that in fact led to such innovations. Yet another key factor, it is generally assumed, was the intensified reurbanization of Europe in the high Middle Ages, the accompanying positive value placed on the accumulation of wealth in a money and credit economy during the commercial revolution, the positive value placed on urban professions in a period of greater social mobility, and the shifting perceptions about the ideology and meaning of work itself. Significantly, however, thinkers in the Middle Ages do not seem to have ever revealed in their writings an intimate, hands-on knowledge of the nature of the work involved in the varied productive and practical arts they so freely classified, although at times they did explore the arts, as Jacques Le Goff has argued, in the context of economic and social changes taking place, particularly in the twelfth century. And, as Le Goff further maintains, they did indeed expand the purview of the arts to incorporate into their writings and classifications a number of those technological changes.33
All things considered, then, it is supremely difficult to gauge precisely what socioeconomic factors can be said to account for the change in sensibilities about the arts as a form of specialized knowledge as we move from the classical period to the Middle Ages, just as it is extremely difficult in many instances to determine if indeed there was historically much of a significant change in overall sensibilities. For while many thinkers had managed in one way or another to frame the arts as “an essential kind of knowledge which shared in the ultimate aims of natural philosophy or theology,”34 and while many had come to think of them as essential, morally valuable, and conducive to the good life within an overall “theology of work,”35 social hierarchies still largely mapped themselves onto the classificatory rankings of the arts, much as they did in the earlier classical period.36 Certainly a number of forms of work long associated with specific denigrated arts came to be viewed as inherently sinful, or else, almost as bad, they rendered the practitioner all the more susceptible to sin.37 Consequently, in the Middle Ages as in antiquity, it was impossible to dispel entirely the pejorative connections linking social place with certain arts, particularly those that required manual labor and were thus perceived as demanding physical effort that dulled the senses as opposed to the mental effort that nurtured the soul, even if, to be sure, monastic culture, as well as the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, profoundly elevated the value of all honest labor generally, even the most menial labor, as an important vehicle for serving the glory of God in an overall theology of work.
This, then, was the broad intellectual and cultural framework within which Italian Renaissance authors wrote about both the productive and the practical arts and considered issues related to work and professional identity.
As we move from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Italy, something quite extraordinary seems to take place outside the ambit of the intellectual elite who produced commentaries on, for instance, Vitruvius’s first-century BCE book on architecture and who, in the process of generating these and other writings, raised various issues about the arts.38 For, strikingly, practitioners themselves started composing discourses about arts in significant numbers, beginning in the fifteenth century but with a veritable outpouring of them in the sixteenth century.39 These discourses ranged widely in nature and quality, and they appeared in print and manuscript form. They constituted what the historian of science Pamela O. Long has aptly dubbed, borrowing from the Aristotelian categories dominant from antiquity to the Renaissance, discourses about “praxis” and discourses about “techne,” which is to say, discourses dedicated to inculcating the practice of doing something, along with the knowledge required to build the moral character prepared to fulfill the practice in question, and discourses dedicated to inculcating the craft of making something, along with the knowledge required to fulfill the specific skill in question.40 These discourses about arts—which for the purposes of this study constitute both of Long’s categories of praxis and techne, since the terms “ars” and “arte” encompassed both categories in the Italian Renaissance—also varied substantially in formal and conceptual complexity. At one end of the spectrum, we find sophisticated, “dialogic,” humanist treatises written in Latin or in a polished volgare, with models of imitation and emulation calculatingly underpinning them and a host of erudite allusions enriching the rhythmic, periodic prose. At the other end of the spectrum, we find practical, unembellished, “monologic” manuals that are fundamentally instructional in nature. Either way, the fact that a substantial number of practitioners with extremely different backgrounds and levels of schooling turned to authorship and wrote so many discourses about the productive and practical arts covering so many different fields in just under two centuries is indeed new. And it speaks to a large-scale cultural shift in attitudes taking place in Renaissance Italy regarding the value of the arts specifically, the value of professional life more generally, and, as some historians have argued even more expansively in the context of early modern Europe, the ideological and moral value of work itself.
Practitioners of specific arts who turned to authorship in Renaissance Italy wrote these discourses in a period when political leaders recognized the need to make use of the productive and practical arts in order to legitimate themselves and succeed as rulers.41 It was not enough to have character, build character, train character, and possess virtue in order to govern, as was traditionally believed to be the case in the classical period when an aristocratic ethos of social privilege prevailed and virtue and superior character were viewed as largely the distinct right of birth and family lineage. To succeed in governance, one also needed—leaders in the Italian Renaissance soon came to understand—the most skilled artisans capable of creating advanced weaponry and defense systems so that the state could remain secure and potentially grow (the most up-to-date and effective guns, cannons, forts, and the like), as well
