the state could run as smoothly as possible (the best secretaries, ambassadors, courtiers, and the like). Not surprisingly, in writing these discourses about arts, practitioners turning to authorship sought to take advantage of manifold opportunities potentially available to them, from bureaucratic to artisanal ones. In this respect, a host of what we might call broadly “professional” reasons can be said to account historically for why a significant number of practitioners became authors of discourses about their arts.
Some practitioners turning to authorship were undoubtedly seeking to enhance the art underpinning their profession, endowing it with prestige and making a spirited claim for its cultural value as sophisticated and teachable with a determinate, rational, rule-bound, communicable, and reliable knowledge underlying it. In the process these practitioners were promoting themselves and seeking to elevate their own position, readily inviting readers to acknowledge their achievements and, in some instances, those of like-minded professionals in the author’s own field. In rhetorical terms they were establishing their exemplary “ethos,” or character, in the context of their expertise as professionals and, to be sure, as men worthy of recognition. They thus presented themselves as authorities who could legitimately hold forth about an art and, at the same time, reliably and masterfully apply the art in question to achieve a clearly defined and purposive end. We certainly find these strategies of professional self-definition employed in a broad variety of discourses about arts, from those dedicated to the art of being a secretary to those that concentrate on multiple sectors of the economy devoted to the visual arts.
Within the productive arts, one particularly interesting example of a technical treatise devoted to mechanics that addresses such issues is Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia (The Pirotechnia, 1540).42 This early exoteric treatise on metallurgy, composed in a period when Europe experienced a growth in exploitative capitalist enterprises in general and a mining boom in particular, not only serves the important economic and social function of providing potential wealthy investors and established practitioners in Italy with the means to imitate the Germans and make a substantial profit (fig. 9). Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia also serves to expand the opportunities of the author himself, who has labored in the profession and is taking advantage of a thriving market for minerals and metals in the sixteenth century by positioning himself as an authority on the art in question and, above all, by championing the social and cultural value of the art he professes to teach. As a form of specialized knowledge, the art of metallurgy—Biringuccio asserts from the outset—investigates the lifeblood of minerals coursing through the veins of the earth (13). Accordingly, it yields up to a well-trained and experienced eye such as Biringuccio’s—which is thoroughly versed in the art of reading manifold surface signs spread out across creeks, ditches, riverbeds, valleys, hills, plains, and mountains—where all the longed-for riches lie hidden deep within, ready for eager entrepreneurial spoil (14–15). In professional terms, then, Biringuccio, like so many other practitioners writing about their arts, takes up authorship to present himself with a highly specialized expertise and thus as a “professor,” in essence, professing knowledge. His art, like the art of other practitioners making a case publicly for themselves, is worthy of esteem and therefore should be culturally, socially, and economically valued.
FIGURE 9. Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1539), De la pirotechnia (Stampata in Venetia per Venturino Roffinello. Ad instantia di Curtio Navo. & fratelli, 1540). Reproduced by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Frontispiece.
Along with defining their own exemplary professional status as they sought to enhance, and in many instances socially elevate, the value of their art, some practitioner authors were attempting to pass on or expand a critical vocabulary related to their art and engage in competitive rivalries, debating the pros of their art and its specialized knowledge in relation to the cons of others, as well as making all sorts of jurisdictional claims within—to borrow the terms of the sociologist Andrew Abbott—a “system of professions.”43 In doing so, they were also occasionally engaging in more personal rivalries and advocating for certain traditions of making or doing things in the productive and practical arts. Biringuccio does something of this sort when he provides an extensive vocabulary to understand every aspect of mining and repeatedly takes on alchemists, defining that particular, well-established esoteric art, which he finds to be suspect, fanciful, obscure, and charlatan-like, over and against the reliable, open, and highly useful art of the metallurgists, which he contends consistently yields positive results for the avid and patient investor. Similarly, the maverick surgeon/physician Leonardo Fioravanti, often considered something of a charlatan himself, takes on entrenched members of the medical community in a number of his writings, competing with them for a jurisdictional claim within a highly stratified, hierarchical profession.44 Nor is it difficult to imagine why Fioravanti, whose writings we will examine at length in Chapter 3, would have attacked the established university-based medical community so vigorously. Who, after all, possessed the “secrets” of Nature and understood so profoundly its language? Surely it had to be the traveling surgeon Fioravanti, the radical empiric who went out into the world and, turning his back on arcane bookish learning, accumulated those secrets of medicine from common folk in order to cure people. He, Fioravanti would have us know, discovered this coveted and useful information, not the established doctors who relied on institutionally transferred knowledge.45 In this light, Fioravanti’s hostility toward much of the medical profession arose over a competition within the medical community regarding who in fact had access to and possessed hidden knowledge, the mysteries of the medical misterium, with the term “misterium” here understood to signify a craft, occupation, trade, or calling—in a word, an “art.”46 For Fioravanti surely felt that tracking down and learning medical secrets was his job and the province of expertise of his art. Collecting, testing, and then eventually divulgating through print those medical secrets in a language accessible to all was indeed a principal way Fioravanti aimed to make his mark in the medical community, following in the path of not only the classical empirics of the ancient world but also the peripatetic Don Alessio Piemontese, the fictional author of the best-selling Secreti (Secrets, 1555).47
As a number of practitioners advocated the virtues of one art over another, engaging in a competitive system of professions, they were also—in a far more mundane manner—simply trying to make a profit during a period that witnessed an increased interest in professions and professionalization in the intensely urban world of the Italian Renaissance—an interest that found expression in a number of cultural forms, as George McClure has demonstrated, and culminated in Tomaso Garzoni’s massive and often quirky encyclopedic La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (The Universal Piazza of All the Professions in the World, 1585/1587). In the process these practitioner authors were capitalizing as best they could on a widespread demand for their expertise in the “market” and court culture.48 In crudely materialistic terms, they were trying to “cash in.” Hence some practitioner authors, such as once again Fioravanti and Biringuccio, wrote in some measure to advertise their skills and/or products so as to capture a broad-based consumer demand. Biringuccio, for instance, enthusiastically urges investors to take advantage of his expertise so that they can reap rich rewards from the mining boom of mid-sixteenth-century Europe. His book, which guarantees wealth for the bold and adventurous entrepreneur, is in one sense an invitation for work as he implores Italians in particular to turn away from the untold risks and endless drudgery of mercantile labor and encourages them to invest their energies and capital in looking for such rare yet valuable minerals as gold in, oddly enough, Italy (34–35)—not, to be sure, a geographically resource-rich region of Europe. Far more bluntly, Fioravanti, who was always keen on selling himself and his services, even provides readers in a few of his discourses with the addresses of selected apothecaries in Venice where the products of his labor can be readily purchased by mail order.49 Other practitioners, including those discussing the art of
