members of a cultural elite that needed assistance in governing and had developed a passion to possess durable objects of all kinds and sizes as a way of fashionably expressing their own social position and distinction but also as a way of creatively constructing culture and distinction itself.50 In sum, functionaries and artists had services and products to sell, and practitioners eagerly sought to sell them and themselves as they turned to authorship through the writing of discourses about their arts.
Additionally, a number of practitioners wrote discourses about arts to puzzle over problems related to their particular skill and explore avenues for expanding their own understanding of the art in question, both as a practice and as a form of knowledge. These discourses can be seen as functioning as a cognitive act. A few of them even unfold as essays in the root sense of the word, as the staging of an attempt to come to terms with a serious intellectual problem through an ongoing process of reflection. Leonardo da Vinci’s remarkable writings about the art of painting, for example, which never finally cohered into a formal printed treatise during his lifetime, would fall into this particular category. His surviving writings on painting in manuscript form, accompanied by his dazzling sketches about ideal proportions and the like (fig. 10), do more than engage us in a characteristically Renaissance paragone (competition) about the relative value of the art in question within a system of professions defined by established hierarchies of the arts (painters, of course, belong to the loftier major guild, “arte,” of apothecaries in Florence, for instance, whereas sculptors belong to the minor guild of stonemasons). Nor do Leonardo’s scattered remaining writings on the art of painting only serve to pass on information about the language of painting or, for that matter, only seek to elevate socially the art of painting by characterizing the painter as a distinguished, clean, and elegant gentleman leisurely applying his skill in his well-ventilated, dust-free studio with musicians all the while fashionably entertaining him. Leonardo’s writings about painting also function as ongoing explorations into the nature of the world and the human form, linking the work of the painter to the insights of the natural philosopher, the particulars of the experience of applying the art in question with the episteme of mathematical principles, optics, and universal harmony. Painting and examining the world closely as a unified—indeed fused—coordinated practice in Leonardo’s writings consequently engage him in epistemological inquiry, making the art of the painter a veritable science that is creative and fundamentally divine in nature.51
More broadly, a distinctive feature about a number of these sorts of writings—writings by practitioners, that is, in which the arts are viewed as having an important cognitive function—is that for the first time since the classical period we witness a sustained, full-fledged theorizing about the practices in question in significant discursive form. This process of theorizing takes place not only in writings that remained inchoate in manuscript form, such as Leonardo’s on painting, but also in those that were fully fleshed out and appeared in print, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s on architecture and painting and Biringuccio’s on metallurgy. As Paolo Rossi long ago observed in his seminal Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts, “the medieval technical writings gave ample and detailed instructions on the way ‘to work.’ They offered themselves as a compilation of rules, recipes, and precepts. They were completely devoid of ‘theory’ understood as an attempt to derive the precepts from general principles and then to base them on a totality of verifiable facts.” Moreover, even if we apply some pressure to Rossi’s allembracing assertion that medieval technical writings were absolutely devoid of theory, this strategy of theorizing about the arts by practitioners certainly seems to have found its greatest impetus and most sustained development discursively in the postclassical period in the Italian Renaissance, where “for perhaps the first time a fusion had been effected between technical and scientific activities, and manual labor and theory.”52 As a result, the workshop in which visual artists were apprenticed became in Renaissance Italy not just a place for the construction of objects but also a space of reflection—a laboratory of sorts, in which the particulars of experience were linked to the universals of broader fields of knowledge, such as geometry, anatomy, optics, and perspective (fig. 11).53 In this way the Italian Renaissance resuscitated the classical concept of techne as not just the specialized knowledge of how to make or do something with expertise but also the specialized knowledge about the making or doing of something with expertise. This theoretical knowledge in its turn allowed the experts in question to understand in depth why something was done or made in a particular way and thus, by extension, allowed those experts to be in a position to explain in their varied discourses the underlying causes that made the art possible in the first place. Furthermore, these discourses became viewed as learned subjects and the province of interest of patrons curious about different aspects of the world, above all in a period “fueled by a growing appreciation for novelty and new inventions,” revitalized by the conspicuous consumption of large- and small-scale objects by the cultural elite, and increasingly invested in the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the arts.54
FIGURE 10. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Head of a Man with Scheme of Its Proportions. Accademia, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY. Leonardo’s examinations into the perfect proportions of the human body, here developed in the context of an examination of a head, dovetail with Piero della Francesca’s and Albrecht Dürer’s similar mathematically grounded reflections on such matters, also conceived as a science, an “art.”
As practitioners turned to authorship, some of these discourses about arts can also be construed as ego documents, it is important to stress. This appears to be a somewhat new phenomenon as well in the Italian Renaissance, a period when there is a notable rise not just in autobiographical modes of writing but of artisanal autobiographies themselves—a rise that continues well into the early modern period in Europe.55 These discourses about a particular art ranged from full-fledged “lives,” which draw on classical models and eventually figure into the development of the genre of biography and autobiography in the early modern period, to treatises that purport to inform us about specific skills but end up effectively functioning equally well as ego documents, at times offering up examples of some of the most egregious forms of aggressive self-fashioning of the entire European Renaissance. In the first group we could readily place such works as Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, both the 1550 Torrentiniana and 1568 Giuntina editions), as well as Castiglione’s masterpiece Il cortegiano (printed in 1528 but certainly in circulation, and therefore “published,” earlier), even if Castiglione purports not to be representing himself in the process of fashioning the perfect courtier and deliberately absents himself from the conversations that putatively took place over four days in spring 1507 in the ducal palace of Urbino. In the second group we would place everything from Benvenuto Cellini’s treatises on goldsmithing and sculpting (1568) to a number of Fioravanti’s varied treatises on medicine, such as his Il tesoro della vita humana (The Treasury of Human Life, 1570), published while he worked in the ambit of the combative, industrious, and financially strapped writers closely associated with the print industry in Venice, the so-called poligrafi (polygraphs).56 There is a notable range, then, to the sorts of discourses that practitioners composed that are dedicated to their arts and, at the same time, function in one form or another as ego documents.
FIGURE 11. Agostino dei Musi (Agostino Veneziano, ca. 1490–ca. 1540), The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli, 1531. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence. Reproduced by permission of © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. Baccio Bandinelli’s academy, in some ways a forerunner of the Accademia del Disegno, here represents the artist’s workshop established not only as a place of training but also as a space of intellectual
