authors of these discourses about arts that function as ego documents are performing a number of important cultural functions. What is perhaps most significant is that they are often seeking to elevate their art in some measure as a form of specialized knowledge built on rational rules rather than just experience, as well as rational rules derived from extensive experience, in the very moment that they promote themselves and seek status, occasionally with the aim of securing work and patronage. Put differently, if in the classical and medieval periods, to paraphrase Plutarch once again, we are meant to admire the product but not the producer, in the Italian Renaissance the authors of many of these discourses about particular arts would have us admire not only the knowledge associated with the specialized work they do with such evident expertise but also themselves as masterful practitioners who have defined, assimilated, communicated, and, at times, surpassed through their practices those very same rules discussed in their writings.57 In this context a key operative word or concept underpinning some of these discourses about arts that function as ego documents is “admire,” along with its variants in the vernacular (ammirazione, meraviglia, ammirare) derived from the Latin “miror,” with its concomitant emphasis on gazing and the privileging of vision as a vehicle for understanding the world. Indeed, often enough there is a language of marveling associated not only with the work produced or performed but also the workers themselves, whether we are talking about Cellini’s and Fioravanti’s over-the-top, self-aggrandizing representations of themselves as near miracle makers in their stupefying ability to accomplish certain feats of labor with dazzling skill or, inversely, Vasari’s and Castiglione’s far more tempered selfpresentations as they showcase their complete command of their art as indeed admirable yet still, in keeping with the dominant behavioral codes of the cultural elite in the period, subtly represent their achievements with the appropriate decorum and restraint.58
Moreover, in the course of writing about themselves as they write about a specific art, these practitioners who turned to authorship in the Italian Renaissance are often redefining the value of work and by extension the cultural value of an art itself as a form of specialized knowledge as it is embodied in their own spectacular achievements or the achievements of other remarkable practitioners. Bear in mind that from classical antiquity to the medieval period, work was not deemed in discourse to be done for one’s own personal selfdevelopment, reward, and growth, although some practitioners did indeed occasionally express exceptional pride in their accomplishments achieved through work. Modern historians examining the ideology and meaning of work have driven home this point in a variety of ways, perhaps none more effectively than Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly in their comprehensive historical survey Worthy Efforts: Attitudes Toward Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe. In classical Greece and Rome, work, to be sure, could sometimes be conceived unfavorably, as the negation of a privileged, productive otium (leisure), as neg(not)-otium. In the intervals when one was temporarily and mercifully freed from the tedium and tyranny of work, the very work that could render one captive to either one’s own or someone else’s ongoing bodily needs and desires, one could exercise and enhance one’s powers, nourish oneself spiritually, dedicate oneself intellectually, say, to the liberal arts or, for that matter, the semiliberal arts through a certain rarefied otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity). More generally, however, work was immensely valued in a period that “abounded in [a] polyphony” of voices on the matter.59 For some thinkers advocating its distinct moral and social benefits, work made life more tolerable for individuals and families: most people needed to work to survive much less thrive. At the same time, and perhaps most important of all, work itself served to reinforce social hierarchies, inculcate discipline, and serve the community. It was certainly preferred to idleness, the dark side of otium as a form of slothful “inertia.” And it could enhance virtuous behavior, particularly such work as husbandry in antiquity but also, for Cicero and other elite classical authors, such essential activities as statecraft and public service broadly conceived. Work also generally made life more tolerable for others in the community. Some people through work, such as physicians, demonstrably improved the lot of those around them, while others, such as large-scale merchants engaged in socially accepted forms of legitimately acquiring wealth through commerce, could benefit society by being charitable, by proving themselves magnanimous, and by ensuring that goods flowed freely from one place to another. And, of course, work inevitably served in so many occasions as a palliative to life’s uncertainties and onslaughts. Some treated work, we might say to borrow from the pervasive language of modern therapy, as a coping mechanism.
Even in the monastic environment where work was codified and championed both as a necessary part of cenobitic life and as a virtuous activity that commanded respect (beginning with the earliest formative rules of Basil, Augustine, Pachomius, and Benedict),60 the specialized knowledge associated with any given particular art served not as an end unto itself. One did not go to Heaven, that is, because one possessed an art or was an expert in any one specific art. Rather, the specialized knowledge associated with any given art served to ward off the sluggishness of accidia (spiritual apathy and desperation), to eschew sloth, to suppress the appetite of carnal desire and chasten the body, to provide for a self-sufficient monastic community by taking care of what was necessary for everyone involved to survive in a mutually reinforcing collectivity, to prepare oneself spiritually and eschatologically for the Second Coming, to engage in penitence, to inculcate obedience, to be one with the sacred, to bear witness in word and deed to the Truth, to practice more efficiently asceticism, to adhere more rigorously to the vita apostolica (apostolic life), to promote charity, to ensure that idle hands do not become the devil’s workshop, to make oneself useful socially, to discourage evil thoughts and encourage patience and obedience, to aid in prayer and transform work into prayer, to practice humility, to take personal responsibility for caring for the world, to develop the spiritual self through useful endeavors, to do God’s work by participating in creation, to exalt God, even to produce material sweat itself as a divine offering.61 Hence, as James R. Farr summarily puts it, “work was, in short, a spiritual discipline. Medieval theologians … did not think about work in terms of the economic calculation or the material value of production, that effort would somehow create wealth and better one’s position in life. Instead, they conceived of work in moral terms, a distinctly premodern notion.”62 What mattered, in brief, was social utility, not modern notions of economic productivity, when it came to thinking about the value of work.
There is some reason to believe, however, that during the Italian Renaissance—beginning in the mid-fifteenth century but intensifying above all in the sixteenth century—professional identity associated with the knowledge of a certain art mattered also as an end unto itself, at least as the work associated with that art was defined and configured in discourse outside the context of the monastic environment. Consequently, having a profession and applying the art underpinning it in the form of work was seen not just as a means of acquiring recognition and even honor in a status-conscious, hierarchical society bound by an ideology of discipline, utility, service, and obedience but, as McClure has argued, as a source of personal, nonspiritually determined happiness and fulfillment. Or, to frame the matter in terms more congenial to this study, in the Italian Renaissance the happiness and self-satisfaction derived from work, as it is voiced in a number of discourses about arts written by practitioners, seems to grow increasingly out of the sorts of direct, personal, self-serving—in Marxist terms, “unalienated”—connections that practitioners made with the product created or the act done. In such discourses one could actually revel in, and indeed feel good about reveling in, the “self-indulgence of personal labor” in a manner that we do not at all find typically expressed in the literature of the classical period, in the elaborate classifications of the arts composed in the Middle Ages, or, for that matter, within the confines of writings connected to or emerging out of monasticism and the mendicant orders.63 As “polyphonic” as the notion of work was in classical Greece and Rome and the European Middle Ages, work was principally valued because it served some end goal larger than the individual person exerting “worthy effort”: something such as the family, a secular or ecclesiastical community, the state, the social and political order conceptualized according to the presumed hierarchical functions of the individual parts of the human body, corporatism, or the divine.64 Put differently, if,
