preindustrial period in Europe “the standard universal command was that one must exert oneself,” a notion of exertion that the Greeks captured “with the term ponos” understood as a form of “tireless activity, work,” one was still always expected to toil in a virtuous way for something larger than the individual self.65
We do, however, find powerful expressions about the intense, personal, selfserving rewards of labor voiced in the writings of the above-mentioned Cellini and Fioravanti, for example, although other practitioners who turned to authorship from the period could be adduced in support of this claim.66 In Cellini’s exuberant autobiography, which is not a discourse strictly about an art but nevertheless details exhaustively the habits and attitudes of an artisan and his extensive, onerous labors, we are presented with a glorified image of the artist so passionately absorbed in his work that he simply cannot find the time to write down the story of his life and must therefore dictate it to an assistant while keeping his hands busy with all sorts of taxing projects and competitive commissions. And the intense self-satisfaction Cellini feels in the process of “doing” (il fare) as opposed to just “talking” (il dire), to use terms from his treatises on goldsmithing and sculpting, can transform Cellini within his narrative into a demonic demiurge with a brazenly outsized sense of his place as a professional in society. As he transforms objects, shaping them with his hands so that they become works of arresting beauty, so, too, Cellini transforms himself into a wondrous figure for all to admire. Emblematic of this selftransformation is the key moment when Cellini boasts with characteristic fustian bravado how he masterfully crafted a large, multifigured statue of Perseus and Medusa in bronze in a single casting, thereby achieving (even though he did not in fact achieve it) something through his art never done before in the ancient or modern era. In this highly dramatic self-portrayal, Cellini presents himself as a heroic Perseus figure who can grant life and defy death through his creative energies, while he also emerges as a terrifying Medusa figure petrifying others who gaze, transfixed with astonishment in the public square, at the extraordinary expertise embodied in his monumental sculpture. Cellini’s heroic and demonic efforts as a maker are one, we are invited to believe, with the statue he daringly crafts and puts on display for all to see and appreciate with such amazement, while the severed Medusa head held aloft and designed with such astonishing artistry transfixes with her transmogrifying gaze the surrounding statues in the square—according to a play of allusions within the context of Cellini’s paragone as a goldsmith turned sculptor—by petrifying those very hardened lapidary statues, the famous works of art of Cellini’s Florentine rivals with whom he vies, into so many isolated pieces of stone (figs. 12 and 13).67
FIGURE 12. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Side view with Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus in the background, both conceptually “petrified” from the Medusa’s gorgonizing gaze.
Similarly, fantasies about self-satisfaction derived from work, as well as the self-importance and honor associated with work, abound in Fioravanti’s writings, so much so that he characterizes himself over and over again as a wonder with a sort of thaumaturgic touch to him, stunning others in his highly theatrical performances and gradually acquiring—thanks to his complete command over his art—status, recognition, honor, wealth, and, last but not least, a title of knight that he is only too happy to flaunt. Not entirely unlike the charlatans of his time, Fioravanti was something of a spectacle wherever he went, a sort of curiosity figure in an age that possessed an insatiable appetite for exhibiting and collecting curiosities.68 His ability to appear as a marvel to so many people perhaps explains in some measure the enmity he aroused from some in the medical community, the persecution he felt he endured in Rome, Venice, Milan, and Madrid.69 A number of physicians no doubt felt threatened by his success in putting on such a good show and, perhaps, competing with them all too successfully for coveted clients. In this regard, Fioravanti may have been something of an irritating and obnoxious gadfly within the medical community of the period, especially as he overtly challenged and rebuked well-ensconced authorities, but he was a popular gadfly, he emphasizes, and one, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 3, who took great satisfaction in his accomplishments, his social advancement, and his mastery over his art as a highly specialized and rewarding form of knowledge. Time and again, Fioravanti’s sense of identity, like Cellini’s and that of so many other practitioners of arts who turned to authorship, was intimately bound up in the specialized knowledge that underpinned his art and in the final realized products of his labor. Professional identity, then, mattered. And it mattered because it allowed such exemplary practitioners as Cellini and Fioravanti to feel not only socially enhanced in relation to others but also positively about themselves and their relationship to their art as self-proclaimed and acknowledged professionals.
FIGURE 13. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545–1553. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. Reproduced by permission of Archive Timothy Mc-Carthy/Art Resource, NY. Detail of the head of Medusa, with blood spewing from the severed neck.
Given the deep personal investment that practitioner authors sometimes made in their work, at least as they characterized themselves and their relationship with their work in their writings, as well as the associations often assumed in the period between the personalities of people (Raphael, for instance, is deemed by Vasari to be full of grace) and the products of their labor (Raphael’s paintings are likewise deemed by Vasari to be full of grace), some of the discourses by practitioners inevitably find themselves tied to more broad-based cultural issues related to creativity, character, and conduct. This is particularly true in the sixteenth century, when Italians exhibited an intensified interest in etiquette and a keen concern for how men should behave with one another in a variety of homosocial situations, as well as how they should and should not behave in relation to a variety of social superiors, both men and women.70 On the one hand, in the sixteenth century anyone applying an art who aspired to be accepted by the cultural elite should behave in some measure, we are often led to believe, with decorum, exercising prudence, control, caution, and discretion at every turn. To this end, some of the practitioners who have taken up the role of authorship as they write about their art as a form of specialized knowledge occasionally spend time trying to indoctrinate others, who might well aim to put into practice the art they write about in their discourses, into the pleasantries of polite social conventions. Don’t be a slob, Vasari is repeatedly teaching visual artists through edifying examples, if you aim to succeed in a career as an artist in a society increasingly dominated by court culture and complicated patronage relationships. Please, he seems to plead when writing about such people as the bizarre Piero di Cosimo, try not to eat only boiled eggs cooked all at once, as well as by the dozens, in a filthy bucket, if you want to be taken seriously by the cultural elite and be invited to interact with them on an ongoing, if not even intimate, basis. Don’t be abrasive, obnoxious, difficult, offensive, obsessive, recalcitrant, spacey, vulgar, dirty, overly taciturn, eccentric, uncouth, or even, in the case of the otherwise perfectly apt Raphael, excessively libidinous.71 Castiglione similarly reprimands courtiers for engaging in all sorts of boorish habits, from bragging too much to acting out brashly like impudent schoolchildren.
On the other hand, in the sixteenth century in Italy, the self-importance some practitioners of an art arrogated unto themselves within their discourses allowed them at times to reject all the accepted pleasantries of polite comportment and pose alternative modes of interacting with the cultural elite—modes that fly directly in the face of everything espoused by such men of distinction as Monsignor Giovanni della Casa in his influential etiquette treatise Il
