Stefano Guazzo in his equally influential book of manners designed for gentlemen of the court, La civil conversazione (Civil Conversation, 1574). Both Cellini and Fioravanti are emblematic of the more aggressive, assertive, and at times even uncouth practitioner who emerges in sixteenth-century Italy. This sort of abrasive practitioner presents himself occasionally exercising his art with such dazzling mastery that he feels, by virtue of his talents that render him one of a kind, that he can get away with behaving in all sorts of indecorous ways, at times even egregiously transgressing the norms of polite behavior, particularly when it comes to interacting with social superiors. Cellini, for instance, even goes so far as to tell us in his life story how he snubbed his patron the king of France—an ill-advised move, Vasari would have surely declared. Fioravanti casts himself in the role of the upstart upsetting social conventions with superiors within the medical community wherever he went, both up and down the peninsula as well as from Italy to Spain.
At one level, these distinctly opposing yet still related strategies of behavior explored by practitioner authors in their discourses about the arts can be seen to disclose competing conceptions of manhood emerging above all in sixteenth-century Italy, a period that featured some exceedingly powerful, larger-than-life male rulers of both decorous and indecorous comportment.72 On the one hand, one conception of manhood in the period required a person to be deferential, prudent, and highly rational. It owed much to classical rhetorical and contemporary poetic strategies. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were then perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male strategies of self-discipline and self-control over the emotions. On the other hand, another conception of manhood in the period entitled one to be abrasive, imprudent, and occasionally highly irrational. It owed much to longstanding codes of chivalric honor and patterns of aggressive, violent behavior long associated with feudal aristocratic privilege. And it can be seen as having appropriated what were perceived in gendered terms as distinctly male habits of responding to people and events with forcefulness, aggression, and assertiveness as a way of both defending and affirming collective and individual honor. Either way, some of the male practitioners in question who turned to authorship clearly wanted to level out the social playing field in their discourses and envision themselves through their varied modes of temperate or intemperate comportment as near equals in a highly stratified world of extremely competitive men, precisely when their relationship with their (typically, but not exclusively, male) superiors was, and always would remain, hierarchically arranged rather than laterally configured in society. To this end, they occasionally pictured themselves in a primarily male-dominated professional world collaborating with their social superiors in the spirit of mutually reinforcing processes of exchange. So configured, they occasionally idealized their relationships with their male superiors as reciprocal, perhaps most blatantly in Filarete’s (Antonio Averlino’s) treatise on architecture, which, as Long has thoughtfully posited, establishes a sort of conceptual “trading zone” where ideas could be fruitfully exchanged in a manner that perhaps looks ahead to the sorts of interactions that formally took place within the scientific communities of the seventeenth century.73
Along with teaching and thinking about character and conduct, as well as instructing us on how to interact with the cultural elite in the context of applying an art as a form of specialized knowledge, some of these discourses are both reflective and instructive of burgeoning aesthetic values and address what we might broadly call, partly in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “taste.” Consider in this context Vasari’s monumental Le vite, which offers us not only a host of exemplary biographies of visual artists, replete with colorful tales about their sometimes fascinating personalities, along with abundant information—both accurate and erroneous—about the products of their labors, but also a lengthy introductory section, expanded in the second edition, on highly technical matters related to the three principal arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. As a result, when we come to Le vite we readily presume, on the one hand, that many of the rules that define the art of the painter, sculptor, and architect—the very same rules that define a knowledge about and rational ability to represent a variety of concepts, such as grace, harmony, sweetness, and urbanity—spoke to desirable qualities that constituted part of the shared vocabulary aimed at describing and evaluating visual art in the period. Hence Vasari’s Le vite can be taken, as it so often is, as a document that reflects a broad-based horizon of expectations. In part it provides us retrospectively with an understanding of what constituted the period eye of the Italian Renaissance.74 Consequently, as scholars we regularly consult Le vite to get an historicized understanding of how some people collectively viewed visual art at the time and thereby learn some of the critical terms they applied to it as the product of a supremely rational techne.
On the other hand, when we come to Vasari’s Le vite, we can also envision it as a book of instruction that taught readers of the period how to appreciate visual art so that they might better know what they, as nonpractitioners, should value when they looked at visual art, unpacked its formal construction, and situated artifacts in a broader historical development. In this regard, Vasari was not just defining accepted rules of a certain community related to a particular art as a form of specialized knowledge worthy of respect. He was also consciously fashioning how we, as potential viewers and consumers, are expected to make careful distinctions, thereby teaching us what to look for in assessing whether a painter, sculptor, or architect is indeed “excellent” in his art—if he knows the rules of the art, if he adheres to them too slavishly, or if he transcends them by liberating himself from those very same rules through years of rigorous training. In this respect, Le vite is an edifying book about the very discipline of looking at visual art. It not only trains readers to understand how art is made in the introductory section, thereby reminding us all the more emphatically that the author is indeed a broadly trained artisan fully qualified to talk about the matters at hand—that he has, in rhetorical terms, ethos in the context of his profession and the art underpinning it as a form of specialized knowledge. Vasari’s Le vite also trains its readers to value certain kinds of visual art and, what is more, certain trends in art. And in this respect Le vite taught its readers and potential consumers in the sixteenth century—and thus teaches us today—“taste.” Read Vasari, for instance, and you are led to privilege Florentine and Tuscan art over other “regional” forms of art, as well as, of course, “disegno” (“design” understood as primarily an intellectual practice realized through diligent preparatory drawing before actually applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for hard, defined edges) over “colorito” (“design” understood as more of an intuitive practice realized through coloring as a way of creating forms in the act of applying paint, while demonstrating a predilection for soft, blurry edges). Those visual distinctions mattered to Vasari, presumably they mattered to his readers in search of marking themselves with distinction and in search of understanding visual art, and they still matter to us now—or at least the “us” that makes up an ever-dwindling community of readers still interested in Vasari and the Italian Renaissance.75
Moreover, within the context of thinking about Le vite as a book that edifies by performing for its readers a discipline of looking, Le vite offers us—and offered its readers over four centuries ago—two very different but still interrelated master narratives about the development of visual art in the context of the arts themselves as forms of specialized knowledge.76 One narrative—the narrative we have all grown most accustomed to over the years—is fundamentally heroic in nature. It is grounded in the achievements of primarily exceptional Florentine and Tuscan artists over time, from Cimabue to Giotto to Masaccio to Leonardo and the like. These heroic individuals within Vasari’s discourse gradually uncover, disclose, and make use of the universal rules underpinning the knowledge that makes up their art. That core master narrative, familiar to anyone who has read through even an anthologized version of Le vite, has its ultimate flowering in Michelangelo, particularly in the first Torrentiniana edition of 1550 but also still very much so in the enlarged Giuntina edition of 1568. In this regard, it is crucial that Michelangelo, the telos of this heroic narrative and providential process of artistic awakening, is viewed as inimitable so that his achievements are not readily transferable and always remain historically specific to his hand, his particular, individual, awe-inspiring terribilità, most divine nature,
