is fundamentally institutional in spirit. It is grounded, as Marco Ruffini has perceptively observed, in a corporate structure of artistic production that goes all the way back to the medieval guild system, finds expression in such exemplary artists as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, and Raphael with their extensive workshops, and has its great flowering in the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Design), of which Vasari was such a vital and inspirational participant. The climax of one master narrative of historical artistic development—the heroic life work of the individual Michelangelo at the service of single patrons—in fact prepares for the upswing of the other—the rise of institutional visual art produced by an impersonal collectivity at the service of a bureaucratic “state.”78 Hence Michelangelo becomes an even more exceptional figure for Vasari within Le vite as these two master narratives—one valuing and privileging individuals, the other valuing and privileging collectivities—strategically dovetail at the end. Accordingly, Michelangelo is viewed not only as the heroic master of the three major visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as Vasari makes plain, but also as the mythical foundational hero whose providential and timely death, mourned in an elaborate funeral staged by the Accademia, makes possible the new professionalizing corporate structure of visual art of Vasari’s time—an impersonal, discipline-bound, transhistorical, and rigorously rule-governed art that will be fashioned by and through an academy, so much so that it will become, as Ruffini has elegantly phrased it, “an art without an author.”
Read this way, Le vite is not just about promoting rules for a certain type of visual art based on a form of specialized knowledge that Vasari values and seeks to elevate socially as an accomplished practitioner. Nor is it just about promoting a discipline of looking at works of visual art and understanding how they are skillfully made. Nor is it just about promoting a particular group of exemplary artists, or about promoting primarily Florentine and Tuscan artists. Nor is it just about promoting the author as a learned practitioner with a thorough command of his art within a book that ineluctably comes off as a self-reflexive ego document in the very moment that it talks primarily about other people’s lives. Nor is it just a book about promoting a heroic conception of the development of visual art with individual artists contributing to the punctuated evolution of the artist’s craft presented as possessing a form of specialized knowledge. Nor even, as I have argued elsewhere, is it just a book about promoting rules of behavior for artists (and allowing for exceptions to those rules for exceptional artists) in a period so feverishly committed to codifying conduct and civility yet so clearly peopled by larger-than-life, aggressive male personalities from Cesare Borgia to Julius II. Le vite, as Ruffini has brilliantly demonstrated, is also very much about promoting an institutional approach to an art and, as a result, a certain institutionalizing of taste as a marker of distinction. This strategy of shaping what we would probably call today a sort of “corporate taste” within a discourse about an art by a practitioner writing about the art in question is new, and it finds its first forceful and most seminal expression in the Italian Renaissance in Vasari’s Le vite.79
Finally, many of these discourses composed by practitioners about their arts address matters connected to issues of educability and the possibility (or fantasy) of social mobility. Framed in terms of our contemporary belief systems, knowledge creates opportunities for both employment and social access, and a key way of acquiring knowledge, we readily assume (and we are invited to assume today by publishers and educators alike through all sorts of pedagogical hype), is through books (or electronic versions of books on an ever-changing array of inventive platforms). Want to be a goldsmith? Learn the lessons in Cellini’s treatise.80 Want to be an architect? Learn from Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, or Andrea Palladio.81 Want to be a metallurgist to meet a demand for the exploration and exploitation of minerals for a variety of commercial and productive ends, including the fabrication of armaments and the minting of coins? Read Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia, which displays multiple designs of how that art can be profitably put into practice, beginning with the very border of the frontispiece (fig. 9). Want to be a builder of forts, an inventor of war machines and armaments, a military leader, a soldier? There are a host of informative printed books to enjoy on the topic, too many to even begin to list, but they are certainly there to edify you.82 Want to be a visual artist? Learn from Cennino Cennini, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, and, up to a point, Gian Paolo Lomazzo.83 Want to be a courtier, a surgeon, a secretary, an ambassador—even a cook or steward? Learn from Baldassare Castiglione, Leonardo Fioravanti, Andrea Nati, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Angelo Ingegneri, Giambattista Guarini, Bartolomeo Zucchi, Tomaso Costo, Benedetto Pucci, Ermolao Barbaro, and Cristoforo Messisbugo, among others.84 An art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly explored in the Italian Renaissance through an unprecedented flourishing of discourses written by practitioners invested in a variety of professions. What is more, a host of nonpractitioners—not to be outdone—contributed to the outpouring of discourses about arts in Renaissance Italy, from a mere handful of authors who remain well-known in academia (Niccolò Machiavelli writing on princes and the work of military leaders, Leon Battista Alberti writing on painters, and Torquato Tasso writing on secretaries and ambassadors),85 to those who are reasonably well-known by specialists within subdisciplines (Francesco Sansovino writing on secretaries, Roberto Valturio writing on military science, and Paolo Cortesi writing on cardinals),86 to those who remain obscure even for academics occasionally toiling away in what Herman Melville would have no doubt called sub-sub-subdisciplines (Gabriele Zinano, for instance, writing on secretaries, Ottaviano Maggi writing on ambassadors, and a plethora of authors writing about soldiery and related military tasks).87
Collectively and individually, these discourses serve to edify, and at face value the knowledge purveyed in them about a particular art is presented not secretively but openly, offering up information in the spirit of full disclosure.88 People eager to pursue or perfect a career as a painter, architect, medic, surgeon, ambassador, sculptor, engineer, goldsmith, soldier, ambassador, or secretary—even, to be sure, as a new prince terrorizing his subjects in order to secure his position and state or a worldly cardinal climbing the social food chain by building and running the household of a magnificent palace in Rome—can, it would seem, begin at the very least by reading these edifying discourses, which often enough reveal how one can go about trying to succeed in a particular profession grounded in an art with its distinct knowledge. In the Italian Renaissance, mastery of an art as a form of specialized knowledge was repeatedly presented in these discourses as something to be desired, in which the ability to transform objects or people’s minds and abilities symbolized the artists’—understood as the makers’ or doers’—protean capacity to potentially change themselves in society by becoming acknowledged, exemplary masters through discipline and self-control as well as, at times, masters over others by giving shape to other people’s lives and by directing them toward purposive ends. Moreover, acquiring mastery over an art can be viewed as the source of no small self-satisfaction on the part of practitioners who have actively pursued professional life and can take personal pleasure in it and the specialized knowledge necessary to succeed in it.
And yet the crucial, underlying issue about how to go about actually acquiring the specialized knowledge of an art and then apply it masterfully, thereby becoming through some calculated process of inculcation and training a firstrate practitioner, can turn out to be exceedingly complex in some of these discourses—far more complex than it may at least at first glance seem to be. As these books divulge information openly about an art as it is configured as necessary for success in a profession, they often lay claim to the value of a particular profession so that people will want to enter it and admire it, and they make the profession and the art underpinning it appear accessible by presenting the knowledge related to it as eminently learnable. But in at least a few cases, the authors of these books adopt a strategy of enticing and openly edifying readers only—in truth—to close off access to the profession they want everyone to admire and learn about by mystifying the very process by which one can actually acquire the ability to become a true acknowledged master over the art in question. It is therefore essential that some of these discourses function as ego documents.
