yet complementary, angles. My focus in these parts has been principally on the sixteenth century because during that period, for reasons that will become evident as the book unfolds, we witness in Italy a marked increase in the investment in the individual among men in a broad array of activities—an investment that will flower in the seventeenth century in the visual arts, for instance, in the cult of the individual. Moreover, as we move from one part to another of this book, we should bear in mind the following: Although the word “individuo” was broadly understood in the Italian Renaissance to mean “indivisible,” as it is defined in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Lexicon of the Academy of the Crusca, 1612) in light of standard usages of the word as a “dialectical term” in, say, theological argumentation,6 during the same period the word “individuo” also began to acquire the more familiar modern meaning, which first gained currency in England in the mid- to late 1600s, of “distinguished from others by attributes of its own,” “marked by a peculiar and striking character,” and “pertaining or peculiar to a single person or thing or some one member of a class” (Oxford English Dictionary). In this regard, it is worth noting that the word “individuo” is also furnished with the meaning of “cosa particolare” (“a particular/specific/identifying thing”) in the Vocabolario della Crusca and eventually provided with apposite examples from the sixteenth century in later editions,7 all of which suggests that sometime in the late Renaissance the word “individuo” in Italy began to acquire the meaning we might roughly associate with it today, at least in a very generic way.8 In any event, it is hardly necessary for a word to have been actively and pervasively used in a period in order for it to serve as a placeholder for scholars talking about a concept that otherwise possessed meaning in some measure for people in the past. We customarily employ the words “selfhood,” “agency,” “interiority,” and “subjectivity,” for instance, to talk about matters related to identity in the European Renaissance generally, even though those particular words were hardly current in the period either, at least as we are accustomed to conceptualizing them today. That said, one of the principal burdens of this book is to demonstrate that some men in Renaissance Italy thought in terms of the concept of the “individual,” that it was a concept that thus had significant cultural force in the period, and that a number of men expressed themselves as individuals through the verbal and visual means that they had at their disposal. It is not a burden of this book to argue for the notion that the concept of the individual in the Enlightenment, Romantic, or post-Romantic sense of the term as it has been explored in the modern disciplines of philosophy and sociology emerged for the first time in Renaissance Italy, a period that runs, I take it, from roughly 1350 to 1600. Nor is it a burden of this book to trace a genealogy of the concept of the individual from the Italian Renaissance to the modern era, however much it occasionally draws comparisons between the present and the past in an effort to articulate salient convergences and differences.
Part I focuses on a topic of broad cultural interest of the period: professionalism. It shows how a few men primarily in the sixteenth century deliberately mystified the success of masterful individuals in a profession—a profession that was, to be sure, collectively defined by, as, and for a male group. In Chapter 1, “Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne,” I examine both Baldassare Castiglione’s landmark Il cortegiano (The Courtier) and Benvenuto Cellini’s Due trattati di oreficeria e scultura (Two Treatises on Goldsmithing and Sculpture) as complex discourses written by practitioners who appear to invite everyone interested in the profession to participate in it by openly disclosing the rules of their arts. At the same time, however, Castiglione and Cellini reveal that only a privileged group of unique men, a select few who already somehow possess a certain mysterious, innate quality (effectively a nescio quid), can successfully master the art of the profession in question so that they emerge as not just exemplary individuals but inimitable ones worthy of admiration and wonder. In Chapter 2, “Reflections on Professions and Humanism in Renaissance Italy and the Humanities Today,” I examine principally Ermolao Barbaro’s De officio legati (On the Duty of the Ambassador), Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince), Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections), Torquato Tasso’s Il secretario (The Secretary), and, once more, albeit briefly, Castiglione’s Il cortegiano. My aim here is to demonstrate how five different men who were either humanists or greatly indebted to humanism engaged the topic of professional identity in their writings. They did so, I argue, to reveal how certain individuals, thanks in large measure to that enigmatic nescio quid, manage to succeed in a profession while others prove only moderately adept at it or else fail miserably in it. In this way the authors here examined mystify the very process by which a person can acquire the skills necessary to achieve professional mastery through the diligent application of an art.
Part II focuses on the topic of “mavericks” in the context of issues related to professional self-definition, concentrating more exclusively on test cases of individuals in the paired chapters: one test case focuses on a doctor working in the practical arts, the other a painter working in the productive arts. Specifically, this part of the book examines how two men—the surgeon/physician Leonardo Fioravanti and the painter Jacopo Tintoretto—embedded themselves in Venetian culture and owed their identities in great measure to their strong associations with the institutions, customs, and sodalities of that city while, at the same time, they worked hard to stand out from it as individuals in their chosen professions. In the process, they often challenged the professional or local cultures in which they labored and to which they were indebted for their sense of themselves as individuals. Fioravanti did so in the process of fashioning an aggressive and highly personalized voice in print, Tintoretto in the process of fashioning an aggressive and highly personalized style in painting. In Chapter 3, the first chapter of the two in this part, “Constructing a Maverick Physician in Print: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Leonardo Fioravanti’s Writings,” I examine how a radical empiric openly challenges the institutionalized practices of medicine and its elite, bookish, Latin-based culture. Fioravanti does so by taking advantage of the thriving book industry of Venice and aggressively presenting himself through the medium of print culture and in the popularizing language of the vernacular as a unique—indeed, a rather defiant and iconoclastic—individual operating within his chosen profession of medicine. In Chapter 4, “Visualizing Cleanliness, Visualizing Washerwomen in Venice and Renaissance Italy: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Jacopo Tintoretto’s Jews in the Desert,” I turn to a male painter who incorporates into a large religious canvas the prominent image of washerwomen as gendered symbols of Venetian refinement, purity, and piety. At the same time, he aggressively asserts his individuality in the unique manner in which he renders those washerwomen by placing them conspicuously in the center of his canvas. In this way, they function not only as symbols of the myth of Venice (that is, of the uniqueness of Venice as a harmonious republic in which the individual is ideally suppressed in favor of an all-embracing social and religious collectivity) but also as symbols of the uniqueness of Tintoretto himself—a uniqueness that defines him within Venetian culture as a maverick artist who stands out from the collectivity and feels free to assert his individuality through a signature style, in particular by focusing on the lower classes in a novel way.
In the first two parts we move from a matter of broad cultural concern for a variety of men (“professionalism”) to specific, individual cases of two male professionals in the practical and productive arts (the “mavericks” Fioravanti and Tintoretto). In the third and final part we concentrate more narrowly on a single distinguishing physical sign associated strictly with men as we also move from matters that are primarily intellective in nature (humanism and theories of knowledge underpinning the arts, for instance, in Part I) to those
