The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (review)

Tomaso Garzoni's fascinating work, The Universal Piazza of All the Professions of the World, like a pebble tossed into a pond, provides the central core that moves this study of the culture of the professions in late Renaissance Italy. Republished twenty-nine times in Venice alone between 1585 and 1683, Garzoni's proto-encyclopedic examination of more than 150 professional categories is the focus of the central chapters of the book (3 and 4), and the other chapters ripple out from them, discussing a rich and understudied group of literary texts that address the meanings of work and the professions. Anticipatory ripples are provided by early chapters, which discuss works that McClure sees leading up to, and influencing, Garzoni and post-ripples are provided in later chapters that examine texts that flesh out a sixteenth-century flourishing of interest in the topic.

Apparently providing a revisionary perspective on the received wisdom that a progressive "aristocratization" of culture and society took place in Renaissance Italy, McClure argues that the literature of the period actually saw a deepening interest in, and understanding of, the professions and their culture. A quick overview of humanist and theological backgrounds opens the discussion, followed by a richer look at the way in which jokes, carnival songs, and parlor games reveal, often in ironic and playful ways, this growing interest. The central Garzoni chapters follow, examining Garzoni from the perspective of authorial intention, but breaking from tradition by not proclaiming a consistent voice. McClure notes, for example, that Garzoni slipped easily from lauding the professions to condemning them and that he often used irony to meld the high and low even as he analytically separated them. Two points are central, however: that, in the end, Garzoni's work had a leveling effect on the professions (it "self-consciously sought to disrupt traditional hierarchies") and that it signaled "a fuller discovery and glorification of the lower arts" (209).

The work concludes with chapters that examine late Renaissance texts about dress, ritual, and death for their attitudes toward the professions—most notably, Cesare Vecellio's On the Ancient and Modern Dress of Diverse Parts of the World (1598) and Fabio Glissenti's revealing, Moral Discourse Against the Displeasure of Dying (1596), which, for McClure, confirm that "the silent and inglorious arts . . . [had] found their voice" (215).

This excellent book provides a challenging new perspective on the meaning and place of the professions in Renaissance culture. But like all works that range widely and make big claims, it will elicit controversy. If McClure had melded his literary studies with the rich material on the topic in Italian archives and the secondary literature based on them, his book and his conclusions might well have been different. A closer analysis of the relationship in practice between nobility and the higher professions might have also been useful, given that Venetian nobles were merchants by tradition and that many of the great families, like the Medici in Florence, were bankers or merchants with strong economic ties to the trades. Finally, the increased interest in the professions at the end of the Renaissance might have coincided with an increased emphasis on social hierarchy not with the result of conferring more respect on the lower professions, as McClure claims, but of keeping them in their proper places.