On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards By Douglas Biow (review)

The question of individualism has long bedeviled studies of the Italian Renaissance. For Burckhardt, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, fifteenth-century elites “discovered” the firm identity of the self-controlled individual who crafted the Renaissance state “as a work of art.”¹ Most recently Ruggiero turned Burckhardt’s famous thesis on its head, arguing that the period crafted the individual as a kind of work of art and discovered the idea of the state.² Among the many others who attempted to answer the question are Greenblatt, who sees the autonomous individual as an illusion created by the process of self-fashioning, and Martin, who considers Renaissance individualism a myth.³

These different interpretations derive, in large part, from the assumptions of the more literary disciplines tending to hold onto a Burckhardtian notion of the individual more ardently than social or art historians.⁴ Biow breaks through these disciplinary barriers with a truly interdisciplinary method that examines how men (and only men) in Renaissance Italy conceptualized their identities through art, literature, humanist discourse, medical treatises, and how-to books. Although close textual readings are his forte, he fully engages the life experiences of his subjects, including how, for example, Leonardo Fioravanti, the notorious maverick physician, constructed himself through print.

The strongest readings in the book concern the professions—the manner by which Renaissance writers, such as Baldassare Castiglione, Benvenuto Cellini, and Niccolò Machiavelli, among others, tried to codify the rules for becoming a successful courtier, sculptor, or prince. Biow shows with considerable elegance, however, how the secrets of individual professionals—that peculiar combination of personal attributes and technique (arte)—remained a mystery to these writers. The recurring theme in these texts was the nescio quid, the “I don’t know” answer to what made a professional successful, that ineffableness of his “prudence,” “grazia,” “sprezzatura,” or “virtù.” To be a professional was to repudiate aristocratic privilege by acquiring a certain arte, but how to sculpt like Cellini was always complex, extremely difficult, and ultimately indescribable.

Biow makes an intriguing case about the fashionable beards that elite men in sixteenth-century Italy grew, as shown in portraits, to create their identities. He argues that this recourse to facial hair was a manifestation of anxiety about the loss of political independence during the Italian wars and the need to adapt to a court society in which discretion and the disguising of raw emotions became essential. The witty, clever courtier, who was a master of words rather than the sword, created a new way to demonstrate masculinity while masking his vulnerability. These “reflections,” as Biow calls them, offer a new answer to the old question. The male individual, who was mysteriously “marked by a peculiar striking character” through his professional actions, his distinctive beard, and his self-performance, became one of the greatest inventions of the Italian Renaissance (17).