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  • On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, their Professions, and their Beards by Douglas Biow
  • W. R. Albury
Biow, Douglas, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, their Professions, and their Beards (Haney Foundation), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; cloth; pp. 328; 56 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $55.00, £36.00; ISBN 9780812246711.

Douglas Biow’s work shows how some sixteenth-century Italian men found ways to signal their individuality and stand out from the crowd. The crowd in question was not an amorphous mass of humanity; it was always a specific group with which the person concerned wished to be identified. Such men, therefore, were not the wholly autonomous individuals theorised a century and a half ago by Jacob Burckhardt, because of their need for a corporate identity, nor were they the culturally determined self-fashioners of the New Historicists, because of their ability to improvise a distinctive personal stance within that corporate identity.

The ideal technique for this process of individuation involved three steps, often taken concurrently. First, one had to demonstrate one’s membership in a particular group, in the cases examined here, a profession, broadly defined at the time to include occupational groups such as barbers as well as courtiers, goldsmiths, physicians, and the like. Then, having established one’s professional identity, one had to demonstrate, or at least persuasively claim, outstanding excellence in the art underlying that profession. This could be done either by becoming recognised within the profession itself as a consummate practitioner of the art (e.g., Baldassare Castiglione among courtiers); or alternatively, by appealing to the public and presenting oneself in opposition to the mainstream of the profession as an iconoclastic improver of the art (e.g., Leonardo Fioravanti among physicians). Finally, one could make oneself visually recognisable, not only in person but in one’s portraits, by adopting an accepted article of male fashion, such as the beard increasingly became in sixteenth-century Italy, and wearing it with a distinctive style.

Biow develops this theme in a series of loosely connected chapters; an organisational format which occasionally gives the book the flavour of an essay collection rather than a sustained monograph, but which nevertheless does not detract from the substantial interest of each individual chapter. In some ways, the work can be seen as a sequel to Biow’s In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Stanford University Press, 2010), and it focuses on some of the same characters. Given this relationship between the two books, and the prominence that beards assume in the more recent one, Biow could perhaps have called the present volume On Your Face if he had wanted a title that parodied his own work rather than Oscar Wilde’s. [End Page 260]

W. R. Albury
University of New England
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