Let me begin a reflection on the role of ars and arte in Renaissance Italy, the first such reflection of this book, by sketching out the history of the concept of techne in classical antiquity. By doing so, we will be in a position to see how the Italian Renaissance treatment of it rehearses as well as revises elements that were originally embedded in the classical notion of techne itself. To this end, I examine in the first section of this chapter the general significance of the term “techne” (pl. “technai”) in ancient Greece and then how that term changed,...

Humanism, I maintained in the previous chapter, was a language-based educational and cultural program in Renaissance Italy that did not, in point of fact, have a particular professional bent to it. Yet humanists in Renaissance Italy, the vast majority of them of course being men, did have professional identities, even if humanism itself was “not,” as Lisa Jardine emphatically observes, “job-specific.”¹ Humanists typically worked as secretaries, notaries, chancellors, ambassadors, courtiers, editors, and schoolteachers in private, civic, courtly, business, and ecclesiastical settings. They thus tended to occupy, as Paul Oskar Kristeller observed long ago, certain professions throughout the Italian Renaissance, and...

The various writings of Leonardo Fioravanti (fig. 18), virtually all of which are dedicated to popular medicine, and certainly all of which stand at the antipodes of the sorts of highbrow humanist writings we looked at in the previous chapter, furnish an understanding of Renaissance culture in literary and rhetorical terms in ways that have not always been adequately explored by scholars attending to his life and work as a surgeon/physician. The historian William Eamon, for example, brilliantly disclosed how Fioravanti, as a radical empiric invested in discovering the “secrets of nature,” contributed in a significant way to the development...

“The history of cleanliness,” the historian Peter Burke observed in an article devoted to the topic of cultural history as polyphonic history, constitutes “a meeting-point between studies of the body as a physical object and studies of the wider culture, between purity in the literal and in the metaphorical senses.”¹ Anyone who has thought seriously about the history of cleanliness can certainly attest to the polyphonic nature of it. Historiographically, the history of cleanliness yields no linear master narrative, although some have tried to fashion one.² More to the point, the history of cleanliness must engage multiple sources, from low...

Look at any portrait of elite men in Renaissance Italy before 1500. Take, for instance, a sophisticated humanist: Angelo Poliziano, Pomponio Leto, Ermolao Barbaro, Leon Battista Alberti, Jacopo Sanazzaro, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolomeo Platina, or Giovanni Pontano, for whom wearing a beard, as it turns out, could at times constitute a hideous sight.¹ Or take a rulingclass Florentine patrician, such as Cosimo de’ Medici, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Piero de’ Medici, or any other elite Florentine of the period, much less any other Italian man belonging to the cultural elite before 1500, such as those depicted with sometimes unflattering realism in Andrea...

I end this series of reflections with a work of imaginative literature, Giordano Bruno’s comedy theCandelaio, a rather curious and cumbersome play that has sometimes been read in light of his philosophical positions advanced in his more famous writings, such as hisDe umbris idearum(Concerning the Shadow of Ideas, 1582),Ars reminiscendi(The Art of Memory, 1583), andDe gl’ heroici furori(Concerning Heroic Furors, 1585). But the play, I think it is fair to say, does not seem to be philosophically serious in nature, the way, say, some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist plays are, and a case...