On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy : : Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards / / Douglas Biow.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2015
• VerfasserIn: Biow, Douglas,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Haney Foundation Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 56 illus.

In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not deny the strong cultural and historical constraints that placed limits on identity formation in the early modern period. Still, as he contends in this witty, reflective, and generously illustrated book, the category of the individual was important and highly complex for a variety of men in this particular time and place, for both those who belonged to the elite and those who aspired to be part of it.Biow explores the individual in light of early modern Italy's new patronage systems, educational programs, and work opportunities in the context of an increased investment in professionalization, the changing status of artisans and artists, and shifting attitudes about the ideology of work, fashion, and etiquette. He turns his attention to figures familiar (Benvenuto Cellini, Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari) and somewhat less so (the surgeon-physician Leonardo Fioravanti, the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio). One could excel as an individual, he demonstrates, by possessing an indefinable nescio quid, by acquiring, theorizing, and putting into practice a distinct body of professional knowledge, or by displaying the exclusively male adornment of impressively designed facial hair. Focusing on these and other matters, he reveals how we significantly impoverish our understanding of the past if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the Italian and the broader European Renaissance.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- PART I. PROFESSIONALISM -- Chapter 1. Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy-Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne -- Chapter 2. Reflections on Professions and Humanism in Renaissance Italy and the Humanities Today -- PART II. MAVERICKS -- Chapter 3. Constructing a Maverick Physician in Print: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Leonardo Fioravanti's Writings -- Chapter 4. Visualizing Cleanliness, Visualizing Washerwomen in Venice and Renaissance Italy: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Jacopo Tintoretto's Jews in the Desert -- PART III. BEARDS -- Chapter 5. Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard -- Chapter 6. Manly Matters: Reflections on Giordano Bruno's Candelaio, and the Theatrical and Social Function of Beards in Sixteenth-Century Italy -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments