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On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow
Читать онлайн.Название On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812290509
Автор произведения Douglas Biow
Серия Haney Foundation Series
Издательство Ingram
A case in point is Cellini’s treatise on goldsmithing, the work of a near contemporary who lived and labored just a generation after Castiglione.113 Like Castiglione, Cellini (fig. 16) aims to impart a knowledge that is determinate, rule-bound, rational, reliable, and communicable. Since Cellini is writing this discourse with the aim of instructing us about what goes on in the finest possible goldsmithing workshops (fig. 17), we can only assume that Cellini presumes his knowledge is teachable. In a word, he is inculcating an “art” in the classical sense of it as a “techne,” much as Cennino Cennini emphatically did before him when writing about painting in the visual arts.114 And Cellini is transparently open about what he will teach us, undertaking, as he puts it in the preface, “to write about those loveliest secrets and wondrous methods of the great art [arte] of goldsmithing” (1). This is patently the case. If you happen to wake up one morning with a hankering to know everything about goldsmithing in the Italian Renaissance, from how to do complicated filigree work to how to tint a diamond, Cellini is your man. He is open to a fault in providing us with details about his art as a specialized form of knowledge, carrying on for thirty-seven chapters (some fairly long, some quite short) so that in the end we can have a full and informed grasp of the technical ins and outs of goldsmithing. Moreover, if any of the information he is conveying can at all be considered secretive, either because it is the sort of information that might be viewed as constituting the intellectual property of a closed group of highly specialized artisans or because it can be construed as the sort of information that appeared in so many self-styled books of secrets containing the mysteries of a misterium, Cellini in his treatise is repeatedly letting the cat out of the bag as he unveils the “secrets” of his craft. Or at least he is divulging a good portion of those secrets, having, he tells us in the context of talking about just the art of niello alone, “not even said half of what is needed” (9) in order to understand and appreciate fully the nature of that particular branch of goldsmithing as a form of darkened engraving. And as Cellini talks about these matters so openly, he seems to be having a good time of it, taking pleasure in broadcasting so much of what he knows and has learned over his fifty-three years as an exemplary goldsmith, from the year he entered into apprenticeship (1515) to the year the book appeared in print (1568). Yet again like so many practitioners who turned to authorship before him, Cellini is here establishing in rhetorical terms his ethos, his character as an expert within the context of his profession and the form of specialized knowledge of the art underpinning it.
FIGURE 16. Francesco Ferrucci del Tadda (1497–1585), Portrait of Benvenuto Cellini, ca. 1555–1570 (probably after a design by Cellini). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Photo courtesy of Louis A. Waldman.
FIGURE 17. Alessandro Fei (1543–1592), The Goldsmith’s Workshop, ca. 1570. Studiolo of Francesco I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy. Reproduced by permission of Scala/ Art Resource, NY.
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