LITMIR.BIZ

      Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne

      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, and in many respects did not change, as it evolved into ars from ancient Rome through the European Middle Ages. Readers not particularly interested in the complex evolution of the concept of techne over almost two thousand years, which I try to compress into as few pages as reasonably possible, may jump directly to the second section, where I provide an overview of the role and value of ars and arte as forms of knowledge in Renaissance Italy, exemplifying some of the issues explored in my discussion by examining briefly the writings of three very different sixteenth-century practitioners of arts: Leonardo Fioravanti, Vannoccio Biringuccio, and Giorgio Vasari. In the third section, having furnished a broad context for an understanding of the concepts of techne, ars, and arte from classical antiquity to the sixteenth century (devoting in the process special attention to the Italian Renaissance), I offer a more focused and extended reading of two very different treatises written at roughly the same time by two very different practitioners versed in two very different arts: Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise on the art of the courtier and Benvenuto Cellini’s on the art of the goldsmith. In the fourth and final section, I explore what I take to be both significant and new about the Italian Renaissance treatment of the arts and then investigate some salient aspects of Jacob Burckhardt’s famous claim that the very concept of art (in his terms “Kunst”) lay at the heart of what defined the Italian Renaissance—a claim that still resonates in scholarly literature today and undergirds discussions about Renaissance self-fashioning, although in a manner that elicits serious qualifications on the part of a variety of literary, intellectual, art, and cultural historians when it comes to thinking about the notion of the individual, be it a male or female individual, in the period.

      Before turning to these matters, however, I should clarify a few points about terminology. Because the term “techne” evolves not only conceptually but also linguistically as we move from ancient Greece to ancient Rome (when the term “ars” is used) to the European Middle Ages (when both the terms “ars” and “arte,” among others, are used) to finally sixteenth-century Italy (when, again, both ars and arte are used), I typically employ the three terms selectively in the context of the period examined at any given point in my discussion. It seemed to me perverse and historically inaccurate to do otherwise, to use the term “techne,” for instance, when speaking of the Italian Renaissance or, inversely, to speak about ars or arte when talking about ancient Greece. Moreover, when talking about guilds, which were, of course, “arts” (artes/arti), I refer to them directly as guilds so as to avoid, I hope, confusion in terminology. Furthermore, where it seems to me clear from the general discussion that I do not need to employ the terms “techne,” “ars,” and “arte” over and over again to make it evident to readers that the terms were used in specific periods and places, I have adopted the English “art” and “arts,” with the understanding throughout my discussion, however, that I am not referring to the fine arts or visual arts, which is how we conventionally tend to think of the word “art” today, but all the practical and productive arts generally. Finally, I distinguish from time to time between the practical arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at doing something) and the productive arts (defined here broadly as arts directed at making something) where it seemed to me necessary and appropriate to do so, but the distinction between the two should always be borne in mind as a significant and durable one during the longue durée covered in this chapter, even when the distinction is not always fully articulated in my discussion, and even when the distinction itself changed over time and can be perceived as blurry in the periods themselves.¹