Excerpts from Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: the Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist, p. 3: How to reconstruct the status of art and artists in the Renaissance? It is difficult, at this end of the half millenium that separates us from the age, to comprehend fully the culture's obsession with questions of of social rank and with what most of us would be tempted to characterize as its trivial concenrs with class and status. Awareness of differences in social status may have been unusually acute in Renaissance Italy; certainly, the vocabulary for describing these nuances was elaborate, whether it was used to define the nobility of a given family, the political rights accorded a citizen, or the membership in a greater or smaller guild. Filarete's mid-fifteenth century treatise on architecture provides evidence of such consciousness, in his insistence that the scale of a given building be commensurate with the social status of its occupant, and the specific architectural styles be employed only for specific social ranks.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, an individual's personal standing in Italian society depended on many factors: the status of their familty and ancestry, their circle of friends and associates, membership in associations, marriage ties, and so on, but perhaps the most important determinant was the rank attached to occupation. That occupation was always evaluated socially on the basis of its proximity to, or distance from, physical labor. Even in Antiquity, the visual arts had belonged to the category defined as manual; hence, in the Middle Ages they were called the 'mechanical' arts, unlike poetry which, defined as intellectual, was as highly classified as the liberal arts. Poetry's intellectual prestige was based on its alliance to rhetoric in the medieval Trivium, just as music was included in the medieval Quadrivium. Thus, what we today think of as the creation of art was in the early Renaissance defined as the fabrication of artifacts, and the visual artist was characterized as a craftsman with a concomitantly low standing in society....

/p. 4 One strategy in the artistic community's "public relations campaign" to re-classify art as "liberal" was to deny the role played by manual execution in its creation. "Painting is a mental occupation", wrote Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo stated equally firmly, "we paint with our brain, not with our hands".... Leonardo laid down the correct sequence in the creative cycle: the painter must work "first in the mind [mente], and then with the hands [mani]." "Astronomy and other sciences," he said, "proceed by means of manuat activities, but [they] originate in the mind, as does painting, which is first in the mind of him who reflects on it, but," he was obliged to acknowledge," painting cannot achieve perfection without manual participation." The hand was to be understood as an extension of the mind, as in Alberti's claim that his objective in his treatise was to "instruct the painter how he can represent with his hand [mano] what he has understood with his talent [ingenio]...."

So tenacious was the artistic community's long-term struggle for betterment that by the end of the sixteenth century it had succeeded dramatically in renegotiating the standing and the value of both artifact and maker. By 1600 it was possible for an artist to re-invent himself as a creator to be venerated for his godlike powers. Many of the artifacts, taking on a heightened aesthetic character and a mystique of greatness, were redefined as "art." The works of such an artist as Michelangelo were seen as entering a new realm of "genius" that transcended ordinary cultural production.

/p. 13: Chapter 1: Self-Fashioning in Life and Art

Men are not born, but fashioned -Desiderius Erasmus

How a person constructs the relations between "I" and its world is the crucial factor in self-presentation, whether in life or art. Here we address the question of the concept of the self in the early modern period. How did people of a very different age conceive of the self and its relation to the surrounding world? Specifically, what was the relationship between the practitioner of the visual arts and the ambient culture? How did the Renaissance artists reconcile artistic or professional identity as imposed by the culture and that same identity as formed from within by the conscious self? What were the period terms in which they articulated this sense of identity or self?

Our (seemingly natural) conception of the self is in actuality a construct with a long and varied social history. According to the anthropologist Mauss, the category of the "person", the idea of the "self," developed slowly over many centuries and always in relation to contemporary social history. Different cultures held different notions of the self at different times, the construction of each being connected to the culture's particular form of social organization [Mauss, M,"A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self," in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, eds. M. Carrithers, S Collins, and S. Lukes, Cambridge, 1961]....

There was, it has recently been argued, a general tendency beginning in the fifteenth, but accelerating in the sixteenth century, to view the internal self as an agent or subject. One of the primary cultural factors in this development is seen as the emergence of humanism. Questions concerning humankind had not been ignored in the Middle Ages, but Renaissance humanists are thought to have paid more attention to the problems and experience of the human person than their predecessors. Indeed, the questions encountered by man and his life in this world were more pervasive in early Renaissance Italy, according to Kristeller, than in classical Antiquity....

/p. 14: "Protagorus... declared that man is the mean and measure of all things," wrote Alberti in 1436. Exploring the current that came together to create "modern identity," Taylor hypothesized that the monumental change in self-understanding that this statement implied had been fed from many sources, one of which was Pico della Mirandola's landmark affirmation of the privileged position for humans within the universe. To explain man's circumstances and his peculiar nature, Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man offered his late Quattrocento version of the creation of man.

Whereas Ficino had assigned to man and his soul a fixed, albeit central, place in the hierarchy of beings, Pico gave his fellow man neither a determined nature nor a fixed place but rather located him outside the hierarchy, givining him greater freedom of choice. The chameleon and the mutability of which it was capable was, he said, to be man's exemplar.

To give man permission to select his own destiny was a new vision of human potential....

/p. 15: Greenblatt has explored the extent to which the upper classes of Elizabethan England -- that is, those who would have been sufficiently educated in Latin letters to read Pico --felt that they could accept the freedom that he offered their class. In England the verb to fashion, a term for the process of creating a distinct, personal style, had long been in use, but in the sixteenth century it took on special connotations as a way of designating the shaping of a given person's identity, as revealed by a distinctive personality or a consistent mode of behavior. Thus, Elizabethans would have agreed with Pico that they had the power to impose a shape on themselves and the ability to control the emerging identity. They were, moreover, increasingly self-conscious and verbal about this "fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process."

It has been argued that one of the primary social factors of the new understanding of the self as an agent was the expanding size of Renaissance courts. Italian Renaissance literature confirms the prevalent interest throughout the culture, but especially at court, in the possibility of self-transformation. Machiavelli's Prince was based on the author's conviction in the ruler's capacity to shape what we would call his public image into whatever form he wished. The metaphor of the world as a stage was endemic at court, where to cut a good figure in public, fare bella figura, was essential to successful participation in sixteenth-century public life. The entire text of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier addresses itself to this issue: the self-confection of the courtier and the development of that controlling behavioral technique called sprezzatura, a technique of performance that created the "illusion of spontaneity, if necessary by careful rehearsal." The chameleon's constant transformations were compared to a form of theatrical representation, and Castiglione likewise conceived of the ideal courtier as an actor who, putting on a mask, consciously shaped his image to blend in with his surroundings and to satisfy his audience. Playing at being himself in public, the courtier would "remember...where he is, and in the presence of whom, [assuming]...apt poses and witty inventions." The resulting performance of eloquent speech, elegant demeanor, ready wit, scholarly attainment, and political acumen would "draw [on him] the eyes of the onlooker," and recommend him to the prince as a close confidante. Who is to say whether life imitated art --that is, whether Castiglione's vision of the courtier as a work of art found its principles and practices already embodied in High Renaissance portraiture --or art, life-- that is, whether artifacts called portraits codified already existing courtly values and practices.