Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or

corporation, only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air . . .
man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such- Jacob Burckhardt
In one of the most oft-quoted passages, Jacob Burckhardt, Peter Burke comments, “invented”
this idea of Renaissance individualism. ' He discussed the passion for fame and its corrective,
the new sense of ridicule, all under the general rubric of 'the development of the individual'.
For the use of this 'blanket term', he has been severely criticized. As it happens, Burckhardt
came to be rather sceptical about the interpretation he had launched, and towards the end of
his life he confessed that he may have been wrong.
The idea of the self, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out half a century ago, is not
natural. It is a social construct, and it has a social history. Indeed, the concept of person
current (indeed, taken for granted) in a particular culture needs to be understood if we are to
comprehend that culture, and as another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz suggested, it is a
good way into that culture for an outsider.
If we ask about the concept of person current among elites in Renaissance Italy, we may find
it useful to distinguish the self-consciousness with which Burckhardt was particularly
concerned from self-assertiveness, and both from the idea of the unique individual. The idea
of the uniqueness of the individual goes with that of a personal style in painting or writing. At
the court of Urbino, the poet Bernardo Accolti went by the nickname L'unico Aretino. The
poet Vittoria Colonna described Michelangelo as unico (only). In his biographies, the
bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci often refers to men as 'singular'.
Burckhardt (1944, p. 87f) argued that the craving for fame was a new phenomenon in the
Renaissance. The Dutch historian Huizinga retorted that on the contrary, it was 'essentially
the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times'. The romances of chivalry do indeed
suggest that the desire for fame was one of the leading motives of medieval knights, so what
Burckhardt noticed may have been no more than the demilitarization of glory. However, it is
remarkable quite how often self-assertion words occur in the Italian literature of this period.
Among them we find 'competition’, 'emulation', 'glory'; 'envy', 'honour', 'shame'; 'valour'; and,
hardest of all to translate, a concept of great importance in the period referring to personal
worth, which we have already met when discussing its complementary opposite, fortune:
virtu.
Psychologists would say that if words of this kind occur with unusual frequency in a
particular text, as they do, for example, in the dialogue on the family by the humanist Leon
Battista Alberti, then its author is likely to have had an above-average achievement drive,
which in Alberti's case his career does nothing to refute. Florentines in general were
unusually concerned with achievement is suggested by the novelle of the period, which often
deal with the humiliation of a rival; by the institutionalization of competitions between
artists; by the sharp tongues and the envy in the artistic community, as recorded by Vasari,
notably in his life of Castagno; and, not least, by the remarkable creative record of that city.
At any rate self-assertion was an important part of the Tuscan image of man. The humanists
Bruni and Alberti both described Hfe as a race. Bruni wrote that some 'do not run in the race,
or when they start, become tired and give up half way'; Alberti, that life was a regatta in
which there were only a few prizes. Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists to draw in
company because 'a sound envy' would act as a stimulus to do better.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that competition encourages self-consciousness, and
interesting to discover that the Tuscan evidence for this kind of individualism is once again
richer than anything to be found elsewhere. The classic phrase of the Delphic oracle, 'know
thyself, quoted by Marsilio Ficino among others, was taken seriously in the period, although
it was sometimes given a more worldly interpretation than was originally intended.
The most direct evidence of self-awareness is that of autobiographies, or more exactly (since
the modern term 'autobiography' encourages an anachronistic view of the genre) of diaries
and journals written in the first person, of which there are about a hundred surviving from
Florence alone. Even if these memoranda were not intended to express self-awareness, they
may have helped to create it. Rather more personal in style are the autobiographies of pope
Pius II (written, like Caesar's, in the third person, but none the less self-assertive for that), of
Guicciardini (a brief but revealing memoir), of the physician Girolamo Cardano (a Lombard,
for once, not a Florentine) and of the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.
Autobiographies are not the only evidence for the self-consciousness of Renaissance Italians.
There are also paintings. Portraits were often hung in family groups and commissioned for
family reasons, but self-portaits are another matter. Most of them are not pictures in their own
right but representations of the artist in the corner of a painting devoted to something else,
like Raphael in his School of Athens. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, we find
self-portraits in the strict sense by Parmigianino, for example, and Vasari, and more than one
by Titian. They remind us of the importance of the mirrors manufactured in this period, in
Venice in particular. Mirrors may well have encouraged self-awareness according to Burke.
Evidence of self-awareness is also provided by the conduct books, of which the most famous
are Castiglione's Courtier (1528), Giovanni Delia Casa's Galateo (1558) and the Civil
Conversation of Stefano Guazzo (1574). All three are manuals for the 'presentation of self in
everyday life' as the sociologist Erving Goffman puts it —instructions in the art of playing
one's social role gracefully in public. They inculcate conformity to a code of good manners
rather than the expression of a personal style of behaviour, but they are nothing if not self-
conscious themselves and they encourage self-consciousness in the reader.
Castiglione recommends a certain 'negligence to show that 'whatever is said or done has been
done without pains and virtually without thought', but he admits that this kind of spontaneity
has to be rehearsed. It is the art which conceals art, and he goes on to compare the courtier to
a painter. The 'grace' {grazia) with which he was so much concerned was, as we have seen, a
central concept in the art criticism of his time. It is hard to decide whether to call Castiglione
a painter among courtiers or his friend Raphael a courtier among painters, but the connections
between their two domains are clear enough. The parallel was clear to Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which he has God say to man that
'as though the maker or moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape
thou shalt prefer'.