Chapter One: A Renaissance Keyword

ch a P t er on e A Renaissance Keyword Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true study of aesthetics. — walter Pater, studies in the history of the re nais sance (1873) t his book e x Pl or es grace as a complex keyword of the Italian Renaissance. Grace surfaces time and again in the period’s discussions of the individual pursuit of the good life and in the collective quest to determine the best means to a harmonious society. It rises to prominence in theological debates about the soul’s salvation and in secular debates about how best to live at court. It plays a pivotal role in the humanist campaign to develop a shared literary language, and it features prominently in the efforts of writers and artists to express the full potential of mankind. It is often treated at the level of a topic in the literate culture of the Italian Renaissance, but it is employed as an instrument of persuasion too, one whose sound was as sweet as it effects were amazing. The title of this book is at once revealing of its ambition and potentially deceptive. Take the first definite article: is there any such thing as ‘the grace of the Italian Renaissance’? Studies have been written about the various different types of grace that abound in Renaissance Italy: grace as an aesthetic quality that characterises the period’s finest art; grace as the affable and pleasing manners of its best courtiers and ladies; grace as the gift from God that was so contested during the Reformation; grace in [ 12 ] a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 13 ] relation to the exchange of favours at the heart of the early modern patronage system. Which of these graces does ‘the grace’ in this book’s title denote? The answer is all of them, and a few more besides. A central aim here is to embrace the semantic abundance of grace and to explore what happens when it crosses the boundaries between art, literature, social discourse, gender relations, theology, and politics. The definite article in the title is therefore not designed to suggest that there was just one grace in Renaissance Italy nor that the grace found in different settings was always one and the same thing. Rather, it indicates the book’s focus on a single keyword that unites a range of qualities and characteristics, rather like a single family name brings together many individual members, linked by elemental genetic traits. The second half of the title equally deserves comment: Was there any such thing as ‘the Italian Renaissance’? ‘Italy’ itself was an aspiration rather than a reality during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the peninsula had no central seat of power, capital city, common currency, or language. It was not until 1871 that the peninsula became a united kingdom with Rome as its capital. What is now a republic was, in the early modern period, a complicated and frequently riven patchwork of nationstates of various sizes and structures. Pre-nineteenth-century ‘Italy’ is, therefore, a problematic concept. Yet the notion of italianità (Italian-ness) did exist in early modern literature, and writers from Dante to Petrarch and Ariosto called on their italici brothers to free their dolci campi from perfidious foreign invaders.1 Political commentators and historians, too, discussed the ways and means by which ‘l’Italia’ could withstand attack from French, Spanish, and Germanic forces.2 The quest for italianità found full expression in the early modern questione della lingua, that debate about language whereby intellectuals sought a common vernacular idiom to replace Latin as the language of literature. It was present, too, in Italian humanism as an intellectual movement whose revival of antiquity brought remembrance of a time when Roman emperors had made the country their principal domain and when Roman orators, rhetoricians, and poets had exemplified its virtues. Moreover, a sense of italianità was assured by the power of the Vatican over Italian territories, which gave the debates about religion that raged across Europe a distinctive national character. ‘Italy’ did exist in the early modern period, then, in the particular characteristics of the peninsula’s internal concerns and quarrels, in the contrast between it and other European nation-states, and in the literary and artistic hopes and aspirations of many of its inhabitants. Grace, this book argues, was central in each of these contexts. [ 14 ] ch a Pter 1 Grace became a mark of distinction in the questione della lingua and in the new language of literature. It was reenergised by the recovery of ancient texts that extolled its virtues as an instrument of persuasion in the language and visual arts. And it was the central bone of contention in Reformation and Counter-Reformation discussions about the nature of God’s intervention in human salvation. Within each of these contexts, grace became a defining quality that Italians made their own. It came to represent a means of claiming distinction for artists, writers, and thinkers, and of arguing for the preeminence of their chosen fields. The adjective ‘Italian’ in this book’s title is not used blithely, therefore, but with the dual purpose of underlining the italianità of the grace that it studies and of emphasising its centrality to those forces that eventually helped modernday Italy come into being. If the use of ‘Italian’ in this book’s title requires clarification, its use of ‘Renaissance’ does, too. Can we really still speak of ‘the Renaissance’? Debates about whether early modern Italy actually did witness a renaissance have animated scholarship for quite some time. Everyone accepts that something major happened to visual culture during the period 1300– 1600: advances in artistic techniques and topics did occur, as did a revival of the ancient quest for beauty. Yet art historians themselves have shown that, even in artistic circles, cultural regeneration was not unique to that place and time. Italy and Europe had witnessed several ‘renascences’, or revivals of classical antiquity accompanied by a flourishing of literature and art and a sense amongst contemporaries that they lived in a golden age of rebirth, renovation and restoration. Previous European ‘renaissances’, according to Erwin Panofsky, included the Carolingian revival of classical imagery in the ninth century and a twelfth-century revitalization of classical literature in art.3 Panofsky is one scholar amongst many to highlight how exaggerated the claims for a fourteenth- to sixteenthcentury cultural miracle that put an end to centuries of intellectual and artistic darkness were. The ‘Renaissance’ (with a capital ‘R’) that Jacob Burkhardt immortalised in his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1861) was not a singular cultural phenomenon. Moreover, Burckhardt’s ‘Renaissance’ was anything but uniform. In certain important arenas— such as in the lives of most women (to cite just one example)—the cultural revolution was circumscribed, limited to the highest aristocracy living in restricted geographical regions.4 The so-called Italian Renaissance, in other words, was neither unique nor universal. So why persist with that term? Because, this book suggests, grace played a crucial role both in those movements that have characterised the period since Burkhardt’s time as a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 15 ] one of renaissance and in the cultural processes that saw those movements yield to other ones. As such, it complicates and enriches existing accounts of sixteenth-century Italy and raises new questions about the degree to which it was a moment of rebirth and innovation. Grace provides a unique perspective on sixteenth-century Italy, for it rose to prominence in the context of so-called High Renaissance art, yet it also played a pivotal role in its polemical progress towards Mannerism. It was not, therefore, a banner that united artists in their advance towards the full maturity of their discipline, as Giorgio Vasari would have had it, but a locus of encounter and conflict between different ways of conceiving of the visual arts. At the same time, it was a keyword in the humanist revival of classical Latin in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but also in the later promotion of the vernacular as the preferred language of modern literature. It was not, in other words, the outstanding feature and sole preserve of ancient Latins, as certain humanists had argued, but a sign that living languages could carry the same authority and dignity as ‘dead’ ones. Moreover, grace played a significant role in the beginnings of what Norbert Elias has called the ‘civilising process’ in Western society, yet it also evoked the feudal manners of the ‘Dark Ages’ it supposedly left in its wake.5 It evoked, in short, the social graces of great European courts as much as it did the humanist graces of Renaissance Italian ones. Finally, grace was fundamental to the explosion of debates about religion that marked the passage from Renaissance to Reformation. It was, in this respect, as much a Reformation keyword as it was a Renaissance one. Grace marked the climax of the Renaissance, but it also stoked the embers of the past and, at the same time, heralded the dawn of a new age. It stands to reveal, therefore, not just one perspective on sixteenth-century Italy but different ways of looking at its culture and society and, as such, goes to the heart of the question: Just what was the Italian Renaissance? Evoking the word in this book’s title is an invitation to consider both ‘grace’ and the concept of ‘the Renaissance’ afresh, and to think of the former as a sort of crucible in which the continuities and innovations, the friendships and rivalries, the rebirths and disintegrations we still sometimes think of as ‘Renaissance’ were formed. Amazing Grace Grace is not, of course, a keyword of sixteenth-century Italy alone. It acts as a crucible for culture and society, spirituality and politics across the centuries, rising time and again to prominence across a range of contexts.6 [ 16 ] ch a Pter 1 On June 26, 2015, to take a particularly public twenty-first-century example, U.S. president Barack Obama delivered a funeral eulogy in which spiritual and rhetorical grace combined with a political force that is rare in contemporary politics. The funeral ceremony was that of the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney, pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, slain the previous week by a white supremacist along with eight of his congregation. Obama’s fortyminute speech paid tribute to the ‘graciousness’ of Reverend Pinckney, ‘his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor’, those qualities ‘that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation’.7 He praised, too, the ‘grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group . . . as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle’, a stranger who was to shoot and kill them. He eulogised the extraordinary grace of the grieving families for the way they responded to that stranger during his bail hearing in court, addressing him—‘in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness’. Their ‘amazing grace’, he said, led him to reflect ‘on this idea of grace’ as a whole. In an oration as powerful yet apparently simple as the eighteenthcentury hymn he evoked (and later went on to sing), Obama’s reflections on the events of June 17 led steadily to the boldest statements of his career about American society and its discontents. ‘As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy’, he declared, ‘God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind’. Turning from the particular circumstances of the massacre to its reflection of American society as a whole, he criticised the widespread blindness in American culture to ‘systemic oppression and racial subjugation’, as well as the endemic failure to see how ‘racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it’. Tackling the most contentious issues in U.S. politics, he condemned the degree to which Americans had been blind to the ‘unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation’ and inveighed against the inability to discern the circumstances that ‘permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career’. The Charleston massacre, he said, was a gift from God, because it allowed Americans to see what they had failed to see before, and offered them a unique opportunity to create historical change. It would be a rejection of the forgiveness expressed by the Charleston families ‘to go back to business as usual’ after the massacre, ‘to settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change’. Grace, he concluded, calls for ‘an open mind—but, more importantly, an open heart’. Through open hearts, he seemed to suggest, grace demands—and a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 17 ] sometimes begets—grace in return and fuels the reciprocal exchange of goodness that should form the bedrock of any civilized society. The speech won widespread acclaim in the media.8 The world was, once more, moved by grace: the grace of Reverend Pinckney, of the grieving family members, of the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina whose people pulled together like never before in the wake of the tragedy. It was moved, most of all, by a world leader who called all his rhetorical graces into the service of a speech as spiritual and political as it was steeped in American history. Whatever one thought of Barack Obama’s politics, there was no denying the evocative power of his words. Behind the rhetorical force of the Charleston eulogy was the power of the word ‘grace’. Charged with its array of meanings and American-specific connotations, grace permitted Obama to unleash on an unsuspecting audience his deep criticism of his country and to drive home other wise unutterable political arguments both rousingly and respectfully. Grace allowed him to frame positively uncompromising ideologies and to gather cross-community support. This was not the first time that grace and politics had come together with such rhetorical force, but, adapted for new circumstances, it came across as original and compelling. Nor was it the first time that grace was positioned right at the heart of the most urgent debates of its day. In sixteenth-century Italy, too, grace occupied this position time and again. In tracing the movement of grace to the heart of sixteenth-century Italian ethics, aesthetics, culture, and society, this book aims to reflect on ‘this idea of grace’ as a whole, and to make sense of its lasting ability to move, to persuade, and to effect real change. Meanings and Methods So what does the word ‘grace’ actually mean, and how is one to approach it? Definitions of grace abound in all European languages. The Oxford English Dictionary alone lists eighteen entries under the heading ‘grace’.9 These range from ‘divine favour, benevolence, or providence bringing about worldly benefit or advantage’ (entry no. 2) and ‘an instance or manifestation of favour; a favour conferred on or offered to another’ (no. 3) to the archaic meanings of ‘mercy, clemency; pardon, forgiveness’ (no. 5) and ‘a person’s lot, destiny, or fate; luck, fortune’ (no. 6). Other entries include ‘the giving or an expression of thanks; gratitude’ (no. 11); ‘an attractive or pleasing quality or feature’ (no. 13); ‘the quality of being pleasing; attractiveness, charm’ (no. 14); and ‘appropriateness of behaviour’ (no. 15). The OED lists, as well, more specific (and sometimes bizarre) meanings for [ 18 ] ch a Pter 1 grace such as the three Graces, grace notes in music, a game otherwise known as ‘grace hoops’ or ‘the graces’, and an exemption from the statutory requirements for a degree granted to Oxford and Cambridge students. Challenged by the abundance of meanings associated with grace, poets, writers, artists, and philosophers—from Quintilian and Pliny through Schiller and Kleist to Bergson, Beckett, and Coetzee—have set out to capture it in writings that span the fields of aesthetics, theology, social ethics, and literary criticism.10 One of the most memorable accounts of grace is by Alexander Pope, who in 1711 described it as a beauty beyond precepts, a ‘nameless allure’ found in the best literature and art.11 Pope’s grace is made up of ‘happiness as well as care’, luck as well as learning, and its source is as mysterious as its effects are sudden and surprising. Methods cannot teach grace, human reason cannot grasp it, and only the master-hand can reach it by transcending the limits of learning, availing itself of a certain ‘lucky license’, and snatching it from somewhere ‘beyond the reach of art’. Pope had, of course, snatched this idea from various sources. In his article ‘A Grace Beyond the Reach of Art’ (1944), Samuel Holt Monk took Pope’s immortal phrase as his starting point and traced grace back to its classical origins via eighteenth-century criticism, seventeenth-century aesthetics, and Italian Renaissance literary and art theory. Amongst Pope’s many influences, Monk lists Pope’s French near contemporaries Roger de Piles and René Rapin, who also inherit from the ancients the following understanding of the idea of grace: ‘(1) that grace is a distinct aesthetic quality; (2) that it is a gift of nature; (3) that it is to be distinguished from those beauties that rules make possible; (4) that its effect is sudden and surprising; (5) that it defies analysis; (6) that it appeals rather to the heart than to the head; (7) that it is especially the mark of genius’.12 Monk’s pioneering essay provides a highly influential account of grace and proves that the term carried as much nameless allure in mid-twentieth-century aesthetics as the qualities it described. What the essay also suggests, though, is that the grace discussed by Pliny, Cesare Ripa, and Dominique Bouhours is one and the same ‘thing’; that writers as diverse as Quintilian, Baldassare Castiglione, and Nicolas Boileau are united by their interest in a common subject. Yet the venustas of Pliny, the gratia of Ripa, and the Anmut of Schiller are not, in fact, the same. The eighteenth-century grace of Alexander Pope—indebted to his self-trained neoclassicism and English Catholic upbringing—does not map onto other conceptualizations. It is a far cry, for example, from the grace expressed by twenty-first-century president Barack Obama—suffused with African American Evangelism, a deep acquaintance with the American civil rights movement, and present-day a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 19 ] U.S. democratic politics. How useful is it, then, in terms of understanding the complex reality of a word, to construct grand narratives that privilege continuity over specificity and sameness over difference? Grand narratives, like Monk’s, fail to capture the semantic richness of any keyword. Grace proves especially inaccessible by this method since it acts as a sort of chameleon intangible that refuses to settle down in language. Rather than remain stable across time, it is deployed by individual language users in historically and culturally specific ways. Grace, in other words, is as hard to narrativize as it is ever- present across the ages. Even within the same historical moment, individuals use it differently, revealing thereby fundamental differences in worldview. The Schifanoia Allegory of April, for example, illustrated its classical pedigree, its association with love and poetry, as well as its dynamism in the cycle of benevolence that passes from the graceful to the grateful. We shall see that the sixteenth-century courtier and writer Baldassare Castiglione, by contrast, described grace as that ‘certain air’ which distinguishes excellent courtiers and court ladies from their mediocre counterparts, an affability that could be learned in order to win the favour of princes. His artist friend Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael) saw it as that quality produced when one conceals the hard work and effort of art behind a veil of nonchalance and ease. But this classically inspired grace drew criticism from those who saw it as self-interested and superficial. Shunning the idea that grace could be cultivated merely by dissimulating effort, opponents like Michelangelo Buonarroti and Vittoria Colonna promoted instead an image of it as the God-given reward for hard work and religious devotion. Their repeated meditations on the grace of Christ made it clear that it is something that can be neither learned nor earned. Whether artistic or spiritual, grace is taken out of our hands and placed firmly in the hands of the divine. Master narratives like Monk’s, then, fail to encapsulate the semantic scope and variety of grace, while dictionary definitions like the OED’s fail to express the peculiarities of individual usage (nor, of course, do they purport to do so). Neither master narratives nor definitions can account for how different interpretations of grace reveal different ideological, philosophical, theological, and aesthetic perspectives. No catchall account of grace will shed light on the historical and ideological specificity of Pope’s or Obama’s grace, for example, just as no totalizing description will capture the distinctive interpretations of del Cossa, Castiglione, and Colonna. Eduardo Saccone was the first to point out the trouble that bedevils universalising approaches to grace. In his 1983 essay on the grace of [ 20 ] ch a Pter 1 Baldassare Castiglione, Saccone called into question the critical tendency within Renaissance studies to focus not on the meaning of the word within particular contexts but on its role within larger frames of reference.13 Individual interpretations of grace, he pointed out, are all too often misrepresented by critics who wish to assimilate the term into broader conceptual debates, to co-opt it into more general studies of, for example, Neoplatonic philosophy, the history of ideas, or theories of art.14 He called for a departure from these wider theoretical discussions and ‘disembodied ideas’ and a return to ‘the materials of which literary texts are made, that is, the words themselves’.15 Saccone went a long way towards retrieving grace from catchall definitions and grand narratives, in sum, by promoting a return to a philology of the word itself. Philology has not always been fashionable in the Anglophone humanities. On the contrary, as Edward Said put it, ‘philology is just about the least with-it, least sexy and most unmodern of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism.’16 Since the 1960s and 1970s it has come to be caricatured as a dusty old practise carried out by scholars who used their knowledge of ancient and modern languages to establish the authenticity, identify the origins, and determine the meanings of particular words and texts. Unlike critical theorists, new historicists, cognitively inflected cultural critics, or other more fashionable types, philologists were thought not to concern themselves with contemporary preoccupations, nor to consider texts as uniquely revelatory of the specific cultural contexts that produced them. Allegedly hostile or indifferent to literary theory, they were seen as overly concerned, instead, with book histories and word puzzles to the exclusion of all else. Resistance to such caricatures has come from various quarters in recent years, while calls for a return to philology or, indeed, for a ‘new philology’ have come in abundance.17 In medieval studies, for example, new philologists declare a dual desire ‘to return to the medieval origins of philology, to its roots in a manuscript culture’ and ‘to minimise the isolation between medieval studies and other contemporary movements in cognitive methodologies, such as linguistics, anthropology, modern history, [and] cultural studies’.18 Nadia Altschul insists that new philologists in medieval studies should henceforth concern themselves not with textual criticism alone but with the study of ‘culture as well as text’, while Martin Eisner suggests they should combine close study of ‘the textual contents’ of books with ‘their material and paratextual forms’, that is, with ‘the material record of a work’s transmission not only in manuscripts and editions, but also translations and adaptations’.19 There are a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 21 ] also medievalists who think new philology is the (good) old philology by another name—old wine in new bottles.20 Clearly, there are differences of opinion about what, precisely, the philology of medieval studies should look like and about whether its orientation should be more towards book history, textual criticism, or cultural history. But it is not only medievalists who urge philological renewal.21 In fact, as Sean Gurd has suggested, perpetual renewal is a defining feature of the best philological enquiry across the ages, which is rooted in its past even as it is responsive to the changing historical and cultural environments in which it is practised.22 Eduardo Saccone, who wished to save grace from universal narratives by encouraging philological rigour, for example, was deeply conscious of the work of Renaissance humanists like Angelo Poliziano, for whom philology involved reading widely and closely not just literary but also medical, legal, and philosophical texts and for whom philologists were the true philosophers. Like Poliziano, Saccone was actively conversant with the prevailing theorists of his own day, too, in particular with deconstructionist reflections on the epistemological difficulties and ethical imperatives inherent in the interpretation of any text as developed by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man (whose essays Saccone translated into Italian).23 Coming from Italy, where philology had long been the cornerstone of literary study, however, Saccone never felt the need to define his own practise as ‘new’. The same is not necessarily true for Anglophone scholars. In 2013 Richard Scholar described for early modern studies a ‘new philology’ that would combine traditional philology (broad-ranging reading and careful attentiveness to the words of which literary texts are made) with practises endorsed by Raymond Williams and, in particular, Edward Said, who prefaced his (previously quoted) description of philology as unsexy and unmodern with a robust defence of it.24 Scholar sympathised with the suggestion, in Williams’s study of the keywords that defined and shaped postwar British culture, that words do not simply reflect but actually effect ideological and cultural change. In his ‘historical semantics’, Williams was committed to showing ‘that some impor tant social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and of relationships really are’.25 The task of historical semantics should be to assess the relationship between the changes in language usage (the invention of new words and adaptation, alteration, transfer, extension, or reduction of old ones) and changes in the cultures and societies in which those changes took place. Williams’s recommendation left its mark on Edward Said, who praised his scrutiny of the words we live by. Said complimented, as well, the past [ 22 ] ch a Pter 1 masters of philology—including Giambattista Vico, E. R. Curtius, and Eric Auerbach—for their erudition, comparative literary sensibility, and broad-ranging attentiveness to texts from different periods and cultures. Inspired by their work, he proposed the renewal of two of the attitudes at the core of philological enquiry: receptiveness and resistance. By receptiveness, Said meant close reading: ‘a detailed, patient scrutiny of and lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetoric by which language is used by human beings who exist in history.’26 By resistance, he meant ‘a paradoxal mode of thought’: thinking against the grain (or against the ‘doxa: common sense, received ideals’); questioning preconceived wisdom; and taking no inherited meanings for granted. A philology that emphasised reception and resistance was urgently needed, he felt, in a twenty-first century ‘changed considerably since the terrible events of September 11, 2001’ and ‘now brimming over with belligerency, actual wars and all kinds of terrorism’.27 The new philology of the kind Said promoted is crucial, too, in early modern studies. In the campaign ‘to protect and forestall the disappearance of the past’ (which Said calls one of the most important roles of intellectual intervention), it is vital to defend the traditional philological activities (authenticating, translating, tracing, dating, producing editions, and so on) that preserve the material objects in which that past is recorded (books, manuscripts, incunabula, and so on).28 It is necessary too, to read carefully the languages of those books—and to study the words that constituted them—so that we may gain better access to the ideas, beliefs, and uncertainties expressed therein. Such careful reading must involve receptiveness to the contexts in which words were used, and to the ‘web of complexity’ in which their uses and meanings are entangled. Coupled with this reception should be sustained resistance to the idea that early modern words are politically neutral signifiers unchanging across contexts and over time. New philologists working on early modern Europe must remain constantly alert ‘to historical actors of the period . . . when they sought to impose their meanings on a word’; ‘to the existing historiography of the period when it has attempted to clear away the web of complexity surrounding a word and, in so doing, has damaged the object it claimed to be finding’; and also ‘to our modern world when it takes the modernity of its words and meanings as read’.29 The Grace of the Italian Renaissance combines philological receptiveness, then, with a large dose of resistance to the idea that grace was a monolithic term whose meaning was the same for all sixteenth-century users (as Monk, Blunt, and others have suggested). It analyses seminal a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 23 ] occurrences of grace at close quarters, comparing and contrasting them with a range of canonical and noncanonical texts that also deal with grace. In so doing, it restores to view ‘the web of complexity’ surrounding the term that existing accounts of it tend to obscure. The different ways in which sixteenth-century protagonists used grace belies C. S. Lewis’s suggestion that words are stable repositories of meaning.30 On the contrary, grace reveals itself to be a locus of encounter—sometimes conflictual, sometimes amicable—between individual interlocutors and disciplines. It is not just an index of tastes and aspirations, moreover, but an active agent in the processes of change that characterise the period. Always at the heart of the questions and quarrels that troubled sixteenth-century citizens, it was a sort of linguistic currency whose purchasing power changed the course of Italian culture. Many of the instances of grace studied in this book are verbal, but many others are not. When applied to the nonverbal media of painting and sculpture, ‘close readings’ of grace become ‘formal analyses’ of how it is expressed in visual form. In the spirit of Horace’s famous simile ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), the book’s formal analyses of key paintings and sculptures (like its close readings of key texts) are accompanied by careful attention to the commentaries, letters, treatises, and poems that treat grace at the level of a topic and that precede, accompany, or follow them in time. In this respect, the principles of receptiveness and resistance still pertain. By remaining receptive to both visual and verbal sources, the book traces the interdisciplinary encounters that grace makes possible and restores the dialogue between word and image that was so active in sixteenth-century Italy. It also sheds new light on the network of friendships and rivalries in which grace played a pivotal role. In so doing, it presents a further line of resistance to sixteenth-century actors and subsequent historiographers who describe the Renaissance as an incontrovertibly golden age of creativity and culture and highlights, instead, the altogether less-than-golden transactions that helped produce some of the period’s finest art and letters. In an ideal world, each philologist would own up to the par ticular characteristics of his or her own resistance. The present study is shaped by an abiding fascination with theories of grace that harks back to undergraduate classes on Castiglione’s foundational take on the theme.31 It is indebted to conversations with literary critics, philosophers, and art historians about the ways in which certain ‘keywords’ may be said to unlock the secrets of a given place and time.32 It is inflected by the efforts of leftwing intellectuals like Raymond Williams and Edward Said who set out to [ 24 ] ch a Pter 1 interrogate the words we continue to live by. Last but by no means least, it is indebted to the work of feminists whose unrelenting resistance to maledominated discourse has changed the way in which a whole generation of scholars approach early modern culture.33 Through a feminist lens, grace might be seen as a tool of oppression that characterises women as aesthetically pleasing adornments bedecking the top Renaissance courts. An entire book could be dedicated to the role of grace in women’s affairs—its pervasiveness in treatises about beauty, manners, and gender roles; the knock-on consequences for women of the humanist popularisations of images of the three Graces, and of Reformation reevaluations of the Madonna’s divine grace. The present book limits its focus on a feminist account of grace to specific case studies, exploring some of the ways in which men ascribe grace to women, probing the reticence with which such ascriptions are often met by the women, and—in a further turn—revelling in those moments when women speak back, claiming grace for themselves and wielding it as a tool not of oppression but of liberation from the yoke of excessive idealisation and sanctification. A short answer to the question ‘What does the word “grace” mean?’, then, is that it means different things at different times to different people. Whittled down to its semantic essence, it means ‘a certain something which pleases’, but this is not a definition so much as a core principle since pleasure is, of course, subjective, encompassing a vast array of human experiences.34 From musical grace notes to balletic graces, from the grace of artistic inspiration to God’s gift of divine grace to humankind, and from the social graces of a courtier to the sexual graces of a courtesan, grace is given, received, performed, or embodied for the pleasure of a grateful recipient. It inscribes a relationship of pleasurable exchange whose nature and tenor change from one pair of individuals to the next. Grace is, in this respect, a chameleon intangible, as ever-present and ever-changing as are the concepts of delectation and delight that it carries with it. Metaphors such as the one just employed help, better than any definition could, to harness the elusive intangibility that characterises sixteenthcentury grace and its workings. Throughout the book, I explore several other metaphors besides that of the chameleon intangible. In the prologue and first chapter, alone, I describe grace as a ‘mobile and multifaceted force to be traced in and around the crossroads between the ideal and the real of the Italian Renaissance’; as a ‘family name [that] brings together many individual members, linked by elemental genetic traits’; as a ‘sort of crucible in which the continuities and innovations, the friendships and rivalries, the rebirths and disintegrations we still sometimes think a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 25 ] of as “Renaissance” were formed’; and as a type of (non-Freudian) pleasure principle shared between one who gives, performs, or embodies it, and another who receives it with pleasure and—ideally—with gratitude. Metaphorical thinking of this kind serves a capacious and elusive term like grace well, communicating those principles common to all its iterations, yet without reducing its plurality unnecessarily or staying its constant movement. Perhaps no metaphor serves better to capture the movement of grace through sixteenth-century Italian society and culture than rainfall. That metaphor communicates how grace saturates large tracts of Renaissance discourse, fertilizing diverse terrains whose ability to bear fruit is unpredictable. It has illustrious (and highly relevant) precursors in Christian theology. In De Trinitate (4.i, 2), St Augustine interprets the ‘spontaneous rain’ sent by God in Psalms 68:9 as a metaphor for grace, which is ‘not rendered to merit, but freely given, whence also it is called grace; for He gave it, not because we were worthy but because He [so] willed’. In seventeenthcentury France, the occasionalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche puts this Augustinian metaphor into the ser vice of his controversial suggestion that God’s will acts in accordance with laws of nature combined with laws of grace, as opposed to acting directly on individual human lives.35 In Christian thought, God’s grace is ever-available to believers and yields fruit when it irrigates fertile souls primed to receive its nourishing effects. It does not always have the desired effect, sometimes falling on barren ground, but it elicits in ready hearts and minds a reciprocal flourishing of virtue and devotion that serve as thanksgiving for its nourishment. The same analogy may be put to a secularized aesthetic use. Artistic grace can be visualised as a natural force that inspires and influences those who are ready for it, fertilizing cultivated minds that produce great works of art and literature. Artists and writers, thus ‘graced’, please others who reciprocate with appreciation of various material and immaterial kinds in a dynamic cycle of reciprocity. The grace of courtiers, beautiful women, and harmonious music is bestowed on those who prepare the ground for its flourishing. Graceful manners and sounds flourish and bear fruit either where nature has been particularly bountiful or where rules have been sufficiently mastered and skill sufficiently honed. For such individuals, grace is a generative process that unfolds almost without agency, as if it acts through them rather than being produced by them. Its effects are as profound as its sources are elusive. For many of the protagonists of this book, this source is God: artistic, social, and spiritual graces are indistinguishable in this respect. For others, however, the sources are human culture and the hard [ 26 ] ch a Pter 1 work, training, or—alternatively—je-ne-sais-quoi that comes who knows whence. Each may have one’s own idea of what causes the rain to fall. The aim of this book is to compare ideas of grace amongst Renaissance individuals. Thinking through metaphor provides one of the means by which it combines methods and crosses disciplines. Metaphors allows discrete manifestations of grace to speak for themselves. As they speak, The Grace of the Italian Renaissance eavesdrops, tracing a series of conversations—some friendly, some not—about the means of generating, cultivating, and propagating one of the most beguiling and deceptively powerful of early modern keywords. Narratives This book examines what grace meant to Renaissance artists and writers from Francesco del Cossa (ca. 1430–ca. 1477) to Torquato Tasso (1544–1595). It involves close analyses of pivotal texts and images from del Cossa, Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568), Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Tullia d’Aragona (1510–1556), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Moderata Fonte (1555–1592), Tasso, and others and attends to peculiarities and particularities of usage, exploring the correspondence— direct or indirect—between individual occurrences of the term. The end result is a narrative, but not a grand narrative of the kind criticized by Saccone and, more generally, by Jean-François Lyotard.36 Rather than oppress the messy specificity of individual moments in the pursuit of a sweeping account, as Lyotard’s ‘grand narratives’ were said to do, this book’s primary focus is, precisely, those messy moments, those instances that make the life of sixteenth-century grace so interesting. These instances are then aligned with other individual interpretations as the relationship between them is explored. It is not, in other words, that the grace of this book plays a supporting role in a grand narrative about something else. Rather, it plays the starring role in its very own story of rebirth, decline, disintegration, and regeneration. Chapter 2 situates the emergence of grace within three contexts. The humanist revival of antiquity, the quarrels about religion, and the debate about language each sought intellectual rupture with the immediate past and a radical rethinking of the secular and the sacred. With these new ways of thinking came new ways of talking: intellectual change wrought changes in language use, and vice versa. Changes in how grace was used at this time were inextricably bound up with the broader problems its early a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 27 ] modern users were trying to resolve. To do justice to the semantic abundance of Renaissance grace, therefore, we must view it first within those contexts that privileged it as a focal point for their conversations about culture and society. In this way, we can begin to see just how key grace was, and to chart the semantic quarry from which later sixteenth-century understandings were mined. The life of Renaissance grace begins in earnest with Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) (1516) and Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione (1514–1516). It does so, I suggest in chapter 3, because preoccupations with grace and its multiple senses are central to both the book of manners and the painting, so much so that Castiglione came to be known as the great theorist of grace while Raphael was identified as its painter. Both have been referred to in countless studies from the sixteenth century to today as the embodiments of Renaissance grace. In addition, the network of interconnections between them makes Castiglione and Raphael a promising point of departure, an ideal testing ground for observing how grace behaves in different media and examining the extent to which it can be said to contribute to those interdisciplinary rivalries and friendships that allowed Renaissance learning, literature, and arts to flourish. Chapter 4 takes its cue from the discussion in book 3 of Castiglione’s Cortegiano about whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely linked to beauty and to what Italians today refer to as bella presenza than its manly counterpart. Embellishing the environment of the court in ways most pleasing to men, it consists of good looks, decorous manners, and modestly entertaining conversation. Yet grace and beauty, under the pen of women writers, are by no means mutually inclusive. The chapter explores how two women authors, Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d’Aragona, sever the links that unite grace and beauty in male discourse. In Colonna’s love poetry (ca. 1525–1535), grace resists semantic absorption into refined womanly appearances and rhetoric and turns, instead, towards spirituality that admits of no physical or corporeal manifestation. Tullia d’Aragona, by contrast, rejects the language of grace outright, identifying it as an impossible feminine standard, on the one hand, and perilously close to the language of sexual graces and favours, on the other. In her Rime (Poems) and Dialogo dell’infinità d’amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love) (both published in 1547), she identifies it as a word requiring sensitive handling, an instrument of control to flee from and a semantic trap set by men inclined in their treatment of women to the extremes of praise and blame. [ 28 ] ch a Pter 1 While Tullia d’Aragona thus sought to avoid grace, the poet Ludovico Ariosto could not help but be caught in its web, being quickly identified as the master practitioner of grace in literature and the language arts. Chapter 5 examines Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) as an outstanding example of literary grace, following the judgement of sixteenth-century literary commentator and polygraph Lodovico Dolce. The first part of the chapter mines Dolce’s many commentaries, paratextual notes, appreciations, and treatises on poetics and aesthetics for a sense of just what he meant when he declared Ariosto the Renaissance poet of grace. The second part, meanwhile, looks to Ariosto himself and focuses both on the poet’s writing and on the emblems and images he used to embellish successive editions of his poem. In this encounter between grace in word and image, it offers an understanding of how Ariosto anticipated Dolce’s reading while varying the terms of that reception. The classically inspired secular grace that Castiglione theorized, Raphael painted, and Dolce saw writ large in the poetry of Ariosto was not universally welcomed. On the contrary, it provoked a quarrel at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, which pitted the Castigliones et al. against those who saw their grace as nothing if not vain and frivolous. Chief amongst such critics was one described as the antithesis of grace, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and his close friend, Vittoria Colonna. On her second appearance in the book, Colonna has become a more mature author of spiritual works. In her later Rime spirituali (Spiritual Poems), a much developed grace bears the hallmark of religious debate about reform and counterreform and chimes in striking ways with the alternative interpretation of grace expressed in Michelangelo’s art. Chapter 6 shows that, in their work and in their poetic correspondence (1538–1547), Michelangelo and Colonna eschew the kind of grace espoused by Castiglione and Bembo and perfected by Raphael and Ariosto, cultivating instead an image of the artist as hardworking and intense. Their desire to reveal— rather than conceal—the labour behind their art can be compared in the Pietàs through which the artist and the poet articulate an alternative aesthetics of grace: one that resists humanist connotations, criticises courtly abuses of the term, and promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God’s gift. Restored here to the domain of religious experience, grace acts as a reminder that art and literature should praise God, not the artist, and in so doing reflects an age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italy. The conclusion explores some of the further transplantations that grace experiences towards the end of the sixteenth century. Emblematic of a r e na is sa nce k ey wor d [ 29 ] these transplantations, so removed in time and tenor from those emerging at the start of the century, are the work of the Ferrarese poet and philosopher Torquato Tasso and the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte. The conclusion first examines Tasso’s philosophical dialogue, Il malpiglio (1585), as a direct response to Castiglione in whom Tasso identifies some timeless principles while also recognising that Italy and life at court have changed. In this context, Tasso’s Malpiglio replaces the ‘grace’ of Il cortegiano with the notion of ‘prudence’, a substitution that marks the passage from the graceful manners that flourished at court in the earlier age to the prudent observance of the ‘strictness of the times’ that is now the order of the day. There is a distinct ambivalence in the movement of Tasso’s work from grace to prudence: a nostalgia for the earlier term, and the survival of its structures of feeling under the altogether more repressive notion with which he replaces it. Forming a contrastive diptych with this nostalgic portrait, Moderata Fonte’s Merito delle donne (The Worth of Women) (1592) presents grace not as a privilege of the past but as a keyword of her era—as a mode of surviving and thriving in the world. After pointing out the fickleness of men who align grace with beauty for their own ends, she asserts that women should cultivate internal graces—eloquence and intellect—that will provide pleasure for themselves, that will never fade or grow old, and that will endure as long as life, and beyond. The book closes, then, with Tasso’s retrospective nostalgia for a long-lost grace and Fonte’s plans for its regeneration. Through them, it contemplates the unwavering ability of grace to remain uncompromisingly plural, at a time when it meant so much.