Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare

By William J. Kennedy

The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets—as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch’s legacy.

Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet’s divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet’s acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the "gift" economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pléiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501703805

Book preview

Introduction

The Marketplace of Mercury

Wily Mercury, quicksilvered and golden tongued. Boy-god, son of Jupiter by Atlas’s daughter, he’s a trickster, thief, and master of deception. He’s as well the inventor of the lyre, a messenger from the gods, and the escort of souls to the underworld. On the day he was born, he stole Apollo’s cattle but compensated for it by presenting the older god with a lyre fashioned from the shell and guts of a tortoise. Pleased with this gift, Apollo recommended Mercury to Jupiter for service as divine courier. In his Greek incarnation as Hermes, Mercury delivered communiqués from Olympus that often seemed hermetic or abstruse in their wording. Armed with hermeneutic skills to decipher their meaning, he kept their import secret when necessary or revealed it when opportune. In these capacities Mercury served as a tutelary deity for writers, orators, poets, and musicians.¹

With his agile wit, verbal dexterity, artistic touch, and willingness to test limits, Mercury also served as a tutelary deity for merchants and mercantile activity (merx ‘merchandise, goods’ derives from an archaic and abbreviated form of Mercurius).² As the Roman patron of trade and commerce, he safeguarded payments (merces ‘payment, reward’), gift-giving, and other forms of economic transaction and exchange. Well-furnished to clinch a deal, he protected mercatores ‘merchants, tradesmen’ and mediated their various mercaturae ‘trades, transactions’. As a veteran of commercial travel (statues of his likeness served as road markers called herms), Hermes/Mercury performed emissary duties and was appreciated for his intercessory powers (the word mercy derives from his Roman name, through medieval Church Latin, for the bestowal of God’s favor upon those who’ve earned it: compare Italian mercede ‘mercy’ and French merci ‘thanks’).³

This book will focus on competing claims about quicksilver eloquence, vatic inspiration, and hermeneutic skills among Renaissance poets, and upon choices that they made for their writing, their literary careers, and the professionalization of their craft. Its ground is the intersection of aesthetics and economics in European Renaissance poetry, and its principal actors are Francesco Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pierre de Ronsard, and William Shakespeare. At the start, a tension between two views of poetry animates Petrarch’s fourteenth-century Rime sparse, each of which relates differently to economic issues figured in the text. One view associates poetry with inspiration, intuition, and a representation of transcendent reality; the other associates it with rhetorical technique, verbal play, and the vocalic manipulation of linguistic elements. In literary and rhetorical theory two centuries later, these views would come to represent the dominant principles of a Platonic aesthetics (focused on visionary furor) and an Aristotelian poetics (focused on the art or craft of writing poetry), both of them transmitted to the late Middle Ages through Horace’s Epistle 2.3 ad Pisones. Economic consequences follow from these principles, the first based on the value or worth of a divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largesse of high-ranking patrons; the second based on craftsmanship and skill acquired through instruction and hard work, rewarded by definable criteria of merit.

With Petrarch, these implications appear rooted in medieval theological assumptions. On the one hand, the Platonic formulation corresponds to an earlier, largely Augustinian view in which art, like wealth, reflects God’s plenitude and abundance as a gift to humankind and is therefore a good. The artist’s visionary furor reflects the natural inequality of human beings whom God endows with economic gifts and talents that are highly developed in some and less so in others, imposing on their recipients a moral obligation to use them toward productive ends. On the other hand, the Aristotelian formulation corresponds to a later, largely Scholastic view in which art constitutes a particular skill or mechanical handiwork exercised for profit in proportion to the amount of labor power or exchange value expended upon it or to the degree of satisfaction or utility value inherent in it. The artist’s skill reflects training, specialization, and accomplishment and is directed toward purposeful gain in the marketplace. Here the material components of Petrarch’s poetry assume some importance, literally readable in the author’s working papers and successive drafts whose revisions bear evidence of his technical skills. In this regard, as in others, Petrarch is a homo economicus who conserves and exploits the material resources of his art. The first two chapters of part 1 in this book focus on Petrarch’s legacy to later Renaissance poetry.

Aesthetics, Economics, Professionalism: The Case of Petrarch

In Petrarch’s time, the economic coordinates for these paradigms seem only barely emergent. A Platonic aesthetics would take distinctive shape in the late fifteenth century with Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works into Latin and subsequent humanist commentary on them.⁴ An Aristotelian aesthetics would emerge after Aldus Manutius’s publication of the Greek texts of his Rhetoric and Poetics in 1508, with their various translations into Latin and Italian and the rise of commentary on them.⁵ Still, Petrarch’s grasp of their competing principles via Horace’s formulation of them, and his grasp of their consequences for the economics of literary production and distribution, had an impact on his own vernacular poetry.⁶ Two centuries later they had an impact upon the reception and imitation of his poetry by such writers as Stampa, Michelangelo, Ronsard, and Shakespeare. As with Petrarch, each recognized the exchange value of his or her work as a perfected object. But each also recognized the utility value of pleasure that his or her work conveys to readers through its sound structure, its semantic nuance and syntactic density, its figural inventiveness and tropological ingenuity, its performativity as song, witty repartee, and narrative or dramatic discourse.

As it happens, just-price theory in the late Middle Ages had acknowledged these features in assessments of artistic value.⁷ As articulated by the controversial but influential Franciscan scholar Pietro Olivi (1247–98), this theory echoes late Roman contract law by acknowledging the right of parties to negotiate a sale for whatever price they might agree upon without fraud or malice.⁸ A justum pretium ‘just price’ calculates the worth of an artifact as something separate from the value of its materials or the time spent crafting them.⁹ It accommodates the buyer’s subjective pleasure, a magis et minus beneplacitum nostre voluntatis ‘greater or lesser pleasure of our will’, in judging the work to be beautiful or satisfying and worth enjoying ownership and access to it: Pensatur in respectu ad nostrum usum et utilitatem quam secundum absolutum valorem suarum essentiarum ‘It is construed rather in relation to our use and utility than according to the absolute value of their constituent parts’ (55). It also accounts for the value of the producer’s expertise in terms of time and effort required to learn and practice a certain skill: Si ad altiora offitia…exigitur maior peritia et industria et amplior sollicitudo mentalis ‘So for the higher professions a higher degree of experience and application and a deeper degree of mental care is demanded’ (57). Here the key terms are officium (Olivi’s plural form is offitia) ‘official employment, profession’ (from opificium ‘workmanship’); peritia ‘inclusive experience’; industria ‘meticulous application’; and sollicitudo ‘careful attention’.

In late medieval vernaculars the Italian mestiere, Old French mestier/métier, and Middle English mastery capture these components.¹⁰ Each word derives through Church Latin from the Greek nouns μυστήριον ‘secret ritual or rite, religious ceremony’ and μύστης ‘one who is initiated among followers of a rite’. A distinction between sacred and secular marks their Latin cognates ministerium with respect to the duties of churchly office and the minister who performs them, and magisterium with respect to the teaching of practical skills and the magister who transmits them.¹¹ The word mestiere does not appear in Petrarch’s Italian poetry. In his Latin prose, its closest approximation is ars ‘art or craft’, with a distinction in Familiares 10.5 between artes mechanicae, which provide for life’s necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, and artes liberales, which advance the pursuit of poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology.¹² In the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari imputes to mestiere a mechanical sense of following rules or protocol. In Life of Michelangelo (1550, rev. 1568), Alfonso d’Este’s supercilious agent approaches Michelangelo about his now-lost painting of Leda and earns the artist’s rebuke with the question che mestiero fussi il suo ‘what might his job be’.¹³ Vasari attributes to the noun professione a level of specialized competence when he writes that the young Michelangelo’s sketch for a mural in the Palazzo Vecchio shows quanto sapesse in tale professione ‘how much he knew about his profession’ (2:889/1:341).¹⁴ The following chapters will trace a network of associations among these ideas in sixteenth-century aesthetic (especially poetic) and economic practice.

Our modern and deeply theorized categories of aesthetics (as distinct from a formal poetics rooted in classical literature) and economics (as distinct from a moral or political philosophy rooted in classical and late medieval concepts of social justice) are anachronistic to the European Renaissance.¹⁵ Still, several recurrent features of these categories begin to inflect sixteenth-century thinking about literary and artistic production. The concept of aesthetics is less a matter of Kant’s interesseloses Wohlgefallen than of Michelangelo’s concetto and superchio in his sonnet 151, or of Shakespeare’s perspective and skill in his sonnet 24, and it conveys an idea of mental concentration and moral solicitude. The concept of economics is less a matter of Adam Smith’s Wages and Profit in the commercial or mercantile System than of late Scholastic ethics concerning distributive justice, fair wage, and labor theories of value, along with ascendant humanist revaluations of entrenched attitudes toward usury, interest, fluctuating gold and silver standards, rising markets, cultural exchange, professionalization, and technological innovation.¹⁶ These issues play themselves out in Petrarch’s monastic world, Stampa’s salon society, Michelangelo’s gift economy, Ronsard’s court culture, and Shakespeare’s emerging mercantile world.

What binds these various societies and cultures is a shared sense of experience and application, calling and vocation, conveyed through an emergent sense of profession and a still unformed sense of professionalism. Five recurrent features of the latter converge in the sixteenth century. Three relate specifically to safeguards concerning support, initiative, and focus in an exchange economy. The first is membership in an academy, society, or literary salon, where the presence of like-minded writers, artists, and musicians bolsters a sense of personal confidence along with fairness and self-worth as confidence multipliers that follow from it.¹⁷ Such groups may welcome amateurs as well as professionals, but while the former participate in order to acquire a veneer of culture and sophistication as a social asset, the latter aim to learn from, collaborate with, and compete against their peers. The group acts as a surrogate guild (in the Renaissance there were no guilds for poets, though there were for musicians and visual artists), enabling its participants to benefit from a social, cultural, and economic trust available to members of late medieval artisan associations and early modern trade companies. Their like-mindedness does not imply conformity; quite the opposite, in fact, for literary participants. By constituting self-defined institutional groups, writers profess their commitment to a shared interest in form and formal structure as a bulwark against unthinking con-formity. The form that gives shape to their literary work consequently becomes an index and register of their historical awareness.¹⁸

A concomitant feature is entrepreneurship, prompting some participants to look beyond the group for further opportunities. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century technologies mark a transition from the narrowly defined patronage of a gift economy to the expanded preferences of an exchange economy.¹⁹ By definition, entrepreneurs cast a wide net for untried markets in fluctuant and often idiosyncratic circumstances. Alert to opportunity, the literary sort use their rhetorical skill—their greatest asset—to attract attention to their work for patronage, purchase, or distribution within the limited market conditions of the sixteenth-century book trade.²⁰ A third feature, derived from the other two, is a focus on self-definition and self-critique. While amateur poets may celebrate variety, experimentation, and dilettantish indulgence, professional poets replace these features with a critical assessment of what is irreplaceable in their art.²¹ They venture away from the specter of false consciousness and its idealizing illusions and supplant them with the stimulus of labor in pursuit of socially defined use and exchange values.²²

Two remaining features relate to behavioral characteristics of individual writers. Foremost is the individual’s commitment to perfecting craftsmanship and technique through a process of contraction and expansion, redaction and revision. This commitment acknowledges seams, imperfections, and unfinished thoughts even in a terminal redaction, and it directs attention toward such gaps as markers of social conflict and economic antagonisms.²³ The final recurrent feature of professionalism is the writer’s capacity to reflect upon the boundaries of his or her work. Amateurs write what they choose to write. Professionals position themselves to meet their clients’ requests, but always according to the norms of a generic competence that they challenge, contest, transform, and internalize. They articulate their insights through a discourse and performativity that set competing claims of matter against form, rhetoric against poetics, immanence against transcendence, and studied craftsmanship against inspiration.²⁴ If some Renaissance writers see labor as the origin of value, they resist quantifying its outward appearance in their work. In so doing, they presage a later perception that the source of value is not undifferentiated labor, but rather an abstracted and highly differentiated labor power that gives rise to a labor theory of value and its redistribution of raw labor value.²⁵

Each of the five poets studied in this book presents a challenge or exception to one or another of these features. Petrarch conjures his entrepreneurial efforts to attract elite patronage and support; channels his intense, even obsessive literary focus to renovate Latin and vernacular poetry; embraces microscopic habits of practice and revision to craft his style; and moves toward a macroscopic theoretical understanding of literary language in relation to literary expression.²⁶ Yet throughout his long career he retains no long-term membership in any school, coterie, court society, or intellectual movement. The hundreds of letters collected in his Familiares, Seniles, and Sine nomine situate him as an independent agent forging his own identity, a writer outside the bounds of church, school, and courtly patronage systems. The form of his self-presentation overlaps with that of a homo economicus in an emerging commercial world, where we encounter the rise of isolated, self-interested, rational human beings intent upon maximizing their gains. To abet these efforts, Petrarch cultivates a literary persona as a homo litterarum, an expansive writer whose sheer quantity of work underscores his design to capture attention on a large scale.

As a tonsured cleric, Petrarch qualified for ecclesiastical benefices that provided him with income and free time to pursue his writing. A rough sketch of his economic support includes a nonresident canonry at the cathedral of Lombez in Gascony, recommended in 1335 by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna (to whose administrative staff he was attached from 1330 to 1347); another at the Cathedral of Pisa, awarded in 1342 by Pope Clement V; a canonry and house at the Cathedral of Parma awarded in 1346 by the same pope (there he received news of Laura’s death two years later); and a canonry and house at the Cathedral of Padua, recommended in 1349 by Jacopo da Carrara, lord of Padua (where he resided periodically until 1368). Between 1353 and 1361 the Visconti family provided him with a residence in Milan, and between 1362 and 1368 the Venetian Senate provided him with one near the ducal palace. In 1370 Francesco da Carrara had a house built for him at Arqua, where he died in 1374. Over the years Petrarch sought patronage and protection from King Robert of Naples; Azzo da Correggio, sometime ruler of Parma; and Pandolfo Malatesta, a military commander formerly in service to Milan; but no records attest to substantial support by any of them.²⁷

Petrarch’s Italian poetry inscribes his unique status as a mobile man in the middle whose autonomous identity in a late medieval environment of interlocking loyalties and corporate affiliations is retrospective, provisional, and transitional. The poet responds with his commitment to craftsmanship and style. Like his ever-evolving persona, his individual texts undergo alteration, change, verbal adjustment, and critical displacement. He happens to be one of the first European authors from whom a number of working papers and successive drafts has come down in appreciable order, enabling us to trace the evolution of his texts and editorial decisions over several decades. The codex of these drafts displays his many erasures, insertions, transpositions, and inversions as visible signs of craftsmanship, skill, and rhetorical technique.²⁸

Here Petrarch’s understanding of himself as a craftsman of style converges with his critical understanding of the Rime sparse as a product of poetic labor. His poetry takes shape at an intersection of matter and form where form comes to matter most when the poet transacts its material components—its grammatical structures, oral-aural sound patterns, figurative arrangements, and tropological turns—into vehicles of embodied meaning. His poems unfold as dramas that pit competing claims against each other and energize them with the freedom and constraints of meter and rhyme, syntax and semantics, etymological wordplay and literary allusion. At times, Petrarch appears deeply skeptical about the moral and intellectual worth of his vernacular efforts, bedeviled by an anxiety that his texts generate surface reflections with no inner truth value. It often happens, however, that exactly when his poems—and those of his sixteenth-century imitators—look most playful, most dispersive, most technically brilliant, they also penetrate to the depths of human consciousness, cultural development, and historical situation. This embodiment of meaning in the play of language constitutes his legacy to the later Renaissance. It’s a legacy achieved through the labor of drafting and redrafting, revision and emendation, as poets polish their rhymes, energize their rhythms, and display their originality, proceeding quietly but steadily in the solitude of their studies, surrounded by sheaves of parchment or paper, sharpened quills, jars of ink, stacks of books, and the flicker of candle or oil lamps well past midnight.

Sixteenth-Century Italy: Gaspara Stampa and Michelangelo Buonarroti

Chapters 3 and 4 of part 1 in this book focus upon the poetic achievements of Gaspara Stampa and Michelangelo Buonarroti in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Among Petrarch’s many Renaissance commentators, Lodovico Castelvetro (1507–71) de-idealizes the poet’s work in his Le rime del Petrarca brevemente sposte (1550s, published 1582) by examining his heterodox sources in scripture, classical Greek and Latin texts, Italian Stilnovist poetry, and Dante. Castelvetro wrote one of the best vernacular commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics, his Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570), which articulates a pragmatic labor theory of value for poetry as well as a claim for its utility value based upon the reader’s satisfaction in engaging with the text. From the outset Castelvetro mocks the idea of poetic furor as a fabrication by self-serving poets whom Plato regarded with suspicion and expelled from his republic.²⁹ He instead favors Petrarch’s emphasis upon craftsmanship, and from the poet’s letter to Tommaso da Messina he cites with approval the inventiveness of worms that create silk from their own viscera (1:94–95/41–42).³⁰ To assess the value of a poem, the sole consideration is the labor and effort [ fatica et industria] which it requires of the poet (1:186–87/66–67). Poets become objects of greater admiration to the degree that they appear virtuosi of style (1:241/90) with a profusion of rhetorical techniques that afford pleasure to readers by engaging them in abundant [più largo] if not more proportionately intense intricacy (2:368/321).³¹

With his emphasis on authorial craftsmanship and skill, Castelvetro points to a growing professionalization of writerly arts in the mid-sixteenth century. The development of print technology and the growth of literacy created a market for informational books in the arts and sciences as well as in various trades and commercial enterprises. Among them are such broad-based encyclopedic treatises as Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo ‘The Universal Marketplace of All the World’s Professions’ (1585, with twenty-eight subsequent editions) and Cesare Vecellio’s lavishly illustrated De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo ‘Ancient and Modern Clothing from Various Parts of the World’ (1590) and Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo ‘Ancient and Modern Clothing from the Whole World’ (1598), both of which associate dress with status and occupation.³² These books demarcate a highly stratified sense of expertise and specialization that had long marked business and commerce in Venice.

Garzoni offers a particularly elaborate treatment of the division of labor and social distinction. His delineation of 155 vocational categories and 545 skilled occupations runs the gamut from academics, agriculturalists, and arithmeticians to poets, potters, and prostitutes. The first edition of his compendium ends with a lengthy chapter on Poets (to which the second edition in 1587 adds a shorter chapter on Humanists).³³ It situates poets and humanists outside the economic marketplace as observers of its frenetic activities. The genres that Garzoni highlights are neither heroic epic nor tragic drama, but instead satiric verse and the laudatory epigram che in un subito t’abbassa nel centro della terra, e in un subito t’alza per fin sopra Olimpo ‘that in one instant lowers you into the earth’s center and in another raises you above Olympus’ (1482). Ludovico Ariosto emerges as his most frequently quoted poet and—not surprisingly—Mercury as his most frequently cited mythological figure. Poets themselves are i Mercuri che portano con la lingua loro l’eccelse lodi di quelli fino al cielo ‘Mercuries who with their tongues transport the highest praises of [their friends and associates] all the way to heaven’ (1485). The author iterates every writer’s need to flatter patrons, rival authors, and prominent critics, and he ends by recounting a critical exchange on a Latin elegy composed by a prominent patrician, whose termini di modestia che sono usati fra persone civili ‘expressions of modesty deployed by polite individuals’ (1495) illustrate the civic functions of poetry.

If we revert to an earlier moment in sixteenth-century Venice, we find its culture poised at a turning point in literary professionalization. Here a symptomatic figure is Gaspara Stampa (1522-25?–1554) who assigns Mercury a cameo appearance in sonnet 4 of her Rime (1554), Quando fu prima il mio Signor concetto ‘When my Lord was first conceived’.³⁴ Various deities confer special gifts upon her beloved Collaltino di Collalto: Eloquentia Mercurio; ma la Luna / Lo fè gelato più, ch’io non vorria ‘Mercury [gave him] eloquence, but the Moon made him colder than I might have wished’. Despite his eloquence—which partly refers to his skill as a poet—differences in the social and economic status of each challenge their union. He is a nobleman with a landed estate near Treviso and clientage ties to the powerful Farnesi family. She is the daughter of a Paduan jeweler-merchant (protected by Mercury, the patron of commerce), upon whose death she was brought to Venice in the 1530s by her mother. The disparity of status and rank between them could only doom any prospects for their future together.

In the absence of manuscript evidence, there’s scant documentation of Stampa’s lexical, syntactic, or tropological revision. On the level of rhetorical imitatio, however, her entire project constitutes a sensational work of revision in its feminine regendering of male-authored Petrarchan figures, tropes, and dramatic situations. It resonates with the salon culture of sixteenth-century Venice in which she participated as a writer and solo performer of her verse, the latter most likely with self-accompaniment on a lute or other stringed instrument. Her self-critique is unmistakable as she creates a lyric persona with a distinct character, style, voice, and form of address. Her metaliterary reflections emerge in poems addressed to Collaltino and to literary associates with whom she might have collaborated in shared endeavors. For all Stampa’s intimations of belonging to a salon culture, however, there’s no record of her membership in any single salon, no traces of support from any particular patron or sponsor, no overt signs of self-promotion. It’s tempting to imagine Stampa turning her elusiveness into a critical virtue as she moves from circle to circle of experts and amateurs. Her anonymity and lack of binding attachment provide her with vantage points from which to evaluate her social environment and its artistic practices, edging her toward a critique of the Venetian ideology that subtends both.

Stampa’s public life spawned rumors about her sexual entanglement with prominent Venetian noblemen, including the aged doge Andrea Gritti.³⁵ The scandal only hints at the link between aesthetic and economic concerns underlying her Rime. In aesthetic terms her poems cultivate a distinctive style that rescues them from bland conformity. In economic terms, she was the daughter of a jeweler-merchant, and she took into her own hands the shaping of a career that validated her aspirations. Her poems negotiate among differences between patron-sponsored courtly environments and an emerging salon society where she associated with eminent artists, musicians, and literary peers. The posthumous publication of her poetry under her sister’s supervision smacks of a business deal negotiated with the Venetian printer Plinio Pietrasanta. Beyond these precincts, Stampa guarded the details of her everyday life so that her work comes to us as aesthetically mediated, economically indeterminate, and socially anonymous.

The first part of this book ends with a consideration of Michelangelo’s private poems and gift drawings sent to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. There’s no denying Michelangelo’s intense concentration on the visual arts of sculpture, fresco painting, drawing, and architectural design, but the scattered drafts of his poems, their recurrent emendations, and the unfinished state of many suggest only a casual literary engagement.³⁶ Michelangelo’s habits of work challenge many sixteenth-century assumptions. He belonged to no single movement, school, academy, group, guild, or coterie, but he dispensed his work grandly among many patrons and sponsors (often at an equally grand price) as well as among friends and fellow artists (as freely bestowed gifts). From an entrepreneurial perspective, he nurtured a reputation for solitary genius, one that enhanced the social and economic value of his work. In the visual arts he concentrated on sculpture and fresco painting, media that prove resistant to casual reworking and revision, but for which he found compensatory solutions.³⁷ By contrast, the manuscript pages of his poetry display prodigious feats of rewriting and revision. And in return they reveal his intense concern with both visual and literary production and with hermeneutic skills of interpretation.

Among the recipients of Michelangelo’s poetry, Cavalieri and Colonna belonged to the nobility and were personal friends of his, but they never provided him with formal patronage. Michelangelo sent both of them poems and drawings as gratuitous expressions of intimacy with them. His pencil and chalk drawings sent to Cavalieri and Colonna show no evidence of having been retouched, though a letter to Cavalieri offers to supply a new and improved version of one of them if requested.³⁸ His verse on the other hand evolves in multiple drafts that teem with redaction, and conspicuous parallels link them to his drawings.³⁹ The pictures intended for Cavalieri depict various mythological actions (the rape of Ganymede, the punishment of Tityus, the fall of Phaethon) that, like the poems addressed to him, carry markedly erotic overtones.⁴⁰ Those executed for Colonna depict scenes of Jesus’s crucifixion and Mary’s lamentation that, like the poems addressed to her, express strong religious devotion.

One early drawing sent to neither of them, the Saettatori ‘Archers Shooting at a Herm’ (Windsor Castle, Royal Library), deserves attention for its concern with social, sexual, professional, and economic issues in this phase of Michelangelo’s work. Likely completed in Florence before the artist moved to Rome, it anticipates the topics of his poems and other drawings sent to Cavalieri.⁴¹ It depicts nine people in various poses aiming at a target on a road-marking herm, shooting at it with invisible arrows from invisible bows. At least three constructions of its meaning seem possible. In one, the weapons’ invisibility suggests that the action is a mental one, conveying great intellectual focus and energy. Because Hermes’s communiqués were often opaque, the action may refer to the capacity of well-aimed explication to interpret enigmatic images and utterances.⁴² And, further, since such images and utterances can be deciphered on multiple levels of meaning, the work of understanding them can range dialectically afield and may encompass competing and even contradictory claims in bono and in malo—both in a good sense as exemplifying something virtuous, heroic, and praiseworthy, and in a negative sense as exemplifying something evil, perverse, and culpable. In bono the archers might represent the strenuous efforts needed to understand the artist’s work. In malo they might represent misguided efforts to do so.

The hermeneutic principle of construing a single figuration in different senses according to different contexts had shored up biblical exegesis since at least St. Augustine’s description of it in De doctrina Christiana 3.25. It undergirds interpretations of medieval and Renaissance visual and poetic art that juxtapose contrasting figures and tropes, and it subtends much of Michelangelo’s work in both media.⁴³ These principles contribute to a second understanding of the drawing in which the archers appear spurred on by the force of a natural urge.⁴⁴ For beings endowed with intellect and will, this urge concentrates their desire for love and beauty, whether in bono for a spiritual object of love and beauty or in malo for cupidinous and degenerate objects. The figure of Cupid sleeping at the bottom of the herm suggests that he may be a particular target of the archers, referring to an oscillation of the artist-poet’s libidinous desire between poles of good and bad.

A third interpretation proceeds from the role of Hermes in his Roman incarnation as Mercury, the patron of commerce and mercantile activity. Both in bono and in malo the god stands impassive against an onslaught of those who contend against him. In the commercial world of art, the archers may figure so many talented competitors—each accomplished in his or her skills—striving for the success that Michelangelo has attained in bono. Their sensuousness may suggest in malo his vulnerability to the physical beauty of those who wound him with the shaft of love. Like the knavish Mercury, he conceals these failings from the casual viewer while leaving them open to interpretation by patient observers. All three understandings converge upon the artist’s self-revelation as one who pursues beauty and love in bono as objects of spiritual perfection and in malo as inducements to degenerate behavior, merchandising his art in sober consideration of its import, again in bono and in malo. In the moral meditation upon life and art that Michelangelo’s Rime sketch, Petrarchan conventions mediate the speaker’s self-critical stance in surprising ways. Jostling with a Neoplatonic terminology that describes his artistic vision, Michelangelo articulates an aesthetics firmly grounded in Aristotelian assumptions about poetic practice and its economic consequences.

Gallic Inflation: Pierre de Ronsard, Prince of Poets and Poet of Princes

In France, the first major humanist inquiry into economic theory was the treatise De asse ‘On coin’ (1516) written by Francis I’s royal secretary Guillaume Budé (1468–1540). It appeared at a time of financial crisis provoked by costly invasions into Italy and wars against Spain’s Charles V. Budé trains his humanist methodology not just on the recovery and understanding of texts about the economies of ancient Greece and Rome, but on their exemplarity and applicability to the present. In its dialectical engagement with the past, Budé’s treatise on monetary weights, measures, and units of exchange in antiquity typifies the rhetorical scope of humanist economic discourse.⁴⁵ It begins with texts by Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), endorsing his rational approach to the extrinsic and wholly arbitrary value of coins and precious metals in opposition to superstitious beliefs about their intrinsic and occult powers.⁴⁶ But the author soon modifies Pliny’s reasoning by citing conflicting evidence from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Columella, and Suetonius, as well as from Demosthenes, Xenophon, Plutarch, and others. Budé analyzes their complex usage of words about money and monetary transactions and criticizes imprecision in their mathematical calculations and practical applications: Ego vero antiquos quoque illos, homines ut nos fuisse puto, liqua etiam scripsisse quae parum intelligerent ‘As for me, I think that the ancients themselves were humans like us, and that they came to write about matters that they barely understood’.⁴⁷ Whatever the outcome, he forges ahead with bold speculation about historical consequences, fueling a complex narrative about moral issues concerning gain and loss.⁴⁸

With Pliny, Budé argues that in the aftermath of Nero’s disastrous reign, money came to signify social distinction and power, which in turn came to incite greed and avarice.⁴⁹ He finds parallels with the onset of inflation during the reign of Louis XII. Exploiting the medieval trope of France as a garden, Budé notes that the Gallic kingdom offers a perfect geographical location and extraordinary natural resources for the use and enjoyment of its populace: Mitto temperium caeli & quod utriusque maris cinctu & commercio commode comiterque habitatur ‘I leave aside its temperate climate and the mildness of its weather and the fact that friendly and agreeable commerce is available through its seaports on both [Mediterranean and Atlantic] shores’ (169). Appropriating the Roman narrative of decline, he laments that mismanagement during Louis’s reign has led to bankruptcy and ruin. But as with the installation of Vespasian as emperor after Nero, the recent coronation of Francis I portends recovery: Omninoque ea tunc hominum constans erat opinio, hactenus expiata nostra esse peccata, Francicique regni maiestatem suo genio restitutam ‘And certainly it was then the firm consensus that our mistakes up to this point have been corrected and that the grandeur of Francis’s kingdom has been restored through his talent for rule’ (303). France now beckons the citizenry to nurture its assets, mend its economy, and bring prosperity back to the realm.

Royal counselors influenced by Budé proceeded to focus their economic discourse upon particular applications affecting the mechanics of pricing, configuring legitimate rates of interest, and codifying legal and commercial contracts.⁵⁰ On the eve of the Council of Trent, the Valois monarchy enlisted its humanist scholars to secure papal approval for policies associated with moderating rates of interest on borrowed money and regulating the transmission of family property through marital arrangements. Charles Du Moulin (1500–66), a legal advisor to both Francis I and Henri II, served the interests of the crown in the first instance with his Treatise on Contracts and Usury, which legitimized the payment of interest in civil contracts (1547), and in the second instance by collaborating with Gilles Bourdin on their Conseil sur le fait du Concile de Trent (1564), which transferred issues concerning marriage to the jurisdiction of secular parlements rather than ecclesiastical courts.⁵¹ Four years later Jean Bodin (1530–96), the Parisian jurist and eventual advisor to the crown on the theory of sovereignty, sought to shore up the royal treasury by outlining a quantity theory of money in which wealth begets wealth as money circulates and recirculates, consumption spurs demand, and suppliers respond with innovative products. Contextualizing these developments, the second part of this book will show how France’s preeminent poet, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), appropriated this discourse of interest and self-interest when he emerged (reluctantly, as we’ll see) as a Petrarchan love-poet in Les Amours (1552–53).

Fairly late in his career, Ronsard assigned Mercury/Hermes a mediating role at the intersection of art and commerce in his ecphrastic poem La Lyre (1569). Here the boy-god invents the lyre seemingly on a whim, but yet par un art nompareille ‘with incomparable know-how’ (392), and he offers it to Apollo en contre-eschange ‘in counter-exchange’ (407) to settle accounts with the muses’ patron after having stolen his cattle.⁵² The poem illuminates Ronsard’s conception of his art as he undergoes a decline in creativity. A younger version of himself had celebrated the power of fureur in launching his verse. Taking an early cue from Platonic aesthetics, he aspired to numinous heights in his Odes (1550–52) and Hynnes (1555–56), and later in his political Discours (1562) and his epic Franciade (1572). But as his passions cooled and his critical reputation sagged, his reasoning about art took a new turn. Craftsmanship and skill, and especially his showcasing of them in massively revised and radically reorganized collected works became the poet’s priority.

With Ronsard, all five considerations about sixteenth-century professionalism and its economic concomitants apply. The poet named other poets—among them, Joachim Du Bellay, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Olivier de Magny, Etienne Jodelle—as members of his brigade, but for long periods he sought isolation and even alienation from them. He explored commercial outlets that they eschewed, though not for reasons we might take for granted. He cultivated an awareness of the mechanics of the book trade, less to maximize payment from sales (publishers and booksellers received the lion’s share) than to invite elite readers to join his community of connoisseurs, to flatter them with the aura of superior taste, and—most important—to open doors to court patronage. In matters of self-definition and self-critique, Ronsard refracted his focus across various genres of epic, ode, mythological and cosmological hymns, elegies and pastoral poems, and political discours. Multiple editions of his revised Oeuvres (six in his lifetime and a seventh posthumously) invite readers to trace his progress poem by poem from one redaction to another. The public visibility of his emendations in print—and doubtless each single one implies scores of others in long discarded manuscripts—illuminates Ronsard’s shift from a Platonic poetics of fureur to an Aristotelian poetics of craftsmanship and skill.

Ronsard, in short, invested in his own name-brand to secure a robust patronage.⁵³ The poet, like Petrarch, was tonsured and had taken minor orders that qualified him to receive rentier income from ecclesiastical benefices. His father, Louis de Ronsard, was lord of the Gastine forest bordering his ancestral manor, La Possonnière, at the village of Couture west of Vendôme and north of Tours. Like other cadet sons of landowning nobility, he aspired through a humanist education to renew his family’s legacy with a position in the expanding court bureaucracy. Though early bids for patronage—notably from Charles de Guise, the cardinal de Lorraine, his childhood classmate at the College de Navarre in 1534—proved unsuccessful, his tonsure brought some payoff in his late twenties. Through his cousin Charles de Pisseleu, bishop of Condom, he obtained a curacy at Mareuil-lès-Meaux in 1552, and two years later—possibly through Cardinal Jean du Bellay—he accepted a curacy near Le Mans. In 1560 after the death of Joachim Du Bellay, he acceded to his friend’s archdeaconate at Château-du-Loir. A considerable advance came in 1563 when the thirteen-year-old Charles IX awarded him an annual income of 1,200 livres tournois, which Henri III renewed in 1578. A half dozen benefices followed. Among them was the priory of Saint-Cosme on the Loire River west of Tours, granted by Charles IX in 1565. In 1566 he rented a comfortable priory at Croixval, four miles east of La Possonnière. After 1568 he lived there and periodically at Saint-Cosme where he died in December 1585.

The word that Ronsard uses to denominate his career is métier, cognate with the Italian mestiere and—resonating with his glorification of fureur—evocative of its sacral significance.⁵⁴ Increasingly, however, he mutes this association. In 1560 an elegy addressed to a soon-to-be disgraced royal counselor Pierre L’Huillier argues that in most professions the skills learned in youth survive throughout maturity:

Mon L’Huillier, tous les arts appris en la jeunesse

Servent à l’artizan jusques à veillesse

Et jamais le mestier en qui l’homme est expert,

Abandonnant l’ouvrier, par l’âge ne se pert. (Céard 2:105, lines 1–4)

L’Huillier, all the arts learned in youth assist the artisan well into old age, and the profession in which one is skilled, never abandoning its practitioner, is never lost in old age.

With poetry, however, the power of fureur diminishes over time so that one ne se voit jamais d’une fureur saisie / Qu’au temps de la jeunesse ‘never seems seized by a fureur, except in the season of youth’ (lines 14–15). Only in youth does fureur s’enfle dans nos coeurs, nous trouvant d’avanture / Au mestier d’Apollon preparez de nature ‘swell up in our hearts, finding us perchance disposed by nature for Apollo’s profession’ (lines 21–22). The speaker mournfully concludes that after the age of thirty-five (Ronsard’s age at the time), poets can rely only upon acquired skills when they practice their métier.

Lumbered by a sense of not having lived up to his potential, Ronsard in 1561 addressed his poem Le Procès ‘The Trial’ to Charles de Guise, cardinal de Lorraine. Unpublished until 1565, the poem stages a mock trial against its addressee with Calliope as Ronsard’s attorney and Apollo as judge. They arraign the cardinal for breaching his promise of patronage and—equally to the point—for hesitating to acknowledge the poet’s technical skills. Guise himself is an accomplished rhetorician who, with Mercury’s tutelage, engineered the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559: Vous fustes envoyé comme un sage Mercure / À Chasteau Cambresis, pour en prendre la cure ‘You were sent to Cateau-Cambrésis as a wise Mercury to effect a resolution’ (Céard 2:71–77, lines 99–100). Ronsard later calls upon the parents of other disappointed poets:

Hà! Que vous fustes fols pauvres peres, de faire

Apprendre à vos enfans le mestier literaire:

Mieux vaudroit leur apprendre un publique mestier,

Vigneron, laboureur, maçon ou charpentier,

Que celuy d’Apollon,…[qui]

Les fait estimer fols, furieux, insensez. (lines 183–90)

Ah, how foolish you poor fathers were for encouraging your children to take up the literary profession. It would have been better for them to learn a public trade, to become a vintner, laborer, mason, or carpenter, rather than the career of Apollo,…which makes them seem foolish, frenzied, or out of their minds.

Inevitably, then, the poet abandons his own purchase upon fureur.

In part 2 I’ll argue that this process begins in Les Amours (1552, expanded in 1553, and revised for his Oeuvres of 1560) when Ronsard devotes himself to painstaking appropriations of Petrarchan materials in order to attract a readership. The thematic concerns of these poems enact his determination. In Les Amours, the lover’s effort to promote himself to his beloved matches the poet’s effort to sell his work to patrons, a publisher, and a reading public. In each case it generates an ongoing war of attrition among the participants. With Cassandre, after years of wooing her mind, the lover would settle for her heart, but it isn’t available. Much of his professional strategizing he drew from the model of Ariosto, whose career provided a compelling example of literary entrepreneurship. Famed as an epic poet who polished his Orlando Furioso to perfection through incessant revision, Ariosto cultivated habits of work that influenced Ronsard even more than specific features of his style or form managed to do.

As part 2 will show, Ronsard’s career moves through multiple stages of experiment in the 1550s and 1560s. His various modes and styles range from Petrarchan and Ariostan to Ovidian and Anacreontic, all as the shape-shifting poet drafts verse on consignment to court noblemen for their customized pleasure. To this rentier paradigm Ronsard brought a sense of how he might package and remit, charter and promote his poetry so as to maximize his readership.⁵⁵ The concept of offering successively revised and augmented editions of his Oeuvres, beginning in 1560, became for him a way to reclaim, revise, and—changing the address and narrative situations of his commissioned poems—reassign them to a Second Livre des Amours on the topic of his love for Marie de Bourgeuil. Finally,