How was the self represented in the Renaissance?

Stock
One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or
imagined use of reading and writing.

He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much
discussed "modernity" and "individuality" are best understood in the context of his search for the
manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities

Burke
central development in Italian culture in that period was what he
called 'individualisni' or 'the discovery of man'. (burckhardt)

In the Middle Ages, according to him, people were

aware of themselves only as members of a group; in the Renaissance, on
the other hand, 'man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself
as such'. The rise of self-awareness or subjectivity was reflected by the
rise of autobiographies and portraits

he underestimated the
importance of the preoccupation with the individual self in the Middle
Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards.

cultural movement we call

the Renaissance, or whether they simply happened at the same time

'self-presentation', 'self-stylization' and 'impression

management'. They are interested not only in the person but also in the
'persona', the mask which the individual wears in public, the role which
he or she is playing

Self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-cultivation, self-examination

and self-reliance also deserve to be considered.

Equally important was the presentation of self to others. 'Giving a good

impression of oneself
The uniqueness of the individual was also a concern at this time.

Burckhardt's later remark that in the Middle Ages 'man' was

only conscious of himself as a member of some general category, while in
the Renaissance a sense of the individual developed.

new term suggests that people were becoming more aware

of the difference between an inner and an outer self, a difference which
was given it5 classic formulation by Descartes

Outside Italy, few biographies were written before the sixteenth century,
but then the trickle turned into a flood.

witness to its author's sense of a divided or fragmented self. - the secret

the city, which offers alternative ways of life,

encourages a sense of individual choice. The sixteenth century was an age
of urbanization. It was also an age of travel, and travel encourages selfconsciousness
by cutting o f f the individual from his or her community.

There was also a more personal, confessional

style in the manner- of St Augustine, whose example was followed by
Petrarch, among others, and also by St Teresa,

A si~nilar tension between stereotype and spontaneity or authenticity

car1 be.found in another form of self-presentation, the letter.
Petrarch and Erasmus put a good deal
of themselves into their letters; indeed, both men used letters as a tool of
self-presentation or self-fashioning

Montaigne made a comparison between autobiography

and self-portraiture, taking the example of Rerii: of Anjou. 'Why is it riot
legitimate for every man to portray himself with his pen, as it was fi)r him to
do it with a crayon?'

Material culture was, and is, an important vehicle for expressing views of
the self. Palaces and country houses expressed the self-images of their
owners, all the more effectively when they were decorated with the owner's
coat of arms, badge, device, name or initials,

Painted and sculpted portraits, which became increasingly

numerous in the course of the Renaissance, can also be read as expressions
of the sitter's self-image

an increase in self-awareness in
the course of the Renaissance
physical appearance as an expression of the inner self'. The concern with
fame was reflected in portraits and biographies alik

It should be added that the cult of the outstanding individual did

not appeal to everyone. Some upper-class Venetians, for instance, were
sr~spicious of this fomm of individualism and cultivated an alternative,
communal tradition.

related not only to selfawareness

but also to the rise in the status of the artist

the variety of' Rrriaissaricr selves or concrptions

of the self. A remarkably wide range of people portrayed themselves

In India, the Mughal emperor Babur wrote his rriernoirs early

in the sixteenth century

assumption that self-consciousness arose in a particular place, st~chas Italy,

at a particular time, perhaps the fourteenth century. It is better to think in
terms of a variety of categories of the person or conceptions of the self
(more or less unified, bounded and so on) in different cultures, categories
and conceptions which underlie a variety of styles of self'preseritation or
self-fashioning.
How was the self represented in the Renaissance?

Stock
One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or
imagined use of reading and writing.

He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much
discussed "modernity" and "individuality" are best understood in the context of his search for the
manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities

Burke
central development in Italian culture in that period was what he
called 'individualisni' or 'the discovery of man'. (burckhardt)

In the Middle Ages, according to him, people were

aware of themselves only as members of a group; in the Renaissance, on
the other hand, 'man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself
as such'. The rise of self-awareness or subjectivity was reflected by the
rise of autobiographies and portraits

he underestimated the
importance of the preoccupation with the individual self in the Middle
Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards.

cultural movement we call

the Renaissance, or whether they simply happened at the same time

'self-presentation', 'self-stylization' and 'impression

management'. They are interested not only in the person but also in the
'persona', the mask which the individual wears in public, the role which
he or she is playing

Self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-cultivation, self-examination

and self-reliance also deserve to be considered.

Equally important was the presentation of self to others. 'Giving a good

impression of oneself
The uniqueness of the individual was also a concern at this time.

Burckhardt's later remark that in the Middle Ages 'man' was

only conscious of himself as a member of some general category, while in
the Renaissance a sense of the individual developed.

new term suggests that people were becoming more aware

of the difference between an inner and an outer self, a difference which
was given it5 classic formulation by Descartes

Outside Italy, few biographies were written before the sixteenth century,
but then the trickle turned into a flood.

witness to its author's sense of a divided or fragmented self. - the secret

the city, which offers alternative ways of life,

encourages a sense of individual choice. The sixteenth century was an age
of urbanization. It was also an age of travel, and travel encourages selfconsciousness
by cutting o f f the individual from his or her community.
There was also a more personal, confessional
style in the manner- of St Augustine, whose example was followed by
Petrarch, among others, and also by St Teresa,

A si~nilar tension between stereotype and spontaneity or authenticity

car1 be.found in another form of self-presentation, the letter.
Petrarch and Erasmus put a good deal
of themselves into their letters; indeed, both men used letters as a tool of
self-presentation or self-fashioning

Montaigne made a comparison between autobiography

and self-portraiture, taking the example of Rerii: of Anjou. 'Why is it riot
legitimate for every man to portray himself with his pen, as it was fi)r him to
do it with a crayon?'

Material culture was, and is, an important vehicle for expressing views of
the self. Palaces and country houses expressed the self-images of their
owners, all the more effectively when they were decorated with the owner's
coat of arms, badge, device, name or initials,

Painted and sculpted portraits, which became increasingly

numerous in the course of the Renaissance, can also be read as expressions
of the sitter's self-image

an increase in self-awareness in
the course of the Renaissance
physical appearance as an expression of the inner self'. The concern with
fame was reflected in portraits and biographies alik

It should be added that the cult of the outstanding individual did

not appeal to everyone. Some upper-class Venetians, for instance, were
sr~spicious of this fomm of individualism and cultivated an alternative,
communal tradition.

related not only to selfawareness

but also to the rise in the status of the artist

the variety of' Rrriaissaricr selves or concrptions

of the self. A remarkably wide range of people portrayed themselves

In India, the Mughal emperor Babur wrote his rriernoirs early

in the sixteenth century

assumption that self-consciousness arose in a particular place, st~chas Italy,

at a particular time, perhaps the fourteenth century. It is better to think in
terms of a variety of categories of the person or conceptions of the self
(more or less unified, bounded and so on) in different cultures, categories
and conceptions which underlie a variety of styles of self'preseritation or
self-fashioning.
Intellectual and cultural historians who focus on the Middle Ages, for instance, have
mustered considerable evidence that many of the humanistic and even individualistic ideals
Burckhardt viewed as originating in Italy in the Renaissance had in fact emerged much
earlier in the period

if the individual was not a central concern of the Middle Ages, this was due to a veil "of
faith, illusion and childish prepossession"; that, finally, what emerged in the Renaissance
was man as he really is.

postmodern arguments and insights, have begun to argue that individualism itself is a
construction,

As Michael Mascuch has recently cautioned in his study of the self in seventeenth-century
England, "individualism is a multidimensional phenomenon, an amalgam of practices and
values with no discernible center.

A variety of forces-social, economic, political, intellectual-contributed to its making, each

one of which was paramount at some time or another, either separately or jointly with
others.
-shift in moral vocabulary played a significant role in the construction of new notions of
individualism in the Renaissance world

New Historicists such as Jean Howard, also view the self, like a text, not as an autonomous
entity but rather as a site on which broader institutional and political forces are inscribed.

Self fashioning is deployed in a variety of fields: in social history, art history, intellectual
history, the history of science, and it even has important implications for the study of the
self in other times and places

Greenblatt notes, "the simplest observation we can make is that in the sixteenth century
there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity
as a manipulable, artful process.117

self-fashioning appears to make sense of a world in which the court was central to literary
life-conscious of fashioning particular selves in order to survive or advance in the high-
stakes world of court society

Greenblatt himself notes, "self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it
functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life."

(One can view Galileo's insights, that is, not exclusively as the consequence of external social
and political factors impinging on the scientific imagination nor as merely the result of
developments within Renaissance mathematics and astronomy but rather as the outcome of
Galileo's own efforts to navigate courtly culture and its patronage expectations in relation
to late Renaissance or baroque science)
The Galilean revolution is thus a result neither of social change per se nor purely of
developments intrinsic to science but of the way these two spheres intersected in Galileo's
studied "self-fashioning."

certain political and religious forces in the Renaissance created the fiction of individual
autonomy

Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning offers a view of the self as a cultural artifact, a

historical and ideological illusion generated by the economic, social, religious, and political
upheavals of the Renaissance

Montrose – identity is shaped form the outside

it becomes possible to read a painting such as Durer's Self-Portrait of 1500 (see cover
illustration) simultaneously as a submersion of the self in the identity of Christ and as an
expression of artistic individuality and genius.

The tide has shifted, then, from Burckhardt's notion of the discovery of the individual to a
New Historicist analytics of self-fashioning.

Renaissance notions of the self portray an explicitly layered quality, which represented a
sense not only of inwardness but also of mystery about what Renaissance writers, drawing
on a long tradition, imagined as their inner selves. - Petrarch Secret

In the sixteenth century, however, this concern reached a new level of intensity. The
Venetian reformer Gasparo Contarini conveyed a sense of this inwardness in a celebrated
letter, his epistle to Tommaso Giustiniani of April 1511: "if you were to know me from
within, as I really am (but even I do not know myself well), you would not make such a
judgement about me."

Montaigne, one of the preeminent architects of inwardness in the sixteenth century, made a
similar observation: "I, who make no other profession, find in me such infinite depth and
variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I
still have to learn."'

in the Renaissance court as well, the issue of the representation of the self was a central
dimension of the life of the elites. The very popularity of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of
the Courtier in Italy and throughout Europe provides evidence of this.

The experience of self in the Renaissance world was, in short, often the experience of a
divided self - frequently forced to erect a public façade that disguised his or her convictions,
beliefs, or feelings.
In the Renaissance generally and the sixteenth century in particular - new emphasis on
inwardness or the idea of an interior self as the core of personal identity.

Though, Medieval society, especially in the wake of the cultural and monastic revivals of the
late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, had numerous writers and theologians who
fashioned a deep sense of inwardness e.g. Abelard's ethics.
-There was something significantly new about the way men and women in the Renaissance
began to conceptualize the relation between what they saw as the interior self on the one
hand and the expressions of one's thoughts, feelings, or beliefs on the other.

- This ideal (of Prudence) underwent a significant shift in the Italian Renaissance, especially
in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when humanists began reading and
interpreting Aristotle's works - prudence was no longer the equivalent of providence but
rather an ethical strategy that gave new emphasis to the individual's will.
- in the early sixteenth century, in the work of Machiavelli's the Prince, prudence was
divorced entirely from ethics.
-In Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, the humanist Pietro Bembo states that one should
never trust anyone, not even a dear friend, to the extent of "4communicating without
reservation all one's thoughts to him,"

Piccolomini's- stress on the need for the individual "to project an impressive image of
himself, training himself to be all things to all men, while at the same time preserving his
own inner freedom and remaining detached from the world in spite of his dealings with it"

The Renaissance refashioning of prudence indicates a significant shift in the

understanding of the self.

From the fifteenth century on, by contrast, the will was seen as increasingly free of these
external (and internal) constraints and more emphasis was placed on the feelings,
emotions, and expressiveness of what we might describe as the individual subject.72

-a growing moral imperative to make one's feelings and convictions known

- a characteristically modern concern: to see particular utterances and works of art and
literature as essential expressions of individual selves, above all, to desire to connect
speech with feeling

What was novel about sixteenth-century views of the self was the new understanding of the
relation of one's thoughts and feelings to one's words and actions.

-Renaissance writers, especially by the sixteenth century, placed new emphasis on

differences between individuals
-Protestant reformers gave a new legitimacy to the expression of one's emotions-an
expressiveness of feelings that would, increasingly, be subsumed under the ideal of sincerity.

-In Renaissance Europe, many men identified themselves with a personal emblem. Calvin
designed his as a hand-held heart,

THE DISCOVERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL was to a large degree, therefore, the result of
fundamental shifts in the ethical visions of Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers
– men and women could fashion their religious, social, political and even personal identities.

-Renaissance notion of the self as an individual and expressive subject

-the new sense of the self views the human being as agent, subject, or author-as someone
responsible for his or her actions and assertions

Montaigne connected his emphasis on self-knowledge and on the individual with his
decision to retire in 1571 and devote his leisure to the study of himself-a project he
ultimately realizes in the Essays
-perhaps best known for the image he created of the individual cultivating freedom entirely
apart from others.

-For Greenblatt, in short, Montaigne's individualism or self-fashioning is primarily a

consequence of the dynamics of an emerging capitalism; the self is implicated in the
structures of an economy that would place a supreme value on separating one's private
from one's public life
– Sincerity and Prudence - both these virtues emphasized the need for the individual to
fashion the public self from within, to know when it was most appropriate to present in
one's expressed life a reflection of "true" feelings (as in the case of the Protestants) or
"true" nature (as in the case of Montaigne) or when, by contrast, it was more
appropriate to project or to wear a mask, to dissemble-in short, to exercise prudence in
one's affairs, whether public or private - The ideals of prudence and sincerity, that is,
were not fashioned at one particular moment or even in one particular context but
developed gradually over the course of several generations.

Montaigne's point is rather obvious. There are multiple layers in the make-up of a
particular person: a natural temperament, a cluster of (often conflicting) emotions, a
primary language, a particular family and education, as well as broader political, social,
and cultural forces-all of these go into shaping us, making us who we are.

– portrayal of oneself in public becomes popular

Greenblatt's view that, in the Renaissance period, "there is no layer deeper, more authentic,
than theatrical self-representation.1

what Burckhardt long ago called "the development of the individual"-cannot and should
not be confined to one particular historical moment or context

-Elias has written concerning such terms as "civility" in his magisterial The Civilizing
Process, "fashionable words, concepts current in the everyday speech of a particular
society. This shows that they met not merely individual but collective needs for expression

Renaissance men and women were shaped with a new awareness of the self as subject, as an
individual.

Princes may have controlled the outward gestures of their courtiers, but they continued to
fear what lay in the hearts of their "subjects.”

The primary cultural factors in the making of Renaissance individualism were the
emergence of humanism and the development of Protestantism, both of which deeply
problematized the relation of what contemporaries viewed as the internal self to one's
words and actions

The primary social factors were the rapid expansion of urban life and the burgeoning size
of the courts

the individual came to see him or herself as a unique entity, largely responsible for his or
her words and deeds, and capable of either concealing or revealing his or her feelings and
beliefs as circumstances dictated.

the growing importance of the ideals of prudence and sincerity-as well as the tensions
between them-made it increasingly possible in the Renaissance and in the early modern
period generally to view a particular person as a complex individual, who was self-conscious
about the degree to which the inner self, now viewed as largely cut off from God, directed
the outer, public self in its daily interactions with one's fellow citizens, subjects, or courtiers.