The Absence of Grace

Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books

Harry Berger Jr.

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780804739054, 9780804739047
• eBook ISBN: 9780804779869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Absence of Grace is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558). The interpretive method is a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The book focuses on the way the Courtier and Galateo cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender.

The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and correlation the Courtier establishes between two key terms, (1) sprezzatura, defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate the attributes of (2) grazia, understood as the grace and privileges of noble birth. Because sprezzatura is negatively conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest how the binary opposition between these terms affected the discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of Galateo, an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the question of sprezzatura in the gender debate that develops in Book 3 of the Courtier, and Part Three explores in detail the characterization of the two narrators in the Courtier and Galateo, who are represented as unreliable and an object of parody or critique.

1

Wax, Brick, and Bread—Apotheoses of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Painting: Descartes and Pieter de Hooch

I suppose it is correct to say that the Enlightenment was a motley, a variety of overlapping, diverging, crisscrossing trends. Historians are good at gathering and replaying such complexities. Philosophers, on the other hand, are, for all their abstruseness, simplifiers. And what I want to offer in this chapter is a wild simplification, a way of thinking about the meaning of the Enlightenment through the consideration of two images: a piece of wax and some bricks, a brick wall really. My thought is this: each of these two images, wax and brick, embodies and thereby provides or projects an account of the meaning of enlightenment; hence each image pictures a utopian moment that can be thought of as constitutive of the very idea of enlightenment; but, and here is the rub, these two images stand in radical opposition to each other. Hence what we are given through the two images, wax and brick, are two enlightenments, the one we have actually had, enjoyed, and suffered, and another enlightenment that has been lost almost from the moment of its appearance, that indeed has never been more than a painted image. Since precision is not part of this story, it is nice to know that each image is precisely datable: the piece of wax is from 1641, and the brick wall from 1658.

Wax

Most of you will have already guessed the provenance of my piece of wax: those great paragraphs that conclude the Second of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. I still find this one of the strangest, most disturbing, and most breathtaking moments in all of Western thought. Let me remind you how this story goes. At this juncture in his account Descartes has already shown how even the most radical doubt—say, that some evil demon is trying to deceive me at every turn—can be terminated by the knowledge, the certainty, given through the cogito ergo sum. I can never doubt that I exist since the very act of doubting presupposes that I exist. In the midst of doubting I necessarily affirm my existence and so myself. Knowing that I exist in this way, Descartes argues, I also know that I am a thinking thing. That too is indubitable. Nonetheless, Descartes worries that he is tempted by the common-sense thought that “corporeal things,” physical objects, are more clearly known than one’s own mind (153).¹ In order to test this idea he suggests we consider “the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly comprehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see; not indeed bodies in general, for these general ideas are usually a little more confused, but let us consider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax: it is fresh from the honeycomb so it retains the taste of honey, the smell of the flowers from which it was gathered; its color, shape and size are manifest. It is hard and cold to the touch, gives out a sound when rapped with my knuckle” (154). Now, Descartes says, I will put the piece of wax by the fire: it loses the remains of its flavor, the fragrance evaporates, the color changes, the shape is lost, the size increases, it becomes fluid and hot, it can hardly be handled, it no longer gives out a sound if you rap it. Is this the same piece of wax? Of course it must be: no other piece of wax or anything else has come to replace it. Yet its look, feel, taste, smell, and sound have all either changed utterly or even disappeared. Every sensible feature of the piece of wax—“the sweetness of the honey, ... the agreeable scent of flowers, that particular whiteness”—has altered. How can it be the same? “Abstracting from all that does not truly belong to the piece of wax, let us see what remains. Certainly nothing remains excepting a certain extended thing which is flexible and movable” (154). Having rid the piece of wax of all its sensible features, or rather delegitimated those features of their authority as constitutive of the identity of the piece of wax and hence delegitimated sensory awareness of its authority as being capable of grasping the object, Descartes inquires into what we might mean by thinking of the wax as flexible and movable—ideas that may be capturable by the imagination. But not only cannot the piece of wax be known through the senses; it also cannot be imagined, since flexibility involves an “infinitude of changes,” which is to say more changes than I could ever imagine: “I should not conceive clearly according to truth what wax is, if I did not think that even this piece that we are considering is capable of receiving more variations in extension than I have ever imagined” (155). With this in place, Descartes can now move to his conclusion: “We must then grant that I could not even understand through the imagination what this piece of wax is, and that it is my mind alone which perceives it.”

Let me say immediately that some of the great power and magic of this passage actually stems from a misreading of it, and that it is the misreading and the actual argument together that have made the image of the piece of wax almost an emblem of enlightened thought. The misreading is quite natural since it tracks the apparent disappearance of the sensible piece of wax after its ordeal by fire. It is as if the actual fire and the fire of the mind had, together, truly purged the wax of all it sensory properties, such that the piece of wax known by the senses could disappear altogether in order to be replaced by its purely intellectual counterpart. Thus the only properties essential to the piece of wax are that it is something that fills space and can take on an infinite number of shapes. But this is just to say that what belongs to the wax essentially are just those features of it that are quantifiable, and hence those properties that make the only true knowing of the piece of wax the knowledge given of it by mathematical physics. For Descartes, true knowledge of the wax is given not by the senses or imagination but by mental perception alone. Before our eyes, so to speak, the sensuous piece of wax, with its delirium of taste and aroma and feel and look, has disappeared and been replaced by an “object” whose true nature is to be expressed in a series of equations and formulas.

In fact, this is not quite what Descartes is arguing; it is only in the Fifth Meditation, if anywhere, that he argues for the essence of matter being extension and hence for the ideal of a science of nature based on geometry. The argument of the Second Meditation is more modest. It starts from the belief that our conception of wax is derived from the senses—that is, we conceive of wax as something the senses reveal as hard, white, and sweetly scented, etc. When all those sensible features change, it follows that our conception of the piece of wax cannot have rested on them since we are still conceiving the same piece of wax. Indeed, it is part of our ordinary conception of the piece of wax that it can change in an infinite number of ways and yet remain the same piece of wax. It might even change so radically that it would stop being a piece of wax. But this is just to say that our ordinary conception of the piece of wax goes beyond information provided by the senses or the imagination. My everyday conception of the piece of wax draws on, and is a work of, the understanding rather than the senses. Hence the common-sense belief that the material bodies we touch and see are better known than our own minds is false: what we know of bodies belongs strictly to the mind itself, apart from the senses and imagination.² Of course, Descartes could not conclude that the mind is better known than bodies without fully anticipating the argument that the essence of material objects is solely their mathematical properties, something that Descartes states with his usual vividness: “But when I distinguish the wax from its external forms, and when, just as if I had unclothed it, I consider it quite naked, it is certain that although some error may still be found in my judgment, I can nevertheless not perceive it thus without a human mind” (156). The image of the material world as merely clothed in sensory images, and that when unclothed quite naked, revealing a perfect intellectual form without sensory residue, is still startling. It is hard not to think of the fire that burns away the sensory as the fire of the intellect, and that fire of course as the purifying fire of enlightenment itself.

That course of argument in Descartes covers just six paragraphs; but in those six paragraphs the visible world of things known through the senses disappears and we are left with the refinements of mathematical knowing—the things themselves becoming somehow insensible. The truth of the visible world is the invisible world of insensible particles described wholly in mathematical terms. There are endless variations on this frightening and exhilarating moment in Descartes, from Galileo to Eddington’s two tables. But there is something exemplary about the piece of wax: having the familiar world of the senses first liquefy and then disappear into mathematical knowing is a fable for the fate of things in the modern world, and by extension a fable of modernity itself with which we have yet to get on level terms. The account of the piece of wax can have this power, because, by continuing the abstractive process and achievement of methodical doubt, it leads to a radical undermining of the authority of the senses, not merely in terms of their overall accuracy or veridicality or sufficiency, but as properly cognitive mediums with objects corresponding to them. Delegitimating sensory knowledge takes with it the sensible world. It is not too much of a stretch to see the abstraction from particularity and sensory givenness as the abstractive device of modern forms of social reproduction: the subsuming of the use values of particular goods beneath the exchange value of monetary worth, or the domination of intersubjective practices by norms of instrumental reason that yield the rationalization or bureaucratization of our dominant institutions. Somehow the advance of the modern world, its enlightenment, is the advance of the process of abstraction and the domination of the qualitative by the quantitative. This of course is both a utopia and a nightmare.

What makes Descartes’s dissolution of the sensible world even more disturbing is that in the very next decade the attempt was made to offer to the material world of the senses an authenticity, and so an authority, beyond anything previously achieved. It was an attempt to transform the material world from a forever surpassed vehicle for spiritual—ultimately, “other” worldly—activity and meaning into the perfected corollary of being ourselves wholly embodied, sensuous, and finite beings. In putting the matter this way I am suggesting that what happened in the following decade, in 1658, was the emergence, however briefly, of a “naturalism” or even “materialism” different from the naturalism or materialism we associate with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and its triumphal procession into the present.

Brick

My candidate for the author of an enlightenment “other” than the Cartesian one is the Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch.³ In 1658 in Delft, de Hooch began painting canvases of ordinary life, which gave to the visible, tangible experiences of everydayness a solidity, dignity, authority, and self-sufficiency that has found no equal. Whatever else is occurring in these canvases—which is to say, however else we might read and interpret these pictures —the dominant experience they render is of a material world suddenly “there” with a density and solidity not in themselves imaginable, and by extension, a vindication of a wholly secular world that requires nothing outside itself for its completion. To put the same thought another way, I want to see these paintings as themselves a form of claiming, a way of rendering the sensible world of everyday experience such that it can be seen as self-sufficient and complete, hence fully worthy of our investment in it. What de Hooch offers is everydayness raised to the level of the monumental, a sublime everydayness that in being sublime in this way images a life for finite creatures that does not call up any contrasting—infinite, otherworldly, heroic—values. Arguing this case is a complex matter since it involves, first, urging these paintings as forms of claiming that are considerable in their way every bit as much as a philosophical argument is considerable in its; second, transforming, or at least deepening, the standard reception of de Hooch; and hence, third, distinguishing de Hooch’s accomplishment from that of Vermeer. That Vermeer is the greater painter I will not dispute; but the similarity of their paintings in the period between 1658 and 1660 may lead one to consider de Hooch simply the lesser artist rather than, as I shall suggest, falling upon for a short period of time a unique vision, one that simply disappears almost as soon as de Hooch moves from Delft to Amsterdam sometime in 1660. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Although suggesting that Pieter de Hooch rather than, say, Locke or Hume or even Rousseau provides the most profound challenge to the Cartesian version of enlightenment (the version that reaches its fulfillment in the thought of Kant) is, I confess, wild, it has a precise echo in debates inside art history. And these art-historical debates are not idle ones for the purposes of my argument because they concern the kind of intelligibility that Dutch art of the seventeenth century might possess. Attuning ourselves to these issues takes some effort because, I suspect, for most of us no art seems more readily accessible and self-evident in its claims than the realism of the Dutch school. Yet neither traditionally nor even now is the meaning of realism, its point and purpose, or its claims clear or uncontested. On the contrary. The easiest place to begin is the famous critique of the art of the Netherlands that Francisco de Hollanda attributes to none other than Michelangelo:

Flemish painting . . . will . . . please the devout better than any painting of Italy. It will appeal to women and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of the trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful choice or boldness, and finally, without substance or vigour.⁴

Let this passage stand in for the broad Italian critique of Dutch realism. This critique has both a hermeneutical aspect and a connected if distinct normative, aesthetic aspect. The hermeneutical issue is there on the surface: what could be the meaning of an art that seems content to merely describe what it sees, that gives itself over to a world presumed to exist prior to and independently of its rendering in paint? What is the point of realism? Can realism have a point, or is it not, despite its technical accomplishment, pointless and empty, a mere collecting of particulars as if the heaping up of these by itself could be meaningful? The connected aesthetic challenge, lodged most fiercely by E. H. Gombrich, follows on directly: We can understand the nonclassical ideals of Dutch art only from within the frame of the “objective core of the classical ideal.”⁵ In accordance with Gombrich’s view, there is only one core Italian aesthetic norm for modern European art in which the claims of order on the one hand, and fidelity to nature on the other, are competing axes of orientation that must be somehow reconciled. The ideal solution to the demands of the competing axes is the “classic solution,” and it is that which the great art of the Italian Renaissance represents. ⁶ What is thus denied by Gombrich is that there could be a nonclassical aesthetic, at least for us. For Gombrich, fidelity to nature is only ever intelligible as an axis in relation to the competing claims of nonmaterial order. The competing axes constitute the possibility of painting, and the “classic solution,” which is thus “a technical rather than a psychological achievement,” represents all that painting, in principle, could hope for itself; the classic solution might be repeated, but cannot be improved upon: “Deviation on the one side would threaten the correctness of design, on the other the feeling of order.”⁷

One bold response to this critical charge is to deny that Dutch realism flouts the norms and expectat...

Table of contents

• Cultural Memory in the Present
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: (Late) Modernism
• 1 - Wax, Brick, and Bread—Apotheoses of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Painting: Descartes and Pieter de Hooch
• 2 - Judging Life: From Beauty to Experience, from Kant to Chaim Soutine
• 3 - Modernism as Philosophy: Stanley Cavell, Anthony Caro, and Chantal Akerman
• 4 - Aporia of the Sensibte—Art, Objecthood, and Anthropomorphism: Michael Fried, Frank Stella, and Minimalism
• 5 - The Death of Sensuous Particulars: T. J. Clark and Abstract Expressionism
• 6 - Social Signs, Natural Bodies: T. J. Clark and Jackson Pollock
• 7 - Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.: Nominalism and the Paradox of Modernism (Thierry de Duve and Marcel Duchamp)
• 8 - Freedom from Nature? Reflections on the End(s) of Art: Arthur Danto, Yves-Alain Bois, and Robert Ryman
• 9 - The Horror of Nonidentity: Cindy Sherman’s Tragic Modernism
• Reference Matter - Notes
• Index