Edward de Vere appears to have pursued an aesthetic of the ineffable.
This is the grace (venusta) that makes that non so che, which often is pleasing in the works of painters and of poets alike, because it fills our souls with an infinite delight without our knowing whence arises the thing that pleases us.
(Ludovico Dolce)
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non so che
non sapio quid
je-ne-sais-quois
I know not what
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The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe
Richard Scholar
...The story of non sapio quid ( note - Romance language form of nescio quid) is rather similar. Italian is the first Romance language to develop its variant form, non so che, into a noun. But the non so che, despite its currency in sixteenth-century Italian, never achieves sedimentation. Historians of the non so che cite an early substantival occurrence in Agnolo Firenzuola's treatise Della bellezza delle donne (1541). Firenzuola uses the noun to name the inexplicable quality of feminine grace:
(We are forced to believe that this splendour is born of some unknown proportion and a measure that can be found in none of our books, which we neither know nor can imagine, and which is, as we say of things that we cannot explain, a non so che.)
Firenzuola uses the non so che with the lexical self-consciousness reserved for terms enjoying a new currency. His gloss uses esprimere to mean "explain" rather than 'express', a cognitive act rather than an utterance. The non so che allows Firenzuola to name in one gallant stroke that grace in women which 'we' experience yet cannot explain.
Firenzuola is not the only writer to connect the inexplicability of the new non so che with the sweetness of grace. The art theorist Ludovico Dolce does so too when, in his dialogue on painting L'Aretino (1557), he asserts that Michelangelo's laboured designs (as he sees them) are inferior to the painting of Raphael. Raphael, for Dolce, is the master of a careless grace:
(This is the grace (venusta) that makes that non so che, which often is pleasing in the works of painters and of poets alike, because it fills out souls with an infinite delight without our knowing whence arises the thing that please us.)
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"I remember, the players have often
mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that
IN HIS WRITING (whatsoever he penned) he never
blotted out line. My answer hath been, would
he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought
a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity
this, but for their ignorance, who choose that
circumstance to commend their friend by,
wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine
own candour (for I loved the man, and do honour
his memory - on this side idolatry - as
much as any). He was (indeed) honest, and of
an open, and free nature: had an excellent
fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions:
wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometime it was necessary he should be
stopped: sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said
of Haterius. His wit was in his own power;
would the rule of it had been so too." (Jonson)
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Scholar, (con't.)
Dolce applies here to Raphael a topos found in Pliny the Elder and Quintilian about the fourth-century BC Greek painter Apelles, who is commonly said to have been among the greatest of antiquity (although none of his work survives). Pliny, searching for the right Latin term for the artist's famous ease of execution or 'grace', translates charis in Greek as venustas in Latin; Quintilian offers gratia. Dolce, modifying the topos as he repeats it in Italian, introduces the non so che as the inexplicable pleasure that accompanies the intervention of grace (venusta). The semantic connection between grace and the non so che will remain when the latter term passes into French. For 'grace' refers, as the je-ne-sais-quois may do, to a subtle SWEET quality that remains irreducible to systems of explanation while setting them into movement. The two terms share a similar range of reference: both name this quality in theological discourse as well as in the fields of erotic relations (Firenzuola) and art (Dolce). That said, 'grace' is in general a more stable term than the volatile je-ne-sais-quois, and particularly so in theology, where the latter word remains too heavily associated with worldly experiences, erotic and otherwise, for the comfort of the devout.
Dolce visibly uses the term's semantic connection with grace to establish the non so che as a feature of current usage. This currency is reflected both in prose and poetry. Tasso, above all, systematically exploits the term in his heroic epic poem Gerusalemme
Liberata (1581). He is quoted on five occasions by Bouhours's learned wits, who comment that Italian poets use their non so che on all possible occasions. But, unlike their French successors, Italian sixteenth-century writers do not, as far as I am aware, make the substantival non so che into an organizing topic. It remains widely current, but unsedimented, in early modern Italy. (pp. 27-29)
(note - Shakespeare's 'I know not what' never achieved sedimentation in England either.)
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Or SWEETEST Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
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Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia
Fredrika H. Jacobs
Non so che, that indefinable something associated with aesthetic grace (grazia) and charming elegance (leggiadria), was the acknowledged essence of love and beauty. In I libri della famiglia Alberti describes non so che as a "certain something... which attracts men and makes them love one person more than another." Many later critics and theorists, including Lodovico Dolce, agreed. As Cropper, Sohm and other scholars have noted, Dolce's use of non so che may be understood as the ineffable beauty of Petrarch's Laura. Indeed, the indeterminate and unbounded nature of sensible beauty that is part and parcel of non so che is implicit in the term vaghezza, which is related to vagare, meaning to wander or move about without a specific destination. Equicola captures the essence of the allusive indeterminacy in his discussion of the visual apprehension of grazia. (note - Othello - extravagant (wandering) and wheeling stranger)
He begins by repeating the often noted observation that perfect beauty cannot be found in one place: "la singular grazia in una non ritrovarse." It is scattered and, therefore, must be collected and combined or reconstituted.
(snip)
Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverst parts. Danti explained the preferred compositional method advocated by Renaissance writers. Seeking the assistance of nature, the artist should "make use of various men, in each of whom some particular beauty is to be seen. And having taken this and that from this and from that man, they have composed their figures with more perfection than is possible in [nature].
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Shakespearean and Oxfordian 'Shreds of Forms' - Compositional method to achieve perfect beauty.
Opposed to Jonsonian 'wholeness, integrity, unity of form'. (Test of the 'close-cut nail/parts so peis'd)
Shakespeare:
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so GRACIOUS is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
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Alciato's Book of Emblems
Emblem 69
Self-love
Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away the method of the ancients seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own fantasies.
http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e069.html
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The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe
Richard Scholar
The Case of Shakespeare:
...An entire study of the je-ne-sais-quois could be devoted to Shakespeare's plays. They dramatize its main themes, whether the ghostly apparition of an insensible force in nature, the stroke of a disastrous passion, or the super-subtle artifice of signs of quality; they show the characters who undergo such experiences attempting, with extraordinary sophistication, to come to terms with them; and, at such moments, forms of the English phrase 'I know not what' tend to appear. Shakespeare's place in the present study is marginal, since my criterion of inclusion was that a writer should occupy at least a potential place in the historical rise and fall of the je-ne-sais- quois (n.), and Shakespeare has no place in that history. He stands apart from it, a stranger on its threshold, while effortlessly revealing his mastery of its terms and themes. As with so many of the new approaches and theories that literary critics bring to his plays, one is left with the bardolatrous feeling that Shakespeare saw the whole thing first, that it was in fact he who dreamt up the je-ne-sais-quois.
A Midsummer Night's Dream exemplifies Shakespeare's mastery of the je-ne-sais-quois. A strange force of sympathy falls between certain individuals in the play. The characters discuss the nature of this force obsessively: some attempt to dispel, subdue, and explain it away; others sense that it is something really inexplicable and inexplicably real and, in saying so, they grasp at forms of the phrase 'I know not what'.
(snip)
...For love, the play reveals, is the stuff of life: an I-know-not-what that appears and vanishes like a dream.
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We are forced to believe that this splendour is born of some unknown proportion and a measure that can be found in none of our books, which we neither know nor can imagine, and which is, as we say of things that we cannot explain, a non so che. Firenzuola
http://home.att.net/~tleary/GIFS/DROUS.JPG
Droeshout figure 'composite whole made of diverse parts' - but monstrous (against nature).
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his WIT
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face ; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
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A DISCOURSE OF WIT.
BY David Abercromby, M. D.
Qui velit ingenio cedere rarus erit.LONDON, Printed for John Weld at the Crown between the two Tem|ple Gates in Fleetstreet, 1686.
3. I cannot then pretend to give you a true and genuine Notion of Wit, but an imperfect, and rude inchoate description thereof, yet so general and comprehensive, that it contains all such Creatures, as without any violence done to the Word, we may truely call Witty. Yet shall I not say with a great Man of this Age, that Wit is, un je ne scay quoy, I know not what: For this would be to say NOTHING at all, and an easie answer to all difficulties, and no solution to any.
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"Science and the Secrets of Nature"
William Eamon
The distinguishing mark of the courtier, according to Castiglione, was grazia, or grace, "a seasoning without which all the other properties and good qualities would be of little worth." Essentially identical with elegance, urbanity, and refinement, grace was the highest achievement of culture.
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Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverse parts. Danti explained the preferred compositional method advocated by Renaissance writers. Seeking the assistance of nature, the artist should "make use of various men, in each of whom some particular beauty is to be seen. And having taken this and that from this and from that man, they have composed their figures with more perfection than is possible in [nature]. (Fredrika H. Jacobs)
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1572 - Edward de Vere, preface in Latin to Batholomew Clerke's translation into English of Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (The Courtier).
For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the figure and model of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although nature herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet the manners of men exceed in dignity that with which nature has endowed them; and he who surpasses others has here surpassed himself and has even out-done nature, which by no one has ever been surpassed. Nay more: however elaborate the ceremonial, whatever the magnificence of the court, the splendor of the courtiers, and the multitude of spectators, he has been able to lay down principles for the guidance of the very Monarch himself.
(snip)
Again, to the credit of the translator of so great a work, a writer too who is no mean orator, must be added a new glory of language. For although Latin has come down to us from the ancient city of Rome, a city in which the study of eloquence flourished exceedingly, it has now given back its features for use in modern courts as a polished language of an excellent temper, fitted out with royal pomp and possessing admirable dignity. All this my good friend Clerke has done, combining exceptional genius with wonderful eloquence. For he has resuscitated that dormant quality of fluent discourse. He has recalled those ornaments and lights which he had laid aside, for use in connection with subjects most worthy of them. For this reason he deserves all the more honor, because that to great subjects -- and they are indeed great -- he has applied the greatest lights and ornaments.
For who is clearer in his use of words? Or richer in the dignity of his sentences? Or who can conform to the variety of circumstances with greater art? If weighty matters are under consideration, he unfolds his theme in a solemn and majestic rhythm; if the subject is familiar and facetious, he makes use of words that are witty and amusing. When therefore he writes with precise and well-chosen words, with skillfully constructed and crystal-clear sentences, and with every art of dignified rhetoric, it cannot be but that some noble quality should be felt to proceed from his work. To me indeed it seems, when I read this courtly Latin, that I am listening to Crassus, Antonius and Hortensius, discoursing on this very theme.
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nescio quid
"And I maintain this also, that when a certain training and well- formed learning achieve and outstanding and illustrious character, then that *noble and unique something* usually STANDS FORTH." (Cicero)
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The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature
David M. Posner
...Even and especially when the noble courtier is performing that function most proper to his class, namely making war, that activity becomes above all a performance designed not so much to serve the interests of the State as to impress one’s employer. One should be sure, when in battle, to perform one’s heroic deeds as visibly as possible, and if it can be managed, right in front of one’s boss. The practical results – if any – of this martial performance, and of other, less overtly dangerous forms of showing off, are vastly less important than the perception therof by the princely onlooker. In the discussion in book II, section 11, of masquerade (“lo esser travestito”), and of its great utility for showing of one’s true (noble) identity through disguising it, Castiglione emphasizes that the success of the courtier’s performance is determined by the audience reaction, and particularly by whether or not the audience “si diletta e piglia peacere” (“is delighted and pleased”). Control of that reaction, through controlling the pleasure experienced by the beholder, thus becomes paramount. This pleasure arises not from the audience’s experience of the showing forth of some Truth, a la Cicero, but rather from its being deceived. Castiglione shows that the essence of the courtier’s performance is a kind of multi-layered deception, in the form of a performed concealment – a concealment that pretends to be the opposite, to be an intentionally incomplete concealment that instead reveals, with a wink and a nudge, the “truth” behind its supposedly consensual pretense. Through performing "con abito disciolto,”: in a disguise meant to be seen into, the performer invites the audience to feel as though it is in on the joke. The audience’s pleasure arises from its accepting that invitation, from being fooled into believing that , rather than being fooled, it is seeing beyond the mask (representing e.g. a pastor selvatico, a peasant) to the “real” (i.e. noble) visage underneath. The precise locus of this pleasure, as Castilione makes clear, is the
tension between what is actually seen and what is artfully hinted at, without however being revealed in what Bacon will call the “Naked, and Open day light” of Truth. *Nor could that shadowy something-hinted-at ever be thus revealed, as it is neither presence nor substance, neither essence nor Truth, but rather the reflection of the desire of the beholder, at the very moment of “l’animo…(chi)…corre ad imaginar…” (“the mind which rushes to imagine”)*. In this specular performance, there is always something more – Castiglione’s “molto maggior cosa” – than can be seen, or indeed be present; the desire for that shadowy cosa is the delectation proper to this masquerade, and it is the eliciting of that desire that is the object of the courtier’s performance.
The success of that performance, of its come-hither pseudo- revelation, is in turn dependent on a sort of meta-deception, another layer of pretense that likewise attempts to disguise itself as its opposite. The courtier’s performance must persuade, but that effort at persuasion must itself be covered over by another persuasive effort, on that “demonstrates” to the audience that no effort at persuasion is being made. One cannot be seen to be doing what one is in fact doing, namely working very hard to persuade one’s audience of a noble identity which – if it actually were what it claims to be – would need no rhetorical helps to impose its intrinsic veracity, its mathematical Identity with itself, on the minds and emotions of the audience. That such an effort of rhetoric is in fact needed suggest that the Identity being performed is not what it professes to be, or at least that the person laying claim to it has no intrinsic, “natural” right to do so. Effort must therefore be disguised as its opposite; one must persuade the witnesses to that effort of its absence. This is sprezzatura.(pp. 9-12)
(snip)
Castiglione appropriates from Cicero the notion of artful artlessness, as well as its seductive effect: that the audience, finding what it beholds “sit venustius sed non ut appareat,” is incited to suspect, and desire, the presence of something more than what is actually seen. (While Castiglione’s rewriting of diligens negligentia jettisons the explicit comparison with the woman made more beautiful and attractive by her non-use of external adornments, the model of a seductive delectation is everywhere implicit in Castiglione’s idea of the courtier’s relationship with his or her audience.) But the Cortegiano expand the field of application of diligens negligentia well beyond the narrow limits of a single style of oratory (note – plain style); sprezzatura governs all courtly behaviour, and indeed is its essential defining characteristic. Upon it depends grazia, grace, which must be seen to accompany the courtier’s every action; *upon it depends above all the crucial ability to persuade one’s public of the presence of the “molto maggior cosa,” that Something Else, always just beyond the reach of clear perception, which is the key to noble identity*.(p.13)
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Oxford's English critics, unimpressed with his Italian ideas, felt that his compositions of diverse elements' were monstrous assemblies of forms, dismissing them a casual gatherings of shreds and pieces. Classical scholar Gabriel Harvey gives us an idea of the variety of forms that Oxford availed himself of and portrays the Traveller's ridiculous grace:
Speculum Tuscanismi
Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out,
Not the like resolute man for great and serious affairs,
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States,
Eyed like to Argus, eared like to Midas, nos'd like to Naso,
Wing'd like to Mercury, fittst of a thousand for to be employ'd,
This, nay more than this, doth practice of Italy in one year.
None do I name, but some do I know, that a piece of a twelve month
Hath so perfited outly and inly both body, both soul,
That none for sense and senses half matchable with them.
A vulture's smelling, Ape's tasting, sight of an eagle,
A spider's touching, Hart's hearing, might of a Lion.
Compounds of wisdom, wit, prowess, bounty, behavior,
All gallant virtues, all qualities of body and soul.
O thrice ten hundred thousand times blessed and happy,
Blessed and happy travail, Travailer most blessed and happy.
"Tell me in good sooth, doth it not too evidently appear
that this English poet wanted but a good pattern before his eyes,
as it might be some delicate and choice elegant Poesy
of good Master Sidney's or Master Dyer's
(our very Castor and Pollux for such and many greater matters)
when this trim gear was in the matching?"
(Equicola's definition of grazia as a union of gendered opposites "femmina masculo e masculo femmina" (Fredrika Jacobs))
He begins by repeating the often noted observation that perfect beauty cannot be found in one place: "la singular grazia in una non ritrovarse." It is scattered and, therefore, must be collected and combined or reconstituted.
(snip)
Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverst parts. Danti explained the preferred compositional method advocated by Renaissance writers. Seeking the assistance of nature, the artist should "make use of various men, in each of whom some particular beauty is to be seen. And having taken this and that from this and from that man, they have composed their figures with more perfection than is possible in [nature].
********************************
Jonson, Epigrammes, On Poet-Ape:
Poor POET-APE, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays ; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own :
And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish gaping auditor devours ;
He marks not whose 'twas first : and after-times
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool ! as if half eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece ?
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Oxford/Amorphus the Deformed Traveller - from Jonson's Cynthia's Revels:
Cupid: What's he, Mercury?
Mercury: A notable Smelt. One, that hath newly enter-
tain'd the Begger to follow him, but cannot get him to
wait near enough. 'Tis Asotus, the Heir of Philargyrus;
but first I'll give ye the others Character, which may
make his the clearer. He that is with him is Amorphus
a Traveller, one so made out of the mixture and shreds
of forms, that himself is truly deform'd. He walks
most commonly with a Clove or Pick-tooth in his
Mouth, he is the very mint of Complement, all his Be-
haviours are printed, his Face is another Volume of
Essayes; and his Beard an Aristrachus. He speaks all
Cream skim'd, and more affected than a dozen of wait-
ing Women. He is his own Promoter in every place.
The Wife of the Ordinary gives him his Diet to main-
tain her Table in discourse, which (indeed) is a meer
Tyranny over the other Guests, for he will usurp all
the talk: Ten Constables are not so tedious...
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Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverst parts. (Jacobs)
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Equicola: "The visage of a woman is praised if it has the features of a man; the face of the man if it has the feminine features, hence the proverb" 'the effeminate male and the manly female are graceful in almost every aspect."
Equicola's definition of grazia as a union of gendered opposites "femmina masculo e masculo femmina" (Fredrika Jacobs)
Shakespeare:
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
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'Gendered Style' and Effeminate Oxford:
Speculum Tuscanismi
Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
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The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
By Domna C. Stanton
…In what constitutes the most extensive seventeenth-century commentary on le je ne sais quoi, Bouhours insists that it can only be known only by its effects and that all the terms which have been used to define it – “those impressions, penchants, instincts, feelings, affinities: - are nothing but flim-flam: “When we have said all that and and a thousand other things besides, we have said nothing. It would no longer be a je ne sais quoi if we knew what it was; its nature is to be incomprehensible and unexplainable”.
Although Mere purported to believe that “certain people know its cause and origin, he, along with the other writers on honnêtete, continued to regard le je ne sais quoi as the impenetrable “explanation” of the self-as-art. The countenance of an honnête homme, for example, radiates “a merry and insinuating je ne said quoi:, and his body, “a certain secret, charming je ne sais quoi that we cannot describe". Like his manner, urbanity brings together “a courteous and polished je ne sais quoi, a je ne sais quoi that is at the same time bantering and flattering”. In conversation, his voice has a "gentle and tender je ne said quoi that touches the heart", or “one that has an appealing, casual je ne sais quoi”, and his verbal style, according to Mere, has a “je ne sais quoi (that is) pure and noble,” “refined,” “natural,” “subtle and lofty,” “precise and insinuating” The global pertinence of this SIGN OF THE INEFFABLE also dominates Scudery’s analysis: “this je ne sais quoi galant which permeated the entire person of its possessor – his mind, his words, his actions or even his clothing – put the finishing touch on honntêtes gens, makes them lovable and causes others to love them. Bouhours said both the first and the last word on the subject when he insisted that the presence of the je ne sais quoi could remedy all defects and that its absence could invalidate all virtues. (p.208)
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And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I
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Wotton reported in 1617 that Oxford had built himself a house while in Venice
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A Man in Hue:
Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance By Harry Berger
...It seems possible, then, to discern cultural, social and political agendas that either adhere to the graphic by association or inhere in its formal capabilities. Is if also possible to locate such agendas in optical and textural performances? Are there instances in which the differences between graphic and optical effects are transformed into contestation? Instances in which optical/textural passages seem to be deployed in a manner that stages resistance to graphic agendas - deployed, for example, to obscure where the graphic clarifies, loosen where it fixes, animate where it freezes, soften where it hardens? An antisculptural, antimonumental, antilinear counter-practice? Though Vasari treated this invidiously, less as a counter-practice than as a defect, apologists for Venetian painting from Pino through Dolce to Boschini elaborate on their basic motif, the demotion of disegno, in a manner that increasingly promotes optical and textual values as if they were Venice's emulative response to the Florentine graphic and hegemonic context for it provided by Vasari. The earlier Florentine emphasis on disegno and the later Venetian emphasis on colorito reflect and implicit conflict over the relative merits of the graphic and optical modes that would become explicit in the discourse of French academicians in the seventeenth century. Similarly, the partially overlapping debate about the relative merits of 'smooth' and 'rough' manners of painting arises in response to the drift of the optical towards the textual mode. Van Mander carries Vasari's position to the Netherlands when he claims that the smooth style he associates with van Eyck, Durer, Bruegel, and other Northern painters is preferable to "the newer modes of rendering based on the flagrant brushwork of Titian's epigones."
The formal interplay of bound variables that characterizes the system of early modern painting thus provides a necessary but not sufficient basis for politico-formal interpretation. Yet within the disegno/colorito distinction lurk the makings of a more sufficient basis, which would surface in the rhetoric of the French polemicists. This rhetoric has been analyzed by Jacqueline Lichtenstein as activating an ancient distinction
between ornament and makeup, between a regulated and unregulated use, between lawful employment and abuse...In the case of language, it was addressed to the din of hyperbole, the indulgence of metaphor, the glut of tropes that were charged with overwhelming content and obscuring the purity of the idea. In the case of the image, the distinction concerned coloration, whose brilliance was accused of shrouding the line and corrupting its efficacy. The analogy is often explicit in medieval rhetoricians: 'Employed sparingly, rhetorical figures enhance style just as colors bring out a drawing; when used too lavishly, they obscure it and cause the clear line to disappear.'
Lichtenstein aims to show how even the defenders of colorito, preeminently Roger de Piles, exploit the biased gender implications that inhere in the traditional distinction, comparing 'the surprises of coloring' that seize the spectator to "the surprises of love" by which the "lover is victimized". But her account of the apologetic task confronting the colorists clearly brings out the long tradition of masculinist/idealist/elitist investments that undergo a rinascita in the scopic regime founded on disegno and dominated by its achievements in graphic representation.
In taking up the defense of color, they attacked the domination of discourse as well as the superiority of drawing, the hegemony of a mimetic and therefore metaphysical conception of the image along with the privilege of the idea for representation, the principles of morality at the same time as the pedagogic virtues of rules. They insolently defended the purely sensible qulities of painting, indecently vindicating makeup, pleasure and seduction...This rebellion was already evident in the writings of the Italian colorists, although their defiance was timid and often cautious.
In painting by Venetian colorists there may have been an incipient rebellion against the strict construction of a graphic order identified with the Florence-Rome axis.
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Thomas Bancroft (1639), Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs
118. To Shakespeare.
Thy Muses SUGRED DAINTIES seeme to us
Like the fam’d apples of old Tantalus :
For we (admiring) see and heare thy straines,
But none I see or heare those sweets attaines.
