How much does it cost to be stylish? Ease, effort, and energy consumption in Benvenuto Cellini's Vita

Abstract

Ever since Baldassar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, sprezzatura, or the art of concealing one's effort, had become a dominant aesthetic code of comportment in Renaissance court culture. Recent scholars have noted how this same discourse about the projection of ease also came to permeate writings about science and the mechanical arts. In this article, I argue that Benvenuto Cellini's Vita offered an alternative to this aesthetic, highlighting, rather than concealing, the physical toil and energetic expenditure required to produce artistic form out of raw matter. This alternative is significant, I contend, especially when considered in the context of the writings of sixteenth-century engineers like Georgius Agricola, who were beginning to think in terms of the tradeoffs between ore extraction, agricultural production, and human well-being. Tradeoffs imply effort and difficult choices rather than ease, hence, writers like Cellini and Agricola, by offering an alternative manner of describing costs and energy expenditures, also allowed for a greater degree of awareness of employed resources.