The Italian term sprezzatura refers to making what one does appear nonchalant and effortless when it in fact involves calculation and effort. This notion, which comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, captures a practice that permeates many areas of our aesthetic lives, from the performing arts to everyday social interactions, and is useful for criticism and appreciation. However, this concept has received little attention in philosophical aesthetics. By filling out and making more precise Castiglione’s casual and (...) indirect remarks about sprezzatura, I show how this concept both points to heretofore underappreciated aesthetic values and helps us see important aesthetic and moral differences between cases that otherwise seem alike. (shrink)

Concealment -- Part of eloquence is to hide eloquence -- The concealed ornament -- Art or nature? -- In the garden -- Iki -- Those who cannot dissimulate cannot rule either -- True eloquence mocks eloquence -- Ready-mades.

At the end of Matters of Exchange , Harold Cook's major revisionist account of the early modern scientific revolution, he locates the political and economic writings of Bernard Mandeville within the practices and values of contemporaneous Dutch observational medicine. Like Mandeville, Cook describes the potency of early modern capitalism and its attendant value system in generating industry and knowledge; like Mandeville, Cook finds coercive systems of moral regulation to be mistaken in their estimation of human capacities; and like Mandeville, Cook (...) does not shy away from the violence that often made the worldwide commerce in matters of fact possible. “Every Part was full of Vice,” famously rhymed Mandeville, “Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” The practices and values of science, this book suggests, stemmed from the vices of the merchant and the consumer, not the sprezzatura of the baroque courtier, the asceticism of the Christian gentleman, the speculation of the university philosopher, or the dour appraisal of the theologian. Interest, not claims to disinterest, made modern science and its attendant values possible. Scrupulous attention to goods from around the world and right at home created the conditions for natural knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the concept of “courtliness” in Castiglione and Gracián. The hero of Gracián learns the art of the “courtliness” from Castiglione, but he is not a “courtier”. Gracián uses the word “courtier” in a much broader sense. The courtliness in Castiglione is a sort of meta-discipline that contains in itself all the arts and is founded on the universal rule of «grace». The article shows how the theory of the grace of Castiglione, through (...) which the count would have been able to reconcile two requirements, achieved success in Court and a life governed by the sign of elegance, loses its intensity in Gracián, who insists more on the strategic behavior, based more on prudence and discretion than on grace. The courtesan philosophy of Gracián is understood as a discourse on the life. If we understand the court as the enclosed space in which the courtier of Castiglione lives, it is not a philosophy of court but a philosophy of human life. Gracián court is the square in the world. (shrink)