How a Renaissance man is made
The universal man of the fifteenth century was not a genius who happened. He was the graduate of a small school with a known method, and the method still works.
Ask a man to name a Renaissance man and he will say Leonardo, and he will mean an accident of nature: a mind that could paint, dissect, engineer and compose because it was built differently from his. That is the comfortable reading, and it is wrong in the way that matters. Leonardo was apprenticed to Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence at about fourteen and spent the next ten years grinding pigments, casting bronze, drawing drapery and being corrected. The most famous polymath in history was made in a shop, by a master, among other boys who were being made the same way.
The fifteenth century had a name for what it was trying to produce, l’uomo universale, and it did not think of him as a miracle. It thought of him as a graduate.
Consider the school. In 1423 Vittorino da Feltre took charge of the education of the Gonzaga children at Mantua and turned a pleasure house into a school he called the Casa Giocosa, the joyful house. The sons of the ruling family studied there, and so did Federico da Montefeltro, who would make Urbino the most civilised court in Italy, and so did a number of poor boys Vittorino took in for nothing and fed at his own expense. They read Latin and Greek, whole books rather than extracts. They did arithmetic and geometry and music. And every day, in every season, they rode, fenced, swam, ran and played ball, because Vittorino held with Plato that a mind trained inside a neglected body is a mind trained in half of itself. He lived among them. Nobody studied alone. The school was never large.
Consider the book. Castiglione’s Courtier is a record of four evenings of conversation at Urbino in 1507, a company of friends arguing about what the complete man would be. Their answer begins with arms, because a man who cannot defend himself is not yet a man, and goes on to letters, music, drawing, and grace in speech. Then it names the quality that holds the rest together: sprezzatura, the ease that hides the labour. We tend to hear that as a social trick. It is a description of integration. Sprezzatura is what a man looks like when his parts have stopped fighting each other.
Consider the sentence under all of it. Pico della Mirandola, in 1486, imagined God telling the newly made Adam that every other creature had a fixed nature and he alone did not: you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you prefer. That is the whole programme in a line. A man is a project. Projects have methods.
Put the school, the book and the sentence together and the method is plain. It had five parts.
A canon, read whole and in order. Not information but formation: the same texts, in the same sequence, so that each one was read by a man who had already been changed by the last.
The body inside the curriculum, not beside it. Riding and swimming were not recess from the Greek. They were the Greek, continued by other means.
A room that judges. The workshop, the schoolroom, the four evenings at Urbino. You said what you thought the text meant, and you were answered, by men whose opinion you could not dismiss.
A master a few steps ahead. Vittorino, Verrocchio. Not a celebrity to admire from a distance but a man in the same room whose life you could study at close range. A role model is a method, not an inspiration.
Years. Vittorino’s boys came as children and left as men. Leonardo’s apprenticeship lasted a decade. Nothing in the method happened in a weekend.
Now look at what the modern age has put in each place. Information in place of formation: everything ever written is a tap away, and almost nobody reads anything whole. The body outsourced to a gym with headphones and the mind to a feed, each a hobby, neither a curriculum. No room: a young man’s opinions go either unanswered or answered by strangers who owe him nothing, which is the same thing. No master, only famous men, whose lives he sees edited. And the settled expectation that anything worth having should arrive in a course of six videos. The result is one of two men. The specialist, excellent at one thing and a stranger to himself. Or the sampler, who has tasted everything and finished nothing. Neither is a Renaissance man. Both are what you get when the method is missing.
Here the misreading has to be corrected, because it is the one that keeps men from even trying. The mark of the universal man was not range. It was unity. Alberti, who is supposed to have said that a man can do all things if he will, did not mean a man should do all things. He meant that the things a man does should be one thing in him. “Universal” means whole, not wide. A man who paints and fences and reads Greek but whose life is in three pieces is not universal; he is scattered, with talent. The point of the joyful house was the harmony, and the harmony is why the right modern word for what it produced is not polymath but integrated.
So how is one made now? The same way, because the material has not changed. A list of books, in order, read with a pencil. A body trained as part of the mind’s education rather than as its rival for the evening. A small room, every week, where you defend your reading out loud and are argued with by men who have done it too. One or two men a few steps ahead, close enough to study. And time: a year, then another, not a month.
None of this requires genius. Vittorino’s pupils were the sons of soldiers and merchants, and the poor boys he fed. None of them was Leonardo. Several of them became men a whole city could look at and understand what a man was. The method is five hundred years old and it was never a secret. The only question it leaves open is whether you can find the room, and whether you will stay in it.