Stupendous Surgery and Renaissance Self-Fashioning

William Eamon

Medieval Studies Institute Seminar University of New Mexico

In October 1548, Leonardo Fioravanti, a thirty-year old undistinguished surgeon from Bologna, faced a crisis moment in his life. A university dropout who had become disenchanted with traditional medicine, he had been practicing surgery for fifteen years and his career was at a standstill. Yet he hungered for fame. So Fioravanti did what other restless individuals of the Renaissance did: he went out “into the world” to seek new secrets and, to employ a modern manner of speaking, to find himself. As he recalled in his autobiography, published as part of his book, Treasury of Human Life, “I left my home sweet home, Bologna, solely with the intention of traveling throughout the world in order to gain knowledge of natural philosophy.” His search took him wandering all over the Mediterranean world, “by land and by sea” [as he put it], learning secrets from empirics, distillers, shepherds, farmers, and surgeons. We have no way of knowing how competent a surgeon Fioravanti was when he left Bologna. Doubtless, as he admits, he had much to learn. But of one thing we can be certain: that

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he had an uncanny knack of sizing up a situation and an instinctive gift for self-promotion.

These are commonly thought of as the traits of a charlatan and, for better or worse, that is how history has judged Leonardo Fioravanti. Yet Fioravanti’s story suggests other avenues for understanding Renaissance culture. Historians used to think of the Renaissance as the “age of the discovery of the individual,” as Jacob Burckhardt famous characterized it. Nowadays, historians are more skeptical about that formulation. One of the strongest challenges to Burkhardt’s interpretation of the Renaissance has come from the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt and the so-called ‘New Historicist’ school that he inspired. The title of Greenblatt’s now classic study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, seemingly announces a hopeful message to liberal optimists – perhaps even a Burkhardtian one – but that message is rather wickedly subverted by the more depressing claim (which Greenblatt saves for the end of the book) that the “I” is really entrapped in a totalitarian narrative about power, class, and historical circumstance. “Self-fashioning,” according to the New Historicists, is largely an illusion. Rather than having produced the autonomous, self-creating individual, the Renaissance created only the fiction of the individual.

Bernardino Mei, Il Ciarlatano, 1656

Bernardino Mei’s painting depicts an aged, bearded charlatan seated on a chair on his makeshift stage. The image of the charlatan as a suspicious fraud was beginning to take shape in the public’s imagination.

My lecture today is meant, in part, as a challenge to that claim. It’s not that I’m urging a return to Burckhardt, nor am I arguing for a ‘neo-Burckhardtian’ interpretation of the Renaissance. Rather, I would like to use the example of Fioravanti to illustrate a kind of Renaissance individualism that depended much upon the kind of improvisations that a charlatan might have engaged in. For the charlatan is a player, a character for whom the theatrical is essential – in fact, the earliest ciarlatani were actors who sold medicaments to the crowds who came to see the commedia dell’arte that they performed on their makeshift stages in the piazzas. Combine that mentality with that of a surgeon confronting a new and unexpected situation, and you get an idea of Fioravanti’s modus operandi. For him, the ‘stupendous’ surgeries that he accomplished – and claimed to

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accomplish – were instruments of self-fashioning.

David Teniers, “Surgical Operation,” 1690

We usually think of medieval and Renaissance surgery as an art confined to relatively minor, or at least not life-threatening ailments: mending broken bones, treating wounds, skin lesions and cankers, bloodletting, and so on. David Teniers’s painting depicts one of these “everyday” surgical operations.

These situations were, no doubt, the usual activities of surgeons. Yet historians have been able to show that surgeons sometimes attempted some rather daring and risky procedures. Michael McVaugh has described, for example, various surgical techniques used to correct hernias that emerged in Western Europe in the thirteenth century.

Renaissance surgeons were, however, sometimes called upon to deal with even more extreme situations. The widespread use of firearms, for example, made gunshot wounds common. As a result, surgery became more challenging and also, probably, more daring. Such situations, where the outcome is uncertain and the suspense is high, necessitate a kind of improvisation that is the central characteristic of Renaissance self-fashioning. Fioravanti’s career as a Renaissance surgeon – and self-fashioner – might thus give us new insights on the Renaissance understanding of the individual.

Fioravanti’s journey took him first to Palermo, where, through contacts with local surgeons, he began to perfect his surgical skills. According to his autobiography, published as part of his book, The Treasury of Human Life, he soon gained a reputation as a powerful healer. His daring cures caused people to marvel that he must have been from some “distant country” to know such secrets.

Most marvelous of all, however, was an event that occurred in 1549.Years later Fioravanti would still remember it with amazement. An army captain called Matteo Greco asked him to treat his beautiful young wife Marulla, whose hypertrophied spleen caused her such pain that in desperation she begged her husband to find someone who could remove it. Whatever the risk, she was willing to take it. The woman’s physicians advised the captain that the operation could be done without danger, although none of them wanted to do it. When Fioravanti finally visited her, he reports, the spleen “had grown so large in her body that it caused both of her legs to be horribly ulcerated, so that the poor woman didn’t even want to live.”

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The captain asked Fioravanti if he had the courage to do the operation. Now, as Fioravanti later admitted, up until then he’d never performed a surgery that had taken him into the mysterious interior of the human body. Everything that he had done until that time had been confined to the ordinary ‘outer-body’ territory of the surgeon: sores, skin lesions, bloodletting, and so on. Nevertheless, he boldly answered, “Of course.” He tried to delay the procedure, but day after day the captain came to him, begging him to do the operation. “To tell the truth,” Fioravanti, relates, “even though I promised him, I really didn’t want to, because I didn't want to make a blunder of it.” He continues with this account of what happened next:

I sent for a certain old surgeon I knew from the city of Palo, in the Kingdom of Naples. This fellow, who was called Andreano Zacarello, operated there with the knife, removing cataracts and similar things, and was very expert in that profession. I asked him, “Dear Master Andriano, an extraordinary wish has come to Captain Matteo’s wife: she wants to have her spleen taken out! Can this be done safely?”

“Of course it can be done,” the old man calmly answered. “I’ve done it many times.”

“But do you have the courage to go ahead with it?” I urged. He replied that he would do it with me, but not alone. So we resolved do it together. I went back to arrange things with the woman and her husband – [the ‘arrangements doubtless having to do with his fee] – and then went to the authorities to give her up as dead, as is the custom. Having that license, we went to the woman’s house. Master Adriano took a scalpel and cut the body of the woman above the spleen. When she was cut, the spleen popped out of the body and we proceeded to separate it from the tissue until we completely removed it. Then we sowed up the body, leaving just a tiny air-hole. I treated the wound with hypericon oil, powder of incense, mastic, and myrrh, then had her drink water boiled with a dried apple, betony, and cardo santo. I continued to care for her that way and in twenty-four days the woman was healed.

The extracted spleen was something wonderful, so extraordinary that Fioravanti brought the marvelous thing to the loggia of the merchants and displayed it there for three days.

This account must give us pause. For, on the face of it, it would seem incredible such drastic surgery could be successful in the sixteenth century – an age that knew no antisepsis or anesthesia. Yet, physiologically, there was nothing impossible about the operation. Although risky because of the danger of infection and doubtless excruciatingly painful, losing the spleen would not necessarily have killed the patient. Marulla Greco’s condition, splenomegaly, must have been quite common in southern Italy, for it is often associated with malaria, a disease endemic to the region. If Marulla survived the operation, as Fioravanti claims, it is a remarkable testament to the skills of sixteenth-century surgeons.

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My point, however, is not to claim that this was a routine procedure – it almost certainly was not – but to suggest that it presented Fioravanti with unusual an opportunity for self-promotion, a means, if you will, of self-fashioning. He made sure that the entire city knew about the operation, displaying the deformed organ in the merchant’s loggia alongside the butchers’ meats and grocers’ wares piled high in the stalls, like a gigantic fish pulled triumphantly from the sea. We can be sure he was there to tell about it, too. And what a story he would have told! “The glory of this experiment was mine alone,” he gloated, although doubtless he left out the part about it being the Neapolitan surgeon Andreano Zacarello, not he, who actually performed the operation.

Leonardo Fioravanti was no fool. Displaying Marulla’s grotesque, swollen spleen in the marketplace was a theatrical performance calculated to astonish onlookers and to create the persona of a wonder-working healer. The great Rabelais scholar Mikhail Bakhtin provides a key to understanding Fioravanti’s play on the grotesque. Bakhtin pointed out that Rabelais’s fiction is populated with characters whose grotesque features include body parts growing to monstrous dimensions: men with enormous bellies and huge feet, hunchbacks with gigantic humps, and so on – images that ridicule and mock conventional bodily proportions.Nor does the grotesque limit itself to the outward features of the body. It also puts on display the inner body, blood, bowels, hearts, kidneys, and other organs. Fioravanti’s display was a theatrical self-demonstration as much as it was a display of a bodily organ – an improvisation that enabled him to take advantage of the unforeseen and transform it into his own scenario. That opportunism, behavior typical of the charlatan, was a central Renaissance mode of behavior.

Fioravanti’s ‘stupendous surgery’ – along with other ‘miracles’ he supposedly performed – bolstered his reputation as a kind of shamanistic healer, and emboldened him to move to Naples, the center of the Spanish empire in Italy. Along the way he stopped in Tropea, a fishing village on the Tyrrhenean coast of southern Italy. He’d heard of an ingenious surgical procedure for rebuilding damaged noses that had been developed by two famous surgeons from that village, brothers by the name of Pietro and Paolo Vianeo. The art of rhinoplasty had been practiced in southern Italy since the early fifteenth century, and the Vianeo brothers were in great demand as plastic surgeons. Wealthy patients from throughout Italy journeyed to Calabria to have the operation.

It’s not difficult to see why the nose was the earliest object of reconstructive surgery in the Renaissance. Giambattista Della Porta, in his treatise on human physiognomy, wrote that “more than any other part of the body, the nose alone is enough to make someone beautiful or ugly.” But why was rhinoplasty in such demand in the sixteenth century? One reason was because of the ravages of the French Disease, or syphilis, Europe’s newest and most feared epidemic. One of the most shocking symptoms of syphilis was the gaping hole left in the center of the face where the disease had eaten away the flesh and cartilage of the nose. With the outbreak of the syphilis epidemic in sixteenth-century Europe, the syphilitic nose became a mark of shame, a visible sign of the moral and bodily corruption that stigmatized its unfortunate victims.

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Others lost their noses by violent means. Aristocratic violence, especially in Italy’s Spanish South, was legendary. Dueling was part of the gentleman’s code, and violent quarrels took place over the most trivial violations of honor. In fact, ‘duels’ were usually little more than street brawls, but the weapons and the violence were exactly the same. When hot-blooded cavaliers went at it with weapons drawn, rapiers flailed wildly in the air and the odds of receiving a blow to the head were high. The indignity of sacrificing a nose in a fight was compounded by the fact that the loser bore the mark of defeat for life, smack-dab in the middle of the face.

Arriving in Tropea, Fioravanti proceeded to the Vianeo brothers’ house under the pretense of being a Bolognese nobleman who had come on behalf of a relative who had lost his nose in the battle of Sarravalle. He wanted to see the surgery, Fioravanti explained, so that he could better advise his relative whether he should have the operation. The Vianei consented to the request. This is Fioravanti’s description of the procedure:

First they gave the patient a purgative. Then they took pincers and grabbed the skin in the left arm between the shoulder and the elbow and passed a large knife between the pincers and the muscle, cutting a slit in the skin. They placed a strip of linen under the skin, and medicated it until it thickened. When it was just right, they cut the nose to fit the end of the little skin flap. Then they snipped the skin on the arm at one end and sewed it to the nose. They bound it there so artfully that it could not be moved until it had grown onto the nose. When the skin flap was joined to the nose, they cut the other end from the arm. They skinned the lip of the mouth and sewed the flap of skin from the arm onto it, and medicated it until it was joined to the lip. Then they put a metal form on it, and fastened it there until the nose grew into it to the right proportions. It remained well formed but somewhat whiter than the face. It’s a fine operation and an excellent experience.

A gentleman without a nose. From Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s 1597 treatise, De curtorum chirurgia.

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Of course, there were alternatives to this undoubtedly painful procedure. Going without a nose was not the most desirable of them. One could also wear a prosthesis. The French surgeon Ambrose Paré described several prosthetic noses and considered them to be a much better alternative to submitting to the prolonged and painful Calabrian procedure. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a prosthesis made of gold and silver alloyed to a flesh color. The mark of the consummate aristocrat, the false nose replaced one he had lost during his university days in a duel with another student.

Evidently Brahe wore his new nose proudly; at least he made no effort to have it concealed in his portraits. Yet those who underwent rhinoplasty seemed equally well satisfied with the results, and the operation was in great demand. When Fioravanti went to Tropea to observe the Vianei at work, the brothers had five nose jobs waiting. The Neapolitan scholar Camillo Porzio reported that he was very pleased with the new

In this 1597 illustration of the Calabrian method of rhinoplasty a patient is depicted in a brace that holds the arm firmly in place while the skin flap grafts to the nose. The procedure could take as long as 40 days to complete.

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nose that the Calabrian surgeons had fashioned for him. Porzio declared his new nose to be “so similar to the first one that it will be difficult for those who do not know to realize that it is not the same.” The Vianeo brothers used this method to repair noses, lips, ears, and other facial defects. They were all-around plastic surgeons, and their skills were widely sought-after until the end of the century, when the family died out and the method disappeared with them.

It was not until the late-sixteenth century that Calabrian rhinoplasty finally reached an academic audience. Reports of the operation were heard in academia from time to time since the early sixteenth century, but medical writers gave various garbled or incoherent versions of it. Without actually knowing much about the procedure, most academics believed that it was impossible to fashion a new nose in the manner rumored out of Calabria. The anatomist Gabrielle Falloppio took it as “proven by Hippocrates” that a severed body part cannot be reattached. Field surgeons probably routinely disproved this bit of academic nonsense. Fioravanti, for example, related an incident that happened during the African campaign:

A Spanish gentleman named Signor Andres Gutiero was strolling through the camp one day and came to words with a soldier. They drew weapons and with a backhand stroke the soldier cut off Signor Andres’s nose, which fell in the sand. When the quarrel ended the poor gentleman stood there without a nose. I picked it up and pissed on it to wash the sand off it, and sewed back it on firmly, medicated it with balsam, and bandaged it. When I took off the bandage I found the nose very well attached. All of Naples marveled at this.

Fioravanti was probably the intermediary through which knowledge of Calabrian rhinoplasty reached academic culture. When he visited Bologna in 1568, he met Giulio Cesare Aranzio, a professor of surgery at the university. Evidently a cordial friendship developed between the two Bologna natives. We will never know the nature of the conversations that took place between them, but we can be sure that Fioravanti was eager to share his knowledge of the Calabrian secret with Bologna’s most distinguished surgery professor. For the occasion of his visit was to take the examination for his doctoral degree, and Aranzio was on the examining committee. Fioravanti must have impressed his younger colleague with stories of the heroic surgeons of the South. We know that Aranzio began practicing rhinoplasty at about the time of Fioravanti’s visit.

One of Aranzio’s pupils was a medical student by the name of Gaspare Tagliacozzi. After his graduation in 1576, Tagliacozzi began teaching anatomy and surgery at Bologna and, at about the same time, experimenting with the Calabrian technique. By 1588 he was calling himself, rather exaggeratedly, narium et aurium primus reformator,

Tycho Brahe’s nose.

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“first restorer of noses and ears.” In 1597, he published a Latin treatise describing the method. In the book, Tagliacozzi argued that the operation was not frivolous or merely cosmetic, but was intended to “buoy up the spirits and help the mind of the afflicted.” The ideology that underlay Tagliacozzi’s famous work was radical; for it linked surgery to the Renaissance ideology of human autonomy advanced by thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola. In the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico has God tell Adam, in opposition to the view that human nature is fixed, that “you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.” Pico in 1486 imagined the transformation of the human soul. A hundred years later, Tagliacozzi expressed the autonomy of human choice in the possibility of refashioning the body. Renaissance self-fashioning is ceded to the physician, who can now remake man in his own image.

In The Physician, one of the writings collected under the name of Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., the aspiring surgeon is instructed to follow the armies in order to learn the art of surgery. In times of peace, Hippocrates writes, rarely if ever, “even in a whole lifetime,” does one encounter the kinds of severe wounds that one must contend with in the heat of battle. The cold analytical language of the Hippocratic corpus barely conceals the irony behind the suggestion that warfare, whose aim is to kill and maim, should be such fine training for the surgeon, whose art is that of healing. Yet behind that counsel lies the understanding that in learning any art, practice alone makes perfect.

Like many Renaissance surgeons, Fioravanti followed that Hippocratic advice, and it was in the university of war that he perfected his treatment for wounds. As with most of his methods, he learned the art from another surgeon, in this case a Franciscan friar called Matteo Guaruccio, who was an expert at treating wounds. Fra Matteo’s treatment was to use a special ointment, which Fioravanti refined and called Grand Liquor, the principle ingredient of his famed Artificial Balsam. His opportunity to try it out on battle wounds came when he was recruited as a surgeon into the Spanish Viceroy’s navy during the siege of the city of Africa, in Tunisia, which had fallen to the feared Turkish pirate, Dragut. With typical bravado, he reported that during the African campaign, he made “anatomies of living men” – meaning that the grotesque war wounds he encountered gave him a chance to peer into the insides of live human bodies and, doubtless, poke around a little before sewing them up. The use of firearms made warfare bloodier than ever in the sixteenth century and, incidentally, made vivisection commonplace. It must have been quite a sight for a surgeon’s eyes. For all that we can

A surgeon’s view of warfare. From Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch.

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tell from Fioravanti’s personal testimony, the war was to him a surgeon’s school and an opportunity to hone his skills – both in surgery and in self-fashioning.

Fioravanti always said that his most important discovery was the ‘true way of healing wounds.’ The method was simple: close the wound and swab it daily with Artifical Balsam, a water distilled from a mixture of herbs. He made extravagant claims for the curative powers of his wound balm. And why not? – the secret of his method of treating gunshot wounds was to clean the wound with what was essentially distilled water and let nature take its course, a treatment that would at least have had the merit of reducing infection.

The history of medicine comprises many myths, and one of its most enduring is the myth of Ambroise Paré as the ‘liberator’ of surgery from the painful and dangerous practice of cauterizing gunshot wounds. Speaking of self-fashioning, Paré himself was the author of the legend, and his account of how he invented the method is a classic portrait of scientific discovery. On a military campaign in Italy in 1537, Paré relates, he had been forced to innovate. Initially, he used boiling oil to cauterize what were considered to be poisonous gunpowder wounds, as he was taught in school.

But my oil ran out [he explains] and I had to apply a healing salve made of egg-white, rose-oil and turpentine. The next day I slept badly, plagued by the thought that I would find the men dead whose wounds I had failed to burn, so I got up early to visit them. To my great surprise, those treated with salve felt little pain, showed no inflammation or swelling, and had passed the night rather calmly – while the ones on which seething oil had been used lay in high fever with aches, swelling and inflammation around the wound. At this, I resolved never again cruelly to burn poor people who had suffered gunshot wounds.

Paré’s representation of the event was a brilliant performance, and it catapulted him to the court of King Henri II. The story of his fortuitous discovery of a ‘new way’ of treating wounds, supposedly liberating surgery from a ‘superstitious’ medieval practice, has become a dogma in the history of medicine. Yet it is worth asking: How common was the practice of cauterizing gunshot wounds in the sixteenth century? Or, to put it another way, was ‘Paré’s doctrine’ really Paré’s?

Fioravanti did not, evidently, cauterize gunshot wounds, even though he believed that they were poisonous. Yet it is inconceivable that he ever read Paré’s account, nor is it likely that he learned about Paré’s supposed ‘discovery’ by word of mouth from other surgeons. In fact, his wound treatment was essentially the standard medieval method, one described in detail by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century surgeons such as Henri de Mondeville, Guy de Chuliac, and Heinrich von Pfolspeundt. The painful procedure that Paré rejected was in fact an innovation introduced by the Italian surgeon Giovanni de Vigo, who revived an Arabic practice and described it in his surgical manual, a widely used textbook. Paré knew it well; trained in the Hôtel Dieu, where university professors gave regular lectures, he had a copy of De Vigo’s book with him during the campaign. Yet unlike Paré, most surgeons did not have formal school training – instead they

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learned the art through an apprenticeship with a master surgeon. Hence they would have practiced the traditional medieval method that was handed down orally through many generations. In other words, Paré’s ‘discovery’ was actually the discovery of a method in common use on the battlefield.

If Fioravanti’s practice was essentially the standard medieval method, why did he claim he had discovered a ‘new way’ to treat wounds? It had nothing to do with his disregard of cauterization. Rather, his ‘innovation’ was to have invented new healing balms like Quintessence and Artificial Balsam. His use of a balm to heal wounds was tied both to medieval surgical practice and to a folkloric tradition whose origins are, in part, Biblical. Magic waters and wound-healing balms are common motifs in medieval folklore. The ‘balm of Gilead’ mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah, the most famous of all balms, became a well-used metaphor of healing.

The ancient dream of a magical balm that healed wounds instantly without leaving a scar was still alive in the Renaissance. Cervantes turned it into a good joke with Don Quijote’s ‘Fierabrás’s balm,’ two drops of which will heal a knight cut in half. The ancient idea of a wound-healing balm gave rise to an alchemical quest that Fioravanti eagerly pursued. His famous Artificial Balsam was the result. Fioravanti did have a ‘new way’ of healing wounds. It was composed of four ingredients: a medieval surgical procedure, the science of alchemy, the folklore of wound-healing balms, and surgical skills learned in the heat of battle.

At the end of the war, Fioravanti returned to Naples and, in 1555, his ambition afire, moved to Rome to seek a better fortune. The sixteenth century was a violent age, and the Holy City was one of the most violent places in all of Italy. One historian has calculated that sixteenth-century Rome had ten serious woundings per day and about thirty-five murders per year. Let’s bring that a little closer to home. Modern-day Albuquerque is about 5 times the size of mid-sixteenth century Rome. At Rome’s crime rate, Albuquerque would have over 50 violent assaults per day instead of its actual rate of nine, and 196 murders per year instead of 41, which it had last year.

Fioravanti found himself in the thick of this city of mean streets. Once he treated a ‘vagabond’ who was beaten over the head with a staff by an innkeeper in the Campo Fiore. Another time he treated an Augustinian friar who had been brutally attacked in the night, leaving him with two stab wounds in his arm, one of which fractured the humoral bone. He also treated victims of what must have been common robberies, assaults, and duels, such as the porter who was attacked in the Campo Martio and stabbed in the arm. He recalled a particularly violent incident that occurred in the piazza in front of his house, where a goldsmith was stabbed thirteen times and left on the pavement to die. Fioravanti says that he treated the man with his Balsam and “in sixteen days he was healed and saved.” Rome was a great opportunity for a surgeon with a wound-healing balm, and Fioravanti made good use of it.

But for Leonardo Fioravanti, who had aspirations of becoming a world-famous author, it was in Venice, the printing capital of Italy, that the greatest opportunities lay. Venice

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was a Mecca for writers, who flocked to the city in order to work in its printing houses and to shop their manuscripts, hoping for the chance to publish their books – they all had multiple books, books to suit the occasion – especially that one book that would make them rich and famous, or gain the favor of a prince.

They were the poligrafi, tradesmen of the pen who sold their words with the detachment of a merchant selling a bolt of cloth. Not many of them got rich, but some did become famous. The phenomenal success of the satirist Pietro Aretino, who rose from poverty in provincial Arezzo to become a bestselling author, encouraged others to come to Venice and try their hand at writing fiction, poetry, letters, and burlesques, the standard fare of the popular literature of the day. But Aretino was an exception. Most of the writers in Venice worked for menial wages as editors and proofreaders, a situation that at least gave them access to a printer, a necessary precondition for publishing. When an early modern author finally did get published, earning income from writing books proved to be no simple task. Books paid pittances in royalties and competition for patronage was fierce. Exploited offshoots of the printing business, the professional author lived at behest of the printer, without whom the poligrafo would not have existed.

This is the community into which Leonardo Fioravanti settled a few months after his arrival in Venice. Without any contacts among the poligrafi, his entrance into that profession came about entirely by accident. As often happened in the Renaissance, his good fortune was the result of another man’s bad luck, in his case that of the poet Dionigi Atanagi. After several years struggling to make a literary career in Rome, Atanagi had arrived in Venice in 1559, just a few months after Fioravanti settled there.

The poligrafo’s life, though not very glamorous, could be surprisingly dangerous. Literary quarrels fueled the sale of books, but occasionally they turned violent. Atanagi had been in Venice for only a few months when he was assaulted by one of his enemies, a ‘man of means,’ as he called the assailant. In the attack, Atanagi received a gunshot wound to the head. The bullet penetrated the skull and the attending surgeon deemed the case hopeless. Fioravanti was called onto the scene, and when he arrived at Atanagi’s bedside, the poet was near death. Fioravanti used his wound balm to save the man’s life – at any rate, that’s the account that Fioravanti gives, and it is confirmed by Atanagi’s testimony. After his recovery, Atanagi called Fioravanti “an angel of paradise, sent by God to earth for the health and preservation of human life.” As a result of the incident and Atanagi’s publicizing of it, Fioravanti became a sensation among the Venetian litterati. “He performs miracles in the world with his remedies,” exclaimed the astonished Ruscelli.

Saving Atanagi’s life was Fioravanti’s entree into the community of the poligrafi. Within a few short months of his arrival in Venice, he had become a favorite of the literati and would soon become one of the most famous healers in all of Italy. His books, like the Medical Caprices, which entertained, instructed, and threw irreverent barbs at the medical establishment, became best-sellers.

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What explains the attraction of this seemingly uncultivated surgeon to the refined circle of the poligrafi? How was he able to gain entrance to that group so quickly, and from there to launch a career as a best-selling author? To begin with, the poligrafi regarded him as the quintessential philosopher of natural secrets. Plainspoken, vagabondish, and vulgar when it served him; yet savvy, experienced, and shrewd, he portrayed himself as a champion of experience who demonstrated the value of sagacity and good judgement as opposed to the ‘empty doctrines’ of the authorities. But Fioravanti’s success was also, in equal measure, a result of his own efforts. The consummate chameleon, he transformed himself again and again, and in those transformations illustrated the mechanics of Renaissance self-fashioning.

I began my lecture with a portrait of Fioravanti – a woodcut done in 1566 by the Venetian illustrator Nicolò Nelli, as you can see by the signature in the upper left-hand corner. Nelli was a fixture in the community of the poligrafi, and he produced portraits of many other writers, including Dionigi Atanagi and Girolamo Ruscelli. I will end my lecture with another portrait of Fioravanti. This one, by an unknown illustrator, is a profile of a much older man, a seasoned scholar-traveler and gentleman. Dressed in the ermine-collared robe of a physician, he wears a heavy cross around his neck. The portrait identifies him as ‘Leonardo Fioravanti Cavaliere.’

In the new portrait, Fioravanti is no longer the battle-scarred surgeon and empiric of the Medical Caprices. Instead, he is a distinguished physician, a graduate of the renowned University of Bologna, and a Palatine Knight, an honorific title he earned by graduating from Bologna. Putting himself in the company of distinguished Bologna physicians like

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Ulisse Aldrovandi, in the preface that accompanied the portrait he posed a question that was central to the Renaissance debate over the self: What constitutes ‘true’ nobility? Is nobility conferred by birth or by talent? Castiglione, in The Courtier, had famously formulated the proposition that nobility consists in ‘virtue.’ Fioravanti posed the question in a slightly different and more personal way: How might a common man without inheritance, such as I, acquire nobility, riches, and fame? The answer he gave was a standard Renaissance one: either by arms or by letters, and he added, “when these two things are joined [as they are in this representation], both are perfected.”

These two portraits represent two sides of the man. The remarkable thing is, they were made within just four years of each other – one in 1566 and the other about 1570 – and are not, as the images suggest, portraits separated by many years. Fioravanti really was a chameleon who changed himself at will.

Even if the history of the Renaissance can no longer be written as a heroic narrative of ‘the discovery of the world and of man,’ as Burckhardt told it, that does not diminish the significance of individual performances of selfhood. Although such performances may not have displayed pure, unfettered subjectivity, they reveal something more important to our understanding of the Renaissance: an emerging consciousness of the need to perform. Taking on different roles in different contexts meant learning the art of ‘prudence’ and, in some contexts, duplicity. As Greenblatt put it, improvisation was “a central Renaissance mode of behavior.”

The more I look at Renaissance personalities like Fioravanti, the less I can agree with Greenblatt’s pessimistic account of Renaissance self-fashioning. As I have suggested today, surgery was both a means of physical self-fashioning – as in rebuilding noses and fashioning prostheses – and a means for surgeons to self-fashion through daring and heroic feats.