Sprezzatura

In Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the aesthetic of sprezzatura, or the art of artlessness.

Sprezzatura, of course, requires a great deal of effort to pull off. Elegant sonnets, capping contests--any kind of "spontaneous" performance--is the result of much patient labor. It is the paradox of improvization: in order to achieve something spontaneous, one must have done the slow and painstaking work of learning to be spontaneous.

Sprezzatura is about concealing this work, concealing the artfulness.

This aesthetic was widely influential in not just the Italian, but also the English and French Renaissances.

The idea of sprezzatura is intimately bound up with the aristocratic ideals of The Courtier. The poet who scorns the evidence of labor in his verse is the poet for whom labor is anathema.

I've been wondering about the death of this aesthetic. Even at the height of the Renaissance, there were poets who eschewed it. The poetry of Edmund Spenser, for instance, takes no pains to conceal its artifice or its manneredness. But, especially compared with poets like Sidney, Spenser was from the middle rather than the upper classes. It seems as though the triumph of the heroic couplet (end-stopped, rhyming lines) in the 18th century is a repudiation of the prizing of seeming-spontaneity in verse. And perhaps it's no coincidence that none of the poets one associates with heroic couplets are courtiers. Dryden comes closest, but he's nearly always out of favor with some one. Pope was Catholic and faced religious prejudice. Swift was Irish. These are not lazy courtiers, but hard-working craftsmen.

Here's Yeats on the matter:

Adam's Curse

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know --
Although they do not talk of it at school --
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.