The question of individualism has long bedeviled studies of the Italian Renaissance. For Burckhardt, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, fifteenth-century elites “discovered” the firm identity of the self-controlled individual who crafted the Renaissance state “as a work of art.”1 Most recently Ruggiero turned Burckhardt’s famous thesis on its head, arguing that the period crafted the individual as a kind of work of art and discovered the idea of the state.2 Among the many others who attempted to answer the question are Greenblatt, who sees the autonomous individual as an illusion created by the process of self-fashioning, and Martin, who considers Renaissance individualism a myth.3
These different interpretations derive, in large part, from the assumptions of the more literary disciplines tending to hold onto a Burckhardtian notion of the individual more ardently than social or art historians.4 Biow breaks through these disciplinary barriers with a truly interdisciplinary...