“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

Coloured engraving of Niccolò Machiavelli after a portrait by Stefano Ussi, ca. 1894 — Source.

Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. Outside the hustle and bustle of the city, there is peace and quiet, but also a lively cross section of the working class: farmers, millers, innkeepers, hunters, masons, and carpenters.

In the summer of 1513, a disgraced forty-four-year-old man repairs to these sylvan surrounds. A tavern, as well as a few scattered farms, had been in the family’s possession for years, and the modest rent from these properties had supported them for some time. His father, Bernardo, never rich but always eager for learning, owned a modest library, and sent his son to study under the famed pedagogue, Paolo da Ronciglione. At the age of twenty-nine, with no administrative experience and virtually unknown, Bernardo’s son was catapulted to be the second chancellor of the Republic and the secretary to the Council of Ten, Florence’s ministry for diplomatic affairs. For fourteen years, in the upper echelon of society, in the thick of action, he hobnobbed with the great and the good. Now he is alone, in the periphery.

This, of course, is Niccolò Machiavelli.¹ 1513 was a precipitous year for him. The republican regime that had ruled for eighteen years had collapsed; his patron, Piero Soderini, had fled into exile; the Medici make a triumphant return. The previous year, Machiavelli was formally dismissed from his lofty post. Shortly thereafter, Machiavelli is tried for conspiracy, tortured, and imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of attempting to assassinate Giovanni de’ Medici. A month later, Giovanni becomes Pope Leo X. Celebration erupts, and a general amnesty is granted. Machiavelli is released and exiled to his family farm.

Silhouette portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, ca. 15th–16th century — Source.

On December 10, he writes a letter that is well known to students of the classical tradition. As with all his works, the circumstances surrounding its composition are thick with subtexts. Between 1513 and 1515, he and his close friend Francesco Vettori exchange some forty letters.² Vettori was five years younger than Machiavelli and a leading member of the Florentine elite, which he was not. In early 1513, Vettori is appointed ambassador to Rome, and Machiavelli repeatedly urges him to use his influence “so that I may begin to receive some employment from our lord the pope.”³

In an earlier letter dated November 23, Vettori tries to convince Machiavelli to go to Rome. He lists all the wonderful things that happen in a typical day: he spends his afternoons at leisure, in the garden or horseback riding in the countryside; in the evenings, he wines and dines at home, or he goes out; at night, he reads: “I’ve managed to get a lot of history books, especially those of the Romans. . . . With them I pass the time, and I think about what kind of emperors poor Rome, which used to make the world tremble, has endured, and that it’s no wonder that [Rome] has also put up with two popes of the sort that recent ones have been [Julius II and Alexander VI].”⁴

When Machiavelli responds, the letter, as scholars have demonstrated, is an almost point-by-point reply to Vettori’s letter.⁵ A less charitable reading would say that he is “trolling” Vettori. One is in the very center of power, the other at the margins. In his response, Machiavelli describes a typical day: In the morning, he likes to trap birds, or cut down trees, killing time with the woodsmen, who always have some petty disputes with someone or another. Afterward, alone, sitting by a spring or in his aviary, he reads recent authors such as Dante and Petrarch, or the old poets such as Tibullus or Ovid. He likes their amorous tales, and — just to put in a little brag — he says they remind him of his own. At midday, he goes to the local inn, eats, and gossips with the innkeeper, butcher, miller, and furnace tenders. They play card games. Someone cheats. Again, no shortage of snark and petty disputes.

Giorgio Vasari, Six Tuscan Poets, ca. 1543, featuring Dante (seated), Petrarch (to his right, holding the green book), Boccaccio (the laurel-headed man between Dante and Petrarch), Cavalcanti (far right), and two other later poets: Cristoforo Landino (far left) and, next to him, Marsilio Ficino — Source.

Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.

Then appears an extraordinary evocation of an imaginary library:

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversations and composed a short study, De principatibus [The Prince], in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the definition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost.⁶

Notice the sheer corporeality of his images: the microtextures of daily life, the clothing, the food, the senses, the ritual motions, the affects of boredom, shame, and anxiety transformed into the state of what contemporary psychologists call “flow”, or deep absorption in an activity.⁷ The difference between day and night is, well, day and night. The day is earth — dirt and dust (piena di fango e di loto); the night is transcendence — regal and courtly (reali e curiali). Outside, Machiavelli wants to kill time (two hours); inside, he wants time to dilate (four hours).

In these precious four hours, Machiavelli achieves an optimal, peak experience in which his mind is completely immersed in an “autotelic” activity. His flow of intense and focused concentration on the present is achieved paradoxically by summoning the ancient past. Studying (and putting on appropriate clothing) thereby enacts the fiction of encountering dead voices. Through the sheer will of his imagination and fantasy— always important words in Machiavelli’s lexicon —the author of The Prince can transfigure the lowly scrittoio in his farmhouse into the high “ancient courts of ancient men”. Entering into this exalted realm, he feels their relationship is one of co-equals. He takes what he thinks is rightly his alone: “I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for”.

Cover page of the 1550 edition of Nicolò Machiavelli’s The Prince — Source.

Chutzpah, perhaps? Entitlement, even? Or maybe just an ironic contrast to Vettori, who has access to the real halls of power? Probably all of the above, but it is above all a performance. Machiavelli here uses an ancient rhetorical technique called prosopoeia. From the Greek prósopon (“face, person,” and poiéin “to make, to do”), it is a trope of personification. As the Roman orator Quintilian explains, prosopoeia is used “to introduce conversations between ourselves and others. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.”⁸ This is exactly what Machiavelli is doing: he conjures the souls of the dead. After all, every time we read, we breathe into texts whose afterlife exists because of us. We revivify figures that are no longer here. But we are dependent on them in turn — they give us a storehouse of language and ideas, and we make them live again through our own words and voices. Reading as necromancy, then.

W. E. B. Du Bois may have been thinking about Machiavelli when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903):

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.⁹

Du Bois’ evocation is as riveting as any Italian humanist’s: his conversations with authors — dead and white — are possible and necessary because they all share a pursuit of truth that is beyond any historical divide or racial schism. He finds in books a transhistorical humanity that offers him horizons of thinking beyond the limits of segregation and bigotry that beset his country. Du Bois and Machiavelli alike find friendship and equanimity in the classics instead of elitism and exclusion. Du Bois published these words in 1903, eight years after his doctorate from Harvard and years after extensive travel in Europe and study in Berlin. Now that he has gained entrance into the gilded halls of the great and good, Du Bois, like Machiavelli, can hold his own in the imaginary space of his personal library. For both, books offer them an escape, a temporary detachment from the stupidity of the times.

Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois at his desk at Atlanta University, 1909 — Source.

In the Middle Ages, the monastic cell — the cubiculum — was the place for reading, prayer, and contemplation. The scriptorium was a place where scribes copied and illuminated manuscripts. The bibliotheca, holding pagan and sacred texts, constituted the archive of the world’s knowledge. But the studiolo — the diminutive of studio in Italian, a precursor to the modern-day study — came to offer readers access to a different kind of chamber, a personal hideaway in which to converse with the dead. Cocooned within four walls, the studiolo was an aperture through which one could cultivate the self. After all, to know the world, one must begin with knowing the self, as ancient philosophy instructs. In order to know the self, one ought to study other selves too, preferably their ideas as recorded in texts. And since interior spaces shape the inward soul, the studiolo became a sanctuary and a microcosm. The study thus mediates the world, the word, and the self.

From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity. In the 1330s, in Vaucluse, a remote valley in southern France, Petrarch constructed a little villa with a small study, in modest imitation of the ancients. While there were already private studies in the Burgundian courts and the papal palace in Avignon, Petrarch was one of the first to construct one unattached to any institutions.¹⁰ “Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland”, he wrote. “Here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.”¹¹ Petrarch inaugurated the idea of reviving classical antiquity as a transhistorical conversation between the living and the dead. The studiolo thus becomes a sort of chronotope, an ingathering of time and space, where the perception of the past, present, and future accelerates or dilates at the will of the reader. In their tiny corners of the world, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Du Bois each in their own ways conjure a utopia of friends, binding together the far and near, the long-ago and recent past into the plenitude of the here and now.

Intarsia in a studiolo originally from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, Italy, now housed at the MET, ca. 1478–82 — Source.

The tradition of the library as a refuge continued with Michel de Montaigne, whose special hideaway was a circular tower in his estate, located some thirty miles from Bordeaux. (You can still visit it today.) On the ceiling beams of his library, Montaigne has inscribed ancient maxims and biblical proverbs in Greek and Latin. These inscriptions form a sort of architectural commonplace book, a thesaurus or database gleaned from his vast readings which he would redeploy in his writings. The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized, and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.

In the essay “Of Solitude”, Montaigne writes, “We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness [tout de heur] depends on them. We must reserve a back room [une arriereboutique] all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.”¹² Clearly present here is the emergence of the modern liberal self — the autonomous individual with his right to privacy. After all, Montaigne discusses outright the need for happiness, freedom, liberty. His use of arriereboutique, “back room”, is interesting, for it evokes more of a shophouse bustling with trade rather than the tranquility of a nobleman’s secluded estate. Machiavelli in his letter similarly uses the humbler scrittoio, a writing room, as if his space in the farmhouse is not deigned to be worth the title of the lofty studiolo. For both writers — and this is true for Renaissance humanism at large — there is no contemplative life without the active life — the two modes necessarily co-exist.

From the 1500s, in the elegant courts and cities of Europe, the studiolo became a must-have accessory for the aristocrat and humanist alike. Elite women, too, also had an opportunity for their own self-fashioning. Isabella d’Este had her own bespoke studiolo in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua.¹³ As a widowed Marchioness, Isabella became a patron of considerable renown, commissioning artworks from Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian. But not every noblewoman had Isabella’s discerning tastes nor means. As in all things, the studiolo is imbricated in the early modern economy — the accelerated acquisition of knowledge, power, capital, and real estate — and to point this out is to acknowledge that gender and social inequality pervaded their world as it does ours. In Virginia Woolf ’s famous formulation, a woman always struggles to find “a room of one’s own”.

Gabriel Metsu, Woman Reading a Book by a Window, ca. 1653 — Source.

The enclosure of the study, for those of us lucky to have one, offers us a paradoxical sort of freedom. Conceptually, the studiolo is a pharmakon, a cure or poison for the soul. In its highest aspirations, the studiolo, as developed by humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne, is a sanctuary for self-cultivation. Bookishness was elevated into a saintly virtue, as can be seen in the iconology of Mary in the Annunciation and St. Jerome in his Study paintings. But, when you spend too much time in the studiolo, bibliophilia can turn to bibliomania. Holing ourselves up into a room with too many books may not always be a good thing, liable to induce claustrophobia and paranoia. Having imaginary conversations with the dead can be a sign of delusion. The studiolo, so certain of its universalism, may promise a false abundance, becoming a closed system that seals itself up into a mirror-house of solipsism.