This article examines the protean nature of ingegno in Renaissance England. Beginning with dictionary definitions and period translations, it traces the semantics of ingegno in writings by Haydocke, Hilliard, Sidney, Harington, and Dee, and in images by Gheeraerts the elder and Hilliard. The term’s semantic elasticity carried over into English, changing shape to denote variously “wit”, “inborn talent”, “sharpness”, “swiftness”, “nobility”, “freedom”, and “ingenuity”. The article concludes by considering the socio-economics of ingenuity, and how the slippage between “ingenious” and “ingenuous” speaks to a newly emerging understanding of the liberal status of the artist and his craft.

It has long been known that Elizabethan and Jacobean writers had difficulty comprehending, and especially translating, the terms of Italian art criticism. Richard Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, scoltura, et architettura (1584/5)—A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge, carvinge and buildinge (1598)—is often singled out as a potent example of such difficulties. As Lucy Gent noted pithily, “Where Lomazzo writes about ‘arte disegnatrice’, Haydocke is floored.”¹ But while the English response to a word/concept such as disegno has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the reception of a key theme in Italian Renaissance writings on the arts—ingegno—has been largely neglected.² This essay explores the fortunes of ingegno in England, particularly in relation to Haydocke’s influential book and the writings of his acquaintance, the limner Nicholas Hilliard.

Deriving from the Latin ingenium, ingegno is a term that became semantically inflated over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Italy, in particular in writings about faculty psychology and the arts.³ The first dictionary definition in English is John Florio’s in A worlde of wordes (1598), in which the adjective ingegnóso is rendered as “wittie, wilie, ingenious, subtile, wise, cunning, craftie, full of inuention”.⁴ Florio’s ingegno embraces qualities that had started to attach to ingenium over the course of the sixteenth century but which had previously been lexically distinct from it, such as “subtlety” (subtilitas), “cunning” (sollertia), and even “wisdom” (sapientia). Notably, the first translation he gives is “wittie”, reflecting the widespread use in English of “wit” to denote the various properties of ingenium.⁵ Indeed, this is Haydocke’s most frequent translation of Lomazzo’s ingegno, such as the “excellency of . . . wit” required of the poet, or the “fineness of . . . wit” exhibited by Lomazzo’s master Gaudenzio Ferrari in his painting of cangianti colours.⁶

Wit, ingenium, and ingegno could all mean generically “natural disposition” or the innate talents with which one is born. These talents may be brought to perfection and utility through teaching and diligence, neatly summarized in the popular mottoes ars et ingenium and ingenium et labor.⁷ Lomazzo invokes this “natural ability” sense of ingegno in the preface to his treatise, where, in a customary apology for deficiency, he writes that by his “debil ingegno” (aptly rendered by Haydocke as “as much as in me lay”), he has gathered together the rules of the “science of painting”.⁸ Yet ingegno could also denote special talent. In particular, when mobilized by or on behalf of artists it could refer to the creative potency necessary to imagine and invent in a way that cannot be taught, and which thus raises the possessor of ingegno above their less gifted peers.

Italian and English dictionary definitions capture some of these senses. For example, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) defines ingegno as “Acutezza d’inventare, e ghiribizzare, che che sia, senza maestro, o avvertitore” (“Sharpness in inventing and fantasizing whatsoever, without a teacher or prompter”).⁹ Lomazzo grants this capacity to the “ingenious painter”, who can “imagine of himself” a variety of postures and expressions.¹⁰ Crucially, these interpretations place ingegno within the realm of the imagination—especially, in La Crusca’s ghiribizzare, with the caprices of fancy—while distancing it from commonplace associations of ingenium with teachability or models. This implies not only that ingegno is an innate quality but also that it operates without or beyond rules. Moreover, the fact that it needs no prompting connects it to spontaneity and quickness.

DOI This is one of the key senses we find in Cesare Ripa’s popular handbook of iconography: the Iconologia, in which “Ingegno is that potency of spirit which by nature inclines a man to be quick, able in all the sciences” (fig. 1).¹¹ Such a definition reflects period celebrations of visual artists who work in a rapid yet masterful way, underpinning also the increasing value of the sketch—sometimes referred to in Italian as a ghiribizzo—as the direct and immediate manifestation of an artist’s idea.¹² In this sense, ingegno was related to disegno, which by the second half of the sixteenth century had become (at least in the hands of academicians such as Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccaro) the means of explaining the connection between a metaphysical idea, the artist’s mental creation in his intellectual faculties, and its subsequent manifestation through the skilful workings of the hand.¹³

Despite the evident confusion about disegno in England around 1600, something of this kind is at work in Sir John Harington’s anecdote about Nicholas Hilliard (see fig. 2), published in his 1591 translation of Ariosto (which Haydocke had plundered for his translation of Lomazzo):

My selfe have seen him, in white and blacke in foure lynes only, set downe the feature of the Queenes Majesties countenaunce; that it was eve[r] thereby to be knowne; and he is so perfect therein . . . that he ca[n] set it downe by the Idea that he hath, without any patterne.¹⁴

Harington’s observation that Hilliard could work “without any patterne” presumably alludes to the widespread practice of using a “face pattern” in the making of portraits, a topic to which we shall return.¹⁵ Yet he may also be trading on the conventions of Aristotelian faculty psychology in which mental pictures (i.e. patterns) are impressed on the memory. Certainly, his comments are reminiscent of Sir Philip Sidney’s Platonic notion of the fore-conceit in The Defence of Poesy, while conveying some of the key qualities of ingegno: sharpness, quickness, and (although this is less common) economical elegance.¹⁶

We have already encountered the sense of quickness in Ripa, found also in the first English dictionary proper: Robert Cawdrey’s A table alphabeticall (1604), in which “ingenious” is defined as “wittie, quicke witted”.¹⁷ Sharpness—a visual property of the type of linear image Harington describes, but also a mental quality—pervades translations from or into Latin, such as Thomas Thomas’s 1587 translation of perargutus as “Very subtile, ingenious, wittie, and captious”.¹⁸ Similarly, in one of his annotations to Daniele Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius (I Dieci Libri dell’Architettura di M. Vitruvio, 1567), Inigo Jones translated “Et questo non solo per dottrina, ma per acutezza d’ingegno si puo fare” as “no rule to teach this but by sharpenes of witt.”¹⁹ We may note that Sidney, whom Hilliard knew, described “wit” in precisely these terms in his Defence of Poesy, referring to the “point of man’s wit”. Here Sidney deploys the imagery of pen, needle, and sword, in a play on the intimate but oblique relationship of “stylus” to “style”, linking mental acuity with sharp instrument and finessed (but pointed) manner.²⁰ Harington’s comments should be placed within this field of discourse, and he was clearly impressed by the economy of Hilliard’s likeness, created using a refined implement in “foure lynes only”. We might tentatively relate this to the association of ingenuity with both pithiness and with salt, specifically the “Attic salt” of an elegant and succinct turn of phrase, which by 1623 had led Cockeram to include “Atticke” as a definition of “witty”, alongside “ingenious” and “pregnant”.²¹

The association of Hilliard with “Attic grace” is not implausible, given that William Scott compares the limner favourably to Apelles in his Model of Poesy.²² The notion that the limner would have been thought of as pregnant is especially apt. Haydocke deploys this term when translating Lomazzo’s account of the “first inventor of Plasticke” (i.e. modelling), Prometheus, described as a man of “a most pregnant wit and sounde wisedome”.²³ This returns us to one of Florio’s translations—“full of invention”—suggesting that the ingegnóso is both ready and replete with wit; perhaps, pace Harington and Sidney, full of ideas or fore-conceits.²⁴

The language of “pregnancy” to denote the intellectual quickness and readiness of “wit” was widespread in the period. As early as 1530 John Palsgrave—an acquaintance of Thomas More and Erasmus—had translated the French “empraignant” as “Quycke/ pregnant of wytte”, while for John Rider in 1589 the Latin “pregnans” meant “A pregnant, or sharpe witte. Acre ingenium. Acutum ingenium.”²⁵ Haydocke’s use of the word is especially appropriate given its connotations of birthing, for Prometheus, we are told, “formed men’s images of earth, adding a certaine artificiall motion unto them, so that they seemed to be indued with spirit and life”. Literally and figuratively, Prometheus is equated with the sort of inspiration sometimes appended to ingegno in the Neoplatonic tradition of poetic fury.²⁶ Indeed, we see him in the act of “inspiring” in the frontispiece to the Tracte, accompanied by other representatives of the “artes of curious paintinge, carvinge and buildinge”: Juno, Pallas, and Daedalus (fig. 3).²⁷ More could be said about the implicit connection here between curiosity and ingenuity, but at the very least we may note that by this date Daedalus was synonymous with ingenuity, as the entry for “Dédalo” in the Perceval–Minsheu Spanish–English dictionary of 1599 shows: “Dedalus, a proper name signifying ingenious.”²⁸

The equation of pregnancy and birthing with ingenuity is part metaphorical, part the result of etymological confusion, since throughout the sixteenth century the Latin ingenium mingled liberally with the word ingenuus, meaning “freeborn” or “noble”. The conflation of these terms, stemming in part from the “natural” aspect of ingenium, is particularly pronounced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, so much so that by 1676 Elisha Coles could state in his Dictionary that “Ingenious and Ingenuous, are too often confounded.”²⁹ To a certain extent this slippage is explainable in social terms: in the hierarchical society of early modern England it was natural to ascribe qualities of superior intelligence and ability to the nobility, and the importance of this relationship for the standing of the liberal arts in the Renaissance is well known. For our purposes, we should observe chiefly its significance for the justification of drawing (and therefore painting, which rests upon it) as a liberal art. The introduction of this idea into England via Italy, especially through Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, has been thoroughly examined and need not be rehearsed, other than to note that it is given full vent by Lomazzo, who in a typical passage asserts: “For to saye the trueth, what Prince or ingenuous man [huomo libero] is there, which taketh not delight, with his pencell to imitate God in Nature, so farre foorth as he is able?”³⁰ With this in mind it is surely no accident that Haydocke, writing for a socially elite audience that required convincing about the legitimacy of the visual arts, addressed his paratextual letter to “the ingenuous reader”.

Let us investigate further the nature of the ingenious–ingenuous nexus in Elizabethan and Jacobean England by considering the economics and aesthetics of freedom, specifically in relation to the status and self-presentation of the visual artist. We will focus especially on Hilliard, singled out by Haydocke as a representative of English ingegno; that is, a native painter whose ability rivals those artists cited by Lomazzo as exemplary, such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Dürer. As Haydocke explains:

Nicholas Hilliards hand, so much admired amongst strangers [may] strive for a comparison with the milde spirit of the late worldes-wonder Raphaell Urbine; for . . . his perfectio[n] in ingenuous Illuminating or Limning . . . [is] so extraordinarie, that when I devised with myselfe the best argument to set it forth, I found none better, then to perswade him to doe it himselfe . . . and by mee promiseth you a treatise of his owne Practice that way, with all convenient speede.³¹

Some seventy years ago, John Pope-Hennessy argued that the treatise in question—the incomplete and only posthumously published Arte of Limning (ca. 1598–1603)—is shot through with the influence of Lomazzo’s treatise in Haydocke’s translation.³² This is evident not least in Hilliard’s assertion that limning is “a kind of gentle painting, of less subjection than any other”, in part by virtue of its ease, cleanliness, and secrecy.³³ But Hilliard is at pains to show that this freedom comes at a price. As he explains:

[Portrait limning] is for the service of noble persons very meet . . . . And this is a work which of necessity requireth the party’s own presence for the most part of the time, and so it is convenient that they be gentlemen of good parts and ingenuity, either of ability, or made by prince’s fee able so to themselves as to give such seemly attendance on princes as shall not offend their royal presence.³⁴

Here the introduction of a “prince’s fee” into the equation injects a note of tension into the ingenious–ingenuous relationship. Hilliard raises this delicate matter elsewhere in his treatise, where, reflecting on the glories of antiquity, he complains: “Like as one good workman then made another, so one botcher nowadays maketh many, and they increase so fast that good workmen give over to use their best skill, for all men carry one price.”³⁵ This is an echo of Haydocke’s explanation as to why he sought to “increase the knowledge of the Arte [of painting]” by publishing his translation of the Trattato:

First the Buyer refuseth to bestowe anie greate price on a peece of worke, because hee thinkes it is not well done: and the Workemans answere is, that he therefore neither useth all his skill, nor taketh all the paines that he could, because hee knoweth beforehand the slendernes of his reward.³⁶

DOI Both Haydocke’s and Hilliard’s statements reflect the very specific situation of the visual arts in Elizabethan England in comparison to the Continent, not least, in Hilliard’s case, the absence of a regular stipend for his services from the Queen.³⁷ Yet they speak also to a more general and widespread concern for the relationship of financial means to creative endeavour, encapsulated in the motto Paupertatem summis ingeniis obesse ne provehantur (“Poverty hinders the greatest wits from advancing”). Widely distributed in emblematic form by Alciati and others, it appears in England both in Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586; fig. 4) and, more elaborately, in Marcus Gheeraerts the elder’s drawing The Unfortunate Painter and his Family (1577; fig. 5).³⁸ Both bear a quotation from Juvenal: “Haud facile emergent quorum Virtutibus obstat res angusta domi” (“With difficulty shall they emerge whose virtues are obstructed by poverty at home”). This alerts us to the proper subject of Gheeraert’s drawing, in which a harassed artist turns from his work—and from Mercury, protector of the arts and financial gain—to attend to his mewling infant, needy wife, and brood of unruly children. Hilliard doubtless knew Whitney’s book and it is not impossible that he had seen the Gheeraerts drawing (although the latter seems to have been intended as a gift abroad). The latter, especially, strikes a chord with his cautionary tale of the indigent and otherwise completely unknown painter, John Bossam:

Nevertheless, if a man be so endued by nature [to be a painter], and live in a time of trouble, and under a savage government wherein arts be not esteemed, and himself but of small means, woe be unto him as unto an untimely birth! For of mine own knowledge it hath made poor men poorer, as among others . . . the most rare English drawer of story works in black and white, John Bossam; one for his skill very worthy to have been Serjeant Painter to any king or emperor. . . . Who, being very poor . . . and growing yet poorer by charge of children etc., gave painting clean over.³⁹

Early modern Englishmen routinely equated the ingenuousness of the freeborn nobility with “open-heartedness”. But Hilliard leaves us in no doubt that the liberal stature of the ingenious painter depends not just on an open heart but also on an open purse. Strikingly, this is a two-way street, extending equally to the “good painter” himself. In a curious diatribe against the “common slander . . . that cunning men are ever unthrifts”, Hilliard offers us a compelling picture of the liberal—in every sense of the word—artist. “Such men”, he says,

are commonly no misers, but liberal above their little degree, knowing how bountiful God hath endued them with skill above others . . . . And oft times when they have performed a rare piece of work (which indeed they cannot afford) they will give it away to some worthy personage for very affection, and to be spoken of. They . . . serve their fancies, having commonly many children if they be married . . . . If a man bring them a rare piece of work they will give more for it than most men of ten times their ability.⁴⁰

Beyond what this tells us about the economics of ingenuity, two aspects of the passage stand out. The first is Hilliard’s introduction of God-given talent. He refers to this elsewhere in his treatise, equating the divine gift of artisanal cunning with freedom from slavery:

God . . . giveth gentility to divers persons, and raiseth man to reputation by divers means . . . he called Bezaleel and Aholiab by name, and filled them with wisdom, skill and understanding, without any teaching, but only of his own gift and grace received. He taught them Himself to be cunning in all fine and curious work . . . being men before brought up but in slavery and making of bricks in captivity.⁴¹

There can be little doubt that this deployment of Bezaleel and Aholiab (the artificers of the Ark and the Temple) derives from Haydocke’s Lomazzo, specifically from the physician John Case’s letter to the reader printed therein. Case names both Bezaleel and Aholiab as “cunning men” and cites Exodus 31 to explain why, having read Haydocke’s translation, he now understands “what Aristotle meant in the sixth book of his Ethics, to call Phidias and Polycletus most wise men”.⁴²

The second significant aspect of Hilliard’s account of the liberal artist is that such men “serve their fancies”. Given the reference to abundant procreation that follows, this is clearly about the licit indulgence of sexual appetite within marriage (which, as per the image by Gheeraerts, literally breeds trouble in the form of needy children). But it pertains also—if we recall some of the definitions of ingegno with which we began—to the free following of imaginative fancy. Does this equate to freedom from rules? After a fashion, since Hilliard, responding to a question from Sir Philip Sidney about the nature of proportion, explains that “our eye is cunning, and is learned without rule by long use.”⁴³ This, too, probably derives from Lomazzo, as we may discern from the important but little known response to Haydocke’s text by Sir Clement Edmondes, in his Observations upon Caesar’s Commentaries (1609):

Lomazzo . . . saith of a skilfull Painter; that being to draw a portraiture of gracefull lineaments, will never stand to take the symmetry by scale, nor marke it out according to rule: but having his judgement habituated by knowledge, and perfected with the varietie of shapes and proportions; his knowledge guideth his eye, and his eye directeth his hand, and his hand followeth both, with such facilitie of cunning, that each of them serve for a rule whereby the true measures of Nature are exactly expressed.⁴⁴

There is not space here to elaborate further upon this swirl of ideas connecting rules, experience, proportion, and cunning. Let us conclude, then, by glancing at a final aspect of freedom: not from rules, but from utility.

This is at the very heart of Hilliard’s arguments as to why limning is “gentle”: “It tendeth not to common men’s use, either for furnishing of houses, or any patterns for tapestries, or building, or any other work whatsoever.”⁴⁵ Here we have a painter who worked—or so Harington claimed—“without any pattern”, and whose creations are not intended to be patterns.⁴⁶ This is a striking inversion of the standard arguments for painting’s worth circulating in learned circles at the time, such as John Dee’s in his account of the “Mechanical Zographer (commonly called the Painter)” in the “Mathematical Preface” to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid’s Elements:

To what Artificer, is not Picture, a great pleasure and Commoditie? Which of them all, will refuse the Direction and ayde of Picture? The Architect, the Goldsmith, and the Arras Weaver: of Picture, make great account. Our lively Herbals, our portraitures of birdes, beastes, and fishes: and our curious Anatomies, which way, are they most perfectly made, or with most pleasure, of us beholden? Is it not by Picture onely?⁴⁷

Despite their acquaintance, it is perhaps doubtful that Hilliard shared Sidney’s view, not least since he seems obstinately literal in his conviction that “all painting imitateth nature, or the life.”⁵¹ But a connection may yet be found in the very topic about which the poet questioned the painter: proportion. Central to Lomazzo’s conception of art, “good proportion” is, according to Hilliard, the “greater part” of beauty: “Whereof our divine part . . . by an admirable instinct of nature judgeth generally.”⁵² This is the stuff of ingegno: a natural instinct of the liberal artist. Yet strikingly, this aesthetic quality pertains not just to the artist, but also to his creations. As Lomazzo explained: “All the inventions of men carry with them so much the more grace and beauty, by how much the more ingenuously [ingegniosamente] they are proportioned.”⁵³ Thus, ingenuity in Renaissance England was not simply an attribute of the artist, nor was it solely a social bond between him and his patron. Ingenuity had the capacity to be an aesthetic property, an affective quality of the work of art exemplifying the talents of its maker and exciting the curious admiration of the beholder.

In writing this essay I have benefitted from discussions with Gavin Alexander, Lucy Gent, Gordon Higgott, and Sarah Howe. I am grateful to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.