- Jun 2023
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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Being a ‘homo ioci plenus’ – a man full of wit – meant something in Rütiner’s friendship group, and knowing how to bring the house down was one way to display one’s communicative capital.
Relationship to sprezzatura?
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- May 2021
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publicdomainreview.org publicdomainreview.org
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Other expressions get close to Castiglione’s ideal: French has je ne sais quoi; Latin, ars est celare artem (it is art to conceal art); Japanese, iki, an adjective meaning “subtly elegant, refined with no ostentation”; but nothing captures this kind of aesthetic coolness quite like sprezzatura, which glides off the tongue almost as languidly as the style it describes.
Versions of the idea of sprezzatura in other languages. Not translations, but extant ideas which are similar.
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- Jan 2019
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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sprezzatur
Sprezzatura is a kind of practiced nonchalance, the play-it-cool mentality that conceals the strategic inner rhetorician. Think Varys in Game of Thrones. A cooler example occurs in Skyfall , in which James Bond descends through the roof of a moving train car while said roof is basically torn off and then immediately fixes his cufflinks like nothing happened. Perhaps not sensible from a narrative point of view, but certainly rhetorically appropriate for the audience and very sprezzatura. Another Renaissance example that we read in Dr. Lynch's Rhetoric I class is Christine de Pizan's The Treasure of the City of Ladies, which is like Castiglione's book if the audience were women of the court.
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- Feb 2017
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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some expressive features, not decorated as for show (all ostentation being both despicable and hurtful here), but such as appear the natural exposition of those bright and deep impressions, made by the subject upon the speaker's mind; for here the end is not pleasure, but emotion.
Perhaps a little sprezzatura going on?
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