[Self Made] It's good to be a genius (even when you're not).

Reading chapter one: "Stand Up for Bastards"

Welcome to the summer book club.

We’re reading Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians. We kicked things off last week with the introduction and today we’re on to the first chapter.

For now, conversation is in the comments. We might open up a Zoom session in a few weeks for a more personable chat when the book’s key ideas have been teased out a bit.

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Chapter 1: “Stand Up for Bastards”

Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, Albrecht Durer, 1500

Three Things to Notice

1. That’s not Jesus in the picture above. It’s the Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, depicting himself as Jesus. In an age of great change and upheaval, Durer pioneered the art of self-creation by presenting himself as a Godlike figure who was simultaneously able to fashion his own personality, public image and economic future.

2. The hierarchical Christian world of the time didn’t know what to do with men like Durer who burst the bonds of the station they were born into. A new category was created to deal with the discomfort: the genius—a sort of divine aristocrat marked out by God with a superior nature. The genius was “God’s noble bastard”.

3. For the everyday non-genius, a parallel concept emerged: sprezzatura, the art of looking like a genius. This inevitably involved lying: “In order to become who we want to be, we first have to convince other people that we are what we are not” (24).

Notable Quote

The Renaissance mythos of godlike nobility—that nature, or God, or fortune had adopted certain lucky figures as their own—went hand in hand with the more cynical premise that it was possible to just pretend that you were one of them. You might not be da Vinci—of whom Vasari breathlessly wrote that “whatever he turned his mind to, he made himself master of with ease”—but, by making things appear easy, you could give off that impression, at least for a while.

Conversation starters (pick one)

How would you summarize this chapter in ten words exactly?

In what areas of modern life do you see people feeling the pressure to turn on some sprezzatura? To give the impression that everything comes as easy for them as it does for a genius?

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See you next week for chapter two — “Shaking Off the Yoke of Authority”.