Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder

Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so miraculous.) The more complex and tessellated the concept, the emotion, the experience, the more deficient the word for it and the more urgent the yearning to speak it with the tongue of the mind, to give it shape in sound and meaning in metaphor.

Over and over, we have struggled to name that quality of being, that state of mind, that orientation of the spirit which “the good life” asks of us. Edith Wharton called its rudiment “an unassailable serenity.” Bertrand Russell called it “a largeness of contemplation.” Iris Murdoch termed it, simply and perfectly, “unselfing.”

In one of the marvelous essays in her posthumous collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) offers the 16th-century Italian term sprezzatura for that ineffable quality of being upon which our deepest emotional, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic longings tremble.

Art by Margaret C. Cook

With an eye to the various definitions of the word, “all very beautiful and very imprecise” — among them “frankness, fluency, the opposite of mannerism or affectation,” “service to beauty,” and “a casual manner of speech or action… typical of a self-assured master” — Campo considers the reductionism of a descriptive definition:

Sprezzatura is in reality a whole moral attitude that, like the word itself, requires a context that is almost gone from the contemporary world, and, like the word itself, is at risk of disappearing. Or rather, since nothing that’s real ever disappears, it is at risk of languishing in those oubliettes where, in savage and more honest times, they used to chain up princes who’d provoked the ire of the people until their very names were forgotten.

[…]

Sprezzatura is a moral rhythm, it is the music of an interior grace; it is the tempo, I would like to say, in which the perfect freedom of any given destiny is made manifest, although it is always delineated by a secret ascesis. Two lines hide it, like a ring in a case: “With a light heart, with light hands, / to take life, to leave life.”

Illustration by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino

We might find sprezzatura, Campo observes, in the lives of the Trappist monks, in the “ferocious geometry behind the Dance of the Dragonflies,” in “the études of Frédéric Chopin, by which tenderness and turbulence, rubati and turbati, ecstasy itself and piercing premonition were mercilessly measured,” and in fairy tales, of course. Across its different manifestations, she considers its defining orientation of the spirit:

Above all else, sprezzatura is in fact an alert and amiable imperviousness to the violence and baseness of others, an impassive acceptance — which to unperceiving eyes may look like callousness — of unchangeable situations that it tranquilly “decrees nonexistent” (and in so doing ineffably modifies). But beware. Sprezzatura is not kept alive or passed on for very long if it isn’t founded, like religious vows, on an almost total detachment from earthly goods, a constant readiness to give them up if one happens to possess them, an evident indifference to death, a profound reverence for what is higher than oneself and for the impalpable, courageous, inexpressibly precious forms that are its emblems here below. Beauty (interior before becoming visible) above all, the generosity of spirit at its root, and a joyful way of being in the world. This means, among other things, the ability to fly in the face of criticism with smiling good grace and a dignified eloquence born of total forgetfulness of self… an immense, unceasing invitation to the interior liberation that is utter forgetfulness of self — of the ego magnetized by the sideways mirrors of psychology and the social — stripping off what hinders and deceives the spirit in order to acquire the light step and radiant rhythm that disburses the happiness of the saints… “With a light heart, with light hands…” A pure life is given its rhythm by this light and vehement music, composed entirely of forgetfulness and solicitude.

This “ineffable rhythm,” she writes, is found in “the elegance of the living flame,” in “the crash of interstellar silences,” in encounters with “supernatural beauty,” “where living and leaving are an ecstasy, one and the same.”

Couple with Campo on fairy tales as a lens on the paradox of knowing who you are and what you want, then revisit Marie Howe’s poem “The Maples,” which offers its own spare, splendid answer to the abiding question of how we should live our lives.

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