Laura JANARA Draft: please do not cite without permission
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Machiavellian optics to problems central to U.S. politics today: specifically, the purveyance by political
leaders of portraits of reality that, as acts of not only deception but self-deception, are perilously
ungrounded in the historical and critical interpretivist sensitivities of virtuoso multiplicitous
perspectivism.
Let us begin by considering the dedicatory letter to The Prince. In this passage, Machiavelli casts
his own optical standpoint in writing The Prince as analogical to that of a landscape painter:
I hope it will not be thought presumptuous for someone of humble and lowly status to dare to
discuss the behavior of rulers and to make recommendations regarding policy. Just as those who
paint landscapes set up their easels down in the valley in order to portray the nature of the
mountains and the peaks, and climb up into the mountains in order to draw the valleys, similarly
in order to properly understand the behavior of the lower classes one needs to be a ruler, and in
order to properly understand the behavior of rulers one needs to be a member of the lower classes
(P, 1995, 6).
Janet Coleman sees in this passage a pithy summation of Machiavelli’s accumulated sensual experience
in the world, including with ancient works. She casts Machiavelli’s textual efforts in The Prince “as
analogous to the representational method of landscape painters”. That is, “He explicitly states that
painters represent the nature of what is there to be seen. They use the learned conventions of artistic
representation (not least the ‘science’ of perspective) to represent through paint on two-dimensional
surfaces the nature of the world that is seen with the eyes and which, through another learned set of
conventions, discourse, can be represented in language” (Coleman, 1995, 43, emphasis in original). For
Coleman, Machiavelli casts himself as theorist as like a painter, specifically, she hints, a Renaissance
painter who deploys scientific linear perspectivism to convey the visually experienced nature of the
political landscape.
Meanwhile, David Wootton associates Machiavelli’s “science of politics” and its signification of
reality found in The Prince with the artistic realism of Renaissance perspectivism. “Just as one looks into
a Renaissance painting, seeing a world one feels one could step into and move about in, rather than
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The Italian original reads “perché cosí come coloro che disegnono e’ paesi si pongono bassi nel piano a
considerare la natura de’ monti e de’ luoghi alti e, per considerare quella de’ luoghi bassi, si pongono
alto sopra monti, similmente, a conoscere bene la natura de’ populi, bisogna essere principe, e, a
conoscere bene quella de’ principi, conviene essere populare” (Il Principe in O, v1, 118).
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Convention