THE ARTLESS POWER OF ART: SPREZZATURA, ONLY FOR THE NONCHALANT

 
What unites Warren Buffet,  Jascha Heifetz, Paul Volcker, Vladimir Horowitz, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Paul Keating and the Renaissance Courtier?

The sly and humble art of sprezzatura..

Sprezzatura, as defined in Baldessare Castilglione's First Book of the Courtier, is the art of non-art. Have you noticed how virtuosi of our socio-economic and cultural orb move effortlessly between, and among their subject-s?

I argue this: great artists and persons of action (not solely renown) achieve, by effortless grace, what the rest of us are denied. With the studied art of the courtier, nevertheless, I contend even we may attain that art.

Heifetz, the peerless athlete bestriding the fiddle;

Volcker, hounding inflation to single-digit subjection;

Horowitz, the wizard of the keyboard (perhaps Jobs deserves a place?);

Keating, deft deliverer of the rhetorical master-stroke;

In Art, in science, in business and in life, I hope we attain to courteous conquest -

With grace and equipoise, may we spring fair Athena from stalwart Zeus' head?

For, as Churchill said, 'Mastery is the prize of the Venture'..