CHAPTER 11
Age of Dissimulation

Traiano Boccalini’s lesson was closer to the experience of his contemporaries than sermons that preached pious transparency. As an anatomist of political power, Boccalini was at once fascinated and repulsed by what he saw. He was equally sensitive to its effects on rulers and the ruled. One of the serious points in News from Parnassus is that the ambition of princes is seldom compatible with human freedom. In Boccalini’s view, the prerogatives rulers claim—to wage war, destroy internal enemies, and hold the monopoly on force—come at a high cost to their subjects. He remarked sardonically that ragion di Stato, the late-Renaissance doctrine that judged the means of amassing power in terms of the state’s ends, so pervaded daily life that the term was on the lips of every porter and shopkeeper. Political power traded in appearances, Boccalini believed, not ideals. “The courts of princes are nothing but mask-shops,” he wrote, “where all the goods are bogus, made for the sake of deception.”¹

For Boccalini’s generation, the noble fabric of civic humanism, according to which the prince was at once a patron of the arts and the protector of his people, was now fraying in a harsh new world. Rule built on brute force replaced an older ideal of clemency and cultivation. In Italy, the Renaissance system of statecraft, which aimed at maintaining a balance among the peninsula’s major powers, was in shambles. French and Spanish armies now moved through the land at will. A series of catastrophes came in their train. Florentine stability was shaken and the independence of Milan and Naples lost. Elsewhere in Europe, monarchies with absolutist designs crippled or co-opted noble resistance.

It was also the time of bitter confrontation between militant Protestantism and a Catholic Church fighting to contain the heresy. The violence of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a conflict ostensibly between Catholics and Reformers, was a more protracted version of what was played out in book-burnings, imprisonment, torture, and public executions. Authoritarian rule, whether political or religious, brooked little dissent. Secrecy and imposed consent were the order of the day, enforced by sudden arrest, censorship, and the Inquisition. Some faced their accusers defiantly and with principled honesty. Many others devised strategies to withhold, mislead, or falsify. For both the great and the small, on the global stage of statecraft and in the intimate spaces of conviction, the mask was a matter of survival.

Human deceit is, of course, universal. But the cultural contours of seventeenth-century Europe brought fresh preoccupation with its many varieties. Some claimed that its actual practice was on the rise as well. Combine coercive state power with a religiously sanctioned inspection of souls under threat of torture or death, they reasoned, and the result is ever more refined techniques for blurring the truth. “Dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of the century,” wrote the essayist Michel de Montaigne. “Innocence itself in these times is unable to negotiate without dissimulation.”²

Paolo Sarpi, the Servite friar who argued brilliantly for Venice when the city was placed under papal interdict, echoed the view. “In other centuries, hypocrisy was not uncommon, but in this one it pervades everything.” Sarpi believed that there was only one recourse. “I am compelled to wear a mask. Perhaps there is no one in Italy who can survive without one.” John Milton called Sarpi the Great Unmasker, a sobriquet that, given Sarpi’s dogged chronicling of papal self-interest, may well have been accurate. But Sarpi also kept his own mask firmly in place. It is necessary “to remain masked with everyone,” he said, “to express conventional opinions while reserving one’s convictions.” Everything conceals itself “behind the mask of religion.”³ According to his biographers, Sarpi was either an orthodox Catholic, a Catholic reformer, a crypto-Anglican, a Protestant, or an atheist who put on a show of piety—a testimony to his skill in dissembling.⁴

The rhetoric of masking saturates the age. Still more remarkable was the eagerness with which people of various callings and occupations embraced it in defiance of age-old convictions that classed untruthfulness as a moral wrong. Few denied the virtue of honesty or endorsed outright deceit. Rather, they devised ways of parsing words and framing discourse that preserved truth even while concealing it. Again Sarpi: “I never speak falsehoods, but I do not speak the truth to everyone.”⁵ This impulse to make masking honest was an acknowledgment of two realities. Institutions held extraordinary powers of life and death over individuals, and nonconformists struggled to fashion a defense that was also upright.

Dissimulation equipped such dissenters with the means to protect themselves. “Whether in relation to public or private affairs,” writes the historian Perez Zagorin, “the idea that people commonly went masked and habitually dissimulated their true beliefs came readily to contemporary minds.”⁶ In this age of dissimulation, dissembling was not just about masking the truth. For many, it was about finding a way to do so that was both ethical (or at least not unethical) and protective. Prudence need not come at the expense of rectitude. This was the message of a virtuoso piece of writing by Torquato Accetto, On Honest Dissimulation. At first glance, the title seems to yoke incompatibles. But Accetto insisted that dissembling was not deceit and that the mask was sometimes truth’s only defense.

Torquato Accetto was born in Naples around 1590, a time of growing tensions between Neapolitans and their rulers, who were regents of the Spanish crown. Accetto was a poet and studied law, but his principal occupation was secretary to the Neapolitan dukes Antonio and Fabrizio Carafa. An early sonnet, “Serving as Secretary,” hints at bitterness and buried wrongs. Its narrator longs for sleep as a balm for “grave offenses,” finds refuge in “silence, the pen, and wisdom,” and faults la servitù gentil—the noun is equivocal, meaning domestic service and slavery—for depriving him of the sun’s warmth and the solace of nighttime.⁷

A century earlier, Baldassar Castiglione’s Book of the Courier (1528) had memorialized the princely advisor as a sparkling conversationalist who schooled his master in polish, learning, and virtue. By Accetto’s time, the luster was gone. A secretary was now more underling than associate. Expected to maintain accounts, compose letters, and perform unsung duties of administration, his chief task was to answer when addressed but otherwise keep silent. “You must conceal your abilities, feign incompetence, and let yourself be fooled,” advised a manual called The Secretary. Another said that “it falls to the secretary merely to execute, and to execute only what the master has intended.”⁸

On Honest Dissimulation (1641) grew from this twilight world of unacknowledged service, but its reach extends far beyond. Its conclusions set it at a great distance from the trampled masks of fifty years earlier. “My aim is to show that living judiciously is not at odds with purity of soul,” Accetto writes near the start of the book. Piety does not demand opening the heart. Dissimulation’s masks are akin to the fig leaf, a necessary acknowledgment, he writes, that the Golden Age—when humans lived with the heart “outside the chest, with its imprint felt on every word”—has passed.⁹ The lesson of the Fall is clear: self-knowledge awakens the urge to veil our intentions. There can be no return to Eden. The powerful demean the innocent and exert unjust dominion. Falsehood flourishes. Existence overflows with peril. Dissembling is our best defense.

Accetto asserts a clear distinction between simulation and dissimulation. Simulation is the “art of pretending,” a show of words and actions. Dissimulation withholds the truth, relying instead on silence and omissions. Simulation cannot be called honest, nor can circumstances make it legitimate. It injures both the deceiver and the deceived. Dissimulation, by contrast, is defensive, a shield and not a sword, a way of avoiding rather than provoking harm. Instead of circulating untruths, it “grants some repose to truth, which can be revealed in its proper time.”¹⁰ Dissimulation controls accustomed forms. It interweaves truths with half-truths to create seeming falsehood. It is patient, prepared to endure hardship, reluctant to condemn, and unwilling to meet malice with malice. One simulates what one is not. One dissembles what one is.

Accetto’s words go beyond the simple counsel to conceal. Dissimulation is “a veil of honest obscurity and violent propriety.”¹¹ The connection between dissembling and propriety was a familiar theme in the seventeenth century. It was a staple of courtly accounts—and the motor of Molière’s comic play The Misanthrope—to observe that codes of etiquette employed a healthy dose of dissimulation. The French moralist La Bruyère, a fierce critic of such “propriety,” called the courtier who disguised his passions, denied his heart, and spoke against his sentiments a refined hypocrite. Accetto disagreed. Hypocrisy, Accetto observes, feigns virtue to hide vice. Dissimulation preserves virtue by hiding truth.¹²

With the concealment comes a fairly brutal stifling, a point Accetto makes by emphasizing propriety’s violence. An undertone of self-mutilation runs through his treatise. The intended book was three times the length of what remains, Accetto writes. Its “wounds” are fresh; the astute will see its “scars"; it is “virtually drained of blood.” “Writing about dissimulation has required me to dissemble, and, to this end, I have amputated much of what I wrote at the outset.” The admission betrays the dissembler’s secret, which is to keep his mask invisible. (Dissimulation, Accetto cautions elsewhere, is a profession of which one cannot make a profession. “Owing to natural curiosity, anyone who wore a mask every day would become better known than all others.”) By drawing attention to the unsaid, Accetto puts the dissembler’s techniques of self-protection on display.¹³ He also hints at hidden meaning within his tightly compacted prose.

The effect is tantalizing. The supposed confession—writing about dissimulation has required me to dissemble—admits to concealment but reveals nothing. As a mask that draws attention to itself, On Honest Dissimulation highlights the deceptive construction of the verb to reveal (L. re- + v$$lum, veil; It. rivelare; Fr. révéler): to disclose, divulge, make known. The re- prefix most commonly means “back” or “again,” but in this word and a small handful of others it signifies un- (resign, to relinquish or surrender; reclude, to open; refix, to abrogate or annul). The critic Salvatore Silvano Nigro, Accetto’s most subtle contemporary interpreter, has written that “the truth of the mask is the mask itself.”¹⁴ Another way of putting it is that Accetto’s admission of dissembling veils as much as it unveils.

Dissimulation forges a middle course between submission and rebellion. From the outside the strategy may look passive, a sort of extreme modesty that borders on the fearful or insecure. For Accetto this is its moral value. Dissimulation, he writes, is at once a virtue and “the decorum of all other virtues, which are yet more beautiful when in some way dissembled.” It is a restraint on pride, cloaking and deflecting qualities that would otherwise “make a vain display of themselves.”¹⁵

As if to underscore the worth of humility, Accetto evokes the powerless in sections on the defense of truth against a greater force. In an extended metaphor on the capacity of the heart to contain all things (“even the world itself”), he sketches the image of a prince in danger who retreats to a secret room inside a palace ringed by guards. “[It is] clear that every man, without expense and exposed to the view of all, may hide his affairs in the vast and secret dwelling that is his heart.”¹⁶ Accetto claims that he intends his treatise for “anyone who commands or obeys,” but his examples point most often to the latter, for whom dissimulation is not merely a virtue but a defense. And with this, in a book with no ostensible reference to contemporaneous people or events, we sense the threatening presence of overwhelming force.

“Dissimulation in the Face of an Unjust Power” is the title of Accetto’s most politically charged chapter. From the first sentence, the rhetoric is pitched in a higher key. “Powers that consume the very substance of those living under their yoke are horrific monsters.” The language is as vivid as his similes elsewhere (editing as amputation, the heart as a prince’s hidden chambers, etc.), but here it is stripped of all analogy. The head that wears an unmerited crown defies all who possess true wisdom, he writes. Dissembling one’s virtue averts the despot’s “fear and jealousy.” Hiding one’s suffering denies him his brutish satisfactions. “When the tyrant forbids breathing, one mustn’t sigh; when the sword reddens the earth with innocent blood, one mustn’t blanch or shed tears.”¹⁷

Accetto cites the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian as an instance of tyranny, but his readers’ thoughts may have run to more immediate atrocities. In Accetto’s lifetime, waves of popular protest were met by increasingly vicious repression. When he was in his early thirties, seven residents of Naples were convicted of treason for insulting and throwing stones at the Spanish viceroy Cardinal Zapata. They were stripped naked, bound, loaded into a cart, and paraded through the streets as their captors tore at them with red-hot pincers. They were then stretched across wagon wheels, and their limbs, torsos, and faces were battered with sledgehammers. Once dead, they were decapitated. Their heads were put in iron cages as an example, and their bodies were quartered and dumped outside the city walls for the dogs.¹⁸

A curiosity in Accetto’s text may signal such violence. Roughly half of his twenty-five short chapters end with their closing words fashioned into a calligram resembling a funnel. The device stirs vague unease, as if the very words are being squeezed into silence or perhaps dropping through an hourglass. At the close of chapter 3, “It Is Never Right to Abandon Truth,” something more may be happening. The passage itself is inoffensive. Accetto writes that one cannot deceive oneself indefinitely, and that prudent dissimulation, if grounded in truth, is a confirmation of its own value.¹⁹ But phantom words emerge from the line-breaks beginning halfway down on the left: rogo (the stake or funeral pyre), tenendo (holding, gripping), temo (I am afraid), mostrando (displaying), sudo (I sweat). This is the only calligram where a series of words appears. Their savage kinship is chilling.

Si può nondimeno tralasciar la memoria del proprio male,
per qualche spazio, come dirò;
ma dal centro del petto son tirate le linee
della dissimulazione alla circonferenza
di quelli che ci stanno
intorno. E qui bisogna il termine
della prudenza che,
tutta appoggiata al vero,
nondimeno a luogo
e tempo va
ritenendo
o dimostrando il
suo splendore.²⁰

The Italian historian Rosario Villari, who learned of the seven protesters’ fate in the archives of Naples, argues that dissimulation was deadly serious. It had affinities with the cunning and intrigue of court society, but its origins were altogether more menacing. It grew from “a climate of oppression, conformism, traditionalism, and the spirit of resignation, which few succeeded in escaping.”²¹ Accetto’s subjects—those who received rather than gave orders, those without riches, those who worried about moral principles even under the constraint of circumstances—did not have to read about dissimulation to grasp its necessity.²²

There were other circles that praised the mask and warned against putting the heart on view. Arguments advancing Reason of State, the novel theories of governing that Boccalini had said were on the lips of even ordinary folk, were both symptom and cause of the pervasive distrust of transparency. In a famous passage in The Prince (1513), Machiavelli states that the ruler should possess the wiles of a fox and the fierceness of a lion. The prudent ruler, having perfected these qualities, will then know to hide them. He will be a gran simulatore e dissimulatore, a great pretender and dissembler.²³ The view coincides with Accetto’s counsel to gain mastery over one’s own affects and passions. In certain respects, this too was an argument from necessity: the capacity for deceit was needed to counter the falseness of others. But unlike Accetto, Machiavelli sets aside questions of right and wrong to discuss how rulers actually rule. In these terms, hiding the heart was not a necessary evil. It was, however, necessary. Such advice for gaining and holding power was a revolution in politics. Its matter-of-fact tone is pitch-perfect for expressing moral neutrality. This scandalized readers.

In a stroke, Machiavelli shattered the alignment of honesty, virtue, and utility that had been the ideal of effective rule since Aristotle. He dismissed as naive the Christian model of prince as moral exemplar and held that the state’s own aims—its demands for the preservation and extension of power as judged by the ruler—transcended moral law. This didn’t necessarily urge plunder and illegality or deny categories of good and evil. Rulers ought to be good insofar as they were able, Machiavelli wrote. Nor was “necessity” simply a dodge to excuse dark actions. That said, morality and justice were not in themselves sufficient guides for rulers, who may be called on to act immorally or unjustly to maintain state power. Machiavelli was the first to translate this reality into a systematic view of politics. Such means were not temporary expedients to be abandoned and foresworn once the prince had finished some distasteful business. Machiavellian virtù—prudent action chosen of necessity—encompassed deceit, fraud, pretense, and hypocrisy.²⁴

A moment from the Thirty Years’ War illustrates the novelty and diffusion of such notions. An acquaintance of the Bohemian humanist Wentzel von Meroschwa had written to ask what the cities not yet touched by war should do: side with Emperor Ferdinand, support Elector Frederick, or remain neutral? Meroschwa replied that the threefold choice was “scholastic” in its “ancient candor.” Just as modern astronomers have discovered new stars with their telescopes, he wrote, the new politics has its own optics and lenses, “through which it is possible to see other elements and alternatives.” Meroschwa enumerated the “new stars”: the cities could feign allegiance to Frederick and secretly aid Ferdinand, feign allegiance to Ferdinand and secretly aid Frederick, feign neutrality and aid one or the other, or feign neutrality and aid both. “Regarding such choices, the political man must ask not only what one should or should not do, but also what one should simulate doing.” Merchants cheat and lie to sell us their rubbish, Meroschwa added. “Can we not do the same to defend our cities and their regimes?”²⁵

It was in this spirit that seventeenth-century political writers defended a version of public deception for the good of the whole. But the influence of the Counter-Reformation is also palpable in tempering what they said and how they said it. Responding to a combination of persuasion and pressure from the Church (Pope Pius V denounced Reason of State as ragion del diavolo), some intellectuals after Machiavelli distinguished between good and bad variants of ragion di Stato. The former sought the well-being of the whole, for which a state might violate its own statutes but never moral law. The latter was the prince’s selfish pursuit of domination, which stopped at nothing.

The post-Machiavellian climate is evident among those who counseled dissimulation in the seventeenth century. Pietro Andrea Canonieri’s Perfect Courtier (1609) spells out strategies that embrace secrecy and silence, advising princes to frame answers solely in the terms of the question and to fashion their gestures and expressions to conceal the truth. He casts this advice as defensive, which he says makes it unobjectionable. One should not reveal the truth, he writes, but one must not lie. Gabriele Zinano, whose On the Reason of State first appeared in Venice in 1626, writes that the statesman is “nothing but artifice” and recommends “all varieties of force and artifice.” Yet here, too, artifice could be virtuous or vicious. The latter feigns virtue and religion and is therefore blamable.²⁶ Ludovico Settala’s On the Reason of State (1627) urges “concealment of thought, distrust, and dissimulation” and warns the prince against “going about with the breast open,” but castigates Machiavelli for recommending deceit, especially in religious matters. Contempt for religion, he writes, has given birth to tyrants by way of temerity, savagery, and finally moral death.²⁷ With these distinctions, political writers in the century after Machiavelli fashioned a version of honest dissimulation to suit their purposes.²⁸

There was a third current that called masking honest. As frontiers hardened between Protestants and Catholics, pressure on nonconformists increasingly set the claims of conscience against the powers of coercion. In contrast to the logic of ragion di Stato, morality was paramount at all times in this domain. Believers had to grapple with whether betraying their convictions threatened their souls with damnation. Religious minorities throughout history have, of course, tried to escape persecution by using pretense or concealment. But the pressures of post-Reformation Europe focused these questions with unequaled intensity. Protestantism’s elevation of inner conviction and its emphasis on faith rather than works caused believers to live in perpetual examination of their own motives. The terms for understanding appropriate action were new, as well. Rather than resorting to ad hoc evasions and equivocations, theologians now made a case for masking the truth based on Biblical exegesis.²⁹

Consider the fate of one of Italy’s most discussed religious dissemblers, Francesco Spiera, an attorney who was tried by the Inquisition in Venice for harboring Calvinist beliefs. Under questioning, Spiera confessed to skepticism about the existence of purgatory and admitted to having translated parts of the New Testament into Italian. He also acknowledged having read the Beneficio di Cristo, a forbidden book popular among Italian reformers. His interrogations continued, and he finally broke. He renounced his secret Protestantism and promised to reenter the Catholic fold. The punishment was light. He was ordered to recant publicly at the end of a Sunday Mass and to purchase a tabernacle for his parish church.

According to a fellow Protestant who was close to Spiera, the retraction was false. “[Spiera] seemed to want to declare his beliefs openly and hide nothing. Finally, after a long internal battle, he decided on dissimulation. He would keep his opinions firmly but secretly in his heart and with his mouth say something else, namely exactly what the legate wished him to say.”³⁰ After Spiera’s public penance, he could not live with himself. Certain that he had damned himself by lying, Spiera fell ill and died in a state of despair six months later. For more than a century, he was familiarly invoked as either reprobate or martyr, and his decision to dissemble was by turns denounced and defended.³¹

The example of Nicodemus, the Pharisee who met with Jesus secretly, was relevant to those like Spiera who faced harsh scrutiny for their beliefs. John Calvin intended scorn in referring to Protestant converts who hid their faith and attended Catholic Mass as Nicodemites. To him, this was idolatry. They should worship in the true faith at home, Calvin urged, and seek to convert as many others as possible, even if it meant death. Those who agreed likened Spiera to Judas.³²

Others took Nicodemus as inspiration. The view was of a piece with the Lutheran spirit sweeping Europe. Firmly grounded in scripture, it privileged the intimate, open channel that each believer had with God and acknowledged no obligation to earthly institutions. Otto Brunfels was a monk who left his monastic orders in Strasbourg and, in 1527, published a work that was to become the locus classicus for religious dissimulation. Pandectarum veteris et novi Testamenti, also called the Pandectae, or Compilations, strongly countered the view that Christians were obliged to make themselves martyrs for their faith. Brunfels wrote that the tactics of papists justified deception. “Before the ungodly it is legitimate to feign and dissemble in order to both prevent and avoid peril.”

Brunfels used Luther’s message of Christian freedom to support his argument. The believer was lord of all and subject to none. Jesus himself evaded Pharisees when they pursued him. By resisting the ungodly and their intrusions, “we may temporarily humble ourselves before them for the glory of God.”³³ Brunfels likened Protestants to Jesus’ early followers, who worked from within the Mosaic law they had renounced to avoid offending those they hoped to convert. He quoted Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews… .

To the weak I became as weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (I Corinthians 9:20, 22). Paul had Timothy circumcised so that Jews would not be scandalized. He gave his flock—“babes in Christ,” he called them—only as much truth as they could digest (I Corinthians 3:1–2).

To dissemble belief or feign Catholicism was therefore excusable. Brunfels denied that this justified willful prevarication. God saw into the heart’s recesses, and any selfish or groundless deception was sinful. Still, the margin for misleading words and actions was wide, extending to worship within the full Catholic rites if judged necessary.³⁴

Brunfels’s Pandectae was read eagerly by Protestants throughout Europe. Fifteen Latin editions were published between 1528 and 1556, and five German editions appeared between 1528 and 1562. By midcentury, there were three editions in French, four in English, and two in Italian. Its cities of distribution—London, Paris, Wittenberg, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Venice—map a widening circuit of pious dissembling. “In this sense, the forgeries and disguises demanded by circumstances revealed the deepest characteristic of this book,” writes the historian Carlo Ginzburg. “Namely, the expression of a piety indifferent to institutional boundaries and therefore assimilable to all.”³⁵

There were many cases in Venice and the Veneto that showed the need to dissemble: that of a renegade monk named Giorgio Siculo, who was hanged for preaching Anabaptist tenets and writing in defense of religious simulation; of Giulio di Milano, who received a life sentence from the Inquisition for having read and spoken favorably about the Pandectae; and of the dyer Zuanbattista Sambeni, who, after months of unremitting interrogation about his heretical views, was lashed to a large stone, rowed to the Adriatic, and thrown overboard. The number of religious dissemblers is impossible to know. One of the many ordinary Venetians caught in the Inquisition’s web spoke of “a world of heretics” who worshiped secretly in the city. Experience, not books, taught them to master their words and actions. By 1600, the Catholic Church had succeeded in ridding northern Italy of the Protestant threat. But ideas of dissimulation—its rationale, techniques, and plausible honesty—remained embedded in the culture.³⁶

The conditions that prompted writers to justify dissembling worked on all who had to reconcile prudence with conviction. People hid their reactions and schooled their gestures to remain within communities. These were ways of enduring inequity, of muffling dissent, of protecting rather than transforming one’s identity. If the anguished end of Francesco Spiera is any indication, their dissembling was not undertaken lightly. In the constricted intellectual climate of the seventeenth century, when challenging orthodoxy could be fatal, their masks were natural and understandable. Wearing one’s heart on a chain was not an option. The dominant image for the age went from window to mask.

Three paintings from the 1640s mark the distance traveled since Cesare Ripa had pictured Fraud as a two-headed beast carrying a mask. Lorenzo Lippi’s so-called Allegory of Simulation is an enigmatic portrait of a young woman with a mask in one hand and a pomegranate in the other (figure 20). She has just pulled off the mask—or is she about to put it on? A finger covers the mask’s mouth, and, like the girl’s own face, the mask is without expression. Her eyes are alert, her mouth almost pursed, her chin slightly raised in pride or defiance. Perhaps an eyebrow arches. Pierio Valeriano, whose Hieroglyphica had depicted The Word of an Honest Man one hundred years earlier as a heart dangling from a neck-chain, had also written that pomegranates were a symbol of duplicity. Inside their beautiful exterior corruption may fester, he wrote. Some viewers of Lippi’s painting have accordingly grouped the fruit with the mask and called the painting a warning.³⁷

But the slice in the rind reveals no corruption. What we see instead are lusciously abundant seeds, some red and others still green. The more common associations of the pomegranate in the late Renaissance ran not to deceit but to regeneration: to plenitude, fertility, and an encompassing oneness-in-variety. In Christian symbolism, its juice signifies blood and its seeds promise rebirth. In Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate, for instance, the baby Jesus holds the fruit and offers a blessing. Such connections argue against seeing this painting as a caution. Its title, Allegory of Simulation, is modern, appearing only in the twentieth century. Earlier it was known simply as Lady with Mask and Pomegranate.³⁸ Unlike Ripa, Lippi shows no monster in the possession of a mask. The girl’s face is unblemished, aloof but not a threat, supremely inscrutable. The pomegranate as plausibly holds secret wealth as any supposed rottenness. This, combined with the girl’s own inscrutability, hints at something more complex than simple deceit—something closer to dissembling than to feigning. It is arguably a version of the honest mask that hides all things securely within the heart, “even the world itself.”

The painter Salvator Rosa, who knew Lippi when they both lived in Florence in the 1640s, executed two works that touch on similar themes. One shows a man in a frock pointing to a mask he holds. Behind him is a youth whose stare contains both disgust and fascination (figure 21). Many have taken the image to be an admonition against duplicity. Its most frequently used title, La Menzogna, or Falsehood, presents the image as an admonition against duplicity.³⁹ In a biographical sketch, however, Rosa’s contemporary Filippo Baldinucci refers to the canvas as a “philosopher showing a mask to another person.” That phrase served as the painting’s ungainly title until the mid-nineteenth century, when Falsehood replaced it.⁴⁰ It is far from clear that the philosopher intends censure. His index finger, more John the Baptist than Noli mi tangere, seems to announce or recommend, not to warn off. The mask’s features bear a plausible resemblance to those of its possessor. Is this a lesson in masking? In a letter to a friend about his service to the Medici family, Rosa wrote: “I go about advising on the best way of wearing a mask, i.e. those acts of abasement and flattery that are so necessary in this court if you want to get ahead.”⁴¹ Clearly, he was familiar with the uses of unseen masks.

FIGURE 20. Lorenzo Lippi, Woman Holding a Mask and a Pomegranate

FIGURE 21. Salvator Rosa, Philosopher Showing a Mask to Another Person

FIGURE 22. Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait

Rosa’s notebooks trumpet honesty in categorical terms. “It is a slavish thing to speak lies and trade in fraud.” “Nothing is more damaging to human society than pretense [simulazione] and broken promises.” “Men win honor with valor, not with fraud.” “Liars are traitors to nature.”⁴² Such statements appear to contradict his advice to wear the mask of flattery to get ahead, unless Rosa followed the practice of his contemporaries and distinguished simulation from dissimulation. If so, the invisible masks he urged were not incompatible with his stubborn refusal to betray principle. There is a space in Rosa’s prose for honest dissembling.

A self-portrait done by Rosa underlines the stance (figure 22). Here Rosa rests a tense hand on a tablet inscribed with Latin. A heavy cloak has slipped from one shoulder. The painter’s grim face looks small against the sky, and its features, especially the strong nose, chin-strap beard, and creased mouth, resemble the would-be philosopher holding a mask. The tablet’s motto reads Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio, “Say nothing unless your words are better than silence.”⁴³ We might imagine the man having just shrugged off his cloak, deciding perhaps to disclose a secret truth that he has been hiding. Now we see it, and it reveals nothing. Rosa has manifestly opted for silence.⁴⁴

The modern renaming of both Lippi’s and Rosa’s paintings is a sign that our own associations with masks have narrowed since the seventeenth century. Feigning and falsehood conform to a view that instinctively links masking to disguise, guile, and deception. There have always been versions of such views, and in the seventeenth century many were eager to call masks the devil’s invention and a symbol of human duplicity. But even as priests and moralists railed against the evils of the mask, others found in it a defensible escape.

The masks of Accetto and Brunfels, of the political minds who split off the bad from the good in ragion di Stato, and of the unremembered many who kept silent to conceal a truth were a curious kind of cover, one that obscured and concealed but steadfastly resisted charges of deceit. These invisible masks, evoked figuratively and depicted by artists, were not identified with pranks, mischief, or attempts to undermine the power structure from within. They were by and large defensive, intended less to manipulate than to survive.

The effect was to habituate large parts of the population to viewing the mask not as an accomplice to guile or trickery—and still less as an intimation of the underworld—but as a modus vivendi, intended to preserve rather than disrupt. To call dissimulation honest recast the mask from the devil’s tool to an instrument of virtue. That its honesty mattered so much was a sign of its particular value. Given the right circumstances, the mask could be conservative.