That public face has or may have an extra dimension – sprezzatura. The term, used by Baldassar Castiglione in his work ‘The book of the courtier’, was described by Stemp (2006, 6) as ‘a lightness of touch that a well educated man should have in a variety of activities such as music painting and writing’. Though determined by its time, the term anticipates the evolution of aesthetic labour. That is the main thrust, the main question of this paper. Castiglione goes on to state (1528, 67) that sprezzatura is ‘to practise in all things a certain nonchalance.
