How to Grow a Nose: The Education of Desire in More’s Utopia and Sade’s Libertine Republic

Abstract

Five hundred years after it first appeared in print, Thomas More's small libellus on the best state of a commonwealth, which came to be known simply as Utopia, remains one of the greatest literary enigmas of the Renaissance, and much of its enduring appeal is due to this, its obstinate and persistent refusal to see its textual cipher being unlocked.In his highly acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt famously compared "More's conundrum" (Carey 1999, 38) to the impenetrable and incongruous mood elicited by Hans Holbein the Younger's celebrated painting "The Ambassadors" which, although it was completed seventeen years after Utopia was released, plays on a similar configuration of strangely disquieting, anamorphic art (1980,(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). On occasion, Utopia's semantic quandary has even been equated to the maddening inscrutability of the stately portrait of the author himself, which Holbein painted in 1527, and which has become the standard representation of More during his later years as Chancellor of Henry VIII (Ackroyd 1998, 260-61; Achterhuis 2016, 25-26). What kind of man are we looking at here? Is he really as authoritative, shrewd and uncompromising as his sumptuous gown and livery collar suggest? Isn't he rather more convivial, to the point where he can barely conceal a self-satisfied smirk? Is the profound ambiguity of