Seeing the Renaissance prince through the Johari window

Cesare Borgia – after a portrait by Bartolomeo Veneto – the model for Machiavelli’s Prince and a paragon of Joharian sprezzatura

As a schoolboy, the photographer and dandy Cecil Beaton – the 20th century’s premier architect of elegance and artifice, and who famously designed the sets and costumes for My Fair Lady — wrote in his diary: “I want only to be…