On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow

      FIGURE 14. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520), Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515. Louvre, Paris. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

      Moreover, Castiglione would have us believe, at least at first glance, that we are made into courtiers, not born into being them. Hence the “grazia” (grace) that is required of all of us to be a courtier—the “grazia” that not only renders us full of grace in our comportment but also wins the gratitude of the prince as we ingratiate ourselves to him as dutiful and delightful courtiers—is not the sort of grace that is divinely bestowed upon someone from on high, any more than it can be conceived in Alexander Pope’s terms as a sort of transcendent “grace beyond the reach of art.”⁹² Quite the contrary, Castiglione is concerned with a grace that is well within our reach if we just put our minds to it: it is secular in nature, learnable, practical, purposive, and decidedly explicable. It is also a grace that can be readily acquired through rules—or, above all, by heeding one all-encompassing, universalizing rule: we must avoid “affettazione” (affectation) and practice in everything we say and do a certain “sprezzatura” (a crucial term that for the moment we shall leave undefined). There are, to be sure, other rules to courtiership that we learn along the way, most of them fairly obvious to modern habits of etiquette: don’t throw food around the dining table, for instance, and don’t be a bore, braggart, or brute. But the general rule that we must act with sprezzatura in all that we say and do is undeniably the most important one within Il cortegiano. Without sprezzatura we will not have the grace needed to “season” all that we say and do (“che mettiate per un condimento d’ogni cosa, senza il quale tutte le altre proprietà e bone condicioni sian di poco valore” [that you require this in everything as that seasoning without which all the other properties and good qualities will be of little worth], 1.24). And without grace we will fail in our ultimate professional goal, which is to please the prince so that we may gain access to him, counsel him regarding what course to take from day to day as a ruler, and thus strategically work our way into having influence over the course of events. We need to follow this rule of sprezzatura, then, not only for our own benefit (the courtier, realistically, is always looking out for his own hide as he strives to advance in a profession and seek honor and recognition in the process) but also for all those people who have anything at all to do with the princedom in general and its harmonious workings in a truly complex and dangerous world fraught with tensions and widespread conflicts (the courtier, not unlike cheerful Miss America competitors, is idealistically supposed to be interested in such niceties as “universal peace”).

      Now the key term “sprezzatura” coined by Castiglione and drawn from the verb “disprezzare” (to scorn, diminish, disdain, reduce in value) suggests that at any given moment, if you have difficulty locating the exact mean between extremes as you seek that perfect Horatian aurea mediocritas (golden mean) in all that you say or do, you should always offer up less rather than more, particularly since the mind for Castiglione is quick to draw a complete picture from the part. What is more, this overarching rule holds true about a whole range of matters. It dictates how much time one should dedicate to fixing up one’s hair: don’t spend too much time on it lest you appear a fop. It suggests how one should speak with friends at court and in public ceremonies: understatement, the privileged strategy of the ironist, is preferred to overstatement, it would seem, so one should theoretically employ litotes rather than hyperbole as a figure of speech and thought. It dictates how much specialized knowledge one needs to possess on any given subject: one should know just enough to convince everyone that you do indeed know what you calculatingly hint at knowing even if you lack, and are expected to lack, any real studied expertise in the subject so that your measured, decorous performance masks at best an amateurish ability and at worst a true underlying incompetence. And, to be sure, it even identifies how physically tall the ideal courtier should be: a bit shorter is always better than a bit taller if it is tough locating the perfect mean in a given culture where you happen to be seeking employment as a courtier (1.20).

      At the same time, the term “sprezzatura” by its very nature suggests something about the ideal emotional state of the courtier, if we can be allowed for the purposes of this argument to gauge his temperament in terms of literally temperature. For the ideal mean between someone who is hotheaded (someone, that is, who is easily inflamed and overemotional and perhaps just a bit too effusively sympathetic) and someone who is cold-hearted (someone who is unemotional, indifferent, excessively detached, insensitive, or unsympathetic) is presumably someone who is “warm” or “warm-hearted.” And yet, because it is so very difficult in practice to know exactly what constitutes “warm” for everyone we meet as we interact with a variety of people in a wide array of social circumstances on a daily basis and are forced to behave differently according to the ravages of occasion in different settings and contexts, we should shave off a bit—scorn and thus diminish the potential excess—and act just a bit colder if we are ever in doubt as to what constitutes the perfect degree of emotional “warmth” warranted in our behavior in all that we say and do. Or, rather, to adopt the language of the 1950s still current today, we should “be cool.” But then again, we must be careful never to be too cool. If you’re “too cool for words,” to be prosaic about the matter yet again, you’re still affected. And if you’re affected, you’ve simply made a horrible mess of it and will never prove to be a good, much less perfect, courtier.

      Ideally, then, the courtier who has mastered the “virtue” of sprezzatura can espouse convincingly the specialized knowledge associated with a whole host of arts, even if he knows only a smattering of any one of them and is consequently clueless as to the real rational, communicable, determinate, and reliable knowledge underpinning the very arts he pretends to know so well as he seeks to impress everyone—and in particular the prince—with his grace. Anyone who stands in admiration of the courtier’s ability, who thinks the courtier as a practiced dilettante can in fact do or know all these things with some credible mastery (dance, sing, paint, and the like), is clearly not part of the professional club. That person as an onlooker has sadly mistaken the appearance for the reality and has thus failed to realize that the courtier’s performance is completely studied and mannered, even as it comes off as supremely natural and the product of real, rather than feigned, expertise. The truly accomplished courtier has worked hard, with all due “labor, industry, and care [fatica, industria e studio]” (1.24), at appearing not to work at all, in convincing people that the part can stand in for the whole. For there is labor involved in dancing and singing, as well as even just standing about the court with a seemingly natural pose in elegant choice apparel, yet that labor is artfully—as in cleverly—hidden.

      In professional terms, then, sprezzatura functions within the court as a “signaling device.” All the courtiers looking on with the requisite sprezzatura know that the person is merely acting, that it is a performance that dupes others, and that the courtier, at best sometimes an informed amateur, is clueless about the specific arts in question in a manner that would render him a master in so many things he only hints at being able to do with some reliable and credible expertise. What the exemplary courtiers collectively observing the performance in the know discreetly admire, however, is instead the illusion created, the courtier’s calculated ability to act with a like-minded sleight of hand. They astutely and instinctively grasp the trick of the trade as an essential part of their own collective profession of courtiership and commend him for what the Greeks would have no doubt called his metis. In this respect, they admire his professionalism and they recognize him as one of their own. He’s “in.” He’s an “insider.” He’s one of “them.” He is part of the select closed circle of the group with its finely tuned strategies for success. And he is decidedly secretive about it. Or, rather, what he conveys is an “open secret” whose core truth—that the courtier doesn’t know as an expert does the various arts in question as he seeks to apply them in his clever, studied performances—is available only to those initiated into the specialized form of knowledge underpinning the profession of courtiership and, needless to say, to all those courtiers who apply that specific art in practice with seemingly perfect aplomb.⁹³

      But this only begs the question. How exactly can one really go about acquiring sprezzatura in order to become part of this “new profession,” as it is so