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

so that one’s mastery of sprezzatura in all that one says or does can indeed function as a substitute for a mastery over the forms of specialized knowledge of a host of other arts that the courtier feigns to know in some measure and that are the province of expertise of other professionals, from musicians to painters to dancers, who likewise periodically sought to attach themselves to courts? We know, to be sure, that we must work hard in order to appear to do so many different things without any work whatsoever—something that would no doubt have pleased the cultural elite in classical antiquity since the very concept of work often carried with it the lingering odor of vulgarity. But what exactly are we supposed to do by way of preparatory “labor, industry, and care” so that we may acquire sprezzatura and thus perform in a manner that conceals all work and, at the same time, convinces people that we possess the requisite knowledge associated with those different things that we appear to be, but indeed are not, masterful practitioners of when all is said and done? How, moreover, do we practice acquiring sprezzatura, since there is no school of courtiership that can show us how to develop and refine this strategy of locating the perfect mean in all that we say and do? Or at least there is no formal institutionalized adult school that can train us in these matters, since the humanist classroom did to varying degrees of success inculcate poetry, grammar, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy and was ideally intended to prepare the cultural elite for success in leadership but certainly had no specific professional bent to it and, of course, served to educate boys rather than full-grown men. Nor is there a formalized guild system—a system, that is to say, of “artes”—whose primary function was to serve as “a device designed to organize and order society” but through which one could also be indoctrinated into the practices of the profession of courtiership and the art underpinning the very mysteries of that particular misterium.⁹⁵ Nor, directly related to this, is there an extensive workshop structure that would-be courtiers can take advantage of as visual artists can when they link themselves to a master, such as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, or Raphael, and are apprenticed to him until such time as they have thoroughly absorbed all the lessons of the art and can then ideally emerge at the end, after years of diligent practice and hard “labor, industry, and care,” as an adult master on their own within the chosen profession, if indeed they choose to pay the dues and enter and belong to the guild as a recognized master.⁹⁶ Nor, of course, does the university system prepare anyone for courtiership.

      Surely, moreover, it is not enough to borrow from accepted poetic practice, as Castiglione indirectly insists we should, and tell would-be courtiers to rely simply on their “bon giudicio” (good judgment), go out into the world, choose the best qualities of courtiers who exhibit grace, and then, after deftly mixing all those admirable qualities together in one’s own behavior, somehow, magically, become a figure of grace for others to imitate, so that the process of inculcation productively repeats itself in an endless, regenerative feedback loop.⁹⁷ For how do we acquire good judgment in the first place unless we are born with it? Castiglione never tells us how to acquire this requisite ur-knowledge of good judgment, which indeed remains something of a puzzle in a book that sets out to provide an underlying rational basis to account for success in all sorts of behaviors and skills related to this “new profession” of courtiership. Worse, how do we put into practice the process of imitation itself? Surely it is one thing for a poet to sit in a room as the laureate Francesco Petrarca did and scribble away with ponderous classical models in mind, then cross out some of his writings that did not satisfy him, then rewrite them, then return to them hours, days, or years later and revise it all over yet again with increased critical detachment until it is just right, so that the power of the classical allusion underpinning the writing and lending it authority and gravitas is not too obtrusive and has been thoroughly absorbed into a signature style after much “labor, industry, and care.”⁹⁸ But it is really quite a different matter altogether, for a host of practical reasons, for an eager aspirant to try to adopt the same strategy of poetic imitation and continuous revision as he seeks to become a courtier with the requisite grace that will win him the desired favor of the prince. For, unlike being a poet, being a courtier means you are involved in a constantly interactive, often spontaneous, improvisation-based, and oratory-bound profession. And that means you are consequently engaged in an essentially theatrical, relational, and conversational activity that you just cannot simply put into practice in solitude or revise in private through an act of calculated withdrawal and reflection.⁹⁹ At any given time, you—as a dutiful functionary whose job is to serve—stand on the stage before others and you must act, come what may. You are out there, vulnerable and visible. And when you are called upon to talk or act, which for Castiglione a courtier is constantly called upon to do on a daily basis, and if, alas, you happen to fail at talking or acting properly at any given moment, you potentially fail in a shame culture in which, we can readily glean from Il cortegiano itself, a variety of people took great pleasure in seizing upon the slightest blemish of rivals to discredit them. Being a courtier, in sum, was extremely risky business in a culture so thoroughly steeped in the widespread trafficking of gossip.¹⁰⁰

      Now, at first glance it would seem that if Castiglione fails to tell us how to exert all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care,” much less show us how to do so, it would be because the universal rule that one must flee affectation and in all things practice sprezzatura is teachable as a rule but only as a rule. That is to say, it would appear that Castiglione cannot provide us with clear-cut mechanisms for learning sprezzatura and thus for systematically acquiring grace. He can name what we need: we need to act and be full of grace and possess good judgment. He can shrewdly, and with some performative nonchalance of his own, invent words to name what we need to do: we need to act, as he suavely puts it through an interlocutor in a casual, offhand manner, with sprezzatura. He can draw on standard rhetorical and poetic practice to suggest how we acquire grace: we need to be like a bee—Seneca’s bee, Petrarca’s bee, any fine, roaming, clever, industrious bee¹⁰¹—gathering the best nectar of courtiership from the choice flowers of the finest courtiers whom we can ever hope to meet and then busily mix all that precious courtly nectar together to come up with our own exemplary signature style of graceful comportment. Castiglione can also rely on classical rhetoric—particularly Cicero’s De oratore, which is the most obvious classical model underlying Il cortegiano—to articulate an overall strategy for success: we need to be persuasive in all that we say and do by choosing our words carefully, by being apt, by understanding the role of wit, by learning all the figures of speech and thought, and the like. Castiglione may even presume that the studia humanitatis, with its focus on grammar, poetry, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history, will inculcate good judgment and grace, although there is some question that it ever achieved such a goal, much less aimed at inculcating it. Finally, Castiglione can show us what the finished product of all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care” might well look like by nostalgically presenting a group portrait of accomplished courtiers interacting in a conversational mode in Urbino and by assuming that the examples presented will adequately instruct us all on how to become accomplished courtiers. But Castiglione cannot really systematically teach us how to go about acquiring this grace and sprezzatura, much less go about learning how to possess good judgment, through preparatory “labor, industry, and care.” Or at least, more important, he doesn’t do so.

      Nor, for that matter, does Castiglione point to some other edifying book that he wrote that would teach us about all the preparatory work we need to do in order to succeed in the profession of courtiership, some sort of companion volume that lays it all out practically and methodically as a basic training manual for professional success and the art underpinning it. Nor does Castiglione tell us what informative books we should read to become at least moderately adept in a host of productive or practical arts that we may need to be versed in as courtiers, or tell us where and how we may hope to get the requisite preparatory training in those arts, so that we can in fact apply ourselves with “labor, industry, and care” to any particular task at hand that is required of us when the occasion arises for us to do so in this “new profession” of the courtier. If Cicero, for instance, the classical author whose works most obviously influenced the shape of Il cortegiano, does not furnish us with all the rules of what it means to be an orator in his “surprising” and “innovative” De oratore (although he does indeed provide us with so many of those rules, particularly in the second and third books),