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

how much time they should or should not dedicate to dancing before the prince to how much time they should or should not devote to coiffing their hair and beards.¹⁰⁶

      How, we might therefore ask, does Castiglione’s strategy as a practitioner author compare to that of Cicero’s, whose De oratore serves as the dominant classical model of a discourse about an art underpinning Il cortegiano? In the middle of the first century BCE, two significant pressures were arguably being exerted against oratory at the time Cicero was writing, each coming from different directions.¹⁰⁷ On the one hand, the rise of the First Triumvirate and the silencing and censoring of Cicero in the period certainly made his own position as orator vulnerable in the face of generals, and so he presumably felt that oratory by and large was threatened, although it does not appear to be quite so endangered in the De oratore as in his late works, notably the Brutus, where the end of oratory seems to haunt the scene and where the notion of the orator is significantly expanded to stand in for some broader category like “statesman” or even, perhaps, “citizen.” On the other hand, the core members of the aristocracy, of which Cicero was indeed not a part, always directed significant hostility toward oratory itself insofar as they preferred to appeal more directly to naturalized forms of entitled authority instead of having to labor to persuade on every occasion. In any event, while Cicero unquestionably needed to defend both “oratory” and “rhetoric” in his writings (indeed, rhetoric was always in need of some sort of defense ever since Plato leveled a series of savage charges against it),¹⁰⁸ in his De oratore he was not particularly concerned with fundamentally redefining the nature of the art of rhetoric he was discussing as he fashioned a perfect orator in dialogue form, even if, all things considered, he certainly did moralize it and thus, like Quintilian, helped transform it in a number of significant and lasting ways.¹⁰⁹ By contrast, Castiglione instead very much aimed to do precisely that—namely fundamentally redefine the art he was investigating in his treatise—as he transformed the courtier from being a boorish soldier of the feudal past versed in accomplished equestrian fighting tactics to a cultured classicist of the humanist schoolroom versed in being stunningly eloquent, from someone who performs in a belligerent manner that is conventionally taken as embodying a male virtue of swashbuckling epic force (of engaging in violent tournaments or heroically thrusting a sword into someone’s gut and taking great personal pleasure in watching the victim squirm) to one who performs in a stylized way that risks being construed as effeminate in light of lavishing undue attention on ephemera (of thinking about hairdos, dancing, table manners, choice apparel, and, more generally, how to please the prince and everyone else associated with the court—especially taciturn, elegant women in the evening—with colorful talk, wry humor, biting gossip, and playful language games).

      Unlike Cicero, then, Castiglione, who was precisely one of those well-trained and well-mannered humanists with primarily linguistic rather than military skills to offer a prince through service, composed his discourse about the art underpinning courtiership in a period when interest in professionalization was keen and intensifying for a variety of social and political reasons, not the least being the development of a host of competitive courts in need of male functionaries to service their complex daily workings. Moreover, unlike Cicero, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of validating its profession with an art as a specialized form of knowledge as it staked out its jurisdictional claim in competition with other rising professions for men within the growing bureaucracies of sixteenth-century Italian courts, such as the profession of the secretary and the specialized art underpinning secretaryship. Rulers, to be sure, always needed letter writers within their chanceries, whereas it was arguably questionable whether they really needed these courtiers attending to them all day long if all they were good for (at least until we get to the fourth book of Il cortegiano) was to look great, talk well, crack good jokes, play coy games, and charmingly entertain each other and some elegant ladies in a sort of fashionable evening salon.¹¹⁰ Furthermore, within this competitive system of professions, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of making a case for the value of courtiership as an essential profession that the prince must be coaxed into believing he wants to make use of in order to succeed as a ruler. And, finally, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that appreciated the threat posed by the social mobility of upstarts potentially infiltrating their ranks and displacing entrenched members who may have viewed their position as secure when indeed it was not. The value of the courtier in sixteenth-century Italy was not, in sum, a given, any more than the value of the orator was in Cicero’s time. Indeed, the courtier’s position, somewhat like Cicero’s orator, was not secure. It was, instead, decidedly vulnerable.

      Consequently, Castiglione adopts a rather convoluted strategy to validate courtiership as a critical profession worthy of respect and, at the same time, to close off access to the “new profession” of courtiership while securing a position for some of its entrenched members, such as himself. First and foremost, he makes courtiership appear so endearing as an exemplary profession that everyone reading the book would ineluctably want to practice it and admire it. Hence he adopts the language of marveling throughout the book, rendering the courtier something of a wonder worthy of intense, discriminating admiration (admiratio). At the same time, he initially makes courtiership appear to be so accessible that all those aspiring individuals seduced into the profession will believe they can indeed be part of a group identity by following some “apparently”—and I use the adverb advisedly—straightforward rules. To this end, in the course of assuring his readers that the profession of courtiership has an art to it and is therefore something they can readily acquire through instruction and training, Castiglione proceeds to provide his readers with a seemingly foolproof set of reliable rules by which they can learn how to be a courtier, above all the universal rule they should act with sprezzatura and seek the mean between extremes (or just a bit less than the exact mean between extremes) in all that they say and do, as well as the general rule that they should learn through example by imitating masterful courtiers. Along with this, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very necessary for the prince that the ruler will want to employ these people so that he might be surrounded by them, benefit from their advice, and, indeed, be charmed by them in the very moment that he is instructed by them and counseled to be a good ruler. Accordingly, if at first glance these courtiers seem to have a purely ornamental function as decorative and decorous window dressing (much as the late fifteenth-century courtiers appear in Andrea Mantegna’s The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, fig. 15), finally, in the fourth book, Castiglione’s courtiers are at long last given a goal-oriented political and ethical function as teachers of wisdom to the prince and counselors of good policies. Indeed, without these courtiers as counselors, we are led to believe, things will lamentably fall into ruin both in the prince’s state and in the world at large. Hence Castiglione configures courtiership as a profession that ultimately has a necessary and exemplary ethical and political service to offer the prince within the court (the courtier in his service can give sound advice that will allow the prince to rule well and with dignity), and he holds courtiership up as a model profession that will please the prince and everyone else within the court (the courtier as an educated functionary confers distinction upon the prince and his court through his fine manners and elegant, fashionable, humanist-style talk). Finally, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very simple to learn—read this book and you’re off and running—but in truth he makes it so difficult to practice in reality that in the end the vast majority of all those competitive would-be courtiers, even as they are openly instructed into the art underpinning the profession as a form of specialized knowledge, will inevitably fail at it because they will lack what it takes—the good judgment, the sprezzatura, the grace—to guide them properly in all that they say and do. Hence Castiglione may seem to prescribe how to become a courtier as he provides us with apparently infallible rules, but in fact he only describes how to be a courtier and, in the final analysis, never shows us how to become a masterful one through a rigorous program of preparatory training.¹¹¹

      FIGURE 15. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, 1465–1474. Camera degli Sposi,