THE COURTIER

Castiglione was sensitive, scrupulous and hard-working. It is refreshing to remember that the daunting paragon of refinement and courtesy was also indecisive, fussy, snobbish and ambitious; that his half-hearted approaches to marriage were inspired by his urgent need for money (his eventual marriage, none the less, was extremely happy); that he was not at all distinguished as a commander and indeed sickened by battle; that he was more than once suspected of treacherous conduct; and that he was excessively fond of fine clothes and horses. In short, he was very human.

He was born in 1478, on his father’s estate at Casatico, in the Mantuan territory, and died, while serving as papal nuncio, at Toledo in 1529. This was a period of incomparable literary and artistic achievement in Italy, and also of grievous national shame, bounded on one side by the years when, in the words of Castiglione’s near contemporary, Guicciardini, the calamities of Italy began (with invasion by the French), and on the other by the years when Rome was sacked and Italy finally fell under the domination of Spain.

Castiglione’s life was intensely active and fruitful. He grew up in noble surroundings and company, with the Gonzaga princes of Mantua among his friends. He studied at Milan University (learning Latin and Greek, as well as jousting, fencing and wrestling), entered the service first of Lodovico Sforza and then of Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua. It was at this time that he first met Duke Guidobaldo and his wife, Elisabetta, after they had been driven out of the city-state of Urbino by Cesare Borgia. Their relationship prospered, and, after Guidobaldo had been restored to power, Castiglione entered his service – with a first command of a company of fifty men-at-arms – in 1504.

For twelve years, until 1516, he served the rulers of Urbino, first Guidobaldo, who died in 1508, and then (when Urbino became a papal fief) Francesco Maria della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Julius II, until he was driven from Urbino by the troops of Pope Leo X. Castiglione fled with him to Mantua, where, after years of busy service in war and diplomacy, he was able to marry, settle down to cultivate his own interests at home and enjoy social life at Court as one of the intimate circle of friends of the ruling family. On the death of Francesco Gonzaga in 1519, however, Castiglione was again employed on diplomatic missions, by the new marquis, Federico, who eventually appointed him as Mantuan ambassador to Rome. In 1524, impressed by Castiglione’s charm and devotion to duty, Pope Clement VII offered him the post of papal nuncio to Spain, where he spent the remaining years of his life, harassed by the repercussions of the ceaseless diplomatic intrigues and squabbles of the rulers of Christendom.

The few years Castiglione spent in the service of Guidobaldo provided the inspiration for The Courtier. The Court had become famous through the achievements of the great soldier-scholar, Federico da Montefeltro, Guidobaldo’s father, whose military talent Castiglione records in The Courtier, and who built Urbino’s great palace, collected an impressive library and made the city a centre of patronage and learning. Guidobaldo, who succeeded him in 1482, was a melancholy and unfortunate ruler, impotent through illness, and hopeless at war. The life at Court, during Castiglione’s years at Urbino, was shaped by the personality of Guidobaldo’s wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga.

The idea of writing The Courtier, Castiglione records, came to him while he was still living at the Court of Urbino, in the service of Francesco Maria della Rovere (the ‘Lord Prefect’). A first draft was roughed out quickly, added to when time was available during the years 1508–16 (especially in Rome, when he was there representing the interests of Francesco Maria and enjoying the company of many of his old friends from Urbino who were now papal officials), and then more or less finished during 1516–18, when Castiglione enjoyed leisure and home life in the company of his wife, Ippolita, and his mother (with whom his relations, throughout his life, were extremely fond), Albisa Gonzaga.

The manuscript was then shown to several of Castiglione’s friends, including Pietro Bembo, because, Castiglione wrote to him in 1518, he was constantly being urged to publish it. Little more was done, however, till 1526, when the news of the death of Elisabetta reached Spain and Castiglione’s memories of Urbino were intensely revived.

In a sense, Castiglione’s whole life was lived for the sake of his book. He spent so many years polishing and pondering on what he had written that the work was very nearly never published at all. How this eventually came to pass he describes in the letter of dedication to Don Michel de Silva: he had entrusted some of the manuscript to the famous Renaissance blue-stocking, Vittoria Colonna, and some people in Naples were threatening to rush into print without his authorization. So in early 1527 he sent the manuscript, with his own careful corrections and instructions for printing, to the Aldine Press in Venice.

Immediately afterwards, in a letter to his steward, Cristoforo Tirabosco, Castiglione described his plans for the first edition. ‘I am writing to Venice to say that one thousand and thirty copies are to be printed, and that I intend to pay half the expenses, because, of this thousand, five hundred are to be mine. The remaining thirty copies will all belong to me, and are to be printed on fine paper, as smooth and beautiful as possible – in fact, the best that can be found in Venice.

In April 1528 The Courtier was published. Castiglione again wrote to Cristoforo to describe how the presentation copies were to be bound and distributed to friends and ‘to the most important personages’. One copy for Castiglione himself was to be printed on vellum ‘with the pages gilded and well pressed, and covered with leather of some rich colour – purple or blue or yellow or green, according as to what you find… and adorned with ornaments of knots and foliage, or panels and compartments of some other description….’^*

In his letter to Don Michel (following his own rule that non-chalance is the mark of a gentleman) Castiglione modestly disclaimed any pretensions to literary achievement: the work is only too full of faults, he suggests, before resigning himself humbly to the judgement of Time. As the care he lavished on its composition and production testified, however, he was enormously proud of The Courtier. And Time ‘accustomed to pronouncing always, on all writings a just sentence of life or death’ has given him a favourable verdict. The Courtier has gone through scores of editions and translations; has exercised a profound influence on European sensibilities; and ranks today as the most representative book of the Renaissance.

The immediate and lasting success of The Courtier is certainly not attributable to its originality of thought. It is largely a series of echoes: of medieval ideals of chivalry, of classical virtues and of contemporary humanist aspirations. Its opening is in strict conformity with the humanist rules of imitation. Cicero, whom Castiglione studied hard as a boy and took for his model (and whose De Officiis was a Renaissance best-seller) supplies the very words for the beginning of the First Book. The Orator begins: ‘For a long time I debated earnestly with myself, Brutus, as to which course would be more difficult or serious – to deny your oft repeated request, or to do what you ask.’^† And The Courtier: ‘I have spent a long time wondering, my dear Alfonso, which of two things was the more difficult for me: either to refuse what you have asked me so often and so insistently, or to do it.’ Hardly a page of The Courtier turns without a bold plagiarism from Plato, Plutarch, Cicero or Livy. Nor, where The Courtier is contemporary, does it add decisively to the commonplace subjects expounded by Castiglione’s contemporaries: the responsibility of Italy’s rulers for the country’s shameful military weakness; the role of women in social and political life; the relative standing of the fine arts; the best type of government; the true nature of perfect love. Admittedly Castiglione did make major contributions to several lively issues of his day and time: to the long and vehement debate, for example, about the need in a divided country for a universal vernacular drawn from Italy’s several regional languages. It is possible, too, to trace the influence of The Courtier on the aesthetic theory of the later Renaissance, and notably on the ideas of artistic grace, decorum and nonchalance expounded by the great art historian, Giorgio Vasari. None the less, even in these spheres, Castiglione’s contributions were not of long-term significance. When The Courtier was finally published, indeed, the world of ideas and institutions which it idealized was, as far as Italy was concerned, and as Castiglione well knew, buried in the past.

But, outside Italy, The Courtier enjoyed for some generations at least a pervasive influence, and not least in Elizabethan England, where the first translation, by Sir Thomas Hoby, appeared (at a time of intense interest in Italian life and literature) in 1561. Even before then, it was influencing upper-class life and manners through books such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, published three years after Castiglione’s work went to press. In 1570, in The Schoolmaster, it was recommended by the influential educationist, Roger Ascham, as a book which, if read with diligence, would benefit a young man more than three years in Italy. The kind of behaviour recommended to the Italian courtiers became the accepted standard for English gentlemen. To Elizabethan literature it channelled Renaissance philosophy and conceits: Ben Jonson uses The Courtier for a scene in Every Man out of his Humour; a poem by Gabriel Harvey justly bases its praise of Sir Philip Sidney on his affinities with Castiglione’s perfect courtier; the neo-Platonism expounded by Bembo in the Fourth Book provides a standard for the fresh endeavours to attain beauty and harmony in literature as well as life; even the witticisms in Shakespeare renew the jokes and puns recommended by Castiglione (and concerning which today’s reader will probably form the same opinion as Lord Chesterfield apropos his own remark that Petrarch deserved his Laura better than his Lauro – ‘and that wretched quibble would be reckoned an excellent piece of Italian wit’).

The truth was that the self-interested endeavour of Castiglione’s contempories at the small Courts of Italy to justify the profession of courtier – to synthesize the idea of the warrior and the scholar, the Christian believer and the classical hero, the self-contained man of virtù and the dutiful servant of the prince – provided an opportune answer, gracefully and fully expressed, to a need felt urgently in the north of Europe as medieval values dissolved. The Courtier was not only a book of courtesy which took an exalted place in the long line of such productions running from the Middle Ages to modern times. (These are discussed in an interesting appendix to R. Pine-Coffin’s translation of the Galateo in Penguin Books.) It was also a political book, justifying the place in society of the courtier successor to the medieval knight, and aiming to establish his role and his status at the new kind of Court that came into being during the Renaissance. In this respect Professor Denys Hay sees Castiglione as an Italian theorist who was ‘particularly adapted to instruct the northern world in the Renaissance attitude to politics’. And The Courtier, he adds, ‘exactly expressed what was most easily assimilated by the northern world in the latter-day Renaissance in Italy. Its dignity and mannered elegance, its respect for both martial accomplishments and literary attainments, its placing of talent at the service of a prince, all expressed Italian civility in a way perfectly attuned to the aristocratic North.’ ^*

During his life Castiglione enjoyed the friendship of men such as Raphael and the respect of rulers such as the Emperor Charles V. Throughout Renaissance Europe, his book became essential reading for the nobility. Both the man and the book have had their enthusiastic admirers ever since; but both have also proved capable of arousing intense suspicion and dislike.

This reaction started very early. Emilia Pia – one of the most sharply drawn characters of The Courtier – caused a great scandal in counter-Reformation Rome, in 1528, when she died, it was whispered, without the sacraments of the Church and discussing passages from The Courtier with Count Lodovico instead of saying her prayers. For several reasons – its occasionally pagan attitudes to life, its anti-clerical sentiments, its suspect orthodoxy in this passage and that – though the book remained immensely popular in Italy during the sixteenth century, it incurred the censure of the ecclesiastical authorities. When Castiglione’s son, Camillo, was preparing a new edition in 1576, he was warned that the work was already on the Index in Spain and that corrections would have to be made. This led to an expurgated edition of The Courtier (in which references to Fortune were removed and jokes about priests revised) in 1584, after a censored edition had already appeared in Spanish. In 1590, with an exception made for the expurgated edition, The Courtier found its way on to the Index. Early in the eighteenth century, the Inquisitors in Padua had to be consulted when a new edition was being prepared. And it was not until 1894, records Castiglione’s English biographer, Julia Cartwright, that a correct version of Castiglione’s work from the original manuscript was finally edited by Professor Cian.

Even then, in a good English version published in New York in 1903, the translator, Leonard Opdycke, felt compelled to bowdlerize, omitting one long passage and refraining from rendering the word ignuda in English.

Today the book still shocks, not of course because of its mild indelicacies but because of contemporary impatience with the fundamental values which it enshrines. It is hard, indeed, to think of any work more opposed to the spirit of the modern age. At an obvious level, its preoccupation with social distinction and outward forms of polite behaviour creates an intense atmosphere of artificiality and insincerity. (When James Joyce first read The Courtier his brother told him he had become more polite but less sincere.)

The great virtues it proposes for a gentleman are discretion and decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness.^* As Luigi Barzini comments in his satirical book on the modern Italian, quoting Castiglione as the model, the ‘show’ is all.^* The courtier must watch his dress, his speech, his gestures chiefly because of their effect on his reputation. If he fights well in battle, he must make sure his commander sees him do so. He has to consider earnestly whether it is correct behaviour to take part in sport with the common people or even to perform in front of them. In love, he must conquer where he can; whereas the women he most admires are those who regard dishonour as a fate worse than death. And then, even when the discussions in The Courtier take a more serious turn, and shallow values are repudiated, notably in the Fourth Book with Bembo’s melding of Platonic love with Christian theology, the language and sentiments seem inflated and occasionally grotesque.

The combination of intense and selfish individualism with appalling snobbery naturally repels the modern reader, and also the modern historian, who is suspicious of the assumption that history consists in the exploits of the ruling class and the favoured few, and who is anxious to know less about the way gifted amateurs danced at Court and more about the mortality rate in the villages down the hill.

More seriously, The Courtier offends modern susceptibilities because it is a flight from the truth. Throughout the book, to be sure, there runs a vein of natural melancholy, partly attributable to Castiglione’s constant awareness of the fickleness of Fortune and the inevitability of death. But by its very nature it is a book which turns aside from the realities of life to its idealization. War – which Castiglione experienced and disliked – is glorified; the criminal behaviour of some of the gay companions he knew at Urbino is glossed over or ignored; the crudeness of Court life in sixteenth century Italy – an earlier version of The Courtier was far nearer in this respect to the historical reality – is refined away. The political discussions – using the language and concepts of the ancient world with regard to the rule of the one, the best or the many – are totally unrealistic. When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, in all innocence he shocked the world for several hundred years because he set out to ‘represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined’. Machiavelli had the humanists very much in mind when he wrote this – ‘Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist….’ And the cap fits Castiglione, who purported to be teaching people how to behave and recording life as it was, and not writing a Utopia. Machiavelli, indeed, has come into his own in the modern world which understands and appreciates the unabashed language of power; whereas Castiglione’s pretences – in the context of normal social behaviour or high politics – are remote.

As a handbook for gentlemen, The Courtier conceals the most shameless opportunism under the cloak of a tiresome refinement; as a memoir of life at the Court of Urbino, it touches up history to the point of distortion. None the less, even though many of Castiglione’s values are questionable (though for their time they shone out in an uncouth world), The Courtier cannot be so easily dismissed. It is historically significant and instructive. It is, at the very least, an entertaining book. Most of all, it is a work of substantial literary achievement.

The historical value of The Courtier, apart from its influence outside Italy, is twofold. It is first and foremost a compendium of Renaissance thought. Not only does it provide the best illustration of the Renaissance preoccupation with the uomo universale, the many-sided man; it also touches, however briefly, on all the themes, great and trivial, pursued in contemporary Italian literature and thought, from the importance of study and imitation of the classical world to the role of Fortune in human affairs. Moreover, it sets before us the ideals of the Renaissance; and in this way it corrects and complements the picture of how Renaissance men did behave – as drawn, say, by Cellini – with an account of the moral and aesthetic standards to which many of them at least aspired.

As for its entertainment value, the reader fresh to The Courtier can judge for himself. The discussions concerning what constitutes the perfect courtier, taking place during four evenings in spring between an intimate circle of cultivated women, men of the world, scholars and buffoons, lead to the exploration of topics which in varying degrees still retain their interest and might even spark off conversation in a senior common room or a television studio: the importance of correct speech; the essential prerequisites for a gentleman, including good breeding and good looks; the superiority of the skilled amateur to the tedious professional; the kinds of witticism and practical joke that are really funny; the qualities men look for in their women; the duties of a good government; and, finally, the true nature of love.

The style, very Latin and sonorous, skilfully catches the tone of the conversations and the mood of the speakers: simple and direct in argumentative dialogue, sometimes like comedians’ cross-talk; matter of fact, cutting and even coarse in the interjections, involved and elevated in the occasional rhetorical flights. The pace is generally brisk and confident (though now and then Castiglione rides a hobby-horse of his own too long) and the transitions from one subject or mood to another are smooth and natural. When the talk grows too pompous, Castiglione hurriedly dispels the gloom with a dramatic interruption or a joke. One of his most attractive aspects, indeed, is his obvious fear of boring anyone or seeming too serious. Gaiety keeps breaking in – and sometimes with disconcerting bathos, as at the very end of The Courtier when, after Bembo’s invocation to Love has struck the whole company dumb, Emilia Pia brings them abruptly back to earth with a matter of fact remark about the next day’s debate. This, incidentally, throws fresh light on her character which, like those of the others taking part in the conversations, is portrayed with notable economy and effect. Gaspare Pallavicino, Count Lodovico da Canossa, Pietro Bembo, Elisabetta Gonzaga, Emilia Pia are clearly revealed through their words as misogynist, nobleman, scholar, duchess and mordant feminine wit, respectively, but also as living persons, with whose complex attitudes and temperament the reader becomes increasingly familiar and whom he even learns to like.

Castiglione’s sensitivity to character and atmosphere and his ability to recreate them convincingly, his delicate psychological perception and his powers of narrative and description betray, in fact, the novelist and the poet. The Courtier may be approached as a romance rather than as an historical record. The story is in the past, almost in the golden days of Italy before the full force of the foreign invasions made themselves felt. Castiglione over the years changed what had been a memoir into a fiction. The first shrewd device was to pretend that he himself had been away in England when the conversations were held: ‘as our Castiglione writes from England’, remarks Ottaviano in the Fourth Book, ‘promising to tell us much more on his return…’. The Palace of Urbino is transformed from the local habitation of a petty Italian ruler into a model for all time. First, it is described, with a touch of realism, as being in a city ‘surrounded by hills which are perhaps not as agreeable as those found in many other places’; when the conversations end, the abstract beauty described by Bembo is complemented by a final look at the beauty of Urbino itself, where dawn has just come to the east, a delicate breeze is blowing, and the birds are breaking into song. It was beyond his power, Castiglione protested, to do a portrait of Urbino as ambitiously as Raphael or Michelangelo, since he knew only how to draw the outlines and could not adorn the truth with pretty colours or use perspective to deceive the eye. And yet there are passages in The Courtier which do nothing so much as suggest a scene by a great painter of the High Renaissance, as when, on the first evening, as Cesare Gonzaga begins to speak there was heard ‘the noise of a great tramping of feet, and, as everyone turned to see what was happening, there appeared at the door a blaze of torches preceding the arrival of the Prefect, with a large and noble escort…’

By the time The Courtier was finished it had become, too, a work of piety towards not only Duke Guidobaldo but also all the other ‘outstanding men and women who used to frequent the Court of Urbino’. For, as Castiglione sighed, as he read his manuscript, ‘I recalled that most of those introduced in the conversations were already dead….’ And so they too were idealized in this glowing account of the last days of Italian chivalry: Castiglione’s remembrance of things past.

I lack, therefore, the excuse for translating The Courtier given by Hoby, namely, that he had waited in vain for this to be done by someone ‘of a more perfect understanding in the tongue, and better practised in the matter of the booke…’. And whether an attempt to put The Courtier into fairly informal but decorous modern English, aiming above all at readability, is justified, is for the reader to decide. The Italian edition I have used is that of Vittorio Cian (Florence, 1947) which is also the basis for many of my brief notes on the text and the characters. I have also consulted the text of The Courtier in Volume 27 of La Letteratura Italiana (ed. Carlo Cordié, Ricciadi; Milan, Naples). A stimulating ‘reassessment’ of The Courtier has been written by J. R. Woodhouse (Edinburgh University Press, 1978).

I must record my thanks to Sir Michael Quinlan and David Richardson for their helpful suggestions, and to Professor Sir John Hale for his encouragement and help. Acknowledgement is due also to John Murray for permission to quote from Baldassare Castiglione by Julia Cartwright, and to Weidenfeld & Nicolson for permission to quote from Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, edited by J. G. Peristiany.

In revising the translation for the 1976 reprint, I consulted the late Bruce Penman on several points, and must acknowledge gratefully the benefit of his sensitive and scholarly advice.