The Book of the Courtier Read online

  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 powe
r, 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.

  G.B.

  Sutton, Surrey

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE best-known version of The Courtier in English is still the vigorous Elizabethan translation by Hoby, who recommended him to mature men as ‘a pathway to the beholding and musing of the mind… To young Gentlemen, an encouraging to garnish their minds with morall vertues, and their bodies with comely exercises … To Ladies and Gentlewomen, a mirrour to decke and trimme themselves with vertuous conditions, comely behaviours and honest entertainment toward all men: And to the all in generall, a storehouse of most necessarie implements for the conversation, use, and trayning up of mans life with Courtly demeaners.’ A new translation, by Robert Samber, appeared in 1724. Modern translations have included Leonard Opdycke’s (referred to in this Introduction), in a usefully illustrated edition, and Charles S. Singleton’s (New York, 1959).

  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.

  FURTHER READING

  Baldassare Castiglione, the Perfect Courtier, His Life and Letters, Julia Cartwright, 2 vols., London 1908.

  Courts and Camps of the Italian Renaissance… the Life and Times of Count Baldassare Castiglione, Christopher Hare, London 1908.

  Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Wayne A. Rebhorn, Detroit 1978.

  Baldesar Castiglione: a Reassessment of the Courtier, J. R. Woodhouse, Edinburgh 1978.

  Castiglione: the Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand, Yale 1983.

  The Fortunes of the Courtier: the European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Peter Burke, Cambridge 1995.

  See also for an extensive Nota Bio-Bibliografica: Opere di Baldassare, Giovanni Della Casa, Benevenuto Cellini, ed. Carlo Cordié, Milan/Naples 1960; also conveniently accessible in the paperback edition of the text edited by Carlo Cordié, edizione Oscar classici 1991.

  CHARACTERS IN THE COURTIER

  THE conversations take place on four successive evenings during March 1507 in the Palace of Urbino. The previous autumn, the warrior Pope, Julius II, had visited the city on his way to attack Bologna in his campaign to reassert his authority over the papal dominions. On this expedition he was accompanied by Guidobaldo, who, however, was bedridden most of the time and played no part in the conquest. On his way back to Rome the Pope again stayed at Urbino, leaving on 5 March. As Castiglione records, several members of the papal entourage remained at Urbino for a while longer; and this was the occasion he chose for the conversations, when most of the people mentioned in The Courtier were, in fact, guests at the Palace.

  ACCOLTI, BERNARDO (1458–1535), better known by his nickname or nom de guerre of Unico Aretino, was the son of a well-known lawyer and historian, Benedetto Accolti. He grew up in Florence and then embarked on the fashionable career of poet and extemporizer, visiting the Courts of Milan, Urbino, Mantua, Naples, Ferrara and notably Rome, where he was patronized by both Julius II and Leo X. His reputation in these noble circles was considerable, and he came to suppose himself, wrongly, as being on the same level as Petrarch and Dante.

  ARIOSTO, ALFONSO (1475–1525), a close friend of Castiglione and Bembo, and the man to whom The Courtier was originally dedicated. The son of a Bonifacio d’Aldobrandini, and a distant relation of the great poet, Ludovico Ariosto, he entered the service of the Este family at Ferrara early in life, and he may first have met Castiglione in Milan. He read the manuscript of The Courtier for Castiglione, and their friendship survived his pro-French proclivities.

  BARLETTA is mentioned twice in The Courtier, where he is described as a fine musician and dancer. In a letter written by Castiglione in 1507 (to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este) Barletta was said to be the Duchess Elisabetta’s favourite musician.

  BEMBO, PIETRO (1470–1547) came from an upper-class Venetian family, lived as a child in Florence, and acquired great facility in Latin, Greek and Tuscan. From 1506 for six years he was a member of the Court circle at Urbino, where he spent his time on linguistic studies and the enjoyment of a varied social life. In 1512 he moved to Rome, where Pope Leo X made him a papal secretary. Subsequently he retired to Padua. During these years he became famous as a literary pundit – insisting on Florentine as the norm and Petrarch and Boccaccio as the models of good writing – a poet, and a courtier, his most notable works being the Asolani (1505) and the Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525). Bembo was made a cardinal in 1539, and then spent most of his remaining years in Rome.

  CALMETA (1460–1508) was the Court or pen-name of Vincenzo Collo, an indifferent poet with an ingratiating manner who found favour at the Courts of Milan, Mantua and, sometime after 1490, Urbino.

  CANOSSA, LODOVICO (1476–1532) came of a noble Veronese family, and was a friend and relation of Castiglione. He grew up in Mantua, spent some time – from 1496 – at the Court of Urbino, and served as a diplomat in the service of the papacy and then of King Francis I, through whose influence he was made Bishop of Bayeux in 1516. He was a man of great culture and ability, a friend of Erasmus and Raphael.

  CEVA (FEBUS AND GHIRARDINO) were two brothers of a noble Piedmontese family who during the early years of the sixteenth century served as mercenaries indiscriminately for either the French or the Emperor. They were notorious for their violence and brutality.

  DOVIZI, BERNARDO (1470–1520) was better known as Bibbiena. He was in the service of the Medici family and in particular attached himself to Giovanni de’ Medici who, after his election as Pope Leo X, made him Cardinal of S. Maria in Portico. His influence on Leo was so considerable that he became known as ‘the other Pope’. He was a close friend of Castiglione and a patron of Raphael. His comedy La Calandria was first presented at U
rbino, before the Duchess Elisabetta, with a prologue written by Castiglione.

  ETTORE, ROMANO, was (probably) the Giovenale Ettore who distinguished himself as one of the Italian champions in the famous combat between thirteen Italians and thirteen Frenchmen at Barletta in 1503, when the French were routed. He appears in The Courtier in the service of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Prefect of Rome and future Duke of Urbino.

  FLORIDO, ORAZIO came from Fano, served as chancellor to Duke Guidobaldo and stayed on in the service of Francesco Maria, to whom he remained commendably loyal after he had been driven from Urbino.

  FREGOSO, COSTANZA was received at Urbino after her family had been exiled from Genoa, since her mother, Gentile, was the natural daughter of Duke Federico. She married Count Marcantonio Landi of Piacenza.

  FREGOSO, FEDERICO, a distinguished courtier and diplomat, the brother of Costanza and Ottaviano, was an intimate friend of many contemporary men of letters, such as Bembo and Castiglione himself, a student of philology, and an expert in oriental languages. He was an active politician (helping and then opposing his brother, Ottaviano, when the latter ruled Genoa) and a soldier. He was given the red hat by Pope Paul III in 1539, partly through the recommendation of Bembo.