The Book of the Courtier

"Absolutely, and it’s still read. It’s an interesting book. Castiglione was a courtier. He was a Mantuan nobleman who ended up at the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino. Guidobaldo was sick all the time and spent much time as an invalid. He was also impotent and unable to have an heir. Much of the court was actually run by Elisabetta Gonzaga, the Duchess of Urbino who was distantly related to Castiglione. They had this close, purely platonic—and there’s no doubt that it was purely platonic—relationship. But Castigilone is, I think, addressing the same issues that Machiavelli and Guicciardini are addressing, but in a different way. The Book of the Courtier is not just a courtesy book. The world is full of courtesy books—like Della Casa’s Galateo which I edited and translated. This is really a humanist neoplatonic study of the perfectibility of men and women and how, in a time of crisis and disillusion, of impotent rulers (literally or figuratively) when the world has turned upside down, where you live through words rather than action, and where the court is ruled by two women—the Duchess and Emilia Pia—you need other things in order to ask yourself what really matters. And, as far as Castiglione is concerned, what matters is culture, understanding, and belief in higher things. He is very much like Eliot in The Waste Land . He is collecting shards against our ruin. You have to keep culture alive. Italy is oppressed, it is ruled by barbarians, by savage foreigners, by brutal oppressors. But Italian culture is still alive—as long as people read the books, know classical literature, read the Greek and Roman authors, are able to practise the arts of human intercourse. What he’s really talking about in this book is that it’s through words and ideas and books that civilisation is sustained. That’s why these things become important and that’s why it’s in the frame of a courtesy book—four nights of discussion in which all the interlocutors are all very different characters but all of them are putting forward the view of what really makes a civilised human being and what civilisation is. The wonderful thing, of course, is that he brings women into it. There’s a whole book on women and women are in charge of the discussions. It’s a very modern book, from that point of view and a very civilised one. His response to the situation of Italy is not to out-brutalise the brutality of the barbarians, not to collaborate, but to make sure that the culture is maintained. Civilisation is being kept—whether secretly or openly—so that when a better world emerges, when the impotence has gone and the light shines during the day, you can bring these things back and civilisation and culture will again rule. Everything. The book is about what it is to be a cultivated human being. What is it to be a human being? What separates us from the barbarians? He goes back to his classical sources—he was classically trained like all of these gentlemen—but it’s also in conversation. You could know everything but unless you’re able to externalise that experience, what meaning does it have? And art, you could have the most beautiful visions of the universe but unless you can reproduce what the eye sees and take the two dimensional plane and turn it into a three dimensional image, what is the point? You could have all the principles of the world but you need to exhibit those principles in the company of others. That’s why there is so much emphasis on interaction in Il Cortegiano. Exactly right. He really comes down to the fundamental statement of what the Renaissance man was: it’s not just being able to do all of these things—from having wonderful conversation that is both witty and profound, being able to dance, being able to provide advice to a prince—but on top of that, to do it in a way that does not intimidate others. You become part of a community. He called it ‘sprezzatura’ which is untranslatable. Sometimes it’s translated as ‘nonchalance’ which is not right. It’s wearing your learning, your sophistication, your achievements lightly so that you do not make others feel uncomfortable and so that you don’t stand out. You realise that you are part of humanity and not some miraculous figure beyond the experience of others. It is. It’s wonderfully readable. The jokes—there are all kinds of jokes—aren’t funny. After 500 years, the jokes cease to maintain their humour. But the characters are beautifully drawn. You have the misogynist, you’ve got the person who wants to be liked too much, you’ve got the person who wants to turn everything into a kind of joke. All of these personalities are so beautifully drawn that, although it’s a dialogue, it’s almost drama."