to be like them, laboring to imitate them through exemplarity in good Renaissance fashion. And in our admiration we must trust that we can be taught by them, likewise disclosing in good Renaissance fashion our faith in our own educability and consequently our sustaining belief, in Erasmus’s terms, that humans are “made,” not “born,” at least when it comes to the belief that we are made, and not born, to make or do certain defined things in life.89 It is equally essential that some of these discourses frame the work or knowledge of the authors themselves as something that is to be admired or wondered at within the text itself. For these remarkable practitioners who have turned to authorship, we are led to believe, have the capacity to edify us, so that by following them we, too, can learn, succeed, and be admired, even if, as I shall argue in the following section, some of the practitioners who turned to authorship lay claim to a position that is decidedly at odds with what the discourse in practice actually does. Put differently, the writers of these discourses may indicate that the art they teach as a form of knowledge requisite for a profession is learnable through the diligent application of rules, thereby rendering the art accessible to professional aspirants as they disclose its specialized knowledge. But in truth they surreptitiously reveal that the art itself can only be applied with real success by a precious few who somehow possess the “right stuff,” thereby effectively closing off access to the profession in question for many while rendering the practitioner authors themselves all the more exquisitely exceptional in light of their obvious, yet still mystifying, achievements as professionals who have so brilliantly mastered their art as a form of useful specialized knowledge that benefits the community at large.
Consider in this context Castiglione’s Il cortegiano as a discourse that brilliantly deploys a strategy of simultaneously disclosing and withholding information necessary to succeed in applying a specific art—in this particular case a practical, as opposed to productive, art.90 First of all, we should bear in mind that Castiglione (fig. 14) in Il cortegiano characterizes courtiership as indeed an art, with it possessing all the characteristics of a techne in classical antiquity. The knowledge associated with it, Castiglione underscores, is determinate, it has an end, it is teachable, it allows us to move from the particular to the universal, it has rules (even if Castiglione is quick to point out that he is not writing a typical catechistic-style, rule-bound manual),91 it is communicable, it is reliable (or so he contends, even if it is certainly far more stochastic than exact in nature), it is performative (one must put courtiership into action so that it can be verified as an art), and it is supremely rational. It is not, for instance, the product of a knack but of calculated reasoning and practice honed through extensive training. Or so we are told with some insistence.
FIGURE 14. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520), Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515. Louvre, Paris. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.
Moreover, Castiglione would have us believe, at least at first glance, that we are made into courtiers, not born into being them. Hence the “grazia” (grace) that is required of all of us to be a courtier—the “grazia” that not only renders us full of grace in our comportment but also wins the gratitude of the prince as we ingratiate ourselves to him as dutiful and delightful courtiers—is not the sort of grace that is divinely bestowed upon someone from on high, any more than it can be conceived in Alexander Pope’s terms as a sort of transcendent “grace beyond the reach of art.”92 Quite the contrary, Castiglione is concerned with a grace that is well within our reach if we just put our minds to it: it is secular in nature, learnable, practical, purposive, and decidedly explicable. It is also a grace that can be readily acquired through rules—or, above all, by heeding one all-encompassing, universalizing rule: we must avoid “affettazione” (affectation) and practice in everything we say and do a certain “sprezzatura” (a crucial term that for the moment we shall leave undefined). There are, to be sure, other rules to courtiership that we learn along the way, most of them fairly obvious to modern habits of etiquette: don’t throw food around the dining table, for instance, and don’t be a bore, braggart, or brute. But the general rule that we must act with sprezzatura in all that we say and do is undeniably the most important one within Il cortegiano. Without sprezzatura we will not have the grace needed to “season” all that we say and do (“che mettiate per un condimento d’ogni cosa, senza il quale tutte le altre proprietà e bone condicioni sian di poco valore” [that you require this in everything as that seasoning without which all the other properties and good qualities will be of little worth], 1.24). And without grace we will fail in our ultimate professional goal, which is to please the prince so that we may gain access to him, counsel him regarding what course to take from day to day as a ruler, and thus strategically work our way into having influence over the course of events. We need to follow this rule of sprezzatura, then, not only for our own benefit (the courtier, realistically, is always looking out for his own hide as he strives to advance in a profession and seek honor and recognition in the process) but also for all those people who have anything at all to do with the princedom in general and its harmonious workings in a truly complex and dangerous world fraught with tensions and widespread conflicts (the courtier, not unlike cheerful Miss America competitors, is idealistically supposed to be interested in such niceties as “universal peace”).
Now the key term “sprezzatura” coined by Castiglione and drawn from the verb “disprezzare” (to scorn, diminish, disdain, reduce in value) suggests that at any given moment, if you have difficulty locating the exact mean between extremes as you seek that perfect Horatian aurea mediocritas (golden mean) in all that you say or do, you should always offer up less rather than more, particularly since the mind for Castiglione is quick to draw a complete picture from the part. What is more, this overarching rule holds true about a whole range of matters. It dictates how much time one should dedicate to fixing up one’s hair: don’t spend too much time on it lest you appear a fop. It suggests how one should speak with friends at court and in public ceremonies: understatement, the privileged strategy of the ironist, is preferred to overstatement, it would seem, so one should theoretically employ litotes rather than hyperbole as a figure of speech and thought. It dictates how much specialized knowledge one needs to possess on any given subject: one should know just enough to convince everyone that you do indeed know what you calculatingly hint at knowing even if you lack, and are expected to lack, any real studied expertise in the subject so that your measured, decorous performance masks at best an amateurish ability and at worst a true underlying incompetence. And, to be sure, it even identifies how physically tall the ideal courtier should be: a bit shorter is always better than a bit taller if it is tough locating the perfect mean in a given culture where you happen to be seeking employment as a courtier (1.20).
At the same time, the term “sprezzatura” by its very nature suggests something about the ideal emotional state of the courtier, if we can be allowed for the purposes of this argument to gauge his temperament in terms of literally temperature. For the ideal mean between someone who is hotheaded (someone, that is, who is easily inflamed and overemotional and perhaps just a bit too effusively sympathetic) and someone who is cold-hearted (someone who is unemotional, indifferent, excessively detached, insensitive, or unsympathetic) is presumably someone who is “warm” or “warm-hearted.” And yet, because it is so very difficult in practice to know exactly what constitutes “warm” for everyone we meet as we interact with a variety of people in a wide array of social circumstances on a daily basis and are forced to behave differently according to the ravages of occasion in different settings and contexts, we should shave off a bit—scorn and thus diminish the potential excess—and act just a bit colder if we are ever in doubt as to what constitutes the perfect degree of emotional “warmth” warranted in our behavior in all that we say and do. Or, rather, to adopt the language of the 1950s still current today, we should “be cool.” But then again, we must be careful never to be too cool. If you’re “too cool for words,” to be prosaic about the matter yet again,
