prove to be a good, much less perfect, courtier.
Ideally, then, the courtier who has mastered the “virtue” of sprezzatura can espouse convincingly the specialized knowledge associated with a whole host of arts, even if he knows only a smattering of any one of them and is consequently clueless as to the real rational, communicable, determinate, and reliable knowledge underpinning the very arts he pretends to know so well as he seeks to impress everyone—and in particular the prince—with his grace. Anyone who stands in admiration of the courtier’s ability, who thinks the courtier as a practiced dilettante can in fact do or know all these things with some credible mastery (dance, sing, paint, and the like), is clearly not part of the professional club. That person as an onlooker has sadly mistaken the appearance for the reality and has thus failed to realize that the courtier’s performance is completely studied and mannered, even as it comes off as supremely natural and the product of real, rather than feigned, expertise. The truly accomplished courtier has worked hard, with all due “labor, industry, and care [fatica, industria e studio]” (1.24), at appearing not to work at all, in convincing people that the part can stand in for the whole. For there is labor involved in dancing and singing, as well as even just standing about the court with a seemingly natural pose in elegant choice apparel, yet that labor is artfully—as in cleverly—hidden.
In professional terms, then, sprezzatura functions within the court as a “signaling device.” All the courtiers looking on with the requisite sprezzatura know that the person is merely acting, that it is a performance that dupes others, and that the courtier, at best sometimes an informed amateur, is clueless about the specific arts in question in a manner that would render him a master in so many things he only hints at being able to do with some reliable and credible expertise. What the exemplary courtiers collectively observing the performance in the know discreetly admire, however, is instead the illusion created, the courtier’s calculated ability to act with a like-minded sleight of hand. They astutely and instinctively grasp the trick of the trade as an essential part of their own collective profession of courtiership and commend him for what the Greeks would have no doubt called his metis. In this respect, they admire his professionalism and they recognize him as one of their own. He’s “in.” He’s an “insider.” He’s one of “them.” He is part of the select closed circle of the group with its finely tuned strategies for success. And he is decidedly secretive about it. Or, rather, what he conveys is an “open secret” whose core truth—that the courtier doesn’t know as an expert does the various arts in question as he seeks to apply them in his clever, studied performances—is available only to those initiated into the specialized form of knowledge underpinning the profession of courtiership and, needless to say, to all those courtiers who apply that specific art in practice with seemingly perfect aplomb.93
But this only begs the question. How exactly can one really go about acquiring sprezzatura in order to become part of this “new profession,” as it is so defined in the first, but then eventually discarded, preface to Il cortegiano,94 so that one’s mastery of sprezzatura in all that one says or does can indeed function as a substitute for a mastery over the forms of specialized knowledge of a host of other arts that the courtier feigns to know in some measure and that are the province of expertise of other professionals, from musicians to painters to dancers, who likewise periodically sought to attach themselves to courts? We know, to be sure, that we must work hard in order to appear to do so many different things without any work whatsoever—something that would no doubt have pleased the cultural elite in classical antiquity since the very concept of work often carried with it the lingering odor of vulgarity. But what exactly are we supposed to do by way of preparatory “labor, industry, and care” so that we may acquire sprezzatura and thus perform in a manner that conceals all work and, at the same time, convinces people that we possess the requisite knowledge associated with those different things that we appear to be, but indeed are not, masterful practitioners of when all is said and done? How, moreover, do we practice acquiring sprezzatura, since there is no school of courtiership that can show us how to develop and refine this strategy of locating the perfect mean in all that we say and do? Or at least there is no formal institutionalized adult school that can train us in these matters, since the humanist classroom did to varying degrees of success inculcate poetry, grammar, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy and was ideally intended to prepare the cultural elite for success in leadership but certainly had no specific professional bent to it and, of course, served to educate boys rather than full-grown men. Nor is there a formalized guild system—a system, that is to say, of “artes”—whose primary function was to serve as “a device designed to organize and order society” but through which one could also be indoctrinated into the practices of the profession of courtiership and the art underpinning the very mysteries of that particular misterium.95 Nor, directly related to this, is there an extensive workshop structure that would-be courtiers can take advantage of as visual artists can when they link themselves to a master, such as Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, or Raphael, and are apprenticed to him until such time as they have thoroughly absorbed all the lessons of the art and can then ideally emerge at the end, after years of diligent practice and hard “labor, industry, and care,” as an adult master on their own within the chosen profession, if indeed they choose to pay the dues and enter and belong to the guild as a recognized master.96 Nor, of course, does the university system prepare anyone for courtiership.
Surely, moreover, it is not enough to borrow from accepted poetic practice, as Castiglione indirectly insists we should, and tell would-be courtiers to rely simply on their “bon giudicio” (good judgment), go out into the world, choose the best qualities of courtiers who exhibit grace, and then, after deftly mixing all those admirable qualities together in one’s own behavior, somehow, magically, become a figure of grace for others to imitate, so that the process of inculcation productively repeats itself in an endless, regenerative feedback loop.97 For how do we acquire good judgment in the first place unless we are born with it? Castiglione never tells us how to acquire this requisite ur-knowledge of good judgment, which indeed remains something of a puzzle in a book that sets out to provide an underlying rational basis to account for success in all sorts of behaviors and skills related to this “new profession” of courtiership. Worse, how do we put into practice the process of imitation itself? Surely it is one thing for a poet to sit in a room as the laureate Francesco Petrarca did and scribble away with ponderous classical models in mind, then cross out some of his writings that did not satisfy him, then rewrite them, then return to them hours, days, or years later and revise it all over yet again with increased critical detachment until it is just right, so that the power of the classical allusion underpinning the writing and lending it authority and gravitas is not too obtrusive and has been thoroughly absorbed into a signature style after much “labor, industry, and care.”98 But it is really quite a different matter altogether, for a host of practical reasons, for an eager aspirant to try to adopt the same strategy of poetic imitation and continuous revision as he seeks to become a courtier with the requisite grace that will win him the desired favor of the prince. For, unlike being a poet, being a courtier means you are involved in a constantly interactive, often spontaneous, improvisation-based, and oratory-bound profession. And that means you are consequently engaged in an essentially theatrical, relational, and conversational activity that you just cannot simply put into practice in solitude or revise in private through an act of calculated withdrawal and reflection.99 At any given time, you—as a dutiful functionary whose job is to serve—stand on the stage before others and you must act, come what may. You are out there, vulnerable and visible. And when you are called upon to talk or act, which for Castiglione a courtier is constantly called upon to do on a daily basis, and if, alas, you happen to fail at talking or acting properly at any given moment, you potentially fail in a shame culture in which, we can readily glean from Il cortegiano itself, a variety of people took great pleasure in seizing upon the slightest blemish of rivals to discredit them. Being a courtier, in sum, was extremely risky business in a culture so thoroughly steeped in the widespread trafficking of gossip.100
Now, at first glance it would seem that if Castiglione fails to tell us how to exert all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care,” much less show us how to do so, it would be because the
