as a rule but only as a rule. That is to say, it would appear that Castiglione cannot provide us with clear-cut mechanisms for learning sprezzatura and thus for systematically acquiring grace. He can name what we need: we need to act and be full of grace and possess good judgment. He can shrewdly, and with some performative nonchalance of his own, invent words to name what we need to do: we need to act, as he suavely puts it through an interlocutor in a casual, offhand manner, with sprezzatura. He can draw on standard rhetorical and poetic practice to suggest how we acquire grace: we need to be like a bee—Seneca’s bee, Petrarca’s bee, any fine, roaming, clever, industrious bee101—gathering the best nectar of courtiership from the choice flowers of the finest courtiers whom we can ever hope to meet and then busily mix all that precious courtly nectar together to come up with our own exemplary signature style of graceful comportment. Castiglione can also rely on classical rhetoric—particularly Cicero’s De oratore, which is the most obvious classical model underlying Il cortegiano—to articulate an overall strategy for success: we need to be persuasive in all that we say and do by choosing our words carefully, by being apt, by understanding the role of wit, by learning all the figures of speech and thought, and the like. Castiglione may even presume that the studia humanitatis, with its focus on grammar, poetry, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history, will inculcate good judgment and grace, although there is some question that it ever achieved such a goal, much less aimed at inculcating it. Finally, Castiglione can show us what the finished product of all that preparatory “labor, industry, and care” might well look like by nostalgically presenting a group portrait of accomplished courtiers interacting in a conversational mode in Urbino and by assuming that the examples presented will adequately instruct us all on how to become accomplished courtiers. But Castiglione cannot really systematically teach us how to go about acquiring this grace and sprezzatura, much less go about learning how to possess good judgment, through preparatory “labor, industry, and care.” Or at least, more important, he doesn’t do so.
Nor, for that matter, does Castiglione point to some other edifying book that he wrote that would teach us about all the preparatory work we need to do in order to succeed in the profession of courtiership, some sort of companion volume that lays it all out practically and methodically as a basic training manual for professional success and the art underpinning it. Nor does Castiglione tell us what informative books we should read to become at least moderately adept in a host of productive or practical arts that we may need to be versed in as courtiers, or tell us where and how we may hope to get the requisite preparatory training in those arts, so that we can in fact apply ourselves with “labor, industry, and care” to any particular task at hand that is required of us when the occasion arises for us to do so in this “new profession” of the courtier. If Cicero, for instance, the classical author whose works most obviously influenced the shape of Il cortegiano, does not furnish us with all the rules of what it means to be an orator in his “surprising” and “innovative” De oratore (although he does indeed provide us with so many of those rules, particularly in the second and third books), we can at least look to one or two of his other rhetorical treatises—his (youthful, by his own admission) De inventione (On Invention), for instance.102 Some of Cicero’s books, including the influential first-century BCE textbook Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was taken by some to be genuinely Ciceronian in Castiglione’s time and was typically paired with De inventione in printed editions, do indeed rather meticulously and systematically provide us with some of the ins and outs of rhetoric, so that we can practice our oratorical skills and learn how to become accomplished public speakers through dutiful preparation in the process of consulting and working through these more technical, prescriptive, manual-structured books.103 But nothing of the sort exists in Castiglione’s dialogue, which, far from being catechistic, instead leaves us high and dry, with no formal method of practical training to adopt and methodically follow. In sum, Il cortegiano tells us that we must work at being a courtier, but it does not systematically show us at all how to work at it.
In this sense Il cortegiano functions as a discourse that appears to be open as it purports to tell us what we need to do to succeed in learning a specific art as a form of specialized knowledge but is indeed secretive and mystifying in providing us with the real, viable means for success in the profession of courtiership. Read this book and you are edified about what it means to be an exemplary courtier but not so much about how to actually become such a courtier by acquiring the art underpinning the profession through careful preparation and training. The artfulness of Il cortegiano, in the sense of its strategic cleverness as cunning intelligence (metis), is to make people reading it believe from the outset that there is in fact an art underpinning the profession of courtiership—that courtiership possesses a distinct techne in the classical sense of the term as a rational, communicable, rule-bound, and reliable form of highly specialized, determinate knowledge that one can learn through some sort of training, as Cicero would seek to offer us, for instance, in his likewise dialogue-structured De oratore. But in truth, Castiglione does not systematically teach us how to acquire that specialized knowledge, and he does not tell us how to acquire the requisite training to develop into a masterful courtier. Or rather, to frame the matter slightly differently, Castiglione’s book overtly says that grace can be acquired, but then Castiglione’s contention conveyed as an assertion turns out to be, at least upon closer examination, somewhat at odds with what the book actually does insofar as Castiglione never teaches us really how to acquire grace through preparatory training, either by instructing us systematically within his book itself how to do so, by pointing to some other book he wrote that will show us how to do so, or by pointing to other people’s books that will authoritatively show us how to do so. We may therefore initially be willing, at least at first glance, to concede that grace—as Castiglione envisions it—is not beyond the reach of art, that it is indeed something that can be acquired through “labor, industry, and care,” and that it is therefore something that is not enigmatic or transcendent in form, a sort of ineffable nescio quid. But upon further reflection as we progress through the book we may also legitimately wonder, since we are never actually indoctrinated into a practical method of training to acquire grace, if people are not in fact “born” rather than “made” to be courtiers—if, in the end, contrary to what we were led to expect from the outset of Il cortegiano, there is simply a mysterious quality bestowed on people that allows one person to succeed in the profession of courtiership while another is condemned to fail at it no matter how hard that individual person works at it with “industry, labor, and care” and no matter how much that person seems, for all intents and purposes, to possess a natural inclination to succeed as a courtier and thus seems to have precisely the right stuff to become an exemplary one.104
In the most obvious sense, this “ruse,” as I see it, of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully allows Castiglione to persuade the ruling elite that courtiership itself is a socially valuable profession with a specialized knowledge underpinning it as an art. After reading this book with its sweeping nostalgia, its elegant, periodic prose suavely expressed in the vernacular, its classicizing models so thoroughly absorbed into a signature style, and its colorful cast of (for the most part) delightful male characters populating it, what eager, ambitious man aspiring to be part of the cultural elite in sixteenth-century Italy wouldn’t have wanted to become a courtier, value courtiership, and hang out in a court exercising sprezzatura all day long? Who wouldn’t have wanted to applaud these courtiers who charm each other, as well as the delightful elegant ladies of the court, for so many hours of the day? Who wouldn’t have wanted to learn how to be like them by trying to follow their examples (or those of other praiseworthy courtiers) and then in turn be conceptually applauded by others when one finally becomes after years of practice an esteemed courtier too? Who wouldn’t, to borrow the still persistent language of the 1950s in our own culture, have wanted to be so damn cool? But at the same time, this ruse of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully permits those very same professionals who somehow already mysteriously possess sprezzatura to close ranks and actually control social mobility, not enhance it, by effectively winking at one another from across the room as they recognize who belongs, who doesn’t, who is a boor, who isn’t, who is “cool,” who isn’t. What is more, this ruse of
