taste for the prince, much as Vasari teaches taste for potential collectors and consumers of visual art as he clarifies what to look for when viewing “excellent” painting, sculpture, and architecture. In this way, Castiglione’s book serves once more as a signaling device, defining who is “in,” who is “out.” He, like Vasari, is articulating “excellence,” both as an aesthetic quality and as a marker of social and cultural distinction.
Put differently, if in the classical period the ruling elite might potentially fear the Promethean upstarts seeking to advance themselves through the acquisition of a techne as a form of specialized knowledge, thus opening up fantasies of “unregulated mobility” in the minds of those who occupied a secure, privileged station in society, here it is the professionals themselves who are fearing upstarts within their ranks, the very upstarts Castiglione seems to invite into his ranks as he reveals so openly the putative rules by which one can become a courtier in the spirit of full disclosure yet effectively excludes from the ranks of courtiership by making it virtually impossible, at least through a reading of Il cortegiano, for those aspiring newcomers who lack grace and good judgment from the outset to acquire the reliable mechanisms to prepare them to become, through “labor, industry, and care,” just like all those admired and exemplary courtiers portrayed together in Urbino as they ever so fashionably entertain each other for four festive evenings in a row. Castiglione’s book in this way functions less to inculcate a precise art that allows for access to his “new profession”—it can hardly be construed in this respect as a full-fledged prescriptive how-to book or primer for social mobility105—and more to establish “taste” by informing a prince what behavioral qualities he should look for in a courtier when he recognizes at any given moment in his lifespan as an autocratic ruler that he needs to surround himself with distinctive, qualified, professional functionaries in order to more efficiently run the ever-growing and increasingly complicated bureaucracy of his expanding princedom. Needless to say, the prince, we are told, should look for someone who possesses grace and all the delightful, ingratiating attributes associated with people who have grace. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, the enlightened prince should look for someone just like Castiglione and his exemplary humanist friends, all of whom can write and speak beautifully but were largely clueless about the one thing a courtier—whose declared primary “profession,” after all, was that of “arms”—was expected to do in Castiglione’s treatise as a hangover from a defunct feudal period in northern Italy: fight in a war, defeat enemies in battle, and prove victorious in combat. Truth be told, the best most of these fashionable, well-dressed, witty, and garrulous men gathered together in Urbino could possibly do when it came to war, I’d wager, was talk their opponents to death—or at least charm them all the way through the night until sunrise. In the final analysis what most of Castiglione’s characters possess—and this is fairly obvious but nevertheless still warrants being stressed—is rhetorical, not military, prowess. Elegant talking, not heroic military fighting, was their principal “manly” activity, which in the context of Il cortegiano becomes the source of no small anxiety on the part of some of the men who find themselves engaged in activities that risk making them appear effeminate in the eyes of others, from caring about how much time they should or should not dedicate to dancing before the prince to how much time they should or should not devote to coiffing their hair and beards.106
How, we might therefore ask, does Castiglione’s strategy as a practitioner author compare to that of Cicero’s, whose De oratore serves as the dominant classical model of a discourse about an art underpinning Il cortegiano? In the middle of the first century BCE, two significant pressures were arguably being exerted against oratory at the time Cicero was writing, each coming from different directions.107 On the one hand, the rise of the First Triumvirate and the silencing and censoring of Cicero in the period certainly made his own position as orator vulnerable in the face of generals, and so he presumably felt that oratory by and large was threatened, although it does not appear to be quite so endangered in the De oratore as in his late works, notably the Brutus, where the end of oratory seems to haunt the scene and where the notion of the orator is significantly expanded to stand in for some broader category like “statesman” or even, perhaps, “citizen.” On the other hand, the core members of the aristocracy, of which Cicero was indeed not a part, always directed significant hostility toward oratory itself insofar as they preferred to appeal more directly to naturalized forms of entitled authority instead of having to labor to persuade on every occasion. In any event, while Cicero unquestionably needed to defend both “oratory” and “rhetoric” in his writings (indeed, rhetoric was always in need of some sort of defense ever since Plato leveled a series of savage charges against it),108 in his De oratore he was not particularly concerned with fundamentally redefining the nature of the art of rhetoric he was discussing as he fashioned a perfect orator in dialogue form, even if, all things considered, he certainly did moralize it and thus, like Quintilian, helped transform it in a number of significant and lasting ways.109 By contrast, Castiglione instead very much aimed to do precisely that—namely fundamentally redefine the art he was investigating in his treatise—as he transformed the courtier from being a boorish soldier of the feudal past versed in accomplished equestrian fighting tactics to a cultured classicist of the humanist schoolroom versed in being stunningly eloquent, from someone who performs in a belligerent manner that is conventionally taken as embodying a male virtue of swashbuckling epic force (of engaging in violent tournaments or heroically thrusting a sword into someone’s gut and taking great personal pleasure in watching the victim squirm) to one who performs in a stylized way that risks being construed as effeminate in light of lavishing undue attention on ephemera (of thinking about hairdos, dancing, table manners, choice apparel, and, more generally, how to please the prince and everyone else associated with the court—especially taciturn, elegant women in the evening—with colorful talk, wry humor, biting gossip, and playful language games).
Unlike Cicero, then, Castiglione, who was precisely one of those well-trained and well-mannered humanists with primarily linguistic rather than military skills to offer a prince through service, composed his discourse about the art underpinning courtiership in a period when interest in professionalization was keen and intensifying for a variety of social and political reasons, not the least being the development of a host of competitive courts in need of male functionaries to service their complex daily workings. Moreover, unlike Cicero, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of validating its profession with an art as a specialized form of knowledge as it staked out its jurisdictional claim in competition with other rising professions for men within the growing bureaucracies of sixteenth-century Italian courts, such as the profession of the secretary and the specialized art underpinning secretaryship. Rulers, to be sure, always needed letter writers within their chanceries, whereas it was arguably questionable whether they really needed these courtiers attending to them all day long if all they were good for (at least until we get to the fourth book of Il cortegiano) was to look great, talk well, crack good jokes, play coy games, and charmingly entertain each other and some elegant ladies in a sort of fashionable evening salon.110 Furthermore, within this competitive system of professions, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that was in need of making a case for the value of courtiership as an essential profession that the prince must be coaxed into believing he wants to make use of in order to succeed as a ruler. And, finally, Castiglione was speaking to a cultural elite that appreciated the threat posed by the social mobility of upstarts potentially infiltrating their ranks and displacing entrenched members who may have viewed their position as secure when indeed it was not. The value of the courtier in sixteenth-century Italy was not, in sum, a given, any more than the value of the orator was in Cicero’s time. Indeed, the courtier’s position, somewhat like Cicero’s orator, was not secure. It was, instead, decidedly vulnerable.
Consequently, Castiglione adopts a rather convoluted strategy to validate courtiership as a critical profession worthy of respect and, at the same time, to close off access to the “new profession” of courtiership while securing a position for some of its entrenched members, such as himself. First and foremost, he makes courtiership appear so endearing as an exemplary profession that everyone reading the book would ineluctably want to practice it and admire it. Hence he adopts the language of
