admiration (admiratio). At the same time, he initially makes courtiership appear to be so accessible that all those aspiring individuals seduced into the profession will believe they can indeed be part of a group identity by following some “apparently”—and I use the adverb advisedly—straightforward rules. To this end, in the course of assuring his readers that the profession of courtiership has an art to it and is therefore something they can readily acquire through instruction and training, Castiglione proceeds to provide his readers with a seemingly foolproof set of reliable rules by which they can learn how to be a courtier, above all the universal rule they should act with sprezzatura and seek the mean between extremes (or just a bit less than the exact mean between extremes) in all that they say and do, as well as the general rule that they should learn through example by imitating masterful courtiers. Along with this, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very necessary for the prince that the ruler will want to employ these people so that he might be surrounded by them, benefit from their advice, and, indeed, be charmed by them in the very moment that he is instructed by them and counseled to be a good ruler. Accordingly, if at first glance these courtiers seem to have a purely ornamental function as decorative and decorous window dressing (much as the late fifteenth-century courtiers appear in Andrea Mantegna’s The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, fig. 15), finally, in the fourth book, Castiglione’s courtiers are at long last given a goal-oriented political and ethical function as teachers of wisdom to the prince and counselors of good policies. Indeed, without these courtiers as counselors, we are led to believe, things will lamentably fall into ruin both in the prince’s state and in the world at large. Hence Castiglione configures courtiership as a profession that ultimately has a necessary and exemplary ethical and political service to offer the prince within the court (the courtier in his service can give sound advice that will allow the prince to rule well and with dignity), and he holds courtiership up as a model profession that will please the prince and everyone else within the court (the courtier as an educated functionary confers distinction upon the prince and his court through his fine manners and elegant, fashionable, humanist-style talk). Finally, Castiglione makes courtiership appear to be so very simple to learn—read this book and you’re off and running—but in truth he makes it so difficult to practice in reality that in the end the vast majority of all those competitive would-be courtiers, even as they are openly instructed into the art underpinning the profession as a form of specialized knowledge, will inevitably fail at it because they will lack what it takes—the good judgment, the sprezzatura, the grace—to guide them properly in all that they say and do. Hence Castiglione may seem to prescribe how to become a courtier as he provides us with apparently infallible rules, but in fact he only describes how to be a courtier and, in the final analysis, never shows us how to become a masterful one through a rigorous program of preparatory training.111
FIGURE 15. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga, 1465–1474. Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. Reproduced by permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY. The theatrically poised and stylish courtiers make up virtually half of the “famiglia”—to the right of the Gonzaga family—within the decoratively framed “window” of Mantegna’s ingeniously frescoed image.
There is no mistaking it. Il cortegiano, one of the great prose masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the European Renaissance generally, was—and remains—an especially sophisticated text written by a smart and gifted humanist who could readily draw on a variety of erudite sources to build a nuanced argument as he strategically engaged in a rivalry with classical culture, particularly Cicero’s De oratore. In doing so, he constructed a profession for his own time, cognizant of the distance that historically separated his world from Cicero’s, his profession of the courtier from that of the classical Roman orator, his art underpinning courtiership from the art of rhetoric espoused in Cicero’s varied treatises, his “new” profession of the courtier, who is an expert in polite comportment and advice giving in a “stylish style,”112 from the long-established but (for Castiglione) now no longer desirable profession of the courtier in sixteenth-century Italy who was an expert in fighting and could be viewed as something of an aggressive, swaggering bore/boor. We should hardly be surprised, then, that Il cortegiano, written by such a talented practitioner and discriminating humanist writer, is more complex in structure than any other discourse about arts composed in the Italian Renaissance as practitioners turned to authorship and sought to define the art underpinning a profession. Nevertheless, some aspects of the overall complex strategy Castiglione shrewdly employs to legitimate the “new profession” of the courtier and the art underpinning it—in particular of presenting the specialized knowledge underlying courtiership openly yet mystifying the very process by which one can truly succeed as a master in acquiring and applying the art in question—can also be found to varying degrees in some other writings composed by practitioners as they talked about arts in sixteenth-century Italy, including discourses about the productive, as opposed to the practical, arts.
A case in point is Cellini’s treatise on goldsmithing, the work of a near contemporary who lived and labored just a generation after Castiglione.113 Like Castiglione, Cellini (fig. 16) aims to impart a knowledge that is determinate, rule-bound, rational, reliable, and communicable. Since Cellini is writing this discourse with the aim of instructing us about what goes on in the finest possible goldsmithing workshops (fig. 17), we can only assume that Cellini presumes his knowledge is teachable. In a word, he is inculcating an “art” in the classical sense of it as a “techne,” much as Cennino Cennini emphatically did before him when writing about painting in the visual arts.114 And Cellini is transparently open about what he will teach us, undertaking, as he puts it in the preface, “to write about those loveliest secrets and wondrous methods of the great art [arte] of goldsmithing” (1). This is patently the case. If you happen to wake up one morning with a hankering to know everything about goldsmithing in the Italian Renaissance, from how to do complicated filigree work to how to tint a diamond, Cellini is your man. He is open to a fault in providing us with details about his art as a specialized form of knowledge, carrying on for thirty-seven chapters (some fairly long, some quite short) so that in the end we can have a full and informed grasp of the technical ins and outs of goldsmithing. Moreover, if any of the information he is conveying can at all be considered secretive, either because it is the sort of information that might be viewed as constituting the intellectual property of a closed group of highly specialized artisans or because it can be construed as the sort of information that appeared in so many self-styled books of secrets containing the mysteries of a misterium, Cellini in his treatise is repeatedly letting the cat out of the bag as he unveils the “secrets” of his craft. Or at least he is divulging a good portion of those secrets, having, he tells us in the context of talking about just the art of niello alone, “not even said half of what is needed” (9) in order to understand and appreciate fully the nature of that particular branch of goldsmithing as a form of darkened engraving. And as Cellini talks about these matters so openly, he seems to be having a good time of it, taking pleasure in broadcasting so much of what he knows and has learned over his fifty-three years as an exemplary goldsmith, from the year he entered into apprenticeship (1515) to the year the book appeared in print (1568). Yet again like so many practitioners who turned to authorship before him, Cellini is here establishing in rhetorical terms his ethos, his character as an expert within the context of his profession and the form of specialized knowledge of the art underpinning it.
FIGURE 16. Francesco Ferrucci del Tadda (1497–1585), Portrait of Benvenuto Cellini, ca. 1555–1570 (probably after a design by Cellini). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Photo courtesy of Louis A. Waldman.
