THE COURTIER
Baldesar Castiglione
TRANSLATED AND WITH
AN INTRODUCTION BY
GEORGE BULL
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation published 1967
Reprinted with revisions 1976
Reprinted 2003
34
Copyright © George Bull, 1967
All rights reserved
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THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER
BALDESAR CASTIGLIONE was born in 1478, a member of an ancient Italian aristocratic family. He received a thorough humanistic education, acquiring a refined appreciation of art. He was essentially a courtier, and his literary activities were spare-time occupations. In 1504, after an unhappy period in Mantuan employ, he entered the service of Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. The ensuing years were the most satisfying of his life. He enjoyed the confidence of the Duke, who frequently entrusted him with important missions, and in his leisure moment he participated in the literary and intellectual activities of the court, then one of the most brilliant in Italy. After Guidobaldo’s death in 1508, he remained in the service of the new Duke, Francesco Maria della Rovere, becoming, in 1513, resident ambassador in Rome. In 1515 the expulsion of Francesco Maria from Urbino deprived him of a job, and in the years 1516–19 he lived quietly on his estates near Mantua. His major work is The Book of the Courtier. He also wrote a small number of excellent poems both in Latin and Italian. In 1519 he returned to Rome, as Mantuan ambassador, and after further activities on behalf of his Mantuan masters entered Papal service in 1524. From that date until his death in 1529 he was Papal Nuncio in Spain.
GEORGE BULL was an author and journalist who translated six volumes for Penguin Classics: Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, The Book of the Courtier by Castiglione, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (two volumes), The Prince by Machiavelli and Pietro Aretino’s Selected Letters, as well as Aretino’s The Stablemaster in Five Italian Renaissance Comedies. After reading History at Brasenose College, Oxford, George Bull worked for the Financial Times, McGraw-Hill World News, and for the Director magazine, of which he was Editor-in-Chief until 1984. He was appointed Director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute in 1986. He was a director of Central Banking Publications and the founder and publisher of the quarterly publications Insight Japan and International Minds. His books include Vatican Politics; Bid for Power (with Anthony Vice), a history of take-over bids; Renaissance Italy, a book for children; Venice: The Most Triumphant City, Inside the Vatican; a translation from the Italian of The Pilgrim; The Travels of Pietro della Valle; and Michelangelo: A Biography (Penguin, 1996; St Martin’s Press, NY, 1997). George Bull was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981 and a Vice-President of the British-Italian Society in 1994. He was awarded an OBE in 1990. George Bull was made Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory in 1999, and awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (Japan) in 1999. He died on 6 April 2001.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Further Reading
Characters in The Courtier
The Book of the Courtier
FIRST BOOK
SECOND BOOK
THIRD BOOK
FOURTH BOOK
Notes
Index
FOR JULIAN AND SIMON
INTRODUCTION
BALDESAR CASTIGLIONE, courtier and diplomat, poet, scholar and soldier, is generally thought of as himself typifying the gentlemanly virtues expounded and extolled in The Book of the Courtier. The comment of the Emperor Charles V, when he heard of his death, has become famous: ‘Yo vos digo que es muerto uno de los mejores caballeros del mundo’ – ‘I tell you, one of the finest gentlemen in the world is dead’ (a tribute, ironically, in the language in which chivalry was to receive its literary death-blow from another well-rounded man, Miguel de Cervantes, about seventy years later). The portrait of Castiglione (now in the Louvre) by Raphael of Urbino confirms the Emperor’s judgement. In the words of Castiglione’s English biographer: ‘The noble brow and broad forehead, the fine eyes, with their clear intense blue and vivid brightness, give the impression of intellectual power and refinement, tinged with a shade of habitual melancholy. All the spiritual charm and distinction of Castiglione’s nature, all the truth and loyalty of his character, are reflected in this incomparable work, which is a living example of the ideal gentleman and perfect courtier.’*
Castiglione was sensitive, scrupulous and hard-working. It is refreshing to remember that the daunting paragon of refinement and courtesy was also indecisive, fussy, snobbish and ambitious; that his half-hearted approaches to marriage were inspired by his urgent need for money (his eventual marriage, none the less, was extremely happy); that he was not at all distinguished as a commander and indeed sickened by battle; that he was more than once suspected of treacherous conduct; and that he was excessively fond of fine clothes and horses. In short, he was very human.
He was born in 1478, on his father’s estate at Casatico, in the Mantuan territory, and died, while serving as papal nuncio, at Toledo in 1529. This was a period of incomparable literary and artistic achievement in Italy, and also of grievous national shame, bounded on one side by the years when, in the words of Castiglione’s near contemporary, Guicciardini, the calamities of Italy began (with invasion by the French), and on the other by the years when Rome was sacked and Italy finally fell under the domination of Spain.
Castiglione’s life was intensely active and fruitful. He grew up in noble surroundings and company, with the Gonzaga princes of Mantua among his friends. He studied at Milan University (learning Latin and Greek, as well as jousting, fencing and wrestling), entered the service first of Lodovico Sforza and then of Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua. It was at this time that he first met Duke Guidobaldo and his wife, Elisabetta, after they had been driven out of the city-state of Urbino by Cesare Borgia. Their relationship prospered, and, after Guidobaldo had been restored to power, Castiglione entered his service – with a first command of a company of fifty men-at-arms – in 1504.
For twelve years, until 1516, he served the rulers of Urbino, first Guidobaldo, who died in 1508, and then (when Urbino became a papal fief) Francesco Maria della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Julius II, until he was driven from Urbino by the troops of Pope Leo X. Castiglione fled with him to Mantua, where, after years of busy service in war and diplomacy, he was able to marry, settle down to cultivate his own interests at home and enjoy social life at Court as one
of the intimate circle of friends of the ruling family. On the death of Francesco Gonzaga in 1519, however, Castiglione was again employed on diplomatic missions, by the new marquis, Federico, who eventually appointed him as Mantuan ambassador to Rome. In 1524, impressed by Castiglione’s charm and devotion to duty, Pope Clement VII offered him the post of papal nuncio to Spain, where he spent the remaining years of his life, harassed by the repercussions of the ceaseless diplomatic intrigues and squabbles of the rulers of Christendom.
The few years Castiglione spent in the service of Guidobaldo provided the inspiration for The Courtier. The Court had become famous through the achievements of the great soldier-scholar, Federico da Montefeltro, Guidobaldo’s father, whose military talent Castiglione records in The Courtier, and who built Urbino’s great palace, collected an impressive library and made the city a centre of patronage and learning. Guidobaldo, who succeeded him in 1482, was a melancholy and unfortunate ruler, impotent through illness, and hopeless at war. The life at Court, during Castiglione’s years at Urbino, was shaped by the personality of Guidobaldo’s wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga.
The idea of writing The Courtier, Castiglione records, came to him while he was still living at the Court of Urbino, in the service of Francesco Maria della Rovere (the ‘Lord Prefect’). A first draft was roughed out quickly, added to when time was available during the years 1508–16 (especially in Rome, when he was there representing the interests of Francesco Maria and enjoying the company of many of his old friends from Urbino who were now papal officials), and then more or less finished during 1516–18, when Castiglione enjoyed leisure and home life in the company of his wife, Ippolita, and his mother (with whom his relations, throughout his life, were extremely fond), Albisa Gonzaga.
The manuscript was then shown to several of Castiglione’s friends, including Pietro Bembo, because, Castiglione wrote to him in 1518, he was constantly being urged to publish it. Little more was done, however, till 1526, when the news of the death of Elisabetta reached Spain and Castiglione’s memories of Urbino were intensely revived.
In a sense, Castiglione’s whole life was lived for the sake of his book. He spent so many years polishing and pondering on what he had written that the work was very nearly never published at all. How this eventually came to pass he describes in the letter of dedication to Don Michel de Silva: he had entrusted some of the manuscript to the famous Renaissance blue-stocking, Vittoria Colonna, and some people in Naples were threatening to rush into print without his authorization. So in early 1527 he sent the manuscript, with his own careful corrections and instructions for printing, to the Aldine Press in Venice.
Immediately afterwards, in a letter to his steward, Cristoforo Tirabosco, Castiglione described his plans for the first edition. ‘I am writing to Venice to say that one thousand and thirty copies are to be printed, and that I intend to pay half the expenses, because, of this thousand, five hundred are to be mine. The remaining thirty copies will all belong to me, and are to be printed on fine paper, as smooth and beautiful as possible – in fact, the best that can be found in Venice.
In April 1528 The Courtier was published. Castiglione again wrote to Cristoforo to describe how the presentation copies were to be bound and distributed to friends and ‘to the most important personages’. One copy for Castiglione himself was to be printed on vellum ‘with the pages gilded and well pressed, and covered with leather of some rich colour – purple or blue or yellow or green, according as to what you find… and adorned with ornaments of knots and foliage, or panels and compartments of some other description….’*
In his letter to Don Michel (following his own rule that non-chalance is the mark of a gentleman) Castiglione modestly disclaimed any pretensions to literary achievement: the work is only too full of faults, he suggests, before resigning himself humbly to the judgement of Time. As the care he lavished on its composition and production testified, however, he was enormously proud of The Courtier. And Time ‘accustomed to pronouncing always, on all writings a just sentence of life or death’ has given him a favourable verdict. The Courtier has gone through scores of editions and translations; has exercised a profound influence on European sensibilities; and ranks today as the most representative book of the Renaissance.
The immediate and lasting success of The Courtier is certainly not attributable to its originality of thought. It is largely a series of echoes: of medieval ideals of chivalry, of classical virtues and of contemporary humanist aspirations. Its opening is in strict conformity with the humanist rules of imitation. Cicero, whom Castiglione studied hard as a boy and took for his model (and whose De Officiis was a Renaissance best-seller) supplies the very words for the beginning of the First Book. The Orator begins: ‘For a long time I debated earnestly with myself, Brutus, as to which course would be more difficult or serious – to deny your oft repeated request, or to do what you ask.’† And The Courtier: ‘I have spent a long time wondering, my dear Alfonso, which of two things was the more difficult for me: either to refuse what you have asked me so often and so insistently, or to do it.’ Hardly a page of The Courtier turns without a bold plagiarism from Plato, Plutarch, Cicero or Livy. Nor, where The Courtier is contemporary, does it add decisively to the commonplace subjects expounded by Castiglione’s contemporaries: the responsibility of Italy’s rulers for the country’s shameful military weakness; the role of women in social and political life; the relative standing of the fine arts; the best type of government; the true nature of perfect love. Admittedly Castiglione did make major contributions to several lively issues of his day and time: to the long and vehement debate, for example, about the need in a divided country for a universal vernacular drawn from Italy’s several regional languages. It is possible, too, to trace the influence of The Courtier on the aesthetic theory of the later Renaissance, and notably on the ideas of artistic grace, decorum and nonchalance expounded by the great art historian, Giorgio Vasari. None the less, even in these spheres, Castiglione’s contributions were not of long-term significance. When The Courtier was finally published, indeed, the world of ideas and institutions which it idealized was, as far as Italy was concerned, and as Castiglione well knew, buried in the past.
But, outside Italy, The Courtier enjoyed for some generations at least a pervasive influence, and not least in Elizabethan England, where the first translation, by Sir Thomas Hoby, appeared (at a time of intense interest in Italian life and literature) in 1561. Even before then, it was influencing upper-class life and manners through books such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, published three years after Castiglione’s work went to press. In 1570, in The Schoolmaster, it was recommended by the influential educationist, Roger Ascham, as a book which, if read with diligence, would benefit a young man more than three years in Italy. The kind of behaviour recommended to the Italian courtiers became the accepted standard for English gentlemen. To Elizabethan literature it channelled Renaissance philosophy and conceits: Ben Jonson uses The Courtier for a scene in Every Man out of his Humour; a poem by Gabriel Harvey justly bases its praise of Sir Philip Sidney on his affinities with Castiglione’s perfect courtier; the neo-Platonism expounded by Bembo in the Fourth Book provides a standard for the fresh endeavours to attain beauty and harmony in literature as well as life; even the witticisms in Shakespeare renew the jokes and puns recommended by Castiglione (and concerning which today’s reader will probably form the same opinion as Lord Chesterfield apropos his own remark that Petrarch deserved his Laura better than his Lauro – ‘and that wretched quibble would be reckoned an excellent piece of Italian wit’).
The truth was that the self-interested endeavour of Castiglione’s contempories at the small Courts of Italy to justify the profession of courtier – to synthesize the idea of the warrior and the scholar, the Christian believer and the classical hero, the self-contained man of virtù and the dutiful servant of the prince – provided an opportune answer, gracefully and fully expressed, to a need felt urgently in the north of Europe as medieval values d
issolved. The Courtier was not only a book of courtesy which took an exalted place in the long line of such productions running from the Middle Ages to modern times. (These are discussed in an interesting appendix to R. Pine-Coffin’s translation of the Galateo in Penguin Books.) It was also a political book, justifying the place in society of the courtier successor to the medieval knight, and aiming to establish his role and his status at the new kind of Court that came into being during the Renaissance. In this respect Professor Denys Hay sees Castiglione as an Italian theorist who was ‘particularly adapted to instruct the northern world in the Renaissance attitude to politics’. And The Courtier, he adds, ‘exactly expressed what was most easily assimilated by the northern world in the latter-day Renaissance in Italy. Its dignity and mannered elegance, its respect for both martial accomplishments and literary attainments, its placing of talent at the service of a prince, all expressed Italian civility in a way perfectly attuned to the aristocratic North.’ *
During his life Castiglione enjoyed the friendship of men such as Raphael and the respect of rulers such as the Emperor Charles V. Throughout Renaissance Europe, his book became essential reading for the nobility. Both the man and the book have had their enthusiastic admirers ever since; but both have also proved capable of arousing intense suspicion and dislike.
This reaction started very early. Emilia Pia – one of the most sharply drawn characters of The Courtier – caused a great scandal in counter-Reformation Rome, in 1528, when she died, it was whispered, without the sacraments of the Church and discussing passages from The Courtier with Count Lodovico instead of saying her prayers. For several reasons – its occasionally pagan attitudes to life, its anti-clerical sentiments, its suspect orthodoxy in this passage and that – though the book remained immensely popular in Italy during the sixteenth century, it incurred the censure of the ecclesiastical authorities. When Castiglione’s son, Camillo, was preparing a new edition in 1576, he was warned that the work was already on the Index in Spain and that corrections would have to be made. This led to an expurgated edition of The Courtier (in which references to Fortune were removed and jokes about priests revised) in 1584, after a censored edition had already appeared in Spanish. In 1590, with an exception made for the expurgated edition, The Courtier found its way on to the Index. Early in the eighteenth century, the Inquisitors in Padua had to be consulted when a new edition was being prepared. And it was not until 1894, records Castiglione’s English biographer, Julia Cartwright, that a correct version of Castiglione’s work from the original manuscript was finally edited by Professor Cian.
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