"Formiamo un cortegian:" Castiglione and the Aims of Writing

Ever since its 1528 publication in Venice by Aldus Manutius' heirs, the notoriety of Castiglione's text has entailed the risk of a certain blindness as to its real intentions. Traditionally, critics have been eager to embrace the speaker's own acknowledged desire to rescue the bright memory of Urbino from oblivion and by his writing make it live for posterity (Il Libro del Cortegiano 3.1.342). ¹ This has also meant accepting at face value the author's sublime self-erasure from the text, which lends the Urbino conversations the air of an invitation to an invisible voyeur. Even so astute a critic as Edouardo Saccone, who hinges the success of courtly performance on the "prudence, discretion, and good judgment" of the "public for whom the spectacle is destined," confines this insight to the scene of discourse within the text--i.e., the spectators at a fictive masquerade--while ignoring any possible relation of this audience to the extratextual audience of Castiglione's readers (64).

Recent attention to the contradictions of the text's courtly interlocutors, however, as well as considerations of the evolution of the text and its relation to extratextual events, have uncovered more subversive tendencies in the text that radically engage Castiglione's reader. ² In addition, readings based on linguistic or rhetorical considerations have ironized the naive self-definitions of the text. Victoria Kahn, for example, has noted that sprezzatura cannot really be defined in the text but must be "enacted" by its interlocutors. As a metadiscursive miming of Castiglione's relation to his own reader, Kahn argues, the courtier's basic posture suggests how the text itself embodies the general rhetorical principle of prudence. In Castiglione, as in quasi-humanist texts by Sidney, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and others, examples "do not simply 'fail' to illustrate general precepts, but in failing, succeed in questioning their subordinate status as mere illustrations of theory"; i.e., they solicit acts of judgment on the part of the reader. Posing the problems rather than solving them, they invite the reader to imitate not the examples themselves but the "author's discretion as embodied in the rhetorical practice of the text as a whole" (379). For example, insofar as Ludovico da Canossa exemplifies "grace" by refusing to teach it, he implies the reader's necessary judicial intervention to determine the "values" of any given precept or example of courtly norms (380). ³

There is, moreover, a historical dimension to Castiglione's rhetoric of exemplification. As we now know, the Libro del Cortegiano is a multi-layered text begun not long after the events it fictionalizes while its author was still a relatively minor courtier living at Urbino. It was then articulated in several distinct redactions, with the final layer, the letter to De Silva, added shortly before the book's publication by the then papal nuncio to the imperial court of Europe's most powerful prince, Charles V. ⁴ Hence from the vantage point of the author the limited, indeed parochial, perspective of his text's interlocutors stands in contrast to his own hard-won prudential knowledge. It is not simply a question of ironizing the speaker's nostalgia for the cultural simplicities of Urbino. In light of the author's experience on first the Italian and then the European stage during the work's long gestation, the cultural premises of a relatively powerless North Italian court in 1507 inevitably take on a different coloration as they recede into an emerging historical perspective. Inevitably, such a shift impinges on the book's reception. As Castiglione contemplated sharing his invention with the unknown audience of a printed edition, he was forced to confront the implications of a different kind of conversation than those depicted in his text: that of a writer with his distant reader. This new rhetorical scene raises questions either unsuspected or suppressed under the simple model of a represented discussion among peers: What is the relation...