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Chapter Nine— Renaissance Transformations: I
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Papal Curia and Courtier Clerics

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's (1405–1464) De curialium miseriis did not proscribe courtly service for the man of piety, but warned him of the extraordinary difficulties of remaining pure among the soiled: “si potest ignem ingredi et non uri, non illum curiam sequi prohibeo; nam meritum tanto grandius assequetur, quanto periculosius militavit.”[20] This warning found an echo in Castiglione's dialectical notion that true virtue needs testing and stands out clearly only in the midst of vice. Piccolomini had profited from a long, intense experience of court life in Italy and central Europe. As to the term he used in this letter, it is worth noting that the vernacular curiali for “courtiers” was also current in Quattrocento Italy.[21] In tune with the negatively polemical radicalism of the traditional subgenre, however, the pamphlet turned the ambiance of the court into a den of vices that stifled all moral and psychological freedoms, even denying the virtues of eloquence and learning that the idealistic tradition had regularly posited: “in princely courts it is a fault to know letters and dishonorable to be called eloquent,” since “no good art and no love of virtue rule there, but only avarice, lust, cruelty, debauchery, envy, and ambition.”[22]

The field is still wide open for research and, rather than in the Roman social world, I suspect we shall have to search for evidence of the continuity of curialitas in the antipapal documents of conciliary debates. Yet the genre of episcopal biographies, once thriving in medieval Germany, continued its productive life in the Renaissance, including such outstanding papal biographies as that of Nicolas V by Giannozzo Manetti (1459), Julius II and Leo X by Raffaele Maffei, Paul II (1474) by Gaspare da Verona (1400–1474), and those of several popes by Jacopo Zeno (1418–1481) and Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi, 1421–1487).[23] The great Lorenzo Valla expounded his views on the role and nature of the Curia in his inaugural lecture at the University of Rome, the Oratio in principio sui studii (1455), where he proposed the Curia as the logical center of the renaissance of the Latin language and culture. Even earlier, in 1438 the Florentine humanist Lapo da Castiglionchio il Giovane (1405–1438) had written a short Dialogus super excellentia et dignitate Curiae Romanae where, in a somewhat ambiguous context, the Curia was discussed as a locus for humanistic undertakings.[24]

Given the ecclesiastical connections of the ideological framework we have been pursuing, it is pertinent to recall the relative frequency of


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personal association with the Church. With Piccolomini we are in the presence of a future pope. Many important historical characters in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier held (in 1507) or were about to hold important ecclesiastical positions. Bembo was ready to embark on a successful and fruitful ecclesiastical career which saw him secretary to Leo X and then, after 1539, cardinal. Federico Fregoso became bishop of Salerno and almost a cardinal, Bibbiena a cardinal, and Ludovico di Canossa bishop of Tricarico (1511) and then Bayeux. Michael de Silva, Castiglione's Portuguese dedicatee, was then bishop of Viseu and in 1541 a cardinal. Castiglione himself died as bishop of Avila, having been a cleric since 1521 and a candidate for a cardinal's hat since 1527, before publishing his book in 1528.

Dionisotti has estimated that in the first half of the sixteenth century about half of the high literati in Italy moved within the Church as priests, monks, bishops, cardinals, or holders of important ecclesiastical benefices. Even such an apparently unlikely candidate as Ariosto was not only, for a time, secretary to Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, he was himself a cleric and, for a while, hopeful of a bishopric from Leo X.

Rome was teeming with intellectual clerics who gravitated about the cardinals' familiae and the papal Curia,[25] but in secular republics, too, clerical positions were sought for social and political advancement by all sorts of intellectuals. In late Quattrocento Florence, among the leading humanists Angelo Poliziano held minor orders, Marsilio Ficino was a priest, and Pico della Mirandola an apostolic protonotary with minor orders. A prominent humanist who combined high-level philological activity with a full politico-curial career was Niccolò Perotti (1429–1480), archbishop of Siponto and governor of Viterbo, Spoleto, and Perugia.[26]

Against this background, the connection between Castiglione's oeuvre and a contemporary treatise by a leading humanist, Paolo Cortesi's (1465/1471–1510) De cardinalatu, is worth exploring, dealing as it does with the figure of the cardinal as an ideal courtier.[27] Dedicated to Julius II and published posthumously in 1510, it derived from the author's 1504 Sententiarum libri, in turn part of a projected but never accomplished treatise about the prince (De principe ). Castiglione's dialogues are placed in 1507 but were ready in 1516 (first redaction), hence chronologically and ideally close to Cortesi's work as well as to the famous Commentarii urbani of Raffaele Volaterrano, a friend of Cortesi who had grown up in the same circle of the Roman Curia. The main point is that, to put it as does Dionisotti (68), “the cardinal is for


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Cortesi more or less what the courtier is for Castiglione: an ideal figure of a man who stands close to the center of a real social sphere, the center, that is, of the ecclesiastical, curial society of the early Cinquecento.” In Italy cardinals were, like Castiglione's courtiers and like chaplains and bishops around German imperial courts, at the point closest to the center of power. Cesare Borgia, for a striking example, had turned himself from a cardinal into a prince.

In the Renaissance, the Roman environment provided little incentive to keep alive the basically Ghibelline tradition of medieval curialitas; moreover, the humanistic climate made it more expedient to lean on the paradoxically less dangerous patterns and motifs of ancient Roman glory. Humanism rings in Cortesi's manner of referring to his cardinal as cardinal/senator, even though he conducted himself more as a cardinal/prince. Furthermore, it was more prudent to deal with style of life and speech than with moral substance and deep-seated merit. Images of once admired courtier bishops could not be safely invoked in an age of rampant absenteeism from pastoral duties. A couple of glaring examples will suffice. Although bishop of two English sees, the active humanist Cardinal Adriano Castellesi never visited England; while bishop of Aquino and Cavaillon, and despite the urgings of his close friend Jacopo Sadoleto, Mario Maffei, another humanist among high prelates, lived in Rome, Florence, and his hometown of Volterra.

Cortesi's encyclopedic work is also somewhat analogous to Castiglione's in the arrangement of subject matter. Book 1, entitled “liber ethicus et contemplativus,” deals with personal character and moral qualifications, education, and cultural aptitudes; the second, the “liber economicus,” deals with the management of the cardinal's princely court; and the third, “liber politicus,” with the cardinal's function as an advisor to the pope, supreme prince of the church, and as a subordinate ruler at his nominal service. The elaborate listing of the virtues required of the cardinal is a conflation of Christian, classical, and courtly prerequisites, including prudentia, memoria, providentia, intelligentia, ratiocinatio, docilitas, experientia, circumspectio, cautio, consilium, and judicium.

In book 2 Cortesi prescribes in detail a magnificent life style for princes of the Church, precisely defining a standard in line with what had been the prerequisites of the high aristocracy and would become the mark of high social status under Louis XIV. The household of the cardinal, Cortesi says, must be ample and imposing, requiring support to the tune of 12,000 aurei or ducats per year on the average. For com-


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parison, let us note Cortesi's specification that major officials should earn about fifty gold florins or ducats per year.[28] The College of Cardinals was expected to supply such funds and, should the College run short, the pope was to help. According to the census of 1526/1527 each court or familia of the twenty-one contemporary cardinals averaged 134 servants, administrators, and protégés (the papal familia then numbered seven hundred). Other incomes derived from other benefices, including bishoprics.

This and other tracts on Church government show a distinct similarity to secular political treatises. Del governo della corte d'un signore in Roma by the Florentine humanist Francesco Priscianese (1495–1549) described in detail the management of a Roman princely court of the secular kind with duties and functions corresponding to Cortesi's description of a cardinal's familia.[29] Cortesi himself held a court of sorts in his own house, in what is usually referred to as the Roman Academy (variously conducted by Pomponio Leto, Cortesi himself, Angelo Colocci, and Johannes Goritz, with rather dramatic vicissitudes).[30] Vincenzo Colli, known as il Calmeta (d. 1508), the famous proponent of the lingua cortegiana referred to by Castiglione, was a prominent member of Cortesi's Academy and left a valuable account of it in his biography of the poet Serafino Aquilano.[31] Calmeta makes intriguing comments on the courtly behavior of Cortesi's house circle, ascribing Ciceronian influences to a humanistic discussion centered on decorous public behavior as well as on the principle of decorum in literature and poetry, especially in vernacular works. As to Serafino's career, Calmeta places the court and its patronage system at the centre of that poet's work, despite the lack of appreciation on the part of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Serafino's lord.[32] It is an important sign of the realization that courtly environments had become vital for poetic and literary creativity.

Later in the Cinquecento, the literature on the formation, duties, and social status of the bishop gradually started to reflect the shift toward less worldliness and a greater sense of clerical responsibility which was dictated by the Counter-Reformation. Early treatises go from the important De officio viri boni ac probi episcopi (1516) by Gaspare Contarini (1484–1542) to Pier Francesco Zini's (ca. 1520–ca. 1575) Boni pastoris exemplum ac specimen singulare (1555).[33] These Venetian citizens forcefully advocated a type of high ecclesiastic who, consonant with the clergy's way of life in the Venetian republic, purposely eschewed the imitation of princely display of wealth and mundanity that characterized the Roman Curia. Contarini specifically excludes magni-


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ficentia as a necessary or desirable attribute of a bishop's life (1571 ed., p. 407).[34] For one thing, the princely courts held by cardinals and bishops, as splendidly illustrated by Cortesi, were made anachronistic, at least on principle, by the Council of Trent's injunction to the high clerics to reside in the places of pastoral assignment. De facto, bishops and high prelates were affected much more by the new sense of austerity than were the cardinals, who continued to live and rule like ostentatious princes holding court. The new priests, foremost among them the Jesuits, were less like courtiers than were their predecessors. Yet the pendulum swung back when, in the course of the Italian wars, the secular courts lost much of their importance and autonomy, while the diplomats who felt superior to the princes started to gravitate toward the only effective court in Italy, the Roman Curia, thus consummating a process of “desecularization” that would have important and lasting consequences for Italian society. As we have seen, this was typically the destiny of several of the Cortegiano' s interlocutors.


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Chapter Nine— Renaissance Transformations: I
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