Chapter Ten—
Renaissance Transformations:
II
Educators at Court
Partly because of historical conditions, partly by influence of the Cortegiano, treatises on the education of princes were frequently given a courtly setting. Prominent among these treatises in Castiglione's time was Erasmus of Rotterdam's Institutio principis christiani (1515), dedicated to the future Emperor Charles V. The prince, Erasmus says, carries in his person the image of the eternal prince: as the sun is God's image in heaven, so is the prince God's living image on earth, and all the ritual, iconographic, and formal paraphernalia of power are necessary expressions of this exalted status.[1] Thus Erasmus, appearing in the manual as the educator-philosopher, did not hesitate to invest the prince with the high role of a representative of God on earth by using the image-making metaphor of the sun—the traditional metaphor that Dante had recalled in the Monarchia but that Machiavelli had rejected as implying a symbolic/metaphysical superiority of monarchic over republican government. The concept would live on down to Louis XIV, the Sun-King. Curialitas was becoming adoration. Once advisors, collaborators, and administrators, the courtiers began to yield to a new role as ornaments of the god's palace.
Another successful writer, the master of estilo culto Antonio de Guevara (1480–1545), was a high courtier in Charles V's service in Spain. Having been brought up at court as a page under Isabel, he then turned
Franciscan friar, but Charles V recalled him to court as his official preacher and historiographer. He later became bishop. His most famous book is the Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, 1528), revised as Relox de príncipes (Dial of Princes, 1529), a seven-hundred-page manneristic repertory of preaching topoi written in a Euphuistic style avant-la-lettre, as Eduard Norden and then Morris W. Croll characterized it.[2] It was an instant best seller throughout Europe. In Italy both versions, Libro aureo and Relox, received two translations each.[3] In two later works, the Aviso de privados ó despertador de cortesanos (Warning for Favorites and Awakening-Bell for Courtiers, 1539)[4] and the Menosprecio de corte y alabança de aldea (Scorn of the Court and Praise of the Country, Valladolid, 1539), both published ten years after the Relox,[5] Guevara managed to reverse and subvert both classicism and Renaissance humanism in a vigorous revival of medieval anticourt criticism, set in a context that the Counter-Reformation would soon welcome and that was reminiscent of medieval mesure in its focusing on aurea mediocritas or mensura. These revisited anticourt sentiments were now expressed by turning the “mirror of princes” into a theater of the topsy-turvy world. The court implicitly appeared as a mirror of the world of Satan, Prince of Darkness, versus the good prince as Prince of Light (the light of the Sun as in Erasmus). A new asceticism and mysticism were aiding political absolutism. Guevara's Menosprecio, whose main sources were John of Salisbury's Policraticus, A. S. Piccolomini's De curialium miseriis, and Petrarca's De vita solitaria, used the world of the pastoral to praise life in the country as a corrective for the mad and ungodly corruption of the courts, urging courtiers to abandon both court and city for the virtuous countryside. Of course, that countryside was populated not by real peasants but by gentlemen turned shepherds who conducted themselves by none other than that genuine courtly code which the court was taken to task for having betrayed.[6] The shift of locus had not displaced the code. Such pastoral references to court motifs, which fill Renaissance and baroque literature, brought back Virgil's way of donning the Arcadian veil to clothe political allegories and even personal economic allusions (like his complaints to Augustus on his loss of the family farmland).
A history of the social implications of the pastoral and Arcadian myth (the topos of the Golden Age) remains to be written.[7] It would demand an assessment of anthropological, religious, and historio-graphic functions, not only by surveying the myth in its literary uses,
but by explaining, for example, why so many authors associated with court life treated the myth in a spirit of wishful, utopian withdrawal from the realities of the court. At times it was used as an act of escape or refusal, at others as a reform from within. Although it was basically outside the medieval pastorela, the myth was ubiquitous even before the birth of the pastoral as a classical genre. Brunetto Latini, for one, had expressed his bourgeois communal background by rejecting the myth's implication that primitive man was virtuous and happy: only rationality, culture, and the city provide human conditions for what is, without them, only a beast.[8] Dante may have been impressed by Latini's argument, which recurred often in the democratic environment of the communes, as it did in Fazio degli Uberti (Dittamondo: 1.12:52–91) and then again in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, in the famous “realistic” painting of Piero di Cosimo studied by Panofsky.[9] In that environment the pastoral happiness of a perfect idleness was consciously opposed by a firm notion that social values are the result of human industry, “work,” including the work of agriculture versus the otium of shepherds. For noblemen, instead, including the courtly milieus as well as the high merchants on their way to a seigniorial state, like the Medici, the Golden Age of human happiness coincided with the idyllic life of pastoral otium (e.g., Lorenzo il Magnifico's Selve d'Amore: 2.84-2.112).[10]
An Italian counterpart of Guevara was, in his odd way, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), an intellectual who created his literary market by selling fame while buying ephemeral influence and earthly success. His Ragionamento delle corti (1538) was a radical anti-Cortegiano where the court was picturesquely styled “a hospital of hope, burial of life, . . . market of lies, . . . school of fraud, . . . paradise of vices and hell of virtues, . . . more wretched than the most horrid and bestial cave or tomb.”[11] The court he knew best was that of Rome, although he was writing from the safety of Venice.
Saba (or Sabba) da Castiglione's Ricordi (Bologna 1546; expanded edition Venice 1554; published twenty-six times before the end of the century) drew on Guevara, though in a more manageable and orderly mood. A monsignor and knight of Malta, Saba introduced Tridentine dogmas and catechist prescriptions into the education of the prince, with the addition of the prescribed behavioral qualities of “maestà, gravità, modestia, maturità e decoro.”[12] He carried forward Guevara's court criticism by denouncing contemporary courts as dens of vices and degeneracy (37v). In the chapter of his Ricordi that dealt with “La cor-
tegiania dei nostri tempi,” he reversed all the traditional virtues of the courtiers, now all degenerate, into their opposites, since they are all “vili, ignoranti, adulatori, assentatori, parasiti, lenoni, per non dire ruffiani, malcreati, buggiardi.”[13] Yet, once again it is important to be aware of a new twist to this way of handling court criticism. Whereas medieval court critics operated outside the courts and looked to an alternative way of life—the life of the monastic orders and a reformed Church—such critics as Guevara and Saba could not easily get out of their milieu, since the court was their real world. What they proposed was little more than a disguised or reformed court. Saba also recouped Castiglione through the notion of “giusto mezzo” between “affettazione” and “naturalità”—a new dressing for sprezzatura. In Saba's readily apparent, conformist Christianization of the genre the courtier, the prince and the knight (cavaliere ) have become thoroughly clericalized.[14] The key virtues of the gentleman courtier were to be modestia, magnanimità, and umiltà.
Some didactic treatises had begun even earlier to assimilate courtly values to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. The pious anonymous author of the Novo corteggiano de vita cauta e morale (probably issued in Venice by an unknown publisher in 1530 or 1535) attempted to educate an aristocratic ruling class according to principles of aurea mediocritas that were inspired more by ideals of retreat from the dangers of the world than by a positive appreciation of court life.[15] The author's praise of the agreeable solitude of country living, “amene solitudini,” sounds like the later pastoral appeal to the theme of country versus city/court in Guevara's Menosprecio. Similarly, the Genoese Pellegro Grimaldi Robbio wrote a successful book of Discorsi ne' quali si ragiona di quanto far debbono i gentilhuomini ne' servigi de' lor signori per acquistarsi la gratia loro (1543), where the echoes from Castiglione are as evident as the attempt to clericalize him by shifting the main reference point to the Roman Curia.[16] In these borrowings from Castiglione we note the generalization of both the approach and the subject matter, now covering the broad educated classes of “gentlemen.” In his way, Stefano Guazzo would continue this trend in his La civil conversatione (1574). It is a literature that expresses a malaise growing out of acute disillusionment with life at court.
The growing disenchantment with the moral life of the leading classes, from the high clergy to the new princes and courtiers, brought about a semantic drift. As the terms cortegiano, homme de cour, and courtier gave way to their synonyms galantuomo, honnête homme, and
gentleman, in Italy cortegiano acquired a negative connotation. Castiglione had avoided the feminine of cortegiano, using instead donna di palazzo, because cortegiana already had the negative connotation of English courtesan and French courtisane.[17] The more derogatory views come forth in the literary genres of satire and lirica giocosa à la Berni, where, however, the prevailing cynicism must be partly discounted as a generic prerequisite in this attempt to exploit social observation for purposes of facile comedy. Here as elsewhere the most common reproach was of avariciousness and illiberality; this revived the medieval motif of liberality as a trademark of true courtoisie, which the new bourgeois ethic had not managed to sweep away. Typically, a Matteo Bandello mirrored the new skepticism in a demystifying perception of ladies who no longer rewarded virtue in their admirers, but only wealth.[18]
The Courtesy Book
Self-fashioning after a chivalric image is analogous to the acquisition of manners, insofar as both impose a personality and a behavior from the outside through social pressures and education. These two civilizing forces—that is, chivalry and manners—must be ranged side by side because the chivalrous habit included an imposition of social manners in both feeling and gesture. A subgenre of the treatise of manners is the manual of etiquette, especially table manners, which enjoyed great popularity in the sixteenth century. It grew out of earlier educational treatises that often contained sections on such matters, and it signaled changes in the consciousness of civilized behavior.[19]
Although specific precepts started to be voiced as early as the twelfth century as the expression of collective awareness rather than a result of original speculation, the first broad compilation of such rules was Erasmus's enormously successful De civilitate morum puerilium of 1530. Immediately translated into several languages, it was reprinted in its original form thirty times within the remaining six years of the author's life and 130 times through the eighteenth century. Its seven chapters dealt successively with bodily cleanliness, care of the body, manners at church, at the table, in public gatherings, at games, and in the bedchamber. Its direct impact was felt in the popular Colloquiorum scholasticorum libri quatuor by the Calvinist Mathurin Cordier (1564; 1568).[20] Both Erasmus and Cordier had a close antecedent in Johannes Sulpicius's De moribus in mensa servandis.
The Erasmian title provided the common term for approved behav-
ioral attitudes in many languages, such as French civilité and English civility, later extending into the more general and abstract French and English civilisation, Italian civiltà. Protestant educational manuals, like Cordier's Colloquia, contributed to the wide diffusion of the new terms, which for a time were practically interchangeable with “courtesy,” courtoisie, and Hübescheit. This last term had appeared perhaps for the first time, in the form hüfscheit, in the German title (buoch von der hüfscheit ) that Thomasin von Zerclaere reported in his Wälscher Gast (ca. 1210) for his now lost Italian treatise on the subject. It was akin to German Hofzucht (courtly manners), title of a book attributed to the courtly poet Tannhäuser (ca. 1200–ca. 1270).[21] A similar early treatise was Bonvesin da la Riva's De curialitatibus, where the “curiality” of the Latin title was equivalent to cortesia in the body of the Italian text. German hübsche Leute (the fine people) meant the court nobles, just as Höflichkeit (courtliness) was their ethical code, allied to the etymologically and semantically related Höfischkeit, still current for “courtesy.” Gradually, French civil and civilité, alongside poli, politesse, and the even more popular honnête and honnêteté (which in France also acquired the connotations of Italian cortegiano, like the nominal French gentilhomme and English “gentleman,” more explicitly denoting nobility), displaced courtois and courtoisie. In other words, “civility” replaced courtesy as the name for politeness, as pointedly noted by Dominique Bouhours in 1675.[22] The two terms courtoisie and civilité were still used interchangeably in Jean du Peyrat's translation of Della Casa's Galateo in about 1562, where the term gentilhomme, too, appeared in the very title: Galatée ou la maniere et fasson comme le gentilhomme se doit gouverner en toute compagnie.[23]
Castiglione died a bishop. Giovanni Della Casa (Mugello 1503–Rome 1556), another leading writer of treatises on social manners, was archbishop of Benevento for the last dozen years of his life. He had been first clerk to the Apostolic Chamber since 1538 and then archbishop of Benevento and papal nunzio to Venice in 1544. Made secretary of state to the Vatican in 1555 by Paul IV, he hoped for a cardinal's hat in the last year of his life. His Galateo, published posthumously in 1558, is one of the most important exemplars of the subgenre of etiquette or courtesy books, and is also of particular interest for its references to high clerical spheres. The title came from the Latinized name of Galeazzo Florimonte, bishop of Aquino first and then of Sessa Aurunca, who appears in the story as a paragon of courtliness.
Della Casa was a steady student of Cicero, whose De officiis, that
crucial text for the tradition of curiality, he adapted in part of his De officiis inter tenuiores et potentiores amicos, a treatment of friendship between the powerful and their dependents, hence close to the principal concerns of court life. It was published in a vernacular version as Trattato degli uffici comuni fra gli amici superiori e inferiori by Giovanni Antonio degli Antonj (Milan, 1559).[24] The Aristotelian/Ciceronian/Horatian notion of virtue as medietas or mediocritas, middle point between extremes, which we encountered as a key ingredient of medieval courtesy under the rubrics of Latin moderamen, French mesure, and German mâze, returns as the supreme ideal in the Trattato. One achieves this certo mezzo o certa misura (middle point or measure), which is convenevole, “decorous,” when one manages to please and captivate the powerful. Chapter 7 gives an interesting aperçu on the role of the addressee with clear understanding of the communicative relationship between speaker and audience: “conoscere chi noi siamo e con cui parliamo” is proposed as the key to amicizia or (with a Greek term) filía.
The text of the Galateo, too, shows the proximity of Cicero's De officiis, particularly for the constant presence of the paradigm of measure. See, for example, the eloquent passage in the second part of chapter 13: “even the good, when excessive, displeases . . . . Those who make themselves humble beyond any sense of measure and refuse the honors they deserve, display in this more pride than those who arrogate to themselves what is not due to them.”[25] Chapter 20 derives “good manners” from misura, a happy medium which consists of avoiding both the excess of deferring to our interlocutor (this is giocolare e buffone, demeaning buffoonery and downright flattery) and the opposite excess of being unconcerned with the effect we make on others (this is for the zotico e scostumato e disavvenente ). The string of three insistent terms: bellezza, misura, and convenevolezza (beginning of chap. 26) appears to echo the Ciceronian as well as the courtly appeal to moral beauty, measure, and honesty in the sense of mores that are becoming to our social status and function. Later on (start of chap. 28) we find an echo of Castiglione's emphasis on grazia: “Gracefulness is nothing other than a certain light that shines forth through the fittingness of things that are discreetly and harmoniously composed all together: without this degree of measure even the good is not beautiful, nor is beauty truly pleasing.”[26] Next, manners are compared with food: gracefulness and a sweet lightness of touch are to manners what flavor is to food, which will not be pleasing just by being wholesome and nourishing.
The work characteristically concentrates on manners and mores, as indicated in the very title Galateo ovvero dei costumi, and this narrower focus reminds us of the schoene sîte or zuht of the German traditional nomenclature. Notice the emphasis in chapter 1:
I shall begin with . . . what is pertinent to the purpose of being well mannered and pleasing: which nevertheless is either a form of virtue or very similar to virtue . . .. Good manners are no less important than greatness of soul and mastery of the self, since they need to be exercised many times in the course of every day, . . . whereas justice, fortitude, and the other nobler, major virtues are put into practice more seldom.[27]
He repeats later on that he has been treating not virtues and vices intrinsically but “fitting or unbecoming ways of dealing with each other.”[28] Likewise, he had gone over the matter of making dress and speech appropriate to social status and local custom for the sake of not displeasing our audiences unnecessarily in matters of no moral substance. Here again we could think of Cicero's treatment of honestas as the virtue of fitting behavior to occasion and circumstance.
The elegant little treatise insists on a pattern of civic behavior that will ensure respect toward others' interests and rights, sensitivity to others' wishes and well-being, and, in one word, the beauty and sacredness of individual “liberty.” See the prolonged critique of false display of respect, which offends the recipient as insincere and inappropriate if not downright adulatory with ulterior motives. The author designates this insincere adulation with a relative neologism, cerimonie, implicitly attributing it to foreign influences (read: Spanish; it has not taken deep roots in Italy, he says). Such obnoxious “standing on ceremony” hinders that freedom which we all desire more than anything else, and derives from an annoying overemphasis on nobility as mere social status. It is an excess of formality that either covers up for moral vacuity or conceals a base character.[29] Della Casa advises against using social status as a basis for judgment of personal character.
Della Casa's overarching concern is with being “pleasant,” but this pleasantness is not based on conformism and indifference to underlying moral issues: it is a necessary aspect of a way of life that takes into account the need to communicate and interact with others, in full respect for their feelings and interests. In other words, it is the outer veneer of that urbanity that we have seen attributed to the city dweller, the asteîos anér, both in ancient Greece and Rome and in the medieval centers of curiality. This form of urbanity was particularly at home in the Italian communes, as part of a city-bound society: “nella città e tra
gli uomini.”[30] From the very beginning of his dialogue, Della Casa explicitly stresses the distinction between morality and sociality, the heroic ethic of pure virtue, which comes into play only seldom, and the compromise with others that makes the worldly city human and operative. The moraliteit that Tristan was teaching the young Isolt, and that Gottfried of Strassburg extolled as the most profound message of courtly education, was, we can extrapolate, closer to this sociality than to a pure, abstract, and heroic morality. For Della Casa this concrete virtue of “comune conversazione” is part of social intercourse: it is not at home in the solitude of hermitages (“non per le solitudini o ne' romitori”).[31]
The Humanists' Ethical View of Man as Citizen
Della Casa's theme of “conversation” implemented humanism's commitment to civic-minded allegiance to the community, excluding the recluse, the misanthrope, and the hermit. This bias invested much of the philosophical moral literature of the Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento, from Leonardo Bruni to Lorenzo Valla and on to, say, the Sienese Alessandro Piccolomini, a reader in philosophy at the University of Padua. In two versions of a lifetime work running from 1543 to 1582, Piccolomini spoke of the “animale civile e comunicativo” that thrives in the society of the city, whereas the hermit ceases to be truly human. Social living requires manners (costumi ) that are developed by education through literature and poetry, history and eloquence, the natural sciences being only instrumental.[32] Similarly, another Piccolomini, Francesco (1520–1604), stressed the scienza civile over and against the heroic virtue worthy only of heroes.[33] It was all part of that humanistic concern with the viver civile which runs through both Castiglione and Della Casa, continuing some specific themes of the medieval curial tradition and applying them to social conduct in new environments.[34]
Other ethical treatises embodying mature humanistic views were due to Sperone Speroni, Pietro Pomponazzi, Agostino Nifo, Giambattista Gelli, and Paolo Paruta.[35] In his Capricci del bottaio and Circe (1541–1548) the spirited Florentine shoemaker/philosopher/littérateur Gelli (1498–1563) dramatized the motif of man's freedom to choose between rising to the nobility of angels or stooping to the materiality of brutes—a motif that had been made famous by Pico della Mirandola's Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486).[36] Speroni was radical in his defense
of the active life (in the second part of his Dialoghi, Venetia 1552, new ed. Venezia 1596: 180–215). Marc-Antoine Muret's Roman oration De moralis philosophiae laudibus (1563) extolled ethics above the natural sciences and the contemplative life, as the philosophy of the active man in the full blossoming of the civic community. In his Della perfezione della vita politica (1579) Paruta proclaimed that a goal of philosophy was preparation for the active life, incomparably superior to the works of the solitary man who lives only for himself. On a more professional philosophical level, a host of commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics carried on the message of the superiority of praxis to pure contemplation, as part of civic humanism's stress on the citizen's duty toward the social group: we are human only by being an active part of society. Referring to the works of Bernardo Segni, Agostino Nifo, Crisostomo Javelli Canapicio, Felice Figliucci, A. Scaino, Antonio Brucioli, Pietro Pomponazzi, Simone Porzio, and Torquato Tasso (Dialoghi ), one of the most authoritative students of this literature, Eugenio Garin (1965: 204), found it to be generally lacking in originality and ultimately sterile, even while it perpetuated an important message of Quattrocento humanism. Yet, for all its relative platitude, what interests us in this once successful production is the continuous vitality of specific motifs of chivalric and courtly virtues, which, rather than being overtly brought forth in treatises with a specific chivalric/courtly theme, were generalized, disguised, and eventually assimilated to classical virtues.
Court and World as Actor's Stage
The motif of sociality as the truest form of morality that is shared by much of Cinquecento ethical speculation becomes a true leitmotif in Stefano Guazzo's (Casale Monferrato 1530–1593) La civil conversatione, where it insistently recurs even ad nauseam.[37] This treatise is remarkable for its impact abroad, which in distant England was almost equal to that of Castiglione. It is significant that Guazzo's rather modest book enjoyed greater influence abroad than the more substantial treatises by Speroni, Piccolomini (Alessandro), Pomponazzi, Nifo, Gelli, and Paruta, which it rather unimaginatively summarized. This was because it explicitly put the accent on those criteria of social conduct that observers of Italian life wanted to hear about.
A Piedmontese courtier, ambassador, and writer, Guazzo came from a noble and wealthy family of courtiers to the marquises of Monferrato and the dukes of Mantua. He continued in his forefathers' footsteps
by serving the same lords as secretary and courtier at different times, following Ludovico Gonzaga of Mantua to France for seven years when the latter became duke of Nevers, then serving as ambassador to Charles IX of France and, in 1566, to Pope Pius IV. Enjoying no fewer than thirty-four Italian editions (twenty-five of them between 1574–1603, but none after 1631), his major work was soon translated into French (ten versions), Latin (fourteen versions), Dutch (two versions), Spanish, and German; of the six English versions (last, London, 1788), most influential was the one by George Pettie (1581, first three books), continued by Bartholomew Young for book 4 and published in complete form in 1586.[38]
Guazzo's title made “conversation” a term for social behavior throughout Europe. It echoed Della Casa's “comune conversazione,” but its twofold acceptation of “pleasant, civilized social intercourse” and “using language as a civilized and civilizing means” was already established, as shown in the “cosmological” thesaurus La fabrica del mondo (1546–1548) of Francesco Alunno (1485–1556). The notion of “civil conversation” and the association of the city with courtesy, urbanity, and civility was manifest in Alunno's definition of urbanità: “urbanità, la civilità”; “urbanità: Lat. urbanitas, facetiae, dicteria, ioci, sales, lepores, cavillatio, dicacitas, argutiae, delitiae; è gratiosa conversatione di cittadini.”[39] It was a list of rhetorical figures covering all forms of wit. Alunno defined conversare as “conversare per praticare insieme,”[40] and cortesia as “beneficence, gift, humane and gracious liberality, with a becoming habit of moderation; so denominated from the courts of good princes where such virtues always shine.”[41]
Although conversation for Guazzo meant social intercourse, his dwelling on verbal civility contributed to the spreading of “conversation”'s more modern acceptation.[42] The lexical choice is an important echo of the humanistic emphasis on language as the foundation and carrier of civilization—“language as the basis of social intercourse,” as Burckhardt recalled with reference to the large section dedicated to linguistic matters and the effective use of language in Castiglione's book 2.[43] Humanists conceived of speech as the essence of humanity, and language as action in dialogue, hence truly “the art of conversation.” “He who wishes to engage successfully in civil conversation,” says Guazzo, “must consider that language is the mirror and portrait of his soul; and that, much as we can tell a coin by its sound, so from the sound of our words we see deeply inside a man's character and his behavior.”[44]
After Castiglione, his earnest concern for the moral substance of the
man of court came to take second place to the art of speaking charmingly and effectively in public. The art of the courtier became a sort of court rhetoric and elegant conversation. Guazzo well represented this narrowing of the horizon according to a widespread trend that was perhaps more pronounced in Spain than elsewhere, as clearly shown by Luis Milán's Spanish translation of Il Cortegiano in El libro entitulado el Cortesano (1561), dedicated to Philip II. Milán's hero must speak well but mostly, it seems, about pleasant, witty, and harmless things: he must be a good motejador. Although this emphasis on orality was to be further developed in France, the Spain of Philip II provided a new breeding ground for the medieval virtue of reticence: besides knowing how to speak well, the new hero, el cortesano, that is “el caballero armado virtuoso, la mejor criatura de la tierra,” has to know when it is more appropriate to keep silent: “bien hablar y callar donde es menester.”[45] We sense here a new twist away from Castiglione's individualistic and comparatively independent agent toward a mere servant at court, prudent master of diplomacy and self-effacement. This twist was already apparent in Pellegro Grimaldi, who in his Discorsi (1543) did not want to discuss the virtues of a complete courtier but only the art of survival, to be summed up in the advice “to keep your mouth shut, as the saying goes,” “tenete (come si dice) la bocca chiusa,” after doing all that pleases the prince—and no more.[46] One of the more than one hundred proverbial sentences that stud Guazzo's Civil conversatione has the same ring: “il tacere a tempo è più lodato che il ben parlare,” “keeping mum at the right moment wins more praise than eloquence.” Guazzo also differs from Castiglione by focusing on real conditions and practical applications. Furthermore, he extends the area of Erasmian “civility” and deemphasizes the service to the prince and the imperative of pleasing the prince with a willful search for a broader social grace that will satisfy the inner man, too.
The dialogue sets Annibale Magnocavalli, a doctor, against the author's brother Guglielmo, who, disappointed by the futility of courtly life, is thinking of retirement from the world. Appearing as Guazzo's spokesman, Annibale argues for a good life in service of society but away from politics and the court. One senses here a disenchanted echo of Guazzo's difficult relationship with the rulers of Monferrato and their ruthlessly absolutist disregard for the statutory freedoms of the recent feudal past. His patron Ludovico Gonzaga was distrusted by Duke Guglielmo of Mantua, whose cousin Vespasiano Gonzaga Marquis of Sabbioneta, his longa manus and strongarm man in Casale, at one
point even ordered all followers of Duke Ludovico of Nevers out of town.[47]
Guazzo basically follows Castiglione in the ordering of topics, even down to the digressive theme of love, although in formal presentation he echoes the Cortegiano only in book 4, which enacts an actual conversation in the course of a banquet, whereas the preceding three books are more like a treatise.[48] Nevertheless, he makes a brave attempt at originality in departing from the established generic patterns. The result is an idiosyncratic nomenclature that strikes the reader as plainer and more down-to-earth than Castiglione's, especially since the discussion divides the topic into public and domestic behavior, including relationships between spouses (as in treatises on the management of the household), and presents a set of virtues and vices that does not remind us specifically of the received schemes. Guazzo's love is a civilizing force whereby a man “waxes more wise”; an honest love makes us capable of finer things; it inflames us with virtuous thoughts and even “stirs up to Poetry” (book 2, vol. 1: 238 of Pettie's 1581 translation). Sprezzatura has become negligenza o sprezzamento, based on avoidance of affettazione (p. 161 ed. Venice: Robino, 1575) and on hiding that arte which is the cultural basis of the elect behavior: “faccia il tutto con arte, ma in maniera che l'arte sia nascosta e paia il tutto a caso” (ibid.: p. 20).[49]
The city, larger setting of the court, is regarded as the seat of civilization and virtuous living, “albergo di virtù,” although it can also be “albergo de' vizi” (book 1). Hence the sphere of civility goes beyond the walls of both the court and the city: “Civile conversation is a vertuous kinde of living in the world . . . [but] to live civilly is not said in respect of the cities, but of the qualities of the mind: so I understand civile conversation not having relation to the citie, but consideration to the manners and conditions which make it civile” (Pettie 1: 56).[50] Thus, beyond the taste for a plainer style, Guazzo's originality vis-à-vis Castiglione lies mainly in this broader scope than that of the man whose whole career is centered on currying favor with superiors and the powerful. Consequently his art of conduct becomes, in the end, potentially incompatible with the dissimulation, the insincerity, the theatrical display, the cultural dilettantism, and the outward ornamentation that life at court seemed to require and that court critics found so objectionable even in Castiglione, regardless of that author's lofty moral concerns.[51] Only transcending the world of the court would satisfy the other protagonist of the dialogue, his brother Guglielmo, at whose instance the dialogue was presumably engaged. His appeal to the broader common
sense and freer manners of the educated gentleman rather than the professional courtier is similar to Della Casa's impatience with insincerity in all forms.
Yet, the centrifugal force of court patterns was such that, while Guazzo was trying to transcend the narrow boundaries of the court, his views of good behavior remained conditioned by the court. Standards of conduct at court were based on a relationship between individual worth and public image. Accordingly, Guazzo's willful advice to be what we want to appear, “tale dee procurar l'uomo d'essere, quale desidera d'apparere,”[52] remained wishful thinking. What the French would later call le qu'en dira-t-on, similar to the punctiliousness of the Spanish pun de onor, is a special dimension of a society that recognizes the importance of our public image: the man of court is all reputation, next to which inner worth is nonexistent or irrelevant. Regretfully, Guazzo had to recognize that “the jugement which wee have to know our selves is not ours, but wee borrow it of others” (Pettie). An attentive critic (Frank Whigham [1983]: 637) has underscored this statement as a sign that reputation had replaced virtue for all practical purposes, and was therefore “radically dependent on the eye and voice of the audience.” Thus, “the ideal courtier is never off-stage” and “public opinion takes precedence over one's own moral perception” (Whigham 634 f.). On this ground Stanley Fish (1988: 260) makes a remark which could be a summary conclusion on the general drift of that courtly ethic we have seen unfolding from the beginning: “so self-consciously rhetorical is courtly life that moral categories themselves are realized as various performative styles.” Fish (261) quotes Heinrich F. Plett's further observation (1983: 613) that “the courtier lives only as a social being and is in private ‘retreat’ . . . a cipher.” The literature of the sophisticated court society of Louis XIV compels us to agree with these characterizations. From his angle, Fish was trying to define Ben Jonson's (1572–1637) poetically productive attempt to protect himself from the cannibalistic nature of the court by reversing roles and offering the truly moral and honest man a way to form an inner society away from the court, within “the tribe of Ben.” This interpretation offers an understanding of Ben Jonson's difficult predicament in reconciling inner honesty with successful adjustment to the ways of the world, especially in the hothouses of princely courts.
Guazzo's attempt to broaden the social scope of good manners was a latter-day index of Renaissance humanism, and was destined to be lost in the reversion to a top-heavy social makeup that came about in
the baroque age. Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675) typically expressed this need for a select speech that in its witty urbanity (arguto, urbano ) would operate as a status symbol, privileging the élite gathered around the prince by sharply differentiating them from the hoi polloi: “differenzia il parlar degli uomini ingegnosi da quel de' plebei.”[53] The motif of urban versus rustic that we have often encountered is here intensified into an explicit defense of the theatricality of court manners and gestures as a functional semiotic pattern, consciously sought and accepted as part of necessary class distinctions within an aristocratic society.
The Novels of Chivalry, 1300–1600
Though politically and socially diverse, all regions of Italy welcomed the courtly culture issuing from northern and southern France. Monferrato and the Venetia were particularly receptive to Occitan poetry. During and after the Albigensian Crusade (1208–1228) several troubadours were attracted to the court of the powerful Marquis Boniface I of Monferrato, and after his death their frequent reproaches to his unworthy successors were an eloquent example of the troubadours' court function of education and moral judgment. The principal area of diffusion of Occitan literature was the Venetia, particularly near Treviso at the court of Ezzelino da Romano's brother Alberico after 1236, and thanks mainly to Uc de Saint-Circ (Faidit). Between 1220 and 1240 Uc authored many of the vidas and razos of Occitan poets and their poems as well as the Donat Proensal, the first grammar of a European vernacular.
It was in that area of northeastern Italy between Trieste and Padua, including the territory of Ferrara, that a Franco-Venetian literature of chivalry flourished in prose and verse from at least the end of the thirteenth century through the beginning of the fifteenth. Its Mischsprache, a hybrid language that, for all its local elements, was basically French, testifies to the vitality of the subject matter, since it was widely enjoyed by illiterate yet diglossic popular audiences in public squares. In that literature a felicitous juxtaposition of the two matières of France and Brittany found its roots, leading to the famous “fusion” (the term goes back to Pio Rajna) or “contamination” of the two rival and somewhat incompatible matters of Charlemagne and King Arthur which has long been credited to Boiardo and Ariosto.
This Franco-Venetian literature, much discussed by Vincenzo Crescini, Adolf Mussafia, Pio Rajna, Giulio Bertoni, and others,[54] reflected
the presence in that region of a strong contingent of aggressive feudal families that controlled the land and dominated the communes. Rolandino of Padua's thirteenth-century chronicle of the March of Treviso maps out the history of the region, including the Venetian hinterland all the way to Verona, as a history of four great families: the Marquises of Este, the Da Romano, the Camposampiero, and the Da Camino.[55] The situation was similar in most of northern Italy including the northwest, in the hands of the Savoy, the Marquises of Monferrato, and those of Saluzzo. Their hold on local communes was much like that of the feudal lords of, say, the duchy of Burgundy, the earldom of Lancaster, and the archbishopric of Cologne.[56]
The successful Entrée d'Espagne of around 1320, the work of a learned and inspired Paduan poet, displayed a mixture of Carolingian warlikeness and Arthurian adventurousness: Roland abandons Charles out of pique and embarks on Oriental wanderings that also entangle him in an erotic situation. Around 1330 the Entrée found its continuation in La prise de Pampelune, dedicated to Nicolò I d'Este (d. 1344) by Nicolò da Verona, a court poet who was probably a doctor of laws at Padua.[57] The text geographically closest to Boiardo and Ariosto was perhaps La Guerra d'Attila, a vast poem of the second half of the fourteenth century. Niccolò da Casola, a Bolognese notary in exile in the Venetia and then Ferrara, composed it by encouragement from his Ferrarese friend Simone Bisone and left it unfinished after more than 37,000 lines in sixteen cantos, with the intended dedication to Count Bonifacio Ariosti, uncle of the Marquis of Ferrara, Aldobrandino d'Este.[58] It shared with both Boiardo and Ariosto not only the clear courtly intent of celebrating the Este family by recalling the brave stand against the Huns of their mythical ancestor, Prince Forest, but also the mixing of knightly valor and romantic love in the story of another legendary ancestor of the Este, the handsome Accarino. Thus was the wedding of the two matières handed over to the later Ferrarese poets.[59]
Both directly and through the intermediary of the Franco-Venetian tradition, the stories of chivalry also filtered into Tuscany by way of the popular jongleurs known as canterini di piazza, or cantimbanchi, the best of whom was Andrea da Barberino (ca. 1370 after 1431). Andrea skillfully used Franco-Venetian as well as Tuscan sources for his several prose romances, including the extremely popular Reali di Francia and Guerino il Meschino. Franco-Venetian and Tuscan traditions came together once again in La Spagna in rima (mid-fifteenth century), where the Tuscan octave was used to clothe the matter of the Entrée d'Espagne
and of the Tuscan Rotta di Roncisvalle in verse. La Spagna also had a shorter Emilian version, surviving in a miniatured codex prepared for Borso d'Este in 1453. Through the Tuscan Orlando and La Spagna in rima the medieval matter transmitted in the Franco-Venetian texts provided a fertile background for the Morgante by Luigi Pulci, a sort of communal court poet who was a member of the salon of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo de' Medici's mother.[60]
Italians performed the remarkable feat of saving lively medieval traditions in both genres of manners and of chivalry when France and Germany tended to abandon them. Except for the prose Lancelot, Chrétien himself and his other French contemporaries and immediate followers ceased to be read after 1400 even in France: they were in any event linguistically unapproachable. After 1500 the glorious stories of medieval knights continued to be of vital importance in European literature thanks, chiefly, to the new Italian versions.
Distortions and original interpretations contained in popular texts became part of the Italian chivalric tradition. The legend of Tristan in particular was reworked into cyclical compilations, foremost among them the Tristano Riccardiano of around 1300, and the still broader summation of Arthurian matter, the Tavola Ritonda, usually dated between 1320 and 1340; both of these were Tuscan. The Tristano shows that the story had taken roots in Italy in a form that was clearly outside the mainstream of courtly love. The adventure between Tristan and the (married) Dama dell'Agua della Spina (chaps. 41–44) is overtly sexual and entails the consummation of avowed desire at the first private encounter. Starting with King Mark, who aggressively rivaled Tristan but hid his jealousy like a courtly dissimulator, the men at court acted enviously and treacherously, Ghedin openly scheming to destroy Tristan. This way of handling Arthurian lore confirms that Petrarca's decisive contribution to the crystallization of courtesy in the love lyric drew directly from the Provençals through the philosophically-bent Stil Nuovo poets, whereas the cantimbanchi who operated in the mixed climate of northern Italian courts and burghers' communes could hardly appreciate the tense purity of erotic sublimation underlying the ideals of chivalry.[61]
L'Entrée d'Espagne, La prise de Pampelune, and La Guerra d'Attila, we have seen, acted as precedents for the “fusion” of genres, but the fusion also had such French precedents as the thirteenth-century Huon de Bordeaux. Pulci's Morgante, too, mixed some characteristics of both genres, though somewhat superficially: his main characters, Orlando and Rinaldo, spent most of their time running after personal adven-
ture, in disregard for Charlemagne's needs. In terms of aesthetic value and impact on future reception, however, Boiardo's and Ariosto's “fusion” was indeed a signal achievement that changed the nature of the genre. H.-R. Jauss (“Theory of Genres”: 82) has neatly commented on the phenomenon in a way that combines his “test of commutation,” designed to discriminate genre from genre, with the relevance of reception or reader-response to determine values and meanings within literary forms.
Despite the gradual assimilation of the heroic epic to the knightly romance in the French tradition, heroes like Roland or Yvain, ladies like Alda or Enide, and lords like Charlemagne or Artus [sic in trans.] were not brought from out of the one genre into the other; a reception through another tradition, the Italian one, was first called for, so that through a fusion of the two French genres into a new one, the so-called romance epic, the originally distinct groups of characters could be transposed into a single structure of action.
The fusion involved more than merging the textual characteristics of two French genres in their mature form; it also brought back some early Celtic elements which had been downgraded or brushed aside altogether. The marvelous of Boiardo and Ariosto gave new life to the giants and fairies of the original Celtic lore, which Chrétien and his followers had replaced with tall knights and sensuous maidens. Together with the fairies, numerous and powerful in intrigue—especially Morgan-le-Fay, (very busy in the background of, say, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight )—Merlin and his acolytes also came back in full glory. They had played a major role in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, but only the thirteenth-century prose romances found room for them within their cyclic treatment of Arthurian matter.
Despite the bold humor of his narrative, critics have attributed to Boiardo (1441–1494) the only true revival of medieval cortesia in a serious vein.[62] Boiardo did feel that the virtues of true chivalry were still gracing the court of Ferrara:
Se onor di corte e di cavalleria
può dar diletto a l'animo virile,
a voi dilettarà l'istoria mia,
gente legiadra, nobile e gentile
che seguite ardimento e cortesia,
la qual mai non dimora in petto vile.[63]
Boiardo's revival of chivalry was made possible by the new climate of refeudalization that was part of the successful Este policy, consciously
pursued, according to recent historical investigation, as an instrument of social and political control.[64]
Croce's elegant formula, which defined Boiardo's poetic inspiration as “il gusto dell'energico e del primitivo” (a taste for primitive energy), can be reset within the framework of our inquiry by correlating such instincts to the traditional military qualities (militia —the theme of the Germanic sagas, vigorously espoused by the reactionary clerical circles), now freshly felt as knightly vis vitalis. But Boiardo's characters are more than just warriors: they can be courtly and courteous knights. Beyond the enjoyment of the supremely entertaining spectacle of tall tales, the more serious part of Boiardo's attitude includes a perception of chivalric virtù that is internal, made of inner control of the will, relying on force but with the help of more courtierly astuzia, and resulting from an eager quest for self-discovery. It implies subordination of the individual to the rules of the ideal chivalric code, serving others (lord or lady) rather than individual interest, and it includes pietà prevailing over ira, humane compassion above soldierly anger. At the conclusion of a duel the winner will show respect for the dignity of his worthy rival. Both Christians and pagans can possess this virtù, whose perfect hero is Brandimarte (first a pagan, then a Christian): “un Saracin, che un altro sì perfetto / non ha la terra che è dal mar voltata / . . . / ma sopra tutto la persona umana / era cortese, il suo leggiadro core / fu sempre acceso da gentile amore.”[65]
One of the most memorable passages of the Orlando Innamorato is the friendly argument between Orlando and Agricane when they are resting for the night before resuming their mortal duel (1.18.41–45). Orlando contrasts Agricane's barbarous version of knighthood as mere rule of force with his own courtly view of it as made of arms and studies—the ancient epic topos of sapientia and fortitudo in a Renaissance setting, but well anticipated by the medieval image of the literate knight at court. In his spirited way of tackling old stories and his own fitting inventions, Boiardo coupled cortesia with allegrezza (e.g., OI 2.1.2), reminding us of the hilaritas the curiales expected in their successful leaders, despite the frowns this caused among ascetic reformers.
Ariosto continued Boiardo's juxtaposition of knightly “manliness” to true courtesy in the form of joining sapientia to fortitudo (see Orlando Furioso 20.1–20.2, extending it to women who have also excelled, some in arms, like Camilla, and some in letters, like Sappho: “Le donne antique hanno mirabil cose / fatto ne l'arme e nelle sacre muse”).[66] A synthesis of the basic themes of the medieval lyric, epic, and romance, added to the ironic echo of Virgil's and Homer's exclusive references to
their hero's deeds, is programmatically achieved by Ariosto from his very first octave, a lucid index of his power of concentration in a deceptively plain-sounding “median” style. “Le donne e i cavalier, I'arme e gli amori, / le cortesie, I'audaci imprese io canto”: the deeds of prowess performed by knights out of courtois love for their ladies will be the subject of his singing, he says—military valor (militia ), that is, aimed at winning a high lady's love.[67] The double chiasmus ties together the traditional ingredients.
Title notwithstanding, from the vantage point of the poem's courtly function, namely of winning the favor of the Este patrons, the main character is Ruggiero:
Ruggier, come in ciascun suo degno gesto,
d'alto valor, di cortesia solea
dimostrar chiaro segno e manifesto,
e sempre più magnanimo apparea.
(OF 41.4.1–4)
The career of this paragon of chivalry makes a true Bildungsroman, a novel of education of the hero who, like Perceval, gradually finds his way. From its beginning Ruggiero's career is mapped on the pattern of the Perceval story. He starts out bumbling, like Perceval/Parzival, then takes, or tries to take Angelica, just as Parzival had symbolically “raped” Jeschute in Wolfram, and finally goes through the perilous experience of Alcina's Garden of Pleasure.[68] Perceval's mother had kept him in the wilderness in order to avoid his falling victim to the same passion of chivalry that had caused the deaths of both his father and his brothers. Likewise Ruggiero is isolated by his tutor or adoptive father, Atlante, within the impassable walls of a magic castle: this is meant to forestall his destiny, which Atlante knows will lead him to become a Christian in order to marry Bradamante. His life is surrounded by magic, like the mysterious events that studded Perceval's growth into manhood. Ruggiero has to overcome this string of enchantments by going through several wrong moral choices (like his entrapment in Alcina's garden) and recovering from their consequences; he then finds his way painfully by winning many tests of chivalric prowess, and finally attains the necessary degree of wisdom. It is precisely in Alcina's garden that Ruggiero makes a formal profession of courtliness and chivalry (6.80):
Ruggier rispose: “Non ch'una battaglia,
ma per voi sarò pronto a farne cento:
di mia persona, in tutto quel che vaglia,
fatene voi secondo il vostro intento;
che la cagion ch'io vesto piastra e maglia
non è per guadagnar terre né argento,
ma sol per farne beneficio altrui,
tanto più a belle donne come vui.”[69]
Even Orlando's madness was not entirely a novel idea, since it had precedents in both Yvain/Iwein and Perceval/Parzival. Yvain went mad when his wife abandoned him for an unintentional infraction of the code (forgetting his appointment with her); Parzival when, out of selfpity for having failed to ask the pertinent question of the ailing Anfortas, he renounced his saintly adviser Gurnemantz and even God, thus entering upon his period of Goteshaz, “hatred of God.” Inner moral substance and sense of purpose constitute true humanity, and they are the consequence of suffering and the realization of error, as again in the cases of Ruggiero and Orlando. Rodomonte himself, a new Starcatherus, brutal hero of pure militia, and in feudal terms the very image of the great lord who recognizes no superior and goes it alone, shares with Ruggiero and Orlando the fate of the warrior who will find out that he needs, above all, love, but that love must be won by loving truly, loyally, and through hard tests.
The French and German poets of romances, especially Chrétien, Hartmann, and Gottfried, had often taken a critical view of Arthur's court as guilty of formality of manners and superficiality of ethic. Mutatis mutandis, this theme surfaces again in the Orlando Furioso. One glaring case is Rinaldo's dogged and ill-humored defense of Gabrina in full awareness of her perfidy (apparently a derivation of the complicated episode of the “demoiselle toute chenue” in the prose Lancelot, the obnoxious hag who obliges Lancelot to abandon the rescue of Guenièvre in order to pursue all sorts of unpalatable services to her).[70] The reader is struck by this supremely humorous example of empty formalism in the performance of courtly rules, which result not in justice but only in absurd constraints on behavior. In Boiardo and Ariosto, Doristella, Origille, and Gabrina echo the unworthy ladies Perceval and Gauvain served in Chrétien's poem, where one of them was declared to be worse than Satan (“pire que Sathanas,” Perceval v. 7456). Such episodes also easily remind us of Yvain (and Hartmann's Iwein ): Arthur's court was unable to recognize Yvain in the Knight of the Lion and gave aid to the devious Meleaganz and to Lunete's undeserving older sister, while it denied it to the virtuous Lunete as well as to Gauvain's brother-in-law. In the same story the seneschal Kay was typical as a bad and dishonest
judge of right and wrong, although even the most exemplary knights could act quite irresponsibly.
Ariosto's famous irony has seldom been traced further back than to Boiardo or, perhaps, to Pulci, but recent criticism has stressed (perhaps overstressed and overread) Chrétien's irony and that of succeeding poets of Arthurian romances (signally Hartmann and Gottfried) as part of that critical stance they often seemed to share toward the moral irresponsibility of the Arthurian court. In the prose cycles this irresponsibility became a cause of the court's downfall. We cannot tell whether Ariosto could detect such signs of ironic treatment in his French sources, or rather, if he did, he could attribute it to authorial intentions. Yet it is reasonable to assume that, rather than by his personality alone, his own unmistakable mood was induced at least in part by the very nature of his sources as he read them. The genre was ready for full parodic treatment of the kind we find in Teofilo Folengo's (d. 1544) burlesque Baldus, an inspiration to Rabelais for the way it echoed the popular spirit of reversal of roles and subversion of sociocultural hierarchies (in Bakhtin's sense).
On a more general level bordering on the metaphysical, this way of burlesquing the knight (an inherent aspect of the representation of the hero from the earliest romances) marks an artistic distancing from an idealized self-image which ostensibly does not coincide with a given social reality. The chivalrous and courtly knight is not simply a warrior or an aristocrat: his nobility is more ideal than social.[71] Ariosto was the supreme master of this expression of ironic detachment, but it was characteristic of the genre to encourage the knight to look at himself critically. In a sense, all literature holds up an ideal dream of beauty and perfection at the same time that it contains the artistic consciousness of it as a fictional, though powerfully functional, dream. Lancelot, Gawain, Yvain, and Tristan are monumental embodiments of the divergence between ideal and reality: their sublime troubles are those of the inner incoherence of that very dream.
Ariosto's relationship to his society was one of both acceptance and resistance: he accepted the chivalric interests of the refeudalized Ferrara but he also knew that he had not been born to be a knight. In his humorous reference to Ippolito turning him from a poet into a knight (“di poeta cavallar mi feo,” Satire 6: 238) the choice of the deprecatory form cavallaro, “horseman,” betrays his protest at being forced to forego the sublime pleasures of his poetic vocation for the unwanted burdens of courtierly activities. Laying to rest De Sanctis's and Croce's image of a
poet willfully unconcerned with social realities, recent Ariosto criticism has brought forth the image of a man who brilliantly expressed his complex Weltanschauung by bending the received literary forms to his advantage. His “cosmic harmony” is a controlled form for a bitter view of the human condition.[72]
The reception of Ariosto's masterpiece includes the invidious comparison with Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and vice versa, in a farflung controversy that unfolded largely at the Este court of Ferrara. One aspect of the classicistic reaction to the Furioso is particularly relevant here. After Giraldi Cinthio's (1504–1573) and Nicolucci Pigna's (1530–1575) defenses of Ariosto's narrative format in 1554, the influence of the growing Aristotelianism persuaded many a critic, from Sperone Speroni (1501–1588) to the young Torquato Tasso (1562 preface to the Rinaldo ), Antonio Minturno (1563), Ludovico Castelvetro, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Filippo Sassetti (1575/1576), to voice a lively string of demurrers against elements of Ariosto's narrative method that contradicted basic Aristotelian norms. The polemic surrounding the Furioso had to do with the classicistic notion of regular genre, namely a literary form based on rational rules authorized and exemplified (possibly, also theorized) by ancient models and authors. This definition of genres and attendant rules was, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized, nothing but an invention of the Italian Cinquecento critics. Giraldi Cinthio, for one, first labeled the Furioso as a romanzo cavalleresco, a new, modern type of work with its own privileges.[73] The ensuing classic-minded critics insisted on classifying the romances as a form of epic (as Tasso continued to do until his Discorsi of 1594), hence subject to the typical strictures of that genre, with the resulting exclusion of some of the most salient features of such works as the Furioso —and just about all of the most valid works of imagination, including, first and foremost, the Divina Commedia.
Specifically at issue were, first, the frequent authorial interventions in the form of (ironic) moral judgments on action and characters, especially in the exordia to the cantos; second, the constant interruptions of the action in order to shift from one to another of the plot's numerous threads. Chapter 24 of Aristotle's Poetics was the authority the classicists repeatedly invoked against authorial comments and infractions of narrative continuity, stigmatized as violations of verisimilitude and unity, respectively. In our own time Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) first pointed out the modern narratological bias against authorial presence, tracing it back to Flaubert and Henry
James, but it must be further historicized as a neoclassic Aristotelian norm, not shared by medieval narrators, who, qua narrators, were surely no less “credible” for breaking that norm.[74] As noted, such medieval epics as the Nibelungenlied also shared the medieval habit of ironic intervention.[75]
Ariosto clearly knew some of his medieval antecedents, at least through the Franco-Venetian versions, but the intentional obliteration of medieval lore that characterized the Renaissance induced the Cinquecento critics to ignore all that matter. Thus, typically, Sperone Speroni (probably shortly after 1560) rejected Giraldi Cinthio's claim that Ariosto's addresses to the reader carried on the oral minstrels' need to address their audiences at the beginning of each new episode in the course of their recitations. For Speroni such exordia were inventions of Boiardo and it was madness, “una pazzia,” to assume that they were a function of the recitation, just as Dante's or Petrarca's addresses to the reader at the beginning of cantos (in the Commedia and the Trionfi ) had nothing to do with such compositions being sung.[76] Being part of the argument against the romanzi, this discourse invested the whole of that glorious episode of medieval literature.
As to the second critique, directed to the structural interruptions, Giraldi and Pigna felt that these much discussed incidents of “interlacing” enhanced the general suspense and held the reader's attention, whereas the more classic-minded critics considered them nothing but violations of the hallowed Aristotelian principle of unity, frustrating to the reader and unredeemable on any ground.[77] Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–1582), however, sagaciously defended the technique as early as 1555 in his Art poétique, specifically mentioning the French romans and their imitator Ariosto, and adducing the argument that the interruptions both provided a welcome suspense and heightened the readers' interest.[78]
We remember that ironic authorial comments as well as the interlacing technique that is characteristic of Boiardo's narrative and, more spectacularly still, Ariosto's, had a well-tested antecedent in Chrétien, Gottfried, Wolfram, and, especially for the practice of interlacing, the authors of the anonymous prose romances of the Vulgate Lancelot/Grail cycle. Both features also distinguished the romance from the classical epic. Eugène Vinaver has masterfully analyzed the precedents of interlacing, with particular regard to their landmark outcome in Sir Thomas Malory's (d. 1471) Le Morte Darthur.[79] The matter is related to the structural and formal character of the romance which, starting
with Chrétien, involved a basic bipolarity—a much debated subject ever since the pioneering study of Wilhelm Kellermann.[80] Chrétien's romances are built on a dual set of adventures involving two heroes or two couples: Alexandre/Soredamors and Cligès/Fenice in Cligès, Gauvain and Lancelot in Le chevalier de la charrete, Gauvain and Yvain in Yvain, and Gauvain and Perceval in Perceval (in Erec the division consists in the two phases of the hero's career). In some instances the two heroes occupy the two parts of a poem, in others their adventures intertwine. This structural duality further developed into a constitutive multiplicity of juxtaposed and integrated stories of individual knights which extended into their full genealogies—a narrative schema that became characteristic of the thirteenth-century prose cycles. The individual found his place in society by discovering his identity in a series of adventures outside society, specifically, outside Arthur's court. In the early romances the hero could learn to live without, above, or against Arthurian society, but this produced either an uncourtly opposition that the society could not abide (this was Tristan's case) or the discovery of a transcendental, mystical salvation higher than the ways of ordinary society (as in Perceval).
More generally, the Aristotelian critics blamed the romances still available to them, namely the cyclic compilations in prose and then Boiardo's and Ariosto's poems, for lack of unity in the plot and unconcern for the reader's ability to keep track of the plot as a whole.[81] This remained Tasso's main objection in his Discorsi del poema eroico (1594).[82] Nevertheless, in both Innamorato and Furioso the specific feature of interlacing, although carried to extreme consequences, contained a basic finality and order. The heroes find their goal at last by overcoming the dispersive obstacles interposed by moral and military enemies. In so doing they either return to their point of origin, like Orlando and Rinaldo returning to the war after the pursuit of Angelica, or they find their true goal, like Ruggiero and Bradamante achieving their fateful union.
Tasso and the Counter-Reformation
Tasso's (1544–1595) difficult predicament vis-à-vis the chivalric tradition and his personal difficulties in writing his masterpiece, including his obsessive need for the Inquisitors' approval, can be better understood if we take into account the widespread criticism against the genre
he had chosen. The arguments against court and chivalry continued to be voiced in the new climate of the Counter-Reformation with specific reference to the later chivalric literature. One of the most authoritative critiques within ecclesiastical milieus was the Bibliotheca selecta (1593) by the Mantuan Jesuit, polymath, and diplomat Antonio Possevino. In this ponderous, systematic assessment of the vast bibliographic material available to contemporary teachers of every academic subject, Possevino specifically proscribed all chivalric literature, including the Orlando Furioso, for its immoral, heretical influence on the nobility.[83] In addition to the moralism of medieval memory, Possevino reiterated the classicistic recourse to the “Aristotelian” rules of imitation of nature, verisimilitude, and regularity of plot.
Besides their historic derivation from the ancient pastoral, Tasso's Aminta (1573) and Battista Guarini's Pastor Fido (definitive edition 1602), respectively historic models for the pastoral drama and the “tragicomic” genre, are ideally linked to the Provençal pastorela and French medieval pastourelle in the introduction of shepherdesses engaged in a possibly equal relationship with courtier/knights. This kind of pastoral could occasionally be set in a rarefied dream-like climate, the best examples of which are possibly Gavaudan's two pastorelas “Desamparatz, ses companho” and “L'autre dia, per un mati” as well as Walther von der Vogelweide's “Nemt, vrouwe, disen kranz.”[84] Whereas the pastorela usually represented the shepherdess as a plaything to be taken advantage of as a member of the subhuman peasant class, the vilans, Marcabru turned it into a confrontation between the absurd arrogance of the knight and the subtle cleverness of the peasant girl, who sends him packing as out of place and out of turn. Gavaudan (fl. ca. 1195–1220) is remarkable for giving the genre a further twist: the knight finds consolation for the disappointments of the court in a relationship with a shepherdess who becomes his true love. Gavaudan considered himself unusual: “eu no sui pars als autres trobadors,” “I am not like other troubadours.” Indeed, he went both beyond the pastoral genre and beyond courtly love itself. Walther, in his turn, presented the motif of love for a shepherdess as the dream of a pleasant and wholesome sexual adventure—a dream because the reality of a class-conscious society made such a solution preposterous. Somewhat similarly, the dreamlike world of the Aminta, with its escapist thrust away from the strictures of the court, expresses the consciousness that the reality of a necessarily repressive society does not allow us such harmoniously natural behavior—and that we are the worse for it.
The nostalgic dream of a gentle chivalrous existence that still inspired Boiardo returns for a moment in Tasso, who, however, was deeply troubled by the remoteness of chivalrous virtues from the realities of court life. After dreaming about bygone ideals in his youthful Rinaldo, in the great work of his maturity, the Gerusalemme liberata (1581), he represented the knightly type in the romantic isolation of Tancredi, and the courtier type in Gernando. The planned contrast between the gentle Tancredi and the savage Argante is also a contrast between the true chivalrous knight and the barbarous warrior who recognizes no rule but his own strength (militia in its pure state). See how Tancredi addresses his opponent (6.36, 1–4):
Anima vile,
che ancor nelle vittorie infame sei,
qual titolo di laude alto e gentile
da modi attendi sì scortesi e rei?
And Argante dies as a Starcatherus would have wanted to die (19.26, 6–8):
Minacciava, morendo, e non languìa,
superbi, formidabili e feroci
gli ultimi moti fur, l'ultime voci.
The sentimental rejection of the court is best represented by powerful indirection in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds: just as she gives up (temporarily, as Tasso himself was only ever able to do) by withdrawing from the real world of the court, she listens to the disenchanted courtier who has found wisdom and peace in the wilderness, where he now leads the life of a shepherd (Gerusalemme liberata 7.12 f.). The Christian form Tasso newly imposes on the chivalric epic involves once again the fusion of Carolingian and Arthurian in the juxtaposition of centralized authority under loyalty to Godfrey, the leader selected by heaven, and the knights' centrifugal instinct to wander off on their own search for honor and individual happiness (signally, Rinaldo and Tancredi).[85] The order implied in the submission to the collective Christian ideals and goals is threatened by the anarchic thrust of sensuality and passion, love and honor. This is the new aspect of the joining of the epic and the romantic, the new predicament of the “fusion” of genres, which in Ariosto had achieved a sort of happy harmony, but again showed its inherent, almost irreconcilable tension in Tasso, the poet of the manneristic culture of the Counter-Reformation.
Much as he dreamed of achieving a reconciliation of the culture of the knight and the culture of the prince, the feudal dream of independence and the orderly centralization under a benevolent and beneficent monarch, he ultimately failed in his professed purpose since what he did express was, above all, the inescapable disjunction between will and instincts, faith and desire, intellect and heart. The need for authoritarian order that was sanctioned by the Counter-Reformation went together with the developing need for a classicism based on the Aristotelian rules. The Jerusalem Delivered gave poetic voice to both.
Although he never managed to publish them as a whole, Tasso originally conceived his Dialoghi in 1578 as a comprehensive treatment of the vita activa in the form of the basic moral values affecting the life of the man of court—a crucial question for this life-long courtier, son of a diplomat courtier, and recipient of the best schooling a courtier's son could hope for.[86] The first dialogue, Il Forno overo della nobiltà (1580, second version 1585),[87] spoke of the high nobility as made of the illustrissimi (the princes, together with the molto illustri, i.e., their grand feudatories and the noblest knights of court) and the illustri (the higher city magistrates and the high office holders at court).
Tasso's lucubrations on courtly life come forth most significantly in another dialogue, Il Malpiglio overo de la corte (probably 1585), where he also discusses whether Castiglione's portrait of his subject is limited by the historical vicissitudes that affect and change all human affairs. He concludes that Castiglione had provided a Platonic, transcendentally philosophical, and universal image of ideal value for all times and places.[88] When he summarizes his conclusions, Tasso lists the basic virtues with terms that are significantly close to Aristotle's list as Dante had translated it: fortezza, magnanimità, magnificenza, liberalità, cortesia, modestia, verità, affabilità, and piacevolezza.[89] He defines courtliness as exercise of chivalry in order to win the favor of the prince while avoiding the envy of courtiers. These two goals are mutually exclusive, so real skills must be downplayed. Chivalry consists of physical aptitudes for riding and fencing as well as spiritual virtues, good mores and sociable manners. Knowledge of all disciplines and arts elicits esteem, hence favor. Fortitude and liberality must be exercized with extreme prudence and humility in obeying the prince, so as to avoid both envy and the prince's suspicion. Hence modestia is also necessary as a constant concealment of our true excellence: “Dunque appari il cortigiano più tosto d'occultare che di apparere,” “the courtier must sooner learn to conceal than to seem.”[90] This twist in the argument reveals a disen-
chantment from the earlier faith in the potential inherent in the man of court or public figure. The prince was becoming more of a tyrant, and the courtier an opportunistic social ornament. Differently from Castiglione's more sanguine approach, this new portrait, where Dante's and Aristotle's “intellectual” virtue of prudence, a necessary guide to all the “moral” virtues, has become the paramount consideration (“la principal virtù delle corti”), is said to apply to Tasso's time, since dissimulation has become a major virtue: “in questi tempi, in cui l'infinger è una de le maggior virtù.”[91] Not only is the new courtier reduced to the role of humble servant to the prince—serving even by writing court poetry—he has also been denied access to the political realm that was his predecessors' true vital space. In Tasso's pages that refer to the court, there is no suggestion of political involvement.[92]
We are now approaching the end of the Italian segment of our complex subject, and it is time to take stock of some crucial threads in our story. By tracing the progress of literary forms and themes through the social ambience of the Italian courts and their centrifugal impact on the life of the public squares, I have singled out some typical elements that remained constant as part of an underlying ideology and that take us back to the early manifestations of courtly chivalry, even including some original ingredients of the magical setting of wandering knights and their relatives, the charismatic men of court. We have witnessed the continuity of the courtly heritage in such basic literary attitudes as irony and moral distancing. In a similar pattern of continuity, the early anticourt arguments have kept coming back in new settings and with a renewed sense of purpose.