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]