Also known as Baldesar Castiglione. Born: Casatico, territory of Mantua, 6 December 1478. Education: Studied Latin and Greek at the school of Giorgio Merula and Demetrio Calcondila, Milan, early 1490s. Family: Married Ippolita Torelli in 1516 (died 1520); one son and two daughters. Career: Attended the Court of Ludovico Sforza (”il Moro”) in Milan, c. 1494-99; returned to Mantua, 1499, and entered service of the French-sponsored Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, as diplomat and military commissioner: participated in the Battle of Garigliano against the Spanish-controlled Vice-royalty of Naples, 1503; entered the service of Guidobaldo di Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and his wife Elisabetta, 1504: commanded 50 men-at-arms to recapture lost territory for Urbino, 1504; travelled to England to receive the Order of the Garter from Henry VII, 1506; ambassador in Milan, 1507; on death of Guidobaldo, 1508, continued service with his successor, Francesco Maria, nephew of Pope Julius II; participated with papal forces in the Romagna campaign against Venice,1509, the siege of Mirandola, 1511, and the reconquest of Romagna and Emilia after the Battle of Ravenna, 1512; wrote the prologue for La calandria by Dovizi da Bibbiena, q.v., 1513; ambassador in Rome on the death of Julius II and election of Leo X, 1513; received the castle of Novilara for his diplomatic and literary services, 1513, but settled in Rome as ambassador, 1514-16; followed Francesco Maria into exile in Mantua after the conquest of Urbino by papal forces, 1516; re-established stable relations between Rome and Mantua, 1519; resettled in Rome, 1520, and remained in the service of Rome and Mantua, 1520-24; neutral broker between Milan, France, and Spain to decide the fate of Lombardy, 1524; nuncio for Pope Clement VII at the Court of Emperor Charles V, Madrid, 1525-29. Died: 1529.
Publications
Collections
Opere volgari e latine, edited by G.A. and G. Volpi. 1733.
Opere di Baldassarre Castiglione e Giovanni Della Casa, edited by G. Prezzolini. 1937.
Il libro del cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori, edited by Bruno Maier. 1955; second edition, 1964; third, supplemented edition, 1981.
Opere di Baldassarre Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Carlo Cordie. 1960.
Prose
Il libro del cortegiano. 1528; edited by Vittorio Cian, 1894, revised editions, 1910, 1929, and 1947, also edited by G. Preti, 1960, Ettore Bonora, 1972, Salvator Battaglia, 1988, and Carlo Cordie, 1991; as The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561, reprinted 1974; also translated by Robert Samber, 1724; Leonard Eckstein, 1901; Charles Singleton, 1959; George Bull, 1967.
Plays
Il tirsi, with Cesare Gonzaga (produced 1506). 1553; edited by F. Torraca, in Teatro italiano dei seccoli XII-XV, 1885.
Other
L’epistola ad regem Henricum de Guidubaldo Urbini duce. 1513.
Lettere (includes the Latin poetry and vernacular works). 2 vols., 1769-71.
Lettere inedite o rari, edited by G. Gorini. 1969.
Tutte le opere: Lettere, edited by Guido La Rocca. 1978.
Critical Studies:
Baldassarre Castiglione, the Perfect Courtier: His Life and Letters by Julia Cartwright, 2 vols., 1908; Baldassarre Castiglione by G. Bongiovanni, 1929; Baldassarre Castiglione: Il cortegiano, il letterato, il politico by A. Vicinelli, 1931; La lingua di Baldassarre Castiglione, 1942, and Un illustre nunzio pontificio del Rinascimento: Baldassarre Castiglione, 1951, both by Vittorio Cian; Baldassarre Castiglione: La sua personalita; la sua prosa by Mario Rossi, 1946; Il Cortegiano nella trattatistica del Rinascimento by G. Toffanin, 1962; La seconda redazione del Cortegiano di Baldassare Castiglione edited by Ghino Ghinassi, 1968; Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier by Wayne A. Rebhorn, 1978; La misura e la grazia sul Libro del cortegiano by Antonio Gagliardi, 1989; The Economy of Human Relations: Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano by Joseph D. Falvo, 1992; The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano by Peter Burke, 1996; Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism by Christine Raffini, 1998; Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness by Peter DeSa Wiggins, 2000; The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books by Harry Berger Jr., 2000.
Combining a noble upbringing with a humanistic education, Baldassare Castiglione’s life—as a soldier, diplomat, courtier, and papal legate—never gave him the freedom to develop a literary career in the generation of Bembo, Ariosto, and Machiavelli, and gave rise to his Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) for which he is best remembered, as well as an eclogue, Il tirsi, and Latin and Italian verses. He is also remembered for a production at Urbino in 1513 of Bibbiena’s comedy, La Calandria (The Follies of Calandro), for which it was long held that he had written a prologue.
The genesis of The Book of the Courtier took place at, and the work was modelled on, the court of Urbino under Francesco Gonzaga, where Castiglione resided between 1504 and 1513, though it is really more of a nostalgic memoir of the rule of Frederico da Montefeltro some years before. This exposition of the qualities of the ideal courtier, the archetype and model for many treatises on behaviour and books of manners that were to follow, was circulated among scholars for suggestions, debate, and corrections from the time of its inception in 1507-08 until publication in 1528, and translated the Ciceronian idea of the perfect orator (De Oratore) into the Renaissance concept of a manual and formula for the perfectibility of the gentleman (and lady) at court. Others had written treatises for the perfect cardinal (Cortese) and the perfect prince (Machiavelli). Yet the realism of Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince) contrasted starkly with the idealism of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier: like the theoretical writings on language by Bembo, the latter was a refined and cultivated literary ideal, based as much on cultural antecedents and tradition as on observed experience at the court of Urbino. Castiglione’s treatise provided a model for the educated and cultivated gentleman at court (the basic social structure for the power base and government of many European states, and most, though not all, of the Italian states in the Renaissance period) and projected into the arena of politics and government the idea of the polymath, an educated ideal of the multi-talented humanist, an ideal that has had a measurable impact on subsequent educational systems. All this was articulated as the ideal in spite of the traditional clash of interests between the form of the principality as an absolutist state and the freedom of an artist’s creativity, enshrined in the complaints of writers from Ariosto to Tasso (and projected by the iconoclasm or anti-classicism of satirists like Aretino), which began in Castiglione’s own generation and continued long after him. By 1525, Castiglione’s refined ideal courtier had its antidote in the satire of the papal court in Aretino’s courtesan (La cortigiana), since, as noted, the book had been widely read long before its official publication.
The Book of the Courtier identifies the qualities a successful courtier should possess, from the martial arts to artistic flair in poetry and music, from sprezzatura (an effortless gracefulness in accomplishments that eschews the boastful and arrogant) to a finely developed aesthetic sense. Already we have the formula for a gentleman which was to be widely influential. But the gentleman must have his mate, and the donna di palazzo is given similar arts and graces (and similar artfulness and gracefulness) in the work, and a notable equality with man that is in tune with the prominence of women (as warriors, as poetesses, as governors) in the society of Ariosto and Castiglione. On the appropriate language for discourse (as opposed to writing) Castiglione is more pragmatic than Bembo is in Le prose della volgar lingua, since usage is admitted as arbiter, though in the conclusion to The Book of the Courtier the supremacy of the Platonic ideals of Ficino is given to Bembo to expound. In broadest outline then, The Book of the Courtier is a discussion between Castiglione’s authoritative contemporaries, and roughly approximates to the three ages of man: youth, maturity, and old age. The first part, from Ludoviso di Canossa and Federico Fregoso, represents the earthly and humanistic courtier; the second, from Ottaviano Fregoso, projects the ideal courtier as wise counsellor to the prince; whereas the third proposes the sublimation of love into the metaphysical Neoplatonic philosophy of Ficino, through the mouth of Pietro Bembo.
Politically, of course, The Book of the Courtier had to favour the form of a principality, for this is its explicit frame of reference; but the work does not blind itself to other possibilities, and contemporary ”mixed” forms of government (from Machiavelli in the most recent exposition) find their way in with election of councils of nobles and the people, even if, with the image of Duke Federico da Montefeltro in the background as memory and inspiration, the figure of the prince is benignly paternalistic, caring, civilizing, and morally upright—at some remove, therefore, from the opportunism and pragmatism of the Machiavellian idea. As a window on the world of the Italian Renaissance—whether escapist fantasy fossilized in an already outdated cultural ideal, or a manual for courtly deportment and a survival package in an age of rapidly changing values—The Book of the Courtier has had an enduring influence on educational and political thinking ever since it was written, and seems resolutely contemporary in several of its themes—in man’s sense of cultural identity and the function of the arts in his make-up and personal ambitions, in the notion of mens sana in corpore sano, and, not least, in the long debate between service (servility) and freedom in politics.
