In this sense Il cortegiano functions as a discourse that appears to be open as it purports to tell us what we need to do to succeed in learning a specific art as a form of specialized knowledge but is indeed secretive and mystifying in providing us with the real, viable means for success in the profession of courtiership. Read this book and you are edified about what it means to be an exemplary courtier but not so much about how to actually become such a courtier by acquiring the art underpinning the profession through careful preparation and training. The artfulness of Il cortegiano, in the sense of its strategic cleverness as cunning intelligence (metis), is to make people reading it believe from the outset that there is in fact an art underpinning the profession of courtiership—that courtiership possesses a distinct techne in the classical sense of the term as a rational, communicable, rule-bound, and reliable form of highly specialized, determinate knowledge that one can learn through some sort of training, as Cicero would seek to offer us, for instance, in his likewise dialogue-structured De oratore. But in truth, Castiglione does not systematically teach us how to acquire that specialized knowledge, and he does not tell us how to acquire the requisite training to develop into a masterful courtier. Or rather, to frame the matter slightly differently, Castiglione’s book overtly says that grace can be acquired, but then Castiglione’s contention conveyed as an assertion turns out to be, at least upon closer examination, somewhat at odds with what the book actually does insofar as Castiglione never teaches us really how to acquire grace through preparatory training, either by instructing us systematically within his book itself how to do so, by pointing to some other book he wrote that will show us how to do so, or by pointing to other people’s books that will authoritatively show us how to do so. We may therefore initially be willing, at least at first glance, to concede that grace—as Castiglione envisions it—is not beyond the reach of art, that it is indeed something that can be acquired through “labor, industry, and care,” and that it is therefore something that is not enigmatic or transcendent in form, a sort of ineffable nescio quid. But upon further reflection as we progress through the book we may also legitimately wonder, since we are never actually indoctrinated into a practical method of training to acquire grace, if people are not in fact “born” rather than “made” to be courtiers—if, in the end, contrary to what we were led to expect from the outset of Il cortegiano, there is simply a mysterious quality bestowed on people that allows one person to succeed in the profession of courtiership while another is condemned to fail at it no matter how hard that individual person works at it with “industry, labor, and care” and no matter how much that person seems, for all intents and purposes, to possess a natural inclination to succeed as a courtier and thus seems to have precisely the right stuff to become an exemplary one.104
In the most obvious sense, this “ruse,” as I see it, of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully allows Castiglione to persuade the ruling elite that courtiership itself is a socially valuable profession with a specialized knowledge underpinning it as an art. After reading this book with its sweeping nostalgia, its elegant, periodic prose suavely expressed in the vernacular, its classicizing models so thoroughly absorbed into a signature style, and its colorful cast of (for the most part) delightful male characters populating it, what eager, ambitious man aspiring to be part of the cultural elite in sixteenth-century Italy wouldn’t have wanted to become a courtier, value courtiership, and hang out in a court exercising sprezzatura all day long? Who wouldn’t have wanted to applaud these courtiers who charm each other, as well as the delightful elegant ladies of the court, for so many hours of the day? Who wouldn’t have wanted to learn how to be like them by trying to follow their examples (or those of other praiseworthy courtiers) and then in turn be conceptually applauded by others when one finally becomes after years of practice an esteemed courtier too? Who wouldn’t, to borrow the still persistent language of the 1950s in our own culture, have wanted to be so damn cool? But at the same time, this ruse of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully permits those very same professionals who somehow already mysteriously possess sprezzatura to close ranks and actually control social mobility, not enhance it, by effectively winking at one another from across the room as they recognize who belongs, who doesn’t, who is a boor, who isn’t, who is “cool,” who isn’t. What is more, this ruse of inviting everyone to admire those who can play the game of courtiership successfully allows Castiglione to define taste for the prince, much as Vasari teaches taste for potential collectors and consumers of visual art as he clarifies what to look for when viewing “excellent” painting, sculpture, and architecture. In this way, Castiglione’s book serves once more as a signaling device, defining who is “in,” who is “out.” He, like Vasari, is articulating “excellence,” both as an aesthetic quality and as a marker of social and cultural distinction.
Put differently, if in the classical period the ruling elite might potentially fear the Promethean upstarts seeking to advance themselves through the acquisition of a techne as a form of specialized knowledge, thus opening up fantasies of “unregulated mobility” in the minds of those who occupied a secure, privileged station in society, here it is the professionals themselves who are fearing upstarts within their ranks, the very upstarts Castiglione seems to invite into his ranks as he reveals so openly the putative rules by which one can become a courtier in the spirit of full disclosure yet effectively excludes from the ranks of courtiership by making it virtually impossible, at least through a reading of Il cortegiano, for those aspiring newcomers who lack grace and good judgment from the outset to acquire the reliable mechanisms to prepare them to become, through “labor, industry, and care,” just like all those admired and exemplary courtiers portrayed together in Urbino as they ever so fashionably entertain each other for four festive evenings in a row. Castiglione’s book in this way functions less to inculcate a precise art that allows for access to his “new profession”—it can hardly be construed in this respect as a full-fledged prescriptive how-to book or primer for social mobility105—and more to establish “taste” by informing a prince what behavioral qualities he should look for in a courtier when he recognizes at any given moment in his lifespan as an autocratic ruler that he needs to surround himself with distinctive, qualified, professional functionaries in order to more efficiently run the ever-growing and increasingly complicated bureaucracy of his expanding princedom. Needless to say, the prince, we are told, should look for someone who possesses grace and all the delightful, ingratiating attributes associated with people who have grace. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, the enlightened prince should look for someone just like Castiglione and his exemplary humanist friends, all of whom can write and speak beautifully but were largely clueless about the one thing a courtier—whose declared primary “profession,” after all, was that of “arms”—was expected to do in Castiglione’s treatise as a hangover from a defunct feudal period in northern Italy: fight in a war, defeat enemies in battle, and prove victorious in combat. Truth be told, the best most of these fashionable, well-dressed, witty, and garrulous men gathered together in Urbino could possibly do when it came to war, I’d wager, was talk their opponents to death—or at least charm them all the way through the night until sunrise. In the final analysis what most of Castiglione’s characters possess—and this is fairly obvious but nevertheless still warrants being stressed—is rhetorical, not military, prowess. Elegant talking, not heroic military fighting, was their principal “manly” activity, which in the context of Il cortegiano becomes the source of no small anxiety on the part of some of the men who find themselves engaged in activities that risk