The Book of the Courtier

Baldassare Castiglione

The ideas

29 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• Ask what makes a person admirable and everyone answers from taste. One praises the man who talks a lot, another the quiet one, and the rude man gets called frank. A court settles it with a party game: describe the perfect courtier, and let everyone object.

• Critics said no perfect courtier exists, so describing one is folly. The reply is an archery contest: when many shoot and none hits the mark, the one who lands nearest still beats the rest. Even the man chosen to describe him says he does not practise the rules.

• A man from a noble family is judged kindly before he does anything, and his family name pushes him to keep it clean. One listener disagrees. Many nobles, he says, were full of vices, and many low-born people lifted their families by their own virtue.

• The courtier’s main trade is fighting. The proof of courage is what a man does in small matters when nobody is watching, since with a crowd looking on even the frightened press forward. Away from the enemy he should be gentle and quiet, and never brag.

• Copying one master whole is a trap, because people often copy the very flaw. Take the best part of each person you admire, the way a bee takes from many flowers. One man who admired a king copied only a habit the king had from an illness.

• One rule matters most for grace: avoid affectation, which is like a sharp rock. Do hard things as if they cost nothing, and hide the effort. Everyone knows how hard rare skills are, so doing one with ease earns the most admiration.

• Thus you see how the exhibition of art and study so intense destroys the grace in everything.

• Faking carelessness is affectation too. A man who lets his cloak drop mid-dance to show he is not thinking about it is thinking about it harder than anyone. Overdoing carelessness spoils grace the same way overdoing care does.

• Write the way good people speak today, and choose the best words in use. On this side, dug-up old words add nothing, because “to divide thought from words is to divide soul from body”. What matters first is having something worth saying.

• Goodness comes first, and learning next: glory lasts through writing, which is why Alexander kept the Iliad by his bed. Music rests the mind and pleases ladies, and drawing teaches the eye to judge statues, buildings, and faces. Whether painting beats sculpture is argued hard and left open.

• Old people nearly always say the past was better. The cause is in them, not the times: pleasures fade and everything seems flat, and a memory of joy colours whatever shared it. If the world kept getting worse, it would have hit bottom long ago.

• Before acting, check the setting: the place, who is watching, your reason, your age, your trade, your aim, and your means. A man who bored a lady he had just met with tales of the men he had killed and the way to parry a battle-axe ignored all of it.

• Show your best skills rarely and before the right audience. Even the finest thing bores a crowd that sees it often, and the first performer is watched more closely than the last. Wrestling a peasant in public risks a lot and wins little, since losing is shameful.

• Serve a prince with real devotion, but do not flatter him. Share his reasonable tastes, ask for little, and take honours with a little reluctance. He should obey whatever helps and honours the prince, refuse what shames him, and leave a master who is truly wicked.

• To have the favour of princes, then, there is no better way than to deserve it.

• People judge you by your friends and by the first thing they hear about you. Someone seen with fools is taken for one. Verses passed around under a famous poet’s name won applause until the real author came out, and then they were thought poor.

• We laugh at what is out of place but not truly wrong. A joke lands best when the listener expects one thing and hears another. It comes in three kinds: a story told so well that people see it, a quick sharp saying, and a harmless trick.

• Do not mock the poor, the powerful, or the wicked: the first is cruel, the second risky, and the third pointless. Jokes also fail on people in pain, since a joke can deepen it. A woman’s honour is never fair game.

• A lady at court needs the courtier’s learning and grace, with a softer manner. She walks a narrow line: friendly enough to be agreeable, reserved enough to be respected. A prude who flees free talk looks as if she hides something, and a flirt is thought loose.

• One speaker calls a woman nature’s mistake. Another replies that both sexes are one species, women understand whatever men understand, and men gave themselves a license they punish in women. Both lean on dropped theories of warm and cold bodies, which the reply does not need.

• All that skill has one worthy use: to win a prince’s trust so you can tell him the truth. Princes rarely hear it, because enemies keep silent and friends turn into flatterers. A courtier who has earned the favour can steer the prince away from wrong.

• The deepest flaw of rulers is not knowing themselves, and flattery feeds it. One speaker says to offer virtue the way doctors put something sweet on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine for a sick child. Music, horses, verse, and talk can all carry a little goodness.

• One speaker says goodness cannot be taught, since people are born with it or without. The reply is that we are born able to receive it and habit does the rest: a person who acts justly becomes just. Appetite comes first in a child, so practice does too.

• Tyranny is the worst rule, one speaker says, so its opposite, monarchy, is best. Another says liberty is a supreme gift and a crowd errs less than one man. The reply is that true liberty is living by good laws, not as you like.

• A prince is great by the worth of his subjects, not their number: a king of animals rules little, and a shepherd whose flocks turned into wise men rules much. He should also be like a builder’s square, straight himself and making straight whatever it touches.

• An objection says the one who teaches a prince must outrank him, and an old man cannot win a young prince by dancing and games. The answer is that skill is the way in, and a whetstone cuts nothing yet sharpens iron. Aristotle and Alexander are offered as the proof.

• Love is a wish to enjoy beauty, and the body is only the doorway to it. Young lovers who chase the body find boredom, torment, or both. An older man can climb a stair: from one beloved face to beauty in all bodies, then to beauty’s source.

• The same speaker holds that a beautiful face shows a good soul. People do expect good traits from attractive faces, but the pull is moderate, strongest for social skill and near zero for honesty and care for others. So it is a common expectation, not proof.

• Nobody notices the night go. The windows open on a rosy dawn, and the biggest quarrel is put off to the next evening.

The book in short

In plain words

You know the kid who spends all morning on his hair and then says he just rolled out of bed? Everybody can tell. It makes him look worse, not better. In a famous Italian story from about 500 years ago, a group of friends spend 4 nights arguing about exactly this kind of thing, and a lot more besides.

The game where everyone may say you’re wrong

Picture a small palace on a hill. The duke is sick with gout and goes to bed right after supper. Every evening his friends gather in the room of his wife, the Duchess, and sit in a ring, a man, then a woman, then a man again. Her best friend, Emilia, runs the games.

On this night the rule is that everybody must invent a new game. One person wants each guest to say what kind of fool he would make of himself. Another wants a guess at what a letter on the Duchess’s forehead means. Then a man named Federico has a better idea. Pick someone to describe the perfect courtier, he says, and let everyone else say where he’s wrong.

A courtier is a person who lives at a ruler’s palace, serves him, and tries to be great company and good at everything. Emilia picks a nobleman called the Count to describe him. She says she doesn’t think he knows the answer. If he gets it all wrong, she says, the game will be more fun.

The Count doesn’t mind. He says he doesn’t even do what he’s about to describe. He also says people disagree about what’s admirable, because everybody praises what they like. A talker is called pleasing and a quiet person is called modest, while a rude one gets called frank. Then he starts anyway.

The dancer who dropped his cloak on purpose

His list is long. The courtier should be a fighter, a reader of old books, a musician, and someone who can draw. But the list isn’t the point. Someone asks how a person who wasn’t born charming can get that easy charm, and the Count says there’s one rule that beats all the others. Don’t let the effort show.

Think of a dancer who looks as if he’s counting his steps, stiff as a stick. Everybody sees the work. Now think of one who just moves. The Count says the same goes for a painter, who can show his skill with a single easy line, and for a singer who ends a phrase on one sweet note. People watching decide he could do much more than this. They know how hard these things are, so doing them as if they cost nothing is what wins them over. In Italian, the word for this calm ease is sprezzatura.

He adds a second tip. Don’t copy one hero from head to toe. Take the best part from many people, the way a bee takes a little from lots of flowers. One man at the court admired a king so much that he copied only the king’s twitch, a habit the king had from an illness.

Then comes the trick that makes the room laugh. A funny friend jokes that a man named Roberto is the master of this ease. When he dances, his cloak slips off and his slippers fall off, and he keeps on dancing without picking them up. The Count shakes his head. That isn’t ease, he says. Roberto is working as hard as he can to look like he isn’t thinking about it, and that takes more thought than anyone else is using. So the rule isn’t to act like you don’t care. The rule is to be so well practised that the effort disappears. If you fake it, people can tell.

Why the lady counted the minutes

Federico takes the next night. He’s supposed to say how a courtier should use all those skills, and he starts with a story about a man who forgot to look around. The man met a lady he had never seen before. To entertain her, he told her how many men he had killed. Then he showed her how to swing a sword with both hands, and how to block a battle-axe in armor and out of it. The poor woman sat there, Federico says, counting the minutes, and half afraid he’d start on her.

The man missed a short checklist, Federico says. Look at where you are and who’s watching. Think about why you’re doing it, how old you are, what your job is, and what you want out of it. A man who skipped all of that thought a fight story would impress a guest at a party.

The same checklist explains other advice. Show your best skill only now and then, because even the finest thing bores a crowd that sees it all the time. Don’t wrestle a peasant in public. If you win, you’ve gained almost nothing, and if you lose, everyone saw. An old man should not sing love songs to young ladies. And a young man who stays calm, like a lion, is worth more than one who runs around making noise.

The poem everyone loved until they heard who wrote it

Federico has more to say about how people judge you before you’ve done anything. He tells about some verses that went around the palace with a famous poet’s name on them. Everyone clapped and said they were wonderful. Then it came out that someone else had written them. Right away the same verses were called weak. A song got the same treatment. It won no praise until people heard the composer was a famous master, and then they decided it was good. Even a glass of wine, he says, was called perfect on one day and dull on another, depending on where the drinker thought it came from.

So the lesson is to arrive with a good name already in front of you, and to make the first minute count. People also judge you by your friends. Someone who’s always seen with fools gets taken for one, and someone seen with wise and kind people gets taken for wise and kind. Federico adds that a person should have one very close friend and be kind to everyone else.

Egg on the jester’s face

Later that night, the funniest talker in the room, a man named Bibbiena, takes a turn. He’s asked to explain jokes. He says people laugh at something that’s out of place but isn’t truly wrong. The best joke is one where you expect one thing and hear another.

He tells about an exile who sent a message to a powerful rival: the hen is hatching, meaning trouble was coming. The rival sent back a perfect answer: hens don’t hatch well away from their nests. Bibbiena says a good joke can be a story told so well that people almost see it, a quick sharp answer, or a harmless trick.

And then he tells about a trick that was played on him. He loved to play jokes on friars when he wore a mask at carnival time. One day he spotted a friar standing alone, looking a bit lost. He swept him up, said the police were after him, and gave him a ride on the back of his horse. People from the windows started throwing eggs, and Bibbiena thought they were aiming at the friar. They weren’t. The friar, who had been pretending, jumped down and pulled back his hood. He was a stable boy who looked after Bibbiena’s mule. Bibbiena went home covered in egg, and the whole town laughed about it for days.

There are rules, though. Don’t make fun of someone poor and down on his luck, because that’s cruel, and don’t poke someone powerful, because that’s risky. Picking on someone truly wicked won’t help anything either. A joke aimed at someone in pain can make the hurt worse.

Who gets to be called a mistake?

Bibbiena also says that one kind of joke should be off limits, which is joking about a woman’s good name. Gaspar, who never has a good word for women, says that’s unfair. Men and women should get the same treatment, he says. Another man says Gaspar could answer that women are lesser than men and need a strong rule to keep them good. A nobleman called Giuliano, a friend of the ladies, says that goes much too far.

The ladies jump up, as if to chase Gaspar around the room. Emilia says they’ll find a champion to answer him, and she chooses Giuliano. It had better be someone fair, she says. If it’s one of Gaspar’s friends, he’ll make the perfect lady into someone who only cooks and spins.

So Giuliano describes a court lady. She should have the same learning, the same easy charm and the same good sense as the courtier. Her manner should be softer. She should be friendly enough to be good company but careful enough that nobody can spread stories about her. Gaspar laughs and says that if they give women all that, they’ll want to run cities and armies while men stay home and cook. Giuliano says an old Greek thinker once let women run a city.

Then Gaspar says the thing he came to say. Nature always tries to make a man, he says, so a woman is a mistake. Giuliano answers him, and it’s the best part of the whole argument. Men and women are the same kind of creature, he says. Anything a man can understand, a woman can understand too. And the human race can’t go on without both of them. Women don’t want to be men to become better, he adds. They want to be free of the power men have taken for themselves.

Giuliano also points out a rule that men made for themselves. The same wrong is a small thing in a man and a ruin in a woman. Men gave themselves that rule on their own say-so, he says.

Both of them also lean on some old ideas about hot and cold bodies that nobody believes today. Those ideas are wrong. But Giuliano’s main points don’t need them. Women think as well as men do, and the double rule is something people made up.

A statue stuffed with rags

On the last night, the man who was supposed to speak, Ottaviano, doesn’t turn up for a long time. The others start dancing. Then he walks in late, and the Duchess won’t let him off. He had promised to say what the courtier is for.

All the dancing and singing and clever talk, he says, are only the flower. The fruit is something else. A courtier who has won a ruler’s trust can say what nobody else dares to say. Rulers are almost never told the truth. Their enemies are happy to see them do badly, and their friends want to stay in favor, so they flatter. The ruler grows proud and ignorant without knowing it.

Ottaviano compares such rulers to the giant statues built for a festival in Rome. They looked like heroes on horseback, but inside they were stuffed with rags and scraps. A bad ruler is worse, because he can’t even stand up by his own weight.

His trick for giving truth to someone who hates it is the one doctors use on sick children. They smear something sweet around the rim of the cup so the bitter medicine goes down. A courtier uses music and games and good company in the same way, and slips a little goodness into each one.

Gaspar says that goodness can’t be taught. You’re born with it or you aren’t. Ottaviano disagrees. People are born able to learn it, he says, and it grows by practice. Someone who does fair things becomes fair. A child’s wants come before good sense does, so practice comes first and understanding follows.

Giuliano has a sharp question. If the courtier teaches the prince, doesn’t that make the teacher greater than the ruler? Ottaviano answers that a whetstone can’t cut anything, but it makes a knife sharp. And if a ruler is hopeless, he adds, the courtier should leave. The old thinker Plato wouldn’t even try his methods on a cruel king. Nobody has to obey an order to do something shameful, either.

The stairway that starts at a face

Then they turn to love, and a poet named Bembo is asked to speak. He says that love is wanting something beautiful. A young person often chases beauty by chasing a body, and he ends up bored or aching. An older person can learn to love in a better way. He starts with one face he loves, then he sees the beauty in many people, and in the end he sees the goodness that all beauty comes from. Bembo calls it a stairway, with the first step at a face.

He also says that good-looking people are good inside. People do tend to expect that from a pretty face, but it’s only a guess people make, not a rule you can count on.

He talks so long and so warmly that he goes quiet, staring at the ceiling. Emilia tugs his sleeve. Be careful, she says, or your soul will leave your body. He smiles and says it wouldn’t be the first time love has done that to him.

Gaspar can’t resist. Women could never climb a stairway like that, he says. Giuliano answers that the great thinker Socrates said a woman named Diotima taught him all he knew about love.

When the windows showed morning

Just then somebody notices light coming through the cracks in the shutters. It’s already day. Nobody felt tired, because the talk was so good that they never noticed the hours go by. They open the windows and see a pink dawn rising over the mountain. All the stars have gone except one bright one. A cool wind blows and the birds start up in the woods on the hills.

They head to their rooms without torches, because daylight is enough. At the door, someone reminds the Duchess that the biggest quarrel is still unsettled, and it will have to wait for the next night.

The long read

Pope Julius II has just left Urbino. He passed through on his way back to Rome after bringing Bologna under the Church, and some of his court have stayed on to enjoy the duchy’s company. Every evening goes the same way. The old duke, crippled by gout, goes to bed early after supper, and everyone drifts to the room of his wife, the Duchess. They sit in a ring, a man and a woman alternating, and the Duchess’s friend Emilia Pia runs the games.

Tonight’s rule is that everyone must propose a game nobody has played. Gaspar Pallavicino, the company’s sceptic about love and about women, wants each person to name the virtue they would most want in the person they love, and the fault they would allow. Cesare Gonzaga wants each to say what kind of fool he would make of himself. The poet called the Unico Aretino wants a reading of the letter S the Duchess wears on her forehead. Then Federico Fregoso proposes something else: pick one person to describe a perfect Courtier, a gentleman living at a prince’s court, and let everyone contradict him freely, as students do in the philosophers’ schools. Emilia picks Count Ludovico da Canossa for the job. She says she doesn’t think he knows what a good Courtier is, and that if he gets everything wrong, as she hopes, the game will be livelier.

That is the whole setup, and it turns into 4 evenings of talk, set in March 1507. Castiglione wrote it up years later as a conversation, not a manual: “In these books we shall follow no fixed order or rule of distinct precepts”. The idea underneath is simple to state and hard to do. A person who wants to be admired in company, and useful to someone with power, needs a trained set of skills and a way of carrying them that hides the training. The last of the 4 evenings then changes what all that polish is for. Manners, it turns out, are the way in. The real job is to tell a ruler the truth and lead him toward justice.

Every claim here belongs to a speaker, and someone else always pushes back. The dialogue settles a few things and leaves many open, and it ends with its biggest quarrel postponed.

No one can define it for you. The Count begins by refusing the authority he’s been handed. He says he doesn’t practise the rules of Courtiership, so people may judge that he doesn’t know them. Then he explains why a definition is hard to give: everyone praises according to taste. One person likes the man who talks a lot and calls him pleasing, another likes modesty, and people are always clothing vice with the name of its kindred virtue, so that an impudent man is called frank, a modest man dull, and a knave discreet. He still holds that every kind of excellence has a hidden perfect form, which careful talk can find. He offers his own picture as a proposal, not a ruling, and admits he might think differently tomorrow.

Castiglione repeats the defence in a letter to a Portuguese bishop that opens the whole work. Critics said it is pointless to describe a courtier no one can be, since you can’t teach what can’t be learned. His answer is that he is content to have erred in company with Plato, Xenophon and Cicero, who also described ideal states, kings and orators. And the ideal works like a target: when many archers shoot and none hits the mark, the one who lands nearest is still better than the rest.

Birth, and the weight of first impressions. The Count’s first demand is that the Courtier be born noble. His argument has 2 parts. First, noble birth is a lamp that shows good and bad deeds clearly, so it pushes a man to protect his family’s name and spurs him on by fear of shame and hope of praise. Second, and more practically, reputation arrives before you do. Take 2 unknown men, one born a gentleman and one not. The gentleman gets the good impression in a moment, and the other needs time and effort to earn it. The Count has seen silly, clumsy men arrive at Urbino with a reputation across Italy as great Courtiers. They fooled the court for many days before they were found out, because people read a new person through what they’ve heard first, and suspect their own judgment when it clashes with the crowd’s.

Gaspar answers that noble blood doesn’t make a man better. He can cite men of the noblest blood who were full of vice, and low-born men who made their descendants famous. If the seed argument were right, he adds, everyone would share one origin and no one would be nobler than another. The Count doesn’t retreat. He says he’s not claiming the low-born can’t have the same virtues. He’s saying that a Courtier meant to be flawless needs every advantage, and public opinion counts as one. The same section ends with a quieter point: nature gives some people grace at birth, but most people stand somewhere between perfect grace and plain folly, and for them study and effort can polish a lot of what nature left rough.

Arms first, and courage that doesn’t need an audience. The Count says the Courtier’s chief trade should be arms: bold, strong, loyal to whoever he serves. He doesn’t need a general’s science, only courage that can be relied on. The test he proposes is odd and sharp. Courage is shown more in small things than large ones. Plenty of men who are dead inside, he says, rush forward when many people are watching, moved by shame, and do their duty God knows how, while on little occasions they stay safe if they won’t be noticed. The man to trust is the one who shows his ardour and neglects nothing even when nobody will see or recognize him.

Then he mocks the opposite type, the blusterer who says he’s married to his armour. A brave lady once invited such a man to dance, and he refused the dance, the music and every other entertainment, saying such trifles weren’t his business. She asked what his business was, and he said, with a sour face, to fight. She told him that since no war was on, he should have himself well oiled and shut in a closet with all his armour until needed, so he wouldn’t get rustier. So the Courtier is bold, stern and first among the fighters when the enemy is near, and everywhere else he’s gentle, modest and reserved, and he avoids display and self-praise.

Gaspar objects at once: nearly every excellent man he knows praises himself, and surely a man of worth should be able to when the ignorant fail to see it. The Count concedes that modest self-praise can be better evidence than praise from others, and then says what the skill is. The whole art is to say things so that they don’t seem to be said for that purpose, but let fall so naturally that it was impossible not to say them. He gives the failures as examples: the man who was run through the thigh with a spear and said he thought it was a fly sting, and another who said he kept no mirror in his room because his own angry face would frighten him. Cesare adds that Alexander the Great is said to have wept at the thought of a world he hadn’t conquered, and asks whether that’s a bigger boast. The Count agrees it is, and defends it: a great man has to dare, and the line is only that he speak modestly and show less confidence than he has, so confidence doesn’t turn into rashness.

The body and its exercises. The Count’s list of physical skills is practical and a little comic. He wants a Courtier neither very short nor very tall, because both draw the stare we give monsters, and if the choice must be made, a bit short is better than a bit tall, since huge men are often dull of mind and clumsy. The soft, curled, eyebrow-plucking fashion is out, and such men belong outside the society of honest men. The skills he lists are weapons on foot and on horseback, wrestling, riding well in every kind of seat, hunting, swimming, running, throwing, tennis and vaulting, and tumbling and rope-walking are ruled out as tricks of the mountebank. Duels are a last resort: a man shouldn’t be ready to fight except when honour demands it, but once engaged he must be deliberate and show readiness. The Count ends with a rule for being the best in whatever country you’re in. Let him be among the best Italians at the rein and the joust, a match for the French at tourneys, a rival to the Spaniards at bull-fighting and throwing spears, and above all let him temper every movement with good judgment and grace.

Grace, and the art of hiding the art. The word grace keeps returning, and Cesare finally makes the Count explain it. He asks what method can help someone who has some natural talent but not the gift: how can such people acquire grace in the body and in everything they do or say? The Count first refuses to be a teacher. He can tell the smith what armour should be like, he says, but he can’t forge it, and likewise he can say what a perfect Courtier ought to be but can’t teach someone to become one. Then, because he’s pressed, he gives the answer in 3 pieces.

Start early, and take the best masters. Aristotle was chosen to teach the young Alexander his first letters. Then borrow widely, not from one person: as the bee in the green meadows is ever wont to rob the flowers among the grass, so our Courtier must steal this grace from all who seem to possess it, taking from each that part which shall most be worthy praise. He warns against copying one great person whole. A friend of his who thought he looked like King Ferdinand copied only a habit the king had from an illness, a trick of raising the head and twisting one side of the mouth.

Then comes the rule he calls worth more than any other, in all things human that are done or said. It is to avoid affectation, which he compares to a sharp and dangerous rock, and to practise a certain nonchalance, a word he admits he is using as a new one (the Italian word is sprezzatura). Grace, in the Count’s sense, is the quality that makes someone pleasing at first sight and keeps them pleasing, and it isn’t a religious term. His claim is that grace mostly comes from concealing effort: to practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought. The reason it works is that everyone knows how hard rare things are to do well, so doing them with ease draws the highest admiration, while visible straining makes us think little of everything. He states it as a flat test of art itself: we may affirm that to be true art which does not appear to be art; nor to anything must we give greater care than to conceal art, for if the art is discovered it destroys our credit.

He backs this with a pile of examples. Ancient orators pretended to know no letters and made their speeches seem to come from nature, not study. A dancer who dances stiffly, legs straight and head motionless as if counting steps, shows the ungracefulness of affectation. A rider who sits bolt upright in the Venetian manner looks worse than one who seems not to think about it. In painting, the Greek Apelles is said to have criticized Protogenes for not knowing when to take his hand off the panel: over-diligence is a form of affectation too. And the small moment proves the skill: a single graceful step, a single easy brush stroke or a note ending sweetly in a little run shows the dancer, painter or singer can do far more than he is doing. A man who does one thing easily leads people to rate his knowledge higher than it is.

Where the rule turns on itself. The most interesting part of this section is that the room spots the trap. Bibbiena, the quickest wit among them, says that their friend Roberto da Bari must then be the master of grace, since he drops his cloak and his slippers while dancing and keeps on dancing without picking them up. The Count answers that this isn’t nonchalance. It is affectation, because Roberto is striving with all his might to seem to take no thought, and that is taking too much thought. Carelessness as a pose fails for the same reason as visible care. The man with a mirror in his cap and a comb in his sleeve and a servant following with a brush and the man who drops his cloak on purpose both overdo it. Both have lost what the Count calls pure and charming simplicity. So the rule isn’t a trick for seeming effortless. It cuts against anyone who tries to use it as one, and later in the dialogue Gaspar will call concealed skill plain deceit, which Federico will answer with the goldsmith who sets a plain stone in gold and is praised for the effect.

Speak and write as people really do. A long argument about language comes next, and it matters because it is the same argument in miniature: art without strain. Federico says that in writing, old Tuscan words, the ones used by Florence’s own best writers, give authority and gravity, and that Petrarch and Boccaccio should be the safe models. The Count replies with a rule: usage rules language. Writing is nothing but speech that stays after the sound is gone, so what’s improper in speech is improper in writing, and the best manner of speaking is the one that resembles beautiful writing. He’d praise a man who avoids antique words and uses those familiar today in Tuscany and elsewhere in Italy, and he points out that Cicero avoided Cato’s words and Virgil avoided Ennius’s, so to imitate the ancients you shouldn’t imitate their words. He’d rather call the Italian language Italian, taking from every region and being universal and varied, like a garden of many flowers, than make it Tuscan only.

On imitation he gives a second argument. Even the great didn’t imitate in everything. Homer, he says, is so old that nobody knows whom he copied, and Petrarch and Boccaccio were on earth only 3 days ago, so to speak, so who would they have copied? He thinks their real master was their own aptitude, and that masters ought to read their pupils’ natures and not force them into the channel they’d never have chosen. He esteems usage, he says, as mistress of both Latin and the vernacular. The point that matters for a Courtier is what comes before words. What is chiefly necessary to speak or write well is knowledge, since someone with nothing in his mind worth hearing can neither say it nor write it. He puts the point sharply: to divide thought from words is to divide soul from body, which can be done in neither case without destruction. After thought comes order, then words that are precise, choice, rich, and above all in use among ordinary people. A good voice, calm face and unforced gestures help. Morello jokes that nobody will understand a Courtier who speaks with so much elegance, and the Count answers that facility is no impediment to elegance. Emilia ends the argument by saying it’s too long, to be postponed.

When Emilia pulls the Count back from language to grace, he gives the rule one more test, and it turns pointed. Women, he says, are always eager to be beautiful, and so they use paint, pluck brows and hide it, and think men don’t know. Costanza Fregosa objects that he should stay on his subject. He says it’s exactly the subject: a lady who paints so sparingly that you can’t tell, he claims, has more grace than one so plastered she seems to wear a mask and dare not laugh for fear of cracking it. The lady who lifts her dress a little to cross a street, thoughtlessly, and shows a neat shoe, is charming, because people believe her elegance is natural.

Goodness, letters, and the soldier who reads. Moral qualities get surprisingly little space. The Count says he’ll skip the philosophers’ classifications. It is enough that the Courtier is an honest and upright man, since prudence, goodness, strength and temperance are all included in that. He says he esteems him alone to be a true moral philosopher, who wishes to be good, and recalls Socrates: the teaching bears fruit whenever it gets someone to want to understand and teach virtue. The next quality is learning. Letters are, for him, the true and principal ornament of the mind, though he admits the French despise them and treat all men of letters as clerks, a term of contempt. He wants the Courtier to be at least well versed in the humanities, in Latin and Greek, in poets, orators and historians, and able to write verse and prose in Italian. The practical reasons are charming company with ladies and a judge’s eye for other men’s writing. The warning is that a man should hide poor verses from everyone but one trusted friend.

His case for letters among soldiers is the case of memory. Glory is the stimulus to great deeds, and true glory lives in the sacred treasure-house of letters. Alexander kept the Iliad by his bed, Caesar’s works survive, Scipio carried Xenophon, and even Hannibal knew Greek. Bembo, a man of letters himself, objects that the Courtier shouldn’t rank arms above letters, since the mind outranks the body. He recalls Alexander at Achilles’s tomb envying Achilles his Homer. The Count’s reply turns the source around: Alexander wasn’t saying letters beat arms, he was admitting he wanted the one thing he thought he lacked, a writer as good as Homer. Letters have fine material only because arms give them heroes, so each needs the other. Along the way the Count adds a warning that applies to everyone, which is that we are all fonder of praise than we should be, and that flatterers are like sirens, each a cause of shipwreck to the man who doesn’t close his ears. A man should stay diffident, not falsely persuade himself he knows what he doesn’t, and disclaim praise modestly even when he knows it’s true.

Music, and a painter’s defence. The Count wants the Courtier able to read music and play several instruments, because nothing rests a troubled mind better, and because music wins the favour of ladies. Gaspar says music is for women and for men who barely seem men, and that it softens the mind and breeds fear of death. The Count replies with a tour of antiquity. Plato and Aristotle held that music should be taught from childhood for the habit of mind it forms, and Socrates learned the cithern when very old. Chiron taught Achilles music as one of the first accomplishments, in order that the hands that would shed so much Trojan blood should be busy with an instrument. Giuliano, called the Magnifico, sides with the Count and says music is not just an ornament but a necessity.

Then the Count takes up painting, which people now think fit for artisans. He cites Greece, where boys of gentle birth learned drawing in school and slaves were forbidden to, and the Roman Fabii, whose name came from a painter ancestor. It helps in war for drawing sites and fortresses, in judging statues and medals, and in seeing the beauty of living bodies. Emilia turns to the sculptor Giancristoforo Romano and asks whether painting beats sculpture. He answers that sculpture takes more pains, and that the Count is speaking for his friend Raphael’s sake. The Count says he speaks of the art, not the artists. Statues last longer, he grants, but painting does what sculpture can’t: light and shade, colour of flesh and eyes and hair, foreshortening, perspective, sky, sea, dawn. The sculptor says being is nearer truth than seeming and that a marble slip can’t be patched. The argument is cheerful and unresolved, and it’s cut short when the Prefect arrives with a crowd of torches to ask what he has missed. Federico is asked to take over, and dancing fills what remains of the night.

The old always say it was better before. The second evening opens with a digression in Castiglione’s own voice, and it’s one of the sharpest in the work. Old people, he notes, nearly all praise bygone times and censure the present, and they do it about courts too. They remember courtiers who behaved like monks and a time with no brawls, no ambushes and no deceit. His diagnosis is that the change is inside them. Age takes the vital spirits out of the blood, pleasures go flat in the mouth, and the mind keeps only a savour of what it felt when the pleasure was present. Old people are like men watching the shore from a ship: they think the shore is receding when it is the ship that moves. They lament, then, not perceiving that the change lies in themselves and not in the times.

He adds an argument from logic. If the world kept getting worse, as the old claim, and fathers were always better than their children, we would have hit the bottom of badness long ago. And evil and good prop each other up: there would be no justice if there were no wrongs, no courage if there were no cowards. So the past courts had fewer vicious men and also fewer virtuous ones, since nature now puts forth better wits, and those who turn to good do better than before while those who turn to evil do worse. Don’t read this as complacency. He grants there are plenty of bad and wicked men now. His point is that complaint about the age is a bias of the complainer’s age.

Judgment first, rules second. The next evening Federico Fregoso has to say how and when the Courtier should use all those accomplishments. The Unico Aretino says it’s no great task: the Courtier needs good judgment and doesn’t need rules, since nobody is so stupid as to fence while others dance or comfort a bereaved mother with jokes. Federico answers that folly is rarely that obvious. A man can avoid the public absurdity and still praise himself out of season, show tiresome conceit, or tell a joke that falls flat because it comes at the wrong time, and conceit blinds us to those faults more than anything. So a few precepts help. He starts where the Count did, with let him above all avoid affectation, as the Count rightly advised last evening, and then adds the check that carries the rest of the evening: the Courtier should consider well what thing it is that he is doing or saying, the place where he is doing it, in whose presence, the cause that impels him, his age, his profession, the object he has in view, and the means that may conduce thereto.

Morello da Ortona says he heard all that from the friars he confessed to, who called them the circumstances. Federico shows what neglecting them looks like. He knew a man who, to entertain a lady he had never met, told her how many men he had killed, how he wielded a sword in both hands, and how to parry a battle-axe in armour and out of it, until she sat on the rack counting the minutes and half-feared he would kill her too.

The rules produce specific advice. In battle, withdraw a little from the crowd to do your brave deeds with few companions, in sight of the noblest men and, if possible, before the prince, since it is wrong also to defraud oneself of the honour that is one’s due; but fight for honour, not to capture a flock of sheep. At public shows, make sure the horse, clothes and mottoes are right and appear early, because the crowd watches the first performer more than the last. Never take part in a rustic festival. Gaspar objects that in Lombardy young gentlemen dance all day with peasants and wrestle them, which he finds generous. Federico says it’s risky, because the gain of beating a peasant is very small and the loss of being beaten is very great, and he adds that excellence displayed too often bores even the ignorant. Cesare adds the case of a young cardinal in Rome so proud of his body that he takes every visitor, even a stranger, into his garden and presses them to strip to the doublet and try a leaping match.

There is room for play inside the rules. Masks give freedom: a man in disguise can pick his part and put care into the one thing that matters, while treating the rest lightly. But a prince in a masked show shouldn’t play a prince, since he’d lose the freedom to do things beneath a prince’s dignity. If he lays his rank aside and mingles as an equal, yet recognizably, then by renouncing his rank he attains a higher one. Music is best sung to the viol and kept to familiar company, and an old man playing and singing love songs among ladies is ridiculous, and Morello is visibly stung when Federico adds that men who dye their hair and shave twice a week are trying to seem young. Each age has its own fault to correct. The old are wise but talkative, miserly and querulous. The young are spirited and generous but quick to quarrel and quick to love and hate. A quiet and grave young man, like a lion or an eagle, has force in reserve, and a vigorous old one is just as valuable.

Love the prince, don’t flatter him. The hardest conversation, Federico says, is the one with your prince. The Courtier should love him almost to the point of adoration and bend his own habits to the prince’s reasonable tastes. Pietro da Napoli jumps in: that describes a noble flatterer. Federico denies it. Flatterers love neither prince nor friends, he says, and the Courtier will bend only in matters that are reasonable, or neither good nor evil. He won’t sulk, speak ill of his lord, carry bad news, argue to be troublesome, or push forward as if he were an equal. He’ll rarely ask for anything for himself, because a lord who has to refuse an ardent suitor often ends up hating him. For others he’ll choose his time and frame the request so that a refusal causes no offence. He won’t intrude on the prince’s private rooms. He’ll wait for favours to be offered, and take them a little backward, because the more reluctantly they are accepted, the more the giver feels esteemed. Cesare says that’s stolen from the Gospel advice to take the lowest seat at a wedding, and Federico laughs and says stealing from the Evangelist would be sacrilege. The principle he gives is the plainest in the section: to have the favour of princes, then, there is no better way than to deserve it.

Calmeta, a poet in the company, says this is naive. Nowadays only the presumptuous are favoured, he says, and the French court and the Spanish prove it. Federico replies that modesty alone isn’t enough, but modesty joined to worth honours a man, and that the Courtier must also not be so reserved that he is mistaken for timid or proud. He should be fluent when it matters and discuss state affairs sensibly. If he finds himself serving a vicious prince, he should leave as soon as he finds out, though not in war or adversity, lest he seem to be seeking better fortune. His reason is a social one: everyone assumes that whoever serves the good is good, and that whoever serves the wicked is wicked.

Pio, a young soldier, asks the question that matters. Must a gentleman obey a prince in everything, even infamous things? Federico says plainly that in dishonourable things we are not bound to obey any man. A man ordered to commit treachery is bound not to, both for his own sake and for his lord’s honour. Gaspar asks the harder one: what if you think departing from an order would serve your lord better? Federico puts the Roman Manlius Torquatus, who had his own son killed for disobeying, on one side, and a master engineer on the other. The engineer sent the Roman commander Mucianus a smaller ship’s mast than he had requested, because it suited the ram better, and was flogged to death for giving advice instead of obeying. The advice for the Courtier is merchant’s arithmetic. Weigh what you stand to win against what you stand to lose, depart from orders only when the gain clearly exceeds the damage, and risk little to win much but never risk much to win little. With a severe master, don’t change one jot of what you’re told.

Clothes, friends, and games. With equals, the same care applies, and Federico takes the practical questions one by one. On dress, he can’t give a precise rule, except to follow the custom of the majority. He mourns that Italy has lost any costume of its own and tells the story that when Darius changed his Persian sword to the Macedonian fashion, the soothsayers read it as an omen that the Macedonians would rule Persia. For the Courtier he prefers sober colours, black or dark, with bright ones saved for armour and festivals, and a modest elegance that isn’t womanish or vain. He must not fuss over one detail, hair or boots or bonnet, because the single borrowed refinement shows up the plain rest. When Gaspar quotes the proverb that dress doesn’t make the monk, Federico answers that not just dress but gait, laughter and bearing are all signs of the mind within, and that a man who gawps like an idiot gets set down as one without a word.

Friendship, he says, shapes reputation, because he who consorts with the ignorant or wicked, is deemed ignorant or wicked; and on the contrary, he who consorts with the good, the wise, and the discreet, is himself deemed to be the like. Bembo doubts there are any true friends left, since pairs who loved each other for years end by cheating each other, and recommends trusting no one wholly. Federico won’t have it. Without perfect friendship, he says, men would be unhappier than all other creatures, and a few good friendships are still around. He thinks the closest bond should be between 2 people only, because it is harder to tune 3 instruments together than 2, and the Courtier should have one special friend and treat everyone else with courtesy according to their worth. Cards and dice are fine unless they take up too much time or are played for money alone or for cheating. Chess has one flaw, that you need too much study to be good at it and end up having learned only a game, so mediocrity is more praiseworthy than excellence.

Reputation precedes you, and first impressions stay. Favour with a lord is partly luck, Federico says. Sometimes a capable man is disliked at first sight and the whole court follows the prince’s lead, even the pages, and sometimes a dolt gets praised for his rustic jokes. So the Courtier should arrive with a good name already in front of him. Bibbiena objects that he has often been let down by a thing he had heard much praise of. Federico answers that a thing the eye can judge at a glance, like a city, falls short of its fame, but character isn’t visible at a glance, and you wait for the hidden virtue the reputation promised while the good impression holds.

He then proves how powerful first impressions are with a story. A lady fell for a young man, unable to speak to him, and confided in a friend. The friend, hearing her praise, fell in love with him herself without ever seeing him. A third lady read a love letter the friend had written, and she fell in love with him too. Soon many women contested him as boys contest cherries. Gaspar scoffs that this proves only that women are unreasonable and follow one another like sheep. Federico replies that men are no better, and that all of them, Gaspar included, trust other people’s opinion over their own. He cites verses passed round the court under the name of Sannazaro, praised to the sky until it was known they were by someone else, whereupon they were thought less than mediocre. A motet got no applause until people learned it was by Josquin. And a wine was called perfect or insipid depending on which region Gaspar believed it came from. The lesson is to make a good first impression, and to avoid the comic’s trap of joking too freely before people know you.

Ready, but never faking. The same section gathers what the Courtier owes the truth about himself. He should be perfect in the things he claims, because then everything is easy and nothing impresses him, though not in the lofty, silent way of men who show by saying nothing that others cannot match them. Perfection is rare, so a man shouldn’t despair when he lacks some skill: whoever aims at the highest will seldom fail to rise more than half-way. Where he excels, he should draw people to see it by chance, not by ostentation. And preparation is allowed, as long as it’s hidden: let him if possible come ready and prepared, yet appearing to act impromptu throughout. In what he does only moderately well he should touch lightly, so as to seem to know more than he shows. And in what he doesn’t know at all, he shouldn’t pretend, and if necessary he should confess his ignorance frankly.

Calmeta mocks that with the story of Nicoletto, a philosopher who knew no more about law than about flying, and who, appointed to lecture on it, refused to confess, saying it wasn’t fitting for a philosopher to admit ignorance. Federico adds that people often abandon what they do well for what they do badly: a very good musician who gave up music for verse, a great painter who lost himself in philosophy. Gaspar then objects to the earlier advice to hide your skill and conceal your weaknesses: that looks like mere deceit, and a man of honour shouldn’t deceive. Federico replies that it’s an embellishment, not a deceit, and that the goldsmith who sets a plain stone in fine gold deceives the eye and deserves praise for it. King Ferdinand liked to go about in his doublet because he was agile, and almost never took off his gloves because his hands were poor. Caesar, he adds, is said to have liked the laurel wreath because it hid his baldness. The caveat is blunt: in avoiding one error a man often walks into another, and in his wish to win praise he gets blame. He ends with 2 small rules. Stay inside the probable, and don’t tell truths that sound like lies, so as not to earn a liar’s name. And don’t swear on the first day to a new friend that you’d die for him.

Wit, and the three ways to make people laugh. Federico begs off, and Emilia gives the question of jokes to Bibbiena. Bibbiena starts with an observation: laughter belongs to humans alone and is a sign of the mind’s wish for rest, which is why rulers built theatres, and why even prisoners awaiting death look for relief. Then he says where it comes from. We laugh only at those things that have incongruity in them and that seem amiss without being so, he says, and admits he can’t explain it better. The Courtier must not make people laugh the way fools, drunks and buffoons do, and he must watch whom he mocks. Laughter isn’t raised by jeering at a poor unfortunate or at a plain rascal, who deserves worse than mockery. It’s proper to ridicule the faults of people who are neither pitiable, nor wicked enough to deserve capital punishment, nor great enough that their wrath does harm. Later he states it in one line: don’t attack either those who are too powerful, which is imprudent; or those who are too weak, which is cruel; or those who are too wicked, which is useless.

The same situation can give a joke or a serious word. A lady at mass with 3 men, one of them her lover, ignores a beggar who keeps pleading without sending him away, and the lover says it shows she enjoys watching a man beg. The first friend says it’s a lesson that she hates an importunate suitor, and the second that it’s a sign she likes being asked though she never grants. One incident, 3 readings: a grave reproach, a mild compliment and a biting jibe.

Bibbiena sorts witticisms into 3 kinds. The first is continuous narrative: telling a story so vividly that listeners seem to see it, as in his story of a gentleman at Rome reading the abbreviations over 2 doors in the pope’s palace as news about the dead pope, who got in by violence, and about the new one, who was worth nothing. It includes mimicry, done lightly and without grimacing, so that people imagine more than they see. It includes the pretty absurdity: a peasant mourning his stolen donkey says that with his pack on he looked like a very Tullius. And it includes the huge lie, such as the Lucca merchant who said that in Muscovy’s cold the words froze in the air, and that the Poles lit a fire in the middle of the river and the words melted and fell like snow in May, so that the merchant heard the price after the sellers had gone. Or the monkey that played chess brilliantly and beat a gentleman in front of the King of Portugal, and then, afraid of a blow, snatched a cushion from under his elbow to use as a shield.

Next comes the quick saying, whose power lies in the unexpected: in both kinds the main thing is to cheat expectation and reply otherwise than the hearer looks for. Bibbiena’s examples run from puns to retorts. Asked to hire a tutor who had no bed, a man answered that he could not be learned if he had not read, since the Italian for bed and for read is the same word. Palla degli Strozzi, an exile, sent word to Cosimo de’ Medici that the hen was hatching, and got back that hens can’t hatch well away from their nests. King Alfonso took off his rings before dinner and handed them to the first person he met, and when the man came back a year later holding out his hand for more, the king said the first ones should suffice, because these would do for someone else. The painter Raphael, scolded by 2 cardinals for painting St Peter and St Paul too red in the face, said he had done it on purpose, because the saints were surely as red in heaven for shame that their Church was governed by such men as the cardinals. Irony suits dignified speakers, with a straight face and a barb: a man says another is ill-advised to leave Rome, because by staying he might become a cardinal.

Last come practical jokes, which Bibbiena defines as friendly deceit in things that don’t offend, or offend only a little. Some jokes trick the victim, such as the one where a Bergamasque cowherd, well dressed, was introduced to 2 great ladies as the cleverest courtier in Spain, and they heard his dialect as a clever imitation. In others the victim traps himself. There was the gambler who lost everything and went to bed cursing, while his friends put out the lights and played in the dark until he believed he had gone blind and vowed to walk naked to Loreto before they lit a candle. Bibbiena tells the one that was played on him: a friar who asked to ride behind his masked horse turned out to be a groom, and the whole street pelted Bibbiena with eggs. Bibbiena’s Courtier keeps his jokes clear of knavery, and above all pays respect to women, especially where honour is at stake.

Limits are what last: no impiety, and no indecency before ladies. For to the afflicted jocosity often brings greater affliction, and the joke that aims at the wrong target costs the joker more than the victim.

A quarrel starts it all. Gaspar now says Bibbiena is too partial to women: why should men respect women’s honour more than women respect men’s? Bibbiena says it’s because men have made a law for themselves under which loose living is no disgrace for them and complete infamy for a woman, and so mocking a woman’s honour risks doing her real harm. Ottaviano Fregoso, with a laugh, says Gaspar might answer that the law isn’t so unreasonable: women are imperfect creatures of little worth, and fear of shame was needed to make them good, and chastity was most needed to be certain whose children are whose. The Duchess says he speaks that way and then complains that women don’t love him. The ladies rise as if to strike Gaspar like bacchants on Orpheus. Giuliano de’ Medici, called the Magnifico, takes up the defence and says the claim that wise men make no account of women is false. He says the only fair way to argue is to have someone describe a perfect Court Lady as fully as the Courtier has been described, and the Duchess agrees. Emilia warns that if a conspirator of Gaspar’s is chosen, the lady will do nothing but cook and spin. She trusts Giuliano.

Giuliano’s Court Lady. The third book opens with Castiglione’s own boast about Urbino. He says Pythagoras is supposed to have worked out Hercules’s size from the length of a stadium that Hercules had marked off, and that likewise anyone can judge how superior Urbino was from the small matter of its games. Then the evening begins with the usual stalling. Federico says he’d meant to talk about knightly orders and the Sophi of Persia’s court, and Gaspar says the same rules that fit the Courtier fit the Lady, so describing her is a waste. Cesare answers that no court can have adornment or gaiety without ladies, and that no Courtier can be graceful or brave unless moved by the society and love of ladies.

Giuliano describes her. Some qualities she shares with the Courtier: birth, avoiding affectation, natural grace, good manners, cleverness, being neither arrogant nor envious nor vain nor quarrelsome. But her manner should differ: soft, delicate, with womanly sweetness in every movement, never like a man. She should have no weapons, riding or tennis, no drums or trumpets, and she should dance and play with gentle daintiness, with a little shyness first. Beauty matters more to her than to him, he says, and she needs more care not to give grounds for talk, since a woman has fewer ways to defend herself against a false charge than a man.

Her chief skill is a pleasant affability, he says, and a narrow path through two faults. If she is too prudish she seems to abhor all free talk and leaves the moment it starts, which makes people suspect she is hiding something. If she is too free, she gets a name for what she may not be. She shouldn’t gossip about other women, because those who are shocked by every story give an impression of innocence while those who dwell on them with zest seem envious and invite men to presume. She should know letters, music, painting, dancing and the art of being merry, and to have all the virtues, not for entertainment but to be full of virtue itself. Gaspar finds this too ambitious, and says that if women get letters, continence and magnanimity he’s amazed Giuliano doesn’t also give them cities and armies to govern while men stay home to cook. Giuliano answers, laughing, that Plato gave them charge of the city, and that he isn’t fashioning a Queen.

The long argument about women. Gaspar now says what he’d rather not say: very learned men have left in writing that nature always aims at the most perfect thing and would always bring forth men if she could, so a woman is a defect or a mistake of nature, and as he puts it, a creature of chance and accident. Giuliano replies on several fronts. Man and woman belong to one species, so neither is more perfect in essence, and where they differ it’s in accidents, either of body, which don’t matter (even in war the strongest aren’t the most prized), or of mind, where all the things that men can understand, the same can women understand too. Nature makes women for a purpose, since the species can’t survive without them, and the sexes complete each other as body and soul complete a man. Gaspar answers with matter and form: man is form, woman is matter, and a woman always wants to be a man to reach her perfection. Giuliano’s reply is the plain one: the poor creatures do not desire to be men in order to be perfect, but in order to have liberty and to escape that dominion over them which man has arrogated to himself by his own authority. Emilia then begs both of them to stop talking about matters and forms and speak so she can follow, and Gaspar goes on to warmth and cold, calling warmth nobler. Giuliano says temperate bodies are the most perfect, women are the more temperate, and so they tend to live longer.

Be careful with these arguments. Both speakers lean on a physics of warm and cold bodies, and on Aristotle’s matter and form, that nobody holds today. What survives of Giuliano’s reply is simpler: the same minds, the same capacity, and a double standard for which he gives the reason, that we men have of our own authority arrogated to ourselves a licence, so that the same sins are trivial in men and unpardonable in women.

The examples pile up. Giuliano’s women include Alexandra, wife of a cruel Jewish king, who threw his body into the market-place to be mistreated and begged mercy for the children, and won the crowd to their side; Epicharis, who never named her fellow conspirators against Nero under torture, when many senators betrayed theirs; Leaena, to whom the Athenians dedicated a tongueless lioness; Camma, who avenged her murdered husband by sharing a poisoned cup with the tyrant before the altar. Then come the Trojan women who burned the ships to stop the wandering, the Sabine women who walked between the armies carrying their babies and ended a war, and Isabella of Spain, whose mere wish seemed enough to make every man do what he ought. Another is the wife of a Pisan captive, who fell dead on reading that her husband had escaped. Frisio, a skeptical listener, asks how Giuliano knows she didn’t die of grief that he was coming home, and Gaspar says she loved too much.

Gaspar answers with men’s continence: Alexander’s restraint with the captive Persian women and Scipio’s return of a bride to her husband. Cesare takes his turn. He says those men had reasons: ambition, a campaign at stake, strict judges. In one story a girl he knew loved a young man for 2 years without a single token and, married by her father to someone else, kept silent 3 more years and died of grief rather than yield; at Capua a woman seized by Gascons pretended to tie her shoe and threw herself into the river; and at Gazuolo a peasant girl, raped, drowned herself in the Oglio and refused her sister’s rope each time it reached her hands. These examples are meant as proof of women’s strength of will, though today they read as a grim picture of what honour demanded of women. Cesare finishes with a more general claim that also reads differently now. Without women, he says, life would be rude and without sweetness; men who love fear disgrace and risk their lives to win a woman’s praise, and an army of lovers fighting before their ladies would conquer the world. Women are the origin of every graceful exercise in the world, from dancing to Petrarch’s verse. Gaspar’s last word is dry: if the lady lacks virtues, the fault lies with whoever arranged that there aren’t more in the world, since Giuliano gave her all there are.

Love talk. Federico then asks Giuliano the question that matters for a courtly woman: how should she answer men who speak of love, whether they are sincere or false? Giuliano says first she must tell false from true, and that she need follow no will but her own about returning love. She shouldn’t believe quickly that she’s loved. If a man is rude, she lets him see he annoys her. If he is discreet and speaks covertly, she pretends not to understand and applies his words differently, and if the talk can’t be dodged she takes it as a joke and praises his courtesy. Federico objects that this is cruel to a true lover, and Giuliano answers that true lovers have glowing hearts and cold tongues, so that who loves much, speaks little. For a married woman, he says, any love is dangerous to her reputation and conscience, and if she loves she should give her lover nothing but her spirit. For an unmarried woman, she should love only someone she can marry, and show him every token except what might give him hope of anything wanton.

The talk turns lively. Emilia says that whoever would be loved must love and be lovable, and the Unico complains she makes him hated. Giuliano adds that a lover shows his love by manner, in a sigh or timidity, more than in a thousand words, and describes the eyes as the lover’s messengers, sending their spirits like arrows from eye to heart. This is the old theory of vision and love, and it isn’t science any more. Keep it as period colour. He advises secrecy, with one trusted friend, not the ostentatious secrecy of those who tell nobody and therefore give themselves away. Gaspar adds a bitter portrait of women who keep lovers in torment to seem chaste, and Ottaviano, who has said little, protests that the quarrel has gone too far on both sides and made them miss more important things about the Courtier. The Duchess tells him he’ll speak tomorrow.

The dead, and the real subject. The fourth book starts with Castiglione mourning. Not long after these evenings, he says, death took 3 of the best of them: Gaspar Pallavicino, Cesare Gonzaga and Roberto da Bari, all in the prime of life. The ones who lived rose far: Federico Fregoso became an archbishop, the Count a bishop, Ottaviano the Doge of Genoa, Bibbiena a cardinal, Bembo a pope’s secretary, and the Magnifico a duke. He writes it as proof of what that court produced and as a bitter reminder that fortune breaks designs midway.

Then the fourth evening starts with an absence. Ottaviano Fregoso hasn’t been seen all day, and the company has begun to dance when he arrives late. He had promised the night before to say what more the Courtier needs, and the Duchess won’t let him off. He opens by changing what everything so far has been for. A thing can be good in itself, like temperance, or good only for the end it serves, like riches or law. The perfect Courtier described by the Count and Federico is the second kind. If he brought forth no fruit but being charming and skilled, then dancing, singing, devices and love talk would be follies, effeminating the mind and giving Italy a bad name for men who won’t run into danger.

His proposal is that all those graces are the flower, and the fruit is something else. The Courtier wins his prince’s favour and mind so that he can always tell him the truth about anything he ought to know, without risk of offence, and, if he sees the prince inclined to wrong, can use that favour to turn him. In Ottaviano’s words, to lead or help one’s prince towards right, and to frighten him from wrong, are the true fruit of Courtiership. The reason the job is needed is that rulers are almost never told the truth. Their enemies are glad to see them live badly and dare not say so, and their friends, with a few exceptions, turn flatterers to keep favour. The result is ignorance, first of outward things and then of themselves, which Ottaviano calls the greatest falsehood of all, since the mind lies to itself. Ignorance then passes into boundless self-esteem. Princes think ruling is easy and needs no art but force, and he compares them to the colossi made at Rome for a festival in a piazza the year before, with the shape of great men and horses in triumph and a filling of tow and rags. Princes are worse, because the colossi at least stay upright by their own weight.

A man who can’t sing is ashamed to sing, he says, and a man who can’t ride avoids horses, yet some princes who don’t know how to govern, which kills and burns and ruins more than any pest, are not ashamed to rule before the whole world. A stern philosopher who showed one the plain face of virtue would be loathed like an asp. So the Courtier, whose charm gets him heard, must teach by stealth. He’ll lead the prince along the thorny path of virtue strewn with flowers, with music, arms, horses, verse and love talk, and some practice of virtue inside each. Ottaviano says it’s like what cunning doctors do: they often anoint the edge of the cup with a sweet cordial, when they wish to give some bitter-tasting medicine to sick and over-delicate children. Courtiers who use the same charm to corrupt a prince deserve the worst punishment, since they poison the public fountain that everyone drinks from.

Can goodness be taught? Gaspar says no: virtue is given by nature and God, and the proof is that nobody confesses to being unjust or intemperate. He recalls the old story that Epimetheus left men poorer than the beasts, Prometheus stole the arts for them, and Jove, pitying the men who couldn’t band together, sent justice and shame to every person, not to a few experts. Ottaviano answers that people have found arts to tame bears and teach birds to fly where they’re told, and it would be absurd if they couldn’t find an art to improve their own minds. His argument runs through the way virtue behaves. A stone thrown upward 10,000 times never gets used to it, so if virtue were as natural as weight is to the stone, we would never get used to vice. The law punishes to keep the offender and others from repeating, which presumes virtue can be learned. We are born able to receive both virtue and vice, and habit makes us one or the other: first we practise justice, then we are just.

The order of teaching matters. In a child, appetite shows before reason, so habit comes first and understanding second, and care for the body is for the sake of the soul. He adds that nearly every human error comes from ignorance of good and evil. Bembo objects that many who sin know they sin, like the incontinent who struggle against their lusts and give in, as a ship’s anchor breaks in a gale. Ottaviano answers that such people have only a vague idea, not true knowledge, and true knowledge is never overcome by passion. The Magnifico then asks whether struggling virtue isn’t worth more than virtue without a struggle. Ottaviano replies with a captain who fights a strong enemy and wins with danger, against one who wins without a battle, and says the second is the greater and that perfect temperance is like that captain. Cesare worries that this describes a monk and not a prince. Ottaviano says he doesn’t want the passions uprooted, only brought under reason, as horse-tamers don’t stop horses from running but teach them to run on command: anger helps strength, and hatred of wrongdoers helps justice.

One ruler, or many? Gaspar asks which rule is happier, a good prince’s or a good republic’s. Ottaviano chooses the prince: monarchy is more like nature and more like God, and the whole of an army, a fleet or a body is run by a single will. Bembo answers that liberty is a supreme gift that God gave to all, that many judge better than one, and that stags and cranes change leaders, so animals make republics, not kingdoms. Ottaviano’s reply is an argument from opposites: of the 3 good forms of rule, monarchy, rule by the best and popular rule, each has a corrupt form, and tyranny is the worst of all, so the form opposite to it must be the best. And he redefines liberty: we ought not to say that true liberty is to live as we like, but to live according to good laws. He also says that some people are slaves by nature and should obey. That is Aristotle’s old argument, and it is carried in the notes below, not repeated as a claim.

The good prince is, in his picture, God’s minister on earth, and must make his people good, like a builder’s square, which is straight itself and makes straight everything it touches. The rule has a test, from the sage Bias: office shows what men are, since a cracked vase looks sound while empty and shows its flaw when filled. Power added to a bad wish adds harm. Ottaviano describes the opposite life of tyrants. Clearchus slept shut in a chest, and Aristodemus built a room hung in the air, reached only by a ladder, which the mother of the woman who slept there took away each night. Good princes fear for their subjects, and tyrants fear their subjects.

A prince’s life should be active and contemplative, with the first serving the second, as peace is war’s end and rest is toil’s. Peoples who are great in war and then lose their greatness in peace, like iron laid aside, were never taught how to enjoy rest. War should be for defence, to throw off tyrants or to govern badly-used peoples well, and not for lust of rule, like the Scythians who forbade a man to drink from the feast’s bowl unless he had killed an enemy. And in peace the prince should rule like a good father over a good son, not like a master over a slave.

Asked what he would teach such a prince, Ottaviano says he’d advise him to choose a council of the noblest and wisest, with free leave to speak their minds, and a second council from the people, so that the state combines monarchy, rule of the best and the people, as a body with a head. Justice comes first among the cares, with wise and well-tried officials. Religion comes next, true religion and not superstition, since it’s impossible to govern oneself or others without God’s help. He wants the prince to love his people, neither holding them in too much bondage, which breeds conspiracy, nor in too much freedom, which breeds contempt and a dissolute life. He wants most citizens to be neither very rich nor very poor, because the over-rich turn insolent, the poor turn base, and the middle are the greatest number and the safest. His closing image answers Gaspar’s complaint that a prince of good subjects would be a small lord because the good are few. If a Circe changed all of the King of France’s subjects into beasts, would he be a great lord for ruling so many thousands of animals? And if our mountain flocks turned into wise men, would their herdsmen not become great lords? It is not the number but the worth of their subjects that makes princes great.

The objections. Cesare finds this too small. A prince like Ottaviano’s would make a good school-master or a good governor, he says, but a great prince has splendour, generosity, banquets, horses, falcons and hounds, great buildings to be remembered by, as Julius II is now building St Peter’s and Alexander planned to carve Mount Athos into a man holding a city in one hand and a basin of rivers in the other. Ottaviano doesn’t deny that those things are praiseworthy. He says the ancients who wished to deserve such praise began by delivering the world from tyrants, as Theseus and Hercules did, and that Alexander’s conquests civilised the people he conquered, a claim carried in the notes below. He hopes to see a crusade led by young princes of France, England and Spain. And he returns to his own point. Generosity without foresight isn’t generosity, because there are people who rob to give, give to those they shouldn’t, give with spite, or advertise their gifts. Virtue sits in a middle point that is as hard to find as the centre of a circle, and as archers hit the mark by one way only and miss it by many, we err in many ways and do our duty in one. So nothing that can improve a prince is a trifle. Frisio says such a prince is like Plato’s republic and we shall never see him except perhaps in heaven. Ottaviano answers calmly: although they be difficult, things that are possible may still be hoped to come to pass.

Giuliano de’ Medici has a sharper objection, which he makes for the honour of the Court Lady he defended. Ottaviano put the Courtier above the prince, since the one who makes another excellent must be more excellent, and he also gave him an aim that is difficult or impossible. With an old prince and a young Courtier, the prince knows more. With a young prince and an old Courtier, jousting and dancing can’t win the prince over. And a man who directs a prince’s life ought to be called by a higher name than Courtier. Ottaviano’s replies are the most inventive of the night. The Courtier doesn’t make a prince virtuous by himself, since no farmer can grow a crop in sea-sand, but good seed in fertile soil needs a farmer. The whetstone cuts nothing yet sharpens iron. A prince, being powerful, can turn the Courtier’s advice into habit, which the Courtier can’t do himself, so the pupil may end up more virtuous than the teacher. A prince who is already good still needs the Courtier to keep him from being deceived, as a doctor in a healthy town hasn’t failed in his aim because nobody is sick. And the name matters less than the work, because soldiers become captains, private men kings and priests popes. He says that Homer drew a perfect Courtier in Phoenix, sent to teach Achilles to speak and act, and that Aristotle and Plato did the work of Courtiership with Alexander and with the kings of Sicily. Aristotle, in his telling, knew Alexander’s character and fostered it, until he was loved more than a father. The philosopher Callisthenes, who wished to be a pure and austere minister of naked truth, without Courtiership, lost his life and brought shame on Alexander. And Plato, finding the tyrant Dionysius like a book full of errors that needed erasing, not correcting, refused to practise the arts of Courtiership on him. A Courtier serving a hopelessly bad prince should do the same and leave.

Bembo and the stair of love. Gaspar then points out that the Courtier must be old enough to teach a prince, and that love at that age is ridiculous. Bembo, in fun, says he’d have to ask the hermit in his own dialogue before answering, then agrees to speak, on the claim that an older man can love more happily than a young one. Love, he says, is a desire to enjoy beauty (love is naught but a certain desire to enjoy beauty), and a person can pursue it through sense, through reason or through intellect. Beauty is an effluence of divine goodness, shining on a body that is well-proportioned, but the soul that follows sense wrongly judges that the body is the cause and tries to enjoy the beauty by possessing it. That is the young lover’s mistake. After he gets what he wanted he either feels disgust, or remains in the same longing, because a false pleasure never satisfies. And in the meantime his whole life is anguish: pale, melancholy, weeping and wishing for death. Older men, with the soul less weighed down, can love without being deceived, and they hold the beauty perfectly. Young men may be excused for sensual love, provided they show courtesy and worth and leave it behind with age.

Morello da Ortona objects that an old man more vigorous than many youths ought to love as young men do, and that beauty without the body is a dream. He and Federico add that beautiful women are often proud, cruel or immodest, and that beauty has brought wars and the fall of Troy. Bembo answers that beauty springs from God, and is like a circle of which goodness is the centre. He goes further, and says outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness, that a wicked soul rarely inhabits a beautiful body, and that the ugly are mostly wicked as well. He argues from the world’s order, the shape of man, the prow of a ship and a temple’s ridge, where use and loveliness are joined. When Cesare jokes that Gaspar’s earlier claim must make beautiful women the most chaste, Bembo says there’s no answer to that argument.

Then Bembo gives the Courtier his path. At the first stirring of a love that isn’t wise, he should rouse reason and arm his heart. If it persists, he should shun vulgar love and enjoy the lady’s beauty by sight and hearing, her grace, laughter and voice, without going further. He must honour her, put her pleasure before his, love her mind as much as her body, and lead her to modesty and true chastity, so that beauty is engendered in beauty. Because the kiss is a joining of souls more than bodies, a rational lover may even ask for it without blame. This kind of love is happier than the other, he says, because the lady can grant everything the lover asks, as he asks only seemly things. Absence, though, is painful for anyone who loves a body, and so the lover should fix his mind on the beauty alone, separate it from matter and carry it inside. He’ll be spared jealousy, quarrels and despair.

From there the stair goes up. The lover widens one beloved face into the beauty of all bodies, in an imagination that is still not free of matter. Then, turning inward, with the soul cleansed by philosophy and awakened as from sleep, he sees in himself a ray of the angelic beauty, and last, no longer limited to his own mind, he joins the universal intellect and sees the sea of pure divine beauty. All of this is carried in the same fire that, on the pyre on Mount Oeta, made Hercules divine, and in the Burning Bush. Bembo ends with a prayer to Love in his own voice, asking that his soul be taken up, and he stops, rapt, until Emilia takes the hem of his robe and says that his soul should not leave his body with such thoughts. He answers that it wouldn’t be the first miracle love has worked on him, and says he can say no more, because love doesn’t want its secrets disclosed further. The Duchess says that if the older Courtier could follow his path he should have no envy for the youth. Cesare answers that the road looks very steep.

Gaspar says it’s hard for men and impossible for women, since no woman is recorded with this grace. Giuliano answers that Socrates himself said the mysteries of love were revealed to him by Diotima, and that the angel who wounded St Francis has made several women of our own age worthy of the same seal. The Duchess hands the question to Bembo as judge and postpones it. Then Cesare says it is already day, and shows her the light coming through the cracks.

The dawn. Everyone stands in surprise, because the evening had not seemed longer than the others, but it started so late and was so pleasing that nobody noticed the hours go or felt heavy with sleep. They open the windows on the side facing Mount Catria and see that a beautiful dawn of rosy hue was already born in the east, and that all the stars had vanished save Venus, sweet mistress of the sky. A cool breeze rises, and birds begin in the woods on the hills. They leave without torches, because daylight is enough. The Prefect says, at the door, that they’ll come back that evening, early, with their judge, to finish the quarrel between Gaspar and the Magnifico, and Emilia answers that if Gaspar means to accuse women again, he should post bond to prove it, because she accounts him a shifty disputant.

That is where Castiglione stops: a morning, a postponed argument and no verdict. Even the purpose of the whole training, to lead a prince to virtue, is left contested by Giuliano’s objections, and the quarrel over whether women can reach the highest love is carried over to another night.

One real line. “to avoid affectation to the uttermost and as it were a very sharp and dangerous rock; and, to use possibly a new word, to practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought” — the Count, in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.

What didn’t hold.

• The talk as a record. The dialogue presents itself as 4 evenings in March 1507, recalled from a faithful reporter because the writer was in England at the time. A reference article on the work calls that a distortion of the truth: he was back in Italy by the end of February 1507. The letter dated February 1527 says it was written in a few days, and it was printed in 1528 at Venice after being reworked over years. What survives: a literary portrait of a court, put in dialogue form, and not a transcript.
• Noble birth carries virtue, like a seed through a tree. This is the Count’s opening argument, and Gaspar answers it inside the dialogue with noble vicious men and low-born men who ennobled their families. Nobody today holds that rank transmits goodness. What survives: reputation does run ahead of a person, and early impressions are hard to dislodge, as the Count and Federico show with the unworthy men taken for great Courtiers and the verses praised under the wrong name.
• Women as a flawed product of nature, in the warm-and-cold and matter-and-form arguments. Gaspar’s side and Giuliano’s both use old physics that nobody holds. The speakers’ picture of the ideal Court Lady, with no weapons and softness as a requirement, and the examples of women who die rather than lose their chastity, are the standards of their time. What survives is Giuliano’s core: one species, the same capacity to understand, and a double standard that men made themselves.
• Beauty shows goodness. Bembo says a wicked soul rarely inhabits a beautiful body. People do expect attractive faces to go with good traits, and a 1991 meta-analysis of those studies found that expectation moderate and varying widely from study to study, strongest for social skill and near zero for integrity and concern for others (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani and Longo, Psychological Bulletin). What survives: a habit of perception, not a rule about people. His ladder from one body’s beauty to the divine is a Platonist vision, not a tested claim, and it is where later thinkers push back. The theory that love travels through spirits from the eyes (Giuliano, Bembo) is obsolete physiology.
• Some are slaves by nature, and conquest civilises, and a crusade would be a blessing to the conquered. Ottaviano and Cesare, drawing on Aristotle, say these things, with Alexander as the model. They are dated claims that most thinkers reject now, and they are where later thinkers push back. What survives is the argument over a ruler’s honesty and whether power makes people better or worse, as in Bias’s line that office shows what men are.
• Stories told by speakers. The Pythagoras and Hercules measurement, Alexander weeping for other worlds, Alexander’s gift of Campaspe to Apelles, the Trojan women burning the ships and the Sabine women ending the war, and Camma’s poisoned cup are told as the speakers’ examples. They are not checked as history, and the dialogue uses them as illustration only. That Aristotle tutored Alexander is a documented fact; Ottaviano’s account of what the tutoring achieved is his own reading of a famous pair.
• Hiding effort is grace. The central rule is tested inside the dialogue: the Count calls a man’s staged carelessness affectation, and Gaspar calls concealed skill plain deceit, which Federico answers with the goldsmith. The wider debate over whether this ideal means ease or concealed calculation was not checked here, and the distill reports only what the speakers say.
• The translation. This account follows Leonard Opdycke’s 1901 English version, which renders the Italian word sprezzatura as nonchalance throughout. Other English versions word the central rule differently, and a version of the Count’s rule in circulation online may be another translator’s.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.