Death (and deaths) in The Cortegiano

Death is what makes the writings of Castiglione and the ideation of the Libro del Cortegiano possible, as a posthumous revocation of the splendid court of Urbino, by when, however, the protagonists of that season had all left the scene, belonged irreversibly to the past. The Duke was dead, Guidubaldo di Montefeltro; the majority of the characters that appear in the dialogues are dead: the work celebrates an idyll of which history has already decreed the end. It is a refined literary operation that Castiglione completed using the De oratore of Cicero as his model, that was inspired by the premature death of Crassus. Baldassarre is concerned, however, that the readers, having latched on to the fact that he was quoting Cicero, went on to appreciate above all the originality of his own version. In fact, he refused to transfer into his own work the more suffering and pessimistic tones present in the De oratore.

The death of Crassus was used by Cicero as a cue for pointing out the decadence of Roman society and the uselessness of his own political commitment; Crassus was presented as the champion of a then lost generation of men of great value, who had had the good fortune of not seeing the sad and desolate present. But this was not Castiglione’s strategy, he, if anything, wanted to turn on its head the melancholy and resignation of his model. The realisation of the death of his dearest friends, and of the violence perpetrated by Leone X and Lorenzo de’ Medici on the court of Urbino, did not produce regrets, about turns, discomfort. Castiglione replied to the discouragement induced by the loss by ostenting, throughout his work, the lights and conquests of the present age, in the fields of culture and civil life, which are the nourishment for a knowing faith in the future. Every example stands as a warning, to be taken up again in the future: in Baldassarre’s perception, despite genuine suffering, there are no irreparable fractures or lacerations. Smiling is rooted in his humanist temperament, and nothing good that has happened in the past is prohibited from repeating itself in the future.