The errors of the old

Baldassarre Castiglione, acute observer of historical and social phenomena, repeatedly inserted in the Libro del Cortegiano brief but incisive considerations about anthropology, aimed at praising the honours of the present and demonstrating the complete supremacy of the way of living (as a courtier) elaborated by modern men. In this manner he went on to overturn a double assumption or paradigm, integral to humanist culture: “the ancients were better”, and “we were better off before”, as if the passing of time produced only negative inscriptions in the register of losses.

His own era, of which the court of Urbino in the era of Guidubaldo and Elisabetta was elevated as a symbol, is perceived by Castiglione as a target of absolute valour, and to the efforts to reach this target, opposed and complementary to the melancholy vein activated in other parts of the text, he dedicated pages of considerable originality. Among these stand out the prologue pages of the second book, dedicated to the error made by old people, who, in bitter and grotesque self irony, often put forward the idea that the period of their youth was better than any of those that followed. This was the habit, execrable in Castiglione’s view, of the laudatores temporis acti, who always, exactly, “lodano i tempi passati e biasimano i presenti, vituperando le azioni e i modi nostri e tutto quello che essi nella loro gioventù non facevano” (praise past times and criticise the present, vituperating everything that we do and that they did not do) (B. Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, edited by A. Quondam, Milan 2002, I, 97).

Our natural sorrow about lost youth, when it gets the upper hand, becomes intransigent and stops us from appreciating the variety and variability of social phenomena: one derives form this a severe predisposition for melancholy and criticism, as “se il mondo sempre andasse peggiorando” (if the world were always getting worse) (ibid.). In this way Castiglione wanted to censor the mental attitude typical of old people, who, trapped by memories, lose touch with reality and give in to regrets, revocations, that lead to an escape from reality and towards inactivity. In reality, as Baldassarre demonstrated, old men preclude themselves the possibility of enjoying the perpetual genius of history, that reserves for every epoch its own conquests and values, from the moment in which they attribute to the world around them the unease that has its roots solely in their own person.