On the side of the painters
The apologia of the present is one of the essential ideological nuclei of the Libro del Cortegiano, by means of which Castiglione intended to delegittimate the psychological attitude of all those who were perpetuating a faithless and pessimistic view of history. The civilisation of renaissance courts, of which the work gives timely praise, demonstrates that no targets of perfection, ethics and aesthetics, similar to those attained by the ancients, are precluded to modern men. On the contrary, as the results obtained in the various arts demonstrated (starting with he supreme cases of Raffaello and Michelangelo), it was possible to be as perfect as the ancient had been, and, at the same time, different from them. In fact, nature, as is argued in the first book of the dialogue, nature dispenses to the men of every epoch characters and genius that cannot be assimilated to a predetermined mould, so it is legitimate to assert that every individual in every historical moment can freely pursue excellence through the application of his own virtues and his own talents.
Therefore, to praise the contemporary age is to recognise its peculiarities, renouncing, in the name of variety, the strictly prescriptive and repressive criteria typical of old men, who using the meter of a presumed “golden age” judge negatively everything that comes later. On this point, the catalogue of great modern painters served Castiglione as exemplary and decisive proof of a reflection that was at the same the anthropological and epistemological: “Nella pittura sono eccellentissimi Leonardo Vinci, il Mantegna, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Giorgio da Castelfranco. Nientedimeno tutti sono tra sé nel fare dissimili, di modo che ad alcuno di loro non pare che manchi cosa alcuna in quella maniera, per che si conosce ciascuno nel suo stile essere perfettissimo” (In painting are excellent Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Giorgio da Castelfranco. None of them is less than the others in their different styles, so that none of them thinks that he is missing anything in his style, because each one knows that in his style he is perfect) (B. Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, edited by A. Quondam, Milan 2002, I, 67).
The list, which is identical right from the first draft of the work (about 1515), reflects the competence and clarity of judgment typical of Castiglione, who, from the mass of painters active in the 16th Century, extracted the best. This register is not an end unto itself. It serves as a double declaration that certifies the greatness of contemporary culture, such that it no longer need fear comparisons with antiquity, and also the wealth of solutions available to every artist, and thus to every man, for reaching results that are anyway perfect and worthy of praise.
