The praise of variety and variability
“Quasi sempre per diverse vie si può tendere alla sommità di ogni eccellenza” (It is almost always possible to reach perfection by different roads) (B. Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, edited by A. Quondam, Milan 2002, I, 67). This statement by Ludovico di Canossa, contained in the first book of The Cortegiano, applied to the fields of music and of painting, literature and fashion, gives us one of the essential keys for understanding the thoughts on aesthetics of Castiglione. In fact, he constructed the entire work with the implicit objective of negating the validity of the thesis of those who maintained that, for every environment of human action, it was possible to establish a unique model of abstract and eternal perfection. On the contrary, as we can read at the beginning of the dialogue, “in ogni cosa tanto è difficile il conoscere la vera perfezione, che quasi è impossibile. E questo per la varietà dei giudizi” (in everything it is so difficult to find perfection, that it is almost impossible. And this is due to the variety of opinions) (p. 30).
The legitimisation of variety is the cornerstone that governed the writing enterprise of Castiglione, aimed at demonstrating how the archetypal assumption of all the Libro (the birth of a new “sorte di uomini che noi oggi chiamiamo cortigiani”- type of man that today we will call a courtier) finds justification in the continued progress of nature and civilisation. Although as a humanist he was exposed to the admiration of classical ruins, and inclined to mourn the loss of great friends who prematurely died, Castiglione repeatedly, in The Cortegiano, signalled that the cult of the past, both distant and recent, must never be perpetrated to the detriment of hope and generous projects for the future. In his eyes there can be no doubts: his positive and curious disposition towards the incessant movement of nature and history obliged him to believe that the world was young, and not that the greatest achievements of civilisation were now a thing of the past.
Thus he developed, and placed at the centre of his work, a theme that had already been present in classical thought, as in Horatio: the genial creativity of men, from century to century, expresses itself in different styles and forms, always new, in a plurality of cultural experiences of which it would be vain to wish to produce an aprioristic classification. Therefore, under this perspective, the modern courts of the Renaissance were the expression of a different anthropological paradigm, but not for this corrupt or inferior to those of antiquity, and must be evaluated, starting from the very art of the courtier, in their specificity.
