The two sides of power
The fourth book of The Cortegiano and the Principe by Machiavelli present antithetic contents. The first, built on the basis of classical and humanist theorisation, celebrates the idea of a rational state and of a pacific prince, and underlines the tight and necessary connection between ethics and politics. The primacy of moral virtue, as a reference point for the action of government, is never placed in doubt. The Principe, on the other hand, puts explicitly to one side any abstract theory and every ideal, to pursue an examination of political action based on reality. It follows that, in Machiavelli, we have a disenchanted, cynical, disillusioned vision, which prescribes for the prince not goodness but strength, operative energy, the capacity to read events and dominate them. If this hypothesis is correct, where Castiglione presupposes that the Principe has a conscience, it follows that The Cortegiano, and in particular the part of the work that is specifically political, was also a reply to the ruthless arguments of Machiavelli, and to the desperate lucidity of which they were the fruit.
The two writers moved in opposite directions because they started from different premises. Machiavelli, when he wrote the Principe had behind him many years spent, between 1498 and 1512, in an important position in the administration of Florence; his sources are above all Latin historical masterpieces. The careful and disenchanted observation of the political, diplomatic and military behaviour of his time induces him to outline not the profile of an ideal and perfect prince, but the criteria for efficient operational success. His observations are not aimed at the reasons for the existence of the prince, but at the most opportune tactics for the conservation and defence of the state, especially in a moment of crisis, as was that in Italy at the start of the 1500s. Castiglione, on the other hand, remained faithful to the schemes of classical political doctrine: and his work expressly proposes the image of the wise prince, inferred from Plato and Plutarch.
The art of government, according to Machiavelli, has as its sole objective victory over the enemy; according to Castiglione, on the other hand, it must strive to create those values (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance) in which resides the possibility that man may express his most noble self.
