Prudence and magnanimity
Starting from his own prolonged experience in diplomatic and military fields, Castiglione elaborated a personal reflection on politics, to which he gave voice specifically on two distinct occasions: first with the long letter to Henry VII King of England, aimed at commemorating the figure of Guidubaldo di Montefeltro, the day after his death, and the in the fourth book of The Cortegiano, in which the theme of the conversation is the relationship between the man of court, cultured and refined, and his prince. In both circumstances, Baldassarre proposes a meditation on the figure of the ideal prince, educated, peace loving and dominated by reason, that reveals many similarities between his thought and that of the utopian literature of the renaissance, of which in that same period Thomas More (Utopia in 1516) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (Institutio principis christiani, also in 1516) were protagonists.
Starting form the historical events that he witnessed personally, literary writing was for Castiglione a place where he could focus on the exemplary and lasting values that can be extracted form dramatic reality. From this operation, on the other hand, he drew inspiration and comfort from the numerous pages of courtly literature of the second half of the 15th Century, and especially from the works of Bartolomeo Platina and Giovanni Pontano. In this way he constructs the image of the ideal humanist prince, whose catalogue of virtues is presented so that they may be perused and cultivated by everyone: justice, modesty, humanity, clemency, dignity, magnificence, liberty, prudence, fortitude. Above all, however, Baldassarre wanted to urge the prince to strength of will and courage, that enable a man to stand firm, serene and steadfast, facing the onslaught of fate. This is a theme that Castiglione reiterated repeatedly: prudence and magnanimity are the two virtues that permit every man to resist adverse fate and to transform the sadness of his own fate into a stimulus, to exalt his most ancient and internal qualities.
