The Libro del Cortegiano, dedicated to the definition of the perfect gentleman of court, reflects the progressive knowledge of himself and his role, which Castiglione develops in the first two decades of the 16th Century. Even if his first duties and first charges that he completed, on behalf of the Duke of Mantua Mantua Francesco Gonzaga, were of a military nature, nonetheless, his greatest professional success were in the diplomatic field and not on the field of battle: thus, all his contemporaries referred to him as a very able diplomat, never as a man of arms. Baldassarre, that is, experimented personally that for the solution of conflicts, often, negotiations are more useful than war. Therefore, in his literary work, he tries to qualify a man of arms also as an able diplomat.
A good diplomat, to be successful in conversations, must have both tact and eloquence: two qualities that, as theorised by Castiglione first in the letter to Henry VII and then in The Cortegiano, are acquired through a humanist and literary education. On this Castiglione affirms: “il vero e principal ornamento dell’animo in ciascuno penso io che siano le lettere” (the true ornament of the soul of each one of us, I think, is literature) (B. Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, edited by A. Quondam, Milan 2002, I, 75). This is a fundamental turning point in the course of the discussions proposed in the first book of The Cortegiano: to the noble in arms, who believes he is worthy only of warring, Baldassarre demonstrates that, with the advent of the great European monarchies, it is time to take on a new and different professional statute, founded on the acquisition, next to the techniques of soldiering, of a humanist culture, resting on the art of words
The new apprenticeship that Castiglione proposes therefore contains the study of poetry, the arts, music and dance. It follows that the courtier is expected to abandon the attributes proper for an ancient knight (pride, hauteur, arrogance), or at least to moderate them by means of the new virtues identified in the Libro: grace and modesty. In this manner he hopes to induce the perfect courtier, alongside the exercise of the sword, to also study the pen, alongside the threat of war, the strenuous exercise of conversation.
Letters and arts
