Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [17]
Duke Federigo’s court was a model of its times, and it is no accident that when Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) decided to write a manual of courtly behavior, which should be both a treatise on good manners at the highest level and a popularization of Renaissance ideals, he made Urbino the setting. Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) is a series of imaginary dialogues between experienced members of the court, discussing and describing the ideal gentleman and gentlewoman and how they can be made fit for the best court society. The author, from Mantua, was well versed in the classics and had done court service not only at Urbino but under the Gonzagas in his home city and knew what he was writing about. When it was published in 1528 it won the approval of the authorities, but, more important, it delighted young people and has remained a classic ever since, albeit little read these days. In its time it was a winner, and no book did more to turn the notions of the Renaissance elite into the received wisdom of Europe. To complete Castiglione’s good fortune, he was made the subject of Raphael’s finest surviving portrait.
However, while Castiglione was describing the sunny and elegant side of court life in the Renaissance, his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was completing the picture with the darker and, it must be said, more realistic side. Il Principe (The Prince) was written in 1513, after Machiavelli, who had been involved in both the military and the diplomatic side of Florentine government, had been dismissed from office when the Medici returned to power in 1512. He was a historian as well as a man of the world, the author of books on Florentine history and the art of war. He was concerned not so much with ideals, as Castiglione purported to be, as with what actually happened in a rough and pitiless world. He told the reader, This is not what rulers ought to do but what I know from my own experience they actually do, or try to do, in order to outwit their internal and external enemies. It is not, as its critics maintained at the time and have ever since, a diabolical book, designed to discourage the virtuous and to corrupt the ambitious. It is the original work of realpolitik, not without a certain resigned wisdom, and a patriotic work too, written from the viewpoint of a proud Florentine who had seen republican ideals and local freedoms ruined by invading armies and recognized sadly that if the great cities of Italy were to survive as independent states they had to be ruled by shrewd men without illusions, who drew on the lessons of recent history.
Castiglione soothed and Machiavelli shocked, but both provided valuable information of a do-it-yourself kind, and no two treatises did more to spread all over Europe the hard-won knowledge of an Italy that, by the date they were published, had lived through a cultural revolution more than a century old and a series of invasions that were destroying her liberties and torturing her soul. They were key items in the Renaissance export trade. But of course, just as Italian towns were quick to swallow and assimilate the changes in the printing trade and make them their own, so the rest of Europe was avid for Italian ideas and techniques, and had been so for the best part of two centuries.
Yet the speed at which Italian ideas radiated across Europe was determined to a great extent by historical accident as well as by the availability of talent. Initially at least France was slow to respond, or appeared so. That was surprising. In the thirteenth century France, rather than Italy, seemed the cultural heart of Europe. Paris had by far the busiest university in the world, whose influence continued to grow as the century progressed. There were three major French-speaking courts, with Burgundy richer than the Kingdom of France in some respects, and Navarre