HIST30006_Readings_Week_11

The Renaissance in Italy

SUBJECT READER COMPILED BY CATHERINE KOVESI

WEEK 11

How to Rule and Be Ruled in the Renaissance: Machiavelli and Castiglione Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. ‘Dedication’, Chapters: VII, X, XII, XIV, XV, VVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, and especially Chapters XXII and XXIII. Please note these are not included in the subject reader for copyright reasons, but are hot-linked in the LMS. 11.1_Machiavelli Machiavelli, Niccolo. ‘Machiavelli on a Typical Day at His Farm, 1513’. In Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith, 195-197. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995.

11.2_Atkinson Atkinson, James B. ‘Niccolò Machiavelli: A Portrait’. In The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by John M. Najemy, 14-30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

11.3_Skinner Skinner, Quentin. ‘Machiavelli’s Advice to Princes’. In Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith, 186-192. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995.

11.4_Castiglione Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, translated by Charles S. Singleton and edited by Edgar de N. Mayhew, 11-17. New York: Anchor Books, 1959; Ibid., 288-333.

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11.5_Biow Biow, Douglas. ‘Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard’. In On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. 181-206. University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

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SECTION 1

Nicolo Machiavelli, On a Typical Day at His Farm (1513) 10 December 1513, Florence To Francesco Vettori, his benefactor, in Rome Magnificent Ambassador: "Never late were favors divine." I say this because I seemed to have lost-no, rather mislaid-your good will; you had not written to me for a long time, and I was wondering what the reason could be. And of all those that came into my mind I took little account, except of one only, when I feared that you had stopped writing be cause somebody had written to you that I was not a good guardian of your letters, and I knew that, except Filippo [Casavecchia] and Pagolo [Vettori, brother of Francesco Vettori], nobody by my doing had seen them. I have found it again through your last one of the twenty-third of the past month, from which I learn with pleasure how regularly and quietly you carry on this public office, and I encourage you to continue so, because he who gives up his own convenience for the convenience of others, only loses his own and from them gets no gratitude. And since Fortune wants to do every thing, she wishes us to let her do it, to be quiet, and not to give her trouble, and to wait for a time when she will allow something to be done by men; and then will be the time for you to work harder, to stir things up more, and for me to leave my farm and say: "Here I am." I cannot however, wishing to return equal favors, tell you in this letter anything else than what my life is; and if you judge it is to be swapped for yours, I shall be glad to change it.

I am living on my farm, and since I had my last bad luck, I have not spent twenty days, putting them all together, in Florence. I have until now been snaring thrushes with my own hands. I got up before day, prepared birdlime, went out with a bundle of cages on my back, so that I looked like Geta when he was returning from the harbor with Amphitryo's books. I caught at least two thrushes and at most six. And so I did all September. Later this pastime, pitiful and strange as it is, gave out, to my displeasure.

And of what sort my life is, I shall tell you.

I get up in the morning with the sun and go into a grove I am having cut down, where I remain two hours to look over the work of the past day and kill some time with the cutters, who have always some bad-luck story ready, about either themselves or their neighbors. And as to this grove I could tell you a thousand fine things that have happened to me, in dealing with Frosino da Panzano and others who wanted some of 896

this firewood. And Frosino especially sent for a number of cords without saying a thing to me, and on payment he wanted to keep back from me ten lire, which he says he should have had from me four years ago, when he beat me at cricca [a card game] at Antonio Guicciardini's. I raised the devil, and was going to prosecute as a thief the waggoner who came for the wood, but Giovanni Machiavelli came between us and got us to agree. Battista Guicciardini, Filippo Ginori, Tommaso del Bene and some other citizens, when that north wind was blowing, each ordered a cord from me. I made promises to all and sent one to Tommaso, which at Florence changed to half a cord, because it was piled up again by himself, his wife, his servant, his children, so that he looked like Gabburra when on Thursday with all his servants he cudgels an ox. Hence, having seen for whom there was profit, I told the others I had no more wood, and all of them were angry about it, and especially Battista, who counts this along with his misfortunes at Prato.

Leaving the grove, I go to a spring, and thence to my aviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming. Then I move along the road to the inn; I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn; there is the host, usually a butcher, a miller, two furnace tenders. With these I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny, and nevertheless we are heard shouting as far as San Casciano. So, mixed up with these lice, I keep my brain from growing mouldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me, and have composed a little work On Princedoms, where I go as deeply as I can into consid897

erations on this subject, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost. If ever you can find any of my fantasies pleasing, this one should not displease you; and by a prince, and especially by a new prince, it ought to be welcomed. Hence I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Giuliano [de' Medici, later duke of Nemours, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent]. Filippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you some account in part of the thing in itself and of the discussions I have had with him, though I am still enlarging and revising it.

You wish, Magnificent Ambassador, that I leave this life and come to enjoy yours with you. I shall do it in any case, but what tempts me now are certain affairs that within six weeks I shall finish. What makes me doubtful is that the Soderini we know so well are in the city, whom I should be obliged, on coming there, to visit and talk with. I should fear that on my return I could not hope to dismount at my house but should dismount at the Bargello, because though this government has mighty foundations and great security, yet it is new and therefore suspicious, and there is no lack of wiseacres who, to make a figure, like Pagolo Bertini, would place others at the dinner table and leave the reckoning to me. I beg you to rid me of this fear, and then I shall come within the time mentioned to visit you in any case.

I have talked with Filippo about this little work of mine that I have spoken of, whether it is good to give it or not to give it; and if it is good to give it, whether it would be good to take it myself, or whether I should send it there. Not giving it would make me fear that at the least Giuliano will not read it and that this rascal Ardinghelli will get himself honor from this latest work of mine. The giving of it is forced on me by the necessity that drives me, because I am using up my money, and I cannot remain as I am a long time without becoming despised through poverty. In addition, there is my wish that our present Medici lords will make use of me, even if they begin by making me roll a stone; because then if I could not gain their favor, I should complain of myself; and through this thing, if it were read, they would see that for the fifteen years while I have been studying the art of the state, I have not slept or been playing; and well may anybody be glad to get the services of one who at the expense of others has become full of experience. Of my honesty there should be no doubt, because having always preserved my honesty, I shall hardly now learn to break it; he who has been honest and good for forty-three years, as I have, cannot change his nature; and as a witness to my honesty and goodness I have my poverty.

I should like, then, to have you also write me what you think best on this matter, and I give you my regards. Be happy.

"Machiavelli on a Typical Day at His Farm, 1513," from Allan Gilbert trans. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, Vol. 2, 1965, pp. 927-930, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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SECTION 2

James B. Atkinson, Niccolo Machiavelli: A Portrait Machiavelli’s grandson Giuliano de’ Ricci, who devoted much of his life to gathering, preserving, and copying his grandfather’s papers, tells a perhaps apocryphal story that reveals how Machiavelli’s contemporaries understood his personality and unconventional attitudes. In 1504, four years after Machiavelli’s father died, a friar at the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, where the family chapel was located, informed Machiavelli that some bodies of persons not from the family had been illegally buried there and that he ought to have them removed. But Machiavelli told the friar, “Well, let them be, for my father was a great lover of conversation, and the more there are to keep him company, the better pleased he will be.”1 The kernel of truth in this story lies in Machiavelli’s gratitude to his father for passing on an enjoyment of conversation and initiating him into the world of writers, and also in Machiavelli’s penchant for viewing things with a slant frequently at odds with propriety. Indeed, the pragmatism and sly, ironic wit that characterize his response to the friar appear repeatedly in his writings. The anecdote underscores the significance that “conversation” had for a man who delighted in talking to and questioning people and books and enjoyed an easy familiarity with them. His love of friendship, dialogue (even imagined ones), and irony, frequently leavened with a mischievous and mocking wit, never left him (not even, as another legend has it, on his deathbed). In letters to him, chancery colleagues and other friends affectionately acknowledged his roguish, scoffing irreverence. But “conversation” was also his favorite metaphor for the serious pursuits of intellectual life. In the most famous passage of his December 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli described his study of ancient texts as conversation: I chat with passersby, I ask news of their regions, I learn about various matters, I observe mankind ...When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse [parlare] with them and to question them about their motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I 899

do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.2 His ability to “absorb” himself “completely” into his interlocutors is intrinsic to his virtuosity as a writer and originality as a political theorist.

Youth (1469–1489) and “lost” years (1489–1498) Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, into an old Florentine family with a distinguished record of political participation but without the wealth and political status of the elite families (ottimati). “I was born in poverty and at an early age learned how to scrimp rather than to thrive.”3 His father, Bernardo, was a doctor of law who, although chronically short of income, nonetheless provided his son with a solid humanist education. According to the snapshots of family life in Bernardo’s diary, Niccolò was learning Latin at age seven, studying arithmetic at eleven, and translating vernacular texts into Latin at twelve.4 Bernardo was also a friend of the humanist chancellor Bartolomeo Scala, who gave Bernardo’s name to a speaker in his dialogue On Laws and Legal Judgments and referred to him as “amicus et familiaris meus.”5 That Machiavelli grew up in a household that valued learning is also apparent from the contents of Bernardo’s library, which, given that book printing began only in the 1460s and many books were still expensive manuscripts, was an admirable collection. Among the books Bernardo owned or borrowed that would later influence his son were Livy’s History of Rome and Cicero’s On Moral Duties, Philippics, and On the Orator. Years later, Machiavelli implicitly acknowledged the importance of his father’s library. In The Prince’s dedicatory letter, he wrote that “I have found nothing among my resources that I cherish or value as much as my knowledge of the deeds of great men, learned from a wide experience of recent events and a constant reading of classical authors.” In the Discourses (3.46) he opined that what “a young boy” takes in “at an early age” has a profound influence “because he must needs be impressed by it, and then afterward throughout all periods of his life he regulates his way of doing things from that.”

Among the ancient authors Machiavelli studied were Greeks that, because he never learned that language, he read in Latin translations, including Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Polybius, and Thucydides, and Romans whose works he read in Latin, including the moral philosophers Cicero and Seneca, the historians Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Sallust, the poets Ovid and Virgil, and the playwrights Plautus and Terence.

One Roman poet he never mentions by name but who had a profound influence on him is Lucretius, whose sober, philosophical book-length poem De rerum natura permeates Machiavelli’s outlook on religion and a host of other topics. Machiavelli acquired his familiarity with Lucretius the hard way, copying the entire poem by hand from a humanist manuscript edition.6 He wrote some poetry, and one early poem, 900

addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Giuliano with an allusive pun on his name, “Se avessi l’arco e le ale, giovanetto giulìo” (“If, cheerful young man, you had a bow and wings”),7 suggests some connection to the Medici, possibly as a result of Bernardo’s friendship with Scala. But we know little else about Machiavelli’s early adulthood between 1489 and 1498, when he was elected as head of Florence’s second chancery, which administered the city’s relations with its subject territories.

That other pillar of Machiavelli’s “knowledge of the deeds of great men” was his experience of the dramatic events of Florentine and Italian history. Late fifteenthcentury Florence was a thriving commercial and cultural center under the political sway of the Medici. Lorenzo de’ Medici began his unofficial rule the year Machiavelli was born, but his first decade in power was punctuated by threats to his supremacy, chiefly the 1478 Pazzi conspiracy and subsequent war launched by the Pazzi’s co-conspirators, Pope Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Naples – events to which Machiavelli later devoted many pages of both the Discourses and the Florentine Histories. Lorenzo survived these challenges and tightened his control over the republic, but two years after his death Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 and swept through the peninsula so easily that Machiavelli later wrote in The Prince (chapter 12) that he “was allowed to conquer Italy with chalk.” Internal and external threats against the Medici converged when Lorenzo’s son Piero surrendered Florentine territory and fortresses to the French, angering the Florentines and undermining the regime. A revolt removed the Medici from power and sent them into exile in November 1494. Into the ensuing political vacuum came the powerful voice of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who excoriated both the Florentines and a hedonistic Church for moral degeneracy, welcomed Charles VIII as a purifying “sword of God,” and helped persuade the Florentines that moral reform would begin with the establishment of a republican government built around the Great Council whose creation he urged and inspired.

Savonarola’s denunciation of Florentine sins and secularism ignited fierce controversy that led to his downfall. In March 1498, as Savonarola desperately fended off his enemies, Machiavelli, his curiosity obviously piqued, attended two of the friar’s last sermons. Ina letter to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, he described the embattled preacher’s skillful tactical adjustments in addressing his followers, concluding that he “acts in accordance with the times and colors his lies accordingly.”8 Behind this harsh judgment and his cold skepticism toward Savonarola’s dire prophecies, Machiavelli may have felt admiration, or at least respect, for the friar’s adaptability and support of republican government. Savonarola’s enemies in Florence and elsewhere, including Pope Alexander VI, who accused him of heresy and being a false prophet, had him arrested, tried, and then executed on May 23, 1498.

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Less than a month later, on June 19, Machiavelli was elected second chancellor and soon thereafter secretary to the foreign policy magistracy of the Ten. Although his entrance into government may have been facilitated by association with Savonarola’s adversaries, Machiavelli remained deeply ambivalent about him. In the first Decennale, a poem recounting the turbulent decade of Italian history that opened in 1494, he lamented the profound political divisions caused by Savonarola. Yet he referred to him as “that great Savonarola, whose words, inspired by divine virtù, kept you [Florentines] enmeshed. But because many feared to see their city gradually collapse under his prophetic teaching, no place to bring you together again could be found unless his divine light grew dark or a more intense fire quenched it.”9 Calling him an “unarmed prophet” in chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli faulted Savonarola for lacking the means to keep power but implicitly put him in the company of great lawgivers like Moses. In Discourses 1.11 he wrote that Savonarola “convinced” the Florentines “that he spoke with God” (as Moses had similarly persuaded the Hebrews) and that “countless people believed him without ever having seen anything unusual to make them believe him, because his life, learning, and the subject that he chose were enough to make them lend him credence ...I do not wish to judge whether or not it was true, because one must speak of so great a man with reverence.”

Molded by this “experience of recent events” and a humanist education centered on “a constant reading of classical authors,” Machiavelli entered the chancery already in possession of that combination of “resources” of which he boasted in The Prince.

He was perhaps referring to the influence of these formative years when he wrote, in an April 1513 letter to Vettori, that “Fortune has seen to it that since I do not know how to talk about either the silk or the wool trade, or profits or losses, I have to talk about politics [lo stato]. I need either to take a vow of silence or to discuss this.”10 In 1496 Machiavelli’s mother, Bartolomea Nelli, died, and in 1500 his father died. In 1501 Niccolò married Marietta Corsini. The couple had several children who died young or in infancy and one daughter, Bartolomea (the mother of Giuliano de’ Ricci), and four sons who reached adulthood: Bernardo, Ludovico, Piero, and Guido, the youngest and perhaps his father’s favorite. Machiavelli’s many diplomatic missions kept him frequently away from home, and Marietta chafed at his absences.

In November 1503, after their first son was born, she wrote him in Rome: “I would be flourishing more if you were here ...The baby is well, he looks like you: he is white as snow, but his head looks like black velvet, and he is hairy like you. Since he looks like you, he seems beautiful to me ... Remember to come back home.”11 Government career (1498–1512) The paucity of documentation before 1498 gives way to a wealth of information from Machiavelli’s years in government, especially his private correspondence and 902

the dispatches he sent to the Ten and to the republic’s chief executive magistracy, the Signoria, from his legations (diplomatic missions). These fourteen years were the valuable seed time for the judgments that season his later political and historical writing.

A good point of departure is his letter of October 1499 to “a chancellery secretary in Lucca” in which Machiavelli delineates his conception of a secretary’s job – to be his government’s “interpreter,” its lingua, literally its “language,” “tongue,” or “mouthpiece”–and reveals how he saw himself and his work: Among the many considerations that show what a man is, none is more important than seeing either how easily he swallows what he is told or how carefully he invents what he wants to convince others of, so that every time he swallows what he ought not or invents badly what he wants to convince people of, he can be termed both thoughtless and reckless.12 An efficient secretary must render the thoughts of his interlocutors accurately and strive to uncover the mind behind their words. He wanted the Ten, for example, to understand the difficulty he experienced in deciphering the secretive Cesare Borgia in their thorny exchanges in late 1502. As he told them, Cesare “makes all his own decisions, and whoever doesn’t want to write mere speculations [ghiribizzi] and farfetched ideas must check the facts, and checking them requires time.”13 As the Ten’s “interpreter” in Borgia’s camp, Machiavelli would not “swallow what he is told” or “invent badly what he wants to convince people of.” Earlier he had reported that, although Borgia “would seem to want a treaty between you and him to be drawn up quickly, nevertheless, in spite of the fact that I pressed him closely in order to get some particulars out of him, I was always outflanked and never could get out of him more than I have written.”14 A constant concern for correct interpretation of political situations and figures characterized Machiavelli’s work as an envoy; the skillful, effective use of language that he acquired in this work later shaped his habits of thought and expression.

Machiavelli’s responsibilities as second chancellor involved the administration of Florence’s dominion in Tuscany, but he soon became the Ten’s favorite envoy to foreign governments and princes. He was never a full fledged ambassador, a post reserved for members of elite families; his tasks were the less glamorous but perhaps more crucial ones of gathering information, uncovering secrets, and interpreting intentions. There were also some memorable encounters. In 1500, the Signoria ordered Machiavelli to France, where he met Georges d’Amboise, cardinal of Rouen and King Louis XII’s finance minister. In The Prince (chapter 3) Machiavelli recalled rebuffing the cardinal’s arrogant assertion that the “Italians had no understanding of warfare” with the retort that “the French had no understanding of statecraft; for, if they had, they would not have let the Church gain such strength.”

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In 1502 a major constitutional reform resulted in the election of Piero Soderini as lifetime Standardbearer of the republic in an effort to assure greater continuity of policy and stronger leadership. Soderini admired Machiavelli’s talents and astute judgments and increased his influence in government, particularly in allowing him in 1505–6 to implement the project for a homegrown militia that Machiavelli had long believed necessary because of the unreliability of mercenaries. He persuaded Soderini to permit him to raise a militia from the dominion territories, to be administered under a new magistracy, the Nine, whose secretary he became in January 1507. Machiavelli was as proud of these troops as was a contemporary who wrote that they were “the finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence.”15 External events dominated Machiavelli’s experience of politics and nourished his growing theoretical interests. In September 1506, he watched Julius II, attended by only 150 bodyguards, boldly march into Perugia to bring that city back under papal rule. In a famous letter to Giovanbattista Soderini (Piero’s nephew) known as the “Ghiribizzi” (“Speculations”), he pondered the apparent illogic of the pope’s success and wondered how it was possible to establish a meaningful correlation between means and ends, tactics and results: “The reason why different actions are sometimes equally useful and sometimes equally detrimental I do not know – yet I should very much like to.”16 He theorized that, because individuals are fixed in their ways and unable to adapt as circumstances around them change, success is purely a matter of chance: if one’s built-in “way of doing things” is what the times require, success will follow; if not, not. The question would continue to haunt him, especially in The Prince’s penultimate chapter on “The power of Fortune in human affairs and how she can be countered,” where he came to a similar conclusion (again using the example of Pope Julius). In his 1517 poem L’Asino he still believed in the essential immobility of each human temperament: “the mind of man, steadily intent on pursuing what is natural to it, does not yield to any plea contrary either to habit or nature.”17 In 1507 Soderini wanted to send Machiavelli to negotiate with Emperor Maximilian, but powerful ottimati, who perceived Machiavelli as Soderini’s “lackey” who would loyally support the pro-French policy they were trying to undermine, blocked the appointment and replaced him with Francesco Vettori. Machiavelli was humiliated and furious. His friend Filippo Casavecchia consoled Machiavelli in his bitterness over what he regarded as Soderini’s betrayal: “Do you not know that there have been very, very few friendships that in the passage of time do not become their opposite?”18 Soderini later had Machiavelli join the mission with Vettori, but the episode made starkly clear that Machiavelli had enemies among the ottimati. Another reason for their hostility toward him was the militia, which they feared might become an instrument of personal power in Soderini’s hands, but which Machiavelli continued to build for the war to regain Pisa. In June 1509, after fifteen years of resistance, Floren904

tine forces finally forced the port city to submit. In this high point of Machiavelli’s career, his chancery colleague Agostino Vespucci exulted: “If I did not think it would make you too proud, I should dare say that you with your battalions” have “restored” the Florentine state.19 Casavecchia lauded “the outstanding acquisition of that notable city” and declared that “truly it can be said that your person was the cause of it to a very great extent.” Mindful of Machiavelli’s adversaries, however, he added a word of caution: “Niccolò, this is a time when if ever one was wise it should be now. I do not believe your ideas will ever be accessible to fools, and there are not enough wise men to go around ... Every day I discover you to be a greater prophet than the Hebrews or any other nation ever had.” He urged him to “come and stay here with me ... I am saving you a ditch full of trout and a wine like you have never drunk.”20 In 1509 Machiavelli’s friend and chancery colleague Biagio Buonaccorsi warned him of efforts to remove him from his posts. Matters were so precarious that Buonaccorsi even encoded parts of this letter: “Believe me, Niccolò, I am not telling you half of the things that are going around,” and then in code: <You have so few people here that want to help you>.”21 The many letters Machiavelli exchanged with Buonaccorsi, Vespucci, and others in the chancery enable us to feel the close-knit friendship among them. They shared gossip, off-color jokes, good-natured banter, and allusions to Machiavelli’s peccadilloes and political vulnerability. The intersection of Machiavelli’s public duties and intellectual interests occasionally emerges. Buonaccorsi responded to a request Machiavelli sent from Borgia’s camp in Imola in 1502: “We have tried to locate some Lives of Plutarch, and there are none for sale in Florence. Be patient, because we have to write to Venice; to tell you the truth, you can go to the devil for asking for so many things.”22 Evidently, Machiavelli was already determined to ferret out clues from ancient examples in interpreting the actions of his contemporaries.

Machiavelli’s political work and literary vocation continued to overlap in these years.

Some of the memoranda he drafted after returning from diplomatic missions are cast as literary narratives that interpret and even dramatize, rather than merely report, the facts. A notable example is the “Description of the method used by Duke Valentino [Cesare Borgia] in killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and others” (1503). Politics and literature also converge in his early poetry, including the first Decennale of 1504 and its sequel, the second Decennale, which stops in 1509 but opens with another lament for Italy’s fate (“I shall venture to sing amid so many tears, although I have become almost lost in grief ”).23 Usually dated to these years as well are his poetic meditations on the forces he saw governing men and events, the tercets on “Ingratitude,” “Fortune,” “Ambition,” and “Opportunity.”

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The republic’s days were numbered once Pope Julius organized the Holy League against France in 1511, with a battle cry to free Italy from the “barbarians.” Soderini remained loyal to France, and when the league’s forces drove the French from Italy in the summer of 1512, the angry pope let the Spaniards invade Florentine territory in support of a Medici restoration. After they sacked the nearby city of Prato, futilely defended by Machiavelli’s militia, Soderini was forced into exile. On September 1, Giuliano de’ Medici entered Florence in triumph and a pro-Medici party took over.

In November Machiavelli was relieved of his duties, confined to Florentine territory for a year, and barred from the government palace. Mortified at his militia’s drubbing and what he termed its “cowardice,”24 he scrawled (ironically in the margins of a copy of his 1506 “Discourse on the organization of the Florentine state for arms” [“La cagione dell’Ordinanza”]) the rueful words post res perditas (“after all was lost”).

Contemplative years (1513–1520) The mutual reinforcement of Machiavelli’s outer and inner lives during his active years dissolved with the fall of the republic. Forced away from the political ferment in Florence, he led an outwardly dreary life on his farm near San Casciano, ten miles south of the city. But his intellectual life, animated by the correspondence with Francesco Vettori, among his closest friends since their joint service on the mission to Maximilian in 1507–8, became richer and more exciting.

First Machiavelli had to confront accusations, never proven and certainly false, of complicity in an anti-Medici conspiracy early in 1513. Someone foolishly listed Machiavelli’s name among potential sympathizers, and he was arrested, imprisoned with a “pair of shackles” on his legs, and tortured with the strappado – hoisted with a rope, his arms tied behind his back, and then dropped just short of the floor with excruciating dislocation of the shoulders. He was held for twenty-two days in (as he put it with bitter irony in one of the “prison sonnets” he addressed to Giuliano de’ Medici) the stench of his “refined lodging” among “lice” large enough to seem “like butterflies”25 He was released in March as part of a general amnesty when Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was elected pope as Leo X. Freedom was cold comfort for his physical and psychological pain. Depressed at being disparaged and treated as a criminal, he wrote to his nephew, Giovanni Vernacci, that I have had so much trouble ... it is a miracle that I am alive, because my post was taken from me and I was about to lose my life, which God and my innocence have preserved for me. I have had to endure all sorts of other evils, both prison and other kinds. But, by the grace of God, I am well and I manage to 906

live as I can – and so I shall strive to do, until the heavens show themselves to be more kind.26 He frequently showed his frustrations to Vernacci, revealing his pain more openly to him than he could to Vettori, with whom he often camouflaged his feelings in literary quotations. In one letter to Vettori he expressed his despair by rewriting lines from Petrarch and substituting “give vent to” in place of Petrarch’s “hide”: “Therefore, if at times I laugh or sing, I do so because I have no other way than this to give vent to [sfogare] my bitter tears.”27 Within a week of his liberation, the correspondence with Vettori began. Machiavelli hoped that Vettori, now Florentine ambassador to the papal court, might come to his aid; if so, “I shall do honor to you.” Machiavelli expressed a wish for employment by the Medici, not because he was a sycophant, but because, as he said in the December 1513 letter to Vettori and in the dedicatory letter to The Prince, he could offer experience and competence. But Vettori could offer little tangible help and lamented that he did “not know how to be bold enough to be of use to myself and to others.”28 What he did do, however, proved to be more valuable, for with his letters he drew Machiavelli into dialogue about politics, probing him with questions about current events and encouraging him to gather and refine his thoughts and write about them. In letters of the spring and summer of 1513, Machiavelli began to conceptualize the issues at the core of The Prince, which he wrote between August and December.

Two central themes of The Prince emerged from the correspondence. First is the desperate concern over Italy’s suffering and the yearning for a redeemer. Machiavelli began to theorize the possibility of a leader of “immense virtù” capable of infusing “spirit and order” into the downtrodden Italian people.29 In chapter 12 of The Prince his grief explodes into an anguished lament for an Italy bereft of virtù and “overrun by Charles, plundered by Louis, violated by Ferdinand, and reviled by the Swiss.” In the last chapter, the “Exhortation to seize Italy and free her from the barbarians,” Machiavelli magnifies the redeemer-prince, who first appears in letters to Vettori: In order that after so long a time Italy may behold her redeemer, this opportunity must not be allowed to slip by. I cannot express with what love that redeemer would be received in all these regions that have suffered from these inundations of foreign invaders: with what thirst for vengeance, what determined loyalty, what devotion, what tears ... What Italian would withhold homage from him? This barbarous tyranny stinks in the nostrils of everyone.

Behind The Prince’s apparently dispassionate advice about securing power lie fervor, impatient wrath, and emotional intensity over Italy’s humiliations.

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The second theme that carries over from the letters is Machiavelli’s unflinching insistence that history and politics are after all intelligible. Rejecting Vettori’s sense of the limits of reasoned discourse and the inevitable recourse to “imagination” or interpretation,30 Machiavelli affirms an ability to penetrate the words and actions of princes and, as he then says in Prince 15, to go behind the surface meaning of things to the “verità effettuale”: “I depart from the precepts given by others. But the intention of my writing is to be of use to whoever understands it; thus it has seemed to me more profitable to go straight to the actual truth of matters rather than to a conception about it.” Whom did Machiavelli have in mind in referring to “whoever understands it”? Was he implying that, while the Medici might learn rules for maintaining power, these lessons would not be lost on supporters of republics anywhere? Lorenzo, to whom The Prince was dedicated in 1516 (although originally “addressed” to Giuliano), showed no interest in the work, which failed to rescue Machiavelli from oblivion.

The correspondence with Vettori reveals other facets of Machiavelli’s temperament also reflected in his later works. In humorous exchanges they parried thoughts about love and the nature of desire. Vettori’s description of a dinner party drew Machiavelli into an imaginative recreation of it that invites the reader to see it as a play or short story.31 Reflecting in early 1515 on the “variety” of their letters, Machiavelli justified their frequent changes of subject matter and tone with the idea that in this “variety” they were imitating nature: while some of their letters might suggest that they were “serious men completely directed toward weighty matters,” other letters could give the impression “that we – still the very same selves – were petty, fickle, lascivious, and directed toward chimerical matters [cose vane]. If to some this behavior seems contemptible, to me it seems laudable because we are imitating nature, which is changeable; whoever imitates nature cannot be censured.”32 Much as he did with the ancients, in the correspondence with Vettori Machiavelli similarly “transfers himself ” inside a “variety” of characters, real and imaginary. Nowhere did he do so more inventively than in Mandragola (c. 1518), his richly anticlerical, politicized domestic comedy of seduction whose mordant wit, sometimes ruefully turned on himself (as in act 2, scene 3: “anybody who doesn’t have connections [stato] in this town won’t find even a dog to bark at him”), makes it one of the most brilliant comedies of the Renaissance.

In these same years Machiavelli wrote his Discourses on Livy and Art of War, the latter the only one of his major political works printed in his lifetime (in 1521). Both were inspired by conversations in which he participated in the gardens of the Rucellai family, the Orti Oricellari, where humanists and historians hosted by Cosimo Rucellai (one of the two dedicatees of the Discourses and a speaker in the Art of War) discussed politics and history. Indeed, the Rucellai gardens are the setting for 908

the dialogues in the Art of War, which suggests how grateful Machiavelli was for these stimulating conversations after the years of enforced isolation. The preface to book 2 of the Discourses conveys Machiavelli’s changing self-image: once an adviser to princes, he now sees himself as a teacher to the young. In asserting the political superiority of antiquity when “virtù flourished,” Machiavelli says he will “be courageous and say openly what I understand about those times and our own [when vice “flourishes”] ... so that the minds of the young who read my writings can avoid the latter and prepare to imitate the former, whenever Fortune gives them the opportunity to do so.” He acknowledges, perhaps with a hint of melancholy, that this would be the work of future generations: “For it is the duty of a good man to teach others the good that you have been unable to bring about because of the hostility of the times and of Fortune, so that once many are aware of it, some of them – more beloved of Heaven – may be able to bring it about.” Even as the Medici tightened their grip on power, he desperately hoped for a revival of the republican values of ancient Rome.

Treated unkindly by “the hostility of the times and of Fortune,” Machiavelli was still on the outside looking in and occasionally reacted with anxious dejection. In the allegorical poem he called L’Asino (1517) the woman who consoles the narrator/actor for the ingratitude with which his “great toil” has been rewarded tells him that, “because tears were always unbecoming in a man, one must turn a face with dry eyes to the blows of fortune.”33 In another poem, modeled on conventional Petrarchan emotions, despair adds poignancy: “I hope, and hope aggravates my suffering: I weep and weeping nourishes the weary heart; I laugh and my laughter remains external; I burn and my burning remains within ... everything imparts new suffering.”34 That such discontent was palpable, not trite, is supported by what he wrote to Vernacci in 1518: “Fate has done the worst she can to me ... I am reduced to a condition where I can do little good for myself and less for others.”35 In the proem to the Art of War he identified himself as “Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine citizen and secretary,” thus reminding readers of the pride he took in both his Florentine citizenship and his years of government service.

Rehabilitation (1520–1527) Despite the partial rehabilitation of his last years, Machiavelli’s doldrums were always close to the surface. In 1525 he signed a letter to Francesco Guicciardini “Niccolò Machiavelli, Historian, Comic Author, and Tragic Author.”36 He was indeed a writer of history and plays, but in calling himself a “tragic author” he implied that Italy’s tragic fate was the implicit subject of all his historical and political writing.

Friends from the Orti Oricellari mediated the reconciliation with the Medici in 1520 that opened the way for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (Leo’s cousin, who was himself 909

elected pope as Clement VII in 1523) to approve Machiavelli’s commission from the Florentine Studio to write a history of Florence. It was an ironic challenge for a zealous partisan of Soderini’s republic to be yoked to the Medici and to write a history of Florence in which it would have been imprudent to be too openly critical of the family’s role. Machiavelli confided to Donato Giannotti, a friend from the Orti Oricellari who would hold Machiavelli’s old post of secretary to the Ten under the last republic of 1527–30, that he “could not write” about the period of Medici dominance “as I would if I were free from all worries.” He said he would describe the events but not the “causes” and “methods” of the Medici ascendancy; and what he was unwilling to say as coming from himself he would put into the mouths of their adversaries.37 Was he also referring to this dilemma when he told Guicciardini in 1521, in mocking self-deprecation, that “for some time now I have never said what I believe or never believed what I said”?38 But his commitment to telling difficult truths never wavered. In 1524 he told Guicciardini that he wished he could have him by his side “so that I might show you where I am [in the history], because, since I am about to come to certain details, I would need to learn from you whether or not I am being too offensive in my exaggerating or understating of the facts ...I shall try to do my best to arrange it so that – still telling the truth – no one will have anything to complain about.”39 As far as we know, Clement VII, to whom Machiavelli dedicated and presented the history in 1525, did not complain.

The correspondence with Guicciardini is vital to understanding Machiavelli’s last years. Although Guicciardini came from a family of wealth and status and linked his destiny to the Medici, their letters reveal mutual admiration, respect, and friendship in an interchange rife with irony, chiefly in aid of their anticlericalism. In May 1521, when Guicciardini was governor of Modena, Machiavelli was appointed Florentine envoy to the Franciscan chapter general in Carpi, with an additional commission from Florence’s wool guild to find a preacher for the following year’s Lenten season.

Guicciardini warned him “to take care of ” this business “as swiftly as possible, because in staying there long you run” the risk “that those holy friars might pass some of their hypocrisy on to you.” Guicciardini sardonically approved the “good judgment” of the “reverend consuls of the wool guild” in having “entrusted you with the duty of selecting a preacher, not otherwise than if the task had been given to [the notorious homosexual] Pachierotto ... to find a beautiful and graceful wife for a friend.”

Guicciardini’s next comment tells us much about how contemporaries saw Machiavelli: “I believe you will serve [the consuls] according to the expectations they have of you and as is required by your honor, which would be stained if at this age you started to think about your soul, because, since you have always lived in a contrary belief, it would be attributed rather to senility than to goodness.”40

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Responding to Guicciardini’s letter, which he said he received while “sitting on the toilet ... mulling over the absurdities of this world,” Machiavelli enlisted Guicciardini’s help in perpetrating a practical joke on the friars. He asked him to send messengers more frequently with letters that Machiavelli would pretend were full of big news about the emperor, the king of France, and the Swiss, and which would cause his reputation to “rise among those friars ... once they saw the dispatches arriving thick and fast.” Machiavelli loved making fools of the naive friars. Rising to Guicciardini’s remark about the danger of starting “to think about your soul” so late in life, Machiavelli shows again his characteristic blend of comic unconventionality and serious purpose: “In truth, I know that I am at variance with the ideas of [Florence’s] citizens ... They would like a preacher who would teach them the way to Paradise, and I should like to find one who would teach them the way to go to the Devil ...For I believe that the following would be the true way to go to Paradise: learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it.” Machiavelli concluded these thoughts with an assertion that his detractors should not forget: “Since I am aware how much belief there is in an evil man who hides under the cloak of religion, I can readily conjure up how much belief there would be in a good man who walks in truth, and not in pretense, tramping through the muddy footprints of Saint Francis.”41 In 1525 Machiavelli and Guicciardini discussed a possible Florentine performance of Mandragola, and Machiavelli explicated for Guicciardini some of the play’s proverbial witticisms.42 Guicciardini (and others) commented on Machiavelli’s affair with Barbera Salutati,43 who sang the songs preceding the acts of Mandragola and who may have inspired Machiavelli’s Clizia, the comedy about the elderly Nicomaco (an obvious play on Machiavelli’s name) foolishly enamored of a young woman.

Machiavelli’s last two years were dominated by the storm that was about to break over Italy, now the battleground of the rivalry between Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and Francis I of France. In 1526, as Florence shored up its defenses, the Medici regime finally asked Machiavelli for advice on the militia and fortifications and made him secretary of a new magistracy he himself recommended, the Overseers of the Walls. But it was not an auspicious moment to return to government work. Clement’s vacillations so enraged the emperor that the latter let an ill-paid and uncontrolled imperial army descend into Tuscany in early 1527. In February, Machiavelli was sent to Guicciardini, now lieutenant-general of the papal armies in the north, to urge him to come to his city’s defense, and in April Florence narrowly averted being sacked when Guicciardini led papal–French forces to the rescue. Machiavelli wrote to Vettori: “I love Messer Francesco Guicciardini, I love my native city more than ...”–and here there is an erasure in his grandson’s copybook of the letters. It is speculated that Machiavelli may have written “more than my own soul.”44 Florence escaped, but the hungry army proceeded to Rome and inflicted 911

the devastating sack of May 1527 that resulted in Clement’s imprisonment, an antiMedici revolt in Florence, and the creation of a new republic.

A tormented Italy is the backdrop for the tender, solicitous letter from “a good man who walks in truth, and not in pretense” that Machiavelli wrote to his son Guido in April 1527. Fatherly advice pours out: “You must study ...take pains to learn letters and music, for you are aware how much distinction is given me for what little ability I possess ...Study, do well, and learn, because everyone will help you if you help yourself.” To impress upon his son the values of freedom and compassion, Machiavelli moves on to a topic dear to Guido’s heart – his young mule, which “has gone mad.”

Machiavelli advises that “it must be treated just the reverse of the way crazy people are, for they are tied up, and I want you to let it loose ... Take off its bridle and halter and let it go wherever it likes to regain its own way of life and work off its craziness.

The village is big, and the beast is small; it can do no one any harm.” Machiavelli was fond of animal metaphors, and we may surmise that these lines were also about his desire to regain his “own way of life” in freedom. Machiavelli also asked Guido to “greet Madonna Marietta for me ...I have never longed so much to return to Florence as I do now ... Simply tell her that, whatever she hears, she should be of good cheer, since I shall be there before any danger comes. Kiss Baccina, Piero, and Totto ...Live in happiness and spend as little as you can ...Christ watch over you all.”45 Back in Florence, Machiavelli died on June 22, 1527, “from pains in the belly” caused by an attack of peritonitis. According to a letter (of doubtful authenticity) of his son Piero, Machiavelli “allowed Brother Matteo ...to hear the confession of his sins.”46 A story has it that he told those “who kept him company until his death” about a dream in which he chooses to remain in Hell and discuss politics with Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus and other ancients, rather than go to Heaven and associate with the blessed souls of Paradise.47 With a dream of an afterlife devoted to conversation, we end where we began. The deathbed story may also be apocryphal, but it is true to the sly, ironic wit of a man who was frequently “at variance with the ideas” of his contemporaries.

Notes 1. Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli, 7th edition (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), p. 56; The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli, 2nd edition, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 35.

2. Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 264.

3. To Francesco Vettori, March 18, 1513; Correspondence, p.222.

4. Bernardo Machiavelli, Librodi Ricordi, ed. Cesare Olschki (Florence: Le Monnier, 1954), pp. 31, 103, 138.

5. Trans. David Marsh, in Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. 2, Political Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 173–99 (174).

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6. Ridolfi, Vita, p.426.

7. NiccolòMachiavelli, Opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), p.994.

8. To Ricciardo Becchi, March 9, 1498; Correspondence, pp. 8–10 (quotation at p.10).

9. Opere, pp. 942–3, vv. 155–65.

10. Correspondence, p.225.

11. Correspondence, p.93.

12. Correspondence, p.22.

13. Opere, p.443.

14. Opere, p.404.

15. Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. Alice de Rosen Jervis (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1927), p. 218.

16. Correspondence, p.135.

17. Opere, p.956, vv. 88–90.

18. Correspondence, pp. 157–8 (July 30, 1507).

19. Correspondence, pp. 180–1 (June 8, 1509).

20. Correspondence, pp. 181–2 (June 17, 1509).

21. Correspondence, p.193 (December 28, 1509).

22. Correspondence, p.55 (October 21, 1502).

23. Opere, p.950, vv. 7–9.

24. Letter “to a Noblewoman,” some time after September 16, 1512; Correspondence, p. 216.

25. Opere, p. 1003.

26. Correspondence, p.239 (June 26, 1513).

27. Correspondence, p.228 (April 16, 1513).

28. Correspondence, p.223 (March 30, 1513).

29. Correspondence, p.259 (August 26, 1513).

30. Correspondence, pp. 241–2 (July 12, 1513).

31. Correspondence, pp. 274–8 (Vettori to Machiavelli, January 18, 1514; Machiavelli to Vettori, February 4, 1514).

32. Correspondence, p.312 (January 31, 1515).

33. L’Asino 3, vv. 85–7; Opere, p.961.

34. “Strambotto I,” vv. 1–4, 6; Opere, p.997.

35. Correspondence, p.319 (January 25, 1518).

36. Correspondence, p.371 (after October 21, 1525).

37. Ridolfi, Vita, p.310; Life, pp. 198–9.

38. Correspondence, p.337 (May 17, 1521).

39. Correspondence, p.351 (August 30, 1524).

40. Correspondence, p.335 (May 17, 1521).

41. Correspondence, pp. 336–7 (May 17, 1521).

42. Correspondence, pp. 367–8 (October 16–20, 1525).

43. Correspondence, pp. 360–1, 377, 384–5, 393.

44. Correspondence, pp. 416, 562 (April 16, 1527).

45. Correspondence, pp. 413–14 (April 2, 1527).

46. Correspondence, p.425.

47. Ridolfi, Vita, pp. 391–2; Life, pp. 249–50.

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SECTION 3

Quentin Skinner, Machiavelliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Advice to Princes Arms and the man: these are Machiavelli's two great themes in The Prince. The other lesson he accordingly wishes to bring home to the rulers of his age is that, in addition to having a sound army, a prince who aims to scale the heights of glory must cultivate the right qualities of princely leadership. The nature of these qualities had already been influentially analysed by the Roman moralists. They had argued in the first place that all great leaders need to some extent to be fortunate. For unless Fortune happens to smile, no amount of unaided human effort can hope to bring us to our highest goals ... . They also maintained that a special range of characteristics - those of the vir [man] - tend to attract the favourable attentions of Fortune, and in this way almost guarantee us the attainment of honour, glory and fame. The assumptions underlying this belief are best summarised by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations. He declares that, if we act from a thirst for virtus without any thought of winning glory as a result, this will give us the best chance of winning glory as well, provided that Fortune smiles; for glory is virtus rewarded.

This analysis was taken over without alteration by the humanists of Renaissance Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, an extensive genre of humanist advice books for princes had grown up, and had reached an unprecedentedly wide audience through the new medium of print. Such distinguished writers as Bartolomeo Sacchi, Giovanni Pontano and Francesco Patrizi all wrote treatises for the guidance of new rulers, all of which were founded on the same basic principle: that the possession of virtus is the key to princely success. As Pontano rather grandly proclaims in his tract on The Prince, any ruler who wishes to attain his noblest ends "must rouse himself to follow the dictates of virtus" in all his public acts. Virtus is "the most splendid thing in the world," more magnificent even than the sun, for "the blind cannot see the sun" whereas "even they can see virtus as plainly as possible."

Machiavelli reiterates precisely the same beliefs about the relations between virtu, Fortune and the achievement of princely goals. He first makes these humanist allegiances clear in chapter 6 of The Prince, where he argues that "in princedoms wholly new, where the prince is new, there is more or less difficulty in keeping them, according as the prince who acquires them is more or less virtuoso." This is later corroborated in chapter 24, the aim of which is to explain "Why the princes of Italy have lost their states." Machiavelli insists that they "should not blame Fortune" for their disgrace, be914

cause "she only shows her power" when men of virtù "do not prepare to resist her."

Their losses are simply due to their failure to recognise that "those defences alone are good" which "depend on yourself and your own virtù." Finally, the role of virtù is again underlined in chapter 26, the impassioned "Exhortation" to liberate Italy that brings The Prince to an end. At this point Machiavelli reverts to the incomparable leaders mentioned in chapter 6 for their "amazing virtù"-Moses, Cyrus and Theseus. He implies that nothing less than a union of their astonishing abilities with the greatest good Fortune will enable Italy to be saved. And he adds in an uncharacteristic moment of preposterous flattery-that the "glorious family" of the Medici luckily possess all the requisite qualities: they have tremendous virtù; they are immensely favoured by Fortune; and they are no less "favoured by God and by the Church."

It is often complained that Machiavelli fails to provide any definition of virtù, and even that (as O .H.] Whitfield puts it) he is "innocent of any systematic use of the word." But it will now be evident that he uses the term with complete consistency. Following his classical and humanist authorities, he treats it as that quality which enables a prince to withstand the blows of Fortune, to attract the goddess's favour, and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely fame, winning honour and glory for himself and security for his government.

It still remains, however, to consider what particular characteristics are to be expected in a man of virtuoso capacities. The Roman moralists had bequeathed a complex analysis of the concept of virtus, generally picturing the true vir as the pos sessor of three distinct yet affiliated sets of qualities. They took him to be endowed in the first place with the four "cardinal" virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance-the virtues that Cicero (following Plato) begins by singling out in the opening sections of Moral Obligation. But they also credited him with an additional range of qualities that later came to be regarded as peculiarly "princely" in nature. The chief of these-the pivotal virtue of Cicero's Moral Obligation-was what Cicero called "honesty," meaning a willingness to keep faith and deal honourably with all men at all times. This was felt to need supplementing by two further attributes, both of which were described in Moral Obligation, but were more extensively analysed by Seneca, who devoted special treatises to each of them. One was princely magnanimity, the theme of Seneca's On Mercy; the other was liberality, one of the major topics discussed in Seneca's On Benefits. Finally, the true vir was said to be characterised by his steady recognition of the fact that, if we wish to reach the goals of honour and glory, we must always be sure to behave as virtuously as possible. This contention-that it is always rational to be morallies at the heart of Cicero's Moral Obligation. He observes in Book II that many men believe "that a thing may be morally right without being expedient, and expedient without being morally right." But this is an illusion, for it is only by moral methods that we 915

can hope to attain the objects of our desires. Any appearances to the contrary are wholly deceptive, for "expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude." ...

Machiavelli's criticism of classical and contemporary humanism is thus a simple but devastating one. He argues that, if a ruler wishes to reach his highest goals, he will not always find it rational to be moral; on the contrary, he will find that any consistent attempt to "practise all those things for which men are considered good" will prove a ruinously irrational policy. But what of the Christian objection that this is a foolish as well as a wicked position to adopt, since it forgets the day of judgement on which all injustices will finally be punished? About this Machiavelli says nothing at all. His silence is eloquent, indeed epoch-making; it echoed around Christian Europe, at first eliciting a stunned silence in return, and then a howl of execration that has never finally died away.

If princes ought not to conduct themselves according to the dictates of conventional morality, how ought they to conduct themselves? Machiavelli's response-the core of his positive advice to new rulers-is given at the beginning of chapter 15. A wise prince will be guided above all by the dictates of necessity: "in order to hold his position," he "must acquire the power to be not good, and understand when to use it and when not to use it" as circumstances direct. Three chapters later, this basic doctrine is repeated. A wise prince "holds to what is right when he can," but he "knows how to do wrong when this is necessitated." Moreover, he must reconcile himself to the fact that "he will often be necessitated" to act "contrary to truth, contrary to charity, contrary to humanity, contrary to religion" if he wishes "to maintain his government." . . . The crucial importance of this insight was first put to Machiavelli at an early stage in his diplomatic career. It was after conversing with the cardinal of Volterra in 1503, and with Pandolfo Petrucci some two years later, that he originally felt im pelled to record what was later to become his central political belief: that the clue to successful statecraft lies in recognising the force of circumstances, accepting what necessity dictates, and harmonising one's behaviour with the times. A year after Pandolfo gave him this recipe for princely success, we find Machiavelli putting forward a similar set of observations as his own ideas for the first time. While stationed at Perugia in September 1506, watching the astonishing progress of Julius II's campaign, he fell to musing in a letter to his friend Giovanni Soderini about the reasons for triumph and disaster in civil and military affairs. "Nature," he declares, "has given every man a particular talent and inspiration" which "controls each one of us." But "the times are varied" and "subject to frequent change," so that "those who fail to alter their ways of proceeding" are bound to encounter "good Fortune at one time and bad at another." The moral is obvious: if a man wishes "always to enjoy good Fortune," he must "be wise enough to accommodate himself to the times." Indeed, if everyone were "to command his nature" in this 916

way, and "match his way of proceeding with his age," then "it would genuinely come true that the wise man would be the ruler of the stars and of the fates."

Writing The Prince seven years later, Machiavelli virtually copied out these "Caprices," as he deprecatingly called them, in his chapter on the role of Fortune in human affairs. Everyone, he says, likes to follow his own particular bent: one person acts "with caution, another impetuously; one by force, the other with skill." But in the meantime, "times and affairs change," so that a ruler who "does not change his way of proceeding" will be bound sooner or later to encounter ill-luck. However, if "he could change his nature with times and affairs, Fortune would not change." So the successful prince will always be the one "who adapts his way of proceeding to the nature of the times."

By now it will be evident that the revolution Machiavelli engineered in the genre of advice-books for princes was based in effect on redefining the pivotal concept of virtĂš.

He endorses the conventional assumption that virtu is the name of that congeries of qualities which enables a prince to ally with Fortune and obtain honour, glory and fame. But he divorces the meaning of the term from any necessary connection with the cardinal and princely virtues. He argues instead that the defining characteristic of a truly virtuoso prince will be a willingness to do whatever is dictated by necessitywhether the action happens to be wicked or virtuous-in order to attain his highest ends.

So virtu comes to denote precisely the requisite quality of moral flexibility in a prince: "he must have a mind ready to turn in any direction as Fortune's winds and the variability of affairs require."

Machiavelli takes some pains to point out that this conclusion opens up an unbridgeable gulf between himself and the whole tradition of humanist political thought, and does so in his most savagely ironic style. To the classical moralists and their innumerable followers, moral virtue had been the defining characteristic of the vir, the man of true manliness. Hence to abandon virtue was not merely to act irrationally; it was also to abandon one's status as a man and descend to the level of the beasts. As Cicero had put it in Book I of Moral Obligation, there are two ways in which wrong may be done, either by force or by fraud. Both, he declares, "are bestial" and "wholly unworthy of man" - force because it typifies the lion and fraud because it "seems to belong to the cunning fox."

To Machiavelli, by contrast, it seemed obvious that manliness is not enough. There are indeed two ways of acting, he says at the start of chapter 18, of which "the first is suited to man, the second to the animals." But "because the first is often not sufficient, a prince must resort to the second." One of the things a prince therefore needs to know is which animals to imitate. Machiavelli's celebrated advice is that he will come off best if he "chooses among the beasts the fox and the lion," supplement ing the ideals of 917

manly decency with the indispensable arts of force and fraud. This conception is underlined in the next chapter, in which Machiavelli discusses one of his favourite historical characters, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. First he assures us that the emperor was "a man of very great virtu." And then, explaining the judgement, he adds that Septimius' great qualities were those of "a very savage lion and a very tricky fox," as a result of which he was "feared and respected by everybody."

Machiavelli rounds off his analysis by indicating the lines of conduct to be expected from a truly virtuoso prince. In chapter 19 he puts the point negatively, stressing that such a ruler will never do anything worthy of contempt, and will always take the greatest care "to avoid everything that makes him hated." In chapter 21 the positive implications are then spelled out. Such a prince will always act "without reservation" towards his allies and enemies, boldly standing forth "as a vigorous supporter of one side." At the same time, he will seek to present himself to his subjects as majestically as possible, doing "extraordinary things" and keeping them "always in suspense and wonder, watching for the outcome."

In the light of this account, it is easy to understand why Machiavelli felt such admiration for Cesare Borgia, and wished to hold him up-despite his obvious limitations - as a pattern of virtĂš for other new princes. For Borgia had demonstrated, on one terrifying occasion, that he understood perfectly the paramount importance of avoiding the hatred of the people while at the same time keeping them in awe. The occasion was when he realised that his government of the Romagna, in the capable but tyrannical hands of Remirro de Oreo, was falling into the most serious danger of all, that of becoming an object of hatred to those living under it . . .. Machiavelli was an eye-witness of Borgia's cold-blooded solution to the dilemma: the summary murder of Remirro and the exhibition of his body in the public square as a sacrifice to the people's rage.

Machiavelli's belief in the imperative need to avoid popular hatred and contempt should perhaps be dated from this moment. But even if the duke's action merely served to corroborate his own sense of political realities, there is no doubt that the episode left him deeply impressed. When he came to discuss the issues of hatred and contempt in The Prince, this was precisely the incident he recalled in order to illustrate his point.

He makes it clear that Borgia's action had struck him on reflection as being profoundly right. It was resolute; it took courage; and it brought about exactly the desired effect, since it left the people "gratified and awestruck" while at the same time removing their "cause for hatred." Summing up in his iciest tones, Machiavelli remarks that the duke's conduct seems to him, as usual, to be "worthy of notice and of being copied by others."

Machiavelli is fully aware that his new analysis of princely virtĂš raises some new difficulties. He states the main dilemma in the course of chapter 15: on the one hand, a 918

prince must "acquire the power to be not good" and exercise it whenever this is dictated by necessity; but on the other hand, he must be careful not to acquire the reputation of being a wicked man, because this will tend to "take his position away from him" instead of securing it. The problem is thus to avoid appearing wicked even when you cannot avoid behaving wickedly.

Moreover, the dilemma is even sharper than this implies, for the true aim of the prince is not merely to secure his position, but is of course to win honour and glory as well. As Machiavelli indicates in recounting the story of Agathocles, the tyrant of Sicily, this greatly intensifies the predicament in which any new ruler finds himself. Agathocles, we are told, "lived a wicked life" at every stage of his career and was known as a man of "outrageous cruelty and inhumanity." These attributes brought him immense success, enabling him to rise from "low and abject Fortune" to become king of Syracuse and hold on to his principality "without any opposition from the citizens." But as Machiavelli warns us, in a deeply revealing phrase, such unashamed cruelties may bring us "sovereignty, but not glory." Although Agathocles was able to maintain his state by means of these qualities, "they cannot be called virtu and they do not permit him to be honoured among the noblest men."

Finally, Machiavelli refuses to admit that the dilemma can be resolved by setting stringent limits to princely wickedness, and in general behaving honourably towards one's subjects and allies. This is exactly what one cannot hope to do, be cause all men at all times "are ungrateful, changeable, simulators and dissimulators, runaways in danger, eager for gain," so that "a prince who bases himself entirely on their word, if he is lacking in other preparations, falls." The implication is that "a prince, and above all a prince who is new" will often-not just occasionally-find himself forced by necessity to act "contrary to humanity" if he wishes to keep his position and avoid being deceived.

These are acute difficulties, but they can certainly be overcome. The prince need only remember that, although it is not necessary to have all the qualities usually considered good, it is "very necessary to appear to have them." It is good to be considered liberal; it is sensible to seem merciful and not cruel; it is essential in general to be "thought to be of great merit." The solution is thus to become "a great simulator and dissimulator," learning "how to addle the brains of men with trickery" and make them believe in your pretense.

Machiavelli had received an early lesson in the value of addling men's brains . . . .

He had been present when the struggle developed between Cesare Borgia and Julius II in the closing months of 1503, and it is evident that the impressions he carried away from that occasion were still uppermost in his mind when he came to write about the question of dissimulation in The Prince. He immediately refers back to the episode he had witnessed, using it as his main example of the need to remain constantly on one's 919

guard against princely duplicity. Julius, he recalls, managed to conceal his hatred of Borgia so cleverly that he caused the duke to fall into the egregious error of believing that "men of high rank forget old injuries." He was then able to put his powers of dissimulation to decisive use. Having won the papal election with Borgia's full support, he suddenly revealed his true feelings, turned against the duke and "caused his final ruin."

Borgia certainly blundered at this point, and Machiavelli feels that he deserved to be blamed severely for his mistake. He ought to have known that a talent for addling men's brains is part of the armoury of any successful prince.

Machiavelli cannot have been unaware, however, that in recommending the arts of deceit as the key to success he was in danger of sounding too glib. More orthodox moralists had always been prepared to consider the suggestion that hypocrisy might be used as a shortcut to glory, but had always gone on to rule out any such possibility.

Cicero, for example, had explicitly canvassed the idea in Book II of Mora[ Obligation, only to dismiss it as a manifest absurdity. Anyone, he declares, who "thinks that he can win lasting glory by pretence" is "very much mistaken." The reason is that "true glory strikes deep roots and spreads its branches wide," whereas "all pretenses soon fall to the ground like fragile flowers."

Machiavelli responds, as before, by rejecting such earnest sentiments in his most ironic style. He insists in chapter 18 that the practice of hypocrisy is not merely indispensable to princely government, but is capable of being sustained without much difficulty for as long as may be required. Two distinct reasons are offered for this deliberately provocative conclusion. One is that most men are so simple minded, and above all so prone to self-deception, that they usually take things at face value in a wholly uncritical way. The other is that, when it comes to assessing the behaviour of princes, even the shrewdest observers are largely condemned to judge by appearances. Isolated from the populace, protected by "the majesty of the government," the prince's position is such that "everybody sees what you appear to be" but "few perceive what you are."

Thus there is no reason to suppose that your sins will find you out; on the contrary, "a prince who deceives always finds men who let themselves be deceived."

The final issue Machiavelli discusses is what attitude we should take towards the new rules he has sought to inculcate. At first sight he appears to adopt a relatively conventional moral stance. He agrees in chapter 15 that "it would be most praiseworthy" for new princes to exhibit those qualities which are normally considered good, and he equates the abandonment of the princely virtues with the process of learning "to be not good." The same scale of values recurs even in the notorious chapter on "How princes should keep their promises." Machiavelli begins by affirming that everybody realises how praiseworthy it is when a ruler "lives with sincerity and not with trickery," and goes on to insist that a prince ought not merely to seem conventionally virtuous, 920

but ought "actually to be so" as far as possible, "holding to what is right when he can," and only turning away from the virtues when this is dictated by necessity.

However, two very different arguments are introduced in the course of chapter 15, each of which is subsequently developed. First of all, Machiavelli is somewhat quizzical about whether we can properly say that those qualities which are considered good, but are nevertheless ruinous, really deserve the name of virtues. Since they are prone to bring destruction, he prefers to say that they "look like virtues"; and since their opposites are more likely to bring "safety and well-being," he prefers to say that they "look like vices."

DOCUMENTS The exchange of letters between Machiavelli, exiled after 1512 to his farm at San Casciano in Tuscany, and his friend in Rome, Francesco Vettori, provides the setting for the composition of The Prince. In the first selection, Vettori, a Florentine patrician and statesman, describes his rather luxurious life as Florence's envoy to the papal court in Rome, where he hobnobbed with Pope Leo X, cardinals, and other diplomats. In his famous reply of December 10, 1513, the second selection, Machiavelli stresses his poverty and misery, alleviated only by his "conversation with the ancients" in his evening study of classical history. Composed with ironic intent as the mirror image of Vettori's life in Rome, Machiavelli's depiction of his grim exile in the Tuscan countryside is no doubt exaggerated. These two letters nevertheless provide deeply personal and contrasting visions of life in the era of the Italian Wars.

In The Prince, Machiavelli used the lessons of ancient history and contemporary events to educate a "new prince" to succeed in a volatile, even dangerous, political context. The third selection comprises excerpts from several chapters in The Prince. Chapter 7 presents Machiavelli's view of Cesare Borgia. Chapters 15, 17, and 18 address the prince's need to use evil methods for his own preservation. Finally, Chapters 24 through 26 examine how Italian princes have lost their states. Machiavelli then posits that for tune is a woman, controlled better by a bold prince than a cautious one, and he concludes with an exhortation to a "new prince" to free Italy from the barbarians.

Excerpts from Machiavelli by Quentin Skinner. CopyrightŠ 1981 by Quentin Skinner. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

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SECTION 4

Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier The First Book To Messer Alfonso Ariosto [1] I have long wondered, dearest messer Alfonso, which of two things was the more difficult for me: to deny you what you have repeatedly and so insistently asked of me, or to do it. For, on the one hand, it seemed very hard for me to deny a thing-especially when it was something praiseworthy-to one whom I love most dearly and by whom I feel I am most dearly loved; yet, on the other hand, to undertake a thing which I was not sure I could finish seemed unbecoming to one who esteems just censure as much as it ought to be esteemed. Finally, after much thought, I have resolved that I would try in this to see how much aid to diligence might be had from affection and the intense desire that I have to please, which, in things generally, is so wont to increase men's industry.

Now, you have asked me to write my opinion as to what form of Courtiership most befits a gentleman living at the courts of princes, by which he can have both the knowledge and the ability to serve them in every reasonable thing, thereby winning favor from them and praise from others: in short, what manner of man he must be who deserves the name of perfect Courtier, without defect of any kind. Wherefore, considering this request, I say that, had it not seemed to me more blameworthy to be judged by you to be wanting in love than by others to be wanting in prudence, I should have eschewed this labor, out of fear of being thought rash by all who know what a difficult thing it is to choose, from among so great a variety of .customs as are followed at the courts of Christendom, the most perfect form and, as it were, the flower of Courtiership. For custom often makes the same things pleasing and displeasing to us; whence it comes about sometimes that the customs, dress, ceremonies, and fashions that were once prized become despised; and, contrariwise, the despised be¡ come prized. Hence, it is clearly seen that usage is more powerful than reason in introducing new things among us and in blotting out old things; and anyone who tries to judge of perfection in such matters is often deceived. For which reason, since I am well aware of this and of many another difficulty in the matter whereof it is proposed that I should write, I am forced to excuse myself somewhat and to submit evidence that this is an error (if indeed it can be called error) which I share with you, so that, if I am to be blamed for it, that blame will be shared by you, because your having put upon me a burden beyond my powers much not be deemed a lesser fault than my own acceptance of it.

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So let us now make a beginning of our subject, and, if that be possible, let us from such a Courtier that any prince worthy of being served by him, even though he have but small dominion, may still be called a very great lord.

In these books we shall not follow any set order or rule anything of distinct whatever, precepts, but, as is following most often the the. manner custom of in many teaching ancient writers, and to revive a pleasant . memory, we shall rehearse some discussions which took place among men singularly qualified in such matters. And even though I was not present and did not take part in them, being in England at the time when they occurred, I learned of them shortly thereafter from a person who gave me a faithful report of them; and I shall attempt to recall them accurately, in so far as my memory permits, so that you may know what was judged and thought in this matter by men worthy of the highest praise, and in whose judgment on all things one may have unquestioned 'faith. Nor will it be beside the purpose to give some account of the occasion of the discussions that took place, so that in due order we may come to the end at which our discourse aims.

[2] On the slopes of the Apennines toward the Adriatic, at almost the center of Italy, is situated, as everyone knows, the little city of Urbino. And although it sits among hills that are perhaps not as pleasant as those we see in many other places, still it has been blessed by Heaven with a most fertile and bountiful countryside, so that, besides the wholesomeness of the air, it abounds in all the necessities of life. But among the greater blessings that can be claimed for it, this I believe to be the chief, that for a long time now it has been ruled by excellent lords ( even though, in the universal calamity of the wars of Italy, it was deprived of them for a time). But, to look no further, we can cite good proof thereof in the glorious memory of Duke Federico, who in his day was the light of Italy. Nor are there wanting many true witnesses still living who can testify to his prudence, humanity, justice, generosity, undaunted spirit, to his military prowess, signally attested by his many victories, the capture of impregnable places, the sudden readiness of his expeditions, the many times when with but small forces he routed large and very powerful armies, and the fact that he never lost a single battle; so that not without reason may we compare him to many famous men among the ancients.

Among his other laudable deeds, he built on the rugged site of Urbino a palace thought by many the most beautiful to be found anywhere in all Italy and he furnished it so well with every suitable thing that it seemed not a palace but a city in the form of a palace; and furnished it not only with what is customary, such as silver vases, wall hangings of the richest cloth of gold, silk, and other like things, but for ornament he added countless ancient statues of marble and bronze, rare paintings, and musical instruments of every sort; nor did he wish to have anything there that was not most rare and excellent. Then, at great expense, he collected many very excel lent and rare books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, deeming these to be the supreme excellence of his great palace.

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[3] Following then the course of nature and being already sixty-five years old, he died as gloriously as he had lived, leaving as his successor his only son, a child ten years of age and motherless, named Guidobaldo. This boy, even as he was heir to the state, seemed to be heir to all his father's virtues as well, and in his remarkable nature began at once to promise more than it seemed right to expect of a mortal; so that men judged none of the notable deeds of Duke Federico to be greater than his begetting such a son. But Fortune, envious of so great a worth, set herself against this glorious beginning with all her might, so that, before Duke Guido had reached the age of twenty, he fell sick of the gout, which grew upon him with grievous pain, and in a short time so crippled all his members that he could not stand upon his feet or move. Thus, one of the fairest and ablest persons in the world was deformed and marred at a tender age.

And not even content with this, Fortune opposed him so in his every undertaking that he rarely brought to a successful issue anything he tried to do; and, although he was very wise in counsel and undaunted in spirit, it seemed that whatever he undertook always succeeded ill with him whether in arms or in anything, great or small; all of which is attested by his many and diverse calamities, which he always bore with such strength of spirit that his virtue was never overcome by Fortune; nay, despising her storms with stanch heart, he lived in sickness of health, and in adversity as if most fortunate, with the greatest dignity and esteemed by all. So that, although he was infirm of body in this way, he campaigned with a most honorable rank in the service of their Serene Highnesses Kings Alfonso and Ferdinand the Younger of Naples; and later with Pope Alexander VI, as well as the signories of Venice and Florence.

Then when Julius II became Pope, the Duke was made Captain of the Church; during which time, and following his usual style, he saw to it that his household was filled with very noble and worthy gentlemen, with whom he lived on the most familiar terms, delighting in their company; in which the pleasure he gave others was not less than that which he had from them, being well versed in both Latin and Greek and combining affability and wit with the knowledge of an infinitude of things. Besides this, so much did the greatness of his spirit spur him on that, even though he could not engage personally in chivalric activities as he had once done, he still took the greatest pleasure in seeing others so engaged; and by his words, now criticizing and now praising each man according to his deserts, he showed clearly how much judgment he had in such matters.

Wherefore, in jousts and tournaments, in riding, in the handling of every sort of weapon, as well as in revelries, in games, in musical performances, in short, in all exercises befitting noble cavaliers, everyone strove to show himself such as to deserve to be thought worthy of his noble company.

[4] Thus, all the hours of the day were given over to honorable and pleasant exercises both of the body and of the mind; but because, owing to his infirmity, the Duke always retired to sleep very early after supper, everyone usually repaired to the rooms of the Duchess, Elisabetta Gonzaga at that hour; where also signora Emilia Pia was always to be found, who being gifted with such a lively wit and judgment, as you know, seemed the mistress of all, and all appeared to take on wisdom and worth from her.

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Here, then, gentle discussions and innocent pleasantries were heard, and on everyone's face a jocund gaiety could be seen depicted, so much so that this house could be called the very abode of joyfulness. Nor do I believe that the sweetness that is had from a beloved company was ever savored in any other place as it once was there. For, not to speak of the great honor it was for each of us to serve such a lord as I have described above, we all felt a supreme happiness arise within us whenever we came into the presence of the Duchess. And it seemed that this was a chain that bound us all together in love, in such wise that never was there concord of will or cordial love between brothers greater than that which was there among us all.

The same was among the ladies, with whom one had very free and most honorable association, for to each it was permitted to speak, sit, jest, and laugh with whom he pleased; but the reverence that was paid to the wishes of the Duchess was such that this same liberty was a very great check; nor was there anyone who did not esteem it the greatest pleasure in the world to please her and the greatest grief to displease her. For which reason most decorous customs were there joined with the greatest liberty, and games and laughter in her presence were seasoned not only with witty jests but with a gracious and sober dignity; for that modesty and grandeur which ruled over all the acts, words, and gestures of the Duchess, in jest and laughter, caused anyone seeing her for the first time to recognize her as a very great lady. And, in impressing her self thus upon those about her, it seemed that she tempered us all to her own quality and fashion, wherefore each one strove to imitate her style, deriving, as it were, a rule of fine manners from the presence of so great and virtuous a lady; whose high qualities I do not now intend to recount, this being not to my purpose, because they are well known to all the world, and much more than I could express either with tongue or pen; and those which might have remained somewhat hidden, Fortune, as if admiring such rare virtues, chose to reveal through many adversities and stings of calamity, in order to prove that in the tender breast of a woman, and accompanied by singular beauty, there may dwell prudence and strength of spirit, and all those virtues which are very rare even in austere men.

[5] But, passing over this, I say that the custom of all the gentlemen of the house was to betake themselves immediately after supper to the Duchess; where, amidst the pleasant pastimes, the music and dancing which were continually enjoyed, fine questions would sometimes be proposed, and sometimes ingenious games, now at the behest of one person and now of another, in which, under various concealments, those present revealed their thoughts allegorically to whomever they chose. Sometimes other discussions would turn on a variety of subjects, or there would be a sharp exchange of quick retorts; often "emblems," as we nowadays call them, were devised; in which discussions a marvelous pleasure was had, the house (as I have said) being full of very noble talents, among whom, as you know, the most famous were signor Ottaviano Fregoso, his brother messer Federico, the Magnifico Guiliano deâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Medici, messer Pietro Bembo, messer Cesare Gonzaga, Count Ludovico da Canossa, signor Gaspar Pallavicino, signor Ludovico Pio, signor Morello da Ortona, Pietro da Napoli, messer Rob925

ert da Bari, and countless other very noble gentlemen. And there were many besides who, although they did not usually remain there continuously, yet spent most of their time there: such as messer Bernardo Bibbiena, the Unico Arentino, Giancristoforo Romano, Pietro Monte, Terpandro, messer Nicolo Frisio. So that poets, musicians, and all sorts of buffoons, and the most excellent of every kind of talent that could be found in Italy, were always gathered there. Â Â The Fourth Book To Messer Alfonso Ariosto [1] Thinking to record the discussions held on the fourth evening following those reported in the preceding books, I feel amidst various reflections one bitter thought strike upon me, making me mindful of human miseries and of our vain hopes: how often Fortune in midcourse, and sometimes near the end, dashes our fragile and futile designs and sometimes wrecks them before the port can even be seen from afar. Thus I remember that, not long after these discussions took place, untimely death deprived our court of three of its rarest gentlemen, even while they flourished in robust health and in hope of honor. And of these the first was signor Gaspar Pallavicino who, being afflicted and brought low more than once by a sore disease, was still of such strength of spirit that for a time soul and body held together in the face of death; yet he reached the end of his natural course long before his time: a great loss indeed, not only to our court and to his friends and relatives, but to his native land and to all Lombardy.

Not long thereafter messer Cesare Gonzaga died, leaving to all who knew him a bitter and painful memory of his death; for since nature produces such men as rarely as she does, it seemed only right that she should not so soon have deprived us of this man, because certainly it can be said that messer Cesare was taken from us just when he was beginning to give something more than a promise of himself, and to be esteemed for his excellent qualities as much as they deserved; for by many virtuous deeds he had already given good proof of his worth, which shone forth not only in noble birth, but in the adornment of letters and arms as well, and in every kind of praiseworthy behavior; so that, owing to his goodness, his talents, courage, and knowledge, nothing too great could have been expected of him.

And but a short time passed until the death of messer Roberto da Bari also brought deep sorrow to the whole court; for it seemed right that everyone should be grieved by the death of a young man of good manners, agreeable, of handsome aspect, and of the rarest physical grace, and of as stout and sturdy a character as it is possible to wish.

[2] Thus, had these men lived, I think they would have attained such eminence that they would have been able to give to all who knew them clear proof of how praiseworthy the Court of Urbino was, and how adorned it was with noble cavaliers-as nearly all that were ever reared there have adorned it. For truly there did not come forth from the Trojan horse so many lords and captains as from this court have come men singu926

lar in worth and most highly regarded by all. Thus, as you know, messer Federico Fregoso was made Archbishop of Salerno; Count Ludovico, Bishop of Bayeux; signor Ottaviano, Doge of Genoa; messer Bernardo Bibbiena, Cardinal of Santa Maria in Portico; messer Pietro Bembo, secretary to Pope Leo; the Magnifico rose to the dukedom of Nemours and to that greatness in which he now finds himself. Signor Francesco Maria della Rovere also, Prefect of Rome, was made Duke of Urbino: although much greater praise may be given the court where he was nurtured and because in it he became such a rare and worthy lord in all manner of virtue, as we now see, than because he achieved the dukedom of Urbino; nor do I believe that this is in small part due to the noble company which he continually kept there, where he always saw and heard laudable manners.

It seems to me, however, that the cause, whether through chance or favor of the stars, that has for so long given excellent lords to Urbino, continues still to produce the same effects; and hence we may hope that good fortune will so continue to favor these virtuous achievements that the . blessings of the court and the state shall not only not de cline but rather increase at a more rapid pace from day to day: and of this many bright signs are noted, among which I deem the chief to be Heaven's favoring us with such a lady as Eleanora Gonzaga, the new Duchess; for if ever there were joined in a single person wisdom, grace, beauty, intelligence, discreet manners, humanity, and every other gentle quality-they are so joined in her that they form a chain that comprises and adorns her every movement, uniting all these qualities at once.

Now let us continue with the discussions about our Courtier, in the hope that beyond our time there will be no lack of those who will find bright and honored models of worthiness in the present Court of Urbino, even as we are now finding them in that of the past.

[3] It seemed, then, as signor Gaspar Pallavicino used to relate, that on the day following the discussions contained in the preceding Book, little was seen of signor Ottaviano; wherefore many thought he had withdrawn in order to be free to think carefully of what he had to say. Thus, when the company had returned to the Duchess at the usual hour, a diligent search had to be made for signor Ottaviano, who for a good while did not appear; so that many cavaliers and ladies of the court began to dance, and engage in other pastimes, thinking that for that evening there would be no more talk about the Courtier. And indeed all were occupied, some with one thing and some with another, when signor Ottaviano arrived after he had almost been given up; and, seeing that messer Cesare Gonzaga and signor Gasparo were dancing, he bowed to the Duchess and said, laughing: "I quite expected to hear signor Gasparo speak ill of women again this evening; but now that I see him dancing with one, I think he must have made his peace with all of them; and I am pleased that the dispute (or rather the discussion) about the Courtier has ended so." "It has not ended at all," replied the Duchess, "for I am not the enemy of men that you are of women, and therefore I would not have the Courtier deprived of his due honor, and of those adornments that you yourself promised him last evening"; and so saying, she directed that, as soon as 927

the dance was over, all should sit in the usual order, which was done; and when all were seated and attentive, signor Ottaviano said: "Madam, since my wish that there should be many other good qualities in the Cour tier is taken as a promise that I must declare them, I am content to speak of them, not certainly with the idea of saying all that could be said, but only enough to remove from your mind the charge that was made against me last evening, namely, that I spoke as I did rather to detract from the praises of the Court Lady (by raising the false belief that other excellences can be attributed to the Courtier and, by such. wiles make him superior to her) than be cause such is the truth. Hence, to adapt myself to the hour, which is later than it is wont to be when we begin our discussions, I shall be brief.

[4] "So, to continue the reasoning of these gentlemen, which I wholly approve and confirm, I say that, among the things which we call good, there are some which, sim ply and in themselves, are always good, such as temperance, fortitude, health, and all the virtues that bring tranquillity of mind; others, which are good in various respects and for the end to which they are directed, such as law, liberality, riches, and other like things. Therefore I think that the perfect Courtier, such as Count Ludovico and messer Federico have described him, may indeed be good and worthy of praise, not, however, simply and in himself, but in regard to the end to which he is directed. For indeed if by being of noble birth, graceful, charming, and expert in so many exercises, the Courtier were to bring forth no other fruit than to be what he is, I should not judge it right for a man to devote so much study and labor to acquiring this perfection of Courtiership as anyone must do who wishes to acquire it. Nay, I should say that many of those accomplishments that have been attributed to him (such as dancing, merrymaking, singing, and playing) were frivolities and vanities and, in a man of any rank, deserving of blame rather than of praise; for these elegances of dress, devices, mottoes, and other such things as pertain to women and love ( although many will think the contrary) , often serve merely to make spirits effeminate, to corrupt youth, and to lead it to a dissolute life; whence it comes about that the Italian name is reduced to opprobrium, and there are but few who dare, I will not say to die, but even to risk any danger. And certainly there are countless other things, which, if effort and study were put into them, would prove much more useful, both in peace and in war, than this kind of Courtiership taken in and for itself. But if the activities of the Courtier are directed to the good end to which they ought to be directed, and which I have in mind, I feel certain that they are not only not harmful or vain, but most useful and deserving of infinite praise.

[5] "Therefore, I think that the aim of the perfect Courtier, which we have not spoken of up to now, is so to win for himself, by means of the accomplishments ascribed to him by these gentlemen, the favor and mind of the prince whom he serves that he may be able to tell him, and always will tell him, the truth about everything he needs to know, without fear or risk of displeasing him; and that when he sees the mind of his prince inclined to a wrong action, he may dare to oppose him and in a gentle manner avail himself of the favor acquired by his good accomplishments, so as to dissuade him of every evil intent and bring him to the path of virtue. And thus, having in himself 928

the goodness which these gentlemen attributed to him, together with readiness of wit, charm, prudence, knowledge of letters and of many other things-the Courtier¡ will in every instance be able adroitly to show the prince how much honor and profit will come to him and to his from justice, liberality, magnanimity, gentleness, and the other virtues that befit a good prince; and, on the other hand, how much infamy and harm result from ¡ the vices opposed to these virtues. Hence, I think that even as music, festivals, games, and the other pleasant accomplishments are, as it were, the flower; so to bring or help one's prince toward what is right and to frighten him away from what is wrong are the true fruit of Courtiership. And because the real merit of good deeds consists chiefly in two things, one of which is to choose a highly good end to aim at, and the other is to know how to find means timely and fitting to attain that good end-it is certain that a man aims at the best end when he sees to it that his prince is deceived by no one, listens to no :Batterers or slanderers or liars, and distinguishes good from evil, loving the one and hating the other.

[6] "I think too that the accomplishments attributed to the Courtier by these gentlemen may be a good means of attaining that end-and this because, among the many faults that we see in many of our princes nowadays, the greatest are ignorance and selfconceit. And the root of these two evils is none other than falsehood: which vice is deservedly odious to God and to men, and more harmful to princes than any other; because they have the greatest lack of what they would most need to have in abundance-I mean, some one to tell them the truth and make them mindful of what is right: because their enemies are not moved by love to perform these offices, but are well pleased to have them live wickedly and never correct themselves; and, on the other hand, their enemies do not dare to speak ill of them in public for fear of being punished. Then among their friends there are few who have free access to them, and those few are wary of reprehending them for their faults as freely as they would private persons, and, in order to win grace and favor, often think of nothing save how to suggest things that can delight and please their fancy, al though these things be evil and dishonorable; thus, from friends these men become flatterers, and, to gain profit from their close association, always speak and act in order to please, and for the most part make their way by dint of lies that beget ignorance in the prince's mind, not only of outward things but of himself; and this may be said to be the greatest and most monstrous falsehood of all, for an ignorant mind deceives itself and inwardly lies to itself.

[7] "From this it results that, besides never hearing the truth about anything at all, princes are made drunk by the great license that rule gives; and by a profusion of delights are submerged in pleasures, and deceive themselves so and have their minds so corrupted-seeing themselves always obeyed and almost adored with so much reverence and praise, without ever the least contradiction, let alone cen sure-that from this ignorance they pass to an extreme self conceit, so that then they become intolerant of any advice or opinion from others. And since they think that to know how to rule is a very easy thing, and that to succeed therein they need no other art or discipline save sheer force, they give their mind and all their thoughts to maintaining the power they have, 929

deeming true happiness to lie in being able to do what one wishes. Therefore some princes hate reason or justice, thinking it would be a kind of bridle and a way of reducing them to servitude, and of lessening the pleasure and satisfaction they have in ruling if they chose to follow it, and that their rule would be neither perfect nor complete if they were obliged to obey duty and honor, because they think that one who obeys is not a true ruler. "Therefore, following these principles and allowing themselves to be transported by self-conceit, they become arrogant, and with imperious countenance and stem manner, with pompous dress, gold, and gems, and by letting themselves be seen almost never in public, they think to gain authority among men and to be held almost as gods. And to my mind these princes are like the colossi that were made last year at Rome on the day of the festival in Piazza d'Agone, which outwardly had the appearance of great men and horses in a triumph, and which within were full of tow and rags. But princes of this kind are much worse in that these colossi were held upright by their own great weight, whereas these princes, since they are ill-balanced within and are heedlessly placed on uneven bases, fall to their ruin by reason of their own weight, and pass from one error to a great many: for their ignorance, together with the false belief that they cannot make a mistake and that the power they have comes from their own wisdom, brings them to seize states boldly, by fair means or foul, whenever the possibility presents itself.

[8] "But if they would take it upon themselves to know and do what they ought, they would then strive not to rule as they now strive to rule, because they would see how monstrous and pernicious a thing it is when subjects, who have to be governed, are wiser than the princes who have to govern. Take note that ignorance of music, of dancing, of horsemanship, does no harm to anyone; nevertheless, one who is not a musician is ashamed and dares not sing in the presence of others, or dance if he does not know how, or ride if he does not sit his horse well. But from not knowing how to govern peoples there come so many woes, deaths, destructions, burnings, ruins, that it may be said to be the deadliest plague that exists on earth. And yet some princes who are so very ignorant of government are not ashamed to attempt to govern, I will not say in the presence of four or six men, but before the whole world, for they hold such a high rank that all eyes gaze upon them and hence not only their great but their least defects are always seen. Thus, it is recorded that Cimon was blamed for loving wine, Scipio for loving sleep, Lucullus for loving feasts. But would to God that the princes of our day might accompany their sins with as many virtues as did those ancients; who, even though they erred in some things, yet did not flee from the promptings and teachings of anyone who seemed to them able to correct those errors; nay, they made every effort to order their lives on the model of excellent men: as Epaminondas on that of Lysias the Pythagorean, Agesilaus on that of Xenophon, Scipio on that of Panaetius, and countless others. But if some of our princes should happen upon a strict philosopher, or anyone at all who might tiy openly and artlessly to reveal to them the harsh face of true virtue, and teach them what good conduct is and what a good prince's life ought to be, I am certain they would abhor him as they would an asp, or indeed would deride him as a thing most vile.

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[9] "I say, then, that, since the princes of today are so corrupted by evil customs and by ignorance and a false esteem of themselves, and since it is so difficult to show them the truth and lead them to virtue, and since men seek to gain their favor by means of lies and flatteries and such vicious ways - the Courtier, through those fair qualities that Count Ludovico and messer Federico have given him, can easily, and must, seek to gain the good will and captivate the mind of his prince that he may have free and sure ac cess to speak to him of anything whatever without giving annoyance. And if he is such as he has been said to be, he will have little trouble in succeeding in this, and will thus be able always adroitly to tell him the truth about all things; and also, little by little, to inform his prince's mind with goodness, and teach him continence, fortitude, justice, and temperance, bringing him to taste how much sweetness lies hidden beneath the slight bitterness that is at first tasted by anyone who struggles against his vices; which are always noxious and offensive and attended by infamy and blame, just as the virtues are beneficial, smiling, and full of praise. And he will be able to incite his prince to these by the example of the famous captains and other excellent men to whom the ancients were wont to make statues of bronze, of marble, and sometimes of gold, and to erect these in public places, both to honor these men and to encourage others, so that through worthy emulation they may be led to strive to attain that glory too.

[10] "In this way the Courtier will be able to lead his prince by the austere path of virtue, adorning it with shady fronds and strewing it with pretty flowers to lessen the tedium of the toilsome journey for one whose strength is slight; and now with music, now with arms and horses, now with verses, now with discourse of love, and with all those means whereof these gentlemen have spoken, to keep his mind continually occupied in worthy pleasures, yet always impressing upon him also some virtuous habit along with these enticements, as I have said, beguiling him with salutary deception; like shrewd doctors who often spread the edge of the cup with some sweet cordial when they wish to give a bitter-tasting medicine to sick and over delicate children.

"Thus, by using the veil of pleasure to such an end, the Courtier will reach his aim in every time and place and activity, and for this will deserve much greater praise and reward than for any other good work that he could do in the world. For there is no good more universally beneficial than a good prince, nor any evil more universally pernicious than a bad prince: likewise, there is no punishment atrocious and cruel enough for those wicked courtiers who direct gentle and charming manners and good qualities of character to an evil end, namely to their own profit, and who thereby seek their prince's favor in order to corrupt him, turn him from the path of virtue, and bring him to vice; for such as these may be said to contaminate with a deadly poison, not a single cup from which one man alone must drink, but the public fountain that is used by all the people."

[11] Signor Ottaviano was silent, as if he did not wish to say more; but signor Gasparo said: "It does not seem to me, signor Ottaviano, that this goodness of mind and this continence and the other virtues which you would have our Courtier teach his prince can be learned; but I think that to those who have them they have been given by 931

nature and by God. And that this is so, you will see that there is not a man in the world so wicked and evil by nature, nor so intemperate and unjust, as to confess himself to be such when he is asked; nay, everyone, no matter how wicked, is pleased to be thought just, continent, and good: which would not happen if these virtues could be learned; for it is no disgrace not to know what one has made no effort to know, but it seems blameworthy indeed not to have that with which we should be adorned by nature.

Thus, everyone tries to hide his natural defects, both of mind and of body; which is seen in the blind, the crippled, and the twisted, and in others who are maimed or ugly; for, although these defects can be ascribed to nature, yet everyone is displeased at the thought that he has them, because it seems that nature herself bears witness to that imperfection, as if it were a seal and token of wickedness in him. This opinion of mine is also confirmed by the story that is told of Epimetheus, who knew so badly how to apportion the gifts of nature among men that he left them much more wanting in everything than all other creatures: wherefore Prometheus stole from Minerva and from Vulcan that artful knowledge whereby men gain their livelihood; but they did not yet know how to congregate in cities and live by a moral law, for this knowledge was guarded in Jove's stronghold by most watchful warders who so fright ened Prometheus that he dared not approach them; wherefore Jove took pity on the misery of men who were torn by wild beasts because, lacking civic virtues, they could not stand together; and sent Mercury to earth to bring them justice and shame, so that these two things might adorn their cities and unite the citizens. And he ordained that these should not be given to men like the other arts, in which one expert suffices for many who are ignorant ( as in the case of medicine) , but that they should be impressed upon every man; and he established a law that all who were without justice and shame should be exterminated and put to death as public menaces. So you see, signor Ottaviano, that these virtues are granted to men by God, and are not learned, but are natural."

[12] Then signor Ottaviano said, laughing: "Would you have it, then, signor Gasparo, that men are so unhappy and perverse in their judgments that they have by industry found an art whereby to tame the natures of wild beasts, bears, wolves, lions, and are thereby able to teach a pretty bird to Hy wherever they wish and to return of its own will from the woods and from its natural freedom to cages and to captivity-and that by the same industry they can not, or will not, devise arts to help themselves and to improve their minds by diligence and study? This, to my way of thinking, would be as if physicians were to put all their efforts into finding the method of healing sore nails and milk scab in children, and were to leave off treating fevers, pleurisy, and other grave maladies; and how out of all reason that would be, everyone may consider.

"Therefore I hold that the moral virtues are not in us entirely by nature, for nothing can ever become accustomed to that which is naturally contrary to it; as we see in a stone, which, even though it were thrown upward ten thousand times, would never become accustomed to move so by itself; and if the virtues were as natural to us as weight is to a stone, we should never become accustomed to vice. Nor, on the other hand, are the vices natural in this sense, else we should never be able to be virtuous; and it would 932

be too wrong and foolish to punish men for those defects that proceed from nature without any fault on our part; and this error would be committed by the laws, which do not inflict punishment on evildoers on account of their past error (since what is done cannot be undone), but have regard to the future, to the end that he who has erred may err no more nor by his bad example be the cause of others erring. And thus the laws do assume that virtues can be learned, which is very true; for we are born capable of receiving them and of receiving the vices too, and hence through practice we acquire the habit of both, so that first we practice virtue or vice and then we are virtuous or vicious. The contrary is noted in things that are given us by nature, which we first have the power to practice and then do practice: as with the senses; for first we are able to see, hear, and touch, then we do see, hear, and touch, al though many of these activities are improved by discipline. Wherefore good masters teach children not only letters, but also good and seemly manners in eating, drinking, speaking, and walking, with appropriate gestures.

[13] "Therefore, as in the arts, so likewise in virtue it is necessary to have a master who, by his teaching and good reminders, shall stir and awaken in us those moral virtues of which we have the seed enclosed and planted in our souls; and, like a good husbandman, cultivate them and open the way for them by removing from about us the thorns and tares of our appetites which often so over shadow and choke our minds as not to let them flower or produce those fair fruits which alone we should desire to see born in the human heart.

"In this way, then, justice and shame, which you say Jove sent upon earth to all men, are natural in each one of us. But even as a body without eyes, however robust it may be, often goes astray in moving toward some object, so the root of these virtues which are potentially innate in our minds, often comes to nothing if it is not helped by cultivation. For if it is to pass to action and to a perfect operation, nature alone does not suffice, as has been said, but the practice of art and reason is required to purify and clear the soul by lifting from it the dark veil of ignorance, from which almost all the errors of men proceed-because if good and evil were well recognized and understood, no one would fail to prefer good and eschew evil. Hence, virtue can almost be called a kind of prudence and a knowledge of how to choose the good, and vice a kind of imprudence and ignorance that brings us to judge falsely; for men never choose evil, thinking it to be evil, but are deceived by a certain semblance of the good."

[14] Then signor Gasparo replied: "There are, however, many who know well that they are doing evil and yet do it; and this because they put the present pleasure which they feel before the punishment which they fear will be fall them: like thieves, murderers, and other such men."

Signor Ottaviano said: "True pleasure is always good and true suffering always evil; therefore these men deceive themselves in taking false pleasure for true, and true suffering for false; wherefore through false pleasures they often incur true sufferings. Therefore the art that teaches how to distinguish the true from the false can indeed be 933

learned; and the virtue by which we choose what is truly good and not what falsely appears so can be called true knowledge, more profitable to human life than any other, because it removes ignorance, from which, as I have said, all evils spring."

[15] Then messer Pietro Bembo said: "I do not see why signor Gasparo should grant you, signor Ottaviano, that all evils are born of ignorance; and that there are not many who know well that they are sinning when they sin, and do not at all deceive themselves regarding true pleasure or true suffering. For it is certain that men who are incontinent judge reasonably and rightly, and know that what they are brought to by their lusts in despite of duty is evil, and therefore resist and set reason against appetite, whence arises the struggle of pleasure and pain against the judgment. Finally reason gives up, overcome by too strong an appetite, like a ship that for a while resists the stormy seas but at last, beaten by the too furious violence of the winds, with anchor and rigging broken, lets herself be driven at Fortune's will, without helm or any guidance of compass to save her.

"Therefore the incontinent commit their errors with a certain ambiguous remorse and, as it were, in despite of themselves; which they would not do if they did not know that what they are doing is evil, but they would follow appetite lavishly without any struggle on the part of reason, and would then be not incontinent but intemperate, which is much worse: for incontinence is said to be a lesser vice because it has some part of reason in it; and likewise continence is said to be an imperfect virtue because it has a part of passion in it. Therefore in this I think we cannot say that the errors of the incontinent proceed from ignorance, or that they deceive themselves and do not sin, when they well know that they are sinning."

[16] Signor Ottaviano replied: "Truly, messer Pietro, your argument is fine; nonetheless, it strikes me as being specious rather than true. For even though the incontinent do sin in this ambiguous way, reason struggling with appetite in their minds, and, although what is evil seems evil to them, yet they do not have a perfect recognition of it nor do they know it as thoroughly as they would need to know it. Hence, they have a vague notion rather than any certain knowledge of it, and so allow their reason to be overcome by passion; but if they had true knowledge of it, it is certain that they would not err: since that by which appetite conquers reason is always ignorance, and true knowledge can never be overcome by passion (which pertains to the body and not to the soul); and passion becomes virtue if rightly ruled and governed by reason, otherwise it becomes vice. But reason has such power that it always brings the senses to obey it, and extends its rule by marvelous ways and means, provided ignorance does not seize upon what reason ought to possess. So that, although the spirits, nerves, and bones have no reason in them, yet when a movement of the mind begins in us, it is as if thought were spurring and shaking the bridle on our spirits, and all our members make ready: the feet to rnn, the hands to grasp or to do what the mind thinks. This, moreover, is plainly seen in many who sometimes, without knowing it, eat some loathsome and disgusting food, which seems most dainty to their taste, and then when they learn what thing it was not

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only suffer pain and distress of mind, but the body so follows the judgment of the mind that perforce they cannot help vomiting that food."

[17] Signor Ottaviano was proceeding with his discourse, but the Magnifico Giuliano interrupted him, saying: "If I have heard aright, signor Ottaviano, you said that continence is an imperfect virtue because it has a part of passion in it; and when there is a struggle in our minds between reason and appetite, I think that the virtue which fights and gives victory to reason ought to be esteemed more perfect than that which conquers when no lust or passion opposes it; for in the latter instance the mind seems not to abstain from evil out of virtue, but to refrain from doing evil because it has no wish to do the thing."

Then signor Ottaviano said: "Which captain would you judge to be of greater worth, the one who by fighting openly puts himself in danger and yet conquers the enemy, or the one who by his ability and knowledge deprives them of their strength, reducing them to such a point that they can not fight, and conquering them so, without any battle or any danger whatsoever?"

"The one," said the Magnifico Giuliano, "who conquers more in safety is without doubt more to be praised, provided that this safe victory of his is not due to the cowardice of the enemy."

Signor Ottaviano replied: "You have judged well; and hence I say to you that continence may be compared to a captain who fights manfully, and, although the enemy is strong and powerful, still conquers them even though not without great difficulty and danger; but temperance, free of all perturbation, is like that captain who conquers and rules without opposition; and, having not only put down but quite extinguished the fire of lust in the mind wherein it abides, like a good prince in time of civil war, temperance destroys her seditious enemies within, and gives to reason the scepter and entire dominion.

"Thus, this virtue does no violence to the mind, but very gently infuses it with a vehement persuasion which inclines it to honorable things, renders it calm and full of repose, and in all things even and well tempered, and informed throughout by a certain harmony with itself that adorns it with a tranquillity so serene as never to be disturbed; and in all things becomes most obedient to reason and ready to direct its every movement accordingly, and to follow it wherever reason may wish to lead, without the least recalcitrance, like a tender Iamb which always runs and stops and walks near its mother and moves only when she moves. This virtue, then, is very perfect, and is especially suited to princes because from it many other virtues spring."

[18] Then messer Cesare Gonzaga said: "I do not know what virtues befitting a prince can spring from this temperance, if temperance is what removes the passions from the mind, as you say. Perhaps this would be fitting in a monk or hermit; but I am not at all sure that it becomes a prince who is magnanimous, liberal, and valiant in arms, never to feel, regardless of what is done to him, either wrath or hate or good will 935

or scorn or lust or passion of any kind; or that without these he could have authority over citizens or soldiers."

Signor Ottaviano replied: "I did not say that temperance entirely removes and uproots the passions from the human mind. Nor would this be well, because even in the passions there are some good elements; but temperance brings under the sway of reason that which is perverse in our pas sions and which stands against what is right.

Therefore it is not well to extirpate the passions altogether in order to get rid of disturbances; for this would be like issuing an edict that no one must drink wine, in order to suppress drunkenness, or like forbidding everyone to run because in running we sometimes fall. Note that those who tame horses do not prevent them from running and jumping, but have them do so at the right time and in obedience to the rider. Hence, the passions, when moderated by temperance, are an aid to virtue, just as wrath aids fortitude, and as hatred of evildoers aids justice, and likewise the other virtues too are aided by the passions; which, if they were wholly taken away, would leave the reason weak and languid, so that it could effect little, like the master of a vessel abandoned by the winds and in a great calm.

"Therefore, do not marvel, messer Cesare, if I have said that many other virtues are born of temperance, for when a mind is attuned to this harmony, then through the reason it easily receives true fortitude, that makes it intrepid and safe from every danger, and almost puts it above human passions. And this is true no less of justice (pure virgin, friend of modesty and of the good, queen of all the other virtues), because she teaches us to do what we ought to do and to shun what we ought to shun; and therefore she is most perfect, because the other virtues perform their works through her, and because she is helpful to whomsoever possesses her, and to others as well as to himself: and, without her, as it is said, Jove himself could not rule his kingdom well. Magnanimity also follows upon these and makes them all greater; but it cannot stand by itself be cause whoever has no other virtue cannot be magnanimous. Then the guide of these virtues is prudence, which consists of a certain judgment in choosing well. And linked into this happy chain are also liberality, magnificence, desire for honor, gentleness, pleasantness, affability, and many other virtues that there is not time now to name. But if our Courtier will do what we have said, he will find them all in his prince's mind, and every day will see beautiful flowers and fmits put forth there, such as are not found in all the exquisite gardens of the world; and within him he will feel very great satisfaction, remembering that he gave his prince, not what fools give ( which is gold or silver, vases, garments, and the like, whereof he who gives them is in great want of them and he who receives them has them in greatest abundance), but gave him that virtue which perhaps among all human things is the greatest and rarest, that is, the manner and method of right rule: which of itself alone would suffice to make men happy and to bring back once again to earth that Golden Age which is recorded to have existed once upon a time when Saturn ruled."

[19] When signor Ottaviano here made a slight pause as if to rest, signor Gasparo said: "Which do you think, signor Ottaviano, is the happier rule and the more capable 936

of bringing back to earth that golden age you mention: the rule of so good a prince or the government of a good republic?"

Signor Ottaviano replied: "I should always prefer the rule of a good prince because such rule is more according to nature, and (if we may compare small things with things infinitely great) more like that of God who singly and alone governs the universe. But, apart from this, you see that in those things that are made by human skill, such as armies, great fleets, buildings, and the like, the whole is referred to one man who governs as he wishes. So too in our body, where all the members do their work and fulfill their functions at the command of the heart. In addition to this, moreover, it seems right that people should be ruled by a single prince, as is the case also with many animals, to whom nature teaches such obedience as a very salutary thing. Note that deer, cranes, and many other birds, when they migrate, always choose a leader whom they follow and obey; and bees, almost as if they had discourse of reason, obey their king with as much reverence as the most obedient people on earth; and hence all this is very certain proof that the rule of a prince is more in keeping with nature than that of republics."

[20] Then messer Pietro Bembo said: "To me it seems that since liberty has been given us by God as a supreme gift, it is not reasonable that it should be taken from us, or that one man should have a larger portion of it than another: which happens under the rule of princes, who for the most part hold their subjects in the closest bondage.

But in well ordered republics, this liberty is fully preserved: besides which, both in judging and in deliberating, one man's opinion happens more often to be wrong than the opinion of many men; because the disturbance that arises from anger or indignation or lust more easily enters the mind of one man than that of the many, who are like a great body of water, which is less subject to corruption than a small body. I will say too that the example of the animals does not seem appropriate to me; for deer, cranes, and other animals do not always choose to follow and obey the same one, but they change and vary, giving rule now to one, now to another, and come in this way to a kind of republic rather than to monarchy; and this can be called true and equal liberty, when those who sometimes command obey in their tum. Nor do I think that the example of the bees is pertinent, for their king is not of their own species; and therefore whoever wishes to give men a truly worthy lord would need to find one of another species and of a more excellent nature than the human, if men are to be bound in reason to obey him, like the herds which obey, not an animal of their own kind, but a herdsman who is a man, and is of a higher species than theirs. For these reasons, signor Ottaviano, I hold that the rule of a republic is more desirable than that of a king."

[21] Then signor Ottaviano said: "Against your opinion, ¡ messer Pietro, I wish only to cite one argument; namely, that there are only three kinds of right rule: one is monarchy; another, the rule of the good, whom the ancients called optimates; the third, popular government. And the excess and opposing vice, so to speak, into which each of these kinds of rule falls when it comes to ruin and decay is when monarchy becomes tyranny; when the rule of the optimates changes into government by a few who are powerful and not good; and when popular government is seized by the rabble, 937

which brings general confusion and surrenders the rule of the whole to the caprice of the multitude. Of these three kinds of bad government, it is certain that tyranny is the worst of all, as could be proved by many arguments: thus, it follows that monarchy is the best of the three kinds of good government, because it is the opposite of the worst; for, as you know, those things that result from opposite causes are themselves opposites.

"Now as to what you said about liberty, I answer that we ought not to say that true liberty is to live as we like, but to live according to good laws. Nor is obeying less natural or less useful or less necessary than commanding; and some things are born and devised and ordained by nature to command, as others are to obey. It is true that there are two modes of ruling: the one absolute and violent, like that of masters toward their slaves, and in this way the soul commands the body; and the other is more mild and gentle, like that of good princes over the citizens by means of laws, and in this way the reason commands the appetite: and both of these modes are useful, for the body is by nature made apt for obeying the soul, and likewise appetite for obeying the reason.

There are many men, moreover, whose actions pertain only to the body; and such men differ as much from virtuous men as the soul differs from the body; and, even though they are rational creatures, they have only such share of reason as to be able to recognize this, but do not possess it or derive profit from it. These, therefore, are naturally slaves, and it is better and more useful for them to obey than to command."

[22] Then signor Gasparo said: "The discreet and virtuous, and those who are not by nature slaves, in what mode are they to be ruled?"

Signor Ottaviano replied: "By the gentle kind of rule, kingly and civic. And to such men it is well sometimes to give the charge of those offices for which they are suited, so that they too may be able to command and govern those who are less wise than themselves, yet in such a way that the chief rule shall depend entirely upon the supreme ruler. And since you said that it is an easier thing for the mind of a single man to be corrupted than that of many, I say that it is also easier to find one good and wise man than many. And we must think that a king of noble race will be good and wise, inclined to the virtues by his natural instinct and by the illustrious memory of his forebears, and practiced in good behavior; and even if he is not of another species higher than the human ( as you have said of the king of bees), being aided by the teachings and the training and skill of so prudent and good a Courtier as these gentlemen have devised, he will be very just, continent, temperate, strong, and wise, full of liberality, magnificence, religion, and clemency. In fine, he will be most glorious and dear to men and to God,

by Whose grace he will attain the heroic virtue that will bring him to surpass the limits of humanity and be called a demigod rather than a mortal man: for God delights in and protects, not those princes who try to imitate Him by a show of great power and by making themselves adored of men, but those who, besides the power they wield, strive to make themselves like Him in goodness and wisdom, by means of which they may wish and be able to do good and be His ministers, distributing for the welfare of mortals the benefits and gifts they receive from Him. Hence, just as in the heavens the sun and the moon and the other stars exhibit to the world, as in a mirror, a certain like938

ness of God, so on earth a much liker image of God is seen in those good princes who love and revere Him and show to the people the splendid light of His justice accompanied by a semblance of His divine reason and intellect; and with such as these God shares His righteousness, equity, justice, and goodness, and more happy blessings than I could name, that give to the world a much clearer proof of divinity than the sun's light or the continual turning of the heavens and the various courses of the stars.

[23] "Thus, men have been put by God under princes, who for this reason must take diligent care in order to render Him an account of them like good stewards to their lord, and love them and look upon every good and evil thing that happens to them as happening to themselves, and procure their happiness above every other thing.

Therefore the prince must not only be good but also make others good, like the square used by architects, which not only is straight and true itself, but also makes straight and true all things to which it is applied. And it is a very great proof that the prince is good if his people are good, because the life of the prince is a norm and guide for the citizens, and all behavior must needs depend on his behavior; nor is it fitting for an ignorant man to teach, or for a disorderly man to give orders, or for one who falls to raise others up. "Hence, if the prince is to perform these duties well, he must put every effort and care into acquiring knowledge; let him then erect within himself and in every regard follow steadfastly the law of reason ( not one inscribed on paper or in metal, but graven upon his very mind) so that it will always be not only familiar to him but ingrained in him and that he will live with it as with a part of himself; so that day and night in every place and time, it may admonish him and speak to him within his heart, removing from him those turbulences that are felt by intemperate minds which-because they are oppressed on the one hand, as it were, by a very deep sleep of ignorance, and on the other, by the turmoil which they undergo from their per verse and blind desiresare shaken by a restless frenzy as a sleeper sometimes is by strange and horrible visions.

[24] "Moreover, when greater power is joined to an evil will, greater harm is also joined; and when the prince can do whatever he desires, then there is great danger that he may not desire what he ought. Hence, Bias well said that the office shows the man: for just as vases that are cracked cannot readily be detected so long as they are empty, yet if liquid be put into them, show at once just where the defect lies-in like manner corrupt and depraved minds rarely disclose their defects save when they are filled with authority; because they are then unable to bear the heavy weight of power, and so give way and pour out on every side greed, pride, wrath, insolence, and those tyrannical practices which they have within them. Thus, they recklessly persecute the good and the wise and exalt the wicked; and they allow no friendships in their cities nor unions nor understandings among the citizens, but encourage spies, informers, and murderers in order to make men afraid and cowardly, sowing discord to keep men disunited and weak. And from these ways come endless harm and ruin to the unhappy people; and often cruel death (or at least continual fear) comes to the tyrants themselves; because good princes do not fear for themselves but for those whom they rule, while tyrants fear those whom they rule; hence, the greater the number of people they rule and the more 939

powerful they are, the more fear they feel and the more enemies they have. How fearful and of what an uneasy mind was Clearchus, tyrant of Pontus, whenever he went into the marketplace or theater, or to some banquet or other public place; who, as it is written, was wont to sleep shut up in a chest! Or that other tyrant, Aristodemus the Argive, who made his bed into a kind of prison: for in his palace he had a little room suspended in air, so high that it could only be reached by a ladder; and there he slept with his woman, whose mother would remove the ladder at night and replace it in the morning.

"The life of the good prince must be an entirely different life from this, free and secure, and as dear to his citizens as their own life, and so ordered as to partake of both the active and the contemplative life, in the measure that is suited to the welfare of his people."

[25] Then signor Gasparo said: "And which of these two ways of life, signor Ottaviano, do you think is more fitting for the prince?"

Signor Ottaviano replied, laughing: "Perhaps you think that I imagine myself to be the excellent Courtier who must know so many things and make use of them to the good end I have described; but remember that these gentlemen have fashioned him with many accomplishments that are not in me. Therefore let us first try to find him, and I will abide by his decision in this as in the other things that pertain to a good prince."

Then signor Gasparo said: "I think that if there be want ing in you any of the accomplishments which have been attributed to the Courtier, then they are music and dancing and some others of little importance, rather than those be longing to the education of the prince and to this part of Courtiership."

Signor Ottaviano replied: "None are of little importance that serve to gain the prince's favor, which is necessary (as we have said) before the Courtier may venture to try to teach him virtue; which, as I think I have shown you, can be learned, and is as beneficial as ignorance is harmful, from which all sins stem, and especially that false esteem which men conceive of themselves. But I think I have said enough, and perhaps more than I promised."

Then the Duchess said: "We shall be the more indebted to your courtesy, the more your performance surpasses your promise; hence, be pleased to tell us what you think of signor Gasparo's question; and, by your faith, tell us also everything that you would teach your prince if he had need of instruction-and let us assume that you have won his favor completely, so that you are free to tell him whatever comes to mind."

[26] Signor Ottaviano laughed and said: "If I had the favor of some of the princes I know, and if I were to tell them freely what I think, I fear I should soon lose that favor; moreover, in order to teach him, I myself should first have to learn. Yet since it is your pleasure that I answer signor Gasparo on this point also, I will say that it seems to me that princes ought to lead both kinds of life, but more especially the contemplative, 940

because this in them is divided into two parts: one consists in seeing rightly and in judging; the other in commanding reasonable things (justly and in the proper manner) in which they have authority, and in requiring the same of those who rightly should obey, at appropriate times and places; and of this Duke Federico was speaking when he said that he who knows how to command is always obeyed. And whereas commanding is always the chief office of princes, often also they must witness with their own eyes and be present at the execution of their commands according to the times and needs, and must sometimes take part themselves; and all this pertains to action; but the contemplative life ought to be the goal of the active as peace is of war and as repose is of toil.

[27] "Therefore it is also the office of the good prince to establish his people in such laws and ordinances that they may live in ease and peace, without danger and with dignity, and may worthily enjoy this end of their actions, namely, tranquillity. For there have often been many republics and princes most prosperous and great in war; but then, as soon as they achieved peace, they came to ruin and lost their greatness and splendor, like iron in disuse. And this happened from no cause other than from not hav ing been well trained to live in peace, and not knowing how to enjoy the good of repose. And to be always at war, without seeking to achieve the end which is peace, is not right: although some princes think that their chief aim must be to dominate their neighbors, and therefore they incite their people to a warlike ferocity in despoiling, killing, and the like, and dispense rewards to encourage this, and call it virtue. Thus, it was once a custom among the Scythians that whoever had not slain an enemy might not drink from the bowl that was passed around at solemn feasts. In other places it was the custom to set up about a man's tomb as many obelisks as he who was buried there had slain enemies; and all these and like things were done in order to make men warlike, solely with the aim of dominating others: which was well-nigh impossible, since such an undertaking could never end short of subjugating the entire world; and wanting in reason according to the law of nature which will not let us be pleased with that in others which displeases us in ourselves.

"Hence, princes ought not to make their people warlike out of a desire to dominate, but in order to defend themselves and their people against anyone who might try to bring them into bondage or do them wrong in any way; or in order to drive out tyrants and govern well those people who are badly treated; or in order to subject those who by nature deserve to become slaves, with the aim of giving them good government, ease, repose, and peace. To this end also the laws and all the ordinances of justice ought to be directed, by punishing the wicked, not out of hatred, but in order that they may no longer be wicked and to the end that they may not disturb the peace of the good. For truly it is a monstrous thing and worthy of blame for men to show themselves valiant and wise in war (which is bad in itself), and then in peace and quiet (which is good) show themselves ignorant and of so little worth as not to know how to enjoy the good. Hence, just as in war a people ought to aim at the virtues that are useful and necessary in order to attain the end, which is peace-so in peace, to attain its end also, which is tranquillity, they ought to aim at those righteous virtues to which the prac941

tical virtues lead. In this way his subjects will be good and the prince will be much more occupied in praising and rewarding than in punishing; and his rule will be a most happy one both for his subjects and for himself-not imperious, like that of master over slave, but sweet and gentle like that of a good father over a good son."

[28] Then signor Gasparo said: "I should be glad to know what these virtues are that are useful and necessary in war, and what are the good virtues in peace."

Signor Ottaviano replied: "All virtues are good and helpful, because they tend to a good end; but in war true fortitude is especially useful, freeing the mind from the passions so that it not only has no fear of dangers, but is even unaware of them; so too, steadfastness and a long-suffering patience, and a mind stanch and unperturbed by the blows of Fortune. It is also well, in war, and always, to have all the virtues that tend to moral excellence, such as justice, continence, and temperance; but much more in time of peace and ease, because when men enjoy prosperity and ease, and a favorable Fortune smiles on them, they often become unjust and intemperate, and allow themselves to be corrupted by pleasures: hence, those who find themselves in such a condition greatly need these virtues, be cause idleness readily engenders bad habits in men's minds. Wherefore it was an ancient saying that slaves should be given no leisure; and it is thought that the pyramids of Egypt were built in order to keep the people occupied, because it is very good that all should be accustomed to endure toil.

"There are still many other virtues, all helpful; but let it suffice for the present that I have spoken thus far; for if I managed to teach my prince and instruct him in the kind of virtuous education we have sketched, then I should think I had attained sufficiently well the aim of the good Courtier."

[29] Then signor Gasparo said: "Signor Ottaviano, since you have praised good education so highly and have shown that you think it the chief means by which a man is made virtuous and good, I should like to know whether this instruction which the Courtier is to give his prince ought to be begun as it were in daily practice and conduct, which may accustom him to doing right without his noticing it; or whether one should begin by explaining to him the nature of good and evil, and making him understand, before he sets out, which is the good way to follow and which is the bad way to avoid: in short, whether his mind must first be imbued and stamped with the virtues through reason and intelligence, or through practice."

Signor Ottaviano said: "You are involving me in too long a discourse; still, so that you may not think I abstain be cause I do not wish to answer your questions, I will say that, even as our mind and body are two things, so likewise the soul is divided into two parts, one of which has reason in it and the other has the appetite. Thus, just as in generation the body precedes the soul, so the irrational part of the soul precedes the rational: which is clearly seen in children, in whom anger and desire are noted almost as soon as they are born, but reason appears with the passing of time. Hence, we must care for the body before the soul and for the appetite before the reason; but we must care for the body for the sake of the soul, and care for the appetite for the sake of the 942

reason: for just as intellectual virtue is perfected by teaching, so moral virtue is perfected by practice. First, therefore, we should teach through practice, whereby it is possible to govern the appetites that are not yet capable of reason and direct them toward the good by way of such good exercise; then we ought to establish them through the intelligence, which, although it shows its light only later, yet provides a way of bringing the virtues to an even more perfect fruition in one whose mind has learned good habits-in which, in my opinion, the whole matter consists."

[30] Signor Gasparo said: "Before you go further, I should like to know what care must be taken of the body, since you have said that we must care for the body before the soul."

Signor Ottaviano replied, laughing: "Ask some here pres ent about that, who nourish their bodies so well and are fat and fresh; for mine, as you see, is not so well caredfor. Yet on this point too it would be possible to speak at length, as well as of the proper age for manfage so that the chil dren may not be too near or too far from their parents' age; and to speak of the exercises and education to be fol lowed from birth and throughout their life in order to make them handsome, healthy, and strong."

Signor Gasparo replied: "What women would most like in order to make their children well constituted and hand some, I believe, is that community in which Plato in his Republic would have them held, and after that fashion."

Then signora Emilia said, laughing: "It is not any part of our pact that you should begin again to speak ill of women."

"I thought," replied signor Gasparo, "that I was paying them a great tribute in saying that they desired to introduce a custom approved by so great a man."

Messer Cesare Gonzaga said, laughing: "Suppose we see whether this one can stand among signor Ottaviano's precepts (for I do not know if he has yet mentioned all of them) and whether it would be well for the prince to make it a law.

"The few I have mentioned," replied signor Ottaviano, "would perhaps suffice to make the prince good, as princes go nowadays, although if one wished to examine the matter in more detail, he would find much more to say."

The Duchess added: "Since it costs us only words, tell us, by your faith, all that occurs to you in this matter of instructing your prince."

[31] Signor Ottaviano replied: "Madam, I should teach him many other things if only I knew them; among others, that he should choose from among his subjects a number of the noblest and wisest gentlemen, with whom to consult on everything, and that he should give them authority and free leave to speak their mind to him about all things without hesitation; and that he should act toward them in such a way as to show them all that he wished to know the truth in everything and that he detested all falsehood. And, be sides such a council of nobles, I should advise that from among the people other men of lower station be chosen who would constitute a popular council to 943

confer with the council of nobles concerning the affairs of the city, both public and private. And in this way there would be made of the prince (as of the head) and of the nobles and the people ( as of the members) a single united body, the government of which would depend chiefly on the prince, and yet would also include the others; and such a state would thus have the form of the three good kinds of government, which are monarchy, optimates, and people.

[32] "Next, I should show him that, of the duties that fall to the prince, the most important is justice; for the maintenance whereof wise and proved men ought to be appointed to office, whose prudence should be true prudence joined to goodnessotherwise it is not prudence but cun ning; and when this goodness is wanting, the skill and subtlety of prosecutors lead only to the ruin and destruction of law and justice, and, for all that the errors are theirs, the blame must fall on him who put them in office.

"I should tell how from justice springs that piety toward God which all men must have, and especially princes, who ought to love Him above all else, and direct all their actions to Him as to the true end; and, as Xenophon said, honor and love Him always, but much more when they enjoy prosperity, so that afterward they may with more reason feel confident in asking His mercy when they experience some adversity. For it is not possible to govern rightly either one's self or others without God's help, Who sometimes to the good sends good fortune as His minister to save them from grievous perils; and sometimes adverse for tune to prevent their being so lulled by prosperity as to forget Him or human prudence, which often remedies ill fortune, as a good player remedies bad throws of the dice by placing his board well. Nor would I neglect to urge the prince to be truly religious-not superstitious or given to the folly of incantations and soothsaying; for should he join di vine piety and true religion to human prudence, he will have good fortune on his side and a protecting God ever to increase his prosperity in peace and war.

[33] "Next I should tell him how he ought to love his own country and his own people, not holding them too much in bondage, lest he make himself hated by them, from which come seditions, conspiracies, and a thousand other evils; nor yet in too great a liberty, lest he be despised, from which come a licentious and dissolute life among the people, rapine, thievery, murders, without any fear of the law; and often the ruin and total destruction of city and realms. Next, how he ought to love those close to him according to their rank, maintaining with all men a strict equality in certain things, such as justice and liberty; and in certain other things, a reasonable inequality, such as in being generous, in rewarding, in distributing honors and dignities according to the differences in their merits, which ought always to be surpassed by their rewards and not the other way around; and in this way he would be not only loved but almost adored by his subjects. Nor would he need to resort to foreigners for the protection of his life, because his people for their own good would guard his life with their own, and all men would willingly obey the laws, when they saw that he himself obeyed them and was, as it were, their custodian and incorruptible executor; and he should establish so strong 944

an impression of himself in this respect that, even if sometimes he found it necessary to break the laws in some particular, everyone would recognize that this was done for a good end, and his will would command the same reverence as the law itself. Thus, the minds of the citizens would be so tempered that the good would not seek to have more than they needed and the bad could not do so; for excessive wealth is often the cause of great ruin, as in poor Italy, which has been and still is exposed as a prey to foreign peoples, both because of bad government and because of the great riches of which it is full. Thus, it would be well to have the greater part of the citizens neither very rich nor very poor, for the over-rich often become proud and insolent, and the poor, abject and fraudulent. But men of modest fortune do not lay snares for others and are safe from snares: and, constituting the greater number, these men of modest fortune are also more powerful; and therefore neither the poor nor the rich can conspire against the prince or against others, nor foment seditions; wherefore, in order to avoid this evil, it is salutary to observe a mean in all things.

[34] "Therefore, I should say that the prince ought to employ these and many other opportune measures so that there may not arise among his subjects any desire for new things or for a change of government; which they frequently seek either in hope of gain or of some honor, or because of loss or indeed of some shame which they fear.

And they are incited in this way sometimes by a hatred and an anger that bring them to despair, through the wrongs and offenses that are done them out of greed, insolence, and cruelty, or the lust of those who are over them; sometimes by the contempt which the neglect and cowardice and worthlessness of their princes cause them to feel. These two errors should be avoided by winning the people's love and obedience; which is won by favoring and honoring the good, and by prudently and sometimes severely preventing the bad and seditious from becoming powerful; and this is much easier to prevent before it happens than it is to deprive them of power once they have acquired it. I should say that, to keep the citizens from falling into these errors, there is no better way than to keep them from evil practices, and especially from those that become established little by little; for these are the secret plagues that ruin cities before they can be remedied or even detected.

"I would advise the prince to strive by such methods to keep his subjects in a tranquil state, and give them the blessings of mind, body, and fortune; but give them those of the body and of fortune, in order that they may practice those of the mind, which are the more profitable the greater and more copious they are; which is not true of those of the body and of fortune. If, therefore, his subjects are good and worthy and rightly directed toward the goal of happiness, the prince will be a very great lord; for rule is true rule and great rule where the subjects are good, well governed, and well commanded."

[35] Then signor Gasparo said: "I think he would be a petty lord whose subjects were all good, for the good are few everywhere."

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Signor Ottaviano replied: "If some Circe were to change all the subjects of the King of France into wild beasts, would he not seem to you a petty lord even though he ruled over so many thousands of animals? And, contrariwise, if the flocks roaming our mountains here for pasture were to become wise men and worthy cavaliers, would you not think that those herdsmen who governed them and were obeyed by them had become great lords instead of herds men? So you see, it is not the number but the worth of their subjects that makes princes great."

[36] For some time the Duchess and signora Emilia and all the others had been very attentive to signor Ottaviano's discourse; but when he now made a little pause as if he had finished, messer Cesare Gonzaga said: "Truly, signor Ottaviano, one cannot say that your precepts are not good and useful; nevertheless, I should think that if you were to fashion your prince accordingly, you would rather deserve the name of good schoolmaster than of good Courtier, and your prince would be a good governor rather than a great prince. Of course I do not say that princes should not see to it that their people are well ruled with justice and good customs; nevertheless, it is enough, it seems to me, for princes to choose good officials to administer such things, their real office being a much greater one.

"Hence, if I felt that I was that excellent Courtier which these gentlemen have fashioned, and if I had the favor of my prince, I certainly would not lead him to anything vicious; but, in order that he might pursue that good encl which you have stated (and which I agree ought to be the fruit of the Courtier's labors and actions), I should seek to implant a certain greatness in his mind, along with a regal splendor, a readiness of spirit, and an unconquered valor in war, that would make him loved and revered by everyone, so that chiefly for this would he be famous and illustrious in the world. I should say too that he ought to join to his greatness a certain familiar gentleness, a sweet and amiable humanity, and a fine manner of showing his favor discreetly to his subjects and to strangers, and in varying measure according to their deserts-holding always, however, to the majesty that befits his rank, never allowing his authority to diminish in the least by lowering himself too much, nor excite hatred by too stem a severity; that he ought to be very generous and splendid, and give to everyone unstintingly because God, as the saying goes, is the treasurer of generous princes; that he ought to offer magnificent banquets, festivals, games, public shows; and have a great many fine horses for use in war and for pleas ure in time of peace, falcons, dogs, and all the other things that pertain to the pleasures of great lords and of the peo ple: as in our day we have seen signor Francesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, do, who in these matters seems King of Italy rather than lord of a city.

"I should also try to induce him to build great edifices, both to win honor in his lifetime and to leave the memory of himself to posterity: as Duke Federico did in the case of this noble palace, and as Pope Julius is now do ing in the case of St. Peter's Church and that street which leads from the Palace to his pleasure pavilion the Belvedere, and many other buildings: as also the ancient Romans did, whereof we see so many remains at Rome and at Naples, at Pozzuoli, at Baia, at Civita Vecchia, at Porto, as well 946

as outside Italy, and in many other places-all of which is great proof of the worthiness of those divine minds. So Alexander the Great did also, for, not content with the fame he had rightly won by conquering the world with arms, he built Alexandria in Egypt, Bucephalia in India, and other cities in other countries; and he thought of giving Mount Athas the form of a man, and of building a very spacious city in the man's left hand and in his right a great basin in which were to be gathered all the rivers that rise there, and these were to overflow thence into the sea: a grand thought indeed and worthy of Alexander the Great.

"These are things, signor Ottaviano, which I think befit a noble and true prince, and make him most glorious in peace and in war, rather than such trivial scruples as to fight only in order to conquer and rule over those who deserve to be ruled, or to seek what is good for his subjects, or to deprive of power those who rule badly: for if the Romans, Alexander, Hannibal, and the others had been concerned with such things as these, they would not have reached the pinnacle of glory they did."

[37] Then signor Ottaviano replied, laughing: "Those who showed no concern for these things would have done better to do so; although if you will take thought, you will find many who did, and particularly those first ancients, like Theseus and Hercules. And do not imagine that Procrustes and Sciron, Cacus, Diomed, Antaeus, Geryon were other than cruel and wicked tyrants, against whom these magnanimous heroes waged perpetual and deadly war. Therefore, for his delivering the world from such insufferable monsters (for tyrants should have no other name), temples were raised and sacrifices were offered to Hercules, and divine honors were paid to him: the extirpation of tyrants being so great a benefit to the world that he who does it deserves far greater reward than any that is due to mortal man. And, as among those whom you named, do you not think that by his victories Alexander did good to those whom he overcame, having taught so many good customs to those barbarous peoples whom he conquered, from wild beasts making them men? He built so many fine cities in lands that were sparsely populated, introducing there a de cent way of life and, as it were, uniting Asia and Europe by the bond of friendship and holy laws, so that those who were conquered by him were happier than the others. For he taught marriage to some, to others agriculture, to others religion, to others not to kill their parents but to support them in their old age, others to abstain from copulating with their mothers, and a thousand other things that one could cite in evidence of the benefits that his victories conferred upon the world.

[38] "But, leaving aside the ancients, what more noble, glorious, and profitable undertaking could there be than for Christians to direct their efforts to subjugating the infidels? Does it not seem to you that such a war, if it should meet with good success and were the means of turning so many thousands of men from the false sect of Mohammed to the light of Christian truth, would be as profitable to the vanquished as to the victors? And truly, as Themistocles once said to his household, when he had been banished from his native land and was received by the King of Persia and favored and honored with innumerable very rich gifts: 'My friends, it would have been a disaster if we 947

had not met with disaster,' the same might then be said by the Turks and Moors, because their loss would be their salvation.

"Therefore I hope we may yet see this happy event, if God should grant that Monseigneur d'Angouleme live to wear the crown of France, who gives such promise of himself, as the Magnifico said some four evenings ago; and that Henry, Prince of Wales, wear that of England, who is now growing up in all virtue under his great father, like a tender shoot in the shade of an excellent and fruit-laden tree, to renew it when the time shall come with much greater beauty and fruitfulness; for, as our Castiglione writes us from there and promises to tell us more fully on his return, it seems that nature chose to show her power in this lord by uniting in a single body excellences enough to adorn a multitude."

Then messer Bernardo Bibbiena said: "Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, is also showing very great promise. Although he has not yet reached the tenth year of his age, he already reveals so great a capacity and such sure signs of goodness, prudence, modesty, magnanimity, and every virtue, that if the rule of Christendom is to be in his hands (as men think), we can believe that he will eclipse the name of many ancient emperors and equal the fame of the most famous men who have ever been on earth."

[39] Signor Ottaviano added: "Thus, I think that such di vine princes as these have been sent by God on earth and have been made by Him to resemble one another, in youth, in military power, in state, in bodily beauty, and constitution, to the end that they may be of one accord in this good purpose as well. And if there must ever be any envy or emulation among them, may it be solely in the desire on the part of each to be first and the most fervent and zealous in so glorious an undertaking.

"But let us leave this matter and return to our subject. I say, then, messer Cesare, that the things you would have the prince do are very great and deserve much praise; but you must understand that if he does not know what I have said he ought to know, and if he has not formed his mind on that pattern and directed it to the path of virtue, he will scarcely know how to be magnanimous, generous, spirited, prudent, or how to have any of the other qualities he ought to have. Nor would I wish him to have these for any reason save an ability to exercise them: for just as those who build are not all good architects, so those who give are not all generous men; because virtue never harms any one, yet there are many who rob in order to give away, and thus are generous with the property of others; some give to those they ought not, and leave in misfortune and distress those to whom they are obligated; others give with a certain bad grace, almost with spite, so that it is plain that they do so on compulsion; others not only are not secret about it, but summon witnesses and almost make a public proclamation of their generosities; others foolishly empty the fountain of their generosity at one draught, so that it cannot be used again thereafter.

[40] "Therefore in this as in other things one must know and govern one's self with that prudence which is the necessary companion to all the virtues; which, being at the midpoint, are equally distant from the two extremes, which are the vices; and thus an 948

undiscerning man easily incurs them. For just as with a circle it is difficult to find the point of the center, which is the mean, so it is difficult to find the point of virtue set midway between the two extremes (the one vicious because of excess, the other because of want); and to these we are inclined, now to the one, now to the other. And we see this in the pleasure or the displeasure we feel within us, for by reason of the one we do what we should not do, and by reason of the other we fail to do what we should; but pleasure is the more dangerous, because our judgment lets itself be easily corrupted by it. But since it is a difficult thing to know how far one is from the midpoint of virtue, we ought of our own accord to withdraw by degrees in the direction opposite to the extreme to which we see ourselves inclined, as those do who straighten crooked timbers; for in such a way we draw near to virtue which, as I have said, consists in that midpoint of the mean. And so it happens that we err in many ways, and perform our office and duty in but one way; as archers, who hit the mark in one way only, and miss the target by many ways. Thus, often, in his wish to be humane and affable, one prince will do countless unseemly things and will so abase himself that he becomes despised; another, to maintain his grave majesty with fitting authority, be comes austere and insufferable; another, in order to be thought eloquent, indulges in a thousand strange manners and in long circumlocutions of affected words, listening to himself so much that others for boredom cannot listen to him.

[41] "Therefore, messer Cesare, do not call anything a trifle that can improve a prince, in any way, however little; nor suppose that I think you are condemning my precepts when you say that they would make a good governor rather than a good prince; for perhaps no greater or more fitting praise can be given to a prince than to call him a good governor. Hence, if it were for me to educate him, I would have him take care to govern not only in the ways mentioned, but in much lesser matters, and understand as far as possible all the particular things that pertain to his people, nor ever believe or trust any one of his ministers to such an extent as to give to him alone the bridle and control of all his rule. For there is no man who is entirely apt in all things, and much greater harm results from the trust of princes than from their distrust, which not only does no harm, but often is to the greatest advantage: and yet in this the prince needs good judgment to discern who deserves to be trusted and who does not. I would have him take care to understand his ministers' actions and be the critic of them; abolish and shorten disputes among his subjects; bring about peace among them and bind them together by marriage ties; make his city united and peaceful in friendship like a private family-populous, not poor, quiet, full of good work men; favor merchants and even aid them with money; be generous and handsome in hospitality toward foreigners and ecclesiastics; moderate all superfluities, for through errors committed in these matters, though they may seem trivial, cities often come to ruin. Wherefore it is right that the prince should set a limit upon the too sumptuous houses of private citizens, upon banquets, upon the excessive dowries of women, upon their luxury and display of jewels and dress, which is but augmentation of folly on their part: for besides often wasting their husbands' goods and substance from ambition and the envy they bear one an-

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other, women sometimes sell their honor to anyone who will buy it for the sake of some little jewel or trinket."

[42] Then messer Bernardo Bibbiena said, laughing: "Signor Ottaviano, you are passing to the side of signor Gasparo and Frisio."

Signor Ottaviano replied, also laughing: "That dispute is over, and I certainly do not wish to renew it; so I shall speak no more about women, but shall return to my prince."

Frisio replied: "You may very well leave him now and feel satisfied that he is such as you have described him. For without a doubt it would be easier to find a Lady with the qualities set forth by the Magnifico than a prince with the qualities set forth by you; hence, I fear that he is like the Republic of Plato, and that we shall never see the like of him, unless in heaven perhaps."

Signor Ottaviano replied: "We can still hope for things to come to pass which are possible, even though they may be difficult. Thus, in our time we shall perhaps yet see him on earth; for, although the heavens are so chary of producing excellent princes that one is scarcely seen in many cen turies, such good fortune might befall us."

Then Count Ludovico said: "I am myself quite hopeful of it; for, besides those three great princes whom we have named and of whom we may expect what has been declared to befit the highest type of perfect prince, there are also in Italy today several princes' sons who, although they are not destined to have such great power, will perhaps make up for that in virtue. And the one among them all who shows the best temperament and gives more promise than any of the others would appear to be signor Federico Gonzaga, eldest son of the Marquess of Mantua and nephew to our Duchess here [FIG, 32]. For, besides the comely behavior and the discretion he shows at such a ten der age, those who have charge of him tell wonderful things of his talents, his eagerness for honor, his magnanimity, courtesy, generosity, love of justice; so that from so good a start we can expect only the best of ends."

Then Frisio said: "No more of this now: we will pray God that we may see this hope of yours fulfilled."

[43] Then signor Ottaviano, turning to the Duchess with an air of having finished his discourse, said: "There, Madam, you have what it occurs to me to say about the aim of the Courtier; wherein, if I may not have given entire satisfaction, it will at least be enough for me to have shown that some further perfection might be given him in addition to the things mentioned by these gentlemen; who, I think, must have omitted this and whatever else I might say, not because they did not know it better than I, but in order to spare themselves the trouble; therefore, I will let them proceed, if they have anything more to say."

Then the Duchess said: "Not only is the hour so late that soon it will be time to stop for the evening, but it seems to me that we ought not to mingle any other discourse 950

with this one: into which you have put so many diverse and beautiful things that we may say, respecting the aim of Courtiership, not only that you are the perfect Courtier we are looking for, and qualified to educate your prince rightly, but if Fortune is favorable to you, you ought also to be an excellent prince, which would be of great benefit to your country."

Signor Ottaviano laughed, and said: "Perhaps, Madam, if I should hold such rank, it would be with me as it is wont to be with many others, who know better how to speak than act."

[44] At this, when the matter had been bandied about the company, with some contradiction and also some praise of what had been said and when it was noted that it was not yet time to retire; to sleep, the Magnifico Giuliano said, laughing: "Madam, I am such an enemy of deception that I am obliged to contradict signor Ottaviano who, from having (as I fear) conspired secretly with signor Gasparo against women, has fallen into two errors, both most grave in my opinion. One of which is that, in order to set this Courtier above the Court Lady and make him exceed the bounds that she can attain, signor Ottaviano has also set the Courtier above the prince, which is most unseemly; the other is that he has given him a goal ever difficult and sometimes impossible for him to reach, and such that, if he should reach it, he ought not to be called a Courtier." "I do not understand," said signora Emilia, "how it should be so difficult or impossible for the Courtier to attain this goal of his, nor how signor Ottaviano has set him above the prince."

"Do not grant him these things," replied signor Ottaviano, "for I have not set the Courtier above the prince, nor do I think that I have fallen into any error respecting the aim of Courtiership."

Then the Magnifico Giuliano replied: "You cannot say, signor Ottaviano, that the cause which gives a certain quality to an effect does not always have more of that quality than its effect has. Thus, the Courtier, through whose instruction the prince is to become so excellent, would have to be more excellent than the prince; and in this way he would also be of greater dignity than the prince himself, which is most unseemly.

Then, respecting the aim of Courtiership, what you have said holds good when the prince's age is close to that of the Courtier, and yet not without difficulty, for where there is little difference of age, it is natural that there should be little difference in knowledge as well, whereas if the prince is old and the Courtier young, it stands to reason that the old prince would know more than the young Courtier; and if this does not always happen, it does happen sometimes, and then the goal you have given the Courtier is impossible. But if the prince is young and the Courtier old, it will be difficult for the Courtier to win the prince's mind by means of those accomplishments which you have attributed to him. For, to speak truly, jousting and other bodily exercises are for young men and not for the old, and music and dancing and festivals and games and affairs of love are ridiculous in old age; and it strikes me that they would ill become one who directs the life and manners of the prince, for such a one ought to be a very sober 951

and authoritative person, mature in years and in experience and, if possible, a good philosopher, a good commander, and ought to know almost everything. Hence, I think that whoever instructs the prince should not be called a Courtier but deserves a far greater and more honored name. So that you must pardon me, signor Ottaviano, if I have exposed your fallacy; for it seems to me that I am bound to do so for the honor of my Lady, whom you are determined to have of less dignity than this Cour tier of yours, and this I will not tolerate."

[45] Signor Ottaviano laughed, and said: "Signor Magnifico, it would be more in praise of the Court Lady to exalt her until she equaled the Courtier rather than abase the Courtier until he equaled the Court Lady; for surely the Lady would not be forbidden to teach her mistress also, and to tend with her to that aim of Courtiership that I have said befits the Courtier with his prince. But you are trying more to blame the Courtier than to praise the Court Lady; hence, I may be allowed to continue to take the Courtier's part.

"To reply, then, to your objections, I will say that I did not hold that the Courtier's instruction should be the sole cause of making the prince such as we would have him be. For if the prince were not by nature inclined and fitted to be so, every care and every exhortation on the part of the Courtier would be in vain: even as the labor of any good husbandman would also be in vain if he were to set about cultivating and sowing the sterile sand of the sea with excellent seed, because such sterility is natural to it; but when to good seed in fertile soil, and to mildness of atmosphere and seasonable rains, there is added also the diligence of man's cultivation, abundant crops are always seen to grow in plenty there. Not that the husbandman alone is the cause of these, although without him all the other things would avail little or nothing. Thus, there are many princes who would be good if their minds were properly cultivated; and it is of these that I speak, not of those who are like sterile ground, and are by nature so alien to good behavior that no training can avail to lead their minds in the straight path.

[46] "And since, as we have already said, our habits are formed according to our actions, and virtue consists in action, it is neither impossible nor surprising that the Courtier should lead the prince to many virtues, such as justice, generosity, magnanimity, the practice of which the prince can easily realize and so acquire the habit of them; which the Courtier cannot do, because he does not have the means of practicing them; and thus the prince, led to virtue by the Courtier, can become more virtuous than the Courtier. Moreover, you must know that the whetstone, though it cuts nothing, sharpens iron. Hence it seems to me that, although the Courtier instructs the prince, he need not on that account be said to be of greater dignity than the prince.

"That the aim of this Courtiership is difficult and sometimes impossible, and that even when the Courtier attains it, he ought not to be called a Courtier but deserves a greater name-I will say that I do not deny this difficulty, because it is no less difficult to find so excellent a Courtier than it is to attain such an end. Yet it seems clear to me that there is no impossibility, even in the case you cited: for if the Courtier is so young as 952

not to know what we have said he ought to know, then we are not speaking of him, since he is not the Courtier we presuppose, nor is it possible that one who must know so many things can be very young. And if it happens that the prince is wise and good by nature, and has no need of precepts or counsel from others ( although everyone knows how rare that is), it will be enough for the Courtier to be such a man as could make the prince virtuous if he had any need of that. Moreover, he will be able to realize that other part of his duty, which is not to allow his prince to be deceived, always to make known the truth about everything, and to set himself against flatterers and slanderers and all those who scheme to corrupt the mind of his prince in unworthy pleasures. And in this way he will in large part attain his end, even though he cannot entirely translate it into practice: which will not be a reason for imputing fault to him, since he refrains from it for so good a cause. For if an excellent physician were to find himself in a place where all enjoyed good health, it would not be right on that account to say that this physician failed in his intention, even if he healed no sick. Thus, just as the physician's aim must be men's health, so the Courtier's ought to be his prince's virtue; and it is enough that both of them have this intrinsic aim in potency, even when the failure to realize it extrinsically in act arises with the subject to whom this aim is directed. "But if the Courtier should be so old that it is unbecoming for him to engage in music, festivals, games, arms, and bodily exercises generally, even then we cannot say it is impossible for him to win his prince's favor in that way. For if his age keeps him from engaging in those things, it does not keep him from understanding them; and if he has practiced them in his youth, age does not prevent his having and knowing the more perfectly how to teach them to his prince, for years and experience bring increase of knowledge in everything. Thus, even if the old Courtier does not practice the accomplishments we have ascribed to him, he will still attain his aim of instructing his prince rightly.

[47] "And if you do not wish to give him the name of Courtier, that does not trouble me; for nature has not set such limits upon human dignities that a man may not rise from one to another. Thus, common soldiers often become captains; private persons, kings; priests, popes; pupils, masters; and so, along with the dignity, they acquire the name. Thus, we might perhaps say that to become his prince's instructor was the goal of the Courtier. And yet I do not know who would refuse this name of perfect Courtier, which I deem to be worthy of the greatest praise. And it seems to me that just as Homer described two most excellent men as models of human life-the one in deeds (which was Achilles), the other in suffering and enduring (which was Ulysses)-so he also described a perfect Courtier (which was Phoenix), for, after telling of his loves and many other youthful things, he tells how he was sent to Achilles by the latter's father, Peleus, as a companion and in order to teach him how to speak and act: which is noth ing but the aim we have given our Courtier.

"Nor do I think that Aristotle and Plato would have scorned the name of perfect Courtier, for we clearly see that they performed the works of Courtiership to this same end-the one with Alexander the Great, the other with the Kings of Sicily. And as the 953

office of a good Courtier is to know the prince's nature and his inclinations, and to enter adroitly into his favor by those ways of access that are sure, as we have said, and then lead him to virtue, Aristotle so well knew Alexander's nature and encouraged it so cleverly and well that Alexander loved and honored him more than a father. Thus, among the many other tokens that Alexander gave him of his benevolence, he ordered the rebuilding of his native city of Stagira, which had been destroyed; and besides directing Alexander to that most glorious aim which was the desire to make the world into one single universal country, and have all men living as one people in friendship and in mutual concord under one government and one law that might shine equally on all like the light of the sun-Aristotle instructed him in the natural sciences and in the virtues of the mind so as to make him most wise, brave, continent, and a hue moral philosopher, not only in words but in works; for one cannot imagine a more noble philosophy than to bring a civilized way of life to such savage peoples as those who inhabited Bactria and Caucasia, India, and Scythia; and to teach them marriage and agri culture, teach them to honor their fathers, to abstain from rapine, murder, and other evil things; to build so many very noble cities in remote lands; so that by his laws countless men were led from a brutish to a human way of life. And Aristotle was the author of these deeds of Alexander, employing the methods of a good Courtier: which is something that Calisthenes did not know how to do, even though Aristotle showed him; for he wished to be a pure philosopher and an austere minister of naked truth, without blending in Courtiership; and he lost his life and brought infamy instead of help to Alexander.

"By this same method of Courtiership, Plato taught Dio of Syracuse; and later, when he found the tyrant Dionysius like a book full of defects and errors and in need of complete erasure rather than of any change or correction (since it was not possible to remove from him that color of tyranny with which he had been stained for so long), he decided not to make use of the methods of Courtiership with him, judging that they would all be in vain; which is what our Courtier ought also to do if he chances to find himself in the service of a prince of so evil a nature as to be inveterate in vice, like consumptives in their sickness; for in that case he ought to escape from such bondage in order not to incur blame for his prince's evil deeds and not to feel the affliction which all good men feel who serve the wicked."

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SECTION 5

Douglas Biow, Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard Look at any portrait of elite men in Renaissance Italy before 1500. Take, for instance, a sophisticated humanist: Angelo Poliziano, Pomponio Leto, Ermolao Barbaro, Leon Battista Alberti, Jacopo Sanazzaro, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolomeo Platina, or Giovanni Pontano, for whom wearing a beard, as it turns out, could at times constitute a hideous sight. Or take a ruling- class Florentine patrician, such as Cosimo de’ Medici, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Piero de’ Medici, or any other elite Florentine of the period, much less any other Italian man belonging to the cultural elite before 1500, such as those depicted with sometimes unflattering realism in Andrea Mantegna’s The Family and Court of Ludovico III Gonzaga in Mantua (fig. 15) or those skillfully designed in Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s equestrian bronze statues of the celebrated condottieri Colleoni and Gattamelata in Venice and Padua (figs. 1 and 5). Go ahead. Try it. Select, if you want, individual portraits, group portraits, portraits that idealize male sitters, portraits that show every grubby little feature, such as the often anthologized one by Domenico Ghirlandaio, which reveals the unsightly protuberances—the putative cause of the malady of rhinophyma—on an elderly man’s oversized, bulbous nose as he gazes fondly at his adoring grandson (fig. 40).

Then look at any portrait of elite men in Renaissance Italy shortly after 1500. Pick one. Any one. What do you invariably begin to see increasingly as time passes? Beards.

Beards. And more beards. Beards, to be sure, are suddenly all over the place in Renaissance Italy after the first few decades of 1500. They are simply, unforgettably, enchantingly there. Sometimes they appear in low relief, as the mere shadow of the suggestion of a growth crawling around chins and jowls as marauding, darkened peach fuzz.

Sometimes, at the other end of the extreme, they appear with such effusiveness and a bold elaborate shape to them that they seem to become, in the case of Parmigianino’s marvelous rendition of the condottiere Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale, almost comically over the top, to the point where they could be twisted and twirled into a sort of extravagant mannerist, figura serpentinata–inspired, corkscrew and pinwheel design (fig. 41).

Why? Why shortly after 1500 did men in Italy start wearing beards and, what is more, why did they eventually choose to address and impress the world with such a dazzlingly wide variety of them? This chapter attempts to provide an answer to that question by reflecting on it in light of a variety of issues related to collective and individual 955

self-fashioning by using principally portraits and prose writings to try to pin down something so protean as a shift in fashion. The following chapter, which turns to primarily a work of imaginative literature, then examines how the topic of the beard becomes a unique matter of intense cultural concern in a late sixteenth-century comic playâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a play that was never performed in the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own lifetime but, as we shall see, is all about the performance of the beard in the everyday life of late Renaissance Italy.

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In a fascinating essay titled ‘‘The New World and the Changing Face of Europe,’’ the Jewish studies scholar Elliott Horowitz advances an interesting and plausible explanation for the appearance of beards on the faces of Europeans generally in the sixteenth century. Prior to the discovery of the New World, Horowitz argues, beards had been customarily associated with the Jew and Turk. As a consequence, beards signaled the otherness of a foreign culture over and against which Europeans as Christians collectively fashioned themselves. If the Jew and the Turk routinely went bearded, and the beard became associated with them as the quintessential Other, then Europeans collectively shaped their identity negatively, as non-Jews, non-Turks, and thus as nonbearded people. However, with the discovery of the New World, the ‘‘radical otherhood’’ traditionally associated with the Jew and Turk shifted—according to Horowitz—to the indigenous people of the New World.5 And one of the defining features of those indigenous people was the absence of any facial hair, a fact made apparent not only to the Europeans who were struck by the smooth-skinned faces of the novel people they encountered but also to the indigenous people themselves who were struck by the abundant growth of hair on the faces of the Europeans (facial hair that the sailors had no doubt grown during the long voyage overseas). The otherness of the indigenous people of the New World created a peculiar problem, then, that the absence or presence of the facial hair resolved. For the indigenous people were, like Europeans, deemed white in complexion, yet unlike the Europeans, they lacked facial hair. To mark themselves off even more from the indigenous people of the New World, to collectively differentiate their true, authentic whiteness from the false whiteness of these ‘‘other’’ people of the New World, Europeans according to Horowitz consequently grew beards and cultivated them and their appearance. Additionally, this cultural displacement of otherness focused on the signaling device of the beard could take place in that precise period because by the end of the fifteenth century the Jew and the Turk no longer represented the same economic, social, and political threat that they had before.

Although Horowitz marshals considerable evidence to argue his point, it is nevertheless difficult to imagine that the Jew and the Turk would have so quickly disappeared as figures of ‘‘radical otherhood’’ in the European Renaissance in the sixteenth century.

The natives of the New World may have begun to occupy the status of ‘‘others,’’ but one only need read Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) to gauge the still vibrant perception of the Turk and Jew as Other in the cultural imagination of sixteenth-century Italy. Moreover, otherness is not a binary opposition in the Renaissance but a fluid and dynamic concept: there was no more a single, stable category of ‘‘radical otherhood’’ in the Renaissance than there was a single, stable currency. The otherness of the indigenous people of the New World may have been on the minds of the Spanish and Portuguese toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, and that may account for their habit of adopting the fashion of wearing beards to mark them957

selves off from the people they had conquered. Indeed, Spain and Portugal were two countries that had a large-scale financial and cultural reason to shift their attention from the Far East to now the Far West, from the old Indies to the new Indies. But Italy, we need to bear in mind, did not. Although Italians evinced a keen interest in the New World as soon as the discoveries overseas were made, they did not share the same largescale involvement in it. As a result, the Other for Italians in the Renaissance in the sixteenth century remained, more appropriately, the Protestant, along with the Turk and Jew. Tasso, to be sure, collapses these categories and superimposes the religious erring of the Protestants and their fragmenting of Christendom onto the religious errancy of Islam, which the crusaders combat in his epic both by freeing Jerusalem and, in good post-Tridentine fashion, by unifying themselves into a single body with a single leader and a single goal. Lastly, the most noticeable and publicly recognized case of an ‘‘Italian’’ wearing a beard in the Renaissance had absolutely nothing to do with either the Jews and Turks or the indigenous people of the New World. It had to do with Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, growing a beard while ill and stalled in an entrenched war to regain the Papal States (fig. 42). Not until all the Papal States had been liberated would Julius II shave again. So, too, Clement VII (Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici) began wearing a beard after the sack of Rome.6 For Julius II, as for Clement VII (fig. 43), growing a beard thus physically displayed mourning, a deep despondency, a sorrowful reclusion into hibernation. It registered at once Julius II’s manliness (he would doggedly fight to the end) and amplified his pain (he let his beard grow untrimmed, like a ‘‘hermit,’’ as he was described, dwelling in the wild). The Italian custom of wearing a beard, as it was embodied in the figure of the pope based in Rome, was therefore born out of shame and sorrow, not a virile conquering of others.

And it had little to do with imperial conquest. Nor, for that matter, does the abject example of the old and weary Julius II strike me as the likely, determining stimulus for this dramatic shift in fashion and ensuing trend that captured the imagination of so many men in sixteenth-century Italy and led them to sport all sorts of beards, from scraggly to abundantly thick and elaborately coifed ones.

If stylish Italians of the cultural elite did not begin to wear beards to distinguish themselves directly and agonistically from the indigenous people of the New World, and if they were not universally doing so—I think it is safe to assume—to express religious sorrow or penitential shame in the manner of a mourning warrior pope, why, then, did they do it? To answer, let us consider why they might have preferred not to wear beards before the sixteenth century, even though beards had long been associated with manliness, as we shall examine in even greater depth in the next chapter. One explanation for their desire to shave and go beardless might have to do with the process of urbanization that took hold firmly in Renaissance Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That spectacular process of rapid urbanization, which saw build958

ings and churches rise and tower magnificently over the city walls that were continually being enlarged, would have logically led Italians to prefer to go beardless. For the urban Italian, who collectively thought far more in local than regional terms, the aim was not so much to appear non-Turk as it was to not appear to have come from the nearby country. Everyone of means had financial investments in the country—it was part of the balanced economic portfolio of the wealthy to have farms—but the dominant investment, both intellectual and financial, was in the city, in such enterprises ideally as banking or large-scale trading. In Florence, for instance, the aim in many respects was to erase the original rustic tie with the country in order to present oneself as a wellensconced urban dweller. Then, after having achieved a measure of financial success, the cultured urbanite built or bought a villa that architecturally transferred the image of the city to the contado (countryside), thus bringing the shape of urban experience to the outlying areas beyond the city walls.

Hence urban folk wanting to appear urbane went beardless because, quite simply, people from the country wore beards or were associated with wearing beards. In Machiavelli’s Clizia (1525), for instance, Eustachio, a family farmhand, is urged not just to fix himself up but also to clean himself up by Cleandro, a young man of some social standing in the urban community of Florence: ‘‘I’d like very much for you to fix yourself up a bit. You have this cloak that’s falling off your back, this dusty cap, this shaggy beard [barbaccia]. Go to the barber, wash your face, dust off these clothes, so that Clizia won’t reject you as a swine [porco].’’ Structurally, given the established logical opposition in Renaissance Italy between the city and the country, it was only natural that a farmworker accus- tomed to handling and being around pigs would appear filthy— porco nicely rhymes with sporco—within the walls of Florence (Bruni’s ever-so-clean Florence, we may recall), even though pigs certainly roamed within them. Along with that, it was only natural that the farmhand should appear so vilely bearded and unkempt. To be bearded, it would seem, was as good as being filthy. In Mary Douglas’s classic terms, it was as good as being ‘‘matter out of place’’ within the community of Renaissance urban life. Consequently, the urban elite, in order to differentiate themselves all the more from such vile, rustic workers, aimed to go beardless. Get rid of the ‘‘barbaccia,’’ Machiavelli’s Cleandro insists, if you want to stay in the city and be treated properly.

Why the shift to beards, then? Could it be, perhaps, that the process of urbanization had reached such a point in time that Italians now felt secure in wearing beards?

Had Italians in their cities, in other words, now sufficiently marked their identity as urbanites within the local culture that they no longer needed to fear any lingering association with their origins in the contado as they wore beards? I doubt it. I doubt, that is, that the opposition between country and city fundamentally had anything to do in a sig959

nificant manner with the large-scale shift from a nonbearded Italian Renaissance to a bearded one in the sixteenth century. Rather, what partly propelled the change in fashion from a nonbearded to a bearded Italian face in the Renaissance was insecurity, the feeling on the part of so many Italians belonging to the elite or aspiring to be part of it that, despite all the colossal capital and urban planning and civic pride that went into constructing these marvelous cities that still seem to enchant us today, Italy was as weak and vulnerable as ever. Indeed, it was more vulnerable than ever. To be sure, the traditional date marking that sense of vulnerability was the end of the fifteenth century, and it has remained that way in the historiography of Italy. As Francesco Guicciardini puts it in the very first sentence of his massive Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, ca. 1536– 1540; printed posthumously 1561), a book that is unique in its sophisticated understanding of how Italy figured into European politics generally: I have determined to write about those events which have occurred in Italy within our memory, ever since French troops, summoned by our own princes, began to stir up very great dissensions here: a most memorable subject in view of its scope and variety, and full of the most terrible happenings since for so many years Italy suffered all those calamities [calamita] with which miserable mortals are usually afflicted, sometimes because of the just anger of God, and sometimes because of the impiety and wickedness of other men.

The date the French troops invaded Italy and upset the perfect balance of political parts fostered by Lorenzo de’ Medici in his golden age of peace and stability was 1494.

Thereafter, as Guicciardini puts it in the tragic mode that dominates his history, the ‘‘calamities’’ began. And those calamities only continued to mount, culminating with the sack of Rome in 1527.

Then, not long after the invasion of the French in 1494, beards began appearing on the faces of urbane Italians. The process was slow. Italians did not all suddenly begin to grow beards overnight, but by the second decade of the sixteenth century it was undoubtedly so fashionable to wear a beard that it is difficult to think of famous men of the cultural elite who did not wear one. It was certainly enough of a fashion, for instance, that Baldassare Castiglione, probably among the most fashion-conscious Italians of his age, is depicted bearing a thick, lush beard, ever-so-slightly and suavely parted at the bottom, in the famous portrait of him by Raphael completed between 1514 and 1516 (fig. 14). Moreover, many of the male members of the group gathered together in 1507 at Urbino to talk about the perfect courtier wore stylish beards at some point in the early sixteenth century. To be sure, the comic playwright and cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena did not wear a beard (the portrait of him housed in Palazzo Pitti shows him well shaven), and the jester Bernardo Accolti (Unico Aretino) did not go bearded either (at least as he is represented in Raphael’s Parnassus in the Vatican). But both Pietro Bembo (fig. 4) and Giuliano de’ Medici, two outspoken mem960

bers of the group, most likely did grow beards very early on in the sixteenth century, as is suggested by surviving portraits of them produced by Titian and Raphael. And Ottaviano Fregoso, yet another talkative courtier in Il cortegiano, wore an ample white beard in a portrait depicting him as the doge of Genoa, an office he acquired in 1513, just a few years after the discussions in Urbino ostensibly took place. Surely, then, if these fine arbiters of fashion were wearing beards so early in the sixteenth century, it was a broadly accepted thing to do. Castiglione, Bembo, Giuliano deâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Medici, and Fregoso represented the very best of fashion from various parts of Italy, coming as they did from Mantua, Venice, Florence, and Genoa.

In this light, there are two significant sociopolitical factors that can perhaps help account for the large-scale shift in fashion from a nonbearded Renaissance Italy to a bearded one, although it is important to stress that a direct cause-and-effect historical explanation for the appearance (or, for that matter, disappearance) of a fashion is supremely difficult to validate, and so the suggestions here should be taken as tentative and speculative but still, I think, probabilistic. The first contributing factor is the invasion of Italy by the French, an event that shook the peninsula and reshaped the balance of power forever in the Italian Renaissance, as Guicciardini melancholically pointed out at the beginning of his massive history. The second, an indirect consequence of the invasion first by the French and then by the German and Spanish imperial forces in 1527, was the fact that Italy became a more pronouncedly courtly society, whose ideal character is so memorably described by Castiglione. In both these cases, men in Italy were made to feel subordinate, no longer masters of their own destinies.

The subjection of male Italians in relation to the lord they served in the court, or to the country that now controlled the balance of power in the peninsula, particularly after the conquest of Spain, placed men like Castiglione in a conspicuously subordinate position.

Hence Il cortegiano, as a number of scholars have pointed out over the past few decades, and as we explored at various moments in Chapter 1, gives expression to underlying anxieties on the part of elite men about seeming to be too effeminate. The beard, I submit, effectively masks those anxieties and perhaps even relieves some of them. At one level, the beard asserts the undeniable maleness of these courtiers, whose profession once was that of arms but is now that of posturing, negotiation, calculated talk, and graceful advice giving. For in theory men, and only men, can grow beards. A beard may not make the man, butâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as we shall see in greater depth in the following chapterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is an unmis- takable and evident sign of maleness.15 Needless to say, at a time when Italians suffered from feelings of inferiority in military prowess and when Spanish habits of appearance and comportment came to dominate Italian culture,16 wearing a beard hides a weakness inherent in the culture: these men cannot for the life 961

of them defend themselves against the dominant powers of Europe. In this respect, a beard conspicuously exhibits manhood in the very moment that the manhood of Italy was being questioned through a series of devastating invasions and, to be sure, at the very moment, as Castiglione observes in Il cortegiano, when Italians were quick to abandon (with an alacrity that elicits plaintive astonishment) their longstanding habits of fashion in order to adopt those very habits belonging to the new alien powers—powers, Federico Fregoso laments, that have made Italy the prey of all: Messer Federico said: ‘‘I do not really know how to give an exact rule about dress, except that a man ought to follow the custom of the majority; and since, just as you say, that the custom is so varied, and the Italians are so fond of dressing in the style of other peoples [gli Italiani son vaghi d’abbigliarsi alle altrui fogge], I think that everyone should be permitted to dress as he pleases. But I do not know by what fate it happens that Italy does not have, as she used to have, a manner of dress recognized to be Italian: for, although the introduction of these new fashions makes the former ones seem very crude, still the older were perhaps a sign of freedom, even as the new ones [novi] have proved to be an augury of servitude [augurio di servitu`], which I think is now most evidently fulfilled [il quale ormai parmi assai chiaramente adempiuto].... Just so our having changed our Italian dress for that of foreigners strikes me as meaning that all those for whose dress we have exchanged our own are going to conquer us: which has proved to be all too true, for by now there is no nation that has not made us its prey. So that little more is left to prey upon, and yet they do not leave off preying [cosı` l’aver noi mutato gli abiti italiani nei stranieri parmi che significasse, tutti quelli, negli abiti de’ quali i nostri erano trasformati, deve venire a subiugarci; il che e` stato troppo piu` che vero, ché ormai non resta nazione che di noi non abbia fatto preda, tanto che poco piu` resta che predar e pur ancor di predar non si resta].’’ (2.26) Moreover, at a time when the emphasis was increasingly being placed on affect control, and when one had to be careful not to make a slip and reveal a socially undesirable emotion through a facial expression, a beard could always serve as a handy disguise. Wearing a beard, in this context, must have had its distinct social advantages in the tense courtly world of sixteenth-century Italy. At once declarative (I am a man, the beard announces; I can grow facial hair) and protective (I can conceal my expressions and my inability—as well as perhaps unwillingness—to fight to defend my territory or the prince’s territory), the beard both masks and identifies, selectively conceals and reveals. Needless to say, these strategies, like those of simulation and dissimulation, were prized in sixteenth-century Italy, especially in the court. Indeed, if there is one thing Il cortegiano teaches us, it is that it is always better to reveal less than more. And a beard naturally reveals less of a person’s emotional state, albeit a lot more of his body—or at least what the adult male body can grow abundantly on the face. Consequently, if it is true, as Horowitz argues, that the bearded European signaled ‘‘the virile conquest and 962

domination of the newly discovered world to the West,’’ and if, as he also argues, the fashion of wearing a beard in Italy was largely introduced from beyond its borders, from such countries across the Alps as France and across the Tyrrhenian Sea as imperial Spain (where beards were in fact likewise conventionally being worn by the cultural elite), then the wearing of a beard in Italy signaled not independence, a staking out of difference over and against the Turk or the Jew or the native people of the New World.

Instead, as Castiglione would seem to indicate in the context of talking about the Italian habit of adhering to new fashions of dress from conquering nations, the wearing of a beard signaled conformity to the fashion of the dominant alien powers, the very powers—in the case of France and then later Spain—that had invaded Italy, bringing with them one calamity after another into the peninsula and reducing it to a vulnerable ‘‘prey.’’ In this way, by wearing a beard, the Italian male elite discreetly aligned themselves with the customs of the new dominant powers in Italy, thereby attempting to secure a posture of authority through identification, but ironically their collective alignment through fashion only called attention to their role as dominated. Theirs was, to be sure, the manly beard of ‘‘majesty,’’ to borrow the terms of the anatomist Alessandro Benedetti, but—as we shall see in the case of Cosimo I in the next section to this chapter—it can also be viewed as an elegant and stylized quotation of the imperial majesty that Italians managed to make in good Renaissance fashion their own.

Collectively Castiglione’s group of courtiers discusses proper self-presentation for four evenings in a row, and on the last occasion even through an entire sleepless night.

They also show that they are extremely concerned with how the body appears and emphasize how one must gesture appropriately in order to remain decorous. But they do not address whether a courtier should or should not wear a beard. Nor do they discuss directly whether a beard is inherently manly or not. They only mention that would-be courtiers should not pay too much attention to their beards, the way women, we are given to understand, attend too vainly to their appearance, thus privileging applied cosmetics over inner character or, in the Platonic terms Castiglione often adopts, appearance over essence. ‘‘But to say what I think is important in the matter of dress,’’ the (perhaps bearded) Federico Fregoso says early on in Book 1, I wish our Courtier to be neat and dainty in his attire, and observe a certain modest elegance, yet not in a feminine or vain fashion [ma non pero di maniera feminile o vana]. Nor would I have him more careful of one thing than of another, like many we see, who take such pains with their hair that they forget the rest; others attend to their teeth, others to their beard [altri di barba], others to their boots, others to their bonnets, others to their coifs; and thus it comes about that those slight touches of elegance seem borrowed by them, while all the rest, being entirely devoid of taste, is recognized as their very own. And such a manner I would advise our Courtier to avoid, and I 963

would only add further that he ought to consider what appearance he wishes to have and what manner of man he wishes to be taken for, and dress accordingly; and see to it that his attire aid him to be so regarded even by those who do not hear him speak or see him do anything whatever. (2.27) If a beard signaled manliness in the cultural imagination of Italians in the sixteenth century, too much attention to a beard, Castiglione avers, can still be viewed as a sign of foppishness. How, then, should one wear a beard? How much attention to its appearance meets the requirement of locating that ideal Aristotelian mean that underpins Castiglione’s treatise? What amount of atten- tion constitutes too little or too much?

Too little attention, no doubt, would lead a man to let the beard grow wild and thus make him look like a peasant, a recluse, or a mourning, embittered, bearlike pope. Conversely, too much attention to the beard would perhaps turn a man into an effeminate and affected fop lacking sprezzatura. Moreover, since Castiglione suggests that the physically smaller is generally preferred to the bigger when searching for the proper mean between extremes, as he does, for instance, when discussing the ideal size of the perfect courtier, perhaps a smaller beard is better than a bigger one if there is any doubt about how big or small the beard should be. Needless to say, Castiglione does not address any of these matters in any detail in his treatise, since to codify anything too minutely in Il cortegiano would only defeat the purpose of its rhetorical strategy.

One of Castiglione’s aims is not to prescribe rules of fashion but to show through the edifying practice of exemplarity and carefully crafted descriptions that fashion is culturally—indeed even locally—determined.

Nevertheless, wearing a beard was unmistakably a widespread fashion, and like most fashions in Renaissance Italy, it led to reflection in other conduct and etiquette manuals. In the Galateo, for instance, the treatise that most openly codified conduct and etiquette in the late Renaissance, the topic of beards comes up briefly in the context of Giovanni della Casa’s insistence—an insistence repeated over and over again throughout his treatise—that we must do everything we can to adopt the accepted current fashion of the people where we happen to reside. We should do this, we are told, not just so that we will not stick out conspicuously in the crowd but also so that we will not disturb or offend others. As is so often the case in the Galateo, the aim is to please so as to be pleased. Adopting this behavioral strategy is a virtue, just as it is virtuous in an Aristotelian sense in the Nicomachean Ethics not to overstep boundaries. We must all find the equilibrated place between extremes. Above all, within civil society it is virtuous, for della Casa, to think and care about others in order to allow everyone with whom one has contact to feel at home. And beards, wearing them or not wearing them, directly figure into this civilizing process. As della Casa warns in the context of talking about custom and fashion: 964

Everyone must dress well according to his status and age, because if he does otherwise it seems that he disdains other people. For this reason the people of Padua used to take offence when a Venetian gentleman would go about their city in a plain overcoat as if he thought he was in the country. Not only should clothing be of fine material, but a man must also try to adapt himself as much as he can to the sartorial style of other citizens, and let custom guide him, even though it may seem to him to be less comfortable and attractive than previous fashions. If everyone in your town wears his hair short, you should not wear it long; and where other citizens wear a beard, you should not be clean shaven [o, dove gli altri cittadini siano con la barba, tagliarlati tu], for this is a way of contradicting others, and such contradictions, in your dealings with others, should be avoided unless they are necessary, as I will tell you later. This, more than any bad habit, renders us despicable to most other persons.

Knowing both where and when one should wear a beard, and what kind of beard one should wear, indicates an absence of selfishness. At the same time, it reveals worldliness and understanding and appreciation of otherness. It signals that you are cognizant that you have entered a culturally different space and know, as well as respect, the collectively accepted social customs governing it.

But not all beards are the same, and this was certainly the case in sixteenth- century Italy. On the one hand, wearing a beard might show some general degree of conformity and could therefore be construed as a matter of selflessly deferring to the taste, judgment, habits, and general well-being and comfort of others, of a collectivity. On the other hand, wearing a certain type of beard also revealed, given the constraints within which one necessarily operated, some- thing about the self, and it signaled a discriminating claim that one personally and conspicuously asserted with respect to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own particular identity, oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own individuality within a collectivity. And della Casa is aware of this, too. We must wear a beard where it is appropriate to wear one, he insists, but the particular type of beard worn also all depends on the place, time, and circumstances, although it is difficult, as Castiglione and della Casa knew, to pin down precisely why fashion comes and goes: You should not, therefore, oppose common custom in these practices, nor be the only one in your neighborhood to wear a long gown down to your feet while everyone else wears a short one, just past the belt. It is like having a very pug face, that is to say, something against the general fashion of nature, so that everybody turns to look at it. So it is also with those who do not dress according to the prevailing style but according to their own taste, with beautiful long hair, or with a very shortcropped beard or a clean-shaven face [o che la barba hanno raccorciata o rasa], or who wear caps, or great big hats in the German fashion.

965

Although both Castiglione and della Casa assure the reader that their treatises should not be read as self-portraits, the first overtly in the introduction to his Il cortegiano and the second by having an ‘‘idiota’’ (idiot) narrator voice the concepts of the Galateo, we can nevertheless rest assured that both Castiglione and della Casa, so conscious as they were of how fashion affects others and passes with time, knew how to wear a beard. They knew, that is, what length the beard should be and when it should or should not be trimmed according to the place and circumstance. Indeed, both men certainly wore beards, and neither of them, as it so happens, wore the ‘‘short-cropped’’ one. Della Casa’s beard, as a matter of fact, was rather long, flowing, and abbondante (fig. 44).

For both Castiglione and della Casa, then, wearing the right sort of beard signaled some degree of conformity. It demonstrated publicly an understanding of what sorts of beards are worn in specific places under specific circumstances. This is important, since Renaissance Italians, along with Europeans generally in the sixteenth century, had styles for beards that became associated in a vague sort of way with the habits and customs of a specific place at a particular time, much as della Casa observes that one should not wear a ‘‘plain overcoat’’ in Padua, where it was not the custom to do so.

Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his autobiography, for instance, that the elderly Bembo was wearing ‘‘his beard short after the Venetian fashion [egli portava la barba corta alla veneziana]’’ when Cellini visited the great humanist in Padua and set out to make a medal of him in 1537.26 As we pass from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, then, it is not just a matter of thinking about the differences between a beardless and bearded Renaissance but between a beardless one and one that became obsessed with beards styled in so many varied and conspicuous ways. We pass, that is, from virtually no hair on the face in the fifteenth century to all types of hair sprouting on the faces of urban Italian men. Wearing a beard thus signaled conformity to a general fashion, but the type of beard you wore could spell out publicly, and indeed conspicuously, your own affiliation with a particular style and, at the same time, provide the opportunity to assert your unique style within that group context as a mode of performatively addressing the world through your face. One could choose, for instance, the thick broadfanning beard (represented by Lorenzo Lotto in a portrait of a man [fig. 45]); the long, venerable beard (represented by Pontormo in his portrait of della Casa [fig. 44]); the larger, bushier version of the same in so many portraits of Pietro Aretino (such as the one painted by Titian in ca. 1545 [fig. 46], although Aretino, it is worth pointing out, also changed the look of his beard over time, as can be seen in an earlier portrait of him by Titian); the rather conventional cheek-and- jowl beard (represented in Titian’s portrait of Count Antonio Porcia [fig. 47], the anonymous portrait of Leonardo Fioravanti [fig. 18], and Francesco Ferrucci del Tadda’s profile portrait of Cellini [fig. 16]) or one of similar style with less beard covering the cheek and a bit of the chin showing be966

neath the furry underlip (represented in Raphael’s double portrait of himself with his fencing master [fig. 48]); the stiletto-styled beard (represented, for instance, in images of Michelangelo [fig. 49]); the ‘‘tile beard’’ (a bushy square one represented by Bronzino in his portrait of Stefano IV Colonna [fig. 50]); the rather wooly, thick, mustachioed beard (represented in Tintoretto’s self-portrait [fig. 27]); the truly elaborate one worn by Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale (represented by Parmigianino [fig. 41]); or the long, pointed beard parted the whole length down, like two stilettos (represented by Bronzino, for instance, in his portrait of Bartolomeo Panciatichi [fig. 51]).

Clearly, then, men in Italy invested a great deal of time in taking care of their beards and in choosing the right one for their particular, individual face. Some, such as Panciatichi, perhaps introduced new tastes into the reigning fashions of the day. And yet because beards were fashionable and signaled not just manliness but ‘‘majesty,’’ as Benedetti put it in his treatise on anatomy, a problem potentially arose if you couldn’t grow a beard, and a bigger problem potentially arose if you were a princely leader of men and really couldn’t grow a full one. An interesting case in this regard would be the gradual—indeed, it would seem very gradual—appearance of a full beard on the face of Cosimo I. For Cosimo I began to grow his beard sometime after 1537, when he was only seven- teen or eighteen years old, which was at least five years after the habit of wearing a beard became truly fashionable in Florence, according to the diarist Luca Landucci, although clearly the fashion had, I think it is safe to say, taken hold long before then. In the earliest portrait of Cosimo I painted by Bronzino, and perhaps commissioned as a marriage gift for Eleonora of Toledo (fig. 52), the Duke of Florence is figured at the age of roughly twenty with only a few wisps of hair creeping up both sides of his cheeks, a barely visible moustache that transparently reveals the skin underneath it, and hardly a tuft of hair on the underside of his chin. This ‘‘coolly erotic’’ representation of Cosimo I, as Robert Simon has described it, may make some sense in that Bronzino here figures Cosimo I as the youthful Orpheus, whose iconography was occasionally deployed by the Medici to signal their calculated use of eloquence over force in order to protect Florence and its domains and thus maintain peace and stability—the longed-for quies—in the region, although the calculated mythological allusion in this instance could have also served to indicate to Eleonora that Cosimo I, like Orpheus, would even descend into hell for his beloved new bride. In any event, however we read the symbolic significance of Orpheus in this painting, be it as a public or private message, if one of the well-established ways to convey visually the passage from adolescence to full-blown manhood to old age was the way the beard appeared or did not appear on the male face (as is clear in Giorgione’s Three Ages of Man [fig. 53], for instance), then it certainly made good sense to portray Cosimo I with only a hint of a ‘‘wispy beard,’’ as Janet Cox-Rearick nicely puts it, in the painting of him as Orpheus taming Cerberus. Like Orpheus, Cosimo I—a devoted lover and a tamer of the wild 967

through his voice—must be portrayed as a young man whose age, judging by the beard, would place him somewhere between the adolescent in Giorgione’s painting and the adult who instructs. However, in Bronzino’s later portrait of Cosimo I (fig. 54), which sets him in martial armor with his hand resting on his helmet, we once again witness the duke—now around twenty- four years old—adorned with a delicate, thin beard, yet again appearing at a developmental stage somewhere between a boy and a man. In this three-quarter profile, the duke’s boyish, wispy beard would seem to belie the very threat that the martial armor, with its jutting, highlighted spikes in the breastplates—the so-called besagues—pose to the viewer as sharp, pointed menaces.

The official, political iconography of Cosimo I certainly mattered to the duke and his court, and it was something that they consciously wished to con- trol.31 When, for example, the Medici agent in Milan, Francesco Vinta, was collaborating with the sculptor Leone Leoni (who was also then master of the Milanese mint) on a new medal for Cosimo I, Vinta observed in a letter sent in 1550 to Pier Francesco Riccio, the majordomo of the court in Florence, that he was not at all confident that the medal he had in hand (and that was probably only a year old) offered an accurate, up-to-date likeness of Cosimo I because ‘‘His Excellence,’’ he assumes, ‘‘has grown more beard [ha messo piu` barba].’’ It was evidently important for Vinta and those at court back in Florence that Cosimo I’s beard be presented just right, with the correct amount of hair on his face. The medal clearly called for ‘‘more beard,’’ and more beard is what Cosimo I was bound to receive if a new medal were ever to be made. For the beard mattered in terms of the male elite’s manner of individual self-presentation, and there is clear visual evidence that Cosimo I made a conscious decision to grow a full, manly beard and that it took some time for him to do so. The early portraits modeled on the ‘‘official’’ one by Bronzino, which depicts Cosimo I in about 1543 in martial armor, continue to present the young duke with only a slight, thin beard that cannot cover the chin and, consequently, boasts only a faint brownish smudge under the bottom lip.

Then, some time after Cosimo I received the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1545, when he was about twenty-five, he was portrayed with a somewhat thicker beard. Evidently the two or more intervening years seemed to have made a difference. And for the next ten years, during which time Bronzino’s original three-quarter portrait of Cosimo I served as the ‘‘official portrait of the duke,’’ the beard gradually continued to grow. Indeed, the beard as it grew over the years represented one of the few elements in the paintings modeled on Bronzino's early portrait of about 1543 that actually measured the passage of time in the natural aging and maturing process that we all, alas, have to cope with, for, as Langedijk observes, ‘‘in the case of Cosimo’s likeness in particular a high degree of fixity prevails, both in the painted portraits and the sculptures.’’35 There was thus not much change in the formal structure of the portrait 968

of the first type, which resulted in a sort of iterative series based on Bronzino’s painting, but there was a good deal of change in the beard, which grew bit by bit, in fits and starts.36 Then, by about 1560, the model of likeness changed for a new series of official portraits of the duke (fig. 55). At this point Cosimo I, now aged forty or so, with little fear that Florence faced danger from foes near or far away, has himself portrayed without armor on but conspicuously wearing a thick, wooly beard. Thereafter the beard retains a sizable dimension, although it never did quite fully cover his chin. At best Cosimo I had there what is commonly referred to in contemporary American culture as a ‘‘soul patch,’’ a dense, furry, triangular growth beneath the lower lip.

At one level, what is so intriguing about these portraits is that Cosimo I persisted in his efforts to grow a beard despite the fact that he had a difficult time, at least early on, growing a full, mature one. Cosimo I’s insistence on growing a beard at once calls attention to his desire to impress on people in these official portraits an image of his ‘‘majesty,’’ his legitimate princely right to rule. More specifically, it reveals his desire to have the official image he consciously controlled and presented of himself to the world conform to the image of majesty offered up by Charles V, whose portrait by Titian served as a model for Bronzino’s early portrait of Cosimo I, the very portrait that would function as the model for so many others of Cosimo I.37 At another level, what is also so intriguing about all the beards adorning Cosimo I’s face in these portraits, from the ones portrayed in his youth to the ones of old age, is that they stand out as distinctive, although they were perhaps distinctive by accident. Everyone, from artists to patrons, courtiers to diplomats, as we have seen, wanted to make sure they maintained a certain, discriminating look with their beards, and their understanding of the beards they could design on their faces allowed for a wide range of possibilities and creative, individualizing shapes and sizes.38 Renaissance Italians of some standing in the sixteenth century clearly aimed to acquire some measure of distinction by wearing a fashionable beard. Panciatichi surely aimed to flaunt his distinction through his elaborate beard in a portrait by Bronzino (fig. 51).39 So distinctive is Panciatichi’s highly textured beard that it stands out in the upper center of the canvas. His beard is also formally echoed in the poised forearms placed as perfectly parallel lines at slightly different levels, the fingers of the right and left hands coupled in balanced pairs, and, perhaps most conspicuously, the sets of elegant, snail-shaped, ornamental window braces receding into the background just to the left of the centrally located beard, each of which represent so many smaller, architectural mirror images of the beard. The inverted twin peaks of the beard, so centrally located in the canvas, thus provide the model for the reiterated visual motifs within the canvas itself. By contrast, Cosimo I’s beard—in all of the versions of his painted portraits—is not distinctive in the same way within the picture plane. It is not distinctive, that is, because it is visually stunning or fashionable. Cosimo I’s beard is distinctive because, it would appear, he simply could not seem to grow one 969

that completely covered his chin. In the end, the beard Cosimo I grew, and that he had begun growing in earnest in 1537, was about the best he could manage to grow.

The beard in sixteenth-century Italy thus appears to be something unique to a man as it grows on his individual face in a peculiar way and on that person’s face alone. At the same time the beard in sixteenth-century Italy appears as a sort of mask that can be shaped in a unique way and that serves as an adornment, as if it were something ‘‘worn.’’ It can therefore be spoken of, as Castiglione and della Casa do, in the context of clothing, much as if it were apparel consciously and selectively worn in light of a widespread fashion that universally seized the imagination of a large body of men belonging to the cultural elite or those aspiring to be part of it. Even the language used to describe beards both now and in the Renaissance links these two opposing, yet still interrelated, concepts of identity formation. For one can speak in Italian of ‘‘wearing a certain style of beard’’ (‘‘portare un certo tipo di barba’’) just as one can of ‘‘growing a certain type of beard’’ (‘‘far crescere un certo tipo di barba’’). The first phrase implies something exterior to the face that is actively applied to it. Francesco Vinta, the Medici agent in Milan, even used the verb mettere (‘‘to put’’) to refer to the growth of the beard on Cosimo I’s face, as if the beard were a cosmetic, something added—as if it were conceived even as a sort of prosthetic device. Conversely, the second phrase suggests something instead that passively emerges from within, piercing the surface of the skin to disclose biologically an essential part of the person contained inside. Together these concepts, embedded in different linguistic utterances about beards, articulate completely different notions of masculine identity as rooted in the male body. In one instance identity is what you have as a certain type of man: it’s a given, just as the beard is what you have. You can’t do much about it if you can’t grow a beard over your chin, any more than you can alter your chin and place a dimple in the center because you happen to want one there, whether to be uniquely yourself or, for that matter, appear just like everyone else. Tough luck. In the absence of advanced cosmetic surgery in Renaissance Italy, you were who you were, with all the physical limitations of your individual body, just as your beard was your beard, although arguably it seemed to matter less if you were, as Cosimo I was, a powerful duke.40 In another sense identity is what you make of it: it is something you can fashion, just as the beard can be manipulated, altered, dyed, thickened in representations, rendered more manly and majestic to suit the official portrait on a medal. When it comes to the beard as a peculiar facial feature in sixteenth-century Italy, then, you have some measure of control over selfpresentation, some room for manipulating your facial features in public, some measure for engaging a personal, individualized, tailored style within the context of a broader collective fashion that aligned you with various groups and cemented alliances and loyalties. You may not be able to grow a certain kind of beard, to be sure, but you can still publicly and conspicuously stage the beard. At the very least, you can always go to the 970

barbershop and, as Leonardo Fioravanti and others remind us, have the beard not only thoroughly washed but also properly trimmed so that you can go out and face the day.

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