Picturing Courtiers and Nobles from Castiglione to Van Dyck

Self Representation by Early Modern Elites

John Peacock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000167962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

This interdisciplinary study examines painted portraiture as a defining metaphor of elite self-representation in early modern culture.

Beginning with Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), the most influential early modern account of the formation of elite identity, the argument traces a path across the ensuing century towards the images of courtiers and nobles by the most persuasive of European portrait painters, Van Dyck, especially those produced in London during the 1630s. It investigates two related kinds of texts: those which, following Castiglione, model the conduct of the ideal courtier or elite social conduct more generally; and those belonging to the established tradition of debates about the condition of nobility –how far it is genetically inherited and how far a function of excelling moral and social behaviour. Van Dyck is seen as contributing to these discussions through the language of pictorial art.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, early modern history and Renaissance studies.

1 Courtiers, Nobles and Visual Representation

The Courtier as a Work of Art

In retrospect, Castiglione’s most significant relationship – to speak of cultural as well as purely personal ties – was with the painter Raphael. It produced Raphael’s outstanding portrait of him, copied a century later and subtly revised for a new era by Rubens, who as a courtier-diplomat matched himself with the sitter as well as the artist. It also produced the famous letter in which Raphael explained his notion of the ‘idea’, the mental or imaginative concept he used to guide his attempts at depicting (in this case) perfect feminine beauty.¹ Castiglione’s parallel project, his verbal depiction of the ideal courtier, was to make notable reference to his friend’s métier, to the practice of pictorial art.

The dedicatory letter to Don Miguel da Sylva which prefaces Il libro del cortegiano characterises the book as ‘a portrait (ritratto di pittura) of the court of Urbino’, a representation of a sizeable body of individuals in a distinguished setting, as if to offer an enlarged and updated reworking of Mantegna’s depiction of the court of Mantua, Castiglione’s home city, in the so-called Camera degli Sposi, or a scaled-down and domesticated version of Raphael’s grandly conversing assemblies in the Disputa or the School of Athens. However, Castiglione adds at once, this will be a work

not indeed by the hand of Raphael or Michelangelo but by a lowly painter (pittor ignobile) who knows only how to draw the outlines (linee principali) and cannot adorn the truth with pretty colours or use perspective to deceive the eye.

Non di mano di Rafaello o Michel Angelo, ma di pittor ignobile, e che solamente sappia tirar le linee principali, senza adornar la verità di vaghi colori, o far parer per arte di prospettiva quello che non è.²

He goes on to declare how incapable he is of representing the virtues of the principal figure in his group portrait, the Duchess of Urbino, ‘because not only is my style incapable of expressing them but my mind of conceiving them (imaginarle)’.³ He lacks both the technical skill and the conceptual power, the access to the ‘idea’, which a master painter can command. Of course, readers of the subsequent dialogues would in hindsight recognise here the attitude of sprezzatura, the making light of his own abilities and achievements which is said to be the courtier’s essential quality. The more discerning would observe that those resources which the writer claims to lack, ‘pretty colours’ and ‘perspective’, would serve only to ‘adorn the truth’ (not to mention that perspective is said to ‘deceive’), and they would recall Aristotle’s insistence in the Poetics that just as the ‘soul’ of tragedy is not character but plot, the animating principle of a picture comes not from beautiful colours but from knowing ‘how to draw the outlines’.⁴ Castiglione’s adroit confession of artlessness intimates his artistic ambition. Given that he is an ‘ignoble’ portraitist who cannot even formulate the ‘idea’ of his principal personage, let alone realise it, there do exist noble painters who can represent ideal conceptions, and he implicitly accepts that he will be judged by their standards as he attempts, however imperfectly, to emulate their methods of portrayal.

His enterprise is of course more sophisticated than he initially suggests. The figures in his group portrait are themselves engaged in portraying a more rarefied figure, the perfect courtier. At the outset, Castiglione argues that ‘the Idea…of the perfect Courtier’ can be made real in literary terms, citing three classical precedents: the ideal republic described by Plato, the ideal monarch by Xenophon, and the ideal orator by Cicero.⁵ Implicitly following this tradition, in the dialogues which then get underway, Federico Fregoso suggests ‘that one of us should be chosen and given the task of fashioning in words (formar con parole) a perfect courtier, explaining the character and the particular qualities needed by anyone who deserves such a title’.⁶ However, although words are the medium to be used, Castiglione draws the formation of this figure into the ambience of the visual arts. Count Lodovico, the speaker in Book One who sets out the courtier’s attributes, requires him not only to appreciate but also to have practical experience of the arts of drawing and painting; this leads to a discussion of the paragone between painting and sculpture, which adds a dimension to the earlier, more predictable discussion of the arts of speech and language. As well, pictorial art enters more intrinsically into the courtier’s make-up by providing metaphors for the way he presents himself to the world.

The courtier fashioned through the words of Count Lodovico and his companions turns out to be a figure who, however gifted and however promisingly formed by upbringing and education, must, to be completely effective, form himself. Through the exercise of sprezzatura, the calculatingly unself-conscious display of all his accomplishments to the best advantage, he becomes his own work of art. Castiglione’s speakers express this notion from two complementary points of view. In Book One, Count Lodovico illustrates the effect of sprezzatura in a succession of activities: handling weapons, dancing, singing and painting. The sequence is persuasively judged, as he leads his audience from a courtier’s conventional pursuits – military exercises and élite social pastimes – to those which he has required of his new and perfect model, such as music and visual art. So he praises the deft practitioner who falls effortlessly into the right posture for handling his sword, or executes a simple dance step with consummate grace, or sings a cadence with natural facility, all of which leads to the culminating example:

Then again, in painting, a single line which is not laboured, a single brush stroke made with ease, in such a way that it seems that the hand is completing the line by itself without any effort or guidance, clearly reveals the excellence of the artist, about whose competence everyone will then make his own judgment.

Spesso ancor nella pittura una linea sola non stentata, un sol colpo di pennello tirato facilmente, di modo che paia che la mano, senza esser guidata da studio o arte alcuna, vada per sé stessaal suo termine secondo la intention del pittore, scopre chiaramente la eccellenzia dell’artefice, circa la opinion della quale ognuno poi si estende secondo il suo giudicio….⁷

With a quick scintillation of rhetorical dexterity which mimics its subject, this shows the act of painting as an aesthetic performance, and compares the courtier to the painter in that respect.

In Book Two, the principal speaker, Federico Fregoso, comes at the comparison from a different angle. He requires the courtier to behave always in accord with the sum total of his fine qualities, which must be made into a unified whole (un corpo solo). Following the doctrine of the Stoics, any action should express all the virtues, which are linked together, even though it will be led by one virtue in particular. This means that the courtier must know how to deploy the virtues, setting off one against another to make it manifest. Gentleness, for example, will be most striking in a man of fiery courage, each quality enhancing the other. The same method is used in pictorial design:

This is what a good painter does when by the use of shadow he distinguishes clearly the lights on his reliefs, and similarly by the use of light deepens the shadows of plane surfaces and brings different colours together in such a way that each one is brought out more sharply through the contrast; and the placing of figures in opposition to each other assists the painter in his purpose.

Come i boni pittori, i quali con l’ombra fanno apparere e mostrano i lumi de’rilevi; e così col lume profondano l’ombre dei piani, e compagnano i colori diversi insieme di modo, che per quella diversità l’uno e l’altro meglio si dimostra, e ‘l posar delle figure contrario l’una all’altra aiuta a far quell’ufficio che è intenzion del pittore.⁸

Count Lodovico’s parallel of the courtier and the painter is taken further in this detailed analogy. By using his own kind of chiaroscuro and composition in representing himself as a moral agent, the courtier becomes both the painter and the painting.

Federico’s analogy is derived from Cicero’s discussion of Stoic philosophy in the De Officiis. Cicero contrasts two kinds of virtuous action in the light of Stoic principles: the carrying out of ‘absolute’ duties by the wise man, and that of ‘medium’ or ordinary duties by the man of ordinary virtue. He also observes that the lesser kind of virtue is often mistaken for the greater and more perfect, and rated above its true worth. The reason is that most people do not understand enough about the nature of virtue to tell the difference. In the same way, most people misjudge ‘poems, paintings, and a great many other works of art’, because their fancy is caught by some good feature, but they lack the knowledge to recognise points of weakness.⁹ Castiglione has extracted this analogy between the supremely virtuous man and the wholly excellent work of art and revised it in an optimistic vein. To some sixteenth-century readers, he might seem to have gone too far, aestheticising the practice of virtue in a cultural climate where Christian humanism and, later, Tridentine Catholicism preferred to moralise the practice of art, and opening the door to aestheticising the very concept of virtue, so that the word virtuoso can come to designate an élite searcher after the beauties of art and the wonders of nature. More pertinent to note here is the way Castiglione’s ‘ritratto di pittura’ of the court of Urbino gives rise to further portrayals; the fashioning of the ideal courtier in all his social and moral virtuosity, which modulates into an account of his own self-formation, significantly associates him with the art of painting, in viewing him as both pictorial artist and pictorial subject.

By using metaphors of visual art to present his courtiers, who then build up a picture of their ideal courtier, who in turn emerges as both an artist and his own work of art, Castiglione set a precedent for succeeding writers of ‘courtesy books’. This is recognised two generations after the first appearance of The Book of the Courtier in Tasso’s dialogue Malpiglio, subtitled On the Court (De la corte), which pays tribute to Castiglione’s pre-eminence among ‘those who have described the ideal courtier’ (formata l’idea del cortigiano).¹⁰ The speaker, Giovan Lorenzo Malpiglio, after whom the dialogue is named, knows Castiglione’s book almost b...