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But what do you suppose I have here?" Producing a slip of paper from his vest pocket. "No; it's not another draft! An advertisement! Listen: 'Mademoiselle de Castiglione's select seminary. Young ladies instructed in the arts of the bon ton. Finesse, repose, literature! Fashions, etiquette, languages! P. S. Polkas a specialty! Celestina, your destiny lies at Mademoiselle de Castiglione's.
At the period of the Renaissance, court functions and festivities, so far as the intellectual part is concerned, were not unlike those of the present day; but the magnificent costumes, the highly developed sense of material beauty, and the more elaborate etiquette of the age which gave birth to Castiglione's Cortegiano lent these festivities a higher character.
A very lively picture of the modes of life and the habits of mind peculiar to the Italian burgher may be gained by the perusal of Agnolo Pandolfini's treatise, Del Governo della Famiglia. This essay should be read side by side with Castiglione's Cortegiano, by all who wish to understand the private life of the Italians in the age of the Renaissance.
Castiglione's courtier is, with one or two points of immaterial difference, a modern gentleman, such as all men of education at the present day would wish to be. The first requisite in the ideal courtier is that he must be noble. The Count of Canossa, who proposed the subject of debate, lays down this as an axiom.
Already, on the 21st of September, the annalist of Ferrara wrote: "The French are hated in Milan for their rudeness and arrogance." And a private letter, written by a Venetian from Milan, in October, confirms Castiglione's account of the confusion and disorder that reigned in the Castello. "The French are dirty people.
For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and late respectively as Castiglione's Courtier and Peacham's Complete Gentleman show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his accomplishments. In England special circumstances intensified this tendency of the time.
It was not the first attempt at bringing the pastoral upon the boards, since Poliziano's Orfeo with its purely bucolic opening had been performed as early as 1471; but Castiglione's ecloga rappresentativa was the first of any note to depend purely on the pastoral form and to introduce on the stage the convention of the allegorical pastoral.
Courts being now the only centers in which it was possible for a man of birth and talents to shine, it followed that the perfect courtier and the perfect gentleman were synonymous terms. Castiglione's treatise may therefore be called an essay on the character of the true gentleman as he appeared in Italy.
In his pastoral romance, 'Ameto, ovvero Commedia delie ninfe fiorentine, Boccaccio set a fashion in literature, namely the intermingling for purposes of narration of prose and verse , in which he was followed a century and a half later by Pietro Bembo, the Socrates of Castiglione's renaissance Symposium, in his dialogue on love entitled Gli Asolani, and by Jacopo Sannazzaro in his still more famous Arcadia.
Before its first printing the Orator was used as a reference book for advanced students by Guarino in his school at Ferrara. Castiglione's indebtedness to the De oratore is well known, but few notice that his first paragraphs are a close paraphrase of Cicero's dedicatory paragraphs of the Orator.
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