Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione

Randall Albury unveils courtly philosophy.

On a chilly evening in early March 1507, high in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy, a group of cultivated gentlemen and ladies sit around the fire in the audience chamber of the Duchess of Urbino discussing the qualities of the perfect courtier.

Such is the setting of one of the most celebrated books of the Italian Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), which was an international best-seller for a century after its first publication in 1528. The author, a minor nobleman from Mantua, was a humanistically-educated diplomat who served at the courts of northern Italy for most of his life, ending his career in Spain as Pope Clement VII’s nuncio to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

However, notwithstanding the book’s fame and its translation into all the major languages of Europe, there is little about The Book of the Courtier which at first glance would suggest philosophical seriousness, and certainly nothing to intimate that it contains a hard-headed political philosophy. None of its characters has the ruthless will-to-power of a Cesare Borgia, nor the icily unsentimental pragmatism of a Niccolò Machiavelli, both contemporaries of Castiglione.

…