Personal Blogs

Knowing where to start can be difficult, as Castiglione’s character, the Count, admits. It is a matter of judgement. Then, isn’t everything, says the Count in the same breath. This passage, which somehow reminds me of Wittgenstein, is actually about what constitutes judgement of what is good and best in a thing, action or person. It rests on an as yet unresolved dialectic – in a sublunary world we might intuit ‘perfection’ but never know properly that it is ‘perfection’, mired between different and varying (diachronically and synchronically) ‘opinions of how such perfection be adjudged. Judgement is a slippery thing. This is Castiglione at his most playful best posing problems of judgement and authority. The Count is talking about perfection in a ‘courtier’.  We are posed by opinions about what is judged to be perfection in an artist.

This task looks at 2 opinions of what constitutes an artist’s achievement.

(1)    Raphael doesn’t in a sense, in a private family letter not purposed for sharing beyond that family raise the issue of perfection in the artist per se. He is concerned to show his family that he has achieved a certain status and that status (and its surrounding circumstances) have changed since they last heard of him. The change that constitutes achievement is expressed in the following series, with more than a hint in the ordering what Raphael thinks will most be adjudged success by his current audience: first, monetary wealth, then a role with status (and that adjudged by income) and then a hint of the stability of both status and income. Raphael ‘making it’ as an artist, or at least so he thinks his family will judge, is Raphael with money and promise of more to come. Of course Raphael also associates these things with ‘honour’ that is personal but also shared with the family to which he writes and the city where they live and he originated. But that ‘honour’ is quantified in money and whose value is evidenced in those quantities. Of course, this witty letter is an act of reassurance to his family and a bolster to their faith in them and their belief that he continues to think of them, despite not writing. The final joke is telling. Yes, this could be Raphael but is Raphael in the subject position of the young man who, having left home, must prove he is making good. He does not mention the aesthetic value of his art but is this because he is not thinking of it OR that he knows (in as far as he can judge) that that will not be uppermost in the minds of his audience. We need to remember that all communication will, as I think Castiglione, suggests above will take on the values of the current interaction in assessing what matters.

(2)    The Subject position of the Raphael invented by Castiglione (I'll call if Faux-Raphael) is precisely a man self-conscious that judgements differ in our world and that a better judgement is hard to assess or find. Hence, Faux-Raphael says of the ‘designs’ he sends to Castiglione that they have been judged as good in themselves, but notes that judgement may in itself be compromised in quality and sincerity. This mock letter then is a much more obvious illustration of the dilemma expressed dialectically in The Courtier.

In that search for knowledge of what constitutes ‘perfection’ in art faux-Raphael seeks models in the reconstruction of buried antiquity, critical authority of a master (Vitruvius) but neither offer ‘all that I need’. What this suggests is that perfection is an aspiration rather than an achieved phenomenon and that searching it is dangerous and potentially fatal (the point of the use of the Icarus myth here – to fly too near to the sun of perfection may end by drowning in a sea of undifferentiated mutability.

This piece is full of humour about dangerous death: does, for instance, the original Italian allow you to read the joke in English that shows that the ‘collapse’ of a career can be like being buried under the weight of a falling St. Peter’s. The metaphors of falling and rising he are contiguous – collapsing like a building, raising like Icarus to show that the issue of social reputation too is a dangerous area – seeking perfection may fall foul of the fact that there are too many opinions of what perfection might be – and some of them, not that well informed (even if it be one of successive Popes, as both Raphael and Michelangelo were to find).

The meat of this passage is very playful but central to Castiglione’s philosophy (perhaps I think of him as a precursor to Wittgenstein). A perfect woman cannot be fairly judged – note how Castiglione plays (heterosexual men will be heterosexual men) on Raphael’s well known uxorious life – without being found in a wide trial amongst a very large sample of women. Just as he submits his ‘designs’ to what he supposes is the better judgement (than his own, The Poe or the Roman intelligentsia) of Castiglione at the opening of the letter, at the end, he invites Castiglione in a similar bed-hopping hunt for the ‘best’ in ‘beautiful women’. This is more than a mere joke, it dramatizes the problem in the Courtier – we believe that ‘perfection’ exists but tastes so vary that we cannot attest to perfection without trial of it. At this point, it may no longer be see-able as ‘perfection’. This is the same dilemma we find in Milton’s Comus. Perfection survives not in realised body but in an imagined one that is desired but never caught (witness Galatea in flight in her scallop shell – the scallop is the very icon of eternal perfection). It is really ‘a certain Idea that comes to my mind’. Such intuitions might though actually BE the road to Perfection. Castiglione fades into Plato or, at least, the ancient Neo-Platonic school Castiglione favoured.

Castiglione, B. (1976) (Trans Bull, G.) The Courtier London, Penguin Books.