Baldassare Castiglione's Love and Ideal Conduct

Chapter 1 Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER: Love and Ideal Conduct Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier was quite possibly the single most popular secular book in sixteenth century Europe, published in dozens of editions in all major European languages. The Courtier is a complex text that has many reasons for its vast popular- ity. Over the years it has been read as a guide to courtly conduct, a meditation on the nature of service, a celebration of an elite com- munity, a reflection on power and subjection, a manual on self- fashioning, and much else besides. But The Courtier must also be seen as a book about love. The debates about love in The Courtier are not tangential to the main concerns of the text; they are funda- mental to it. To understand the impact of The Courtier on discourses of love, one must place the text’s debates about love in the context of the Platonic ideas promulgated by Ficino, Bembo, and others, as well as the practical realities of sexual and identity politics in early modern European society. Castiglione’s dialogue attempts to define the perfect Courtier, but this ideal figure of masculine self-control is threatened by the instability of romantic love. Castiglione has Pietro Bembo end the book’s debates with a praise of Platonic love that attempts to redefine love as empowering rather than debasing, a practice of self-fulfillment rather than subjection. Castiglione’s Bembo defines love as a solitary pursuit, and rejects the social in favor of the individual. His speech is also, in subtle ways, a rejection of women, and the threat of male debasement perceived I. F. Moulton, Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century © Ian Frederick Moulton 2014 28 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century to be inherent in the love of women. The Neoplatonic theory of love outlined by Bembo was already fashionable in elite intellectual circles when Castiglione wrote The Courtier.1 But with the volume’s dissemination throughout Europe, The Courtier spread the Neoplatonic idealization of love to a much broader demographic than Marsilio Ficino, Castiglione himself, or the actual Pietro Bembo could have imagined. The Uses of Renaissance Platonism Let us begin with one of the many products of that dissemination. In 1596, almost 70 years after the initial 1528 publication of The Courtier, Edmund Spenser published a collection of philosophical poems on the topic of love and beauty called the Fowre Hymnes. The Hymnes are paired; the first two, the Hymne to Love and the Hymne to Beauty, are based primarily on Classical philosophy and poetry. They deal with physical or earthly love and the beauty that is its object. The second two, overtly Christian poems, deal with the love of God and the beauty of Heaven.2 The first of the four poems, the Hymne to Love, provides an elegant summary of the conflicting notions about romantic love circulating in the sixteenth century, combining elements of Classical and Medieval poetic traditions with concepts from Classical philosophy and Christian theology. The first six stanzas of the poem introduce Love as a martial, tyran- nical figure, a characterization found most influentially in Ovid’s Amores3 and elaborated in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love and elsewhere. LOVE, that long since hast to thy mighty powre Perforce subdude my poore captived hart, And raging now therein with restlesse stowre, Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part, Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart By any service I might do to thee, Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee. (lines 1–7)4 As in Ovid, the speaker is a helpless captive, subdued and wounded by the mighty god of love. Paradoxically, the poet is grateful for his suffering, and his hymn of praise is an attempt to placate his master (lines 8–10). The hymn the poet sings blends elements of various classical accounts of Love’s genealogy and powers. There is little effort to reconcile these often conflicting versions. The poem simply runs them together and ignores the contradictions. For example, drawing on Baldassare Castiglione’s B OOK OF THE COURTIER 29 Diotima’s account in Plato’s Symposium (203b–d), Spenser asserts that Love is the child of Plenty and Penury (line 53), but whereas Plato insists Love is not a god (202a–e), Spenser begins his paean by calling Love, “Great God of might” (line 43). Spenser’s Love is not only a martial conqueror, but also a cosmic force of harmony; it is at once a principle of concord and a destructive flame of desire. Spenser attempts to separate the divine fire of love from the earthly flame of lust, but the distinction is weak: lust desires pleasure; love desires “to enlarge his lasting progenie” (line 105). But the two desires remain intimately connected. Spenser also tries to unite the desire for “lasting progenie” to the contemplation of beauty. Plato argued that earthly beauty could entice a wise man to contemplation of a higher, heavenly or ideal beauty. But once that mystical transition had been made, for Plato the body became irrelevant. Spenser, on the other hand, needs the body, for “progenie,” if not for pleasure. In another contradiction of Plato’s account, Spenser’s Love is characterized as an “imperious boy” with “sharp, empoisoned darts”—the capricious and destructive figure of Cupid, 5 not the divine radiance that Plato associates with the ecstatic contemplation of Beauty. Such paradoxes are ubiquitous in sixteenth-century writing about love. Spenser is well aware of these contradictions, and the speaker of the poem calls attention to them: Why does he honor a tyrant who abuses him and hardens his mistress’s heart against him? How can this brutal and capricious tyrant be “the worlds great parent, the most kind preserver / Of living wights, the soveraine lord of all” (156–157)? Is Love a child or an adult? A loving parent or a cruel tormentor? A force of desire that tears people apart or a source of concord bringing them together? Does Love subjugate or reconcile? Spenser finds ostensible answers to all these questions in Neoplatonism. A way of idealizing physical desire, Neoplatonic theories of love have their beginnings in Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium presents a series of speeches praising love given by a group of male friends enjoying a drinking party, or symposium. Socrates’s friend Phaedrus opens the dialogue by praising Love as the oldest and most glorious of the gods. Pausanias, a young man, beloved of Agathon, the ban- quet’s host, then makes a distinction between earthly love (physical attraction to boys or women) and heavenly love (a spiritual and sexual mentoring relationship between an adult man and a male youth). Erxyimachus, a physician, makes the third speech, praising love as a principle of universal harmony, active in the material world. Then 30 Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century Aristophanes the comedian recounts a fanciful myth explaining that in ancient times the original eight-limbed human beings were pun- ished by Zeus by being split in two, and so now people want to have sex to rejoin themselves to their lost halves. Next comes Socrates, who in his usual fashion turns the entire preceding conversation on its head by redefining the terms of the argument. Drawing on the teachings of a wise woman named Diotima, Socrates posits that love is a transcendent spiritual experience that can lead the soul to a contemplation of beauty and truth. And finally Alcibiades the aristocratic general reels drunkenly in and gives a speech praising Socrates as the perfect lover because he is both wise and possessed of superhuman self-control. From this summary it seems self-evident that the Symposium puts forth various competing and contradictory ideas about love. Based on the order of the speeches, their philosophic content, and the general rhetoric of the dialogue, it would seem that Plato endorses Socrates’s speech, and that it is intended as an implicit refutation of all the others. Early modern interpreters of Plato, on the other hand, tended to assume that despite their contradictions, all seven speeches, from Pausanias’s windy panegyric to Aristophanes’s joking myth, repre- sented the unified thought of Plato on the subject of love. Ficino’s famous commentary, De Amore, takes this approach, treating each of the seven speeches with equal respect. While this snycretic approach is characteristic of Ficino, who believed Platonic thought could be reconciled both with Christian theology and Aristotelianism,6 his attempt to unify the many discordant voices of the Symposium made early modern Neoplatonic theory even more complicated and abstruse than it would otherwise have been. This eclectic approach underpins the confusions about love, both Neoplatonic and otherwise, that characterize Spenser’s Hymne to Love and many similar texts from the period. All the same, the core doctrine of Neoplatonic love is based primarily on Socrates’s speech. He reports the wise words he was told by a woman named Diotima, “deeply versed in [love] and many other fields of knowledge” (201d). Diotima tells him that love cannot be a god, for love desires beauty. You can only desire something if you lack it, and no god could lack beauty; therefore love must not be a god, but rather an intermediary being. Love is neither good nor bad, ugly nor beautiful. After this syllogistic opening, Diotima shifts to mythology and allegory, saying that love is the child of Resource and Need (Spenser’s Plenty and Penury), begotten on the same day Aphrodite was born, and thus devoted to her service (203b–d).

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