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THE ABSENCE OF GRACE

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface....................................................................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................................................1Part 1. Falling from Grace: Sprezzatura, Suspicion, and the Perils of Mastication1. Sprezzatura and the Absence of Grace....................................................................92. Count Ricciardo's Tiny Defect...........................................................................263. Galateo and the Civilizing Process: A Short History of Table Manners....................................34Part 2. Losing Control: The Woman Question in The Book of the Courtier4. A Perfect Gentleman: Performing Gynephobia in Urbino....................................................635. A Perfect Lady: Pygmalion and His "Creatura"............................................................87Part 3. Missing Hercules: Unreliable Narrators in The Book of the Courtier and Galateo6. Internal Distance: At Home and Abroad with Castiglione's Author.........................................1197. Narratorial Sour Grapes: Reading Galateo................................................................179Notes......................................................................................................231Bibliography...............................................................................................255Index......................................................................................................263

Chapter One

The interlocutors in The Book of the Courtier spend much of their time elaborating a technology of behavioral performance founded on what Castiglione calls sprezzatura. "Sprezzatura" is introduced in Book I, Chapter 26, as "una nova parola," "a new word," by the speaker assigned to supervise the "game" of constructing the ideal courtier, Count Ludovico da Canossa. What he describes under that term is an art that hides art, the cultivated ability to display artful artlessness, to perform any act or gesture with an insouciant or careless mastery that delivers either or both of two messages: "Look how artfully I appear to be natural"; "Look how naturally I appear to be artful." Killjoys might be inclined to dismiss this art as a culturally legitimated practice of hypocrisy or bad faith, but others would appreciate the suppleness of the high-wire act of definitional balance performed by the count and his interlocutors. For the sake of simplicity, I shall call this the sprezzatura of nonchalance even though that name is misleading, since what is involved is not merely nonchalance, disinvoltura, insouciance, the ability to conceal effort. Rather it is the ability to show that one is not showing all the effort one obviously put into learning how to show that one is not showing effort.

This, however, touches only on the instrumental or purely aesthetic aspect of sprezzatura. What is it for? A second definitional aspect is beamed up by the count in 1.28, and I give it in Wayne Rebhorn's paraphrase: sprezzatura is "an art of suggestion, in which the courtier's audience will be induced by the images it confronts to imagine a greater reality existing behind them," and this enables the courtier "to make himself into a much more enticing and compelling figure than he might otherwise be." Since, as Frank Whigham concisely renders it, "modesty arouses inference in excess of the facts," we may think of it as a sprezzatura of conspicuously false modesty. Furthermore, the term's relation to the verb sprezzare (to scorn, despise, disdain) and the adjective sprezzata, which appears several times in Books 1 and 2, suggests to Rebhorn that sprezzatura designates "an attitude of slightly superior disdain" by which the performer indicates his easy mastery of whatever he is doing, his "scorn for the potential difficulty or restriction involved" and "for normal, human limitations" (34-35). Eduardo Saccone and Daniel Javitch associate the "disdain, misprision, or depreciation" implied by the etymology with a strategy for maintaining class boundaries; they argue for a sprezzatura of elite enclosure founded on the complicity of a coded performance in which the actor and his peers reaffirm their superiority to those incapable of deciphering the code.

Javitch gives sprezzatura a different look by moving it into the political arena and treating it as a strategic response to "the constraints of despotism" in the courtly context of "fierce competition for favors":

The ruler's desire to keep his subordinates in check, as well as the court's standards of polite refinement, compel its members to subdue or at least mask their aggressive and competitive drives. That is why such qualities as reticence, detachment, and understatement are so valued at court.... The courtier ... inhabits a world where graceful deceit is valued not only for its intrinsic delight but because the despot who governs that world makes it imperative. (23, 26)

This indeed suggests a fourth definitional aspect of sprezzatura as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of "apparent reticence and nonchalance" (Javitch, "Cortegiano," 24). I hesitate to call this the sprezzatura of deceit because, as I'm about to suggest, it involves not deceit tout court but rather the menace of deceit, the display of the ability to deceive. I shall therefore, in the interests of vapid generalization and alliteration, refer to it as the sprezzatura of suspicion.

These formulations don't quite catch a reflexive nuance that hovers cloudily about them. Most of them focus on a skill of performative negation, the ability continuously to display that something is being conspicuously withheld; the ability, for example, to present oneself as someone who may have and can keep secrets, who has power in reserve, who does indeed possess the "aggressive and competitive drives" he is masking, who knows how to conceal unpleasant truths under "salutary deception" ("inganno salutifero," 4.10). Deceit is among the "tropes of personal promotion" Whigham discusses in his fine chapter on that topic. He cites George Puttenham's assertion that the "profession of a very Courtier ... is ... cunningly to be able to dissemble," and he offers the following comment on the statement by Federico in 2.40 that this "is rather an ornament ... than deceit": "Deceit is both denied and admitted, redefined and excused; ... it becomes ... a sauce or manner" (S, 100-101).

The push in all these observations is toward more than the ability to deceive; it is toward the ability to represent the ability to deceive, toward the courtier's ability to show that he has the art and, if called upon, is capable of deceiving. Disinvoltura is both the behavioral sign of this capability and the medium through which it will if necessary be actualized. It is also both a competitive act in itself and a sign that its possessor is willing to compete for favors in court; a guarantee that the ambition and aggressiveness the courtier pretends to mask is really there, and available for his prince's use (see 2.18-25, 32). To modify Puttenham's...