"Formiamo un cortegian:" Castiglione and the Aims of Writing

Abstract

Ever since its 1528 publication in Venice by Aldus Manutius' heirs, the notoriety of Castiglione's text has entailed the risk of a certain blindness as to its real intentions. Traditionally, critics have been eager to embrace the speaker's own acknowledged desire to rescue the bright memory of Urbino from oblivion and by his writing make it live for posterity (Il Libro del Cortegiano 3.1.342). 1 This has also meant accepting at face value the author's sublime self-erasure from the text, which lends the Urbino conversations the air of an invitation to an invisible voyeur. Even so astute a critic as Edouardo Saccone, who hinges the success of courtly performance on the "prudence, discretion, and good judgment" of the "public for whom the spectacle is destined," confines this insight to the scene of discourse within the text--i.e., the spectators at a fictive masquerade--while ignoring any possible relation of this audience to the extratextual audience of Castiglione's readers (64).