Pietro Bembo by Raphael, c. 1504, Szépmûvesti Museum (Photo credit: Web Gallery of Art)
Portrait of Pietro Bembo
c. 1504
Oil on wood, 54 x 69 cm
Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest
RAFFAELLO Sanzio
(b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)http://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/raphael/1early/08bembo.html Web Gallery of Art
When I turned on my computer this morning, there were several entries on Pietro Bembo and several portraits and other images associated our Cardinal. I am glad my short post generated a search for portraits of Pietro Bembo. The internet’s search engines are very powerful and bloggers may be more useful than they seem.
The portrait of Pietro Bembo, shown above, is by Raphael (b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma) or Raffaello Sanzio and it is housed at the Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, in Budapest. Yes, Raffaelo Sanzio was at the Court of Urbino, his birthplace and the birthplace of “l’honnête homme,” not to mention salons. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino produced a very beautiful portrait of Baldassare Castiglioni, the author of Il Cortegiano, or the Book of the Courtier (1528).
Baldassare Castiglione by Raphael, Louvre Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Pietro Bembo is mentioned in Wikipeda’s entry on Baldassare Castiglioni. As for the “Portrait of a Man” it remains unidentified, but according to Britannica, Giovanni Bellini did produce a painting of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, named “Portrait of a YoungMan.” Bellini also painted an identified portrait of the Doge Leonardo Loredan.
His [Giovanni Bellini’s] Doge Leonardo Loredan in the National Gallery, London, has all the wise and kindly firmness of the perfect head of state, and his Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1505; thought to be a likeness of the Venetian writer and humanist Pietro Bembo) in the British royal collection portrays all the sensitivity of a poet (Britannica).
Pietro Bembo by Raphael, c. 1504, Szépmûvészti Museum (Web Gallery of Art)
Portrait of a Man by Giovanni Bellini (Web Gallery of Art)
Conclusion
At the moment, we have three identified portraits of Pietro Bembo: Titian’s, Bassano’s and Raphael’s. Bellini’s “Portrait of a Man” or “Portrait of a Young Man,” shows a young man resembling Pietro Bembo, which is inconclusive. Given that Raphael, Titian, Bassano and Giovanni Bellini made a portrait of the Cardinal, it seems, however, that he was a prominent figure during his lifetime.
The book I am writing, on Molière, includes discussions of l’honnête homme. I am also revisiting préciosité and the querelle des femmes. Women met in salons.
Last night, I watched a video on YouTube. It was about Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. As the Eroica premièred unofficially in a stately Vienna home, Beethoven was told that he could not marry the lady he loved because she had a title and he did not. If she married Beethoven, her four children would be taken away from her. (Just before the News, there is a link to that video. It has Spanish subtitles.)
As I have written regarding Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the courtier, and l’honnête homme, there is an aristocracy above aristocracy: the aristocracy of manners, of the soul, and of the mind. But his genius could not give Beethoven the right to marry the woman he loved and who loved him. She would lose her children. How can good mothers and fathers accept to be separated from their children?
Mid-way through the video, Haydn arrives. Beethoven had been his student shortly. Haydn spent a lifetime at Eszterháza, the Hungarian castle of the Esterházy family. Never was a musician given the tools and facilities Haydn received from his employer. But he was otherwise to know and to keep his place.
To their credit, I should mention that the Estherházy family provided Haydn with a generous pension. But only in Paris and London, London in particular, did he find the appreciation he deserved. A musician and impresario by the name of Johann Peter Salomon had convinced him to travel to France and Britain.
Unfortunately, he and Salomon, who both protected Mozart, were in London when Mozart died, which explains, to a considerable extent, why Mozart did not get a proper burial. Mozart and his wife knew nothing about money.
Again, to their credit, after the Eroica, the Emperor’s family, the Hapsburgs, acted as did the Esterházy family, but more generously. They provided Beethoven with a pension he would receive until his death. Nothing was demanded of him in return. He was not even asked to compose, but he did. However, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, he was completely deaf and had long lived in isolation because it was painful for him to be in the company of persons he could not hear. He had loved walking in the countryside listening to birds sing.
“Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners. Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-effacing, he took as his … (100 of 42863 words)”[i]
I receive comments I do not always have time to answer, but I read all of them and wish to thank you for your encouraging words. It touches me that you should appreciate blogs about people who lived a long time ago. They were a little different, but not altogether. Human nature is human nature and that fact overrides the years that may separate us from an “ancestor.” At any rate, I thank you.
If that’s fine with you, I will continue to write about French-Canadian /Quebecois history and literature. But sometimes an event happens that forces me to write about another subject or not to write.
Moreover, there are times when I need to speak about an artist or a musician or a great work of literature. This week, courtly behaviour came up. How reassuring to know that it was not altogether superficial, or a mask.
Some of my readers have asked for longer blogs, such as sprezzatura. Such blogs are useful to students of all ages. Sprezzatura has to do with the behaviour of the courtier. It is described as nonchalance, but it is in fact a certain reserve, or retenue, on the part of Castiglione’s perfect courtier.
I believe people prefer short blogs. A mixture might be my best option.
In The Aristocrat as Art,[i] Domna Stanton states that “the quintessential prototype of the honnête homme was the Greek philosopher, the incarnation of virtue, of the golden mean, and the source of such fundamental notions as human sociability. It was only as eminently social beings, devoid of pedantry, that Greek philosophers earned the label honnête: ‘People can only imagine Plato and Aristotle in the long robes of pedants,’ protested Pascal.”
In seventeenth-century France, l’honnête homme practiceda degree of sprezzatura, anart that did not seem to have been learned or “art that does not seem to be art.” For instance, as François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (15 Septembre 1613 – 17 March 1680) wrote « L’honnête homme ne se pique de rien. » Maximes 203 (L’honnête homme [the courtier] never boasts [or is never “piqued”] about anything).[ii]We can therefore assume that, conversely, l’honnête homme is also capable of containing his anger: un peu de retenue (take it easy).
In this respect, Molière‘s Philinthe (Le Misanthrope) is the embodiment of honnêteté. Atcourt or in one of the salons of seventeenth-century France, hewould not tell a woman that she has applied too much makeup. This would be the truth, or what Alceste the misanthrope calls sincerity, but it would also be offensive. In such cases, l’honnête homme practices a morally acceptable form of mental reservation, so as not to hurt another human being, in which he is behaving according not only to the dictates of honnêteté, but also according to a moral or ethical code. « Le style c’est l’homme même. » (Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon)
There can therefore be communion between galant behaviour and the respect due every human being, whatever his or her place in society. It is called charity and there cannot be grace, grazia,sprezzatura, honnêteté, where there is no charity or compassion. In seventeenth-century France, deceptive appearances, Pascal’s puissances trompeuses, were considered the greatest of ills. It remains however that honnêteté, cannot be altogether superficial. One cannot play honnête homme no more than one can feign devotion.
In Molière‘s Tartuffe, no one is fooled by the falsely devout Tartuffe, except Orgon, apater familias who needs to be tyrannical with impunity and his mother. Everyone else knows that Tartuffe is a faux-dévot (falsely devout) except Orgon who needs a casuiste under his roof so he can sin with impunity while Tartuffe eats heartily and coveits his wife. He tells her that he knows how to lift scruples; that if she fears offending God (le Ciel [heaven]), this is an obstacle he can remove. (IV.5)
If every member of Orgon’s family, other than Orgon himself, can detect hypocrisy where hypocrisy there is, l’honnête homme will quickly see affectation in a would-be honnêtehomme, which would exclude this would-be honnête homme from the state of grace he would like to achieve. Grace has to be natural or internalized in the manner most of us internalize what we are taught as children. L’honnête homme is an honest man and among his virtues, we find a sense of justice and the realization that one has duties or obligations.
“In Book II, Quintilian sides with Plato’s assertion in the Phædrus that the rhetorician must be just: ‘In the Phædrus, Plato makes it even clearer that the complete attainment of this art is even impossible without the knowledge of justice,’ an opinion in which I heartily concur.” (Quintilian 2.15.29, quoted in Wikipedia)
Castiglione had also read Cicero‘s (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) recently translated (1511) De Officiis (On Duties or On Obligations). According to Cicero, our courtier has duties or obligations.
Noble Birth and sprezzatura: inneism (adjective: innate)
In Italy, the common belief was that the courtier had to be an aristocrat. Yet Castiglione notes that honnêteté coud be innate, but that one could also be innately incapable of honnêteté:
Truth it is, whether it be through the favour of the starres or of nature, some there are borne endowed wyth suche graces, that they seeme not to have bene borne, but rather facioned with the verye hand of some God, and abounde in all goodnesse bothe of bodye and mynde. As againe we see some so unapte and dull, that a man wyl not beleve, but nature hath brought them into the worlde for a spite and mockerie. (First Book of The Book of the Courtier)[iii]
Consequently, noble birth did not guarantee sprezzatura. It is altogether possible to be “borne endowed wyth suche graces” just as it was entirely possible for nature to deny an individual the possibility to acquire sprezzatura. “As againe we see some so unapte and dull, that a man wyl not beleve, but nature hath brought them into the worlde for a spite and mockerie.” (quoted above)
Seventeenth-Century French salons
In this respect, it should be noted that one of the goals of French seventeenth-century salons, before and after runaway préciosité consisted in teaching aristocrat good manners. One does not clean one’s teeth at table using a hunting knife as a toothpick. Many aristocrats were soldiers whose manners left a great deal to be to be desired.
In fact, when Catherine de Rambouillet, “l’incomparable Arthénice (an anagram of Catherine),” (1588 [Rome] – 2 December 1665), opened her salon, rue Saint-Thomas- du-Louvre (between the Louvre, the King’s castle before Versailles was built, and the Tuileries), she provided a meeting-place for individuals who wanted to be in refined surroundings and speak well. Court had yet to be courtly. For instance, Marie de’ Medici, Henri IV’s wife, was not the sort of person well-mannered individuals would invite to dinner. For one thing, she spoke atrocious French.
So both aristocrats and bourgeois found their way to la chambre blue d’Arthénice, Madame de Rambouillet’s blue room, and mingled with one another. Pascal, La Fontaine, Charles Perrault, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, etc. were honnêtes hommes, but notaristocrats. There is an aristocracy above aristocracy: an aristocracy of the mind and of the soul.
Speech: l’Âge de l’éloquence
Speaking well, éloquence, was central to honnêteté.[iv] Quintilian (c. 35 – c. 100) was the author of Institutio oratoria (95 CE) and Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) De Oratore (55 BCE). L’honnête homme, practiced contenance, réserve, retenue, discrétion, sagesse, modération, but above all he spoke and wrote well. Buffon was elected to the Académie française (1753) mostly one the basis of his Discours sur le style (“Discourse on Style”), which he had pronounced before the Académie française. Let us hear him speak about writing: “Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste…. The style is the man himself” (“Le style c’est l’homme même”). Buffon had detractors, but if one cannot express a thought, does the thought exist… Thoughts have to be formulated.
Richelieu and the French Academy
It is in no way surprising that the first French academy was l’Académie française, established in 1635 by le Cardinal Richelieu. The French Academy, the first of the five academies, ruled over matters pertaining to language. Richelieu could not let language be didacted by salonniers and salonnières, people who attended seventeenth-century Salons (see Catherine de Rambouillet), where Préciosité flourished. A calamity!
that, it all likelihood, sprezzatura, in France, went beneath the surface. If the courtier had put on an act, everyone would have known, and he would have fallen from grace, so to speak.
I also wish to state that some people had the ability to learn grace, honnêteté, sprezzatura, while others didn’t: nature played a role;
that one’s aristocratic lineage did not guarantee the possibility of attaining elegance and sociability, i.e. some aristocrats were rotten apples from, perhaps, the moment of conception;
that, conversely, as the French believed, a bourgeois could become an honnête homme,honnêteté being independent of lineage;
that humanitas and virtus are linked to honnêteté;
that the good orator (language) was an honnête homme;
that nonchalance (the term is misleading) is a form of reserve, retenue and often appropriately-applied restriction mentale, as mentioned above;
that the idea of courtly behaviour evolved as it travelled from Italy to its various destinations, and, finally,
that courtly behaviour predates The Book of the Courtier. It belongs to a tradition. It is chevaleresque behaviour: chivalry and it dates back to Græco-Roman Antiquity.
I will therefore close by quoting, once again, Wikipedia’s entry on Baldassare Castiglione.
[t]he perfect gentleman had to win the respect and friendship of his peers and of a ruler, i.e., be a courtier, so as to be able to offer valuable assistance and advice on how to rule the city. To do this, he must be accomplished—in sports, telling jokes, fighting, poetry, music, drawing, and dancing—but not too much. To his moral elegance (his personal goodness) must be added the spiritual elegance conferred by familiarity with good literature (i.e., the humanities, including history). He must excel in all without apparent effort and make everything look easy.
[i]Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 14.
Landscape with Banks and Trees,
by Frederico Barrocci (c.1590)
The British Museum, London
(Used by permission of Art Resource, NY)
Frederico Barocci (c. 1526, Urbino – 1612, Urbino) is a Renaissance artist. As a citizen of Urbino, he is not totally unknown to us. Baldassare Castiglione, the author of Il Cortegiano, The Book of the Courtier, lived at the Court of Urbino. Il Cortegiano was published in 1528, late in Castiglione’s life, but was written over several years. The Italian courtier has sprezzatura. In France, he is l’honnête homme. In England, he displays contenance angloise, a term used to describe a form of polyphonic music, but which suggests élégance characterized by an degree of restraint, or sprezzatura.
I love Barocci’s landscape. I love its flowing lines (mannerist), its suggestiveness and its monochromatic quality. Nothing is overstated. Beauty can be bold, but it can also be a mere whisper, lace curtains gently billowed by the wind, sheer grace: sprezzatura.
According to Wikipedia, “The Book of the Courtier was one of the most widely distributed books of the 16th century, with editions printed in six languages and in twenty European centers. The 1561 English translation by Thomas Hoby had a great influence on the English upper class’s conception of English gentlemen.”
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