Raphael, Portrait of
Baldassare Castiglione,
o/c, c. 1514-15,
Louvre, Paris

Part I
The Complacency
of Camp

Part II
Warhol's Ambiguous
Smile

Part IV
Kant's Aesthetic
Smile

Part V
The Rise & Fall
of the Smile

A few years after Raphael painted this portrait, Castiglione was to publish his famous book The Courtier, which was a kind of handbook to the courtly life. In it, Castiglione was to put forward the strange notion of sprezzatura or "art hiding art". That is, in his handbook for courtiers, Castiglione is proposing the idea that, by a subtle series of gestures, courtiers are able to communicate with each other beneath their very kings’ noses, work out deals, say what needs to be said without actually saying it. This is how real diplomacy is done. In a way, even above kings, courtiers constitute a secret and exclusive caste of initiates, who pass between them a language known to very few. To the outsider, they seem obedient to royal decree, merely carrying out their rulers’ commands, but to their fellow courtiers a whole variety of qualifications and amendments is being enunciated. It is indeed hard to decide whether these gestures are being made or not; they are almost indiscernible. In a sense, it is a matter of simply assuming them, believing in them, and then we see them everywhere. This is in part the very power of a courtier: the fact that no one can tell whether there is any society of them or not; whether there is anything behind what they apparently mean. Of course, Castiglione was a distant relative of such television favourites as Sir Humphrey from Yes, Minister, whose approval or assent, as we know — such are his powers of dissembling or sprezzatura — usually means "No, Minister" or "Only if I want to, Minister". I might just quote here a passage from an article by the Italian Renaissance scholar Eduardo Saccone entitled ‘Grazia, Sprezzatura and Affettazione in The Courtier’, which speaks of how this sprezzatura divides the world into those who know and those who don’t, those who see things behind appearances and those who take things as they are (it should remind us almost exactly of the way Sontag characterised camp):

We know that the essential thing for the practice of irony, as also of sprezzatura, is dissimulation: a trick, or at any rate a detachment, a discrepancy between being and seeming. A dissimulation obviously is intended to the disadvantage of someone. Whose, and of what sort, is this deception? [...] In order to understand this communicative process, it is necessary in my opinion to postulate a structure that is not simply dyadic (emitter-receiver), but at least triadic. We must admit, in the case in question, a bifurcation of the receiver, the public, into two parts, one of which is not necessarily present on the scene. One of those parts will recognise an instance of sprezzatura or irony for what it really communicates, and thus sanction its success; the other will take the action of affirmation at face value, admire, without recognising, the sprezzatura or irony. In other words, it will serve as its victim. The price it pays will be its exclusion from the club of the happy few. To put it differently, sprezzatura is the test the courtier must pass in order to be admitted to this club, to obtain the recognition of his peers.

The Book of the Courtier is one of those texts that is said to mark the beginning of Western humanism, which raises the question of what notion of the human it implies. The human here is precisely the problem of intention or intentionality, the difficulty of determining any final meaning to the play of the world. It is perhaps not going too far to suggest that The Book of the Courtier is also the first treatise on psychology, that speaks of the unconscious — the unconscious not simply as something interior but as the Other already within us, the intersubjective — for in a sense the real issue Castiglione opens up is whether the meaning of the courtier’s gestures is known even to himself, whether it is not already given or determined by another.

But another way of saying this is to think that The Courtier is the first book on aesthetics in the Western sense, predating by a few years even Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. The honour of being the first book on aesthetics is usually given to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, written some 250 years later in 1796 (around the time, coincidentally, when Sontag argues that camp first begins). But if we look at Kant’s argument there — the necessity of ascribing an intention to a work of art — this is very much what Castiglione was already grappling with in The Courtier. (That is, in Castiglione’s book the courtier precisely makes himself into a work of art, very much as the Dandies did at the turn of this century and as Warhol was to do some 60 years later.) In other words, as with Castiglione, we might say that the secret of Kant’s aesthetic theory — something not usually associated with the great sage of Königsberg, whose work is so much about rationality, duty, the infinite deferral of pleasure — is the smile. We might say that the portraitist who did this engraving for the frontispiece to one of his books, in which we can see a sort of smile or snicker emerging from behind his lips almost despite himself, knew something about Kant it took others, principally artists, some 150 years to realise.

© Rex Butler and

Part I
The Complacency
of Camp

Part II
Warhol's Ambiguous
Smile

Part IV
Kant's Aesthetic
Smile

Part V
The Rise & Fall
of the Smile