On First Things’ The Catholic Thing web magazine, Brad Miner, former literary editor of National Review and author of the excellent and highly recommended The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry, shares his view of sprezzatura, grace and gentlemanliness.

What was once called sprezzatura, a wonderful word coined by the sixteenth-century writer Baldassare Castiglione, is a kind of graceful restraint that is an elemental characteristic of true civility. It helped define Western ideas about the gentleman, and it helped strangers to manage the slow transition to friendship. Yet today many people — too many — believe in casual and even instant intimacy. They think it’s perfectly acceptable to say the first thing that pops into their heads and to confess their darkest secrets to folks they have just met. …

Nothing — and I mean nothing — is more destructive of civility than notions of instant intimacy: the way we immediately address one another by our first names; the way we share intimate facts about our lives with strangers; the way some clothing displays nudity.

The handshake developed as a way strangers could show themselves unarmed. It was a sensible and cautious first step towards friendship. We do well to remember that intimacy must be a process, a negotiation, and that who meets a stranger and jumps quickly into bed, so to speak, has a better than even chance of waking up next to an enemy.

Baldassare Castiglione was born to a noble family near Mantua, Lombardy (in present-day Italy) in 1478. At the age of 16, he began his humanist studies in Milan. By 1516, Castiglione became advisor to Pope Leo X and continued to serve as advisor and Apostolic nuncio (to Madrid, Toledo, Seville and Granada) under Pope Clement VII. Castiglione wrote several works, ranging from books and letters to poems, but his most famous book, Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), was published in Venice in 1528, the year before his death.

As Brad Miner comments, The Book of the Courtier “was considered revolutionary in its time,” yet even today it has a surprising freshness and undeniable relevance. Castiglione based his notion of sprezzatura upon Cicero’s Stoic concept of neglentia diligens, or studied negligence, combining it with an Aristotelian drive for arete, or excellence. He described that a complete gentleman should be educated and fashioned to be a balance between things martial (athleticism, courage, military prowess) and artistic (knowledge, art, manners). Mr. Miner describes this as attaining the “golden mean” in all things — for example, courage being the mean between rashness and cowardice, and the proper degree of liberality as being the mean between extravagance and parsimony. And overlying it all is the concept of sprezzatura — a seeming effortlessness or grace derived from talent and ability, but with a notable self-restraint and sense of moderation that derives from the virtue of humility, which is the foundation of all other virtues.

To read more about sprezzatura and the making of the “compleat gentleman,” check out Brad Miner’s The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry. An interview with the author is posted at the Catholic Educational Resource Center.