‘True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.’

Alexander Pope’s lines in An Essay on Criticism hint at the effort required to attain grace, which is not a single quality, but a harmony of virtues balanced against one another. Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), the first thinker to have written seriously about the subject, viewed grace (grazia) as impossible without the complementary qualities of leggiadria (‘loveliness’), disinvoltura (‘calm self-confidence’), and sprezzatura, which he tentatively defined as a means of giving the impression that what you do and say is effortless, and wholly free of calculation. To his mind, all other virtues were of little value without grace, and grace could not be attained without sprezzatura.

Castiglione is best known today for having written The Book of the Courtier, which circulated among friends in manuscript form for years until he finally had it printed in 1527. His good friend Raphael captured something of his personality in a portrait that can still be seen in the Louvre. There is nothing vain, pompous or condescending in his nonchalance: he is simple and unaffected, and feels no need to show off. This is what distinguishes sprezzatura from dandyism, which always has an undercurrent of irony and provocation. Where sprezzatura seems flamboyant, it turns out to be a by-product of the youthful high spirits that are its essence.

Some have always suspected that sprezzatura is nothing more than contrived spontaneity. Castiglione was alert to this. He understood, not merely how to read other people, but to be read in the manner of his choosing. Unexpectedly, he turns out to have a kindred spirit in the French bishop Saint François de Sales (1567-1622), who famously thought that good manners were the beginning of holiness, and was so exquisitely polite that he has been known for centuries as ‘the gentleman saint’. Castiglione too was unfailingly chivalrous and good-humoured, despite enduring sufferings throughout his life that would have broken most other men. This is what makes his embrace of sprezzatura, and his refusal to look boring or solemn, seem positively heroic.

For Castiglione, concealment was not merely an instrument of tact, but a strategic weapon. He was deeply learned in classical Greek as well as Latin literature, yet always took care to hide his learning, in order to avert any possible suspicion that he might be trying to deceive whoever was in earshot. It seemed more honest to win authority through nothing more impressive than the truth, which he expressed in a manner that anyone could follow. Modern readers of The Book of the Courtier are always taken aback at how preoccupied Castiglione seems to have been with questions related to diction, and vocabulary. Despite his attention to detail, he never fell into pedantry; this might help explain why so many scholars seem to loathe him.

Castiglione spent his life variously as a soldier, a courtier and a diplomat; as a young man he studied wrestling as well as jousting, and remained an excellent rider to the end of his life. He moved in milieux where it would have been unthinkable for a man not to love hunting. Even so, the overall impression he gives is of someone who preferred dancing to virtually every other activity. This has its dangers for a gentleman; in The Book of the Courtier he mentions his good friend Roberto da Bari, about whom little is known beyond the fact that on festive occasions he affected not to notice losing a shoe or his cloak, so engrossed was he in the dance. It seems there is such a thing as too much sprezzatura.

Perhaps a better (or worse) example is the Athenian nobleman Hippocleides, who won the hand of a tyrant’s daughter in a series of gruelling competitions with his peers, and celebrated his victory by getting drunk at a banquet and performing a series of elaborate dance moves, first on the ground, then on a table, where he stood on his head and waved his feet in the air in time with the music. ‘You have danced away your marriage’, declared the tyrant, unwilling to give his daughter to a man like that. ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’, responded the young man, and he went on dancing into the night. Sprezzatura can come at the cost of grace.

The great Italian essayist Cristina Campo (1923-77), in her 1971 essay ‘With Light Hands’, demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of sprezzatura that takes on an authentically mystical quality. Her ideas resist summary because she chooses her words so well; you end up wanting to quote her verbatim, and before you know it, you have copied out a page and a half, and are on your way to plagiarising the entire piece of prose.

She sought to claim sprezzatura as a quality natural to the poet, ‘with his deep-seated horror of easiness, prudery, euphemism, promiscuity, heaviness, undue haste’. She saw it as a kind of moral rhythm, ‘in which the perfect freedom of any given destiny is made manifest, although it is always delineated by a secret ascesis’. To manifest this quality is to demonstrate ‘an alert and amiable imperviousness to the violence and baseness of others’, an almost total detachment from earthly goods, and a complete forgetfulness of self. Of course there is an aesthetic element, but at heart this is a quality of saints.

Campo could not see many examples of literary sprezzatura. She forgot about Lord Byron’s poem Don Juan (1819-24), which is so relentlessly entertaining that we often forget how authentically great it is. ‘You are too earnest and eager about a work never intended to be serious,’ Byron told his publisher. ‘Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle? – a playful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped, was what I meant.’ Byron’s dismissal of his own central achievement as an artist is itself a masterclass in sprezzatura.