La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
that makes such mental nourishment possible can be found more readily in the villa than in the city. By calling the pursuit of knowledge a pleasure, and by defining pleasure and establishing its place in a system of human motivations, Taegio did more than expand the theme of villa as locus amoenus; he followed Aristotle, who said that the intellectual life is the perfect ideal of happiness, by grounding his argument for the superiority of villa life in a theory of happiness. By associating the pleasure of the pursuit of knowledge with the honorato ocio of the villa, Taegio recalled both Cicero and Petrarch, and with them argued for the surpassing suitability of the villa as a setting for the contemplative life of scholarly and philosophical pursuits.
The Function of La Villa’s Dialogue Form
La Villa is a polemical work that pretends to be a record of a conversation between two aristocratic Milanese gentlemen. In it Taegio juxtaposes two contradictory arguments, and resolves the tension between them by using one to overturn the other. The question debated in La Villa is whether a palace in the city or a villa in the country is the more suitable setting for the life of a true gentleman. At the outset Partenio, who represents the urban patriciate, condemns villa life and the contemplation it fosters. The common theme of Partenio’s various assertions early in the dialogue is that virtue and happiness are to be found in the active life and, by extension, life in the city. Vitauro, representing the feudal nobility, denounces cities while he extols the virtue and happiness he associates with contemplation and villa life.
As the conversation progresses, two issues arise. One is whether or not farming is a noble, useful, and necessary occupation. The other is whether the pursuit of philosophical studies is more easily accommodated in the city or in the villa. The latter issue provides Vitauro with the pretext for the roll call of villa owners, many of whom are described as dottissimo (very learned), that fills fifty pages in the first half of the book. The second half of La Villa is devoted to a contest between the respective pleasures of city life on the one hand and country life on the other.
At first the conflicting viewpoints of the interlocutors are explored through logical argumentation, giving the appearance of a sincere effort to discover whether one has more validity than the other. Eventually Vitauro emerges as the princeps sermonis, proving the author’s points by easily overturning each of Partenio’s weak objections. At the end of the dialogue, Partenio serves merely as a straw man, even assisting Vitauro as he contrasts the pleasures of the villa with the miseries of the city by setting him up with leading questions. It finally becomes evident that Vitauro has won the debate when Partenio admits that he knows his opponent is telling the truth. From that point on, there is no real conflict, and the conversation continues, not as a true dialogue, but rather as a monologue in disguise.
Taegio himself never said why he composed La Villa as a dialogue, but two better-known Italian writers of dialogues in the second half of the sixteenth century, Sperone Speroni and Torquato Tasso, did reflect on the capabilities of the dialogue form and explained in writing their reasons for using it. Speroni, who is among the villa owners Taegio praised in La Villa, wrote twenty-one dialogues, ten of which were published in seven editions printed in Venice between 1542 and 1558.202 Taegio was probably familiar with some of them.203
Taegio had reason to prefer the dialogue form if one of his purposes for writing La Villa was to induce his readers to join him in a search for truth. The ancient practice of exchanging questions in dialogue for the purpose of discovering truth was exemplified, for writers in Renaissance Italy, by the dialectical method of Socrates as described by Plato. In the Meno, in a conversation that begins with the question of whether virtue can be taught and ends with a discussion of how knowledge is acquired, Socrates, having established that knowledge is essentially recollection, says that “knowledge will not come from learning but from questioning.”204 On the foundation of this practice of dialectic, fifteenth-century Italian humanists, with dialogues such as Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (1401–1406) and Bracciolini’s De avaritia (1428) preferred disputation as a means of access to the truth.
The intention of inviting the reader to join the author in a search for truth was made explicit later in the sixteenth century by Speroni and Tasso. In his Apologia dei dialoghi, Speroni explained that he chose the form “si accorgesse il lettore, che io in tal caso non sapiente o maestro, ma disputante più tosto e condiscepolo seco insieme volessi essere riputato” (to make it apparent to the reader that I did not want to present myself as an authority or master, but rather as a disputant, a fellow student, learning alongside him).205 In the preface to his dialogue La Cavaletta overo de la poesia toscana, Torquato Tasso said that of all the modes of exposition, he considered “questo usato nel dialoghi il più dilettevole e ’l meno odioso: perch’ altri non v’insegna il vero con autorità di maestro, ma il ricerca a guisa di compagno” (this one used in the dialogue to be the most delightful and the least irksome, because it does not teach you the truth with the authority of a master, but [rather, it teaches you] inquiry, after the manner of a friend).206
The friendly manner of the dialogue would have been particularly appealing to writers in an age when “truth” was generally held to be something that was difficult, if not impossible, for an individual to discover on his own. Dialogue, in literature as in life, was seen as a safeguard against error. Such was the view articulated by Baldassare Castiglione in his dialogue Libro del Cortegiano (1528). Castiglione’s belief in the practice of social dialogue as a path to a collective, if not universal and absolute, “truth” is evident in his introductory letter of dedication to Don Michel de Silva, where, in words that are reminiscent of Plato’s in the Meno, he suggests that “la moltitudine, anchor che perfettamente non conosca, sente però per instinto di natura un certo odore del bene e del male” (the multitude, although it does not understand perfectly, does have, by natural instinct, a sense of right and wrong).207
Besides the seemingly altruistic goal of engaging his readers in a search for truth, there is another, more selfish, motive that Taegio might have had for writing La Villa as a dialogue. In sixteenth-century Italy, authors used the dialogue form with the stated intention of accomplishing what we might call “public relations,” by advertising themselves and others in whose projected image they had an interest. It is reasonable to assume that public relations would have been an important goal for writers at a time when they depended for their livelihood on professional, social, and political connections more than on income from book sales. While the dialogue certainly is not unique among literary genres in its capacity to be used as a means toward such an end, it was commonly expected to facilitate the performance of a variety of functions related to advertisement. Castiglione, Sperone, Tasso, and other Italian authors of the period declared their intentions of advertising both themselves and their acquaintances in dialogues. Using the dialogue form, writers propagated fictitious images of themselves and others that served a variety of purposes, and these purposes were furthered by the special characteristics of the genre.
Authors of dialogues in sixteenth-century Italy typically contrived their self-images for both self-promotion and self-effacement. By virtue of its pretended artlessness and spontaneity, the genre of the literary dialogue helped writers to present themselves as accomplished amateurs. At a time when the widespread circulation of printed books was still a fairly recent phenomenon, and works in the vernacular were addressed to a newly literate public, most readers were more receptive than audiences even a century later would be to arguments structured according to the apparently unstructured patterns of everyday speech. Although a dialogue, like a monological treatise, could be used simply to display an author’s erudition, the exceptional capacity of the literary dialogue to imitate the impromptu character of spoken conversation could be exploited to create the impression that the author had not given much thought in advance to the shape his argument would take, thus publicizing his improvisational skill. This is what Castiglione called sprezzatura.208
The dialogue form offered Taegio opportunities not only for self-promotion but also for self-effacement, which could benefit a writer like Taegio in three ways: by diminishing his authority, by disguising his personal opinions, and by giving him a semblance of modesty. Sixteenth-century Italian writers had an incentive to renounce their