Studies on the Idea of Excellence in Europe (15th–18th Centuries)

José Antonio Guillén Berrendero and Gijs Versteegen

With respect to nobility – the main subject of this collection of essays – virtue can be considered an elevated form of a political status that should ultimately be linked to concepts such as Fortune, which, from Machiavelli’s work onwards, was associated with a form of unquestionable luck. Virtue, as an origin of the noble condition, may likewise be understood as representing an exhortation to obedience to instinct, to a form of seizing opportunities, to a broad-ranging cultural experience which belonged to the noble estate, alluding to social issues such as usefulness or social function. This makes it possible to associate areté with agathós in a continuous discourse on the social pre-eminence of nobility both as a social reality and an unquestionable moral concept.

All nobility is based on the principle of conceptual unicity that underpins the assertion virtus única nobilta est. This unitary conception is linked to singular political forms of expression and also – most relevantly to this book – to the group of social forms that rewarded excellence. Firstly, as virtue was a sort of social boundary that distinguished those who conducted themselves in accordance with their social condition, and to the fullest extent of their “good” nature, from those who were given to “vice.” Such a conception reduced the nobility theory of virtue to an eternal and permanent connection between biological conduct expected of inherited qualities and reward. This statutory dimension of a moral value established the definition of virtue as the conceptual key on which nobility and its different forms of cultural expression rested and, in the process, lent meaning to the different cultural devices that represented it. As a classical value, the relationship between nobility and virtue was flexible and permeated all spheres. It applied equally to the theory of birth and of civic or apparently “private” conduct, reducing the old dialectic between blood nobility and nobility by patent to a sort of circular reasoning on qualities. Although it is not appropriate to speak of a model of virtue or nobility, the transfer of the virtuous, and therefore noble, condition was determined by a rhetorical form of hierarchical order of values. The noblest and, accordingly, the most virtuous person was the prince, and from him downwards the dialectical relationship functioned as a mirror and affected all noble cultural forms equally, representing one of the most characteristic elements of noble cosmopolitanism.

When the whole of Europe “dressed” morally in noble guise, and the coat of arms was a cloak of virtue, the nobility exerted their symbolic authority over society through the clear perception of a moral superiority which pervaded all spaces of sociability in the Modern Age and had evident classical roots, as Cristophe Badel noted in La noblesse de l´Empire romain. Les masques et la virtu (Champ-Vallo, 2005). The idea of nobility lay in its unchallenged condition of a habit of conduct linked to will and governed by reason, the “reason” of blood, which governed the system of honour and rewards. This “habit” was the basic component of the ethical and political dimension of nobility and can be traced in the wealth of literature on nobility that circulated around Europe throughout the Modern Age.

A noble was a person who, by dint of this habit of conduct derived from his essentially virtuous nature, was qualified to play the social and ethical role which his skills guaranteed. As stated above, this is a unitary view whose ultimate aim was the harmonious reward for virtuous actions, insofar that the noble had his status acknowledged – not by the possession of a title, a seigneury or an office at the Court but by the display of outward symbols pertaining to his code of conduct and the visual system of virtue embodied in devices such as heraldry.

The idea of excellence in Europe was underpinned by a harmonious and agreed set of commonplaces and “royal places” around which the related discourse revolved: a permanently assimilated memory of deeds and words stemming from the need to legitimise social distinction and the “natural” facts of social inequality. All those who enjoyed this honour therefore bore distinguishing features such as a coat of arms, an unmistakeable indication and outward sign of that characteristic during the Modern Age. But that was not all. Private conduct was also a form of analogy in the relationship between nobility and virtue. If nobility is taken to be a political “place,” then the coat of arms is a symbolic attribute that indicated the manner in which the social “benefit” of virtuous gestures was recognised.

The coat of arms was likewise a form of didactic acculturation of the phenomenon of honour. During the Modern Age, European societies developed ways of codifying the symbolic language of virtuous people and their forms of sociability and this gave rise to a broad range of conducts and descriptions of them which might well strike us as being somewhat ambiguous, though for the purpose of this study the existence of this fact speaks of a “memory of things” that recalls Cicero in De Inventione.

Starting from the consideration of virtue as an ethical category, the essays explore its social influence bearing in mind that those who espoused it also espoused its moral content and symbolic charge. The studies that follow this brief introduction therefore bring a new angle to an “old” term that has been analysed since time immemorial and has as many aspects as the discovery of the spirit. They address the social problems of the practice of virtue as a perfect ideal of nobility. The book starts with a section on the representation of virtue in heraldry, in which José Antonio Guillén Berrendero proposes interpreting coats of arms as an expression of the socialisation of the values that were considered to belong to the nobility. Heraldic devices not only displayed these values, but also guaranteed their perpetuation in time. Jorge Fernández-Santos contextualises the treatise on the French fleur-de-lis included in the collectanea of the Opus regale written by the Dominican author Giovanni Ludovico Vivaldi.

In the next section, which deals with virtue and the nobility, Teresa Martialay explores three fifteenth-century treatises by the conversos Alonso de Cartagena, Diego de Valera and Fernando de Pulgar in order to examine how these authors reflected on noble, chivalric and virtuous conduct in an epoch that saw the exclusion of the conversos from the noble class. Vera Cruz Miranda Menacho analyses the construction of the virtuous image of the Prince of Viana, who was attributed the moral and intellectual qualities pertaining to the humanist code of fifteenth-century noblemen. Juan Hernández Franco and Francisco López Precioso focus on the Jesuit view of true nobility within the context of Christian Occasio, the moment or opportunity that God gives men to attain moral perfection and salvation.

In the section on Stoic virtue, Adolfo Carrasco provides an overview of the ancient Stoic conception of virtue, addressing its espousal in a Christian cultural context, and considering the reception of the doctrine of the Stoa in late humanism and the baroque. Carrasco ends with an analysis of Lipsius’s renewed focus on stoicism in the treatise De Constantia (1584). Marie-Laure Acquier discusses El Embajador (1620), the well-known first printed opus of the future Count de la Roca, Juan Antonio de Vera, examining the new diplomatic culture, the paradigm of virtue, the importance of letters and the nobleman’s service to the king in the first decades of the seventeenth century.

Simona Langella opens the section on virtue in mirrors for princes with an essay that studies the changes in the concept of virtue between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, observing the semantic shifts and deviations of meaning of the classic model of areté. Her analysis is based on a reading of treatises written by Giovanni Pontano, Bartolomeo Sacchi, and Francisco Patrizi, and Niccolò Machiavelli. Gijs Versteegen interprets Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s mirror for princes Corona virtuosa, virtud coronada from the perspective of ascesis, as a text that uses diverse meditative strategies aimed at the moral transformation of its reader.

The section Women and Virtue starts with an interpretation of the model of virtue and gentility transmitted by Juan de Vega and his wife Eleonora Osorio to their son Hernando. The essay analyses both Juan de Vega’s Instructions and the cultural education provided by Elena Osorio, which is reconstructed thanks to the discovery of numerous books from her library. In her essay Lina Scalisi outlines the story of Zenobia Gonzaga, who was Princess of Guastalla and first wife of Giovanni Aragona Pignatelli, Prince of Castelvetrano, but above all a notable member of the Sicilian and Neapolitan aristocracy of the early seventeenth century. The objective of the essay is to understand, through the lens of Zenobia Gonzaga’s life, why some noble women, somehow considered to be devoid of the usual virtues of noblesse, faded into obscurity. The essay shows that some episodes of their lives should be interpreted as an expression of conflicts, tensions and alliances among the aristocracy of the age, which mirrored changes and developments in Italian and Spanish politics. Central to Silvia d’Agata’s essay are Juan de Austria’s natural daughters Giovanna and María Ana, who in spite of their illegitimacy were able to manage their affairs autonomously, defending their interests successfully at the Spanish court.

The book ends with a section that explores the reception of virtue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting with Cinzia Recca’s research on the image of the Sicilian woman at the end of the eighteenth century, which focuses on a redefinition of the model of the virtuous women. Miguel Salmerón Infante discusses the representation of Lamoraal van Egmont by Goethe and Schiller, exploring the different fictional interpretations of a historical figure. Manuel López Forjas ends the section by explaining how the Aragonese thinker and politician Joaquín Costa y Martínez (1846–1911) used a political language based on classical virtue philosophy to criticise the regime of the Spanish politician Cánovas del Castillo.