Part 72

Note 167 page 103. Rome was sacked only the year before THE COURTIER was first published. Italy had become the plaything of foreign conquest.

Note 168 page 103. DARIUS III was King of Persia 336-330 B.C. This story about his sword seems to be founded on the following passage in Quintus Curtius Rufus’s History of Alexander the Great: “At the beginning of his reign, Darius ordered his Persian scabbard to be altered to the form which the Greeks used; whereupon the Chaldeans prophesied that the empire of the Persians would pass to those whose arms he had imitated.”

Note 169 page 104. It will be remembered that Bembo was a Venetian.

Note 170 page 104. The coif (cuffia) here mentioned seems to have been a kind of turban made of cloth wound about the head, with the two ends hanging at the ears.

Note 171 page 105. These unfortunate creatures still abound near Bergamo.

Note 172 page 106. Pylades and Orestes, like Pirithous and Theseus, are the famous friends of Greek legend. The historical and no less tender love between Scipio and Lælius forms the subject of Cicero’s De Amicitia. See note 102.

Note 173 page 109. The fellow’s reward is said to have been a measure of the peas.

Note 174 page 109. The Italian phrase here rendered ‘goes against the grain’ is non gli avrà sangue (more usually non ci avrà il suo sangue), and might be more precisely translated ‘will not suit his humour.’ The ‘as we say’ suggests that the idiom was of recent origin in Castiglione’s time.

MAXIMILIAN I EMPEROR OF GERMANY 1459-1519 ]

Reduced from Braun’s photograph (no. 34.074) of the portrait, in the Imperial Museum at Vienna, by Ambrogio da Predis (flor. 1500). In Morelli’s “Italian Painters” (London: 1892), pp. 180-9, the picture is described as injured by restoration. See note 390.

Note 175 page 113. GIACOPO SANNAZARO, (born 1458; died 1530), was a native of Naples, and the son of Giacopo Niccolò and Masella di San Magno. His boyhood was spent with his mother at San Cipriano, near her birthplace Salerno. He soon made such progress in Latin and Greek that he was admitted to the academy of the famous Pontormo, of whom he became the close friend. Their effigies may be seen together in the Neapolitan church of Monte Oliveto. He received a villa and a pension from the scholarly Aragonese dynasty, to which he remained faithful with pen and sword, following Federico III into exile (see note 401) in 1501, and returning to Naples only after his king’s death in 1504. He seems to have had a peaceful and honourable old age, active in works of piety and charity, and employing his leisure in study and in the society of a certain noble lady for whom he had formed a lasting Platonic friendship. His writings include marine eclogues, elegies, etc., in Latin, but his best known work is L'Arcadia, an Italian prose romance interspersed with verse, of which sixty editions are said to have appeared before 1600. It is regarded by Mahaffy as having originated the idea that the Greek Arcadia was the especial home of pastoral poetry, and probably served Sidney as a model for his poem of the same name. Hardly less famous were Sannazaro’s anti-Borgian epigrams, to which Symonds ascribes no small part of the gruesome legend of Lucrezia’s crimes. He was buried in a church built by him near the so-called tomb of Virgil, and his monument behind the high altar bears the Latin inscription by Bembo, in which he is described as “near alike to Virgil’s muse and sepulchre.”

Note 176 page 113. Motet is “a term which for the last three hundred years has been almost exclusively applied to certain pieces of church music, of moderate length, adapted to Latin words (selected, for the most part, either from Holy Scripture, or the Roman office-books), and intended to be sung at high mass, either in place of, or immediately after, the Plain Chaunt Offertorium of the Day.“ (Grove.) The motet was sometimes founded on the air of some non-sacred song, as in the case of Josquin’s Stabat Mater, which was based upon the ballad Comme Femme. (Ambros.)

Note 177 page 113. JOSQUIN (more properly JOSSE) DE PRÈS, (born about 1450; died 1521), seems to have been a native of St. Quentin, Hainault, Belgium, and was one of the celebrated musicians of the Renaissance. Having been the pupil of Ockenheim, the greatest composer of the day, he was at the papal court of Sixtus IV, and successively in the service of Lorenzo de' Medici, Louis XII of France, and the Emperor Maximilian I. He returned to Italy about 1503 and lived at the court of Ferrara. He is the earliest composer whose works are preserved in such quantity as adequately to present his power, and was called “the father of harmony” by Dr. Burney. Music began to be printed (1498) when Josquin was in his prime.

Note 178 page 114. Other contemporary evidence amply confirms this account of the occasional grossness that marked the table manners of the period.

Note 179 page 115. The two princes here referred to are Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain (see note 392) and Louis XII of France (see note 250).

Note 180 page 116. PAOLO NICCOLÒ VERNIA, called NICOLETTO (little Nick) from his shortness of stature, (died 1499), was a native of Chieti, near the Adriatic. He probably studied at Padua, and remained there teaching physics, although in 1444 he took his degree in philosophy, and fourteen years later in medicine. He wrote chiefly on philosophy, but was noted also as a wit.

Note 181 page 116. “When Frederick Barbarossa attempted to govern the rebellious Lombard cities in the common interest of the Empire, he established in their midst a foreign judge, called ‘Podestà,’ quasi habens potestatem Imperatoris in hac parte.... The title of ‘Podestà’ was subsequently conferred upon the official summoned to maintain an equal balance between the burghers and the nobles.” Symonds’s “Renaissance in Italy,” ed. 1883, i, 61.

Note 182 page 117. This was the battle of Fornovo (6 July 1495), in which the Italian forces under the Marquess Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua failed to prevent the retreat of Charles VIII towards France. Both sides claimed a victory, and the marquess even went so far as to have it commemorated by Mantegna in a picture, “The Madonna of Victory” (Louvre), which contains his portrait. Castiglione’s father died from the effect of wounds received in this battle.

Note 183 page 117. The reference here is plainly to Leonardo da Vinci (see note 96). His contemporaries would naturally regard as chimerical such devices as steam cannon, paddle wheels for boats, and flying machines, or such hints as that contained in his Codex Atlanticus, where he suggests the possibility of steam navigation. “He was the first to explain correctly the dim illumination seen over the rest of the surface of the moon when the bright part is only a thin crescent. He pointed out that when the moon was nearly new, the half of the earth which was then illuminated by the sun was turned nearly directly towards the moon, and that the moon was in consequence illuminated slightly by this ‘earthshine,’ just as we are by moonshine. This explanation ... tended to break down the supposed barrier between terrestrial and celestial bodies.” Arthur Berry’s “Short History of Astronomy” (London, 1898), p. 91.

Note 184 page 118. Suetonius mentions this characteristic of Cæsar.

Note 185 page 119. This is one of the few passages in The Courtier that are plainly reminiscent of Dante, who says: “To that truth which hath the face of falsehood, man must ever close his lips” (Sempre a quel ver che ha faccia di menzogna, De' l’uom chiuder la labbra). Inferno, xvi, 124-5.

Note 186 page 121. The translator admits being at a loss to find an adequate equivalent for the Italian argusie. Our unfamiliar English adjective ‘argute’ suggests that kind of pungent and witty conceits which Castiglione is describing.

CHARLES VIII OF FRANCE 1470-1498 ]

Reduced from Alinari’s photograph (no. 2749) of the anonymous bronze bust in the National Museum at Florence. See note 388.

Note 187 page 121. Bibbiena’s reputation as a wit was well established, while Canossa seems also to have deserved the same epithet, if we may judge from a story that has been preserved of him. The count had at Rome a fine collection of silver plate, including a flagon with a lid in the form of a tiger. A friend having borrowed this flagon and kept it for two months, returned it only on demand and with the request that the count lend him a certain salt-cellar, which had a crab for a cover. Ludovico sent word that if the tiger, which is the swiftest of beasts, had been two months coming home, the crab, being slower than all others, would by the same rule be absent for years, and that on this account he was unwilling to let it go.

Note 188 page 122. The allusion is of course to Bibbiena’s early baldness.

Note 189 page 122. Cardinal GALEOTTO DELLA ROVERE, (born about 1477; died 1508), was the favourite nephew of Julius II, being a son of the pope’s sister Luchina by her first husband Gianfrancesco Franciotti, a patrician of Lucca. Like all his mother’s other children, he was adopted as of the della Rovere name. Having been made Bishop of Lucca, he was created a cardinal on his uncle’s election as pope, appointed pontifical vice-chancellor, and soon given a great number of benefices. Generous and amiable, and a patron of artists and authors, he was much beloved at the court of Urbino, as is shown by several documents, among which is a letter by Emilia Pia mentioning two sonnets of his, in one of which (written the day before his last illness) he foretold his early death.

Note 190 page 123. GIACOMO SANSECONDO, a noted musician who flourished between the years 1493 and 1522 at the courts of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino and Rome, where he attained a wide celebrity in the pontificate of Leo X. He seems to have ended his days in adversity, in some degree relieved by his friend Castiglione, whose letters contain several affectionate mentions of him.