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7 unusual facts about Baldassare Castiglione


Baldassare Castiglione

Castiglione answered both the Pope and Valdés in two famous letters from Burgos.

Castiglione wrote about his works and of those of other guests in letters to other princes, maintaining an activity very near to diplomacy, though in a literary form, as in his correspondence with his friend and kinsman, Ludovico da Canossa (later Bishop of Bayeux).

Bartholomew Clerke

His works included a translation into Latin of The Book of the Courtier from the Italian original Il Cortegiano of Baldassare Castiglione (STC 4782).

Luis de Milán

His last publication, El cortesano (1561), modeled on Il Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione, gives a vivid and entertaining picture of life in the Valencian ducal court.

Ottaviano Fregoso

Contemporary historians and intellectuals remembered Ottaviano as a liberal and magnanimous prince, holding him up as a quintessential Renaissance gentleman and a pattern for rulers, as did Baldassare Castiglione who made him one of the interlocutors in The Book of the Courtier (1528).

There the brothers received a classical humanistic education and were the companions and close friends of such humanists as Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione and the painter Raphael.

Ottaviano and Federigo Fregoso are participants in the fictional discussion presided over by Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, in Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, which was supposed to have taken place at the court of Urbino in 1507.


Tommaso Inghirami

A member of the Roman intellectual elite, Inghirami was praised by Ludovico Ariosto, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Paolo Giovio, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Angelo Colocci.


see also