The Book of the Courtier

Note 46 page 12.Ludovico Pio belonged to the famous family of the lords of Carpi (a few miles north of Modena), and was a brave captain in the service of the Aragonese princes, of Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan, and of Pope Julius II. His father Leonello and more celebrated uncle Alberto had been pupils of Aldus, and were second cousins of Emilia Pia. His wife was the beautiful Graziosa Maggi of Milan, who is immortalized in the paintings of Francia and the writings of Bembo.

Note 47 page 12.Sigismondo Morello da Ortona is presented in The Courtier as the only elderly member of the company, and the object of many youthful jests. He is known to have taken part in the ceremony of the formal adoption of Francesco Maria della Rovere as heir to the duchy in 1504, is referred to in Castiglione’s Tirsi, and seems to have been something of a musician.

Much enlarged from a negative, specially made by Berthaud, of a part of a pen-drawing in the National Library at Paris. The drawing is touched with gold, and forms part of a series illustrating a MS. chronicle (nos. 20360-2) engrossed at Genoa in 1510 by Anthoine Bardin. See note 250.

Note 48 page 12. Of Roberto da Bari little more is known than that his surname was Massimo, and that he was taken ill in the campaign of 1510 against the Venetians and retired to Mantua. Thither Castiglione sent a letter to his mother, warmly recommending Roberto to her hospitality, and saying that he loved the man like a brother.

Note 49 page 12.Bernardo Accolti, (born about 1465; died 1535), was generally known as the Unico Aretino, from the name of his birthplace (Arezzo) and in compliment to his ‘unique’ faculty for extemporising verse. His father Benedetto was a jurist, and the author of a dull Latin history of the First Crusade, from which Tasso is believed to have drawn material for the Gerusalemme Liberata. His poetical celebrity commended him to the court of Urbino, where (as at Rome and in other places) he was in the habit of reciting his verses to vast audiences of rich and poor alike. When an exhibition by him was announced, guards had to be set to restrain the crowds that rushed to secure places, the shops were closed, and the streets emptied. His life was a kind of lucrative poetic vagabondage: thus we find him flourishing, caressed and applauded, at the courts of Urbino, Mantua, Naples, and especially at that of Leo X, who bestowed many offices upon him, of which, however, his wealth (acquired by his recitations) rendered him independent, enabling him to indulge in a life of literary ease. His elder brother Pietro became a cardinal, bought Raphael’s house, and is said to have had a hand in drafting the papal bull against Luther in 1520. He was an early patron of his notorious fellow-townsman Pietro Aretino. Such of his verse as has survived is so bald and stilted as to excite no little wonderment at the esteem which he enjoyed among his contemporaries.

Note 50 page 12.Giancristoforo Romano, (born about 1465; died 1512), was the son of Isaia di Pippo of Pisa and the pupil of Paolo Romano. Perhaps best known as a sculptor, he possessed skill also as a goldsmith, medallist, architect and crystal carver, cultivated music and wrote verse. During the last years of the Sforza power at Milan, he accompanied the duke’s wife, Beatrice d'Este, from place to place, and is now identified as the author of her portrait bust in the Louvre. He executed also at least two portrait medals of her sister Isabella d'Este, acted as adviser and agent of the Gonzagas in the purchase of art objects, worked at Venice, Cremona, Rome and Naples, and is known to have been at Urbino about the time of the Courtier dialogues. In a long letter written by him to Bembo in 1510, he describes the court of Urbino as “a true temple of chastity, decorum and pudicity.” In 1512 he was directing architect at Loreto (see note 311), where he died in May, bequeathing his collection of medals and antiques to a hospital, for the purpose of having three masses said weekly for the repose of his soul.

Note 51 page 12. Of Pietro Monte little more is known than that he was a master of military exercises at the Urbino court, and perhaps a captain in the duke’s army. He may have been identical with one Pietro dal Monte, who is mentioned as a soldier in the pay of Venice (1509), and described as “blind in one eye, but of great valour, gentle speech, and not unlearned in letters,” and as “commanding 1500 infantry, and a man of great experience not only in war but in affairs of the world.”

Note 53 page 12.Niccolὸ Frisio or Frigio is mentioned in a letter by Bembo as a German, but seems more probably to have been an Italian. Dennistoun speaks of him as a musician. In a letter from Castiglione to his mother (1506), the writer warmly commends to her “one messer Niccolò Frisio, who I hear is there [i.e., in Mantua], and I earnestly hope that you will treat him kindly, for I am under the greatest obligation to him with respect to my Roman illness.... I am sure he loves me well.” In another letter by a friend of Bembo, Frisio is described (1509) as an Italian long resident in courts, sure of heart, gentle, a good linguist, faithful to his employers, and as having been used by Julius II in negotiating the League of Cambray against Venice. He had relations also with the marchioness Isabella of Mantua (see note 397), whom he aided in the collection of antiquities. Growing weary of worldly life, he became a monk in 1510, and retired to the Certosa of Naples.

Note 57 page 14.Costanza Fregosa was a sister of the two Fregoso brothers already mentioned, and a faithful companion of the Duchess of Urbino. She married Count Marcantonio Landi of Piacenza, and bore him two worthy children, Agostino and Caterina, to the former of whom Bembo stood sponsor and became a kind of second father. Three letters by the lady have been preserved.

Note 58 page 15. Belief in the efficacy of music as a cure for the bite of the tarantula still survives in Andalusia, Sardinia and parts of southern Italy. In a note on the tarantella dance, Goethe wrote: “It has been remarked that in the case of mental ailments, and of a tarantula bite, which is probably cured by perspiration, the movements of this dance have a very salutary effect on the softer sex.” “Travels in Italy” (Ed. Bohn, 1883), page 564.

Note 59 page 15. The moresca (mime or morris-dance) seems to have been a kind of ballet or story in dance, often very intricate and fanciful. At the courts of this period, it was generally introduced as an interlude between the acts of a comedy. In a letter quoted by Dennistoun (“Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino,” ii, 141), Castiglione describes a moresca on the story of Jason, which was thus performed at the first presentation of Bibbiena’s Calandra before the court of Urbino, 6 February 1513.

Note 60 page 16.Fra Mariano Fetti, (born 1460; died 1531), was a native of Florence, and beginning life as a barber to Lorenzo de' Medici, always remained faithful to that family. At Rome, during the pontificate of Julius II, he won the reputation and enjoyed the privileges of “the prince of jesters,” and became even more famous under Leo X, upon whom as a child he had bestowed affectionate care, and who as pope did not forget his kindness. Thus in 1514 he was made Frate piombatore, or affixer of lead seals to papal bulls, in which office he followed the architect Bramante, was succeeded by the painter Sebastiano Luciani (better known as “del Piombo”), and admitted earning yearly what would now be the equivalent of about £1600, by turning lead into gold. While it remains uncertain whether he was more buffoon or friar, he had a great love for artists, and even composed verse. He seems to have continued in the enjoyment of fame and favour during the reign of the second Medicean pope, Clement VII.

Note 61 page 16.Fra Serafino was probably a Mantuan, and had a brother Sebastiano. He lived long at the Gonzaga court, where he was employed in organizing festivals, and at Urbino, where the few of his letters that have survived show him in familiar relations with other interlocutors in The Courtier. While at Rome in 1507, with the suite of the Duchess of Urbino, he was seriously wounded in the head by an unknown assailant, probably in return for some lampoon or scandal of his against the papal court.

Note 62 page 17. This letter S was evidently one of the golden ciphers that ladies of the period were fond of wearing on a circlet about their heads. In her portrait the duchess is represented as wearing a narrow band, from which the image of a scorpion hangs upon her forehead. The S may have been used on this occasion as the initial letter of the word scorpion, and seems in any case to have been an instance of the ‘devices’ mentioned in note 40.

A sonnet, purporting to be the work of the Unico Aretino, was inserted in the edition of The Courtier published by Rovillio at Lyons in 1562 and in several later editions, as being the sonnet here mentioned. In its place, however, Cian prints another sonnet, preserved in the Marciana Library at Venice and possessing higher claims to authenticity. Some idea of the baldness of both may be gained from the following crude but tolerably literal translation of the second sonnet:

Note 63 page 18. The pains of love were a frequent theme with Bembo, and are elaborately set forth in his Gli Asolani. Quite untranslatable into English, his play upon the words amore (love) and amaro (bitter) is at least as old as Plautus’s Trinummus.

Note 64 page 22.Ippolito d'Este, (born 1479; died 1520), was the third son of Duke Ercole I of Ferrara (see note 203) and Eleanora of Aragon (see note 399). At the instance of his maternal aunt Beatrice’s husband, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (see note 395), he was given the rich archbishopric of Strigonio, to which was attached the primacy of that country, and made the journey thither as a mere boy. In 1493 Alexander VI made him a cardinal. Soon after the death of his sister Beatrice, her husband Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan gave him the vacant archbishopric of that city, and the same year (1497) he exchanged the Hungarian primacy, with its burdensome requirement of foreign residence, for the bishopric of Agria in Crete. In 1502 he was made Archbishop of Capua in the kingdom of Naples, but bestowed the revenues of the see upon his widowed and impoverished aunt, the ex-Queen of Hungary, and a little later was made Bishop of Ferrara,—all before reaching the age of twenty-four years. He was also Bishop of Modena and Abbot of Pomposa. During his brother’s reign at Ferrara, the young cardinal took an active part in public affairs, several times governing in the duke’s absence, and showing brilliant capacities for military command. After the accession of Leo X, he resided chiefly at Rome, where he was always a conspicuous figure and carefully guarded his brother’s interests. He was a friend and protector of Leonardo da Vinci, and maintained Ariosto in his service from 1503 to 1517.