Transcriber’s Note:

Footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

Any corrections are indicated using an underline highlight. Placing the cursor over the correction will produce the original text in a small popup.

The cover image has been constructed from the portrait of Castiglione and key information from the title page and is placed in the public domain.

Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text.

THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER
BY COUNT BALDESAR
CASTIGLIONE

BALDESAR CASTIGLIONE
COUNT OF NOVILLARA
1478-1529

Reduced from Braun’s photograph (no. 11.505) of the portrait in the Louvre, painted in 1516 by Raphael (1483-1520). The original belonged to Charles I of England, after whose death it was bought by a Dutch collector and copied by Rubens. Later it became the property of Cardinal Mazarin, from whose heirs it was acquired for Louis XIV of France.

The medallion on the title-page is from a photograph, specially made by Mansell, of a cast, kindly furnished by T. Whitcombe Greene, Esq., of an anonymous medal in his collection at Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire. See the late Alfred Armand’s Les Médailleurs Italiens, ii, 100, no. 10.

THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER

BY COUNT BALDESAR

CASTIGLIONE

(1528)

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN AND ANNOTATED

BY LEONARD ECKSTEIN OPDYCKE

WITH SEVENTY-ONE PORTRAITS AND FIFTEEN AUTOGRAPHS

REPRODUCED BY EDWARD BIERSTADT

LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1902

Copyright 1901, by

Leonard Eckstein Opdycke

The Book of the Courtier was written, partly at Urbino and partly at Rome, between the years 1508 and 1516, and was first printed at the Aldine Press, Venice, in the month of April, 1528.

There have since been published more than one hundred and forty editions, a list of which will be found at page 417 of this volume. The first Spanish version, by Juan Boscan Almogaver, was issued at Barcelona in 1534; the first French version, by Jacques Colin, was issued at Paris in 1537; the first English version, by Thomas Hoby, was issued at London in 1561; the first Latin version, by Hieronymus Turler, was issued at Wittenberg in 1561; the first German version, by Lorenz Kratzer, was issued at Munich in 1566.

The present edition consists of five hundred numbered copies, of which this is No.