Although both Francesco and his predecessor had generously befriended the Medici during their exile from Florence (1494-1512), Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) seized his duchy in 1516, to bestow it on a nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici. It is needless to speak here of Francesco’s restoration in 1521, of his failure to relieve Pope Clement VII when Rome was sacked in 1527, or of his later life.

While small in person, Francesco was active and well formed. His manners were gentle and his character forgiving, in spite of his fiery temper. Strict in religious observances and an enemy to blasphemous language, he was also creditably intolerant of those outrages upon womanly honour with which war was then fraught. He was famous chiefly as a soldier, and by so competent a judge as the Emperor Charles V was regarded as master of the military science of his day.

Note [4] page 1. This disclaimer of careful authorship is not to be taken too literally. At least a draft of Books I-III seems to have been made at Urbino between April 1508 and May 1509, while Book IV was probably written at Rome in the earlier part of the interval between September 1513 and March 1516. Castiglione apparently continued to revise his work until 1518, when he sent his MS. to Bembo. See Silvestro Marcello’s pamphlet, “La Cronologia del Cortegiano di Baldesar Castiglione.” Pisa, 1895.

Note [5] page 1. As has been seen, Castiglione resided at the Spanish court from 1524 until his death in 1529.

Note [6] page 1. Vittoria Colonna, (born 1490; died 1547), was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna (grand-nephew of Pope Martin V) and Agnese di Montefeltro, a sister of Duke Guidobaldo. At the age of four she was betrothed to the Marquess of Pescara, whom she married in her nineteenth year at Ischia (the fief and residence of his family), and who afterwards became a famous soldier. During his long absences in the field, she consoled herself with books, and after his death in 1525, her widowhood was spent in retirement and finally in semi-monastic seclusion at Rome. The time spared from pious exercises she devoted to study, the composition of poetry, correspondence with illustrious men of letters, and the society of learned persons. Although she never became a convert to Protestantism, the liberality of some of her friends’ belief exposed her to ecclesiastical censure in her old age. Her celebrated friendship with Michelangelo began when he was past sixty and she had nearly reached fifty years. They frequently exchanged verses, and he is said to have visited her on her death-bed. Her poems are chiefly sonnets to the memory of her husband or verses on sacred and moral subjects.

Note [7] page 7. The following passage is from a letter written by Castiglione to the Marchioness: “I am the more deeply obliged to your Ladyship, because the necessity you have put me under, of sending the book at once to the printer, relieves me from the trouble of adding many things that I had already prepared in my mind,—things (I need hardly say) of little import, like the rest of the book; so that your Ladyship has saved the reader from tedium, and the author from blame.”

Despite the many decrees of popes, emperors and other potentates, literary piracy seems to have been quite as common in Castiglione’s time as in ours. He was obviously none too prompt in his precautions, as an apparently unauthorized edition of The Courtier was issued at Florence by the heirs of Filippo di Giunta in the October following its first publication at Venice in April 1528.

Note [8] page 8. Alfonso Ariosto, (died 1526), was a cousin of the poet Ludovico. Little more seems to be known of him than that his father’s name was Bonifazio, that he was a gentle cavalier and brave soldier in the service of the Este family, and that he was a friend of Castiglione and of Bembo. His name appears at the head of each of the four dialogues composing The Courtier, and they purport to have been written at his suggestion. Señor A. M. Fabié, in his notes to the 1873 reprint of Boscan’s translation, affirms that Alfonso Ariosto had nothing to do with the poet Ludovico, belonged to a noble Bolognese family, and enjoyed much favour at the court of Francis I of France.

Note [9] page 9. Giuliano de' Medici, (born 1478; died 1516), was the third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Clarice Orsini. His education seems to have been for a time entrusted to the famous scholar-poet Poliziano (see note 105). During his family’s exile from Florence (1494-1512), he resided much at the court of Urbino, where he was known as “the Magnifico Giuliano,” and where one wing of the great palace was reserved to his use and is still called by his name. He became the father of a boy afterwards known as Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici,—the original of Titian’s fine portrait in the Pitti Gallery. On the restoration of the Medici, Giuliano was placed at the head of affairs in his native city and succeeded in winning the good will of the Florentines, but his gentle disposition and love of ease thwarted other ambitious projects formed for his advancement by his brother Leo X, and he was too grateful to the dukes of Urbino for their hospitality to accept the pope’s intended appropriation of their duchy for his benefit. In 1515 he married Filiberta of Savoy and was created Duke of Nemours by her nephew Francis I of France. In the same year he was appointed Captain General of the Church, but failing health prevented his actual service, and he soon died of fever at Florence, not without suspicion of poison at the hands of his nephew Lorenzo.

Several of his sonnets have survived, and are said to show no mean poetic faculty. Apart, however, from his appearance as an interlocutor in The Courtier and in Bembo’s Prose, his memory is best preserved by Michelangelo’s famous tomb at Florence.