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.