GIROLAMO DONATO
1457-1511

Enlarged from a photograph, courteously furnished by the Director of the Municipal Art Museum at Milan, of a small anonymous bas-relief belonging to the Taverna collection. See Armand’s Les Médailleurs Italiens, ii, 226, no. 11.

Note [210] page 133. This tale, not unworthy of Munchausen, may have been suggested to Castiglione by a passage in one of the minor works of Plutarch, who relates that Antiphanes (a friend of Plato) said that “he visited a certain city where words froze as soon as spoken, by reason of the great cold; and later, sounds uttered in winter melted in the spring and were heard by the inhabitants.” Although Plutarch represents the story as told in illustration of the way in which “those who came as young men to listen to Plato’s talk, understood it only long afterwards, when they had grown old,” it is worth noting that an Antiphanes, of Berga in Thrace, is known as a writer on the marvellous and incredible.

Note [211] page 133. Vasco da Gama rounded the southern extremity of Africa and reached India nine years before the date of the Courtier dialogues.

Note [212] page 133. This must have been Emanuel I, who was King of Portugal from 1495 until his death in 1521, and who promoted the expeditions of da Gama and other Portuguese navigators.

Note [213] page 134. Taffety was a very light soft silk fabric. There is extant a letter of Bembo’s (1541), in which the aged cardinal orders two cushions filled with swan’s down and covered with crimson taffety. The word is said to be derived from the Persian taftah (twisted, woven). Taft is the name of a town in central Persia.

Note [214] page 134. Annibal Paleotto, (died 1516), belonged to an ancient and honourable Bolognese family (with which Castiglione is known to have been on friendly terms), and was the son of an eminent jurist, Vincenzo Paleotto, who died in 1498. Leo X made Annibale a senator of Bologna in 1514, the brief being written by Bembo.

Note [215] page 135. Giacopo di Nino was Bishop of Potenza from 1506 until 1521, and seems to have been a butt for the ridicule of Leo X's court.

Note [216] page 136. An earlier version of this passage reads: “And of this kind was what Rinaldo in the Morgante said to the Giant: ‘Where do you hang your spectacles?’” The Morgante Maggiore is a serio-burlesque romantic poem by Luigi Pulci (1431-1487), introducing, among other characters of mediæval romance, Rinaldo, his cousin Orlando, and the giant Morgante.

Note [217] page 136. Galeotto Marzi da Narni, (born about 1427; died about 1490), a singular example of the adventurer-humanist, studied at the universities of Padua and Bologna, and taught at the latter place. He twice visited the court of Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, for whom he wrote a book on jests. He was something of an astrologer and also the author of a work on chiromancy. Being accused of heresy, he was imprisoned at Venice in 1477, and condemned to make public recantation in the Piazzetta with a crown of devils on his head. He is said to have been learned and witty. The story given in the text became almost proverbial.