The Book of the Courtier
jointly by Alessandro Luzio of Mantua and Rodolfo Renier of Turin.
Enlarged from a negative, specially made by Alinari through the courtesy
of Professor I. B. Supino, of a medal, in the National Museum at
Florence, by Giancristoforo Romano (1465?-1512). See Armand’s _Les
Médailleurs Italiens_, ii, 54, no. 1.
Note 398 page 204. BEATRICE D’ESTE, (born 1475; died 1497), married
Ludovico Sforza, Duke Regent of Milan, in the same year (1491) in which
his niece Anna Sforza married Beatrice’s brother Alfonso, the future
husband of Lucrezia Borgia. Younger, apparently less beautiful, and
certainly less accomplished than her sister Isabella, Beatrice
encouraged her husband’s patronage of art and letters, and took part in
his turbid political schemes. It will perhaps never be determined
precisely to what extent she was responsible for his treatment of his
young nephew and of the latter’s wife (see note 396), and for the
disasters to Italy that ensued, but she is known to have exercised a
great ascendency over her husband’s mind, and he is said to have spent
at her tomb the last night before his final capture and downfall. After
the expulsion of the French from Italy in 1512, her sons Maximilian and
Francesco Maria successively held the duchy for a time, until it passed
into the hands of Spain in 1535. For an account of her life, the reader
is referred to Mrs. Henry Ady’s recently published “Beatrice d’Este,
Duchess of Milan; a Study of the Renaissance,” which owes much to the
labours of Luzio and Renier.
Note 399 page 205. ELEANORA OF ARAGON, (born 1450; died 1493), was the
elder sister of the Beatrice who married Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. A
projected union with Ludovico Sforza (who afterwards married her
daughter) having been abandoned, she became in 1473 the wife of Duke
Ercole I of Ferrara, and bore him two daughters and four sons. Other
contemporary accounts confirm the praise bestowed upon her by
Castiglione, and show her to have been a woman of rare merit, manly
courage and enlightened culture. Fond of music, and herself a player
upon the harp, she seems to have been a discriminating patroness of art
and letters, and at the same time to have taken an active share in the
serious cares of government, especially when her husband was absent or
disabled. A pleasant glimpse of her character is gained from a letter
written by her to the duke’s treasurer on behalf of a certain Neapolitan
engineer, who had rendered important services but had fallen ill and was
in want. “You will see what this poor man’s needs are. You know with
what devotion he has served us, nor are you ignorant who sent him to
us,—a circumstance worthy of consideration. It would ill become us so to
treat him in his sickness as to give him cause for complaint against us.
You must know what his pay is. See, then, what can be done, and arrange
for helping him.” She did not live to witness the downfall of her family
in Naples.
Note 400 page 205. ISABELLA DEL BALZO, (died 1533), was a daughter of
the Prince of Altamura, and the wife of Federico III of Naples (see note
401). When her husband lost his crown in 1501, she (together with the
faithful Sannazaro) accompanied him to France, and shared his exile
there until his death in 1504. Being, by the terms of a treaty between
Louis XII and Ferdinand the Catholic, compelled to leave France, she and
her four children took refuge, first with her sister Antonia at
Gazzuolo, and then at Ferrara, where she was kindly treated and
maintained by her husband’s nephew Duke Alfonso d’Este. Here she spent
the last twenty-five years of her life, but at times in such poverty
that when Julius II placed Ferrara under the ban of the Church, she
obtained special permission to have religious services performed in her
house, on the plea that she had not the means wherewith to leave the
city.
Note 401 page 205. FEDERICO III, (born 1452; died 1504), was a son of
Ferdinand I of Naples, a younger brother of Alfonso II, and an uncle of
his immediate predecessor, Ferdinand II. Having taken part in the weak
resistance offered to Charles VIII’s invasion of Naples in 1494, he
became king on the early death of his nephew in October 1496, and seems
to have tried to keep aloof from the turbulent schemes in which
Alexander VI sought to involve him. After another vain attempt to
withstand the invasion of Louis XII, and having been shamefully betrayed
by the Emperor Maximilian and Ferdinand the Catholic, to both of whom he
had appealed for aid, he retired with his wife and children to the
island of Ischia (which furnished refuge at the same time to his widowed
sister Beatrice, ex-Queen of Hungary, and to his widowed niece Isabella,
ex-Duchess of Milan), ceded his crown to Louis XII in exchange for
30,000 ducats and the Countship of Maine, and spent the last three years
of his life in France.
Note 402 page 205. Federico’s eldest son Ferdinand, DUKE OF CALABRIA,
was besieged in Taranto during the Franco-Spanish invasion which
resulted in his father’s downfall. On a sworn promise to set him free,
he surrendered to the Great Captain (see note 239), but was
treacherously detained and sent as a prisoner to Spain, where he was
treated by Ferdinand the Catholic with almost royal honours. He
continued to reside in Spain, and on the death of his mother in 1533, he
was joined at Valencia by his two sisters.
Note 403 page 205. The reference here is probably to the siege of Pisa
by the Florentines in 1499, which was finally abandoned owing in part at
least to the bravery of the Pisan women. Castiglione himself was the
author of some Latin verses celebrating an incident of the siege.
Enlarged from a cast, courteously furnished by Professor I. B. Supino,
of an anonymous medal in the National Museum at Florence. See
Armand’s _Les Médailleurs Italiens_, ii, 59.
Note 404 page 205. TOMYRIS was in fact queen of the Massagetæ, who were
a nomadic people allied to the Scythians and dwelt north-east of the
Caspian Sea. Herodotus relates that Cyrus the Great sent her an offer of
marriage, and on being refused, invaded her kingdom and captured her
son, but was finally defeated and slain, 529 B.C. The ARTEMISIA referred
to in the text is probably not the Queen of Halicarnassus (who fought on
the Persian side at Salamis in 480 B.C.), but rather the sister-consort
and successor of King Mausolus of Caria, a state on the western coast of
Asia Minor. On her husband’s death in 352 B.C., she reigned two years
until she pined away for grief. The monument, Mausoleum, erected by her
to his memory at Halicarnassus, was regarded as one of the seven wonders
of the world—the others being: the Egyptian pyramids, the temple of
Artemis at Ephesus, the walls and hanging gardens of Babylon, Phidias’s
statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Colossus at Rhodes, and the lighthouse at
Alexandria. ZENOBIA, an Arab by birth, was the second wife of Odenathus,
King of Palmyra, which lay to the east of Syria. On the death of her
husband, about 266 A.D., she acted as regent for her sons and seems to
have shown great talent for war as well as for the arts of wise
administration; but in her effort to extend her sway over the entire
East, she was defeated by the Emperor Aurelian, and adorned his triumph
in golden chains at Rome. She was allowed to spend the remainder of her
life in dignified retirement at Tibur (Tivoli). SEMIRAMIS was the
legendary daughter of the Syrian goddess Derketo, and with her husband
Ninus was regarded as the founder of Nineveh. On his death she assumed
the government of Assyria, built the city of Babylon and its wonderful
gardens, conquered Egypt, etc. To her the Greeks ascribed nearly
everything marvellous in the East. Her name appears in inscriptions as
that of the consort of an Assyrian ruler who reigned 811-782 B.C.
CLEOPATRA, (69-30 B.C.), was directly descended in the eighth generation
from Ptolemy I, the most noted of Alexander the Great’s generals and the
founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with her life. Her
establishment as sole ruler, to the exclusion of her two brothers, was
due to the favour of Julius Cæsar, who is said to have acknowledged the
paternity of her son Cæsarion, ultimately put to death by order of
Augustus. Her love of literature, and the refinement of her luxury, show
her to have been no mere voluptuary.
Note 405 page 206. SARDANAPALUS,—Assurbanipal, the Asnapper of the Old
Testament,—ruled over Assyria from 668 to 626 B.C., and was the last
monarch of the empire reputed to have been founded by Ninus and
Semiramis. His name became a by-word for effeminate luxury, but in
recent times the discovery and study of the larger part of the tablets
composing his library, prove him to have been a vigorous king and an
intelligent patron of art and literature.
Note 406 page 207. In his life of Alexander, Plutarch extols the
magnanimity with which the youthful monarch treated the captive mother,
wife and two daughters, of Darius, the last King of Persia, whom he had
utterly defeated in the battle of Arbela, 331 B.C. In furtherance of his
plan of uniting his European and Asiatic subjects into one people,
Alexander afterwards married Bersine, the elder of Darius’s two
daughters.
Note 407 page 208. This incident is narrated in Valerius Maximus’s
“Memorable Sayings and Doings” as having occurred in the first Spanish
campaign of Scipio Africanus Maximus, 210 B.C., when that commander was
in his twenty-fourth year.
Note 408 page 208. This story of the Platonist philosopher Xenocrates
(396-314 B.C.) is derived from the same source last cited. His teaching
was characterized by the loftiest morality, and included a declaration
that it comes to the same thing whether we cast longing eyes, or set our
feet, upon the property of others. The ‘very beautiful woman’ of the
text is variously mentioned as Phryne and Laïs, rival _hetairai_ said to
have served as models to the painter Apelles.
Note 409 page 208. Cicero’s version of this anecdote (_De Officiis_, i,
40) mentions Sophocles as the ‘someone’ rebuked by Pericles.
Note 410 page 210. The Italians still say:
_Donna pregata, nega;
E disprezzata, prega._
Note 411 page 213. The present translator prefers not to offer an
English version of the following passage, but to reprint it, line for
line, from the Aldine folio of 1528:
si che questo piu tosto un stratogema militare dir si
poria, che pura continentia: auenga anchora che la fama di questo non
sia molto sincera: perche alcuni scrittori d’authorità affermano questa
giouane esser stata da Scipione goduta in amorose delicie: ma di quello
che ui dico io, dubbio alcuno non è. Disse il Phrigio, Douete ha
uerlo trouato ne gli euangelii. Io stesso l’ho ueduto rispose M. Ces. &
però n’ho molto maggior certezza, che non potete hauer, ne uoi, ne altri
che Alcibiade si leuasse dal letto di Socrate non altrimēti, che si facciano
i figlioli dal letto de i padri: che pur strano loco, e tempo era il let
to, & la notte, per contemplar quella pura bellezza: laqual si dice che amaua
Socrate senza alcun desiderio dishonesto, massimamente amādo
piu la bellezza dell’animo, che del corpo: ma ne i fanciulli & nò ne i
uecchi, anchor che siano piu sauii: & certo non si potea gia trouar miglior
exempio, per laudar la continentia de glihomini, che quello di
Xenocrate: che essendo uersato ne gli studii, astretto, & obligato dalla
profession sua, che è la philosophia, laquale consiste ne i boni costumi,
& non nelle parole, uecchio, exhausto del uigor naturale, nō potendo,