anslation below) renders any other delineation of it supererogatory;
but his silence regarding himself personally makes it necessary to
gather knowledge of his life from other sources. His person is made
known to us by Raffael's interesting portrait of him, now in the
Louvre, painted in 1515. It is a portrait by a friend. Raffael was
only five years younger than Castiglione, and their affectionate
relations were of long standing.

Castiglione was the son of a valorous soldier who fought by the side
of the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, but his early youth was
spent not at Mantua but at Milan, where he received from famous
scholars--Demetrio Calcondile and his peers--a brilliant classical
education, rather than the training one would look for in his father's
son. His father's death in 1494 obliged him, in those troublous times,
to seek a protector. As his mother was distantly connected with his
father's friends, the rulers of Mantua, it was to them that his eyes
turned, and in 1499 he was one of the suite of the Marquis on the
occasion of the triumphal entrance of Louis XII. of France into Milan
after his conquest in three weeks of the duchy; a triumph followed by
the hideous ten-years' "caging" of Lodovico il Moro, Milan's duke.

Such spectacles as this triumph and this imprisonment, which the boy
of twenty-one now beheld, were to be familiar to him all his life. The
king-like pope Alexander VI. and his son Caesar Borgia, the warrior
Julius II., the Medici Leo X., the soon-dead Adrian VI., and the
irresolute Clement VII., successively ruled in Rome, or rather dwelt
in Rome, the Cloaca Maxima of Italy, whose pollution sapped the
strength of all the land. The sack of Rome in 1527 was among the last
of the long series of Italian woes Castiglione witnessed. He was not
in Italy at that moment. The last five years of his life were spent at
Madrid as papal nuncio at the court of Charles V. He went thither on
the eve of the battle of Pavia, and the imprisonment there of Francis
I. soon followed; an imprisonment that seems a terrible echo of that
of the enemy of France a quarter of a century before.

'Il Cortegiano' was written in the intervals of military and
diplomatic services, rendered first to Guidobaldo of Urbino and later
to Frederic of Mantua, the son of Francesco. The book was begun
probably about 1514; it received the last touches in 1524, but it was
not published until 1528.

The dialogues that compose the b