The Book of the Courtier

The popularity long enjoyed by this old book, the place that it holds in Italian literature, and the fact that it is almost inaccessible to English readers, seem to furnish sufficient reason for a new translation.

The art of the Italian Renaissance delights us by its delicate and gentle beauty, and yet we know that life during this period was often gross and violent.To understand this, we must remember that art is more the expression of the ideal than of the actual, and that men’s ideals are loftier than their practice.Castiglione gives utterance to the finest aspirations of his time.His pages will lack interest only when mankind ceases to be interesting to man, and will reward study so long as the past shall continue to instruct the present and the future.

The few deviations that the present translator has ventured to make from the letter of the Italian text are merely verbal, and were deemed needful to render its meaning clear.The notes that he offers are intended to explain obscure passages and to relieve the reader from the tedium of searching in books of reference.Perhaps no one will regard it as inopportune to be reminded of what all may have known but few are able to remember with precision.Students who may wish to learn from what Greek and Latin sources Castiglione derived material are referred to Professor Vittorio Cian’s admirable edition.

The translator desires to express his thanks for the friendly encouragement that he has received from Miss Grace Norton, at whose suggestion his task was undertaken. He is indebted to Dr. Luigi Roversi and Signor Leopoldo Jung for their patient aid, and to Signor Alessandro Luzio and many other scholars, in Italy and elsewhere, for the kindness with which they have helped him to gather portraits and bibliographical data. He gratefully acknowledges, also, his frequent use of Professor Cian’s erudite labours, of John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, and of James Dennistoun’s Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino