{"product_id":"castiglione-baldassarre","title":"CASTIGLIONE, Baldassarre.","description":"\u003cp\u003eExceptionally good, clean copy of the first edition of a pastoral composition written jointly by Baldassarre Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga. A commercial enterprise, it features a dedicatory letter by the poet Anton Giacomo Corso explaining how Castiglione and Gonzaga s  Eclogue  had been preserved in ms. in his own library for a long time and was now being finally revealed to the world incidentally together with the second edition of his own  rime , which occupies most of the work. Castiglione (1478-1529) was a courtier, soldier, diplomat and greatly influential author. His name appears indeed at the top of the t-p of this edition, published a quarter of a century after his death and the publication of  Il Cortegiano  the internationally-acclaimed manual for courtiers in the Renaissance. Cesare Gonzaga (1476-1512), cousin of Castiglione, was a soldier at the court of Urbino and a poet. The  Eclogue , attributed almost entirely to Castiglione, is a dialogue between the shepherds Tirsi, Iola and Dameta, whose  pleasures  in harping for their nymphs come close to  martyrdom . It was his first vernacular composition inspired by the  ottava rima  of Politian and the tradition of pastoral drama. Originally staged as a play called  Tirsi  at the court of Urbino in 1506, it remained unpublished until 1553; one ms. copy was owned by Pietro Bembo in Venice, a member of the intellectual circle of Domenico Venier to which Corso (fl. 1540s) belonged. A beautifully printed testimony to Renaissance court culture.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"CASTIGLIONE, Baldassarre.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57816160731471,"sku":"L3097","price":5500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1016\/2425\/0703\/files\/20190706_145306.jpg?v=1781794897","url":"https:\/\/sokol-books-ltd.myshopify.com\/products\/castiglione-baldassarre","provider":"Sokol Books Ltd","version":"1.0","type":"link"}