CASTIGLIONE, Baldassarre.

Exceptionally 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 Originally staged as a play called Tirsi at the court of Urbino in 1506, it remained unpublished until 1553; one ms.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.