The death of his father Cristoforo
Following the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII King of France in the autumn of 1494, the armies of the various states around the peninsula formed a league promoted by Venice, in an attempt to obstruct the enemy on his march home. The troops were commanded by the twenty year old Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. The clash took place on 6th July 1495 at Fornovo on the Taro, in the lower Parma Apennines. The battle was brief and bloody: the Italians plundered the booty of Louis XII but lost a large number of soldiers, while the French succeeded in breaking through the lines and returning home.
Cristoforo Castiglione, father of Baldassarre, participated in the battle as commander of the cavalry of the marquis of Mantua, receiving serious wounds to his chest and leg. On 10 July he was transported to the villa in Casatico, where his son, who had come over from Milan, remained for several months. On 8 March 1499 Cristoforo, now forty, died, wracked by fever and the suffering caused by those incurable wounds, from which he had never recovered. The fruitful apprenticeship that Baldassarre was following in Milan, both in the filed of his studies and life at court, was completely turned on its head by these events, as his sickly brother Gerolamo was undertaking an ecclesiastic career it was left to him to take on the role of the head of the family.
This bereavement impressed in his fantasy and memory, rendered more sensitive by the loss, the cruelty of fate. Just as, on a more strictly political level, he had already been able to observe only two years previously, while still in Milan, when the Duchess Beatrice d’Este died aged twenty, giving birth to her third son, plunging the Duke Ludovico il Moro into the deepest desperation. But Baldassarre will find himself facing death again, repeatedly, to such an extent that it will become a constant theme of his literary meditations.
