Lyrical exercises in the vernacular
Castiglione is not the author of a proper organic collection of poetic texts in vulgar tongue; he, rather, dedicated himself to writing lyrical works on a periodic and experimental basis, without this, however, impeding him from obtaining results of a certain value, in terms of originality and efficacy. In terms of quantity the number of texts that have been attributed to him with a high level of certainty up to the present day, is not very high: twenty one sonnets, three songs and one stanza of a song or madrigal. Mostly they are poems that date back to his youth and early maturity, spent at the Court of Urbino. He followed Petrach’s model as a guide, in line with the new fashion that was beginning to establish itself from the beginning of 16th Century. Thus the generous experimentations typical of the lyrics of the 15th Century were abandoned, in favour of a greater expressive sobriety.
The dominating theme of Castiglione’s poetry, in line with the fashions of the time, was a reflection on the phenomenon of love. His inspirational muse, more or less explicitly, was often the figure of the Duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga, to whom Baldassarre was tied for all his life in a relationship of respect, affection and reciprocal correspondence. In his first song, Amor, poiché ’l pensier per cui sovente, probably written between 1506 and 1507, he muses over the ambivalence of passion, distressing and abstracting but, at the same time, sought after and searched for to the point of risking losing oneself. From Petrarch he took the stimulus to meditate on the dramatic forms underlying every amorous tale. His second song, Sdegnasi il tristo cor talor, s’avviene, was therefore built on the alternation of laughter and tears, the former telling lies and the latter revealing the truth about the torments of the lover.
The bitterly meditative and reassessing tone of the third song, Manca il fior giovenil de’ miei prim’anni, was a result of these moods. The very first verses imposed a grave moral meditation: “Questo viver caduco a noi sì caro / è un’ombra, un sogno breve, un fumo, un vento, / un tempestoso mare, un carcer cieco” (This life we hold so dear is but a shadow, a brief dream, a wind, a tempestuous sea, a blind prison.), therefore, to avoid getting lost in the “tenebre oscure” (dark obscurity) of passion we must trust in the “lume chiaro” (clear light) of reason (B. Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori, edited by B. Maier, Turin 1981, 588).
