The dedicatory
The introductory pages of the work of Castiglione experimented with different solutions in each edition. In the oldest draft of the first edition we read a prologue addressed to Alfonso Ariosto, that contains an ample and marked eulogy of the King of France, Frances I, as if he were the inspiration and had commissioned the work, and an appeal to him to lead a third crusade. The revision that lead to the second draft conserved the dedication to Alfonso Ariosto, but the section praising the king of France ha been expurgated, as the diplomatic and political context had changed it had lost its functionality.
The manuscript Laur. Ashb. 409, sent to the printer from Spain, confirmed the original intention, and each of the four books into which the tract is articulated, presents a prologue addressed to his friend Ariosto. Nonetheless, before the printing was completed by the heirs of Aldo, the work was prefaced, in extremis, by a letter to the Portuguese humanist Miguel da Silva. The duplication of the dedications thus generated double references of praise: the first, before the beginning of the text, calls on an ecclesiastical humanist (da Silva) of international level, to address to him an auxiliary discourse about the reasons for the existence of the work; another, in the name of a diplomat and man of letters from northern Italy (who died on 29th June 1525), is divided among the four prologues spread out in the body of the text to indicate the partitions.
Speaking to Miguel da Silva, in particular, Baldassarre aims at orienting the reading of the text, and when he organises the goodbye ceremony, he entrusts himself to the judgement of posterity: in these pages he pre-empts the probable criticisms of the readers, he faces them head on and believes he neutralises them. Looking back, the long lapse between the inception and the present allowed him to underline his continued intellectual coherence and the permanence of his affections in his story as a man and an author.
