His relationship with Pietro Bembo
Pietro Bembo, a humanist and man of letters famous right from the start of the 16th Century moved definitively from Venice to Urbino in the second half of 1506. And here, during the first months of his stay, he did not hesitate to exhibit his qualities and resources as a poet in vulgar tongue. For the carnival of 1507, together with his friend Ottaviano Fregoso, he wrote the Stanze, a poetic composition destined to be recited, for fun and entertainment, to the court; then, by the end of the same year, he composed the funeral song Alma cortese, for the death of his brother Carlo, with a final parting and address dedicated to the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga.
The Tirsi by Baldassarre Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga was a response, development and corollary to these two texts, specially the first of the two. In the Stanze, in fact, it is imagined that two characters, Bembo himself and his friend Fregoso, disguised, are sent as ambassadors by the goddess Venus to the two noble ladies that stand out in the court of Urbino, the Duchess Elisabetta and milady Emilia Pio. Fiction and reality, in the Stanze as later in the Tirsi, mix in such a way that the spectators can recognise themselves and their own world under the literary patina of the representation. The disguise, in both texts, bows to at least three principal motivations: entertainment; virtuoso display, by the authors, of erudite reminiscences and cultured allusions to Greek, Latin and Italian authors; exaltation of the court of Urbino.
The Tirsi expressly engenders a competition with the Stanze, a friendly emulation: the two cousins, Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga, intend to enter into friendly rivalry, in the spirit of literary solidarity, with Bembo and Fregoso, and therefore they write a text, the Tirsi, that even in terms of size (454 verses) emulates the Stanze (400 verses). Both works adhere scrupulously to an imitation of Petrach, to obtain a sobriety and fluency of words, though in economastic exuberance, that hardly any of the most popular writers of the time (Lorenzo, Poliziano, Sannazaro) had yet reached.
