A joint work

The Tirsi is a work that has to be attributed to the close collaboration of two young authors, Baldassarre Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga, without being able to define with any certainty the confines of the contributions of each one. The pair, both form Mantua and almost of the same age, having completed similar studies and lived similar experiences, decided with this work to present themselves together on the literary stage of their time. After all, only a few years before the genesis of the Tirsi, in the autumn of 1503, the twenty five year old Castiglione had already dedicated to his cousin the sonnet Cesare mio, qui sono ove il mar bagna. Therefore, due to the affinities of birth and education, and due to connections in their lives and their work, it was not surprising that for both of them the Tirsi represented a public declaration of identity, both literary and professional: of people who wanted to let it be known that they desired to join together, in their life at court, in the art of poetry and their diplomatic and military professions. In this very same spirit, Cesare Gonzaga (who prematurely died in 1512) was included by Castiglione as one of the leading characters in the Libro del Cortegiano.

This type of collaboration was not exceptional among contemporary authors. Suffice it to think of the Stanze written together by Pietro Bembo and Ottaviano Fregoso, also at the court of Urbino, just one year before the Tirsi. But, while in the case of the Stanze it seems certain that Fregoso had the role of inventing the story and Bembo that of writing it, regarding the Tirsi it seems more likely that the two cousins divided the work equally, and that Castiglione wrote the first third of the poem and Cesare Gonzaga the rest. An example that is more similar to that of the Stanze was, on the other hand, the letter to Leone X about the restoration of the monuments of ancient Rome, written together by Raffaello and Castiglione. In this case we must attribute to Raffaello the general inspiration of the architectural and technical content, and to Castiglione the stylistic elaboration: though both authors shared the aesthetic principles and cultural sensitivity that underly the text.