The death of his friend Raffaello
Right from the first years of his stay at the court of Urbino, Castiglione struck up a close friendship and collaboration with Raffaello, which later grew in Rome, during the reigns of Popes Giulio II and Leone X. Roughly the same age, Raffaello being born in 1483 and Baldassarre in 1478, they shared the same aesthetic values, and, one in the arts and the other in the field of politics and literature, they pursued the same ideals. There are various testimonies of this: the portrait of Castiglione painted by Raffaello around 1515, currently at the Louvre; the letter, written jointly, addressed to a Leone X about the restoration of ancient monuments; the letter in name of Raffaello addressed to Castiglione himself. In The Cortegiano, Raffaello is presented primarily as the symbol of absolute perfection achieved in the modern field of the arts.
Raffaello, however, died prematurely, on 6th April 1520, and Castiglione, who was in Mantua, was profoundly struck and perturbed by the death of his friend. Thus he composed another eulogy to commemorate him De morte Raphaelis pictoris, later included in his collection of Latin poems. The text, though in a synthetic manner, touched on various themes that were typical of the humanist and literary thoughts of Baldassarre: above all the primacy of Rome, the capital of modern and classical culture, and then the amazing rebirth of the same city, which, after centuries of involution, seemed then to be able to return to its ancient splendours. In this perspective he attributes metaphorically to Raffaello the merit of having, with his works in the fields of painting and architecture, cured a sick city: or better, of having resuscitated a cadaver. But it was his very virtues that fired and stimulated evil fate, which, in the case of Raffaello as already in that of Guidubaldo, preferred to vent itself on men of greater genius. Thus, his premature death appears to Castiglione to be the emblem of a universal law, that all the more men have great qualities all he more they are exposed men to ill fate. The spectre of death appears at the end of the text, as the destiny and final end against which every existence must be evaluated.
