The poetic compositions written in Latin by Castiglione, and attributed with certainty to him, are about twenty, and they take the form of an elegy, egloga or epigram. They are very refined writings of elevated quality, the fruit of the excellent humanistic apprenticeship undertaken by Baldassarre during his stay in Milan.
The poem Alcon, drafted in 1506 and finished off in 1507, commemorated the death of his friend Domizio Falcone and of his brother Girolamo, recalling the themes of Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus, where the mourned loved one was delicately figured in a serene bucolic frame. It is a work of great literary and ideological commitment, in which, with great ambition, he affirmed the value of friendship and solidarity, as absolute ties born out of common intellectual values.
In the elegy Ad puellam in litore ambulantem, composed in 1513, Castiglione refers to the eleventh elegy of the second book of the Amores by Ovid, which talks of the will to stop Corinna undertaking a sea voyage. But here the subject was a simple walk along the shore, which gave the author the opportunity to interlace refined allusions to various passages of the Metamorphosis.
Also many other of Castiglione’s poems were written presupposing a real recipient, where the text wanted to underline the intimate correspondence with the author: the elegy De Elisabella Gonzaga canente, for Elisabetta Gonzaga, was a plainly courtly homage; the Prosopopeia Ludovici Pici Mirandulani contained, behind the evocation of the dead friend, the celebration of a valorous and virtuous prince; the elegy De morte Raphaelis pictoris, written after the death of Raffaello, spoke of his artist friend in solemn and emotional tones that defined his absolute greatness.
But, Castiglione’s most famous Latin poem was the Elegia qua fingit Hippolyten suam ad se ipsum scribentem, elaborated in Rome in 1519. Here the author, imagined speaking with the voice of the woman in love (following the Ovidian model already experimented in 15th Century literature), he depicted his wife and young son Camillo in their house in Mantua, while, consoling themselves of his absence, they spoke the image Raffaello had painted of him.
The Latin odes
