Italian · 1478–1529
A courtier who wrote the book on being one. Castiglione served the Gonzaga of Mantua and then the Montefeltro of Urbino, went to England to collect the Order of the Garter for his duke, and ended his career as papal nuncio in Spain, where Charles V is said to have called him one of the finest gentlemen in the world. Raphael painted him in grey and black, hands folded, eyes level — one of the great portraits of the Renaissance and a fair likeness of the manner he spent twenty years describing. He began The Book of the Courtier around 1508 and revised it until 1528, setting it in the Urbino palace of his youth among people who were dead by the time it appeared. He blamed himself for the Sack of Rome in 1527, having assured the Pope that Charles would not attack. He died in Toledo two years later.