The interest to be found in the literary work of "il conte Baldassare Castiglione"--in the one prose volume he wrote, 'Il Cortegiano' (The Courtier)--arises not only from the historical value it now has, but from its representing the charming character of a gentleman. And it does this not merely by intentionally describing the ideal gentleman of the fifteenth century, but by unconsciously revealing the character of its author. Castiglione was himself distinctively a gentleman. Without eminent abilities or position, his life unmarked by any remarkable deeds or any striking events, he yet deserves remembrance as making vivid to us those admirable qualities and conditions which are the result, in individuals, of the long moral and intellectual cultivation of a large group of men and women. He was one of the group that made famous the court of Urbino, not at the time of its greatest glory under Duke Frederic II., but just afterward, when the duchy was ruled by Frederic's son Guidobaldo--an estimable invalid--and the court was presided over by Guidobaldo's wife, the much beloved and admired Duchess Elisabetta, one of the great Gonzaga family. Castiglione's own sketch of this court (see translation below) renders any other delineation of it supererogatory; but his silence regarding himself personally makes it necessary to gather knowledge of his life from other sources. His person is made known to us by Raffael's interesting portrait of him, now in the Louvre, painted in 1515. It is a portrait by a friend. Raffael was only five years younger than Castiglione, and their affectionate relations were of long standing. Castiglione was the son of a valorous soldier who fought by the side of the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, but his early youth was spent not at Mantua but at Milan, where he received from famous scholars--Demetrio Calcondile and his peers--a brilliant classical education, rather than the training one would look for in his father's son. His father's death in 1494 obliged him, in those troublous times, to seek a protector. As his mother was distantly connected with his father's friends, the rulers of Mantua, it was to them that his eyes turned, and in 1499 he was one of the suite of the Marquis on the occasion of the triumphal entrance of Louis XII. of France into Milan after his conquest in three weeks of the duchy; a triumph followed by the hideous ten-years' "caging" of Lodovico il Moro, Milan's duke.