Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483-1520) · c. 1514-1515
A man in his late thirties turns toward you, hands folded, eyes steady and grey, dressed in grey velvet, black ribbed silk and a great soft collar of lynx fur, with a black turbanlike cap set on his head. He is Baldassare Castiglione, diplomat for the dukes of Urbino and Mantua and author of The Book of the Courtier, the manual of aristocratic behaviour that taught Renaissance Europe the ideal of sprezzatura, the art of making difficult things look effortless. Raphael was his friend, and the portrait is in effect a demonstration of the book: nothing is showy, everything is controlled, and the sitter's authority comes from restraint rather than display.
The astonishing thing technically is that almost the whole picture is built from greys, blacks, browns and white, with only the pink of the face and the blue of the eyes to break it. Raphael keeps the full range alive through texture, contrasting the crushed nap of velvet, the crisp pleats of the shirt, the coarse silver of the fur and the dull sheen of silk. The lighting is even and frontal, the pose a simple half length behind a parapet edge, so nothing distracts from the encounter. Move slightly and notice how the eyes hold you, an effect of the pupils being placed almost exactly on the picture's vertical axis.
The canvas has an extraordinary afterlife. Rembrandt sketched it at an Amsterdam auction in 1639 and reused the pose in his own self portraits; Rubens copied it too. Louis XIV bought it in 1665 from the estate of Cardinal Mazarin, which is how it entered the French royal collection and eventually the Louvre.
Did You Know? Rembrandt made a quick pen sketch of this portrait when it came up for sale in Amsterdam in 1639 and then borrowed its pose for his own self portraits.
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