Raphael ( 1483-1520), Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1514–1515, Oil on canvas, 82 cm × 67 cm, The Louvre, Paris
By the spring of 1519, Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) had returned to Rome, leaving his wife Ippolita Torelli (1499–1520) and infant son behind in Mantua. To console them in his absence, he composed a Latin elegy in which he imagined the two of them turning to the portrait Raphael had made of him, addressing it as though it could speak. His wife, in the poem, approaches the painting, smiles, jokes, and waits for an answer that never comes; his son greets his father’s painted face with childish talk. It is a conceit borrowed from classical poetry, the ancient topos of the speaking likeness, yet Castiglione’s use of it here carries something more than literary convention. The portrait evidently possessed a presence strong enough to sustain, even for a moment, the illusion of a living person in the room.
That presence is still legible in the painting itself. Castiglione sits in a quiet, pyramidal three-quarter pose against an earth-toned ground, his body angled gently towards the viewer. He wears a dark doublet (farsetto) trimmed with squirrel fur (vaio) and black ribbon, with a soft turban (mazzocchio) topped by a notched beret. The winter clothing places the sitting in the season of 1514–1515, when Castiglione was in Rome on diplomatic appointment from Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508) to Pope Leo X (1475–1521). The palette is deliberately restrained: muted greys, blacks, and browns, with only a billow of white shirt (camicia) at the chest to break the tonal sobriety. Nothing about the costume announces wealth or rank. Everything speaks instead of what Castiglione himself, in his Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, first published in Venice in 1528), would call sprezzatura, a term he coined to describe the courtier’s studied nonchalance, the art of making effort invisible.
The painting is, in this sense, a visual argument for its sitter’s own philosophy. The ideal courtier, as Castiglione described him, should dress in dark, sober colours, avoiding ostentation and letting character rather than costume carry the impression. Raphael obliges him exactly. The lightest areas of the composition are the face, seen almost frontally, the white shirt, and the folded hands, which are cropped at the lower edge of the canvas. (Seventeenth-century copies show the hands in full, which long suggested the picture had been cut, though later technical examination established that it had not.) The viewer’s attention is guided, almost without resistance, towards Castiglione’s face, and through his calm, steady gaze towards something harder to name: an interior life, a thinking mind caught in a moment of unguarded stillness.
The friendship between painter and sitter was long-standing and genuine. The two men had known each other since at least 1504, when Castiglione made his second visit to Urbino and Raphael was gaining recognition within the humanist circle of the ducal court. In 1505, Raphael was commissioned by Guidobaldo da Montefeltro to paint a picture for Henry VII of England (1457–1509), and it was Castiglione who travelled to London to present the finished work. It is possible, too, that Castiglione served as a scholarly adviser for Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), and that the figure of Zoroaster in that fresco may record his features. Later, Raphael and Castiglione collaborated on the celebrated letter to Leo X concerning the preservation of ancient Roman monuments, a document that confirms the depth of their intellectual partnership. The portrait, then, is a record of friendship as much as of likeness, and part of its warmth derives from the fact that artist and sitter understood each other well.
The painting’s afterlife confirms the power of what Raphael achieved. It was still in the Castiglione family in Mantua until at least 1588, after which it passed through the Della Rovere collections and arrived in Amsterdam in the possession of the Flemish merchant Lucas van Uffelen (c. 1580–1637). At the sale of Van Uffelen’s collection on 9 April 1639, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), present in the auction room, made a rapid pen-and-ink sketch of the portrait, now in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 8859), annotating it with the sale price of 3,500 guilders, a sum almost five times higher than the most expensive artwork sold in Amsterdam in the preceding four decades. The impact on Rembrandt was immediate and lasting. His Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 (1640, National Gallery, London) borrows the pyramidal composition, the turned pose, and the sober tonality of Raphael’s painting, though Rembrandt introduced a more theatrical play of light and a directness of emotional address that belonged to his own, quite different, artistic temperament. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) also made a painted copy, now in the Courtauld Gallery, London (Princes Gate Bequest, 1978), probably working from the original or from an intermediary copy he encountered during his years in Italy. Where Raphael’s portrait is still and contained, Rubens’s version introduces a Baroque amplitude, a looseness of brushwork and a warmth of flesh tone that translates the image into his own pictorial language.
Titian (c. 1488–1576), too, responded to the portrait, possibly having seen it in Castiglione’s house in Mantua. His Portrait of a Man (sometimes identified as Tommaso Mosti, c. 1520, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) shares the same restrained palette and pyramidal format, and seems to take from Raphael’s example the idea that the dignity of a male portrait might reside in quietness rather than display. In the nineteenth century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) chose a frame for his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832, Musée du Louvre) that echoed the one surrounding Raphael’s Castiglione, a gesture of deliberate affiliation. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) copied the painting at the turn of the twentieth century, and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) reportedly admired it for its structural clarity.
What Raphael achieved in this portrait was something that had rarely been attempted with such confidence before: the depiction of an inner life through outward stillness. Earlier traditions of portraiture in Italy had tended to favour heraldic display, rigid profile formats, or the accumulated evidence of status through elaborate costume and symbolic attributes. Raphael’s Castiglione sweeps all of that aside. The sitter’s distinction is located entirely in his face and bearing, in the intelligence of his gaze and the composure of his posture. The painting offers a vision of the uomo universale (the universal man), the Renaissance ideal of cultivated completeness, but it does so without strain or declaration. This is a portrait in which thinking is visible, and in which the highest form of self-presentation is the appearance of not presenting oneself at all.
It is, in that sense, the perfect visual counterpart to the philosophy Castiglione set out in Il Cortegiano. And it is worth asking whether any subsequent portrait, however ambitious, has entirely escaped its gravitational pull.
References
Capellen, J.M. (2008) Raphael: The Paintings. Volume 3, The Roman Portraits, ca. 1508–1520. Doornspijk: Davaco
De Vecchi, P. and Cuzin, J.-P. (1982) Tout l’oeuvre peint de Raphaël. Paris: Flammarion
Ekserdjian, D. and Henry, T. (eds.) (2022) Raphael. Exhibition catalogue. London: National Gallery
Farinella, V. (2020) ‘Raphael, Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione’, in Faietti, M. and Lafranconi, M. (eds.) Raphael 1520–1483. Exhibition catalogue. Milan: Skira, cat. II.15, pp. 117–118.
Henry, T. and Joannides, P. (eds.) (2012) Raphaël: les dernières années. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Hazan/Musée du Louvre.
Shearman, J. (1994) ‘Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 38(1), pp. 69–97. Avaialvle at, https://www.scribd.com/document/821819006/Castiglione-s-portrait-of-Raphael (Accessed 28 April 2024)