Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione was born in 1478 into a noble family near Mantua, received a humanist education in Milan, and spent his life as courtier, soldier and diplomat at the courts of Italy. His happiest years were at the court of the Duke of Urbino, where the most cultivated nobles, scholars and artists of the age gathered; he was a friend of Raphael, whose portrait of him hangs in the Louvre. Late in life he went to Spain as papal nuncio and died at Toledo in 1529. On hearing of his death the Emperor Charles V said: 'One of the finest gentlemen in the world is dead.'