The greatest painting in Paris is not the Mona Lisa. It’s a different portrait by a different renaissance master, conveniently located only a hundred feet away from the Mona Lisa, in an adjacent Louvre gallery. It’s Rafael’s Baldassare Castiglione.
Baldassare Castiglione, Count of Casatico, was a prominent, brilliant diplomat and courtier, who remains famous as the author of The Book of the Courtier, the quintessential book of Renaissance manners and etiquette. Castiglione was born in 1478; starting in 1494, he spent five years studying the new renaissance humanism before succeeding his father as Count at 21, whereupon he joined the Gonzaga court in nearby Mantua. He served as an ambassador for the Gonzagas until 1504, when he met the Duke of Urbino in Rome, and was recruited to the Urbino Court. Urbino was then the most urbane court in Italy, home and patron of poets, playwrights and painters. The greatest was Rafaello Sanzio, an Urbino native, and before long, Castiglione’s fast friend.
In the years following their acquaintance Rafael moved around northern Italy, soaking up the new renaissance styles; Castiglione meanwhile joined Pope Julius II in his campaign against Venice. Castiglione distinguished himself militarily—so much, in fact, that the Pope gave him a castle as a thank you, along with the new title of Count of Novilara. Afterwards, Castiglione was made Urbino’s ambassador to the Holy See. There he rekindled his friendship with Rafael, now one of Italy’s most famous painters, brought to Rome as part of Julius’s campaign to cultivate the arts.
When Castiglione arrived, Michelangelo was working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Rafael was working on his rebuttal fresco, The School of Athens. Castiglione, well read in Greek and Latin, appears to have advised on the fresco’s setting and characters, and Castiglione himself appears in the painting — near the right edge, depicting Zarathustra, standing beside Rafael’s self-portrait.
Castiglione had, by this point, become one of Rome’s best respected diplomats; he and Rafael had risen to fame together, and remained close friends. In recognition of their friendship, Rafael painted Castiglione again—this time not as a face in the crowd, or an inside joke, but in a full, formal portrait. The portrait is easily Rafael’s greatest work.
Castiglione started the trend of “sprezzatura“; the style of gentleman dressing elegantly but with intentional nonchalance: anti-foppishness. In the portrait, Castiglione wears black and gray, sitting, with his hands clasped, in front of a simple canvas-colored background. The blank background set the tone for the next generation of portraits; its simplicity—rather than the typical renaissance receding room or landscape—gives the painting a sense of being 100 years ahead of its time, better suited to the Dutch Baroque than the Italian renaissance. (It’s the portrait that all Rembrandts wish they could be.)
Like the Mona Lisa—known in French as La Jaconde—the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione is distinguished by the indescribable subtlety of the subject’s expression. Castiglione looks world-weary, irritated—the unwilling subject of a portrait—and at the same time, dryly amused. His eyes are just slightly rolled; his left eyebrow is just slightly raised; the left side of his mouth is just slightly pursed and pulled upward. It’s a quiet, unprepossessing expression, and the deepest face ever painted. It laughs at the Jaconde’s jocundity.
And you might say it sums up Castiglione’s life very well. Famous diplomat, writer and solider, who, a few years after Rafael’s portrait was complete, would lose whose his wife to a sudden and unexpected illness, and in despair, become a monk. Even at that, though, he excelled; 7 years after getting his tonsure, Charles V appointed him Bishop of Avila.
The Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione hangs about twenty paces from the Louvre’s Leonardos, excluding the Mona Lisa, which is in an adjacent room. The Leonardos are the most famous paintings in the most famous museum in the world, and they always have enormous crowds around them. Baldassare Castiglione does not—and I’m really not sure why. Certainly many great artworks are under-appreciated, but this is one of Rafael’s most famous paintings, and Rafael is one of the five or ten most famous painters in history. I suppose the magnetic pull of the (extremely great) celebrity Leonardos has overwhelmed it.
But if you walk just a few steps past Leondardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne—which is the second greatest painting in Paris—you will arrive at the best spot in the city, and probably have it to yourself.
