The BOOK Of The COURTIER
192949051New York: Horace Liveright 1929. Black cloth binding with gilt spine stamping. Yellow decorative eps. Green dust jacket. VG some modest shelfwear/period poi to half-title page/Abt VG backstrip quite sun-tanned/extremity wear with largish piece lacking from rear panel lower left corner. x 4 456 pp. List of Editions pp. 427 - 432. Index at rear. 8vo. 8-3/4" x 5-7/8" <br/><br/>The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione is a lengthy philosophical dialogue on the topic of what constitutes an ideal courtier or in the third chapter court lady worthy to befriend and advise a Prince or political leader. The book quickly became enormously popular and was assimilated by its readers into the genre of prescriptive courtesy books or books of manners dealing with issues of etiquette self-presentation and morals particularly at princely or royal courts books such as Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo 1558 and Stefano Guazzo's The civil conversation 1574. The Book of the Courtier was much more than that however having the character of a drama an open-ended philosophical discussion and an essay. It has also been seen as a veiled political allegory. It offers a poignantly nostalgic evocation of an idealized milieu — that of the small courts of the High Renaissance which were vanishing in the Italian Wars — with a reverent tribute to the friends of Castiglione's youth in particular the chastely married Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga of Urbino to whom Castiglione had addressed a sequence of Platonic sonnets and who died in 1526. The work was composed over the course of twenty years beginning in 1508 and first published in 1528 by the Aldine Press in Venice just before the author's death." Wiki Horace Liveright hardcover books
Tavistock Books, ABAA · États-Unis75,00 $US≈ 63,46 €
