Urbino

Before arriving in the beautiful Tuscan hills where Urbino is situated, we saw many bike riders along the way.

One friendly bike rider, Mauro, stopped to chat outside a grocery store. He told me that his father was taken prisoner of war by the Americans in WWII and kept in Texas for a year. He mentioned twice how his father was very well treated in the USA.

URBINO

Urbino is remote. You approach the city on tortuous two-lane roads that skim the margins of grain fields.

The town looks like something a Cubist craftsman assembled out of an infinite supply of buff-colored bricks — city walls, looming palace with dainty dunce-capped twin towers.

We parked outside the city wall and headed for the Ducal Palace, walking up steep slopes and through narrow streets lined with cafes, loud with students, finally emerging in the miraculous interior courtyard called the Cortile d’Onore, or Court of Honor.

It didn’t hurt Urbino’s reputation that Raphael, already a rising star and much in demand at noble courts, had been born right up the street from the Ducal Palace in 1483 and learned to paint there.

Florence was always far larger, Venice more extravagant, Rome more august, but for a few decades at the end of the 15th century and the start of the 16th, Urbino was truly the ideal city of the Renaissance.

After the gorgeous green of the surrounding countryside and the crabbed medieval cityscape, the cortile is like a crystalline equation.

White Corinthian columns joined by arches define a rectangle of noble proportions; Latin text inscribed in the stone proclaims the “justice, clemency and liberalism” of the palace’s builder, Duke Federico da Montefeltro, Duchess Elisabetta’s father-in-law.

DUKE FEDERICO, who lived from 1422 to 1482, was a fabulously successful condottiere — in essence a Renaissance mercenary — so feared that he was paid not to fight. He amassed a great fortune and lavished it on the finest artists and architects of the day.

Notice how he is dressed in armor while reading a book with his son at his knee in this painting by Berruguete, "Federigo da Montefeltro con il fillip Guidonaldo bambino".

In THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER, the author, Baldesar Castiglione, a diplomat to Rome, set out to define the essential virtues for those at Court. His book is a revealing window on to the ideals and preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance.

The ladies and gentlemen who strolled through this courtyard five hundred years ago would have been richly but soberly dressed, preferably in black — “more pleasing in clothing than any other color,” Castiglione wrote. “For my part,” intoned one of his fashion connoisseurs, “I should prefer [courtiers’ dress] not to be extreme in any way, as the French are sometimes in being over-ample, and the Germans in being overscanty.” They would have been graced with beautiful teeth (“very attractive in a woman”) but the good sense not to “laugh without cause solely to display”.

Even if the guests behaved only half as elegantly as Castiglione made out, it must have been quite a party. Certainly the setting was incomparable. Castiglione boasted (modestly) that Urbino’s ducal palace was “thought by many the most beautiful to be found anywhere in all Italy,” with “countless ancient statues of marble and bronze, rare paintings and musical instruments of every sort” and a vast library.

After an accident in which he lost an eye and broke his nose, the Duke would only permit his likeness in profile.

Sadly, two generations after Federico’s death in 1482, the Montefeltro family lost control of Urbino, and in time the bulk of the palace’s treasures and all of its books were carried off to Rome and Florence. Today, the visitor finds carved door lintels, ceiling medallions, fireplace mantels, a couple of chests and Federico’s huge painted box of a bed - all that remain of the original décor.
The variety of carvings is beautiful.

The one glorious room is the small private study in the duke’s suite — the Studiolo — a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil intarsia (inlaid wood) so ingenious and exact you’re tempted to pluck an apple from the basket of fruit.

Above the intarsia panels are portraits of great authors by Joos van Wassenhove.
The collection today was the special exhibition because several of these now belong to the Louvre but are here on loan
(This appears to be an ongoing source of dismay for Italians.) Federigo had these portraits to inspire him to do well.

The portraits include: Plato, St. Gregory, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Boethius,
St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, Boethius,
St. Augustine, Petrarch, Moses,
Dante, Solimon, Hippocrates, Pieteo d'Albano, Cicero,Seneca, Homer, Virgil, Aquinas, Duns Scotus,, Pius II, Euclid,, Bessarion, Vittorini da Feltre.

I thought the Duke might include my portrait so I made him a selfie.

William Butler Yeats, in a poem touching on those long-ago conversations, conjured up a room ...

“where the Duchess and her people talked
The stately midnight through until they stood
In their great window looking at the dawn.”

In March of 1507, in a lofty high-windowed room in a palace in Le Marche, a region of Italy northeast of Rome, the High Renaissance reached its pinnacle. For four successive nights, a company of poets, artists, scholars and nobles, assembled on the occasion of a papal visit, gathered around a table in Urbino’s magnificent Ducal Palace to chat about love, law, morals, manners, beauty, sex, seemliness, art, hats, cosmetics, tennis and whatever else most pressed the minds of Renaissance men and women.

These were the conversations that the diplomat Baldassare Castiglione recreated (and no doubt embellished) soon afterward in “The Book of the Courtier,” a kind of manual on how to be cool at court that for centuries afterward was required reading throughout Europe for all who aspired to a life of power and polish.

“Here, then, gentle discussions and innocent pleasantries were heard,” Castiglione wrote of the delightful ambience fostered by Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess who presided over the fabled gatherings, “and on everyone’s face a jocund gaiety could be seen depicted, so much so that the house could be called the very abode of joyfulness. Nor do I believe that the sweetness that is had from a beloved company was ever savored in any other place as it once was there.”

At a stroke of the quill, Castiglione made the windy little hill town of Urbino a byword for refinement, elegant nonchalance (sprezzatura was his word for it) and the perfect marriage of money and art.

This is the "Room of the Vigils" where the conversations took place.

The other rooms around the Court of Honor have been whitewashed and repurposed as a museum of medieval and Renaissance art.

La Citta Ideale by Luciano Laurana, 1430.

Urbino’s palace culture also gave rise to the first-ever painted images of utopian cities in the form of a trio of intriguing panels, all now known as “The Ideal City,” one of which remained in Urbino, the other two now being in Baltimore and Berlin.

The book gave me a lot to think about and in many ways is surprisingly progressive.

Were he to return from Renaissance heaven, Castiglione would surely judge our manners coarse, our conversation lacking in wit and our clothes unspeakable in the city he immortalized.

HINTS: DRESS DOWN AND DON'T SHOW YOUR TEETH

The collection’s masterpieces — Raphael’s incomparable portrait of a melancholy beauty, “La Muta,” and Piero della Francesca’s humble, dusky “Madonna of Senigallia” and surreal, puzzling “Flagellation of Christ” — are ghostly reminders of how dazzling this court once was.

David Laskin's NYTimes travel article is a source for this storytelling.