ABSTRACT
Only your portrait, painted by Raphael’s hand, bringing back your features, comes near to relieving my sorrows. I make tender approaches to it, I smile, I joke or speak, just as if it could give me an answer. By an acknowledgement and a nod it seems to me often to want to say something, and to speak with your voice. Your son recognizes his father, and greets him with childish talk. This is my solace, and thus I cheat the long days. 2
And ‘cheat’ it did. Penned as though by his mournful wife, Ippolita Torrello, Castiglione’s elegiac text, entitled ‘Elegy that Baldesar Castiglione pretends was written to him by his wife Ippolita,’ is actually his own; passing for his sorrowful wife by using, yet improving upon, her narrative voice, he exhibits literary as well as emotional transvestism.3 That is, he not only imposes grief upon her but he also sublimates that grief, prematurely mourning himself as would – presumably – his ideal widow. Thus, in what might be read as an anxiety-induced gesture, Castiglione, hoping that his portrait by Raphael will, in his temporary absence, prolong his memory for both wife and son, surreptitiously conflates mournful word and image to ensure that the memorial purpose of this portrait would not be lost on the viewer/ reader. Providing a daily prompt for the widow to mourn the sitter, this portrait reassures the male viewer, still alive, that he, too, will one day be remembered – at least as long as his portrait hangs in the home.
