“…1, 3 r-v , 16 r -17 r , and believed to have been written in 1515-16), Castiglione had originally shown even greater deference to King Francis I than is evident in the definitive text. There he announced that the French king, the "re christianissimo" (2 r ), had actually commissioned the work on the courtier -clearly a fiction, as Cecil Clough pointed out, 47 since, by the time Castiglione first met the king in late 1515, the composition of his work was well advanced. In any case, he lavishes praise on the king, describing him, for instance, as being "endowed with those divine qualities that are so rarely seen on earth among mortals," 48 and indirectly, through the mediation of the dedicatee Alfonso Ariosto, exhorts the king in highly passionate terms to lead a religious crusade.…”