Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (21 page)

Lucrezia, the envoys reported, persisted in her desire to travel by water from Bologna to Ferrara to escape the discomfort of riding and the roads. The Pope was so careful of Lucrezia’s wellbeing ‘that every day and every hour he wanted to hear of her progress: and she has to write in her own hand from each place to tell him of her wellbeing: which confirms what I have told Your Excellency previously that His Holiness loves her more than any other person of his blood . . .’
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On the 18th they were at Urbino, having been greeted two miles outside Gubbio by Elisabetta, the Duchess of Urbino, whom Lucrezia had known while she was married to Giovanni Sforza, and lodged in the palace there, arriving by the light of torches. The arms of the Pope, the King of France, of Borgia and Estense united, and Lucrezia’s own arms were displayed everywhere. At Urbino, Lucrezia and the Este party were lodged in the magnificent ducal palace of the Montefeltro while the Duke Guidobaldo and his Duchess themselves stayed outside the city.

Elisabetta Gonzaga da Montefeltro, Duchess of Urbino (1471 – 1520) was one of the most celebrated women of her age. Sister of Francesco Gonzaga and sister-in-law of Isabella d’Este, to whom she was extremely close, she was much praised for her saintliness in enduring a sexless marriage to Guidobaldo who was both impotent and for much of his life crippled by what was described as ‘gout’ but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which deformed his body from a young age. According to the archivist Luzio, despite his impotence (which was kept secret until 1502) Guidobaldo was extremely erotically inclined, so that Elisabetta was in a state of suspense every day in case he might fall upon her and have a relapse. Elisabetta was the heroine of
The Courtier
which described a sophisticated symposium at her court supposedly held over four days in the year 1507. She was accompanied, as always, by her faithful companion, the witty, high-spirited Emilia Pia, daughter of Marco Pio of Carpi, married to an illegitimate brother of Guidobaldo.

Elisabetta Gonzaga had little reason to love the Borgias, both because of Alexander’s treatment of Guidobaldo, his captain in the Orsini war, whom he had refused to ransom and left to languish in captivity and, still more recently, because of the outrageous behaviour of Cesare who, just over a year earlier, had abducted one of her protégées, Dorotea Malatesta, wife of Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, a Neapolitan captain of infantry in the service of Venice. The incident had caused widespread scandal. Dorotea, the twenty-three-year-old natural daughter of Roberto Malatesta of Rimini, had been brought up at the court of Elisabetta at Urbino where her marriage had been celebrated by proxy. She had been travelling under Venetian protection, and with an armed escort provided by Cesare at the request of Venice, to join her husband, when she was seized just after her company had crossed into Venetian territory. Everyone accused Cesare, who remained as arrogant and plausible as ever, blaming one of his captains, Diego Ramires, who, he said, had had an affair with Dorotea during carnival at Urbino. Letters of protest rained down upon him from Venice, the Pope, the King of France, even Francesco Gonzaga on behalf of his sister. But Cesare did not punish Ramires, nor did he restore Dorotea, and the evidence is that he kept her. At the end of December 1502 Sanudo reported: ‘With the Duke when he left Imola was the wife of our captain of infantry’ Cesare’s escapades can hardly have helped Lucrezia’s relations with the Duchess of Urbino. And, close as she was to Isabella, Elisabetta was under no illusions as to her contempt for her Borgia sister-in-law.

Ferrante d’Este had obviously received a sharp rebuke from Isabella for failing adequately to describe Lucrezia’s clothes. He hastened to write from Urbino that truthfully on the journey he had not seen much change in her wardrobe, but after the ball given by the Duke and Duchess in Lucrezia’s apartments in the ducal palace he was able to satisfy her with more detail. Lucrezia, he said, ‘appeared in a dress of black velvet in her own style decorated with raised stripes of drawn gold running down the robe from head to foot, a little necklace of jewels which we gave her round her neck, cap or coif with stripes of beaten gold and a diamond in the veil above her forehead, and a girdle of beaten gold with large tassels of gold and white silk. The whole outfit being so striking that I thought I should describe it to you.’
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When she danced she was followed by two Spanish jesters shouting, ‘Look at the great lady, how pretty her face is and how well she dances, rarely but excellently.’

The Ferrarese envoys remarked on the abundant hospitality offered by Guidobaldo and Elisabetta, both soon to be rudely ejected from their paradise by the bride’s brother. This time they were writing to Ippolito, ‘because knowing how much you love Our Illustrious Duchess, we are sure it will be very pleasing to you to hear the particulars of everything, adding that our Lady Duchess is well and travelling in good spirits; and if sometimes Her Ladyship has been left weak from riding, the next morning she is always gay [
gagliarda
] . . .’
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On the same day they wrote a long letter to Ercole projecting the time of arrival at Ferrara. As to whether they would travel the final stage from Bologna by road or water, Lucrezia told them the decision awaited the Pope’s answer. Although she would prefer to travel by water, ‘she defers so much to His Holiness in every little thing because she is most obedient to him and because she is discreet, respectful and prudent in a manner that she does not want her own way but follows the wish and opinion of those superior to her or greater than her’.
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Lucrezia and Elisabetta travelled on together from Urbino in the splendid litter provided by the Pope, which seemed infinitely preferable to riding on horseback through the mud. This was prompted by a difficult, muddy two-day journey which left not only Lucrezia and the ladies tired but the horses and mules exhausted when they finally arrived in Pesaro. It must have been a curious sensation for Lucrezia to enter the city of which, as wife of Giovanni Sforza, she had once been countess; now she was there as an honoured guest of her absent brother who, when he was in the city, was accustomed to occupying Giovanni Sforza’s rooms. A hundred children in Cesare’s colours of yellow and red, with olive branches in their hands, greeted her with cries of ‘Duca, Duca, Lucrezia, Lucrezia’. The highest ranking ladies, her former subjects, greeted her warmly in her former palace, ‘with so great a demonstration of affection and respect that one could not wish for better’, noted the envoys of this disloyal or, rather, cynical behaviour. Lucrezia permitted her ladies and damsels to dance with the Pesarese in her antechamber but she herself was not present, clearly feeling a certain reserve about the situation. ‘She kept always to her room,’ the envoys wrote, ‘to wash her hair but also because she is rather solitary and remote by nature.’
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Lucrezia was now passing through Cesare’s duchy of Romagna, staying in palaces from which he had rudely dislodged their former lords—Giovanni Sforza, bitter in exile in Venice; Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini; Caterina Sforza of Imola and Forlì, now released from the dungeons of Sant’Angelo, greatly aged by her ordeal at the hands of the Borgias but living in comfort in the Villa Medici in Fiesole as the widow of Giovanni de’Medici; and Faenza whose young lord Astorre, after putting up a gallant defence against Cesare, had also been lodged in Sant’Angelo, an experience he would not survive. The shadow of Cesare lay across her path wherever she went. From Cesena on 24 January the envoys reported Ferrante’s alarm at a rumour that Caracciolo was in the area and a kidnap attempt might be made on her, in revenge against Cesare for his part in the abduction of Dorotea.
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In every city of the Romagna through which Lucrezia passed, on Cesare’s orders crowds of children greeted her dressed in Lucrezia’s livery of yellow and mulberry and waving olive branches; in all the palaces in which she stayed, so recently vacated by their former lords, the halls were extravagantly decorated and the local grandees lined up to meet her. At Cesare’s orders, Don Ramiro de Lorqua, his sinister Governor of the Romagna, had had the roads levelled and repaired; the entire cost of the passage of her huge company, some 8,000 ducats, was borne by her brother. At Imola, Lucrezia once again insisted on spending a day to wash her hair before facing the Bentivoglio at Bologna in another situation complicated by Cesare’s manoeuvres. The previous summer he had made threats against Bologna, where the Bentivoglio had only saved themselves by invoking the protection of the King of France, while Ginevra Bentivoglio, wife of Giovanni, lord of Bologna, was Giovanni Sforza’s aunt. The envoys were in despair at Lucrezia’s decision to linger in Imola. ‘With Your Excellency’s letters of the 25th we have renewed our insistence with the Illustrious Duchess so that we can leave this place tomorrow and arrive in the Borgo San Luca [outskirts of Ferrara] by the last day of the month, as YE desires . . . She answered us that she was always willing to conform to Your Highness’s will but it was necessary for her to remain here tomorrow, for the reasons already given and because the Duchess of Urbino also wanted to wash her hair which it seemed to her could not easily be done in Bologna . . .’
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If there seems to have been much made of Lucrezia’s practice of washing her hair, it is worth commenting that this was an important part of the Renaissance woman’s beauty procedures. Marinello, the sixteenth-century authority on health and beauty,
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gives five pages of recipes for colouring the hair blonde with various waters, including ashes of vine stocks boiled in water with barley straw, liquorice root cleaned of its outer bark and chopped, and cedar smoothed with a knife; used to wash close to the head and left to dry this ‘will make the hair shine and glitter like gold thread’. Other ingredients included saffron, shavings from horses’ hooves, cumin, myrrh and rock alum. Foreheads were to be kept high, white and serene by hair removal, by applying a paste of mastic overnight. Perhaps the most revolting beauty treatment for whitening the skin of the face, neck, hands and other parts of the body ‘whiter than alabaster’ was this, also from Marinello: ‘Take two young white doves, cut off their necks, pluck them and draw out their innards, then grind them with four ounces of peach stones, and the same of washed melon seeds, two ounces of sublimate of mercury, a spoon of bean flour and ground pebbles which have been infused for a day and a night in milk: two young cabbages: a fresh cheese made that day or hour, fourteen whites of fresh eggs, half an ounce of camphor and an equal amount of borax; and four bulbs of the white lily, ground together and mixed together, put in a glass vial [
labico
] and mix with water and use at your pleasure.’ He continued with a further eight pages of recipes for whitening skin, considered so necessary for the appearance of beauty No wonder the ladies needed an entire day for their beauty treatments.

Finally, on 29 January, Lucrezia and Elisabetta, flanked by Ferrante and Sigismondo, made a grand entry into Bologna.Three miles outside the city she had been greeted by Giovanni Bentivoglio’s four sons, then two miles outside by the Lord Giovanni himself, who paid her the signal honour of dismounting to take her hand. The windows overlooking the streets she passed through were crowded with spectators, the walls decorated with the papal arms surmounting those of the Commune of Bologna, those of the King of France, the Este, Borgia and Duke of Romagna. That evening, Giovanni Bentivoglio gave a magnificent ball attended by many of the most beautiful women in Bologna in his palace where Lucrezia and her suite were lodged. By the end of the day Lucrezia, the cynosure of all eyes, was exhausted: so much so that the next day she slept late and, as Pozzi reported to Ercole, he had not the heart to waken her when the courier arrived with Ercole’s letters and instructions.
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Lucrezia was aware that she was under close inspection every day and hour of her journey. Ferrante may have been dilatory in his reporting but Isabella’s other correspondent, El Prete, was not. At Cagli he had even managed to see the room where Lucrezia had slept and to examine her nightclothes. He wrote that Lucrezia was assiduous in her change of toilettes, even down to the harness of her horses and mules. He sent intimate reports of her entourage of ladies whom he described as ‘
galante dame
’: ‘the first is Madonna Hieronyma [or Geronima] Borgia, sister of the Cardinal, who they say has the French disease, the other is called Madonna Angela [Borgia] who I think will please you because she is my favourite, and she is the natural sister of Madonna Hieronyma, there is a Catalina from Valencia whom some admire and some do not, a girl from Perugia who is beautiful, another Catalina, two Neapolitan girls, one called Cintia, the other Catalina, who are not very good looking but graceful, and a Moor, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and gay and well dressed, she wears bracelets of gold and pearls . . . I understand she is the lady’s dearest favourite.’ El Prete became ever more impressed by Lucrezia, no doubt to Isabella’s distaste. Like everyone else who met her he found her quite different from the villainess and whore of her earlier reputation: ‘I can tell you that the bearing of this lady is modest, from her head which has no curls and her breast covered, as indeed is the case with all her damsels. Every day she makes a better impression on me; she is a lady with a very good mind, astute [so that] you have to keep your wits about you with her. To sum up, I hold her to be a wise lady, and this is not only my opinion but that of all this company . . .’
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