Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (27 page)

Throughout Italy Cesare’s coup was regarded not only as a justifiable punishment for treachery but as a masterstroke. Machiavelli called it an ‘admirable deed’, the King of France ‘an act worthy of a Roman hero’, a later anti-Borgia historian, Paolo Giovio, ‘a most beautiful deception’. Isabella d’Este hastened to congratulate him with exaggerated expressions of affection, sending him a hundred carnival masks ‘because we believe that after the strains and fatigues which you have undergone in these your glorious undertakings, you should also find time to amuse yourself’.
⁴⁴
She was still deep in negotiation over the projected marriage between her son, two-year-old Federico (born 17 May 1500), and Cesare’s daughter Luisa, of exactly the same age. But her real sentiments were echoed by di Prosperi in a cautious reference written on 6 January 1503 to ‘the sad news from the Romagna’.

In Ferrara no one remarked upon any reaction from Lucrezia whose existence had protected the Este from her brother’s depredations. She and Alfonso danced and feasted through the first days of carnival. The Borgias were now at their apogee and Cesare’s successes underlined the necessity of propitiating them. For Lucrezia this had a satisfactory material outcome: the vexed question of her allowance had at last been settled to her satisfaction.
⁴⁵

9. The Heavens Conspire

‘Furthermore, although you have now lost your very great father . . . this is not the first blow which you have suffered at the hands of your cruel and malevolent destiny . . . you would do well not to allow anyone to assume, as some might be led to infer in present circumstances, that you bewail not so much your loss but what may betide your present fortunes . . .’

– Pietro Bembo to the grieving Lucrezia on the death of Alexander VI, 22 August 1503

Young (she was still not quite twenty-three), beautiful and now restored to health, Lucrezia, with her close group of ladies, Angela Borgia, Nicola and Elisabetta senese, were the focus of court life. Since Ercole was a widower, she was already known as ‘
la duchessa
’ and she was the centre of attention in Ferrara. With renewed confidence in herself and a strong sense of having returned from the brink of death, Lucrezia set out to enjoy life. Duke Ercole had given in over the question of her allowance: on 10 January, di Prosperi reported that she was to have 6,000 ducats for herself and 6,000 for the clothing and salaries of her household – the 12,000 ducats which Alexander had been insisting upon. She felt free to enjoy herself, often occupying the place of honour as she did on 19 February when she and Ercole presided over a comedy by Plautus in the Sala Grande. Seated alone with Ercole in front of two tribunals, one occupied by gentlewomen, the other by gentlemen and citizens, she was described by the local chronicler as ‘most richly dressed with great jewels’.

Isabella’s principal spy, El Prete, was in Ferrara for carnival that year, apparently accompanying his master, Niccolò da Correggio. He was adept at telling Isabella what she wanted to hear, usually to Lucrezia’s discredit. She had appeared at a ball in the house of the Roverella, apparently in a bad temper, ‘which it seems she is always in nowadays’. She was always in conversation with Don Giulio, perhaps her favourite, as he was his father’s. She danced the torch dance, ‘
ballo da la torza
’, with Ferrante, and then Giulio, and her last dance with Alfonso. El Prete liked to make out how difficult Lucrezia was, dining alone with her beloved Angela Borgia and being disagreeable to her Ferrarese ladies. On one occasion, he said, two of them refused to put on masks: ‘she rebuked them so that they were reduced to tears’.
¹
More honest and less sycophantic than El Prete, di Prosperi reported earlier on Lucrezia’s efforts to familiarize herself with Ferrara and its ways. She had dined at the monastery of San Giorgio and at the Certosa: ‘and I understand that every Saturday she wishes to visit one of our convents to see the places and enjoy our town better than she has up till now’.
²
Even Isabella’s sister-in law, Laura Bentivoglio, married to Giovanni Gonzaga, gave her a good report: ‘Her manners and comportment seem to me all gracious and friendly and happy,’ she wrote, adding that Lucrezia had expressed herself as anxious that Isabella should write to her sometimes ‘and behave in a more intimate manner than hitherto’.

Strangely enough, the charge of being too formal had been levied against Lucrezia by Isabella the previous year – ‘there is no need to use such terms of reverence [to me] being your cordial sister’
³
– but the rivalry between the two, especially in terms of clothes, remained. Lucrezia questioned Laura Bentivoglio closely about Isabella’s wardrobe and particularly the manner in which she dressed her hair. Isabella spent a fortnight at Ferrara that spring, in anticipation of which, according to a malicious later report by Cattaneo, Lucrezia had pawned some of her jewellery to pay for splendid clothes to dazzle her sister-in-law and had asked her father to give her the year’s income of the bishopric of Ferrara.
⁴
Lucrezia welcomed her sister-in-law to Ferrara with a great show of graciousness, organizing Spanish dances to the sound of tambourines, and a keyboard competition between Vincenzo da Modena and the Duke’s organist, Antonio dall’Organo; and with her she attended a series of elaborately staged miracle plays ordered by Ercole to be performed in the Duomo. After Isabella returned to Mantua, Lucrezia wrote her a letter of exaggerated friendliness: ‘It would be difficult for me to express the supreme pleasure and consolation which I recently received from your most welcome letter,’ she wrote on 17 May, ‘particularly for the news of your most pleasant journey and . . . safe arrival’, going on to insist on how much she missed Isabella, particularly now that Alfonso had ‘left for Marina’.

But, far from feeling bereft and lonely in the absence of Isabella and, more significantly, Alfonso, Lucrezia as the beautiful young Duchess had become the focus and inspiration of a court of literary young men. Ercole was now old, and devoted rather to music and the theatre, while Alfonso, despite a humanistic education, inclined to the visual arts and was uninterested in literature. On the announcement of her betrothal, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti had composed
Colloquium ad Ferrarem urbem
in honour of the wedding and sent two magnificently illuminated copies, one to Ercole and one to Lucrezia, the previous November. Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara and her marriage had been the occasion for the most extravagant epithets by poets, including Ludovico Ariosto, who had composed an epithalamium for her marriage and was later to complete his masterwork,
Orlando Furioso,
the romantic epic poem on the Este which featured Lucrezia. Her arrival had also been celebrated by the Latin poets, father and son Tito and Ercole Strozzi, and her circle included the disreputable poet Antonio Tebaldeo (then in the service of Ippolito but who later became her secretary), and expanded to include the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (who at one point made her the executor of his will) and the celebrated humanist Giangiorgio Trissino. Lucrezia took their eulogies, which included describing her as ‘most beautiful virgin’ and comparing her with the swan in the famous frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, with a large pinch of salt, but she developed a close friendship with Ercole Strozzi and through him a passionate relationship with one of the most famous young writers in Italy, Pietro Bembo.

Ercole Strozzi was a member of the Florentine banking family exiled by the Medici and now established in Ferrara. Despite being so lame that he had to walk with a crutch, he was an intense womanizer and a natural romantic, with a taste for dangerous love affairs. He had been in love for ten years with a woman who was not only married but also had a lover described by contemporaries as
‘vir magnus’,
a powerful man. Strozzi was captivated by Lucrezia and soon became her closest male confidant in Ferrara and the facilitator of her love affairs, a dangerous course which may have led to his violent death five years later. Ercole had succeeded his father (who had made himself deeply hated by the populace for his extortions) as
Giudice dei XII Savi,
leader of the principal administrative council of Ferrara, and as such was a prominent citizen with easy access to the court.

Strozzi became indispensable to Lucrezia; like her he adored extravagant clothes and, although coming from a rich family, was perennially short of money. On frequent visits to Venice (still, after the fall of Constantinople, the main source of textiles from the Ottoman Empire) he acquired wonderful materials for her wardrobe, as witnessed by repeated entries in her wardrobe account books, beginning as early as July 1502, when he provided lengths of the much-prized white
‘tabi’.
⁵
Despite the lavish trousseau she had brought with her from Rome, Strozzi’s contributions feature on almost every page of her wardrobe accounts for the years 1502—3. Encouraged perhaps by Ercole’s concessions over her allowance, she was generous in providing clothing: on 19 June 1503 she had four doublets for Cesare’s lute players made up, and a robe for ‘Zoanmaria the Jew’, one of his musicians. Two yellow velvet doublets were made for woodwind players
(piffari)
to be sent to Cesare that year. There were skirts and other clothing for Angela Borgia, Girolama, Nicola, Catherinella and Camilla. On 9 August 1502, two capes in purple
(paonazzo)
satin were ordered for Giovanni Borgia and Rodrigo Bisceglie. From the same source it is apparent that Lucrezia in return loaned Strozzi money.

On 15 January 1503, Ercole Strozzi gave a ball for her, and it was at this ball that she renewed her brief acquaintance with the most famous of her lovers, Pietro Bembo. A member of a distinguished Venetian family, Bembo was well known in Ferrara, where his father Bernardo had acted as
visdomino
, or co-ruler, a deeply resented office imposed on the Ferrarese after they lost the war with Venice in 1484. Pietro had stayed on in Ferrara for a while after his father returned to Venice; the cultivated atmosphere of Ercole’s court suited his temperament better than the stern, hardheaded mercantile Republic. Bembo’s closest friend in Ferrara was Ercole Strozzi from whom he had heard about Lucrezia long before he met her. Since October 1502 he had been staying in Strozzi’s villa at Ostellato and had briefly entertained her there in mid November, writing afterwards to Ercole that he wished she had stayed longer, describing her as ‘such a beautiful and elegant woman who is not superstitious about anything’.
⁶
After the ball in January, he boasted to his brother Carlo of how many compliments ‘
la duchessa
’ had paid him. ‘Every day,’ he added, ‘I find her a still worthier lady, seeing she has far excelled all my expectations, great though they were after hearing so many reports of her and most of all from Messer Ercole . . .’
⁷
Ercole’s reports to Bembo about Lucrezia, which Bembo called ‘the Lucretian letters’, continued after Pietro left again for Ostellato. According to one authority
⁸
Bembo was inspired to write verses in praise of Lucrezia which were secretly passed to her by his literary friends in Ferrara, Ariosto and, particularly, Ercole Strozzi.

Strozzi deliberately fanned the flames of Bembo’s passion; romantic adoration for Lucrezia became a cult between the two young poets. Very possibly he urged Lucrezia on in the relationship; romantic intrigue excited him and, as later became obvious, there was little love lost between him and Alfonso. Lucrezia entered into the teasing of Bembo with delight: on 24 April she addressed a letter to him in her distinctive hand but when he opened it there was only another letter from Strozzi. A month later, on 25 May, Lucrezia copied out in her own hand a love poem by the fifteenth-century Aragonese poet Lope de Estuniga,
Yo piense si me muriese
. . . The poem barely translates into English, a language with so different a rhythm:

I think were I to die
And with my wealth of pain
Cease longing,
Such great love to deny
Could make the world remain
Unloving.
When I consider this,
Death’s long delay is all
I must desire,
Since reason tells me bliss
Is felt by one in thrall
To such a fire.

Bembo responded with a poem of his own, in Tuscan, the language of his hero Petrarch, in which he described himself as caught in the beauty of Lucrezia’s blonde hair, which in his presence she let down loose on her shoulders and then with ‘two hands of immeasurable beauty’ bound up again and with them his heart. Three hundred years later, viewing what he called ‘the prettiest love letters in the world’ in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Lord Byron stole a blonde thread from the lock of Lucrezia’s hair which she must have sent Bembo in response to this passionate poem. With this and another sonnet, Bembo sent Lucrezia the first volume of his famous prose poem
Gli Asolani,
‘hich I received this very hour’.
⁹
Lucrezia’s response was to ask him to suggest a motto for a medallion which she was thinking of having made featuring flames ‘according to that most subtle and most apt suggestion you gave me’, ‘. . . nothing can prevent me from ever adoring your name’, Bembo replied by courier that same day. ‘As for the fire on the gold medallion which your Ladyship has sent me with the request that I should devise a motto for inscription, I can think of no nobler location than the soul. Wherefore you might have it thus inscribed: EST ANIMUM . . .’
¹⁰

Passionate but still apparently platonic: some time after this letter was written Bembo went to Ferrara to meet Lucrezia when they had an intimate conversation and may have exchanged declarations of love. This might be interpreted from Bembo’s subsequent letter written on 19 June from Ostellato: ‘Gazing these past days into my crystal [heart] of which we spoke during the last evening I paid my respects to your Ladyship, I have read therein, glowing at its centre, these lines I now send to you . . .’
¹¹
The sonnet
Poi ch’ogni ardir
was an expression of physical passion, still apparently unfulfilled. Lucrezia’s reply mirrored his: ‘Messer Pietro mio. Concerning the desire you have to hear from me regarding the counterpart of your or our crystal as it may be rightly reputed and termed, I cannot think what else to say or imagine save that it has an extreme affinity of which the like perhaps has never been equalled in any age . . . And let it be a gospel everlasting.’ The situation was clearly becoming serious, even dangerous; from now on her name was to be ‘f.f.’ Bembo’s reply was passionate: ‘Now is my crystal [heart] more precious to me than all the pearls of the Indian seas, and surely you have acted most mercifully in granting parity such as you have given it, and such company. God knows no human thing could be so dear to me as this certainty . . .’
¹²
There has been much unresolved speculation, as to the precise meaning of ‘f.f.’ Two years later Lucrezia had a portrait medallion struck with, on the reverse, a blindfolded cupid bound to an oak tree and with the motto ‘FPHFF’. All that can be ascertained with any degree of certainty is that the need to use a pseudonym reflected the increasing depth of the relationship and perhaps also the dangers which this implied for both in Ferrara where the Este were all-powerful.