In the order of the narrative:
Chapter 2: The terra cotta mold for da Vinci ’s giant equestrian statue was destroyed by the French, who used it for target practice. However, the horse was reproduced from Leonardo’s drawings in 1999. Da Vinci’s horse can now be seen in Milan.
Isabella d’Aragona, portrayed in this chapter, is believed by some art historians to be the model for Leonardo da Vinci ’s most famous painting, the “Mona Lisa,” whose identity has been the subject of a lively dispute for centuries. Art historian Maike Vogt-Luerrson has recently unearthed contemporaneous rumors of a romance—and perhaps even a secret marriage—between Leonardo and Isabella.
Chapter 3: “The French Disease” was the first term for syphilis, which laid waste to the invading French army in 1495, spreading rapidly from sailors who infected prostitutes in Naples after journeying with Christopher Columbus to the New World. The English called it the [large] “pox” because of the weeping sores that were a frequent, visible symptom. The AIDS of its time, it inflicted rapid death on a population that had no natural immunities to it, just as Old World diseases like measles and smallpox later killed millions of Native Americans.
Chapter 4: While there is no proof that Lucrezia Borgia gave birth to an illegitimate child while at the Convent of San Sisto, where she spent considerable time between husbands, the ninth acknowledged child of Pope Alexander VI (by an unidentified mother) was widely believed to be Lucrezia's son. The father was rumored to be either the pope himself, his son Cesare, or Perrotto, the papal envoy who visited Lucrezia at the convent, and whose murdered body was later found in the Tiber,along with the body of Lucrezia's maidservant.
Chapter 6: Native Americans are called “Indians” and the Caribbean islands the “West Indies” because Europe did not realize what Columbus had “discovered” for a decade or more. Columbus himself went to his grave, convinced he had found a sea route to India.
The sketch of San Sisto, its nuns and its school is a fictional extrapolation from known facts. The convent (which still exists) was founded by St. Dominic (1170-1221). Dominican nuns and monks were the intellectual elite of the times, freed from any obligation of manual labor as the “Order of Preachers,” whose time was dedicated to sermonizing and teaching. San Sisto's “Institutes” (essentially, by-laws) spoke of a school for girls, who should be “brought up in a place apart and diligently formed in good behavior,” at an age younger than eleven if necessary “to save them from grave scandal or for their spiritual welfare.” Lucrezia Borgia, who knew both Latin and Greek, is said to have attended the school, implying that the convent was involved in educating the bastards of influential high churchmen. It was likely wealthy, given the large amount of land it owned and presumably farmed.
While the original rules of the convent were very strict, history reveals that Renaissance nuns were less observant than their medieval predecessors: in period art, they often appear in surprising settings, such as tippling at elaborate banquets.
I have been to San Sisto and know that I have taken some liberties with the physical structure. There is likely a graveyard but it may or may not be next to the church, which is rectangular rather than cross-shaped. It received a new façade and interior décor in a later era, so I have had to imagine what it looked like in 1500. But the sacristy, nun’s choir connecting with the convent, cloister and belltower are still there, essentially as described.
Chapter 7: Pope Alexander VI’s chronicler, Johannes Burkhard, noted that the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglie was “carnally consummated,” but did not describe the public bedding that was customary at the time. The bedroom scene and aftermath are therefore fictional, but consistent with common practice.
Chapter 8: History does not record whether Contessa Caterina Sforza offered sexual blandishments as part of her campaign to induce Machiavelli and Florence to protect her from Cesare Borgia. However, it would not have been out of character. Her Medici son, Giovanni “delle Bande Nere,” became the last and most famous of the condottière, the marauding lords whose mercenary troops were ultimately supplanted by modern weapons and armies. Her grandson was Florentine Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, progenitor of all the later Grand Dukes of Tuscany.
Though the document known as the “Donation of Constantine” was proved a forgery by early Renaissance scholars, the fifteenth century papacy still clung to the fiction that Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, gave all of Italy to the Church as its temporal kingdom. Hence Alexander VI’s attempt to regain what had been lost in ensuing centuries, when the Papal See spent over a century in France (the “Babylonian Captivity”) and split into two rival papacies (the “Great Schism”). At one point there were actually three popes, mostly occupied with excommunicating each other. Alexander VI was the first truly powerful Italian pope in hundreds of years, part of the reason he and his family were hated and vilified by the Italian aristocracy of the time.
Chapter 11: Vendettas are Italians' unique version of the family feud. Italians took their "family honor" very seriously, but the term, as they used it, was oxymoronic: secret, sneaky vengeance was both common and accepted, as it was less likely to trigger the reprisals that no sensible person wanted.
Chapter 14: Lucrezia Borgia did run the Vatican while her father made war on Naples. However, this occurred approximately one year later than the date assigned by this book, which collapses two years into one.
Chapter 16: While it is unlikely that Lucrezia Borgia and “La Bella Giulia” Orsini were natural blondes, there does not seem to be any reliable record of their method for producing their famous golden hair--though there are plenty of rumors. The “recipes” here for hair and skin care come from early sixteenth century sources, unless otherwise indicated. Bleached hair was common both in ancient Rome and during the Renaissance. Venetian courtesans in particular were notorious for their bleached hair.
Chapter 22: Caterina Sforza “defended her fortress far better than she defended her virtue” according to Cesare Borgia. He was dogged by rumors that he raped captive women, including Caterina Sforza —but also, in some instances, by evidence that they happily consented to his attentions. After her capture, Caterina Sforza emerged from the Castel Sant’Angelo, finally, in obvious ill health. She may or may not have starved herself to avoid poisoning.
Chapter 23: While Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli were undoubtedly together as a part of Cesare Borgia’s entourage during his campaign to conquer the Romagna, history is silent on whether they became friends, or witnessed the executions of Paolo and Francesco Orsini. Based on their later association and da Vinci’s actions after this book ends, however, historians have speculated that Machiavelli actually recruited da Vinci as a spy for Florence during this time.
Chapter 28: Leonardo da Vinci did sketch the fantastic siege machines and key-wound wheelock decorated with snake heads that are described in this and ensuing chapters. He is acknowledged as the inventor of the wheelock, the first firing device for a gun that created its own spark. While this was a huge step towards the creation of handguns, the real-life “downsizing” of cannon into practical muskets and pistols had not yet occurred. An intermediate invention was the “arbusquer,” thought to be more like a small cannon or mortar than a musket. The first battle featuring arbusquiers—a troop of soldiers armed with arbusquers—occurred in southern Italy, the year after this book closes. The inventor(s) of both the arbusquer and the musket are unknown.
Chapter 33: Pope Alexander VI continued papal support for the heir to the Byzantine Empire (and father to the Tsarina of Russia) during his reign, though Constantinople had fallen to the Turks nearly fifty years earlier. He also kept the Sultan’s brother, Prince Djem, as a pampered prisoner for several years for a handsome annual fee. Prince Djem’s mysterious death (which eliminated a threat to the Sultan’s reign) was widely attributed to poison administered at the pope’s direction. However, Djem was a prisoner of the King of France at th
e time.
Chapter 35: Leonardo da Vinci was indeed a fine musician and lutenist. He evidently wrote music of his own, but none has survived—unless one counts the dirge that can be read from right to left if musical bar lines are superimposed on the cups, bread and plates scattered across the table in da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper. Josquin des Pres, whose time in Milan overlapped da Vinci's, was arguably the first high Renaissance composer. His first collection of masses was printed in Venice in 1502.
Chapter 36: The story of Pope Joan, revealed as a woman when she miscarried and died on the street described in this chapter, is probably apocryphal. However, the plot against Pius II by humanists of the Roman Academy is not. When he was a young cardinal, Pope Alexander VI was credited with foiling this murder attempt.
Chapter 38: Italian laws governing wills and inheritance at this time vastly favored male heirs, and were consequently very hard on widows. Fathers, not husbands, had the legal obligation to support women—hence the institution of dowry. Unlike England (and most American states), a widow in Italy had no right to a statutory share of her husband’s estate, though she could reclaim her dowry—if her husband hadn’t spent it.
Chapter 40: Da Vinci ’s notebooks contain the cryptic statement, “The sun does not move.” Da Vinci was one of many amateur astronomers who may have discovered that the Earth is not the center of the universe, but dared not contradict the Bible for fear of being accused of heresy. Copernicus received his early education in astronomy in Padua and Bologna around this time, but refused to allow publication of his meticulous mathematical proofs of heliocentrism until after his death in 1543. Galileo was threatened with torture and finally imprisoned for life for supporting Copernicus’ ideas nearly a century later, in 1632.
The rumor among his contemporaries that Leonardo da Vinci was secretly married to Isabella D’Aragona, with whom he purportedly had a close relationship, was reported by art historian Maike Vogt-Luerssen in her book, Wer Ist Mona Lisa?
Emperor Caracalla’s baths may still be viewed across the Appian Way from the Church of San Sisto. However, the art originally found there was stripped by Alessandro Farnese, brother of Pope AlexanderVI’s most famous mistress, “La Bella Giulia” Farnese, after he became Pope Paul III in 1535. Many of the finest sculptures are now in the Farnese Collection in the Archeological Museum in Naples.
Chapter 42: For centuries, the subject of da Vinci's famous painting, “Mona Lisa” has been a mystery. A majority of art historians identify her as Lisa Gherardini Giocondo, wife of a Florentine silk merchant, and believe that she was not painted until after this book ends. However, discrepancies in the historical record make this identity uncertain. Some art historians claim she was instead a mistress of Giuliano de’Medici; still others, that she was a Spanish courtesan. This book adopts the view, shared by some scholars, that the portrait depicts Isabella d’Aragona, for whom da Vinci worked near the end of his stay in Milan.
Chapter 43: Most historians do not believe that Cesare Borgia killed his father, though the death was widely attributed to him at the time. Modern historians believe that Alexander VI, who was in his seventies, died of malaria.
A PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cloulas, Ivan, The Borgias (Franklin Watts Press, 1989)
Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition)
Ritchie-Calder, Peter, Leonardo & The Age of the Eye (Simon & Schuster, 1970)
Kuehn, Thomas, Law, Family and Women: Towards a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 1991)
Murphy, Caroline, The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felicia della Rovere (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Johnson, Marion, The Borgias (Holt, Rinehart 1981)
Bradford, Sarah, Cesare Borgia (McMillan, 1976)
Bradford, Sarah, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Viking Press, 2004)
Jacobs, Sister Mary Martin, O.P Institutes of the Sisters of San Sisto and Statutes of the Sisters of Saint Mary Magdalene: A New Translation (Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, Summit NJ 2004)
Vogt-Luerssen, Maike, Wer Ist Mona Lisa? (English language summary, at www.asn-ibk.ac.at /bildung/faecher/geschichte/maike/monalisa_eng.html, of German language book (Norderstet, 2003)
Chamberlain, E.R. The Fall of the House of Borgia (Dial Press 1974)
Chamberlain, E.R. Everyday Life in Renaissance Times (Putnam 1965)
Viroli, Maurizio, Niccolò=s Smile (Hill and Wang, 2002)
Bondanella and Musa, Eds, The Portable Machiavelli (Viking Press 1979)
Nicholl, Charles, Leonardo da Vinci : Flights of Mind (Viking Press 2004)
Bramly, Serge, Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci (Harper Collins, 1991)
Kelly, Jack, Gunpowder: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World (Basic Books 2004)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Ann Philip (a nom de plume) graduated with honors in “Renaissance Studies” (a self-created interdepartmental major) from Stanford University in 1975, having spent part of her junior year at Stanford's Florence campus, researching her honors thesis using original Italian texts in the Biblioteca Nazionale. She then went to law school (U. Chicago '78) and spent the next twenty-five years raising children and practicing law, with occasional time out to sing in small ensembles devoted to Renaissance music. She now lives in California, and has recently retired from law practice to brush up on her Italian and devote herself to her family and favorite period in history: the Italian Renaissance.
IMAGES
IMAGES THAT BEGIN A CHAPTER:
Chapter 1: The Castel Sant’Angelo, from an early print
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Chapter 2: Ludovico Sforza, called “Il Moro,” the Duke of Milan
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Chapter 3: The Convent and Church of San Sisto, about 1588
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Chapter 5: Savanarola being burned at the stake
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Chapter 7: A portal to the Vatican
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Chapter 8: Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forli
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Chapter 9: Louis XII of France
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IMAGES IMBEDDED IN THE TEXT:
Thought to be Juan Borgia.
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Salome, sex goddess of the Renaissance, in the style of Leonardo da Vinci. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
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A newly-found portrait, thought to be Leonardo da Vinci.
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Savanarola being burned at the stake, from a contemporaneous painting.
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The Roman Colosseum, about 1508
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King Louis XII of France
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Niccolò Machiavelli
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Leonardo da Vinci, by Raphael, who knew him, beginning in 1504
From “The School of Athens” in the Vatican, Rome.
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Figure on the left is thought to be Prince Djem. Figure on the right is Lucrezia.
From the Borgia Apartments, the Vatican, Rome.
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Sketches of cats by Leonardo da Vinci
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The Baths of Caracalla, across from the Convent of San Sisto, Rome
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A Borgia Daughter Dies Page 24