Work continued during Alfonso’s absence at the French court that winter: ‘There has been made a bridge or, as we say in our dialect, a pezolo, which crosses the way entering the cortile of the Corte; that is from the salon where the Duchess gives audience in the hot weather and connects with the apartments allotted to the daughters of Messer Hannibale [Bentivoglio] which were formerly occupied by Messer Niccolò da Correggio and before him used by Duke Borso. This bridge has been made for easier access to the Rooms of the Lady Duchess. And the beams above the Corridor of the Corte, that is the balcony of the Duke’s Rooms which look over the vegetable market, are finished.’5
Alfonso was revealing an unsuspected passion and taste for decoration. His nephew, Isabella’s son Federico, visiting Ferrara in June 1517, lodged in the first set of new rooms and was impressed, reporting that he had seen, probably in the Studio di Marmo, ‘a most beautiful camerino all made of Carrara marble and panels with beautiful figures and foliation excellently worked and adorned with vases and statuettes modern and antique made of marble and metal . . .’6 In Rome Raphael was looking out for ancient works of art for Alfonso, as Costabili reported to him. Alfonso employed the greatest contemporary artists. On 19 February 1518 Titian sent him designs for two balconies. All that year the decorations for the new rooms proceeded, including the installation of marble pavements, cornices, friezes, fireplaces, windows of glass and crystal glass, gilded ceilings and painted façades.
In February 1513 Mario Equicola wrote to Isabella that Alfonso ‘cared only for commissioning pictures and seeing antiquities’. His major artistic project was the commissioning of a series of paintings by the great masters on classical subjects for his camerino. While in Rome for Leo X’s coronation in 1513 he had tried without success to persuade Michelangelo to contribute, but the project actually began with Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, completed in 1514, and continued with three of Titian’s greatest paintings, The Worship of Venus, Bacchus and Ariadne and The Andrians. He also commissioned a frieze and a canvas from Dosso Dossi for the same room.
All traces of Lucrezia’s new decorations in the Castello and the Corte have vanished. Her earliest important commission was for a series of eight canvases in tempera on historical subjects, destined for the vaulted ceilings of her rooms in the Torre Marchesana in the Castello, originally ordered in 1506. As her interest in religion deepened so her taste in paintings changed. While her husband thought only of classical subjects, Lucrezia commissioned from Fra Bartolommeo a Head of the Saviour during his stay at court in early 1516.
Lucrezia’s concern for the spiritual welfare of her citizens led her to back her confessor, Fra Thomaso, in a substantial move against the Dominican monks of Ferrara who had not been behaving themselves. In the presence of Alfonso, his gentlemen, the leading citizenry and the Vicar of the Order, they had been warned that if any one of them failed to conform to the observant life, he must leave the city within three days. The other monks and friars were alarmed that the same thing might happen to them. 'God make it that we see the other religious, priests and friars with the rest of Christendom come to a better reform,’ di Prosperi wrote. She had, through the intercession of Isabella when she visited Ferrara in the autumn of 1517, obtained permission from Cardinal Gonzaga for Fra Thomaso to preach in the cathedral at Mantua that Lent.
Relations between Lucrezia and Isabella had become more friendly than in the past, although there was always a certain spikiness between them. The balance of power had swung towards Lucrezia since the estrangement between Isabella and Francesco. Isabella was humiliatingly forced to have recourse to Lucrezia to obtain what she wanted from Francesco, over whom her enemy Tolomeo Spagnoli was increasingly in the ascendant. On one occasion she appealed to Lucrezia to obtain a pardon for a condemned man from Francesco. Lucrezia replied that although it had been much against her will to intervene to divert the course of justice, and she had not expected to get favours from Francesco as Isabella had seemed to think she would, nonetheless she would do anything in her power to help her and when she had read Isabella’s commendation for the ‘poor little man condemned to death’ (‘quel poveretto condannato a morte’) she had written as best she could to Francesco, moved by the great pity the case had inspired in her. Moreover, she had even got ‘the illustrious Lord Hercule’ to write as well, while she had sent another letter in her own name to Messer Tolomeo. ‘Your Ladyship may imagine what content I feel when also to me no favour is granted,’ she continued.7 She did in fact write to Gonzaga and to Tolomeo in favour of the ‘poveretto’, one Gabriel Comascho, condemned to death for killing a constable. To Tolomeo she wrote asking him to bring the matter to Gonzaga’s attention, and to Francesco himself she addressed a passionate plea for mercy. Comascho was a man ‘of good family, and a person who has never been known to commit any other crime, and this killing was not deliberate but in a fight to which Comascho had been provoked’.8 Isabella, meanwhile, appears to have haughtily complained, to which Lucrezia replied with some asperity: ‘Your Excellency can be most certain that when you ask of me something which I cannot achieve, I am very sorry for it. And if I had had to write to the Illustrious Lord Marquis for my own purpose and need, I could not have written more warmly than I did for Gabriel Comascho to satisfy Your Excellency to whom I enclose the letters which I have received which are not as I would have wished . . .’9
On a more pleasant note, Lucrezia had thanked Isabella for a recipe for ‘el Juleppo’ (?an infusion), which Isabella had sent her in the hope that it would do her good. Lucrezia had been unwell since Isabella left but she was sure that the ‘Juleppo’ would help her ‘principally because it comes from you who I know loves me like a sister: I will soon try it when the weather cools’. She did not know what was wrong with her but joked, ‘it must be as ‘Catherina che suona’, one of her musicians, sings ‘because fortune wills it’.10 References to Lucrezia’s ill health become increasingly frequent in di Prosperi’s reports over these years. On 4 March he wrote that Alfonso, who had been hawking in the Barco and was planning to hunt wolf, put off his plans because of Lucrezia’s delicate state of health and forbade her from continuing her Lenten fasting and dieting.11
Five days later, however, she was seen in public again. On 14 March she dispatched an envoy, il Nasello, to Naples for what di Prosperi thought were negotiations regarding ‘her brother, Don Giovanni’, although it was more likely that it concerned the winding-up of Rodrigo Bisceglie’s affairs. Giovanni Borgia, like Rodrigo Bisceglie, had been under the official tutelage of Cardinal Cosenza, who was joined in that office by Ippolito d’Este in November 1501, presumably in preparation for Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso. Giovanni remained Spanish at heart: he liked to sign himself ‘Don Juan de Borja’ and his letter of condolence to Alfonso on Lucrezia’s death was written not in Italian but in Castilian, in a looping, immature hand.12 Giovanni Borgia was the one member of Lucrezia’s extended family whom Alfonso found hard to stomach. While he liked Cesare’s son Girolamo, and had him in his household after Alberto Pio left Carpi for Rome, Giovanni Borgia can best be described as a nuisance. It would appear that he was now back in Ferrara because in May one of his men killed a squire employed by the ducal sons. Enraged by such a ‘cruel and arrogant case’ touching on his own family, Alfonso was determined to arrest him and tortured other servants of Giovanni’s suspected of having spirited the culprit away.13 In June, di Prosperi reported that Lucrezia too was angry about the case: ‘Alberto di Petrato, a servant of the Lady Duchess was placed in the Castello for having helped the escape of those of the household of Don Giovanni [Borgia] who murdered under the loggia of the piazza a squire of the Lord’s sons and it seems that Her Excellency has been angry with him until now.’ Lucrezia, however, with her customary mercy, later released him. Giovanni Borgia had gone to Rome before Alfonso arrived from Venice on 3 June, ‘and it was conjectured that he had done so because he was no longer well regarded by the Duke’.14 He remained there until early September whe
n di Prosperi reported that he would be given a pension by the King of France and would go to the French court. He was to be a source of endless irritation to Alfonso on his own visit there, and it is a measure of his deep affection for Lucrezia that he did so much for the wretched youth. The feckless creature had been nominated Duke of Camerino by his father Alexander and among Lucrezia’s papers are several documents relating to the estate, I5 but on the fall of the Borgias the Varano family, close connections of the Este, swiftly returned there.
Not only was Lucrezia indulgent towards her worthless half-brother, but she also looked out for the interests and education of another half-brother, Rodrigo Borgia, her father’s last child, born in the final year of his pontificate. From two letters of the faithful Borgia follower Juan Las Cases, written in May and September 1518, it appears that this Rodrigo Borgia had gone from Rome to Salerno in the Kingdom of Naples and that Lucrezia had written somewhat peremptorily, demanding to know how his studies were proceeding. Las Cases gave various excuses, including illness, for failing to reply sooner and expressed a great desire to go to Ferrara to see her ‘to talk about old times’.16 In September, Las Cases wrote again assuring Lucrezia that the chaplain sent to tutor ‘Dom Rodrigo’ had been instructed as she wished to get him to say his offices and to keep him ‘in the love and fear of God’.
Cesare’s two illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla Lucrezia, were under her eye in Ferrara, the former as a page at court, the latter as a nun at San Bernardino. Both were now teenagers, having been born between 1501 and 1502 of mothers unknown, although in a document of 1509 legitimizing Camilla, Lucrezia stated that she was born of Cesare, married, and an unnamed married woman. Cesare’s one legitimate child, his daughter by his wife, Charlotte d’Albret, Luisa or Louise, born in May 1500 and whom he had never seen, was just under seven years old when he died. She never visited Ferrara but wrote dutiful letters to her aunt Lucrezia.17 She married, aged seventeen, an elderly and distinguished soldier and courtier, Louis de la Trémouïlle, in 1517. And Lucrezia, according to her accounts books, also kept in touch with Juan Gandia’s widow and son.18
Early in May 1518 Alfonso went to Abano to take the waters for his health, leaving Lucrezia in sole charge (Ippolito having left the previous year with a huge retinue of hunting dogs, stallions and leopards to look after his interests in the bishopric of Eger in Hungary). ‘The Lady Duchess has remained as Governor and is most expeditious in our affairs at present: it is true that sometimes she asks counsel of the Magistrates to assist her,’ di Prosperi wrote on 16 May. ‘And up till now they have tortured some persons arrested for going about without light at night, so everyone is on their guard . . .’This offence was apparently considered so grave that Alfonso had written to Lucrezia about it from Abano, demanding that they should be tortured because they were armed when arrested. Lucrezia responded, pleading not to be forced to torture them. Her letter gives an interesting insight not only into her own merciful character but into the class-based nature of Ferrarese justice. On 15 May she wrote to Alfonso giving her reasons for her actions:
More than one cause induced me not to torture [dare la corda] Giovanni Battista Bonleo, first because when he was arrested it was only just after the prescribed hour and he was wearing his day clothes and not things that would give rise to suspicion of any evil intent, but having only gone out and was returning home. And then I remembered the proclamation that the corda should not be given to any gentleman nor of the condition he is, I did not think I was wrong to have respect to his house and relations, but I have kept this decision between ourselves and released him on security of 200 ducats. And nor do I think I did wrong in releasing Verghezino because the podestà told me that Your Excellency had ordered him to have great respect for all the Cardinal’s household, and the others were released at the instance of Sismondo Cistarello [probably Ippolito’s untrustworthy wardrobe master, Sigismondo Cestarello] who gave a simple testimony that they were servants of the Cardinal . . . but . . . on investigation of this and suspecting it was not true, I ordered them to be re-arrested . . .
In another letter of 19 May she attempted to calm Alfonso’s anger against a son of Annibale Bentivoglio who had been accused of violence against the Ferrarese officers who were taking a Bolognese to prison and on the next day it was another case of mercy for a man arrested armed with a sword but without a light. This time it was ‘Leonardo, a nephew of Giacomo di Lunardi, who has charge of il Boschetto who, when it was intended to proceed against him according to the proclamation, I was prayed by him that if I would not grant him any other grace . . . he would willingly pay the 25 ducats than suffer the tre tratti di corda. I had him therefore held in prison until I could inform Your Excellency and have your opinion . . .’ Francesco Gonzaga was also bombarded with letters from Lucrezia in her role as administrator of justice, no less than three that month concerning the arrest of a criminal, Alfonso Rampino, ‘my Ferrarese subject’.
On 24 May, Lucrezia addressed a housewifely letter to Alfonso requesting six guinea fowl eggs for hatching, reminding him that, when she had requested some of his fowl for a friend, he had told her that guinea fowl did not survive being moved and promised that he would give her eggs when the season came. At the end of the month while Alfonso was still away, this time having gone from Abano to Venice where he was most honourably received, the two Duchesses of Urbino, Elisabetta and Leonora, arrived on a formal visit. Lucrezia sent her sons out to meet them accompanied by the leading gentlemen and ladies of the court, while she herself waited to greet them, standing at the head of the marble staircase leading to the Corte. She accompanied them to their apartments above the loggia overlooking the piazza where Francesco Gonzaga used to stay and which were now normally occupied by her sons, who for the past month had been staying in the apartment in the great garden of the Castello.
She appears to have been ill again: Di Prosperi was guarded as to the nature of her illness: ‘for a few days now she has not left her apartments because of an indisposition which I think you know of’, he told Isabella on 30 May. Describing the Duchesses’ visit to Alfonso, Lucrezia told him that she had put them in ‘Your Lordship’s rooms’ and had given them not just one camerino, as he had ordered, but both camerini with the Stufa Grande, and had taken their own son Francesco to stay in her apartment, so that they could be more honourably lodged and she could have easy access to them. She had put Emilia Pia, Duchess Elisabetta’s great friend, and the ladies in Don Ercole’s rooms. Anxious to demonstrate to Alfonso the efforts she had made to make them comfortable and to present his possessions to the greatest advantage, she had heard that they wanted to see his ‘boschetto’, the new villa – later known as the Belvedere – which Alfonso had begun to build five years earlier on a sandy island in the Po just outside Ferrara. She had had it furnished and arranged ‘so that it will give them pleasure and they will praise it’. Yet, despite Lucrezia’s efforts, di Prosperi told Isabella that the two Duchesses had ‘taken little pleasure from their stay, principally because of the late hours which we are accustomed to eat’.
Lucrezia was unwell again in August and had not been seen since the 15th, which di Prosperi attributed to ‘il solito male suo’ – her usual sickness – without giving details. She wrote to Alfonso about their sons: Ercole had gone that morning out of Ferrara, as he had ordered, but Ippolito stayed behind because he felt sick but did not appear to be in danger of serious illness. Perhaps because of concern for her and because she was not well enough to carry on government, Alfonso returned to Ferrara and plunged himself into administration: he divided his foreign secretariat between Opizo, or Obizzo, da Remi for Milan and France, and Bonaventura Pistofilo for Rome and Venice. In Lucrezia’s place he himself gave audiences in the Examine – ‘may God make it that he perseveres [in this] to the content and wellbeing of his subjects’, commented di Prosperi which, with other subsequent remarks, implied that Alfonso was not much given to administration. A week later he was still energetically tak
ing part, giving audiences before breakfast, and afterwards taking the Examine with the two secretaries, Hieronymo Magnanimo and the Counsellors of Justice. He was enjoying himself, di Prosperi said, particularly the audiences – ‘as I remember did your Mother of most happy memory’. ‘And, in truth, it is a most lordly thing and of the greatest contentment to his subjects . . . that no one can consider himself with too much influence with His Lordship but all are considered almost equal [my italics].’He took an interest in improving the defences of Ferrara, visiting every morning the quarter known as the Borgo di Sotto, where a fosse and ramparts were being created, the ramparts to be as high as or higher than the tallest palazzo in the city. Walls and towers were being built to house artillery ‘The pity of it is,’ wrote di Prosperi, ‘that almost all the houses in that Borgo are being levelled, including that beautiful monastery of S. Silvestro founded so long ago by San Maurelio, our patron saint.’ When he returned to Comacchio, Lucrezia again took up the business of the Examine and gave audiences, which she did every day he was away.
Lucrezia Borgia Page 39