sense, though in one sense only, the most disappointing. There are a
great number of books dealing with her personality, but little real
information. Few personal friends reveal more of themselves than
Margaret D'Angoulême, Anne of Brittany, or Beatrice D'Este. What is
evasive about them is pleasantly evasive, since every woman should
retain a little that is inexplicable. But Lucrezia Borgia evades
altogether. There is nothing, from beginning to end, comprehensible to
seize upon. All the facts of her life are ascertainable, but never a
word concerning the temperament that to a certain extent gave life to
them. The events of the first half of her existence are begrimed with
evil, but the evil is so involved and extraordinary, so little in
keeping with the second half of her existence, and in many instances
so dubious, that it scarcely adheres to her. In the end she emerges
with such inherent calm, such effulgent gentleness, that the whole
story of her Roman days has an air, not only of inapplicability, but
of extraneousness. The actions of that early period seem to cling to
her little more than the unconscious proceedings of a sleep-walker.
To disarm once and for all any preconceived prejudice, it is only
necessary to look at the supposed portrait of her as St. Catherine,
painted by Pintorricchio. In that she is adorable. To believe in the
absolute baseness of a creature with such an expression is not
possible. Looking at it, do we see anything save a child, nearly grown
up in years, but with a little brain absolutely muddled and
unreasonable? Exquisitely plaintive and helpless, the figure seems
surely as if its youth appealed against it knew not what. The creature
is all prettiness, weakness, and grace. Standing with slender hands in
a useless attitude, her expression appears destitute of any vital
understandings, but conveys instead the very essence of the sweetness
and dependence possible to femininity. The little mouth is weak but
endearing, the little chin weak but tender-hearted. The whole face,
framed in its loose and volatile hair, exhales a gentle, childish
passivity. Only in the eyes lurks an unconscious wistfulness, as if
they knew or foreboded being involved in many tragic contemplations.
There is no evil anywhere--there is no _parti pris_, in fact, of any
sort. A soft perplexity is perhaps the strongest impression given.
The other likeness of her, stamped upon a medal, and known
incontestably to be a portrait, is not so lovable. But no woman's
charm could be conveyed in the few hard lines of a profile struck upon
a medal. There is no possible opportunity to convey more than an
accentuated impression of nose, chin, and forehead. In the medal
Lucrezia's gift of gaiety, here almost saucy, is the chief
characteristic visible.
[Illustration: PROBABLE PORTRAIT OF LUCREZIA IN ST. CATHERINE
AND THE ELDERS
BY PINTORRICCHIO]
This power to be continuously gay, which was so markedly to
distinguish her all her life, was perhaps the only good quality
Alexander was able to transmit to his daughter; but by this one
quality alone, almost, Lucrezia finally lifted herself away--as if it
had been solely a cloak thrust about her by the brutality of
others--from the darkness of her original reputation. Now one is
chiefly conscious of a creature courageously cheerful; a creature
continuously desirous to please, to convey gentle impressions, to
smooth out everything into pleasantness. Having carefully and
repeatedly read the various books upon her, the feeling left is
actually of a woman who understood, up to a point, her woman's
business uncommonly well, but who suffered sore mishandling during the
early crucial years of her existence. The moment they took her out of
the undesirable surroundings in which she had been reared, nothing but
brave, becoming laughter and comfortable domesticity--Ruskin's demand
that a woman should bring "comfort with pleasantness"--issued from
her. Obviously there were no roots of evil to renew themselves; at the
worst there had been only a nature over-adaptable to outside forces,
and a temperament not forceful in powers of resistance.
Born in 1480, she was the daughter of Alexander, then known as
Cardinal Rodriguez, and Vanozza Cataneri, a woman whose origin is
obscure, but who was certainly educated, and who had two husbands,
Giorgio di Croce, and later, when Alexander had turned to younger
idols, a certain Carlo Canali, an author of some reputation in his
day. During her babyhood Lucrezia remained with her mother in a house
close to the cardinal's. But later, though why or when is not known,
she was taken from Vanozza and given into the care of Madonna
Adrienne, a widow, and a connection of the cardinal's, said by
Gregorovius to be also "very deep" in the Spaniard's confidence. The
atmosphere of Madonna Adrienne's house could not have created for
Lucrezia early impressions of delicate or winning conduct--she had no
groundwork afterwards of moving ideals to fall back upon. There is one
incident which lets in all the daylight necessary upon the character
of Lucrezia's guardian. Julia Farnese was her son's wife, and it was
with her mother-in-law's complete acquiescence that the girl became
Alexander's acknowledged mistress. There is something, therefore,
under the flagrant circumstances of the case almost offensive in the
fact that Adrienne had the child carefully instructed in religious
observances, though, for that matter, they were all religious, these
women of undesirable conduct. Vanozza, for instance, built a chapel,
and was looked upon as deeply devout long before Alexander's death.
Lucrezia's intellectual education took the same surface quality as her
spiritual one. The Renaissance ideas of culture for women had not
penetrated to Rome, and the child underwent a very different schooling
from the D'Estes, the Gonzagas, and so many others. Her chief
facility appears to have been in the matter of languages. Bayard, in
1512, said of her, "She speaks Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French,
and a little and very correctly Latin; she also writes and composes
poems in all these languages." Moral sense must have remained
absolutely sheathed. None of the set who brought her up would have
dared to instil so dangerous and disturbing a quality. In
Pintorricchio's portrait there is no sign of a living conscience,
though she might well from her expression be wistfully looking for it,
aware of something wanting.
When Lucrezia was eleven years old, besides, a new impropriety was
added to the number already submersing ordinary moral comprehension.
It was then that Julia Farnese, aged sixteen, became Alexander's
mistress. There was no concealment, and Lucrezia became unhesitatingly
involved in the new arrangements. To her the circumstance wore no more
unnatural air than marriage. The child had never been in an atmosphere
of customary domesticity since she was born; her playfellows were
almost all the children of other cardinals, and in thinking of her
life it should be remembered that few minds question easily the
standards of conduct grown familiar since early childhood.
She was herself already engaged to two people. Alexander, looking at
this time to his own country for a good match for his daughter, had
formally promised her hand to a Spaniard. In the same year,
considering it a better bargain, he also affianced her to a certain
Don Gasparo; so that the child had actually two prospective husbands
at one time. Nothing came of either. In 1492, Innocent VII. died, and
Rodriguez Borgia was elected Pope in his place, assuming the name of
Alexander. He had always notably pleasant manners, but Giovanni de
Medici, looking at the new Pope, remarked, nevertheless, under his
breath, "Now we are in the jaws of a ravening wolf, and if we do not
flee he will devour us." He devoured a good many, though his primary
policy was widespread propitiation.
For Lucrezia, her father's elevation from cardinal to Pope proved
immediately significant. The two previously chosen husbands were
dropped; neither was good enough for a Pope's daughter. And in 1493
they married her to Giovanni Sforza, who was an independent sovereign,
and a relation also of the powerful Ludovico Sforza of Milan. She was
then thirteen years of age, and was to remain, after the marriage, one
more year in Rome before her husband took her away to his own
possessions. Ostensibly, however, they made a woman of her
immediately. She received a house of her own close to the Vatican,
Madonna Adrienne passed from governess into lady-in-waiting, and the
whole weariness of formal social life became a part of the child's
ordinary duties. She had to receive all important visitors to Rome,
and behave with the effortless dignity of a great lady. Alphonso of
Ferrara, come to render homage to the new Pope, had also to pay his
court to this thirteen-year-old bastard, whom he was himself later to
marry. He brought her, in fact, as a wedding present from the duke his
father, two large and beautifully worked silver washing jugs and
basins.
Curiously enough, in the comments made about the marriage, there are
none at all concerning the girl herself. At that age she had clearly
no distinguishing precocities. The Ferrarese ambassador dismissed her
with a phrase, and that referring more to Alexander than the newly
made bride. He wrote that the Pope loved his daughter in a superlative
degree. It may have been so: it is a fact most biographers lay stress
upon. Nevertheless, almost every single known incident tells against
much affection, and it is very certain that he sacrificed her whenever
it was necessary, either for Cæsar's ambition or his own purposes.
Another brief reference made to her at this time is in the well-known
letter by Pucci. From his statement it would almost seem as if Julia
Farnese and Lucrezia were housed together. For he mentioned going to
call upon Julia at the Palace of Santa Maria in Porlica, and wrote,
"When we got there she had just been washing her hair. We found her
sitting by the fire with Madonna Lucrezia, the daughter of his
Holiness, and she welcomed both my companions and myself with every
appearance of delight.... She desired me to see the child, who is
already quite big and as like the Pope _adeo ut vere ex ejus semine
orta dici possit_.
"Madonna Julia has grown fatter, having developed into a very
beautiful woman. While I was there she unbound her hair and had it
dressed. Once loose it fell to her feet; I have never seen anything to
compare with it. Truly she has the most beautiful hair imaginable. She
wore a thin lawn head-dress, and over it the lightest of nets
interwoven with gold threads, shining like the sun.... Her dress was
made after the style of the Neapolitans, and trimmed with fur. So was
Madonna Lucrezia's, who after a while went and changed hers, coming
back in a gown made of purple velvet."
[Illustration: VIRGIN AND CHILD
BY PINTORRICCHIO, IN THE HALL OF ARTS AT THE VATICAN]
The reference to Lucrezia is singularly meaningless, but the letter
itself is interesting. The child of fourteen and the deliberate wanton
were evidently, at least, in constant companionship. "Wanton" is a
strong expression, but Julia Farnese belonged to the type for whom no
other word is equally applicable. She was young, fresh, beautiful, and
Pope Alexander was an old corrupt man of sixty. But she became his
mistress with the same tranquil publicity with which a woman might
become the consort of a reigning sovereign. The fact of her soiled
youth and abandoned domestic decencies weighed no more upon
imagination, than the casual discarding of an uncared-for garment.
Pintorricchio, in his series of frescoes at the Vatican, is said to
have painted her as well as Alexander and Lucrezia. There is, above
the door of the Hall of Arts, a madonna and child, the madonna of
which is supposed to have been Julia. If so--and it looks essentially
like a portrait--she was very interesting as well as exquisite. There
is character and a sort of intelligent carelessness about the
face--the kind of carelessness that suggests an intuitive
consciousness of the insignificance of most minor occurrences. The
error made by Julia was in including ethics among the non-important
contingencies.
As regards the question whether she and Lucrezia were really painted
by Pintorricchio, there seems little doubt that, since the portrait of
Alexander is incontestable, those of the two girls would have been
included somewhere in the series of frescoes. Alexander must so
certainly have desired them painted, and both would have been about
the ages they look in the frescoes at the time Pintorricchio was at
work upon the private apartments of the Pope. As a matter of fact,
Pintorricchio laboured quietly for years in the rooms through which
Lucrezia was constantly passing, and he must have become so much part
of unchanging daily impressions, that one imagines all her after
memories of life in Rome held as a sort of background the
consciousness of the wonderful pictures in which the painter
expressed, with perhaps more completeness than anywhere else, his
special sense of loveliness.
Lucrezia must have known Pintorricchio from the time when she was
little more than a child until her third marriage, though it is
probable that she was at this period too engrossed and light-headed to
take much notice of the wistful-looking man making beauty upon every
side of her. Certainly the complicated nature of her own domestic
drama was in itself sufficient to absorb anybody. Not long after her
marriage Il Moro had drawn France into the Neapolitan adventure.
Alexander VI. was vehemently opposed to this invasion, and was,
besides, close friends with the King of Naples. Instantly the
situation became difficult for Lucrezia's husband; the policy of his
house and that of his father-in-law had grown brusquely antagonistic.
Giovanni himself was acutely alive to the awkwardness of his own
position. In 1494 he wrote to Ludovico that he had been asked by the
Pope what he had to say to the situation, and had answered, "Holy
Father, everybody in Rome believes that you are in agreement with the
King of Naples, who is the enemy of Milan. If it is so, I am in a very
difficult position, for I am in the pay of your Holiness and of the
last-named state. If things are to follow this course, I do not see
how I can serve the one without abandoning the other, though I desire
to detach myself from neither." He concluded the letter by a
statement very unflattering to Lucrezia. "If I had known, monseignor,"
wrote the distracted Sforza, "that I should find myself in my present
position, I would sooner have eaten the straw of my bed than have made
this marriage."
As a young girl, Lucrezia obviously arrested nobody's notice. This
alone suggests that she was not wicked: wickedness always at least
produces attention. To her first husband, when he wrote the above
letter, she could have held no kind of significance. Shortly after
sending it, however, Giovanni left Rome for his own town, Pesaro,
taking the girl he so much regretted marrying with him. He was not yet
openly on bad terms with the Vatican: in addition to his own wife, he
had been given charge of quite a collection of the Pope's ladies.
Julia Farnese, Madonna Adrienne, and Madonna Vanozza were all
included, an outbreak of the plague in Rome having terrified Alexander
as to the safety of the two younger women. Giovanni, probably, would
have preferred Lucrezia to have been less accompanied. Involved always
in this crowd of feminine connections, she must, as a young girl, have
worn almost a mechanical air of manipulation--have seemed little
better than a mouthpiece for the Vatican opinions. While they were at
Pesaro, however, husband and wife went through the momentarily uniting
experience of falling equally under the Pope's displeasure. They had,
it seems, permitted Madonna Julia and Madonna Adrienne to leave them.
Julia's brother was seriously ill, and the two women had gone to nurse
him. Upon this matter, Alexander, who could be very petulant when
thwarted, wrote himself, and not at dictation, to Lucrezia. He wrote
that he was much surprised at not having heard more often from them,
and in a tense and irritated sentence ordered the girl to be more
punctilious for the future. But this was not the real grievance, and
he passed instantly to the departure of Julia and her mother. Lucrezia
and Giovanni were both held to have behaved equally inexcusably in
letting them go without permission from Alexander. He wrote as if they
had been two disobedient children, whose deliberate frowardness had
resulted, as they must have known perfectly from the beginning, in
great annoyance to him personally. At the end of exasperated
remonstrance, they were warned that for the future they would never
again be trusted. A letter like this, including both in mutual
disgrace, might easily have fugitively roused a slight bond of
friendliness between so young a couple. The general opinion is,
notwithstanding, that they were never sympathetic. At Pesaro, besides,
though Lucrezia remained there a year, they were very seldom together.
Giovanni held the position of officer in the Pope's army, and it was a
year of sharp anxiety for Alexander. It required Charles VIII.'s
feeble return journey to France before the papal ground felt once more
solid under the pontiff's feet.
Then Lucrezia was recalled to Rome, and the old wayward existence at
her palace near the Vatican was taken up once more. From this time
onwards the Borgia scandals thickened with extraordinary rapidity,
becoming the interested gossip of every other court in Italy.
Alexander's youngest son, Jofre, had married a Spanish girl several
years older than himself, and upon the return of political quietude
brought her back with him to Rome. This Madonna Sancia alone piled up
a staggering accumulation of scandals for Italy to gasp at. She had a
passion, in her most innocent moments, for the less tranquil pleasures
of life. Her arrival whipped up the gaiety of social Rome into an
extremity of worldliness. She was openly flagrant: the word
"wickedness" seemed to have no more unpleasant meaning to her than
another. Both her husband's brothers, Giovanni and Cæsar Borgia, were
said to be among her lovers. Giovanni Borgia's subsequent murder, in
fact, was looked upon by many people as the outcome of her lack of
moral reasonableness, Cæsar's jealousy, it was thought, driving him to
thrust the other prematurely upon eternity. Between the gorgeous
wickedness of Sancia and Julia Farnese, Lucrezia was trailed like some
insignificant and unconsidered appendage. She is mentioned constantly
as in the society of Sancia, but no impropriety is even suggested
concerning her, until the divorce with Giovanni involved her in the
hate universally nourished against the rest of the family.
This divorce had been shaping ever since the French invasion had
rendered the Sforzas politically useless to Alexander. One day
Giovanni Sforza was bluntly requested to abandon Lucrezia. Should he
refuse, extreme measures were threatened, and no man so intimate with
the family could possibly have been unacquainted with the kind of
coercion likely to be employed should he maintain obduracy. For a few
days he went about hoarding rather more bitterness than he knew how to
deal with. Then a dramatic urgency brought indecision to an abrupt
conclusion. According to most accounts of the story, Jacomino,
_camerière_ to Giovanni Sforza, was in Lucrezia's room one day when
they heard Cæsar Borgia's footsteps outside. Lucrezia had already been
made cognizant of the pending divorce. Alexander and Cæsar never
regarded the soft and pliant creature as likely to need concealments.
She was to them obviously the perfect tool, childlike, flighty,
inherently docile, and moved by the least enticement to new
anticipations. But Lucrezia even then had some instincts her people
did not know of, and to deprive a man of the delight of living was not
endurable to her. She must have suspected some sinister communication,
for on hearing Cæsar's footsteps she thrust Jacomino behind some
tapestry. In the course of conversation, Cæsar stated that the order
to assassinate her husband had already been given. It sounds
incredible, but then the whole Borgia history has the same quality of
impossible melodrama. The moment he had gone Lucrezia rushed to the
curtains: the man must go at once and save his master. Twenty-four
hours later Giovanni Sforza reached Pesaro. His horse fell dead as he
arrived.
Gregorovius states that Lucrezia was not agreeable to the divorce. It
fits in pleasantly with one's conception of her to believe that this
was true. The Lucrezia of recent discovery would have been bound by a
light and gentle affection to any one not unkind to her, and all her
instincts would have been against giving pain to anybody. Certainly,
after Giovanni's escape, she felt the weight of some unpleasantness at
the Vatican. And shortly afterwards she either went, or was sent in
disgrace, to the convent of San Sisto on the Appian Way. In a letter
written that June by Donati Aretino to Cardinal Hippolyte D'Este, he
says: "Madonna Lucrezia has left the palace _insalutato hospite_, and
has gone to stay at a convent called San Sisto, where she still is. It
is rumoured by some that she desires to become a nun herself, but
there are a number of other rumours as well, of a nature not possible
to trust to a letter."
These "other rumours" are presumably the scandals which leapt into
belief after the divorce, and which Giovanni, embittered to the marrow
of his bones, is credited with having started.
But the divorce obtained, a new marriage was instantly negotiated for
the girl, whose ideas of customary conduct must have been so piteously
topsy-turvy. The new match contemplated was solely intended to
benefit Cæsar--in it Lucrezia became purely a means of assistance.
Cæsar, having renounced the priesthood after the mysterious murder of
his elder brother, which had taken place while Lucrezia was in the
convent, had conceived the scheme of marrying Charlotte of Aragon, and
through this marriage of becoming King of Naples. Since the French
invasion the present reigning dynasty crumbled visibly. Cæsar had
already asked for Princess Charlotte's hand, and had been emphatically
refused. It was hoped at the Vatican that Lucrezia's marriage to
Charlotte's brother, Don Alphonso, would pave the way for the other
and more important wedding. Lucrezia was eighteen at the time of her
second marriage, and, according to the ambassador of Mantua, really in
love with the handsome boy who made her Duchess of Biselli.
Unfortunately they remained in Rome, in the undesirable set Lucrezia
had belonged to from babyhood, and from this time horrible scandals
grew as thickly round Lucrezia as the rest of her family. According to
one of them, she had given birth to an illegitimate son, by a certain
favourite of Alexander's, Perotto. This unfortunate is another person
whom Cæsar is credited with having murdered. He did it apparently in
the Pope's very presence, and splashed the blood all over the old
man's garments. The existence of a child by Perotto is not
corroborated, and the truth of later scandals, since discussed with
bated breath, is less ascertainable still. At the same time, that
Lucrezia should have given birth to an illegitimate baby is very
feasible. In a society where lovers were more normal than husbands, it
is difficult to conceive that she should have escaped with flawless,
untarnished innocence--probably took a lover because she was young,
affectionate, and nobody she knew thought it grievous behaviour.
Nevertheless, though there is every reason for this individual scandal
to have had roots in truth, the evidence for its genuineness is
equally flimsy and unsupported.
For a year the Biselli marriage wore an air of ordinary
successfulness. Then the politics of the Vatican veered once more, and
tragically and brutally, Lucrezia's fate changed with them. Louis XII.
had started the second Italian campaign, and Alexander was now upon
the side of the French. Once more, therefore, the awkward factor in
the situation became Lucrezia's husband. It seemed, indeed, as if she
was to have a knack of possessing awkward spouses. In this second
crisis Lucrezia, however, did not wait to be warned of danger, and one
day Alphonso disappeared. A Venetian writer in Rome remarks: "The Duke
of Biseglia, husband of Madonna Lucrezia, has secretly fled, and is
gone to Genazzano, to the Colonnas. He has left his wife six months
_enceinte_, and she does nothing but cry." The statement is at last a
lifting of the veil for a second from the girl's character. She loved
this second husband; at the hint of danger she sent him away, but once
gone she cried for him all day. This is the whole conduct-sheet of any
normal, tender woman.