Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (23 page)

8.A New Life

‘She is most beautiful of face, with vivacious, laughing eyes, upright in her posture, acute, most prudent, most wise, happy, pleasing and friendly’

—The Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, describing Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara, 2 February 1502

Ferrara, a northern river city on a flat plain ribboned with waterways and marshes, could hardly have been more different from Rome, some two hundred miles to the south. In the autumn heavy rains drenched the streets: now in winter, with chilling mists rising from the surrounding waters and the canals that bisected the town, its gaily painted battlements and gilded towers took on the appearance of a medieval miniature. And on 2 February 1502, the day appointed for Lucrezia’s formal entry into the city which was to be her home for the rest of her life, the scene was a blaze of colour.

The arrival of the bride destined to be the next Duchess of Ferrara had been the occasion for months of preparations intended to impress not just Lucrezia and her suite but also the envoys of all the powers represented and the citizens themselves with the ducal magnificence of the Este. Lucrezia crossed the bridge over the Po into the city through the fortified gate of Castel Tedaldo, where doctors of the University of Ferrara waited to hold a canopy of white silk over her. She was mounted on a splendid horse caparisoned in cloth of gold with gilded harness, and accompanied on foot by eight of Alfonso’s courtiers. This was fortunate for, a few moments later, the horse, startled by a shot, threw her and she had to be helped to her feet, laughing, and remounted on a mule which Ercole had thoughtfully provided. Riding beside her under the canopy in the place of honour was the ambassador of the King of France, signifying his approval of the marriage.
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The bridal procession then wound through the streets headed by seventy-five of Alfonso’s mounted crossbowmen in his red and white livery, wearing white plumed caps in the French style, followed by eighty trumpeters and twenty-four musicians playing woodwind instruments, then the Duchess of Urbino’s company, in black satin and velvet, with Alfonso and his brother-in-law, Annibale Bentivoglio, bringing up the rear. Alfonso rode a great bay horse, with trappings of purple velvet glittering with plates of beaten gold in high relief. He himself wore a tunic of grey velvet all covered with scales of beaten gold, a black velvet beret on his head, with laces of beaten gold and white plumes, and short boots of soft grey skin made from unborn calves. Behind him marched Lucrezia’s company, ten Spanish arquebusiers dressed in gold brocade and black velvet, followed by five bishops and the Ferrarese gentlemen and courtiers marching two by two with the Italian ambassadors. Lucrezia rode behind, then Ercole and the Duchess of Urbino side by side, followed by Geronima Borgia and Adriana de Mila, then Lucrezia Bentivoglio in a carriage covered with gold brocade and, following her, in twenty court carriages decorated in gold brocade and white silk drawn by white horses, the Ferrarese and Bolognese gentlewomen and damsels allotted by Ercole to attend the bride.

Lucrezia herself sparkled, her dress carefully noted by Isabella d’Este in one of her daily reports to her absent husband, Francesco Gonzaga. She wore a robe with long sleeves in the French style lined with ermine and decorated with interwoven stripes of cloth of gold and violet satin and over it a cloak of drawn cloth of gold open on one side to reveal its ermine lining. Bitterly, Isabella noted round Lucrezia’s neck a diamond and ruby necklace which had belonged to the Duchess Eleonora and on her head the headdress which Ercole had sent to Rome for her,
²
also undoubtedly a part of the family jewels since it was loaded with spinels, diamonds and sapphires and other precious stones, including very large pearls. ‘The jewellers,’ wrote Bernardino Zambotti, ‘estimated its worth at 30,000 ducats.’ Zambotti was equally impressed by Lucrezia’s baggage train of seventy-two mules caparisoned in her livery of yellow and mulberry and carrying her rich trousseau worth at least 200,000 ducats beyond the 100,000 in cash. He was very taken with the bride’s appearance (he gave her age as twenty-four although she was still only twenty-two – since other authorities overestimated her age, Lucrezia must have looked older than she actually was). ‘She is,’ he wrote, ‘most beautiful of face, with vivacious, laughing eyes, upright in her posture, acute, most prudent, most wise, happy, pleasing and friendly. ‘The people were pleased by her, he said, hoping therefore for help and good government from her and beyond that great benefit to the city, particularly by the authority of the Pope, ‘who loves this daughter of his above all things, as he has demonstrated with the dowry and the castles (Cento and Pieve) which he has conceded to Don Alfonso’. Lucrezia’s prize for completing the final part of her journey to Ferrara was another valuable consignment of Este family jewels presented to her that day, including a silver gilt mirror surrounded by rubies and diamonds.
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Winding through the streets of the city, past platforms of citizens declaiming the praises of Lucrezia and the Pope, the procession reached the piazza in front of the cathedral and the Palazzo del Corte, where two acrobats swung down on ropes from two towers to arrive simultaneously at the cathedral door, to the great amazement of the crowd. As soon as Lucrezia had dismounted at the palace, in the customary division of spoils Ercole’s crossbowmen seized the baldachin and fell to squabbling with Alfonso’s men over her mule, an argument won by Alfonso’s servants. At the head of the marble staircase (which still exists) she was greeted by Isabella, with Lucrezia Bentivoglio, three bastard daughters of Ercole’s brother Sigismondo d’Este, including one of the principal courtiers, Diana, Countess Contrari, and the ladies of the court, and taken through the Great Hall
(Sala Grande
) decorated with cloth of silver and gold and precious silks, and featuring two gilded giants with maces in hand. From there they proceeded to Ercole’s apartments in the Palazzo del Corte which had been specially prepared for the bridal couple, while Ercole himself retreated to newly decorated rooms in the Castel Novo.

After a short while Lucrezia and Alfonso were left alone together for the first time. Forced marriage or not, Alfonso found Lucrezia sexually attractive: that night, according to the report of Isabella’s chancellor to Francesco, he made love to her three times
(‘ha camminato tre miglia’).
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He continued to spend every night with her. What he did during the day was another matter, returning to his former ‘Prince Hal’ life of whores and low tavern companions. Lucrezia’s father, however, was characteristically delighted by the news, ‘particularly understanding that they continue to sleep together at night’, Beltrando Costabili, the Ferrarese envoy at Rome, reported, ‘although he has heard that Don Alfonso takes his pleasure in diverse places as a young man, His Holiness says that he does very well’.
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Although Ercole reported happily to the Pope that Alfonso and Lucrezia ‘gave each other pleasure’, that did not mean they loved each other. It was a marriage of state, eagerly entered into by the one, reluctantly by the other. Lucrezia was not attracted by Alfonso’s rough ways and manners and reserved character, but she had achieved her ambition and she was determined to make a success of her career as Duchess of Ferrara. She used charm and tact to consolidate her position. She had already won over the Este men; she even attempted to win over Isabella herself, but here she met with a polite, well-concealed rebuff. Isabella’s family pride was offended by this young cuckoo in the Este nest, resentful that anyone with Lucrezia’s background should occupy her mother’s place. She had her spy in the Este chancellery, Bernardino di Prosperi, a devoted follower who gave her daily news of Lucrezia’s progress, and whose letters, running into thousands, provide the best and most continuous contemporary account of Lucrezia’s life in Ferrara.

Isabella’s letters to her husband, describing the post-marriage festivities which took place during those carnival days at Ferrara, make clear her resentment. She was not, she made it plain, enjoying herself. There had been no boisterous
matinata
with the family and favoured courtiers waking the newly-wed couple with lewd jokes. Perhaps, since the bride could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a virgin, it was considered inappropriate by the Este. Lucrezia, reportedly ‘tired from her night’s engagement with her husband’, kept to her apartments with her household the next day and did not leave them until Isabella and her ladies came after dinner to take her into the Sala Grande for dancing. Lucrezia, with Isabella, the Duchess of Urbino, and Lucrezia’s company of Roman and Ferrarese ladies, sat on a tribune decorated with cloth of curled gold and tapestries. Isabella complained that the hall was so crowded that dancing was almost impossible and after two dances Ercole paraded 110 actors in their costumes for the five comedies by Plautus which were to be enacted over the following days. The party then went by covered way to the Palace of Justice (the Palazzo della Ragione) nearby, where there would be more space for plays. A stage was set up with painted wooden houses and castles and the company disposed themselves on specially constructed rows all around the room. The comedy the
Epidicus
was presented, interspersed with
moresche
—dancing tableaux – including a mock fight of gladiators. Isabella, like her sister-in-law and close friend Elisabetta da Montefeltro, the latter nine years older than Lucrezia, must have felt their noses out of joint at the younger woman’s glamour and her position at the centre of attention; they did not enjoy themselves. The first play, the
Epidicus,
always had been mediocre, Isabella told Francesco, although she went into detail about the four
moresche
, which featured soldiers, Moors and mock battles. There was no time to describe the variety and number of changes of Lucrezia’s dresses, she said, and complained of the numerous pickpockets operating there – one thief had been found hiding under the bed in the Palazzo Schifanoia and had robbed Cesare’s envoy of a valuable gold chain, for which he was hanged the next day as a deterrent to other.
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A tone of rancour and disparagement of Lucrezia ran through all accounts by Isabella and her entourage of the wedding festivities. The Marchioness of Cotrone wrote a letter of breathtaking sycophancy to Francesco Gonzaga featuring his wife as the star of the proceedings: on the day of Lucrezia’s entry, she wrote, Isabella overshadowed everyone in her ‘beauty and elegant appearance . . . grace and everything’, so much so that had Lucrezia been aware of this she would have made her entry accompanied by blazing candelabra. On the night of the ball, she reported, ‘As soon as your illustrious consort appeared in the room, all eyes turned where she went, and when she arrived among the ladies, she appeared as the sun does obscuring with its rays all the stars . . . Throughout this court one hears the two jesters, finely dressed in clothes given them by the Marchesana [Isabella] shouting out the royal behaviour of the Marchesana. In fact, my lord, the praise of all these feasts will be all for my excellent patroness and consequently of Your Excellency . . .’
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Isabella was infuriated by the time it took Lucrezia to rise and dress herself in the morning, as she complained to Francesco:

Yesterday we all had to remain in our rooms until the twenty-third hour because Donna Lucretia takes so long to rise and dress herself . . . and, it being Friday, there could be no dancing so at the twenty-third hour there began the comedy, Le
Bachide
, which was so long and tedious and without fine
intermezzi
that more than once I wished myself in Mantua to which it seems a thousand years before I will be able to return—both to see our little son and to get out of here where there is no pleasure at all. Your Lordship should not envy me for your not being here at this marriage because it is of such a coldness that I envy anyone who remained in Mantua.

She used the same words in a brief note to her brother-in-law, Sigismondo Gonzaga, the same day
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Isabella was never backward in singing her own praises to Lucrezia’s detriment. She did not have a moment to write in her own hand as she would have liked, she told her husband, because the whole day her brothers never left her alone nor did the gentlewomen who courted her because they could not see Lucrezia until she came down to the hall. ‘At the fifth hour of night we meet, at the seventh and eighth we go to bed. Just think how much pleasure I take from this and have pity on me.’ Just to underline the superiority of her own behaviour as compared with that of her new sister-in-law, she added a proud postscript: ‘I cannot refrain from saying in commendation of myself that I am always the first up and dressed.’

‘Coldness’ was again the theme of her next report: ‘Saturday passed with this coldness: the bride did not make herself visible, having spent the day washing her hair and writing letters . . .’
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This sin was compounded in Isabella’s eyes by Lucrezia’s making a private presentation that evening to Ercole of the papal brief rescinding the census. Isabella and Elisabetta amused themselves, meanwhile, by touring the city with Ferrante, Giulio and Niccolò da Correggio, returning to entertain the French ambassador who had invited himself to dine. After dinner the ladies and ‘some Frenchmen and Spaniards sent by the Lady’ danced
il ballo del capello
(the hat dance) and finally, by general request, she said, Isabella sang, accompanying herself on the lute. On Sunday in the cathedral the Pope’s representative presented Alfonso with the sword and cap blessed by the Pope at Christmas, and that evening Isabella and Elisabetta, with the Este brothers, fetched Lucrezia to the Sala Grande to dance for two hours, during which time Lucrezia danced some
basse francese
with one of her damsels ‘very gallantly’, as even Isabella admitted. There was yet another comedy, the
Miles Gloriosus,
and
intermezzi
. The following day, from the balcony of the Torre di Rigobello of the palace, Lucrezia and the company watched a joust in the piazza between a Mantuan knight and a Bolognese, in the course of which the Bolognese’s horse was killed. This, according to Isabella, was a victory for the Mantuan, who shouted
‘Turco! Turco!’,
the Gonzaga battle cry. This bloodthirsty spectacle was followed by another comedy, the
Asinaria,
and a Mantuan composition by the celebrated singer and composer Tromboncino, who again performed an
intermezzo
to the comedy
La
Cassina
the next day, when a
barzelleta
in honour of the bridal couple was sung. Later six violas were played, one of them by Alfonso himself. That morning, 6 February, Ercole presented Lucrezia with what Isabella described as ‘almost all the remaining jewels’, including diamonds, rubies, turquoises and pearls set in gold or fashioned into head ornaments.
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Following this the ambassadors had given her their wedding presents – rich pieces of cloth, crimson velvet cloaks from the Venetians, curled cloth of gold from the Florentines and two silver vases from the Sienese.