Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (47 page)

16. The Last Year of Tranquillity

‘Thus conditions were at peace in Italy and beyond the mountains’

– Francesco Guicciardini, writing of the year 1518

As Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia was required to be both splendid and domestic, playing a multitude of roles – Governor of the state, leader of a brilliant court, hostess, mother and wife. The suspension of military operations against Ferrara allowed her and Alfonso to enjoy life in the city and to continue to beautify their surroundings, a process necessarily interrupted by war.

Carnival of 1518 was exceptionally gay: at the instance of the Cardinal d’Aragona, Alfonso issued an edict permitting masking in the streets, although for fear of violence the maskers were only allowed to carry staves of a specified dimension and length. The usual spate of pre-Lenten marriages took place, among them that of one of Lucrezia’s damsels, the daughter of Giovanni Valla to Ippolito da li Banchi. An unusual feature of the carnival festivities was tilting at the quintain by both young men and girls with lances of considerable size—‘including one Madonna of ours [i.e. Ferrarese] I leave to your imagination which one it was’, di Prosperi primly commented. Even the young princes, Ercole and Ippolito, took part, ‘with such dexterity that it was a pleasure to see them’, he said. There was dancing in the Corte for three evenings running before the end of carnival.

But now, from 18 February, di Prosperi wrote, ‘at court every one is keeping a Lenten way of life, even the little lords’. Alfonso had exempted them so that they could eat meat but they had pleaded with him to allow them to keep to the Lenten diet. Lucrezia was ill with a fever but she had kept Lent, as had Alfonso and the children.

The consumption of food throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe was governed by the dictates of the Church and regulated by a precise annual rhythm which predicated dietary regimes. According to the Church abstinence from eating meat and all animal products, including, to the distress of many, cheese, was the rule on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday as well as on the eve of important festivals and, of course, the forty days of Lent. Since for them fresh fish was always in relatively short supply and the prices high on days of
‘magro’,
the poor confined themselves to beans, chickpeas, fruit and vegetables while for the rich, as Antonio Costabili’s banquet for Fabrizio Colonna showed, abstinence from meat was scarcely a hardship.

Due to the difficulty of keeping food fresh, the predominant taste in dishes of the day was of preservatives – salt or sugar. In Lucrezia’s kitchen, the pig was the most useful animal, prepared in various ways and used in the making of salami, and sausages (
zambudelli
) and prosciutto. Salted ox tongues were also appreciated for their practicality. Sugar and spices from the East were important ingredients – among them pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and tamarind, as were vegetables – radishes, carrots, garlic, onions, spring onions and leeks. Scented herbs were much in use – notably basil, sage, bay, marjoram, mint and rosemary. Sugar was the predominant luxury article in cooking, in meat and fish dishes as well as confectionery; it came via Venice from the Orient or via Genoa from Portuguese Atlantic sources, notably Madeira. Fruits in syrup of sugar and spices were particularly appreciated by Isabella d’Este who frequently requested them from Lucrezia’s ‘Vincentio spetiale’. They also raised capons, calves, peacocks and guinea fowl
(galline da India
), kid, ducks and swans, supplemented by game in season, and, given the lagoons, waterways and lakes of the Po area, they ate a great variety of fish, notably eels from Comacchio and
carpioni
provided by Isabella from Lake Garda. Then there were cheeses and pasta dishes.

Banquets were a ritual affair, often a movable feast held in different rooms at different seasons, with trestle tables covered with white cloths, napkins and choice decorations, the dressers or buffets (
credenze
) loaded with the family silver and gold plate, and crystal flasks. In the recent years of war, the Este plate – including Lucrezia’s – had much of it disappeared in pawn or been melted down to provide finance for the defence of Ferrara, and the court had been reduced to eating off pottery made by Alfonso himself. Tapestries would be specially hung. Guests were offered perfumed water with which to wash their hands at the beginning of the meal and between courses – scented with rose petals, lemon, myrtle, musk; even the toothpicks were scented and the cloths changed after each course were often decorated with sweet – smelling herbs. Hot courses of at least eight dishes each from the kitchen alternated with cold courses served from the
credenza
and, at Lucrezia’s court, the whole elaborate performance – the decoration of the table,
credenza
and room, the service and the organization of the musical accompaniment and
intermezzi
– was planned and choreographed by the most famous scalco, or steward, of the century, Cristoforo da Messisbugo, who entered the Este service in 1515. He came from an old Ferrarese family and his social status was high enough for him to have entertained Alfonso twice in his own house; his book, the
Banchetti
, published posthumously, was a bestseller. In entertainments, as in theatre and buildings, the Este court of the late fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century set the standard for the other Italian courts.

Lucrezia’s accounts books show the extent of her involvement in the running of her household. On 24 January 1516, for example,
^I
her chancellor lists twenty-five heifers each known by name, among them ‘Violet’ and ‘Rose’. A five-page bill details her commissions for shoes for herself and her household including Girolamo Borgia, Cesare’s son. Another accounts book for 1507 details payments by ‘Vincenzi banchero’ (Vincenzi the banker) on Lucrezia’s orders to a variety of recipients: to a Domenico Sforza for two flasks of Malvasia wine; to Ascanio da Vilaforo, bookseller, for binding seven books for Lucrezia; salaries for her staff including the faithful ‘Sanzo spagnolo’, Tullio, a member of Giovanni Borgia’s household, Bartolommeo Grotto, his tutor, and Cola, another of his servants; a payment to her gentleman, Sigismondo Nigrisolo, for the cost of a coffer he gave to Dalida de’Puti, Lucrezia’s singer; to a chairmaker, a table-decker (
aparecchiador);
Tromboncino and Porino, singers; il Cingano, ‘the Gypsy’, a favourite of Alfonso’s; to jewellers; a Spanish (probably Jewish) embroiderer; a saddler; a ‘Chatelina del forno’, possibly a member of the formidable family of Masino and El Modenese; and Tomaso da Carpi, a painter.
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The official annual accounts were conscientiously signed by Lucrezia herself. She was still signing them in the last year of her life.

Alfonso had now resumed work on new rooms in the Corte and his own particular
camerini
in the
via coperta
. In 1508, before war had interrupted him, he had begun work on a ‘studio of fine marbles’ designed for his collection of statues, ancient and modern, and other antiquities and had already completed a small new chapel constructed of fine marble and nutwood from Venice next to the rooms. That same year he had taken delivery of a series of marble reliefs from the sculptor Antonio Lombardo which he had ordered two years previously for his ‘Studio di Marmo’. Twenty-eight of these are now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, one of which is dated and inscribed ‘In 1508 Alfonso, third Duke of Ferrara, established this for his leisure and tranquillity’, while another bears a quotation from Cicero expressive of Alfonso’s reserved character – ‘Never less alone than when alone’. Early in 1518 di Prosperi recorded Alfonso’s building operations as proceeding ‘at a furious pace’.
³
He was widening part of the
via coperta
and building above it a sumptuous set of new rooms. By early April they were working on the fabric and the windows, so that now the family dined in the first
camera dorata.
On the 17th, despite suffering from gallstones for which he was purging himself and taking ‘
syropi
’, Alfonso was reported as taking great pains over the scaffolding of his rooms. The outside walls of the
camerini
had been finished and the marble floors laid within by the end of August.
⁴
On 4 October di Prosperi reported that Alfonso was overseeing daily the completion of the
camerini
, where the glass and wooden frames of the windows had already been installed though their surrounds had not been finished and it was doubted that Alfonso would be able to sleep there that winter. When Isabella saw it, he said, she would find it twice as pleasing as she had found it before: ‘the more so that in that small piazza stalls have been set up as they used to be to sell goods as they did in the great piazza, to give a more pleasant aspect. Among other things you will see above all the exits to these
camerini
various heads and figures by antique and modern sculptors, and the studio most beautifully decorated and with its fine pavement . . .’

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