The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (12 page)

Isabella took her title of
prima donna
very seriously. She was antagonistic towards her sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia, who, having married Isabella’s brother Alfonso, eventually became Duchess of Ferrara. Isabella was rather disdainful about Lucrezia’s origins and made concerted efforts to slight her sister-in-law on visits to Ferrara.

Felice della Rovere wanted Isabella’s approbation. The Mantuan Marchesa’s good opinion of her could be transmitted across Italy’s most important cities: to Ferrara, where Isabella was more highly regarded than Lucrezia, who was reigning duchess there, and to Milan, where Isabella’s sister was duchess, not to mention Venice, Florence and Naples, the home of Isabella’s mother. Isabella could also reinforce Felice’s relations with Urbino, where her husband’s aunt was Elizabetta Gonzaga. There could be no more useful female friend to Felice. Eliciting the support of Castiglione was an important step in making overtures to the Marchesa.

Of further assistance in her endeavour was securing the approval of Gian Cristoforo Romano. A goldsmith and sculptor, Gian Cristoforo worked primarily at the Vatican court, striking papal medals. In January
1506
he participated with Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo in assessing the newly recovered Hellenistic statue of
Laocoön
, recently excavated from farmland near the Baths of Titus on the Esquiline Hill. Gian Cristoforo also had long-standing ties with Mantua, having produced the medallions gracing Isabella’s famous
studiolo
at the Palazzo Ducale. He continued to serve Isabella from Rome, acting as an agent in securing the precious artefacts she craved, and he corresponded regularly with her.

On
1
December
1505
, Gian Cristoforo wrote to Isabella, enticing her to come to Rome:

If your ladyship comes to Rome this Carnival, I guarantee you that you will be given beautiful things, and that you are awaited with great desire. I have already assured many cardinals that you are coming to Rome, and much affection would be bestowed upon you, and you will be so pleased by the place and the many different things that you will be sorry to leave and want to come back often. This will be so many in many respects because you would be so comfortable staying here amid sweet female companions, and especially that of Madonna Felice the daughter of the Pope, who is the most noble lady, of a noble intelligence and goodness, and dedicated to letters, antiquities, and all virtuous works, and a slave to your ladyship as she has repeated to me many times in speaking with her.
¹²

Gian Cristoforo’s words are designed as a letter of formal introduction for Felice to Isabella, calculated to win Isabella over. The artist and agent attests to Felice’s good character; he refers to her as both noble and good and it is clear that he wanted to present Felice as a woman with whom Isabella had a great deal in common. Felice was highly intelligent and shared Isabella’s humanistic interests. But Gian Cristoforo was also careful to ensure that Isabella should in no way feel threatened by Felice. He made no mention of Felice’s physical appearance; even if Felice had been exceptionally pretty, Isabella would not have been pleased to hear it. Although her poets claimed the contrary, Isabella was by no means a beauty herself. She did not like beautiful women, and was always reassured when Lucrezia Borgia’s attractiveness was contested. Nor did she care for painters to represent her as she truly was. Later called ‘dishonestly ugly’ by the salacious writer Pietro Aretino, in her fifties she made Tititan paint her twice.
¹³
She rejected the first painting the Venetian produced of her. This is no longer in existence, although in the seventeenth century Rubens was able to make a copy showing a rather broad woman in a bright red dress, heavily made up. Only the second painting, portraying her as a comely fifteen year old, met with her satisfaction.

Gian Cristoforo also took pains to make it clear that Felice did not think of herself as Isabella’s equal. He informed the Marchesa that Felice had told him ‘many times’ that she considered herself Isabella’s ‘slave’. Undoubtedly Felice knew of Isabella’s self-regard and temperament, and tailored her own presentation to ingratiate herself with the
prima donna
. Gian Cristoforo’s description of Felice as an intelligent, genteel and cultivated woman was an accurate one. It was his job to provide Isabella with honest assessments, whether of members of the Vatican court or of ‘a bronze panel with finely inlaid ancient figures’, such as he mentions in this very letter. Guaranteeing – a word Isabella liked to hear – that Felice was, as he said she was, a fitting companion for the Marchesa of Mantua was no less important than certifying the beauty and rarity of the works of art he secured for his patron.

Isabella perhaps felt sufficient malice towards Lucrezia Borgia to reciprocate Felice’s overtures of friendship simply in order to spite her sister-inlaw. It could show Lucrezia that while she disdained one pope’s daughter she was happy to spend time with another. But Isabella did in fact find Felice to be ‘the sweet companion’ Gian Cristoforo Romano had promised her. They formed a relationship that bordered on genuine friendship, but that certainly had a marked element of courtly expediency, each aware of the other’s usefulness.

chapter 6

The Education of Felice della Rovere

When Felice approached Isabella d’Este, it was as a woman who shared her scholarly interests. Felice’s dedication to ‘letters and antiquities’ was an important aspect of her strategy for acceptance into courtly circles; the Medici, d’Este and Gonzaga families all prided themselves on their learning and cultivation. A new age of humanism had arrived in Rome and Felice wanted very much to be a part of it. It allowed her to charm and impress such men as Baldessar Castiglione and Gian Cristoforo Romano, as well as the cardinals at the Vatican Palace. Felice was also aware that Lucrezia Borgia had set a precedent as an educated woman. Alexander VI’s daughter had even cultivated a kind of literary salon at her palace at Santa Maria in Portico, attended by such scholars and poets as Raffaello Brandolino, Serafino Aquilino and L’Unico Aretino. While Felice’s father would not approve of his daughter forming such a circle, with all its consequent publicity, he did not prevent her from forging friendships with scholars and poets who came to the Vatican.

The Bolognese poet Giovanni Filiteo Achillini cites Felice in the
Viridario
, a poem he composed in honour of various luminaries at the papal court at Christmas
1504
, in which he describes her as, ‘the lofty Felice, whose elegant manners deserve so much merit, praise and honour’.
¹
The Spoletan poet Pier Giustolo had worked for the Borgia and entertained hopes that Felice might become his new patron.
²
In
1506
, he wrote a poem about the time he had met Felice, two years earlier, on a summer visit to the fortress at Senigallia belonging to her uncle, Giovanni della Rovere.

Giustolo described how, on his own arrival at Sengallia, he had admired the fortress and Senigallia’s market but had been most taken with Felice herself. He praised her physical, moral and intellectual qualities. He also made much of her widowhood, and her appearance in a widow’s veil, which is seen to endow her with a certain mysterious unattainability. In anticipation of procuring future commissions, the poet wrote that he desired nothing more than to be able to sing her praise on the occasion of a future marriage.
³

Felice also actively solicited the help of those who could assist her with acquiring some kind of a humanist education.* She became acquainted with Scipione Carteromacho, a humanist scholar working as the secretary for her cousin Cardinal Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere. Carteromacho was a close friend of the Venetian Aldo Manutius, the most prolific publisher in early sixteenth-century Italy. On
11
December
1504
, he wrote to his colleague in Venice, ‘You remember how I wrote to you about having visited Madonna Felice and she commissioned me to write to you to find out what you have published in either Latin or the volgare [Italian], and if you would be willing to send her some work or another. I haven’t returned to see her, however, because I wanted to be able to tell her what she could have from you.’
⁴
A month later, on
13
January, he wrote again to Manutius, ‘I read some details of your letters to Madonna Felice, who took great pleasure from them, and asked me to thank you greatly and to recommend her to you. In fact she told me she is in constant desire for books, and so I am writing you to send what you could let her have. I ask you to address the books to me, so that I can continue to be the intermediary as I have been in word.’
⁵
Such a transaction assured Carteromacho would continue to work as Felice’s agent, and she be in his debt.

There is something poignant about Carteromacho’s account of Felice’s fervent desire for books. Over and beyond how books helped her appear to her best advantage in fashionable scholarly circles, they also served as her companions during those times when her father deliberately excluded her from courtly events. Books were a means to shut out the trials of ongoing bargaining, and negotiations for a husband she did not want. Reading was one of the great pleasures of Felice’s life. She came to possess magnificent volumes of such ancient authors as Pliny and Suetonius. These were manuscript editions, illustrated, bound in plush leathers and sealed with silver clasps. But such books were in large part for show, artefacts to be placed on display. The real testimony to the fact that she was a serious reader is her possession of numerous unnamed books. Bound in cheap vellum, they were of little monetary worth, cited in inventories of her property only by bulk, the equivalent of a stack of well-thumbed paperbacks today.

Felice was determined to focus on aspects of her personal identity and social connections that reached beyond a role as wife to an Italian lord. None the less, the issue of a new husband still loomed. Felice’s refusal of Roberto da Sanseverino had made her father really angry. The Duke of Urbino had declared that Julius wished to banish his daughter from Rome, Julius did not actually carry out this threat, although relations between himself and Felice did cool. He called a temporary halt to the line of bridegrooms that had been paraded before Felice since January
1504
. Following the Sanseverino incident, there is no mention of Felice in any Vatican-related documents until late in
1505
. Felice might have been made to return to Savona for much of
1505
, or perhaps she continued to stay at the de Cupis palace in Rome. Julius, in the meantime, had other matters demanding his attention.

chapter 7

Enter the Orsini

In
1505
Julius was also preoccupied with matters other than finding his increasingly irritating daughter a husband. This was the period in which he began his career as papal
maecenas
in earnest. Bramante’s work on the Vatican Palace complex continued. Giuliano da Sangallo, architect of the della Rovere palace in Savona, built the Pope a loggia on the south side of Castel Sant’ Angelo, complete with inscription on its frieze reading, ‘Iulius Pont Max Anno II’ (‘The second year of Julius’s pontificate’). It is still visible today.

February
1505
brought thirty-year-old Michelangelo Buonarotti to Julius. Michelangelo was by then unquestionably Italy’s most brilliant sculptor. He had been accommodated in Rome, at the Palazzo Riario (now Cancelleria), during
1496
–
97
while working for Julius’s cousin Raffaelle. For Riario he had produced the
Bacchus
sculpture now in the Bargello in Florence and, for a French cardinal, the exquisite
Pietà
, now in St Peter’s.
¹
Julius, exiled from Rome in the
1490
s, had yet to have the opportunity of employing the Florentine artist. Now he brought Michelangelo, fresh from working on the colossal
David
, back to Rome to plan what Julius wanted to be the greatest, the most magnificent, papal tomb imaginable. Michelangelo, thrilled at the prospect of creating something so extraordinary, spent several months in discussion with the Pope, and then went to Carrara to oversee the quarrying of marble that had to be perfect for such an enterprise.

Julius, meanwhile, turned to a project even dearer to him than his own tomb. Ever since he had been a cardinal, he had dreamed of re-creating St Peter’s church. He believed it was his destiny, that his uncle Sixtus had heard a divine voice telling him one of his nephews would become pope and rebuild the old, fourth-century basilica.
²
Julius turned to Bramante, his partner in design, to produce a church that would ‘embody the greatness of the present and the future’.
³
The crumbling Early Christian church was to be demolished and rebuilt as a grandiose domed interpretation of an ancient temple, a successor to the temple of Solomon. On
18
April
1506
, the ceremonial stone of New St Peter’s was laid. Only once this stone was in place did marriage plans for Felice begin again in earnest.

Felice turned twenty-three in
1506
. By the standards of the time, when girls of the elite married at fifteen and sixteen, she was old to be a bride. Although she was admired by members of the intelligentsia, forward-thinking men of their age, the same could not be said of the nobility, who had a more old-fashioned outlook. Felice was fast becoming a less than attractive marital prospect: illegitimate and to outward appearances, not especially beloved by her father; stubborn, blunt and past her first freshness. She herself undoubtedly knew she was rapidly reaching a point of no return. Young widows who did not remarry were not allowed to maintain the public, independent existence Felice had enjoyed in the previous few years. Eventually, they would be obliged to take holy orders and enter a convent. Felice della Rovere had not cultivated a character fashioned on ancient Roman heroines, or sought friends of the standing of Isabella d’Este, to spend the rest of her days cloistered.