The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (14 page)

Gian Giordano might have been able to buy back some property with money from Julius, but the sum seemed somewhat paltry in comparison to the dowry Julius gave Felice’s cousin Lucrezia. Marcantonio Colonna received
10
,
000
ducats and his palace at the church of Dodici Apostoli (adjacent to the Colonna family palace) as well as the town of Frascati. Nor was it just a matter of money. Julius evidently sought also to embarrass Felice by the manner in which he ordered her to be married. In November of
1505
he had arranged for the marriage of his nephew Niccolò to Laura Orsini, daughter of Orso Orsini and Giulia Farnese, Alexander VI’s mistress. That marriage was celebrated in the Pope’s Vatican apartments and the union blessed by Julius himself. Felice was present to witness it, and to see the gold necklace set with a diamond, two emeralds and a ruby worn by the bride, a gift from the Pope. A book of poems was commissioned to commemorate the wedding. A similar celebration was conducted for the marriage of Lucrezia della Rovere and Marcantonio Colonna, after which there was a public procession from the Vatican to the Colonna palace. The wedding ceremony offered to the Pope’s daughter could not have been more different.

chapter 9

The Orsini Wedding

Felice della Rovere’s wedding was staged over
24
and
25
May
1506
. Julius issued a public ordinance, banning any public celebration of the event: ‘The Pope does not wish there to be any demonstrations, as Pope Alexander would have done, because she is his daughter,’ wrote Sanuto.
¹
The nuptial ceremony did not take place within the Vatican Palace, but instead in the palace belonging to her cousin Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere, Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli, who had taken part in the negotiations to transfer Felice’s dowry to Gian Giordano. This palace, then known as the Cancelleria, the Chancellery, and now as the Palazzo Sforza Cesarini, was originally built in
1458
, when its patron, the della Rovere nemesis, Alexander VI, was still Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. It was appropriated by the della Rovere family to serve as a demarcation of della Rovere territory on the other side of the river from the Vatican palace. Julius would soon begin the construction of a street alongside it, the Via Giulia. Cut, according to ancient prescriptions, as straight as an arrow, the Via Giulia stands to this day in sharp contrast to the winding streets of the medieval city.

So Felice was married in a setting connected with her family, but the Cancelleria was well removed from the Vatican Palace, the site of her cousins’ weddings. Moreover, Julius, whose name appeared nowhere on the dowry settlement, was conspicuous by his absence from his daughter’s wedding. Paris de Grassis, the pernickety master of ceremonies at the Vatican Palace, was in charge of its organization and he wrote a lengthy description of what took place.

Paris de Grassis found several aspects of the event decidedly off-putting. He described the union as ‘doubly bigamous’, a reference to the fact that both Felice and Gian Giordano had been married previously, and he expressed doubts as to whether the union should receive official ecclesiastical blessing.
²
The wedding was staged in two parts. The first, on the Sunday, was an announcement of the terms of the marriage. No women attended this ceremonial business meeting and Felice herself was represented by her cousin, Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere. Among those present were twelve cardinals, eleven of whom, Paris de Grassis noted, were wearing red hats, but one, Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X, had chosen to wear a purple one. Giovanni de’ Medici was an Orsini on his mother’s, Clarice’s, side, so perhaps he felt entitled to vary his appearance. Paris de Grassis, however, felt this was excessive and commented, ‘It would have been better if he had worn one that was the colour red.’ Felice’s uncle, Giovanni della Rovere, the Prefect of Rome, was present, as were the French, Spanish and Imperial ambassadors, and numerous members of the Orsini family.

This first part of the ceremony took place in the Cancelleria’s grand hall. Paris de Grassis had readied the room with carpets, twelve armchairs for the prelates and a stool with a velvet cushion for the Prefect. The other guests were seated on long benches covered in leather, arranged on all four sides of the room. Two notaries arrived, Signor Tancredi from the Camera Apostolica to act on behalf of the bride, and, on the groom’s side, Prospero d’Aquasparta, who announced the amount of Felice’s dowry and the terms of its disbursement. While these proceedings were taking place, Gian Giordano did not sit still but got up to greet his new relatives, Galeotto and Giovanni della Rovere.

The following day saw the actual celebration of the union. Paris de Grassis comments that Gian Giordano Orsini wished to adhere not to Roman nuptial customs but to those of the French and Spanish. For superstitious reasons, the groom preferred the wedding rings not be exhibited, but instead placed on the finger of the wedding celebrant, his cousin Rinaldo Orsini, the Archbishop of Florence. The rings themselves, Paris de Grassis noted, were poor things, worth no more than a couple of ducats. Although the ceremony was due to start at four o’clock, last-minute astrological consultation meant Gian Giordano insisted on a delay until seven. Felice was obliged to sit and wait for these three hours in the chapel. In the meantime, her bridegroom arrived at the Cancelleria ‘not in wedding dress, but in hunting garb, with leather leggings and rough boots, a cheap felt hat, an untrimmed beard, uncombed hair and dismal clothes’. He used the time to call a barber and dress himself in more appropriate attire, a velvet tunic and hat, and a gold chain. De Grassis includes no description of Felice’s wedding gown, or whether she wore any jewels, which suggests that she was plainly dressed for a bride on her wedding day.

Gian Giordano injected several elements into the ceremony that were entirely alien both to his bride and to the onlookers. At one point he removed a handkerchief from his jerkin, which he gave to the celebrant, instructing him to give it to the bride, who evidently had no idea what she was supposed to do with it. And that was not the end to poor Felice’s discomfort. After the rings and the vows had been exchanged, and the pair declared husband and wife, Gian Giordano turned to Felice and bestowed on her what Paris de Grassis calls in Latin an
osculo galico
– a French kiss. ‘That is to say,’ he wrote, ‘one between her lips and teeth, which caused the bride to redden, and the onlookers to both admire and laugh.’

Following the
osculo galico
, Gian Giordano and Felice immediately consummated their marriage in Cardinal Galeotto della Rovere’s undoubtedly lavishly appointed bedchamber. Such a practice ensured that neither side could attempt to annul the marriage later on grounds of non-consummation. They were at least spared onlookers, as Paris de Grassis stresses that no guest was present. That did not prevent those outside the door speculating on what was going on behind it. Emilia Pia, in an account of the occasion which she sent to Isabella d’Este, states that ‘they lay together fifteen minutes. Many believed that they were performing other “secret” acts’ – a reference to the unexpected and exotic French kiss.
³

Following this brief act of sexual union, the entire wedding party then proceeded to the palace of Monte Giordano. Here, Paris de Grassis, who, befitting his position as master of ceremonies, disliked untidiness and lack of protocol, remarked on the Orsini palace’s state of disarray. There were piles of wood everywhere, partially dismantled walls and blocked-up doors. Gian Giordano still did not have the resources, or perhaps the inclination, given his constant absence from Rome, to repair the damage the Colonna had wrought on his home almost twenty years earlier. Paris also noted that only now was new furniture, presumably for the bride, including a bed, being carried into the palace.

Perhaps the politeness customary to his position precluded Paris de Grassis from saying any more than that. Emilia Pia, however, provided a much more forthright account of what occurred after they left the Cancelleria. An appropriate and decorous journey from the Cancelleria to Monte Giordano would have been for the party to have ridden up the Via Papalis, the central artery linking the two palaces. Instead, they went on foot, down a seedy street, the Via del Pozzo Bianco (‘White Well’), named for a white marble sarcophagus that served as a drinking fountain. The journey was short but highly inappropriate none the less. Emilia Pia wrote:

[Gian Giordano] wished to take a certain street called Pozzo Bianco where stand women of ill repute, even though it was said that he should take another way...The women who were with Madonna Felice were Madonna Giulia [Farnese, mother to Laura Orsini, Felice’s cousin Niccolò’s new wife] and the daughter and the sisters of the Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli. Madonna Giulia turned and said with certainty that if the bridegroom was a gentleman then he would have taken another route. As they approached Monte Giordano, a great many sweets [
confecti
] were thrown from the windows and the groom took his hat from his head and put it on the bride’s, but she refused it, and thus they entered the palace. The rooms were badly decorated and the meal was worse, especially as nothing had been served at the Cancelleria. There were two shoulders of mutton, half a lamb and half a kid, a capon and three bowls of white veal...These things were served on one plate in the French style, there was not a single knife on the table, and so many did not stay, as they could not tear the meat apart with their fingernails. When the groom came to the table he performed certain ceremonies in the Spanish fashion, such as placing his hat on the head of a page while he dined; and at dinner he demonstrated his expertise in the French and Spanish languages, which appeared to be his only virtues.
⁴

The day following this peculiar and, for many concerned, wholly un-Italian event the couple departed Monte Giordano. ‘At dawn,’ wrote Paris de Grassis, ‘Gian Giordano left for his home at Bracciano, where he will leave his wife.
⁵
Felice’s new life as an Orsini family member had begun.

The end to Felice’s old life saw her father banning public celebration of her wedding, and staying away from the ceremony. She had a bridegroom who had behaved in a decidedly eccentric fashion, and offered her a wedding breakfast of frugal victuals in a palace in sore need of repair. These are hardly the tokens of a romantic event – one supposed to mark every woman’s life – even by the very businesslike standards of the Italian Renaissance. Nor would they seem to signify an auspicious future. But neither was the new
Signora
of Bracciano a standard romantic heroine. Felice might have been disconcerted by such an unlikely start to her second marriage. However, her refusal to wear her new husband’s hat shows she had no intention of relinquishing her sense of self and strength of will simply because she was newly married. Despite the slights inflicted on her by her father, and her new husband’s eccentricities, the twenty-three-yearold Orsini bride was already plotting how to utilize her new position to its best advantage. She could now campaign for the rewards, the power, control and validation she craved, that she believed were rightfully hers, and thus far largely missing from her young life.

part iii

Felix of the Oak and the Bear

chapter 1

A Bride at Bracciano

At dawn on
26
May
1506
, Felice della Rovere Orsini, as she would now be addressed, weary from the endless events of the previous day, mounted a horse and set out with her new husband to his titular castle of Bracciano thirty kilometres to the north of Rome. Felice’s journey was different from the one she normally took when she left Rome. Her trips to and from Savona were always by sea, sailing on galleons from the port of Ostia; as a result, she had seen very little of the Italian countryside. Now she was riding along the Via Clodia, an ancient road constructed in the first century
ad
. She journeyed through hilly, densely wooded land, admired since antiquity for its beauty, home to Italy’s oldest settlements, where thousands of Etruscans still lie in tombs cut in the soft tufa, the volcanic rock. Almost all of what Felice could see around her was Orsini country; one branch or another of the family possessed nearly everything north of Rome all the way to Viterbo.

In the early hours of her first day as
La Signora
of the Orsini family, Felice quickly became conscious of just how great a departure she had made from her old life. Much of the journey was strange for her, and not only the sights of the Roman countryside. She had never travelled on horseback over such a distance. For a young woman who had grown up in a city, mules were the usual mode of transport. These sure-footed animals were more popular in an urban environment than horses and
mulatieri
, mule drivers, were the taxi-drivers of their day.

In fifteenth-century Florence, Cosimo, the driving force of the Medici family, rode a brown mule; in sixteenth-century Rome, Michelangelo riding his white mule about town and around his neighbourhood near Trajan’s Column was a familiar sight. If she was travelling alone, Felice still often chose a mule over a horse. However, when travelling with her
condottiere
husband, she switched to riding horses. Soldiers did not ride mules, and decorum and practicality dictated that a woman should have the same kind of mount as her husband. Recent decades of horse-breeding, instituted by men such as Gian Giordano, who had spent time in France, had resulted in a mount that was easier for women to ride: short, stocky Italian warhorses had been bred with sleeker French equines to create a more slender animal.
¹
Men rode stallions; women rode mares or geldings. And women rode side-saddle. The Italians, Europe’s most sophisticated riders, were responsible for developing a pommel on the side-saddle to secure the female rider’s seat. Felice was fortunate; women of the Middle Ages had been obliged simply to sit sideways and hold on.
²
And the pace at which Felice now rode to Bracciano was different too. A mule going from the Piazza Navona to the Vatican Palace rarely exceeded a trot on the city streets. Now she was obliged to canter and gallop to cover large stretches of terrain, moving from city palace to country castle. Not so far into the future, Felice the city girl would become an experienced judge of horseflesh, knowledgeable about hunting and saddlery.