The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (22 page)

The history of what Felice did with these cartoons is somewhat fragmentary but compelling none the less. In
1517
, Fra Mariano da Firenze produced a guidebook to the sights of Rome, both old and new. ‘At the beautiful church of Trinità dei Monti’, he wrote, ‘is a chapel belonging to Gian Giordano Orsini with work by Michelangelo, prince of painters.’
³
In
1568
, in his second edition of the
Lives of the Artists
, Giorgio Vasari, describing the
Last Judgment
that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel, writes, ‘It has been found that many years before Michelangelo made various sketches and designs [of the
Fall of the Rebel Angels
], one of which was made into a work in the church of the Trinity in Rome by a Sicilian painter who had served Michelangelo for many months as a colourgrinder.’
4
Vasari was dismissive of the Sicilian’s execution of the fresco, but he notes that the work conveys ‘a power and variety in the attitude and grouping of these naked figures raining from the sky and falling to the centre of the earth, counter-posing with the different forms of the devils who are most frightful and bizarre. It is certainly a capricious fantasy.’ It seems significant that it was a member of Michelangelo’s workshop who carried out the actual painting, a condition possibly laid down by Michelangelo himself, who was notoriously secretive. He had loathed other painters being shown his work in progress on the Sistine Chapel – and was doubtless fearful lest any of his rivals get their hands on his master drawings. Sadly, this chapel was destroyed in the late seventeenth century. However, a record of its frescos remains in what is probably a drawing made of them by the Florentine painter Bronzino, an associate of Vasari, depicting the
Fall of the Rebel Angels
. Its dramatically tumbling figures and naked forms are heavily Michelangesque in tone.
⁵
Peter Paul Rubens, an inveterate copier and adapter of Italian pictorial design, might also have stopped by Trinità dei Monti and the image that he saw there found its way into a
Last Judgment
he painted, albeit one populated by predictably lush-looking, naked women. Even if Vasari found the quality of the chapel’s fresco lacking, both Bronzino and Rubens, major artists of their day, found the chapel worthy of study and note. Any association with Michelangelo was always a major draw for artists wanting to hone their craft.

That Fra Mariano described the chapel as belonging to Gian Giordano Orsini might lead one to think that at the most Felice acted only as an intermediary between Michelangelo and her husband in his acquisition of the cartoons. Fra Mariano’s error was not uncommon; there are several chapels in Rome that belonged to and were paid for by women that are later recorded as belonging to their husbands. But a will Felice was to write in
1518
makes it clear that the chapel was hers. The will specifies that she left
1000
ducats ‘for the adornment of her chapel in the church on the Monte Pincio, which shall be used to fabricate a sepulchre and to repair the altar cloth’.
⁶
A thousand ducats, even minus the cost of the altar cloth, was a splendid sum, but would not have bought Felice a tomb fashioned by the hands of Michelangelo himself. However, as with the walls of the chapel, it might have purchased a design from him to be executed by another, and that might have been Felice’s plan for the completion of her chapel.

Michelangelo’s frescos, acquired and transferred into what she intended to be her burial chapel, formed the centrepiece of an entirely Felicitious space. Felice did not choose Trinità dei Monti as the site of her chapel accidentally. The church, replete with della Rovere family associations, was as Roverian as the Sistine Chapel. The religious order at the church was the Minims, a branch of the Franciscans, the order to which her father and her uncle Sixtus had belonged. Their founder was Francesco di Paola, a southern Italian credited with the ability to perform miracles, including healing the sick. This particular talent led the cunning Sixtus to send him to France, ostensibly to serve as healer to the superstitious and hypochondriac King Louis XI, but actually to work as a spy for the papal court. His mission undetected, Francesco di Paola became enormously popular at the French court, as spiritual adviser to Louis and later to Anne of Brittany and several French princesses.
⁷

In part as reward for Francesco di Paola’s excellent political service, Julius gave his order strong support. In
1506
, a year before the friar’s death, Julius issued a bull establishing the Minims as an order in their own right. In
1512
, he began the canonization process for Francesco; it was completed by Leo X in
1519
.
⁸
Julius also raised a significant sum of money to contribute towards the building of a church for the order, and granted indulgences for attending Mass on feast days, thereby ensuring a larger congregation than the infant order might otherwise attract. Over the course of the sixteenth century, Trinità dei Monti came to have a special appeal for the Roman elite.
⁹
Francesco di Paola created a branch of the ‘Third Order’, a spiritual group for aristocratic men and women. Significantly, the original Third Order had been created by St Francis and Jacopa dei Normanni, an ancestor of Felice. If she was a
terziara
(tertiary), Felice was not a very active member. She did not make a public show of her own spirituality. She preferred to have Mass said privately and travelled with portable altar apparatus to avoid having to attend public Mass. None the less, she did maintain ties with the Third Order, as their general came to see her towards the end of her life to ask for her help in freeing two friars imprisoned in Castel Sant’ Angelo.

Felice found the Minims and their church appealing because of their association with her family. That still does not explain why she would not erect her chapel in another della Rovere church, such as Santa Maria del Popolo, or in her father’s titular church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The real reason why she invested the Michelangelo part of her Julian legacy at Trinità dei Monti is that the surrounding space offered her exceptional opportunity for personal self-expression within the city of Rome.

Trinità dei Monti is situated on the Pincian Hill, at the very top of what are today the Spanish Steps. In Felice’s time the church was surrounded by
vigne
, literally vineyards, though that did not mean that the land was solely used for growing grapes. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, villas, such as those of the Medici (today the Académie Française) and the Ludovisi families began to dot the Pincio. The hill offered a marvellous combination of bucolic environment and splendid panoramas of Rome, with easy access to the city below. Felice della Rovere was, however, the first Renaissance figure to take advantage of the Pincio’s attractions.

Significantly, it was Gian Giordano’s family who owned the
vigna
behind and to the right of the Trinità church, which was situated on Orsini land. Gian Giordano had his own sympathies with the Minims, given that Francesco di Paola was so entrenched at the French court. Also located on the Orsini
vigna
was a small church. Disused and partly in ruins, it did none the less have its
campanile
, its bell tower, intact, and it became the basis for the foundation of a palace. Known later as the Villa Malta, it was to become the site where German scholars and artists, such as Johannes Winckelmann and Angelika Kauffman, gathered.
¹⁰

Two thousand ducats of Felice’s money, another part of her Julian inheritance, went towards renovating and converting the property. The investment was sufficiently large a sum for Felice to claim it as hers in the years to come, separate from the Orsini estate. For her, the establishment of such a residence had particular resonance. The abandoned church had been a popular pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages. It had been dedicated to a martyred pope, San Felice. The
chiesa
of San Felice became the
palazzo
of Madonna Felice.

This land not only had personal meaning for Felice; it carried an ancient pedigree as well, as the site of the famed ancient gardens of the late Republican Lucullus, who had famously planted exotic Asian flora. Messalina, wife of the Emperor Claudius, was so enchanted by Lucullus’ gardens that she plotted to have him put to death in order to claim them as her own. Rather than be tortured and executed, Lucullus committed suicide. Messalina also met her own end in the gardens she had so coveted.

It can easily be imagined how such a history contributed to the prestige of the site that Felice developed. She had a palace built out of the structure of a famed pilgrimage site, adjacent to a church containing her chapel, decorated with designs by Michelangelo. She also developed the land, landscaping a garden as an area separate from the
vigna
. In many ways, the Mons Pincius became Felice’s own Mons Vaticanus: a combination of pastoral landscape and palatial residence with a palatine church in the shape of Trinità dei Monti.

For a woman whose relationship with her father had been so ambivalent, Felice had profited by being the daughter of the former Cardinal Giuliano. Undoubtedly, in her own way, Felice mourned her father’s death. Julius had not always been very kind to her. He had not exactly nourished her filial affection towards him. He had not always given her the things that she wanted and indeed earned. Yet Felice could say with pride that she was her father’s daughter: she had many of his qualities and she knew how to put them to good use. When her father died, this thirty-year-old woman might have remembered herself at twenty, the age she had been when Julius had ascended the papal throne. A great deal had happened to her in that decade. She now had position, authority, respect and influence, not to mention a castle, and a palace of her very own.

Best of all, Felice did not have to feel any trepidation on her father’s death, as she had when he became pope. Now that there was a new pope from Florence, with acolytes of his own, there were many clerics in the Julian inner circle whose influence would start to wane. But Felice’s own power and prestige would not diminish. In May
1512
, after several childless years, she had at last given birth to a son, an heir for Gian Giordano. By the time of her father’s death, ‘Madonna Felice, the daughter of the Pope’ knew another role lay ahead of her. That Felix Ruveris Ursinis might one day become
gubernatrix
of the Orsini of Bracciano was now a distinct possibility.

part iv

Patrona et Gubernatrix

chapter 1

A Trip to Loreto

On
3
October
1511
, Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, the Medici secretary at the Vatican, informed Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the future Clement VII, in his daily report to Florence that ‘Signor Gian Giordano and Madonna Felice have recently returned from Loreto’.
¹
He did not specify the purpose of their visit, but everyone knew that Loreto was a pilgrimage location. Loreto, set on a hilltop in the eastern province of the Marche under the jurisdiction of the nearby town of Recanati, was the site of the Casa Santa, the ‘holy house’ where, according to legend, the Virgin Mary had lived as a girl, and in which she had conceived the Christ Child. Of course, the little stone house had originally stood in Nazareth, but the story went that it had been flown to Italy on the wings of angels to save it from the infidels. In reality, in
1291,
during the crusades, knights had brought back with them a dwelling they believed to be Mary’s Nazareth home from the Holy Land, transporting its stones to Dalmatia. Later it arrived by ship across the Adriatic to the port of Ancona, fifteen kilometres east of Loreto.
²

Felice’s family had a particular connection with the Casa Santa and its surroundings. Her cousin Girolamo Basso della Rovere, who had been served by her stepfather, Bernardino de Cupis, as
maestro di casa
, had been the absentee Bishop of Recanati and Loreto. He had sent Bernardino as his representative to attend to administrative matters in the two towns. The
maestro di casa
had become popular in his master’s diocese and in
1488
the people of Recanati promised that on the birth of his first son they would send a delegate to Bernardino’s home in Rome to serve as ‘godfather in the name of the community’
³
to stand at the baptism and present Bernardino’s wife, Lucrezia, with a gift of
25
ducats.

In
1507
, Julius, who had a special devotion to the Virgin, became the first pope to sanction Loreto as an official site of pilgrimage, and exploited Bernardino’s ties with the area to promote Loreto. Among the commissions Julius gave Bramante was the design of a protective enclosure for Mary’s house: four walls of white marble further embellished with sculptural work by the Venetian artist Andrea Sansovino. Julius’s endorsement of Loreto launched its popularity. The Casa Santa’s reputation grew as a place where prayers were answered and miraculous cures for any kind of bodily ailment achieved. Deep grooves are now worn into the step around the base of the Casa Santa, the effect of five hundred years’ worth of pilgrims on their knees in prayer circling it.

Apart from her family connection, Felice had a very personal reason for visiting Loreto that October. She had recently discovered that she was pregnant and needed to do all she could to ensure the arrival of a boy. Time was not on her side. Popular thinking in the Renaissance was that boys were more likely to be fathered by young men with warm sperm and that it was best for the mother to be young as well. Gian Giordano was now over sixty and Felice was approaching thirty. She did, however, have recourse to the rituals, superstitions and talismans associated with the creation of a male child, which in sixteenth-century Italy was an industry in itself. Tin-glazed earthenware and maiolica bowls and trays emblazoned with the word
maschio
(‘male’) or decorated with strong blond little boys were especially popular. Their use by a woman during her confinement was believed to encourage the growth and safe delivery of a healthy male child. Given the belief that boys grew from all things warm, a woman was instructed to eat warm food, drink warm wine, and avoid cold things, including fruit and fish, as coldness was associated with the female nature.
⁴