The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (24 page)

The chief papal hunting lodge, which had been in use since the later fifteenth century, lay just to the west of Rome and was known as La Magliana. The wooded and hilly area contained a plethora of wildlife, including hares and wild boar. Girolamo Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV, and his wife Caterina Sforza used it, and in
1480
had organized a great wild-boar hunt in honour of the Dukes of Saxony. On his election in
1484
, Pope Innocent VIII had created a
palazetto
(little palace) at the Magliana, embossed with his coat of arms, which is still visible today. He too organized hunts that doubled as diplomatic receptions, including a deer hunt for the Duke of Ferrara.

Julius II’s favourite forms of relaxation involved water. He loved watching boats and he enjoyed fishing, activities in keeping with his upbringing by the sea. But he liked hunting too, recognizing its diplomatic importance, and he was committed to further development at the Magliana. The villa was on the Tiber, not far from Julius’s old titular land as a former bishop of Ostia. Julius built a road from the villa to the river, allowing easy access by barge, and he hired Giuliano da Sangallo, the architect of his palace at Savona, to enlarge substantially Innocent’s
palazetto
.

When he became pope, Leo was thrilled to find that he had access to a large compound comprising palace, chapel, stables and weapons arsenal, which would allow him to indulge his great passion. His huntsmen would assemble as a rowdy group in Rome prior to leaving for the countryside, and march along to a chant of ‘I love hunting! I love hunting!’ Leo did not enlarge the Magliana hunting lodge to any great extent but he did employ Raphael’s workshop to paint frescos in the little chapel, which was dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, as well as grotesque figures and images of the Muses on the walls of the great hall of the palace itself. For Leo, La Magliana became more than just a hunting lodge, it was another papal palace, to which poets, artists and scholars would be invited to provide entertainment after the thrill of the day’s chase. Most of the animals he hunted were local to La Magliana, but on occasion more exotic animals, including an elderly and infirm leopard, were imported to serve as the Pope’s quarry.
¹

There were never enough wild animals at La Magliana for Leo. He even had another member of the Sangallo family, Gian Francesco, construct a
gazzara
, a little compound, to rear hawks and falcons as well as prey, deer and boar, which would later be released in order to be hunted down. Leo’s voracious appetite for the hunt also compelled him to seek more extensive terrain. It was Felice who was able to assist him in his quest. She was encouraged to do so by her old business associate, her corn-broker, Giuliano Leno.

With the ascension of Leo to the papal throne, Leno had risen in power and influence, to the extent where he could justifiably be called ‘the most notable capitalist of the Roman building industry’.
²
He had been appointed by Leo X as
curatore
of all the building work on New St Peter’s, serving as contractor with Raphael as architect. Leno also had his own private interests, such as cloth-manufacturing in workshops on the Via delle Bottege Oscure, where he employed Jews from the nearby ghetto. His monopolies made him intensely unpopular: ‘Giuliano Leno is a spy,’ ran a satirical verse pinned to the ancient
Pasquino
statue, the site for poetical protest, not far from Felice’s home. ‘He looks to everyone for evil gain. He is a beast who has no fear.’
³

One of the reasons for Leno’s unpopularity was his substantial monopoly and speculation on grain, which drove up the price of the valued commodity in the city of Rome. Leno continued to do well from his access to Felice’s ample supply of grain from Palo, but he came to realize that her estate presented further opportunities for profit for them both. Another of the tasks assigned him by Leo was to supervise the work done on La Magliana. Leno knew Leo’s love of the chase as well as the danger of the livestock at La Magliana being over-hunted. He also knew that, in addition to several acres of fields, a dense forest was attached to the castle of Palo. If the papacy, and Leno himself, could profit from Palo’s fields of wheat, then why not from its trees and thickets?

The idea of adding a new forest to his hunting grounds delighted Leo. The only disadvantage was the condition of the castle itself. Leo was accustomed to luxurious accommodation in which to rest, eat and drink at the end of the day’s activity. The thirteenth-century castle was in a state of some disrepair. While Felice had probably intended to renovate Palo herself, she currently had no pressing reason to spend time there and thus no pressing need to invest funds in its repair. When in the country, she resided at either Bracciano or Vicovaro. But Palo’s shabby state posed no problem for Leo, who was more than happy to spend money in pursuit of his own pleasure. They negotiated an accord for Palo to become a papal villa; Leo would pay for the castle’s renovations in exchange for free rent. The arrangement would not affect Felice’s profit from Palo’s grain yield.

Leo put Leno in charge of creating a hunting lodge fit for a pope. Partly to keep costs down, Leno did not hire an established architect to work on Palo, in the way that Julius II had commissioned Giuliano da Sangallo to design the additions to La Magliana. Leno worked with another member of the ubiquitous Sangallo family, Gian Francesco, but Gian Francesco was
misuratore
– a head foreman – rather than an architect. They had no plans to undertake a radical modernization of Palo. Preserving an original, medieval appearance was Medicean design policy for country retreats. In the city of Florence itself, the Medici had built a family palace on the Via Larga, employing the architect Michelozzo to use the latest cutting-edge architectural language. By contrast, their country villas and lodges were designed to appear as if they had stood for hundreds of years. This ‘antiqued’ or ‘distressed’ appearance gave the impression the Medici were a family of established ancient feudal lords rather than of fifteenth-century mercantile arrivistes.

Leo himself would have had no great interest in seeing Palo made fashionably
all’antica
, like the ultra-modern palaces in Rome. He did, however, inspect progress on the renovation. In a letter to Felice her servant Statio del Fara reported that ‘I learned that His Holiness leaves today for La Magliana and they say that he will go to see the work being done at Palo.’
4
Palo benefited from Leno’s easy access to building supplies; the same materials were going into the construction of St Peter’s. Leno’s vast notarial archive contains such details as the shipment in July
1519
of
20
,
000
bricks to Palo. By September
1520
Giuliano Leno had hired ‘master builders’ Pietro Pasqualino of Treviso and Bucchino di Caravaggio for plaster work on the courtyard, and bricks to complete the vaulting, the windowsills and passageways.
⁵
Given the plentiful array of projects Leno was supervising at the time, the work at Palo proceeded remarkably quickly, perhaps because he had a vested interest in the castle’s appearance. Leno had a personal motivation for not wanting an established architectural figure to be involved with the Palo renovations. Although he was a hugely powerful figure in Rome, he was still only a contractor. His associates might have been artists or noble and elite clerics, but he did not have an equivalent status. If poems were composed about him, they were satirical in spirit. And Leno apparently desired the kinds of panegyrics written in praise of those he served, such as Leo, or Felice herself. He contrived to have himself immortalized as the architect of Palo in Latin verse, in a poem that was actually written in praise of Felice by the scholar Paolo Nomentano. Nomentano had composed verses in praise of Felice a few years earlier, along with poems to her eldest daughter Julia and stepdaughter Carlotta. In the earlier poem, Nomentano had extolled Felice’s maternal virtues: ‘Such a mother you are,’ he wrote, ‘the best and the greatest.’ His later poem was about Felice, Leo, Leno and Palo: ‘Our Palo, that is so lush, with its woods, and the sea, and the earth. What it is to live in such a place. How pleasing is this place. And equally so the building that is a great felicitous palace, and you have made a house for Leo with Giuliano Leno. And so they come to your castle where they can hunt stags and deer...’
⁶

Nomentano’s verses are seemingly the only instance of a poem from this time dedicated to a woman’s ownership of a palace, revealing how unusual Felice’s possession of Palo was. For a pope to borrow her residence made the situation all the more special. And Leno’s place in her poem, as the creator of a house fit for a pope, provided him with one of very few opportunities in his life to have an equality with the cultural elite he served.

chapter 5

Papal Payback

Felice received some very special rewards for assisting Leo. On
21
October
1516
, Leo issued a remarkable licence on Felice’s behalf, a proclamation that were she ever to commit ‘any grave or serious crime’, she was to be absolved.
¹
The document was designed to prove Leo’s protection and support of Felice, whatever the circumstances. It had considerable importance for her future life.

Leo had an even greater gift for Felice. He might have ascended the papal throne a well-liked cardinal but few popes stayed universally popular for long. Julius II, as Cardinal Giuliano, had tried to engineer the downfall of Alexander VI, and then saw, in his turn, Spanish cardinals forming the Counsel of Pisa call for his own abdication. As for Leo, in
1517
Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena actually attempted to poison him. His motivation was that the previous year Leo had expelled his brother Borghese, head of the Sienese
signoria
, from his home town. Leo planned to place the Tuscan town, an old rival to Florence, under Medici rule. The assassination plot – a surgeon was to place a poisoned ointment on a fistula on the pope’s notoriously diseased anus – was discovered. On
8
June Leo assembled the Vatican cardinals and demanded to know who among them had been involved. In all, four other cardinals admitted either complicity in or knowledge of the plot.

None of the cardinals was condemned to death, although Petrucci was strangled in prison, and his chief conspirator, Cardinal Sauli, also died in prison a year later. Leo’s response to the assassination plot was to dilute the power of the members of the College of Cardinals by adding to their number. He appointed a total of thirty-one new cardinals, whose gratitude would assure their loyalty to him. They included members of his own family: his nephews Niccolò Ridolfi, Giovanni Salviati and Luigi Rossi, who appears in Raphael’s portrait of Leo alongside his cousin Giulio de’ Medici, who had been appointed a cardinal by Leo at the start of his reign. Other Tuscan appointees included Giovanni Piccolomini of Siena and the Florentine Niccolò Pandolfini. From Rome, Leo chose Pompeo Colonna, Franciotto Orsini, Paolo Emilio Cesi, Andrea della Valle and Francesco Armellini.

Added to this list of Romans was Felice’s half-brother, Gian Domenico de Cupis. As his titular diocese, the twenty-four-year-old received the southern town of Trani. Just as his father’s master, Girolamo della Rovere, rarely visited Recanati, sending Bernardino in his place, Gian Domenico rarely, if ever, set foot in Trani.

Although Julius had made Gian Domenico de Cupis a canon of St Peter’s and a papal secretary, he had refused, despite his daughter’s entreaties, to give him a red hat. He called him ‘an ignorant young boy’ and claimed his appointment would displease the other cardinals. But what Julius would not do for a daughter, Leo would do for a friend. There was nothing obvious for Leo to gain from selecting Gian Domenico as a cardinal. The de Cupis were talented bureaucrats but they did not constitute a powerful Roman family. Leo made the appointment as a favour to Felice, a recognition of what she had done for him. It was, none the less, an exceptional favour to bestow on a woman, particularly one who was not even a Medici family member. Felice’s brother’s appointment undoubtedly incited the envy and resentment of Leo’s female relatives, who felt that they should be the only women in Leo’s circle to have their sons and brothers made cardinals.

chapter 6

Orsini Signora Revisited

Although Felice continued to be closely involved in events taking place at the Vatican Palace, both before and after her father’s death, she also began to take on a much more active role as the Orsini Signora. Tending to the Palo estate and negotiating the sale of its grain had provided her with valuable administrative experience and proved her capable of managing the Orsini properties. Gian Giordano placed increasing amounts of trust in her, increasingly so after the birth of Francesco, for now Felice had a vested interest and legal right in the Orsini estates.

The Orsini estate account books indicate that with this responsibility came direct access for Felice to Orsini family funds. One for the years
1509
–
10
is clearly produced on behalf of Gian Giordano, as Orsini Lord. The next one, which records expenses between
1510
and
1514
, is inscribed, ‘This book contains all the money spent on behalf of Her Illustrious Ladyship, Felice della Rovere Orsini.’
1
Some of these entries record Felice’s personal expenditure. She liked to purchase brightly coloured accessories, so such items as a purchase of a ‘hat for the Signora in blue silk’ at
3
.
15
ducats are noted. Giovanni Casolaro received
2
ducats to make her velvet slippers (
pianelle di velluto
) and Catherina Spagnuola received
60
baiocchi
for making nine towels (
tovaglie
) for the Signora. The account book also provides some of the earliest more intimate glimpses of Felice’s life as an Orsini family member. One of her responsibilities in the month before Christmas was to ‘stand at the gateway of the palace of Monte Giordano to dispense alms to the servants’. Ten ducats were allocated for this purpose on
25
November
1511
. The role played by Felice here was symbolic. The heavy gate to Monte Giordano was at the top of the slope of the small hill. Each member of the staff would walk up the hill towards Felice to receive his or her Christmas bonus. Felice played her part as lady of the house, distributing largesse, in the traditional fashion of
noblesse oblige
. While the Monte Giordano staff received cash, those at Bracciano were fed a Christmas lunch, which, at a total cost of
12
ducats, actually constituted a greater expense than the alms she gave to the Roman servants.