— CHAPTER 26 — Duchess of Ferrara
‘MY JOY IN SEEING YOU IS NEVER DONE’
THE DEATH OF HER FATHER, Alexander VI, followed so rapidly by the collapse of Cesare’s empire and his ambitions, and his humiliating imprisonment so far away in Spain, must have been devastating to the twenty-three-year-old Lucrezia. All the more so, isolated in Ferrara, where, according to the chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, it was widely believed that the pope had been poisoned; Cesare, too, ‘was found to have been poisoned,’ he reported, adding that ‘it was chiefly due to the fact that he was placed inside the still warm entrails of two mules that he was cured.’
The torrential rain that lashed Ferrara that September and October, causing the Po to burst its banks, flooding both fields and city streets, matched the depths of her misery. Couriers arrived daily with news of Cesare’s cities and fortresses as they fell, one by one, some returning to their earlier rulers, others seized by Venice; of the new tenant of her old home, the Vatican Palace, and how the new pope had shut up her father’s apartments, where she had once danced and laughed so gaily, and vilified ‘that Spaniard of accursed memory.’
It was not just her private grief at the loss of her father and brother that overwhelmed her; it was clear from the gossip at court that Lucrezia’s position as wife of the heir to the duchy was now also under threat. One friend advised her to do all she could to assuage her grief lest people thought she was overcome by apprehension about her own future.
Louis XII himself was ready to repudiate both Cesare and Lucrezia now that Alexander VI was dead; and he told the Ferrarese envoy that he knew very well that the Este family had never been pleased with the Borgia alliance, and ‘therefore the French court did not regard Madonna Lucrezia as Don Alfonso’s real wife.’ Alfonso, however, had become attached to Lucrezia. Hearing of her father’s death, he came home to Ferrara to comfort his wife and thus to show that although the marriage had lost its political raison d’être, it still retained its private lustre.
They seemed to have been ‘quite satisfied with one another,’ and they may well have been so, but their temperaments were very different; while he still continued to spend a large part of each day in the lecture halls of the university or in his workshop, poring over proposals for public works, military engineering, and firearms, she enjoyed the life at court, where masques and tableaux, drama and poetry occupied the evening hours.
Music was the interest closest to Lucrezia’s heart, and one she shared with her husband, who was himself an accomplished player of the viol. She employed her own singers, pipers, and lute players, even her own dancing master, spending a large part of her income on the patronage of music. She was particularly fond of songs, of the lovely Spanish poems that were set to music by her musicians; and she vied with her rival, Isabella d’Este, to attract the best players and composers to her court.
The court at Ferrara was famous throughout Italy as a centre of culture. Duke Ercole had doubled the size of the city and transformed it into a setting worthy of ducal grandeur, enclosing a huge hunting park, complete with its own racecourse, where ladies of the court could watch their knights displaying their skills, jousting at the ring or pursuing game with trained leopards; he added new gardens and gilded reception rooms to the ducal palace and, in 1504, decided to build on the grounds the Sala delle Comedie, the first purpose-built theatre since antiquity.
Among the many foreign writers and musicians attracted to this lively cultural centre were the scholarly humanists Ercole Strozzi and Pietro Bembo. A member of the Florentine family whose grand palazzo, built for Filippo Strozzi, is one of the most imposing in Florence, Ercole Strozzi was a poet of distinction. Much disliked by Lucrezia’s husband but admired and sponsored by her father-in-law, Strozzi was a distinctive figure in Ferrara, where he hobbled about on crutches that his clubfeet rendered indispensable.
Strozzi was clearly and immediately attracted to Lucrezia, as she was to him. He sympathised with her in her differences with her father-in-law, who kept her, so she complained, so short of money that she was not able to dress with the distinction that was her due. Strozzi made light of her complaints; she could always borrow money; and since he himself was shortly to go to Venice, he would buy for her there such materials as those for which that city was celebrated. He returned with large bundles to the delight not only of Lucrezia but also of her ladies, who were presented with rolls of material to be made up into dresses of exceptional splendour.
Pietro Bembo, on the other hand, was a Venetian poet, handsome and charming, a man in his early thirties whose company Lucrezia found especially alluring. Indeed, there were whispers at court that the duke’s new daughter-in-law might have succumbed to Bembo’s charms; it was generally supposed that they soon became lovers. Certainly she was always ready to enjoy the company of the lively brilliant poet when he was in Ferrara or a guest at Ercole Strozzi’s lovely villa at Ostellato, on the shores of the lagoon at Comacchio, travelling there from time to time along the waters of the Po in her painted barge.
When apart, the two wrote passionate letters to each other in the fashion of their times. Lucrezia called him ‘Messer Bembomio’ (my Mr Bembo), and he wrote to her with deep affection. She gave him a lock of her lovely blond hair, which can still be seen today, on display in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, along with much of their correspondence and the poems they wrote to each other; seeing ‘those beautiful locks that I love ever more deeply,’ ran one of Bembo’s verses, ‘my heart was torn from me and caught.’ One of his letters to her ends: ‘With my heart do I now kiss that hand of yours, which soon I shall kiss with my lips that ever have your name engraved upon them.’
‘Were I an angel as she is,’ Bembo told Lucrezia’s cousin Angela Borgia, ‘I would take pity on anyone who loved as I love.’ And in one of the verses he sent her, he wrote:
Avess’io almen d’un bel cristallo il core
Che quel ch’io taccio, Madonna non vede
De l’interno mio mal, senza altre fede
A suoi occhi traducesse fore.
[Had I a heart made of fine crystal
rather than the one I hide, which Madonna does not see
from inside me my pain
would betray itself in her eyes.]
When Lucrezia replied (the letter is dated June 24, 1503) that in the crystal of her heart she had found a perfect conformity with Bembo’s, he replied that his own crystal was now more precious to him than ‘all the pearls of the Indian seas.’
When Bembo heard of the death of Alexander VI, he immediately rode the ten miles or so from Ostellato to the ducal villa at Medelana where Lucrezia was staying to see what he could do to comfort her in her grief. But she was, for the moment, beyond grief. ‘As soon as I saw you lying in your darkened room, wearing your black gown, weeping and desolate,’ he wrote to her the following day, ‘I was so overcome by my feelings that I stood still, as though struck dumb, not knowing what to say. Instead of offering sympathy, I felt in need of sympathy myself. I left, fumbling and speechless, overcome with emotion at the sight of your misery.’ He could offer little in the way of solace: ‘I know not what else to say except to remind you that time soothes and eases all our sorrows,’ he said, adding that although Alexander VI, ‘your very great father,’ had died, ‘this is not the first misfortune which you have had to endure at the hands of your cruel and malign destiny.’