Julius II hired artists as if recruiting an army — including most of the great living masters of the Italian Renaissance. One of these was Raphael, who worked for the pope on the decoration of the new official quarters of the palace, the Vatican Stanze; another was Bramante, who undertook to rebuild the ancient and venerated Basilica of St Peter’s, clearing the site of the decaying medieval structure with such eagerness that he became known as ‘maestro Ruinante,’ master Ruiner. He also hired the Florentine artist Michelangelo to paint the memorable frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and to cast an enormous statue of the pope — fourteen feet high and weighing six tons — which was set up on the facade of the cathedral in Bologna and then torn down by the mob after the city rebelled against Julius II’s rule. The ruined statue was given to Duke Alfonso, who melted it down and made it into a cannon, which he wittily named La Giulia.
He had been a great champion of the Church and of its capital city. The Romans, recognizing this, were deeply grateful. When he died in 1513, people wept in the streets and, according to Francesco Guicciardini, they ‘thronged to kiss his feet and gaze upon his dead face, for all knew him to be a true Roman pontiff.’ Although ‘full of fury and extravagant conceptions,’ Guicciardini concluded, ‘he was lamented above all his predecessors and… is held in illustrious remembrance.’
A few days later, twenty-five cardinals assembled in Rome for the conclave that was to elect his successor. Less than a week later, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and Alfonso’s prisoner after the Battle of Ravenna, was elected pope as Leo X, and Pietro Bembo, once Lucrezia’s lover, was appointed papal secretary.
It was not until the summer of 1513, four years after the birth of her last child, Ippolito, that Lucrezia found herself pregnant once more; but upon this occasion, the baby boy to whom she gave birth was far from being as handsome as Ippolito and Ercole. Despite being named Alessandro after her beloved father, it clearly pained Lucrezia to look upon the child with its strangely large and misshapen head, and she was relieved rather than distressed when he gave up the struggle to live, aged just two years old.
Meanwhile, in July 1515, when Alessandro was just fifteen months old, Lucrezia had given birth yet again, this time to a daughter, named Eleonora after Alfonso’s mother. By the time Alessandro died, she was pregnant again with Francesco, who was born in November 1516 and, perhaps, as the name chosen had featured in neither her own family nor that of Alfonso’s, the baby was named after its uncle Francesco Gonzaga; but, anyway, it was a pretty baby whom she clearly adored.
So, with no little pleasure, Alfonso found himself the father of a number of children — all his legitimate heirs. He was engrossed in his own affairs; but, nevertheless, he was highly satisfied with the esteem and admiration now bestowed on his wife. The admiration she excited in former years was due to her youthful beauty; it was not owing to her virtues. She, who as a young girl had been the most vilified woman of her times, had, in middle age, won a place of the highest honour.
The ducal couple, now clearly at ease in each other’s company, shared an interest in all the arts, not solely music, and as the patron of artists and poets that all Renaissance princes were expected to be, Alfonso relied upon the taste and discernment of his wife to guide him. It was she who persuaded him to take into his service the poet Ludovico Ariosto, who, in return, praised Lucrezia with wild hyperbole in his Orlando Furioso: ‘Other women are to Lucrezia as tin is to silver, copper to gold… coloured glass to precious stones.’
It was evidently Ariosto who introduced Titian to the court at Ferrara. At this time Titian was about twenty-five years old. The son of a minor official, he was born in the village of Pieve di Cadore north of Venice, and at the age of nine, he had gone with his brother to live with an uncle in Venice, where he became an apprentice to a mosaicist before moving to the workshop of the elderly Giovanni Bellini, the most celebrated Venetian painter of his day. Also working in Bellini’s studio at that time was Giorgione, an artist some ten years older than himself, with whom he worked on the frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the great storehouse of the German merchants close to the Rialto Bridge in Venice.
Having moved to Ferrara to work for Alfonso d’Este, apparently at Lucrezia’s instigation, Titian worked on a cycle of mythological compositions for the Camerino d’Alabastro, a room that had recently been rebuilt in the castle at Ferrara and where Alfonso proposed to display his collection. He had bought Giovanni Bellini’s canvas of the Feast of the Gods in 1514 and, four years later, commissioned Titian to paint two companion pieces, the Worship of Venus (now in the Prado at Madrid) and Bacchus and Ariadne (now in the National Gallery in London).
These masterpieces were but three of the magnificent works of art to be seen in Ferrara. The tapestries hanging on the walls of the ducal palace were renowned; so was the cycle of frescoes, mostly by Cosmè Tura, in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and the Annunciation on the organ doors in the cathedral; so, too, was the magnificent gold and silver dolphin service designed by Cosmè Tura. Both the works and the company of these artists clearly delighted Lucrezia, as did the company of her lively ladies, who accompanied her on her expeditions to other ducal villas in the countryside outside Ferrara.
She was accustomed to leaving Ferrara each spring, with her ladies and her musicians, to spend weeks on end in the country, choosing to stay in a villa near a convent where she could be a regular worshipper at the services held there. At the villa there would be games of charades, songs, and stories, or, on occasion, the company would be entertained by tales related by Santino, the dwarf, or the wild fantasies and strange behaviour of the mad girl Catarina, whom Lucrezia had done her best to educate. And on warm sunny days, Lucrezia would bathe in the clear waters of some secluded reach of the Po.
Yet in quieter moments, an aura of sadness surrounded Lucrezia, who had taken to wearing sackcloth beneath her silk dresses and had joined a lay order of the Franciscans. Her only surviving brother, Jofrè, died in 1517, having remarried after the death of the childless Sancia in 1506, and was able to pass the title of Prince of Squillace on to his eldest son. She took to making regular confessions to her priest and was just as assiduous in attendance at services in the cathedral. She put aside the ‘pomp and vanities of the world to which she had been accustomed since childhood,’ in the words of Paolo Giovio, ‘and gave herself up to pious works, founding convents and hospitals. She did what she could to help the poor in times of distress, going so far as to pawn some of her jewels to help pay for their relief.’
She was now far from well; the succession of pregnancies and births, some difficult and all debilitating, had weakened her sadly. She had little appetite and fainted often. There were still evenings, however, when Lucrezia would call for her musicians, singers, and dancers, and then Alfonso would appear with his viol, which he played with a virtuosity that astonished those who knew him only as a hardworking ruler and a general devoted to his artillery. Yet her husband, in his insensitivity, still made love to her in his rough, perfunctory way, and in the autumn of 1518, she found she was pregnant once again.