released the man.
The cardinal was a sardonic, elegant, supercilious, and argumentative man. He much regretted having been made a cardinal and certainly did not allow his unwanted eminence in the church to interfere with his passions for hunting and women. His outbursts of temper were notorious; on one occasion he flew into a rage with one of his father’s crossbowmen and had him beaten so savagely that he was almost killed. Lucrezia was intrigued by him, and she was seen so often in his company that the Roman ambassador in Ferrara reported that ‘she belonged to her husband at night, and to the Cardinal by day.’
Meanwhile, Lucrezia, accompanied by Giulio, was forced to leave Modena, where plague had by then also broken out, and made for Reggio, where they were intercepted by a messenger from Duke Alfonso with an order banishing Giulio to a remote estate. At first Giulio refused to go there, but eventually he was persuaded to leave, while Lucrezia induced the chaplain whom Giulio had released from prison to return there voluntarily for the moment.
Nor was this the only aspect of Giulio’s behaviour that was provoking such fury in his brother the cardinal. For months Giulio had been pursuing the pretty, alluring Angela Borgia, Lucrezia’s cousin; and when she became pregnant, it was generally supposed that he was the father of her child. Here was another problem for Lucrezia, for, while conducting an affair with Giulio d’Este, Angela was simultaneously being pursued by a besotted Cardinal Ippolito.
It was at Reggio on September 19, 1505, that Lucrezia gave birth to another child, a boy this time, who was named Alessandro in memory of her father. Bembo offered his congratulations. ‘It gave me infinite pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘to hear of the happy birth of a male child to your ladyship; all the more so,’ he added, after ‘the cruel disappointment and vain hopes’ that had accompanied her miscarriage of the previous year. He prayed also that this ‘dearly awaited son’ would grow into a man ‘worthy of so fine a mother.’ His hopes, and those of Alfonso and Lucrezia, however, were to be once again cruelly dashed. The infant proved poor and sickly; Alfonso sent his own doctor to Reggio to care for the baby, but despite his ministrations, barely a month later Alessandro was dead.
Writing to comfort Lucrezia, who had also suffered a bout of puerperal fever after the birth, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, invited her to stay at Borgoforte, a castle on the border of Ferrara and Mantua that belonged to his family.
The thirty-nine-year-old Francesco was by no means a captivating personality, but his presence would be some comfort to Lucrezia after the departure of Giulio and the death of her baby. Besides, it would annoy Isabella d’Este, who was eight months pregnant, and whose discomfiture Lucrezia always found pleasurable. So she agreed to meet Gonzaga at Borgo forte, where, in his brusque and didactic way, he did his best to comfort and entertain her, even offering to send an envoy to Spain to hear news of Cesare; and when the time came to leave the castle, she wrote to Alfonso to tell him that she had been invited to accompany the marquis to Mantua on her way home to Ferrara. ‘I have been urged with such passion,’ she wrote to him, ‘to go tomorrow to visit the illustrious Marchioness, that, although I resisted strongly, I could not but obey.’
She had reason to be grateful for having done so. The Mantuan court possessed an enviable collection of works of art that Isabella was delighted to show her guest, books and jewels, enamels, glass and silver, and paintings not only by Perugino and Lorenzo Costa but also by Andrea Mantegna.
Mantegna, appointed court painter in 1460, had completed work on the Camera degli Sposi in the ducal palace in 1474, a project commissioned by Francesco’s grandfather, Marquis Lodovico. For Francesco himself, he had painted the nine huge canvases of the
By the time he had finished work on the
Lucrezia left Mantua at the end of October, having greatly annoyed the heavily pregnant Isabella by having so obviously aroused in her husband the passions and desires he was more in the habit of feeling for his wife’s maids-of-honour. Travelling in Francesco’s ceremonial barge, she arrived at Belriguardo, where she was greeted by Alfonso and by Giulio, his banishment rescinded by his indulgent half-brother.
A few days later, Giulio was returning to Belriguardo from a hunting expedition, riding along the road toward the villa, when he was met by a furiously jealous Cardinal Ippolito d’Este; he had been spurned, yet again, by the pretty Angela Borgia, who had scornfully told the cardinal that his brother’s liquid brown eyes were worth more to her than ‘the whole of your person.’ In an excess of rage, Ippolito now shouted orders to his four footmen to kill the man and put out his eyes, those eyes that Angela had told him she so extravagantly admired. Ippolito’s footmen obediently pulled Giulio from his saddle to the ground, where they stabbed at his eyes with their daggers until his face was covered with blood and his eyelids almost severed.
Ippolito rode back to Belriguardo with the news that he had found Giulio lying on the ground and wounded; the footmen fled abroad. Men were sent out to carry him back to the villa, and urgent summons were sent to surgeons at Ferrara. Giulio seemed to be on the point of death or, at least, blinded for life.
Cardinal Ippolito at first denied all responsibility for the incident; then he claimed that the four footmen were ‘formerly in our household.’ Alfonso, reluctant to have his own brother arraigned on a charge of murder, took care that this version of the events was sent to every court in Italy, where it soon became the subject of gossip. In a private letter to Isabella, however, Alfonso confessed the terrible truth, begging his sister not to reveal the true details of ‘this shameful act’; Isabella replied that it was too late, that every barber in the market place knew what had really happened. Like Alfonso, she was also shocked; when Ippolito himself fled to Mantua hoping to find refuge at his sister’s court, she was so horrified by what he had done that he was soon forced to leave.
Eventually, when Giulio had partially recovered his sight, Ippolito was admitted back into Ferrara, where he was induced to make a guarded apology; and that, Alfonso hoped, would be the end of the matter. But Giulio, still in great pain and finding comfort only in darkened rooms, remained bitterly resentful, not only of the cardinal but also of Duke Alfonso, whom he blamed for not charging Ippolito with his crime.
The duke and duchess returned to Ferrara, as was the custom, to celebrate Christmas, New Year, and Carnival in the ducal capital. Lucrezia clearly enjoyed herself, joining in the dancing, relishing the saucy comedies that she asked to be performed at the ducal theatre during Carnival, when she became a familiar figure in the streets, through which she rode wearing a mask, sometimes in a white dress, at other times gold. She did what she could to comfort Giulio, endeavouring to find him a profitable appointment with the Knights of Malta. She also went out of her way to help the tiresome, importunate Angela Borgia, who had discarded the no longer handsome Giulio without, apparently, a second thought and had recently been betrothed to the young Alessandro Pio and now badgered Lucrezia for help in purchasing an extravagant trousseau, including an extremely expensive dress of cloth-of-gold.
While the court laughed and joked and danced, Giulio remained in his darkened room, his resentment growing as he listened to the revelries outside on the city streets. He had begun to recover his sight; at first murky outlines could be seen of faces and objects, but his vision soon cleared. Still in intolerable pain, however, he thought of little other than the revenge he would inflict on Ippolito and Alfonso. He was joined by his half-brother Ferrante, his companion in the carefree exploits of earlier days, who had hopes of usurping Alfonso as Duke of Ferrara. They discussed ways of achieving their aims; they drew others, as incompetent as themselves, into their conspiracy; they discussed methods of poisoning, possible ambushes, traps and snares and disguises. ‘Something sinister is being planned,’ Isabella d’Este’s friend Bernardino di Prosperi wrote to her at Mantua. ‘I don’t think things will ever be right again between Don Giulio and the Cardinal.’
Meanwhile, Cardinal Ippolito’s informers had begun to hear rumours of the plotters and their wretched schemes; during the summer several men, including one of Giulio’s servants, were arrested. Giulio himself took advantage of Alfonso’s absence from Ferrara on a trip to Venice, to escape to the security offered by Isabella in Mantua. When the duke came home in early July, he ordered his half-brother to return home. Giulio refused, claiming that his life was in danger in Ferrara. In an attempt to mediate between the brothers, Francesco Gonzaga
