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
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
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 Cosme Tura, in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and the
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, Jofre, 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.
In November that year news arrived in Ferrara of the death of her mother, Vannozza de’ Catanei, who, unlike Lucrezia, had always been spoken of with respect, in Rome on November 16, 1518. As well as her three inns in Rome and various other properties, Vannozza left several flocks of sheep beyond the city’s outskirts, all of which were bequeathed to various religious and charitable institutions in the city. The Venetian envoy Marin Sanudo wrote in his diary:
The day before yesterday died Madonna Vanozza, once the mistress of Pope Alexander and mother of the Duchess of Ferrara and the Duke Valentino… The death was announced, according to the Roman custom, in the following formal words: ‘Messer Paolo gives notice of the death of Madonna Vanozza, mother of the Duke of Gandia; she belonged to the Gonfalone Company.’ She was buried yesterday in Santa Maria del Popolo, with the greatest honours — almost like a cardinal. She was 76 years of age. She left all her property — which was considerable — to San Giovanni in Laterano. The Pope’s chamberlain attended the obsequies, which was unusual.
As Lucrezia’s pregnancy progressed, she no longer felt the inclination to bathe; at the age of thirty-nine, she felt herself to be growing too old for bearing children. On March 24 Francesco Gonzaga died; the following month she was not well enough to watch her nine-year-old son, Ippolito, be confirmed and be installed as archbishop of Milan, one of the premier sees in Europe. Soon afterward she complained that her head had grown too heavy for her. Her hair was then cut off and swept up on the floor. She felt, she said, that she was going blind.
On June 15 she gave birth prematurely to another girl, who was baptized Isabella Maria that same day, and this time the chronicler had no doubt that the child was sickly. Lucrezia herself contracted puerperal fever, and, pale and drawn, she took to her bed and thereafter rarely left it. Knowing that she had not long to live, she wrote a letter to Leo X:
Most Holy Father and Honoured Master, with all respect I kiss your Holiness’s feet and commend myself in all humility to your holy mercy. I approach the end of my life with pleasure, knowing that in a few hours I may… be released. Having arrived at this moment, I desire, as a Christian, although I am a sinner, to ask your Holiness in your mercy, to give me all possible consolation and your Holiness’s blessing for my soul… 22 June 1519 at Ferrara, in the fourteenth hour, your Holiness’s humble servant.
She died two days later, on June 24, 1519. Duke Alfonso lost consciousness during her funeral in the Church of Corpus Domini. Devastated with grief, he wrote to his nephew, now Marquis of Mantua, that ‘it has pleased our Lord God to call to Himself the soul of our most illustrious Duchess, our well beloved wife,’ and ‘I cannot write these lines without weeping[,] so hard is it to find myself separated from such a dear wife.’
— CHAPTER 29 — Saints and Sinners
ACCORDING TO THE standards of the time, Lucrezia had done her duty as Duchess of Ferrara, leaving her grieving husband with five children, three of whom were boys. Alfonso mourned his loss but in the end took another wife, choosing, much to the surprise of his courtiers, to marry his mistress, Laura Dianti, the lascivious daughter of a Ferrarese bonnet maker, who produced two more sons for him.
When Alfonso died on October 31, 1534,he was buried in a tomb next to his beloved Lucrezia in Corpus Domini and was succeeded by Ercole, for whom he had chosen as a bride Renee of France, the daughter of Louis XII and sister-in-law of the new king of France, Francis I. Ercole II recognized six children, two boys and four girls — two of his daughters, one illegitimate and one legitimate, were named Lucrezia, a testament to the love he bore her. Ippolito, destined from an early age for a career in the church, would be made a cardinal and be the French candidate for election in six conclaves. Renowned for his extravagant lifestyle and his patronage of the arts, he would spend much of his life in Rome, the city of Lucrezia’s birth, and be the patron of that splendid monument to Renaissance architecture and garden design, the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.
The baby Isabella, whose birth had killed Lucrezia, died just short of her second birthday, leaving Eleonora as the only surviving daughter; she became a nun at the age of eight and, ten years later, was made abbess of Corpus Domini, Lucrezia’s favourite retreat in times of trouble and the site of her tomb. Of the palace where Alfonso and Lucrezia lived, sadly little remains after the building was devastated by an earthquake in 1570.
When Ercole II died in 1559, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Alfonso II, who, despite his three wives,
