A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [41]
Despite the unquestioned depravity of Alexander, the most intriguing figure in the carnal history of the time was one of the pope’s four children by Vannozza dei Catanei. Born in 1480, the Lucrezia Borgia who has come down to us is an admixture of myth, fable, and incontestable fact. It is quite possible that she was, to some degree, a victim of misogynic slander. The medieval Church saw woman as Eva rediviva, the temptress responsible for Adam’s fall, and the illegitimate daughter of a pope may have been an irresistible target for gossip, particularly when she was physically attractive. To this day her reputation is controversial. According to the Cambridge Modern History, “Nothing could be less like the real Lucrezia than the Lucrezia of the dramatists and romancers.” Historians disagree, however, over what the real Lucrezia was like. There is certainly evidence that in at least some respects she was what she was thought to have been, but only a few documents are extant. Although these are shocking, we are largely dependent upon what her contemporaries thought of her. It was not flattering. Even Rachel Erlanger, one of her more sympathetic biographers, agrees that she had “a sinister reputation” for “incredible moral laxity.”
Yet it was obvious that there was more to Madonna Lucrezia, as the Vatican court called her, than her celebrated sexuality. Fluent in Tuscan, French, and Spanish, she read classical Greek and Latin, had been educated in manners and style, could engage in lengthy learned discussions, and was an accomplished poet. It seems equally clear that she was vulnerable; beginning in her childhood she had been enveloped in her father’s love, and she suffered from an almost fatal compulsion to please. By all accounts she was exceptionally comely. A contemporary described her as “a woman of great loveliness.” That was women’s impression of her. Men thought her ravishing.
Under the supervision of Giulia Farnese, her father’s mistress, she devoted herself to what Jakob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, called Italy’s “national pastime for external display.” In her youth she was called dolce ciera (sweet face) because of her innocent expression. Bernadino di Betto di Biago (Pinturicchio) captured that artlessness in his portrait of her, painted in her early teens, and the debauchery and lewd excesses which followed do not seem to have altered it. Her most spectacular feature was her long golden hair, which reached to her feet. To enhance its beauty, she washed it using a formula set out in Esperimenti, a book compiled by Caterina Sforza. This was a diluted solution of honey, black sulfur, and alum. It was reported to guarantee a shade called filo d’oro.
Lucrezia was said to have inherited her father’s lustiness at an early age, and her tales of her orgasmic exploits had made her a Roman legend long before she became, at the age of twenty-one, the duchess of Ferrara. By her seventeenth birthday, she was wise beyond her years. This was perhaps inevitable. Her holy and biological father used her beauty and her sexual appetite as pawns. Papal politics made strange bedfellows for Alexander’s daughter. He had wed her to her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro and a member of a powerful Milanese family, when she was thirteen and he was negotiating against the Aragonese dynasty of Naples. Then, using his powers of annulment, he moved her from one marriage to another, depending upon which alliance he was forming.
Left to her own devices in the palazzo of Santa Maria in Portico, built near the Vatican by Battista Cardinal Zeno, she is reported
Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519)
to have