A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [43]
Alexander had named the boy a duke and awarded him the duchy of Nepi and Camerino. It is possible that he had accepted paternity to prevent Cesare from getting his hands on the duchy lands, though historian Giuseppe Portigliotti has suggested another reason for the two bulls—that Lucrezia herself, engaging in double incest, may not have known which of her two lovers was the child’s father. Rome assumed that the Holy Father was. Actually, the Borgias would have preferred that the public be unaware of Giovanni’s existence, and while he was still a fetus plans had been made along those lines. Before Lucrezia had begun to show, she had entered the Convent of San Sisto on the Via Appia, expecting to wait out her pregnancy as a nun. It was impossible. Instead of her finding anonymity in the nunnery, the nunnery, with her present, became notorious. She had brought another of her lovers, a young Spanish chamberlain, with her. The other nuns, an Italian historian wrote, showed themselves “deplorably susceptible” to the example set by their eminent colleague. Indeed, they went so far in “abandoning the old austerity of their regime” that after her departure “sweeping reforms were necessary to bring them back to the sublime joys of self-mortification and to exorcize the atmosphere … which had grown up inside those pious walls.”
However, it was her father’s ambitions which had exposed Lucrezia’s pregnancy to the world. He was arranging a politically advantageous new marriage for her. Later it would end tragically when Cesare murdered the groom, but then it seemed worth pursuing. To that end, she had had to appear at the Lateran Palace on December 22, 1497, for a ceremonial annulment of her ties to Sforza, to be justified on the ground their union had never been consummated. The pope had decided that once the infant was born, Lucrezia could pass him off as her baby brother—as indeed she did for the rest of her life. Her third husband, heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, knew better, but didn’t care; his family was accustomed to the mingling of its legitimate and illegitimate children. However, in 1497 that lay in the future. As the Lateran ceremony approached, Vatican servants spread stories of Lucrezia’s coital bouts with her father and brothers. A curious crowd flocked to the palace, and there they saw that the pontiff’s daughter, despite her loose, full skirt, was six months with child. When the canonical judges delivered their judgment, solemnly declaring her intacta—a virgin—laughter echoed throughout the old halls. Jacopo Sannazaro, the Neapolitan humanist, wrote an epigram in the form of a Latin epitaph:
Hoc tumulo dormit Lucretia nomine, sed re
Thais, Alexandri filia, sponsa, nurus. *
Here lies Lucrezia, who was really a tart,
The daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law of Alexander.
MEANTIME, as tumult and intrigue marked papacy after papacy, Italian arts flourished. It is a paradox that painters and sculptors frequently thrive amid chaos. The deplorable circumstances—the ferment, the vigor generated by controversy, the lack of moral restraint or inhibitions of any kind—all seemed to incite creativity. Yet it should be added that the greatest of the artists were shielded from the excesses of the time. To be sure, some of the era’s most gifted men, like