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Home , Bartolomeo Veneto, Borgia Apartments, Cesare Borgia, Clytemnestra (Collier), Don Alfonso, Giovanni Sforza

BEAUTY WITHOUT , AMBITION WITHOUT REMORSE: AND IDEALS OF RESPECTABLE FEMININITY

A thesis submitted to the College of the Arts of Kent State University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

By Gloria Rusconi May 2021

Thesis written by Gloria Rusconi B.B.A., Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2019 M.A Kent State University, 2021

Approved by

Gustav Medicus, Ph.D., Advisor

Marie Bukowski, MFA, Director, School of Art

John R. Crawford-Spinelli, Ed.D., Dean, College of the Arts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii

CHAPTERS 1

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. LUCREZIA’S VIRTUOSITY IN POESIA AND PITTURA 8

III. THE MOST COMPLETE MORAL DEFORMITY 33

IV. BETWEEN MODERN MEDUSAS AND SECULAR SAINTS 58

CONCLUSION 86

APPENDIX I 92

FIGURES 94

BIBLIOGRAPHY 131

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LIST OF FIGURES Pag

Figure 1. , Disputation of Saint , 1492-94, with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. 9

Figure 2. Pinturicchio, detail of Saint Barbara’s facial features The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. , Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. 9

Figure 3. Pinturicchio, detail of Saint Catherine’s facial features Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. 9

Figure 4. Pinturicchio, detail of the triumphal arch Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. 10

Figure 5. Pinturicchio, Scenes from the life of Isis and Osiris, 1492-94, vault fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. 11

Figure 6. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Portrait Medal of Lucrezia Borgia and “Amor Bendato,” c. 1505, copper alloy, 5.9 cm 20 diameter. Museo Schifanoia, .

Figure 7. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Portrait Medal of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, cast bronze medal, 0.55 cm 21 diameter, 1501-02.

Figure 8. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Portrait Medal of Lucrezia Borgia, ca. 1508-1510, copper alloy, 6.06 cm diameter. of Art, Washington. 25

Figure 9. Ambrogio de Predis, Bianca Maria Sforza, ca. 1493, 51x32.5 cm, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 26

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Figure 10. Bartolomeo Veneto, Lucrezia Borgia, ca. 1508–10, oil on canvas, 58x42 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes. 27

Figure 11. Giannantonio da Foligno, Reliquary Panels of San Maurelius, ca. 1514, engraved silver. Church of San Giorgio fuori le mura, Ferrara. 29

Figure 12. Giannantonio da Foligno, detail of Lucrezia Borgia Reliquary panels of San Maurelius, ca. 1514, engraved silver. Church of San Giorgio fuori le mura, Ferrara. 30

Figure 13. Dante Rossetti, , 1860, watercolour, 52.2x54. Victoria and Albert Museum, . 41

Figure 14. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, To Caper Nimbly in a Lady’s Chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute, 1850, pen and ink, 21.5x15 cm. Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. 41

Figure 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lucrezia Borgia, 1860-61, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50 cm. 45

Figure 16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lucrezia Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate, London. 45

Figure 17. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, detail of the decanter and the poppy flower in Lucrezia Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate, London. 46

Figure 18. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, detail of the glass and decanter of red wine in The Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate Museum, London. 47

Figure 19. The Eternal Sin, 1917, poster, Motion Pictures News. 59

Figure 20. Armand Raprad, Lucrezia Borgia, 1922, poster, 24x36, Bauduin Impressions. 60

Figure 21. Still from Lucrezia Borgia (57:55), 1922, film. 60

Figure 22. Lucréce Borgia, poster, 1935. 61

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Figure 23. Still from Lucréce Borgia, directed by Abel Gance, 1922, film. 62

Figure 24. Josep Renau Berenguer, Lucrecia Borgia, 1935, poster, 36x27 cm. 62

Figure 25. Don Juan, 1926, poster, 24x36. 64

Figure 26. Still from “The Borgia,” Don Juan (00:39), 1922, film. 64

Figure 27. Still from “The Borgia,” Don Juan (00:45), 1922, film. 64

Figure 28. Still from “The Borgia” Don Juan (00:32), 1922, film. 64

Figure 29. Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917, photograph. 66

Figure 30. Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897. 66

Figure 31. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, , 1863, oil on panel, 31x26.5 cm. Hamburg Kunsthall, Hamburg, . 73

Figure 32. Alfredo Ravasco, Glass case with the hair of Lucrezia Borgia, 1926-1928, ebony, malachite, rock crystal, silver, enamels, pearls, emeralds, rubies, 30cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, , . 77

Figure 33. Alfredo Ravasco, Box with Goldfishes, 1927-1930, agata, silver, coral, guilloche, pearls, 6x23x13 cm. Private Collection 78

Figure 34. Alfredo Ravasco, Oval Bowl with Bears, 1925, agata, enamel, sapphires, pearls, 5x9.5 cm. Private Collection. 78

Figure 35. Alfredo Ravasco, Solar Ostensory, 1926, gold, silver, rubies, pearls, green gems, coral. Chapel of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. 78

Figure 36. Alfredo Ravasco, Ostensory, 1932, gold, cloisonnè, pearls, rubies, emeralds, topaz, malachite, coral, agata. Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso Treasury, Milan. 78

Figure 37. Alfredo Ravasco, detail of the pearl strings and cameos of the Glass case with the hair of Lucrezia Borgia, 1926-1928, ebony, malachite, rock crystal, silver, enamels, pearls, emeralds, rubies, 30cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy. 79

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Figure 38. Manuel Boix Alvarez, The Borja, 1995-1998, Corts Valencianes, , . 93

Figure 39. Manuel Boix Alvarez, Lucrècia Borja, 1995-1998, Corts Valencianes, Valencia, Spain. 93

Figure 40. (attributed to,) Portrait of a Young Woman, 1519-1530, oil on wood, 74.5 x 7.2 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 94

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the School of Art at Kent State University for granting me the opportunity to study here, despite all the challenges that we had to overcome.

It has been the most wonderful experience. I want to thank specifically my advisor Dr.

Gustav Medicus, whose patience and guidance has allowed for me to immediately feel welcome so far from home. I also remain grateful to Professor Reischuck, whom I had the pleasure to work under, and to all other professors and members of the Art History department.

My deepest appreciation and love go to my , who have always been the most supportive of all my endeavours and have been beside me to overcome every setback, my family, and those who have always pushed me to never settle and always strive for more.

To my friends, those who have daily been with me and those that have supported me from afar, proving that distance is an obstacle only if you let it be one, thank you.

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INTRODUCTION

“Lucrezia Borgia is the most unfortunate woman in modern history. Is this because she was guilty of the most hideous crimes, or is it simply because she has been unjustly condemned by the world to bear its curse? The question has never been answered.”1

Thus opens his popular biography on Lucrezia Borgia. Immediately, the German historian poses to its readers a fatidic question, for which the answer to the dilemma on the causes of Lucrezia’s infamous reputation will be researched through the entirety of his text. Has the world conspired to frame her figure within negative boundaries, or has she consciously walked into them? The question appears intrinsically uncomplicated because its answer can only be sharp, falling into one of two clear-cut classifications: guilty or not guilty. It is an attempt at finding a permanently fixed and stable identity for the character of Lucrezia, where the author and his readers act almost as final judges and draw from this process all the satisfaction of arriving at a univocal truth. Gregorovius continues:

“Of Lucrezia Borgia we have little more than a legend, according to which she is a fury, the poison in one hand, the poignard in the other... I desired to ascertain what manner of personality would be discovered by treating Lucrezia Borgia in accordance with the original records.”2 Acknowledging the mystification that obfuscates her character, the author undertakes the pursuit of clarity on the matter. Probably for the first time in such a systematic way, he challenges the traditional attributes of her figure, usually expressed in evil and negative terms, to navigate the realm of uncertainty. Gregorovius himself defines the boundaries of his study: “Treating Lucretia Borgia in a way entirely different from that in which she had hitherto been examined, but at the same time scientifically... The book itself

1 Ferdinand Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia (New York: Phaidon Press, 1948), xvii. 2 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, xviii.

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2 will make my intention perfectly clear, which was simply that of the conscientious writer of history. I have substituted history for romance.”3

In his introduction, Gregorovius deems his approach as revolutionary compared to previous 19th century productions on Lucrezia Borgia. On one hand, he cites Hugo and

Guicciardini as great vilifiers of her character and, alongside them, we might also cite many other authors who described her as a sort of “moral monster.” Opposed to this accusatory approach, Gregorovius mentions the undertakings of William Roscoe, Marquis Giovanni

Campori, Giovanni Zucchetti, and other historians who “endeavoured, with the aid of history, to clear up the Lucretia legend, and to rehabilitate the honour of the unfortunate woman.”4

Gregorovius, however, continues to operate within the same dualistic framework of victim- victimizer which characterised all these previous histories, and his scientific approach is no less problematic than the univocal of Campori or Hugo. Not dissimilarly from the other authors that he cited, the author treats Lucrezia as a specimen that has to be analysed for curiosity’s sake and as a riddle that has to be solved: “Her personality appeared to me to be something full of mystery, made up of contradictions which remained to be deciphered, and I was fascinated by it.”5 Even this biography, then, while seemingly pursuing clarity and historical accuracy through an unbiased scientific process, constitutes only another means of appropriating Lucrezia’s character and exploiting it to pursue a goal, individual to each author- in this case satisfying Gregorovius and his readers’ curiosity.

As with Gregorovius’ biography, this thesis will deal with representations of Lucrezia

Borgia in different media, first exploring each media as means to exert control over

Lucrezia’s femininity, and second investigating how her figure was turned from that of a

3 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, xx. 4 Ibid, xix. 5 Ibid, xxi.

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Renaissance duchess into a morality lesson and later into an object commodified for the profit of artists, companies, and cultural institutions. The first thread that will guide this investigation will be the analysis of artistic and literary representations of Lucrezia as instruments of expressing patriarchal control over her figure. In particular, , poetry, movies, and prose will be viewed as the material instruments of a social and cultural phenomenon of “frames and framing,” a systematic process that aims at containing femininity and female sexuality. First utilized by Lynda Nead in her text “The Female

Body,”6 this framework allows an examination of Lucrezia Borgia’s literary and painted portraits as a fragment of a vaster cultural process that utilizes representation as a crucial site for the exercise and regulation of power. As the female body and female existence have been historically regarded as dangerous matter in western cultural productions, artistic documents have often been used to construct boundaries and strict categories as one way of ordering these bodies and experiences considered unruly.

In the case of Lucrezia Borgia, her life and character have revolved around the foundational ideal of respectable femininity. While the category of the good feminine has been composed of different values in each time period of Italian and western European history, it can be generally defined as an array of particular feminine roles and functions, moral qualities, and bodily characteristics that are allocated a special status of importance.

Represented as a desirable but unsurpassable goal, these qualities have been built into precise sets that become in different eras the feminine ideals to which all women would naturally aspire.7 The ideal set of values act in turn as a discriminant for the creation of the boundaries between dichotomic categories such as vice and virtue, victim and victimizer. Once frames, borders, and margins have been established between the ideal and the obscene, between the

6 Lynda Nead, The Female Body: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 2. 7 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 24.

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4 proper and the inadmissible, so feminine bodies and experiences needed to be positioned inside or outside these boundaries. After representing the feminine ideal and therefore setting these boundaries, art and literature start again to operate in the systematic process that Nead defines as the “tradition of exclusion... and inclusion.”8 In the case of Lucrezia, through written and painted representations, her figure was alternatively drawn inside the lines of proper femininity or cast outside and subjected to inevitable judgement. Drawing back to

Gregorovius and his list of “upholders” and “accusers,” we see this process of inclusion and exclusion happening within their works. On one hand, the former group of authors positions

Lucrezia within the frame of the proper feminine, and therefore deems her as a virtuous victim (in this stance it is useful to remember the title of Campori’s article: Una Vittima della

Storia, Lucrezia Borgia.) On the other hand, Hugo and others forcefully throw her outside of these boundaries. Outside the range of the proper and the acceptable, Lucrezia becomes a

“moral monster,” the embodiment of vices, frivolity, and sexual rapacity, and at the same time transforms into a warning against the temptation of stepping outside the boundaries of the consented.

This thesis is divided into three main chapters, which focus on the representations of

Lucrezia Borgia in three main time periods. The first is called “Lucrezia’s Virtuosity in

Renaissance Poesia and Pittura” and delivers an analysis of the visual and literary representations of Lucrezia Borgia executed within her lifetime. The chronological exploration of these productions will aim at establishing a basis for the duality of her character. While the majority can be placed within a larger tradition of virtuous representations of women as pious mothers and wives, other works start equating her name with certain sinful behaviours. Chapter one will therefore directly address the use of

8 Nead, The Female Body, 60.

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5 portraiture and poetry to construct a space of ideal femininity, but also as the means to condemn and exclude women from it. Lucrezia Borgia remained a character secluded inside the two contrasting categories of the proper and the immoral up until the nineteenth century, when her representations changed as a result of her increased popularity in French and

English artistic circles. Opening with the 1833 play Lucréce Borgia by , Chapter

2 draws its title “The Most Complete Moral Deformity” from the Preface to the French play.

Focusing mostly on the English productions of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this chapter will examine those nineteenth-century productions where the body of Lucrezia is presented as the site of a conflagration between beauty and vice, love and ambition, piety and immorality, producing a mythological character that deviates from the previous representations of

Lucrezia as a univocally virtuous or vicious character. The claim of this chapter is that in the mid-nineteenth century Lucrezia trespassed from the realm of the ideal, which is typical of the previous binary representations as victim/victimizer, to enter a more ambiguous category.

Even if Pre-Raphaelite pictures are set apart from the rest of Victorian art and constituted as a separate category,9 in the final part of this second chapter, portraits of Lucrezia will be inserted within the political and social discourses of the era on gender and gender roles.

Chapter two will therefore initiate a discourse, concluded only in the third and final chapter, on the appropriation of the character of Lucrezia Borgia and how this appropriation carried out political and economic objectives. As the theme of the “frames and framing” and the notion of the proper feminine acts as a first thread connecting the different parts of this work, this second fil rouge of appropriation and exploitation will appear as a prominent thread in this latter half of the thesis. Chapter three, titled “Between Modern Medusas and Secular

Saints,” explores the representations of Lucrezia after the nineteenth-century surge in popularity, and after her figure transformed under the hands of Hugo and the Pre-Raphaelites.

9 Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 128.

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In the early 20th century, the space given her in the theatre by Victor Hugo and Gaetano

Donizetti allowed her to trespass from the stage into the cinematic cameras. As movies introduced the name of Lucrezia Borgia to a public larger than ever before, her figure became a place of exploitation for consumeristic purposes. Erasing the historicity of her character, and therefore cancelling any referment to the previous categories of virtue/vice, her figure simply became a bait to allure and intrigue the audience. The rise of capitalism and her entrance within popular culture created a figure that is again alternatively victim or victimizer; however, while these attributes might resemble the previous binary categorizations, in the 20th century they are more an instrument of capitalism than an attempt to frame her figure for moral and political purposes. While the representation of female characters continued to be subjected to a comparison with an ideal of femininity, this process will be viewed in this third chapter through the lenses of capitalist commodification. Lastly,

Appendix I will provide aid in the understanding of the chronological developments of

Lucrezia’s life and artistic representations.

In this work, contemporary feminist methodologies have been applied for the first time to an historical and artistical analysis focused solely on one character, Lucrezia Borgia.

However, this examination of her character can be understood as exemplary in a broader scope of investigation. As this research outlines the social and political issues that have emerged around Lucrezia Borgia, materialized by the artistic productions made of and on her,

Lucrezia will emerge as a model to understand the treatment and manipulation of female figures in cultural productions. Under this perspective, this examination of Lucrezia Borgia can be approached as a case-study fundamental to gain access to this wider range of issues concerning female representation. At the same time, however, while Lucrezia can start shining some light within this much-needed conversation regarding the relationship between femininity and the realm of cultural production, she is only one figure in a larger canon of

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7 powerful women whose characters appear multiple times in the artistic world of different eras. To name but a few, they are Medea, , Phaedra, Medusa, Helen of Troy,

Salomé, Judith, Guinevere, and Beatrice. They are those princesses and queens, witches and killers whose figures underwent similar treatment as Lucrezia Borgia, equally sexualised and vilified, or idealized and cast away. It is hoped, therefore, that this work can be used as a solid stepping-stone for a broader historical analysis on the representation throughout time of active feminine characters. The two methodologies used in this work, which have highlighted the use of artistic representation of the figure of Lucrezia Borgia first as a tool of control and second as means of exploitation, are a universal could in fact be applied to these other feminine characters to furtherly investigate the characteristics and methodologies of the patriarchal approach to the production and consumption of artistic products.

To conclude this introduction, in all purposes and intents, this work will be guided by a clear methodology as inspired by Nead: “An engaged feminist practice necessarily breaks the boundaries... unity and wholeness give way to differences and a recognition that the female body is in a continual process of definition and change. Rather than “being framed,” it is a question of who draws the lines, where they are drawn and for whom.”10

10 Nead, The Female Body, 33.

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LUCREZIA’S VIRTUOSITY IN RENAISSANCE POESIA AND PITTURA

A Renaissance woman’s wedding was probably the most important event of her life. Through marriage, which usually initiated the childbearing phase of a woman’s life, a wife finally gained her intended place inside society. More than just being a ritual, it was a rite of passage through which a woman was thought to form a truer identity for herself, that of spouse and mother. In fact, as family and political life were restructured in the great transition from medieval feudal society to the early modern state, the Renaissance established the relation of the sexes placing men in the public sphere and patrician women at home, requiring social virtues from him and chastity and motherhood from her.11 As a woman, Lucrezia Borgia would have been subjected to these constraints, but as an aristocrat she also participated to the Renaissance courtly ideas on love and manners. The love theories of the courtly culture, a field almost exclusively dominated by male authors, not only relegated aristocratic women in a position of subordination to the interests of husbands and male-dominated kin groups, but also transformed them in aesthetic object.12 The Renaissance ideal of female respectability in a courtly setting was therefore framed by the possession of moral virtues, chastity, fidelity, piety, which were thought to materialize through women’s beauty, grace, and good conducting of their duties in motherhood and marriage. This ideology on courtly women is visible to us through the symbolic productions of Renaissance society, its arts, literature, and philosophy. In particular, portraiture’s subtle manipulation of pose, costume, and accessories helped establish and enforce acceptable female behaviour on a daily basis.13 Moreover, as literary or painted portraits could act as celebratory means to commemorate rites of passage,

11 Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, history and theory, ed. Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 21-38. 12 Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” 39-40. 13 Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, “The Bride and her Donora in Renaissance Florence,” in Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware, 2003), 177.

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9 women’s portraits were oftentimes painted as part of their marriage celebrations or to commemorate the birth of a child. Under this perspective, art not only physically visualized women’s role within society, but even served as means to reinforce this ideology.

Painterly portraits, medals, and celebratory poetry of an on Lucrezia fits within this frame. As in these representations, where her wedding with Alfonso d’Este takes a central role, this first chapter will also revolve around that pivotal moment in the life of Lucrezia

Borgia. On one hand, this analysis of visual and literary productions will chronicle the progression and the that the public figure of Lucrezia underwent from her life in

Rome up until her death. On the other, it will also prove how representations of Lucrezia were consistent in constantly drawing her image inside that Renaissance ideal on female respectability. This investigation will start in the time before her first marriage with Giovanni

Sforza da , when her likeness was presumably portrayed in the Hall of Saints in the

Vatican Palace. Journeying through the publication of an appalling pamphlet containing a serious attack against Borgia, this chapter will then focus on the poems and lyrical poetries composed for the wedding festivities. The greater portion of attention, however, will be given to the medals and paintings produced during her Ferrarese period, which acted as a visual complement to the literary works dedicated to her by distinguished members of the court such as Ludovico Ariosto. While this chapter will be chronologically based in the

Renaissance, and more specifically during the time when Lucrezia was alive, it will not be a biographical account of her life.14 On the contrary, it will present an artistic account of

Lucrezia and how she was viewed by others, and how her public image was shaped by visual and literary compositions. Within the larger project of this thesis, this chapter establishes a discourse on the use of symbolic productions to construct an image of Lucrezia Borgia as a

14 See Appendix I for a brief chronological outline of key events in Lucrezia’s life.

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10 respectable aristocratic woman, after serious charges were levelled against her and her family. Thanks in large measure to these visual and literary means, her public figure successfully combatted those rumours and she reached the highest level of praise.

It was during the first part of Lucrezia’s life, when she was still in and unmarried, that the first of her presumed portraits was executed, her likeness painted as Saint

Catherine in the scene with the Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria within the fresco decorations of the rooms now known as the Borgia Apartments [Figure 1]. The frescoes were commissioned from Bernardino Pinturicchio between 1492 and 1494, only a few months after the ascent of Alexander VI to the papal throne, and constituted part of a larger project of renovation of the living quarters of the . The scene with the Disputation is painted in one of the lunettes of the so-called “Sala dei Santi,” which gives its name to the illustration of episodes from the lives of seven saints: Elisabeth, Anthony Abbott, Paul the Hermit,

Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara, Susanna, and Sebastian. Traditionally, the features of

Lucrezia have been recognized in the figure of Saint Catherine,15 in the scene where the saint is represented while arguing with emperor Maxentius, and it has been pointed out that there is such a close resemblance between the two figures of Catherine and Barbara, painted on another lunette, that the same model might have posed for both [Figure 2 and 3].16 Caught mid-argument, with her mouth open and while gesturing, Catherine is not the center of the composition, but is certainly its focal point. She stands alone before the white steps of

15 Reading scholar Evelyn March Phillipps and biographer on the subject, it is made evident that in the early 1900s this association had already settled into tradition. Phillips in Pintoricchio, (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901), 80 speaks already of this traditional interpretation as such: “The same model has served here (in the fresco of the Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria) as for Saint Barbara- tradition says it was Lucrezia herself, the dearly-loved daughter of the Pope...” 16 Evelyn March Phillipps, Pintoricchio, (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901), 80. Phillipps never questions the does not question the identification between Lucrezia and the paintings of Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara, and even suggests that the artists painted not only her features but even her witty and charming character in Catherine’s confident demeanour.

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Maxentius, compositionally separated from all the other bodies that crowd the figure, the only woman in a scene dominated by male figures. A triumphal arch with three fornixes in the style of the ancient Arch of Constantine, with the ox symbol of the Borgia papacy placed atop the attic, is placed at the center of a background composed of peaceful rolling hills

[Figure 4]. Below the emblem, a motto of Alexander’s, “PACIS CULTURI,” is affixed to the attic itself. The grandiose proportions of the arch, the scintillating qualities of its attributes, and its central positioning are telling of the importance of this element within the scene. Saint

Catherine is depicted in perfect alignment with the leftmost of the three fornixes of the arch, and her sumptuous clothing also gives prominence to the figure; her gown is of a deep royal blue, embroidered with golden thread with a continuous motif that covers the entire length of the fabric, and her cloak in carmine red again displays elaborate patterns on the hem. On her head, Catherine wears a crown, which curiously melts into the golden tones of the halo, creating the impression of an elaborate headdress. While both the crown and the regal clothing are original attributes of the saint, as Catherine was niece to the emperor

Constantine, they are also extremely apt in describing the position of Lucrezia as “princess” of the Vatican, an attribute that will also be underlined in later productions. The spotlight put on the saint by her positioning and her clothing seems to support the identification between

Saint Catherine and Lucrezia.

Besides these elements, the possibility that the members of the Pope’s family were painted within the cycle is justified by the general objective of the fresco of presenting

Alexander VI as a secular ruler. The decoration of the pope’s suites, in fact, does not lose time in celebrating the glories of the papacy, its history, or mission, but is specifically directed in praising Pope Borgia and his . This intent is visually materialized by the profusion of the two Borgia devices all throughout the cycle: the double crown of and the bull. Both insignia had been modified in their original forms by Alexander ever since the

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12 first days of his pontificate in 1492 in a way reminiscent of the emblems of other secular lords; this way, Alexander effectively displayed himself as a temporal and military leader.17

The use of military insignia within the fresco linked the cycle (and in particular some scenes within it, such as the Disputation of Saint Catherine) to the political climate of the period; the

Holy League, in fact, led by the pope, had just defeated the French king Charles VIII, while the Moors, a strong presence within the scene, had finally surrendered their stronghold of

Granada to the armies of Ferdinand of Aragon on Saint Catherine’s day, 25 November, of

1491. In the renovation of the apartments, the double was added as a decoration in the tiled floors and on the ceiling in a repeated pattern with the gilded bull, surrounded by coloured, geometric stucco recalling the Moorish craftsmanship of Granada and Seville. The entire space, therefore, was to be a reflection of Alexander’s pride for House

Borgia, its Spanish genealogy, and its grandiose history.

The narratives in the frescoes reflect this celebratory intent. In the room of the

Mysteries of Faith, Alexander VI himself appears kneeling, dressed in magnificent pontifical robes, before the resurrecting Christ, in a manner already employed by both and especially secular leaders. In the adjacent Room of Saints, the pope is not personally present, but his motto and the Borgia bull are given a position of absolute prominence within the fresco with the Disputation of Saint Catherine and in the ceiling’s decorations. Contrasting with the Christian theme of the upper walls, the vaults draw from ancient pagan mythologies to display the figure of the ox continuously and abundantly. They represent the Egyptian god

Apis, a bull helper of mankind and of the god Osiris, and the animal into which the god and his descendants reincarnated [Figure 5]; and pagan myths drawn from Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, such as the story of Io, the Greek priestess who was turned into a heifer as a

17 Albert Van de Put, The Aragonese Double Crown & The Borja or Borgia Device (London: The Gryphon Club, 1950), 26.

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13 punishment for her relationship with Zeus. An additional to the ceiling cycle was given by Alexander’s personal secretary, Annius of Viterbo, who traced the descent of the

Borgia back to Osiris, making the theme of the vaults inherently dynastic.18 With Apis becoming simultaneously the representation but also the mythical ancestor of the Borgia bull, the Room of Saints again lends force to Alexander VI’s image as a secular ruler.19 It is easier to recognize the figure of Lucrezia in that of Saint Catherine once the representation of the saint is considered within this larger combination of elements that contribute to the praise of

House Borgia, and which turn the cycle into a dynastical celebration. The representation of the heirs to the power of the dynasty in the religious narratives on the lower walls would have been a necessary complement to the dynastic theme introduced with the representation of

Apis and Osiris as mythical ancestors of the House. In fact, the reincarnation of Osiris in the bull Apis gains meaning only through the descendants of the bull, which can carry forward the legacy of the god.20 Moreover, the pope was renowned for the devotion towards his children, who were fundamental for his political aspirations, as were heirs for all Renaissance rulers.

At the time of the execution of the frescoes, Alexander had already started outlining his plans for Lucrezia, who, at the tender age of about 13, had already been betrothed twice and had just celebrated the signing of her first marriage contract. In 1493, Lucrezia was ready to enter society as the wife of , Lord of Pesaro, who had been carefully chosen amongst her suitors to bring the maximum benefit to House Borgia and to

18 Mary Hollingsworth, in Renaissance Italy: from 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 274. 19 Randolph Parks, “On the Meaning of Pinturicchio’s Sala dei Santi,” Art History 2, no. 3 (September 1979): 298. 20 According to Diodorus, it was believed that: “At the death of Osiris his soul passed into this animal [the Apis], and therefore up to this day has always passed into its successors...” Plutarch writes that “they believe that the Apis is the animate image of Osiris.” Cited in Parks, “On the Meaning of Pinturicchio’s Sala dei Santi,” 313.

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Alexander’s position in Rome. In a hagiographic context, superimposing the figure of Saint

Catherine upon a portrait of Lucrezia would have been particularly appropriate in the circumstance of her upcoming wedding, as Catherine was a virginal saint and the prototypic sponsa Christi, the bride of Christ.21 Moreover, the saint’s facial features and hair have been recognized as consistent with later (secure) descriptions of Lucrezia and, intentionally or not, the simple hairstyle that the saint displays in this fresco will become a significant part of the later depictions of Lucrezia. Saint Catherine’s long wavy hair has been left free to fall on her shoulders and down to her waist, while only the frontal strands are knotted behind her head

[Figure 3]. Uncovered and untied hair, in fact, was the customary style for unmarried women or new brides, as Lucrezia was in those years.22 While Pinturicchio and his assistants left

Catherine and Barbara’s hair loose and uncovered, Susanna’s is depicted bound behind her head, a manner that was more appropriate for married women. This proves a certain representational consistency in these symbols that communicated women’s status to the viewers.

The imagery surrounding the figure of Lucrezia starts in Rome, where the portrait of the young girl was completely disguised within the holy figures of two exemplary women.

The fresco invites to the comparison between Lucrezia and the two saints, who were both venerated within a marriage context for their purity and their chastity. Lucrezia’s representation within the cycle faultlessly fits the Renaissance ideals on virtuous femininity.

On one hand, she is elevated for her moral qualities, which she draws from Catherine and

Barbara; on the other, she fulfills her societal function as virginal bride when she is presented as a righteous spouse for the Lord of Pesaro. As in reality so in the overarching dynastic

21 Adrian W.B. Randolph, “Performing the bridal body,” Art History 21, no. 2 (June 1998): 188. 22 Allyson Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia: Propriety, Magnificence, and Piety in Portraits of a Renaissance Duchess,” in Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: making the invisible visible through art and patronage, ed. Katherine A. McIver (London: Routledge, 2012), 81.

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15 theme of the cycle, Lucrezia’s role inside her family is inextricably tied with a marital context. As in the Renaissance marriages were political and economic negotiations intended to establish a family’s status, it was Lucrezia’s duty to accept her role as a bride, first to secure those advantageous relationships and secondly to father children, continuing the lineage. In an interpretation has never been suggested before, moreover, the representation of

Lucrezia as Saint Catherine might also serve to elevate her lineage, as well as to present the bride’s moral qualities. As Catherine was niece of Constantine, the first Christian emperor and defender of the Christian faith, and Barbara was the sheltered daughter of the rich and powerful Dioscorus, so Lucrezia is the daughter of pope Alexander VI, who upheld the

Christian faith and the rights of the Roman church against secular aggressors and the infidels’ threats. This interpretation seems in accordance with the general celebratory direction of the cycle and is also consistent with the identification given in the back of the fresco between

Pope Alexander and Constantine through the representation of the arch.

Lucrezia’s union with Giovanni Sforza turned out to be less politically profitable than what Alexander VI had previously imagined. After the pope had that marriage annulled,

Lucrezia was married off with a better suitor, Alfonso di , son of the king of .

When that marriage also ended in disgrace, with Alfonso killed at the hands of her brother

Cesare, Lucrezia’s reputation was far from being what it was when Pinturicchio painted her as a pure and pious bride. As early as 1496, rumors had started to circulate about an incestuous relationship between Lucrezia and her father, pope Alexander VI. These were first started by the subtle insinuations contained in the letters of the foreign envoys in Rome and

Milan at the time of the dissolution of the marriage between Lucrezia and Giovanni Sforza.

On the matter, the Ferrarese Antonio Costabili wrote to his master, Duke Ercole d’Este, that:

“The Pope had taken her away from him (Giovanni Sforza) in order to have her for

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16 himself.”23 Moreover, there was a general atmosphere of sexuality that surrounded the Borgia court and all of its members,24 which was certainly not in agreement with the Renaissance ideals that elevated spiritual love and asked women for chastity and men for spiritual contemplation of women’s beauty. However, Lucrezia’s public image would suffer its most terrible blow only with the circulation of a pamphlet containing a “Letter to Silvio Savelli,” published after the announcement of her marriage with Alfonso d’Este during the summer of

1501.25 Since all arrangements had already been formalized, the letter did not produce any effects on the promised union. The tones of the publications on Lucrezia and her family changed as the date of the wedding got closer and the preparations for her in Ferrara slowly continued.

Word of the engagement reached Ferrara as early as July 1501; in a note for the month of July, the Diario Ferrarese reports that: “Et fu dicto ch’el signore Don Alfonso era promeso in una fiola de Papa Alexandro Sexto.”26 The union was celebrated in Rome by proxy, as Alfonso remained in Ferrara, on December 9th and Lucrezia left the city in the new year. During those long months of engagements, both the Este and the papal court literati started to sing the praises to the future duchess. We will here analyse only a few of these works, noting in particular the images associated with Lucrezia and the metaphors used to describe her, as these will also recur in later portraits. The compositions belonging to this period are, for the majority, formulaic and didactic and employ classical imageries that were traditionally connected with a marriage context. These praised the beauty, the piety, and the

23 Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: life, love and death in Renaissance Italy (New York: Viking, 2004) 59. 24 Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia, 54. 25 For the scope of this chapter, it is only sufficient to know that the letter furtherly muddied Lucrezia’s reputation in an already delicate time such as the months prior to her wedding with Alfonso d’Este, heir to one of the most powerful of the Italian peninsula. On the specifics of the contents of this letter we say at the beginning of Chapter 2. 26 Giuseppe Pardi, ed., Diario Ferrarese: dall’anno 1409 sino al 1502 di autori incerti (: Zanichelli, 1928), 272.

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17 moral qualities of the bride, in the usual attempt to frame Lucrezia’s figure within the boundaries of Renaissance respectable femininity. While this process of elevation of the spouse was traditional in the context of wedding celebrations, it would have been deemed fundamental in the case of Lucrezia’s wedding with Alfonso, as her reputation had been questioned multiple times. In fact, the literati linger on descriptions of the beauty, grace, elegance of Lucrezia, and especially of her virtues with a suspicious insistence.27 One of such ode is the Lucretiae Borgiae Ducis expectatio,28 a composition by the Ferrarese Celio

Calcagnini that revolves around the long wait that divided the city of Ferrara and Alfonso from Lucrezia. The text, elegant and classicizing, opens with the topos of nature’s rebirth from the cold winter. As during the bitter winter days nature desires to feel again the warmth of the sun, similarly Ferrara will relish the rays of the sun brought by the arrival of Lucrezia:

“Tunc mortale genus tenebras, noctemque perosum… Iam lucere culpit, iam terris alma precatur Lumina restitui Nunc ita Phoebeas sperat mea patria fundi Te veniente faces.”29

The author then proceeds to describe the wait of Father Eridanus, of Phaeton’s sisters, of the naiads and dryads who prepare for her crowns of sweet-scented flowers, and especially of her husband, impatient to welcome her in his arms. Similar gracious praises, but less formulaic, are found in the composition by Niccolò da Correggio, an old cousin and confidant of

Alfonso.30 The old poet praises her name, the glories of her native city, of which there is not

27 Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, “L’arrivo di Lucrezia a Ferrara,” in Lucrezia Borgia: Storia e Mito, ed. Michele Bordin and Paolo Trovato (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2006), 10-11. 28 “The Wait of the Duke for Lucrezia Borgia.” 29 Then the mortal race, who hates the and the darkness... Now it wants to shine, now it prays to the nourishing earth that light will return. Now hopes that Apollo will shine over my homeland, coming you (Lucrezia) like a torch. 30 The composition referred to is the 400th of Niccolò da Correggio’s Rime, published in full in Niccolò da Correggio, Cefalo, Psiche, Silva, Rime, ed. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti (Bari: Laterza, 1969)

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18 another alike, her firm but discrete gaze, her modesty, her grace, and especially he remembers the warm welcome she gave him when he arrived incognito for a secret mission in Rome.

Instead of hiding the circumstances of their first meeting, the text proudly refers to that secret assignment he undertook by order, probably, of Ercole or Alfonso themselves, of spying upon their future family-in-law. While the flattery early in his poem to Lucrezia could be deemed as academic as Calcagnini’s classicizing verses, of her kindness he could speak personally and from experience. For a contemporary investigation into the real character of the historical

Lucrezia Borgia, his carme seems to be more significant than others, as the traditional classicizing praises are supported by the perspective of someone who knew Lucrezia and appreciated her moral qualities. The examination on the use of poetry and art to elevate

Lucrezia into the realm of ideal femininity reveals how Correggio’s poem serves the same purpose as other compositions by Calcagnini, Bernardo Accolti, and Monsior Tioli, and more.

Niccolò da Correggio, however, was not a courtly poet but a member of the Este family, which was never enthusiastic over mingling with House Borgia, and therefore did not have any obligations to exalt the bride. When the poet praises Lucrezia’s name in the second stanza, he introduces a significant analogy that will later be fundamental for Lucrezia:

“Se giova, quando al fonte si rinasce, bel nome, et tuo pudico quello excede d’opre e di nome da chi el nome nasce.”31

The allusion to her “modest” name and to the “opre,” the good deeds, connected with it might allude to the celebrated Lucretia of antiquity, who allowed through her sacrifice the rebellion of the Roman citizens against the usurper Etruscan kings. The following section, where

31 If a beautiful name helps, when one is reborn at the source, your modest one surpasses in deeds and in name (fame) that from whom your name was born.

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Correggio refers to the glories of ancient Rome, and to the benefit that Lucrezia will bring upon her subjects, confirms this reading. Correggio, however, only lightly hints at this comparison between the modern Lucrezia and the ancient noblewoman, while other productions will make the parallel more direct.

One author that fully employed this comparison is Marcello Filosseno, a poet active in

Rome at the time of Alexander VI. He touches again on the theme of the comparison with the

Roman Lucretia, and insisted on another popular motif, the rejoice of Ferrara for the arrival of the lady and the anguish of Rome for its loss:

“Godi, Ferrara, poi che il Cielo disserra Bel dono in te, che al tuo sceptro provede Locando hora Lucretia in la tua sede… Lucretia instaurò Roma con sua morte, questa che in vita agrada al Re Superno, instaura il mondo e la celeste corte. Se Roma ogni città tolse in governo, tu gloriar te puoi con miglior sorte, che hor spogli Roma d’un splendore eterno.”32

Another Roman poet, Giambattista Cantalicio, author of the Spectacula Lucretiana, a collection of Latin poetry commemorating the marriage festivities celebrated at the papal court at the turn of the year 1501-1502. In a classicizing style of his recalls Calcagnini’s, the author turns to the mythological figure of Hercules to glorify the Este Duke and calls upon the ancient pagan deities to bless the marriage.33 As per the figure of Lucrezia, the young bride is sublimated in an apotheosis that places her figure in the myth; the poet first compares her with the ancient noblewoman Lucretia, and secondly with the goddess Diana surrounded

32 Rejoice, Ferrara, because the Heavens have provided a beautiful gift for you, placing Lucrezia within you, benefitting your power... Lucretia founded Rome with her death, that who in life pleased the Heavenly King, establishes the world and the heavenly court. If Rome conquered every city, you (Ferrara) can glorify yourself with an even better luck, that now deprives Rome of an eternal splendour. 33 Tissoni Benvenuti, “L’arrivo di Lucrezia a Ferrara,” 11.

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20 with her court of nymphs.34 Coming from the Roman poets, the analogy gains a new significance. In light of the most recent accusations against her, it was fundamental for

Lucrezia to be presented and praised for her moral virtues, especially given her planned arrival in Ferrara. As she could not claim to be a virgin, since she had been married twice and had already given birth, a parallel with the ancient noblewoman would shine a new light upon her figure, introducing her as a deign bride for her husband, with the same strong sense of dignity and propriety of her homonym. all, these compositions might seem repetitive in their themes and not spontaneous but demanded from the courtly poets by the circumstances.

In reality, they were fundamental tools for every bride, and in particular for Lucrezia, as they started the creation of their new personae as spouses and mothers. For us, these compositions maintain a double value. From a societal perspective, they are means of elevating the bride’s figure to an ideal status; from the point of view of the individual Lucrezia Borgia, they present her through a light under which she is seldom observed, that of an illustrious

Renaissance lady. In fact, if one thing is true of the later (and more popular) productions of

Lucrezia, it is that they overshadowed all previous appreciative compositions.

Ever since her sumptuous and grandiose arrival in Ferrara, which presented her to the city, visual representations of Lucrezia changed to reflect her new social status. While in

Rome her (presumed) portrait depicted her as an elegant young bride instrumental to the ambitions of her family, the Ferrarese productions insisted first on her role as Alfonso’s wife, and later on her position as Duchess. The epithalamiums composed for her nuptials, therefore, acted only as a steppingstone before the greater works on her life at court. While those compositions already worked to construct her image as a virtuous and beautiful lady of

34 The comparison develops within two stanzas (vv. 37-44) of the XLI poem of the collection, the “Divae Lucretiae Borgiae Discessus ab Urbe et Comitatus,” the departure of the Diva Lucrezia Borgia from Rome and her entourage. Giovanni Battista Cantalicio, Bucolica/Spectacula Lucretiana, ed. Liliana Monti Sabia and Giuseppe Germano (Messina: Editrice Sicania, 1996), 268-272.

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21 solid values, during her first years in Ferrara Lucrezia might have still felt the need to visually solidify her image as a pious and devoted wife, and to further put to rest the previous scandals. For this reason, in 1503 she started to give directions for the casting of a new medal with her portrait. In the Renaissance, the importance of portrait medals runs parallel to that of painted portraits; both attempted to portray the sitter as if from nature and life (una vera effigie) and at the same time under an idealized guise.35 Medals, however, suited this task better than portraits, allowing the artists to show on the obverse the “true likeness,” and on the reverse an impresa, which through an allegory presented the individual’s virtues for which the person wanted to be remembered. While it is usually difficult to know how much input Renaissance ladies had over their portrayed images, we are certain of Lucrezia’s involvement in the creation of the medal. In June 1503, only about a year after she arrived in

Ferrara, taking her place at court, in a letter to the writer and scholar she asked his advice for a certain medal she wanted to have coined:

“Certa della vostra valentia per le medaglie, come mi avete dimostro a questi giorni passati, ruminando per trovare qualche impresa, e deliberando farne coniare al presente una, secondo il parere, che mi avete dato…. E perché poi non ci sia altro mescolamento, che possa diminuirla al merito, ho creduto colla presente anche pregarla, per amor mio, di prendersi la pena a pensare al motto da porvisi. Per il che dell’una cosa e dell’altra vi sarò tanto obbligata, quanto meritate, e sarà stimata l’.”36

The resulting work might have been the medal, from approximately 1505, ascribed to an unknown Mantuan artist [Figure 6]. On the obverse side is her portrait, shown in profile, the same that had originally appeared on the medal produced to commemorate her marriage, together with an inscription running circularly alongside the circumference of the medal:

“Lucretia Borgia Esten(sis) Ferrariae Mut(inae) Ac Regii D(ucissa).”37 This ingenious

35 Sergio Costola, “The Politics of a Theatrical Event: the 1509 Performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi,” Mediaevalia 33 (2012): 222. 36 Bernardino Gatti, ed., Lettere di Lucrezia Borgia a Messer Pietro Bembo dagli Autografi conservati in un Codice della (Milano: Biblioteca Ambrosiana Editrice, 1859), 12. 37 Lucrezia d’Este Borgia Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio.

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22 repurposing of the profile picture shown in the circumstance of her nuptials made the new work more recognizable and connected it with a marital (and therefore virtuous) context.38

The previous medal was cast probably between 1502 and 1505, the years of Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara, and featured Alfonso and Lucrezia’s profiles on the obverse and on the reverse respectively [Figure 7]. Alfonso’s bust, facing left, presented the heir to the Duchy of

Ferrara in an ornamented cuirass, wearing a round cap turned up at the back with the inscription “Alfonsvs. Estensis.”39 His bride, Lucrezia, was also shown in a profile view of her bust, and with the inscription “Lvcretia. Estn(sis). De. Borgia. Dvc(issa).”40 As in the

Renaissance female beauty and virtue were intimately linked by the Neoplatonic notion that physical beauty signified an inner beauty of spirit, her lineaments fit perfectly with the beauty ideals of the time: rounded , straight nose, and slightly receding chin.41 Her hair is left mostly unadorned, covering her temples but left free to flow down her neck and shoulder apart from two plaits, which are gathered and knotted behind her head. This simple hairstyle specifically qualifies this as a marriage portrait, since, as we noted before for Pinturicchio’s frescoes, uncovered and flowing hair was customary only for unmarried women or new brides. In this sense, Pinturicchio’s fresco and this marriage profile picture seem particularly alike, from the facial features to the hairstyle. However, the resemblance between these images might also be explained with a certain idealization of the sitters to adhere to the beauty standards of the time, which makes it impossible to recognize with absolute certainly

38 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 81. 39 “Medal FerrM. 56,” The , accessed February 23rd, 2021, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_G3-FerrM-56 40 Lucrezia d’Este and Borgia Duchess; this earlier inscription generically refers to Lucrezia as Duchess, in virtue of her marriage with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the dukedom. The later inscription, from 1505, specifically identifies her with the title of “Duchess of Ferrara, Reggio and Modena,” a more official definition. While Lucrezia might have requested this formality in a further attempt to establish her figure, it is also a sign that this second medal was commissioned after the rise of Alfonso to power after the death of his Ercole I. The inscriptions on the medals serve, therefore, to establish a chronology in the productions of these portraits of Lucrezia. 41 David Alan Brown, “Introduction" in Virtue and Beauty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13.

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Lucrezia as the model for the frescoes. Another element of this portrait medal of Lucrezia that qualifies the sitter as a bride is the brocchetta di spalla that secures her gown, a type of brooch that also often adorned brides, and was especially connected with all the nuptial ceremonies and festivities.42 The gown held up by the brooch is different from those that women usually wore for their portraits; not a contemporary dress, as that worn by Isabella d’Este, Lucrezia’s sister-in-law, in the portrait medal cast after she established her quarters in the Mantuan palace, but resembling an ancient Roman toga, with loose fabric held up only by the shoulder jewel. This type of clothing, and the simplicity of the brocchetta di spalla, compared to others portrayed on illustrious brides, must have a certain significance for

Lucrezia. In fact, even if we are not sure of Lucrezia’s involvement in the creation of this portrait, it is significant that she chose to utilize it again, and without changing any details, when she gave orders to cast the second medal after 1503.

Roman toga might have worked as a signifier of a multitude of meanings. First, it presents Lucrezia as an educated and cultured person, and therefore establishes her figure as that of a sophisticated noblewoman. In the Renaissance courts, culture became an accomplishment for men and noblewomen alike and Latin literacy and classical learning to daughters as well as sons of the , as education started to be considered as a means of developing the inner qualities of the self.43 The medal’s portrayal of Lucrezia’s familiarity with the ancient myths would have therefore classified her as a member of the aristocracy.

Secondly, it elevated her figure through the connection with those notable figures from antiquity that had been permanently ascribed within the ranks of ideal femininity. In accordance with the qualities of motherhood and loyalty valued by society, in the

Renaissance the most revered ancient figures were those whom were believed to have been

42 Randolph, “Performing the bridal body,” 182-190. 43 Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” 33.

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24 particularly devoted to her family, as Empress Faustina the Elder.44 While an analogy with this emblem of fidelity, piety, and maternal virtues might have been particularly favourable for her in the circumstances of the marriage, Lucrezia had already been connected in her epithalamiums with another exemplary woman from ancient times, her homonym Lucretia, the Roman noblewomen who committed suicide after she was brutalized by king Tarquinius.

This comparison with Lucretia, who valued her virginity so much as to take her own life rather than live with the stain of rape upon herself, takes on a special value if put in the context of the accusations of made against Lucrezia before she arrived in Ferrara.

While she could not claim to be a virgin anymore, showing herself as the ancient Lucretia distanced her new image of a loyal bride from the indecent sinner she had been depicted as before. As in poetry so in the medal, this visual analogy with Lucrezia suggest that she is too a loyal and pious wife with a great sense of dignity and chastity. Moreover, during the wedding festivities held in Ferrara after her arrival in the of 1503, in the official speech delivered by the court historian Pellegrino Prisciani, Lucrezia had been equated with another notable from the past, the saint noblewoman Petronilla:45

“Super Petri petram Deus onnipotens, humanitate assumpta, ecclesiam suam edificavit. Et hanc tandem Alexandro VI comisit. Habuit Petrus Petronillam filiam pulcherrimanm; habet Alexander Lucretiam decore et virtutibus undique resplendentem. O immense Dei omnipontentis miseria! O beatissimos homines!”46

Prisciani bravely confronts the delicate subject of Lucrezia’s illegitimate birth, justifying and exalting it as a mystery wanted by God. As Providence gave Peter, the rock on which the

Church is built, his beautiful daughter Petronilla, Alexander in his role as successor to Peter’s

44 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 82. 45 The original text is preserved in a manuscript, autographed by the author, in the Ariostea library in Ferrara and was transcribed in Tissoni Benvenuti, “L’arrivo di Lucrezia a Ferrara,” 17. 46 The Almighty God, incarnating, built his church on the rock of Peter. And ultimately he also did in Alexander. Peter had a beautiful daughter, Petronilla, Alessandro has Lucrezia, resplendent everywhere for dignity and virtue. O immense God of omnipotent misery! O, happy people!

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25 seat was given Lucrezia, who equally shines for dignity and virtue. This comparison between

Peter and Alexander brings forth a new role for Lucrezia, as a saint, a martyr, and as the successor of the ancient noblewomen “daughter of the Church.” In fact, her position as

“princess of the Vatican” recalls her depiction as Saint Catherine in the halls of the Borgia apartments. Prisciani, as well as Pinturicchio, places the figure of Lucrezia on both a mystical and classicizing plane. A discourse on beauty is also brought forth, as Petronilla was especially famous for it. By her father Peter’s will, she was so beautiful that she suffered continually from fever.47 At once, therefore, the author praises Lucrezia’s beauty, her birth, and her virtue. The medal and its visual references to the ancient Roman past was, therefore, totally beneficial for Lucretia, comparing her figure with more than one moral example.

The virtuous overtones of the portrait were only emphasized by the allegory chosen to illustrate the reverse of the 1505 medal. Probably still seeking to affirm her image as a loyal and pious bride for Alfonso, Lucrezia chose the classicizing imagery of a blindfolded Cupid

(Amor Bendato) bound to a tree, and accompanied by a quiver, an inscribed table, a violin, a sheet of music, and a bow with a broken string. Around the edge of the medal, a motto is inscribed: “virtutis ac formae pudicitia praecosissimum.”48 The blindfolded Cupid was a common image of chastity, especially if with his instruments for inflaming passion portrayed broken and unusable (like the bow with a broken string and the broken quiver.)49

This interpretation is also supported by the laurel tree to which Cupid is tied, as the laurel was perceived as both a symbol of virtue, for its connections with the nymph Daphne, and as purity uncorrupted by decay, as it was anciently consecrated to the Vestal Virgins. As an

47 Jacobus De Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. Willian Grader Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 315. 48 In virtue and beauty, modesty most precious 49 Kari Lawe, “La Medaglia dell’Amorino Bendato,” in La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo (1990): 237-239 and Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), Ch. 4.

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26 emblem of chastity and immortality, the laurel appears frequently in religious paintings, especially those depicting the Virgin Mary and saints.50 In choosing the bound Cupid,

Lucrezia therefore rejected Pietro Bembo’s advice of utilizing the motto “Est Animum,”51 a more scholarly quote to represent the human spirit, and possibly spiritual love, to direct the discourse of the medal more clearly towards a representation of her moral qualities. The blindfolded and bound Cupid, in fact, was an extremely popular symbol for female chastity and was highly recognizable in its meaning, since it had been utilized before by two other contemporary courtly women (Jacoba Correggio and Maddalena Rossi.)52 Lucrezia’s interest in the creation of the medal proves women’s active participation in the creation of an ideal on respectable femininity, and of a public image that fit within those boundaries.

Renaissance portrait medals held a variety of functions, from permanently fixing the likeness of the individual and his moral qualities for posterity, to commemorate events, and materialize information on the wealth of the person represented.53 The commemorative function, however, was prevalent, as it also connected the Renaissance examples with the same usage of ancient bronze coins. As per the medals produced for Lucrezia, the Amor

Bendato medal was only the second out of three to be coined in her honour. The third medal, of which one example is currently held at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., represents on the obverse a new profile portrait of Lucrezia with the inscription: “Lucretia.

50 An illustrious example of this practice of using the laurel as a symbol of immortality and chastity is ’s Madonna Bardi from 1485, where the image of the Virgin Mary and two Saints stands out against a verdant background formed by luscious laurel and olive trees. Other religious and secular examples include Girolamo Romano Madonna and Child from 1507, ’s Ginevra de’ Benci, and ’s Laura. 51 Enzo Travi, Petro Bembo. Lettere (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987), 1:153. 52 The medals of Jacoba Correggio, Maddalena Rossi, and Lucrezia Borgia are analysed together by Pollard, Renaissance Medals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) for their use of the image of the blindfolded Cupid on the reverse and are mentioned by Lawe, “La Medaglia dell’Amorino Bendato,” 236 and Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 83. 53 Lucia Travaini, “I ritratti sulle monete. Principi, artisti, collezionismo e zecche nel Rinascimento Italiano,” in Ritratti del Rinascimento, ed. by Raffella Castagnola (Milano: Giampiero Casagrande Editore, 2007), 83-85.

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Esten(sis). Borgia. Dvch(i)ssa” [Figure 8]. The new portrait abandons the previous classicizing attire to present the Lucrezia in contemporary clothes, while her previously flowing hair are now bound in a complicated style. Consistently with the use of these portraits as commemorative objects, the medal visually represents a new stage of Lucrezia’s life in Ferrara. In 1505, after the death of Ercole I d’Este, her husband became Duke, and her title was elevated to Duchess; her position within the city became even stronger when she gave birth to her son Ercole II d’Este in 1508 and to Ippolito in 1509. Her public image, therefore, did not need to be furtherly strengthened by portraits allusive and suggestive.

Instead, she is presented as a proud noblewoman, married, clad by beautifully ornamented clothes and jewellery, and her facial features render again an image of great beauty. As in the previous portrait, great space is given to a precise rendition of her dress and of her hairstyle, as those details carried important political and diplomatic overtones. This time, however, her hair is intricately styled in a long braid at the back of her head, called a coazzone, with a hairnet for coverage and a cord across her forehead (lenza.) This bound hairstyle, which covers the hair almost completely with nets and cords, was doubly tied to Lucrezia’s history.

The long intricate braid had an Iberian origin and it had been popularized among the North

Italian noblewomen by Alfonso’s sister Beatrice d’Este when she arrived in Milan in 1490 as the bride of Ludovico Maria Sforza.54 Its representation in the medal, therefore, might have acted on one hand as a suggestion of the proud Spanish origins of Lucrezia’s native family, and on the other as a statement of loyalty towards her Ferrarese family. After Beatrice d’Este brought the distinctive look of the coazzone in Milan, the hairstyle became a fashion statement for other married and unmarried aristocratic women carrying courtly and noble overtones. Portraits by Ambrogio de Predis of the future empress Bianca Maria Sforza prove

54 Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (May, 2009): 247.

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28 the widespread use of the hairstyle in the most sumptuous circumstances [Figure 9].

Executed to be sent abroad to Bianca Maria’s suitors, the Duke of Saxony and the King of

Scotland, the paintings portray the young Milanese lady sumptuously adorned by the most sophisticated fabrics and jewels, which cover every inch of her body and head. The coazzone, therefore, was more than just a chaste style for married women, which allowed for the hair to be covered as requested by the laws of propriety, but it was also a fashion statement on the finances and wellbeing of the entire family. Through the new portrait, Lucrezia parades her status as duchess of Ferrara and puts herself on the same plane as the most sophisticated and rich women in the whole North of Italy.

As much as the hairstyle, the other details of her garments prove both her propriety and her social status as Duchess, further illustrating this idea of luxury and nobility. The means and ability to wear sumptuous garments and priceless gems were an essential part of the female ruler persona, as they separated her from her own subjects and from the wealthy patrician women, whose personal display was limited by sumptuary laws.55 Her dress is a contemporary piece composed of a brocade fabric cut low on the chest and completed by a veil, or lace, that covers the uppermost portion of the lady’s bust. While this medal clearly refers to the years when Lucrezia was securely at the head of the Ferrarese court, the National

Gallery inscribes it to 1502, therefore to a period even predating her arrival in the city.

Besides the stylistic and iconological considerations that have been made for the piece, which already put into serious question the dating to 1502, the medal also bears a striking resemblance to another portrait of Lucrezia, this one securely executed between 1508 and

1510. It is possible that at the time when Bartolomeo Veneto was commissioned to complete that , a portrait similar in iconography and purpose was designed for the medal. As

55 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 84.

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29 we already noted, in fact, portrait medals were an important means of presenting the likeness and inner attributes of a sitter to one’s peers; given their small dimensions, they were more easily transportable and therefore spreadable, making them also the perfect tool to present the image of rulers to the subjects.

Bartolomeo Veneto’s portrait from 1508-1510 is the only one that can be securely tied to Lucrezia Borgia [Figure 10]. In this case, as per the Amor Bendato medal, Lucrezia is heavily invested in the creation of her image, as the painter appears on her payroll, and not her husband’s. The duchess’ interest towards the execution of this painting, and its resemblance to the profile portrait that appears on the Washington medal, makes it probable that Lucrezia was also the patron of the portrait medal, as she was for the earlier types. The original portrait by Bartolomeo Veneto is currently lost, but the Este family ordered a copy of it to be sent to the humanist collector . After that copy many others were made, of which one is currently in Nimes at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. The portrait was probably executed between 1508 and 1510, perhaps to commemorate the birth of one of Lucrezia’s sons, the events that ultimately secured her position at court. It shows a young woman with a round face and straight nose, dark hair bound by an elaborate and richly adorned hairnet and clothed in an elaborate brocade gown. Her dress, a camora, is probably the same that is also depicted in the coazzone medal, with a low-cut bodice and a white camicia underneath, which prevents her breasts from showing. As in the other depiction, there is an extraordinary display of wealth. The hairnet that enfolds her hair is richly encrusted with pearls and precious stones, which cross her forehead by means of strands of gold thread, from which pearls are suspended, while her dress and the camicia were also unique pieces, decorated with golden stripes, jewels and a lace hem. However, it is again the hairnet that captures the most attention, as it had been one of Lucrezia’s fashion trademarks ever since her wedding. On the day of her entrance in Ferrara, she wore a spectacular loose version covered in pearls and

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30 diamonds, under which her hair flowed freely in the custom of brides.56 Now, in a style more proper for a matron, only two strands are allowed to escape from the hairstyle. Her appearance, idealized or not, keeps adhering to the beauty standards of the time that required clear and white skin, rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and a rounded face, again to implicate virtue and goodness. Even in the context of a depiction as a magnificent Duchess, the style of the portrait maintains firm the importance of a woman’s beauty as a signifier of moral integrity, while the jewelled hairnet is another symbol, recalling her bridal chastity.

The chaste but magnificent image of Lucrezia in profile view with the coazzone hairstyle was chosen again for the only full-length depiction that we have of the Duchess. The portrait was engraved by Giannantonio da Foligno in one of three silver plaques that compose the reliquary of San Maurelio, first bishop of Ferrara and one of the city’s patrons, for the

Basilica di San Giorgio Fuori le Mura, first cathedral of Ferrara before the construction of the

Duomo [Figure 11]. No documents remain on the patronage of the reliquary and on the commission to Giannantonio da Foligno, but there is circumstantial evidence that suggest that

Lucrezia was the primary patron of the work. While this could have certainly been a joint commission from Lucrezia and her husband, her tastes in art were more religious than those of Alfonso, who rarely commissioned religious artwork, and da Foligno’s works are mentioned in the inventories of Lucrezia’s jewels from 1516-1519.57 While no extant works have been recognised as originating from Lucrezia’s art collection, she commissioned many paintings of religious themes and devotional objects, while Alfonso’s patronage insisted on pagan mythologies.58 Some of the works Lucrezia owned included a sacra conversazione with the saints John and , a painting with a head of Christ by Fra Bartolomeo, and

56 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 85. 57 Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia, 33. 58 Famous are especially the paintings Alfonso commissioned for his studiolo, mythological scenes from Gentile Bellini, , and others.

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31 multiple half-length devotional images by Ludovico Mazzolino and Bartolomeo Veneto, two artists that figure multiple times in the Duchess’ account books.59 Her interest in relics, testified by her trip to Nonantola and by the letters to her confessor, combined with her ever- increasing piety, may have led her to suggest such a commission, which was both political and religious at the same time.

The engraved plaques of the reliquary, in fact, permanently link the Este family to the remains of San Maurelio, who had been one of the founders of the Ferrarese church and was an important protector of the city, answering a question regarding the legitimacy of the Este’s rule over Ferrara. In one panel, Saint Maurelio gives his blessing to a kneeling Alfonso and therefore sanctions his control over the dutchy. If Lucrezia was the primary commissioner of the work, her involvement might have been again an attempt to show her loyalty to , but also to definitively certify her role within the Este dynasty. In the second panel, in fact, it is Lucrezia that proudly stands in front of the saint, and presents him the future Duke of Ferrara, her son Ercole II d’Este. Saint Maurelius’ favour for the young Ercole suggests that he is giving his blessing for the continuation of the Este dynasty at a time when the

Italian political situation made it not certain [Figure 12]. The head and bust of Lucrezia are copied from the coazzone medal type; her head is modestly covered by a net and braided down her back, as appropriate for a formal setting and for the guise of a married woman, and her gown is also simpler and less revealing than the one from the Veneto portrait, setting an example of propriety and virtue. Her large retinue of courtly ladies act within the composition as a marker of Lucrezia’s nobility and social status, while at the same time serving to establish a comparison. Against the sumptuousness of the duchess’ clothing, they are more

59 Allyson Burgess Williams, “Silk-Clad Walls and Sleeping Cupids: A Documentary Reconstruction of the Living Quarters of Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara,” in The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior: 1400-1700, ed. by Erin J. Campbell, Stephanie R. Miller, Elizabeth Carroll Consavari (London: Routledge, 2013), 182.

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32 simply dressed and with unadorned hair, but their gowns sit lower on their chests. Their demeanour is also different from that of their lady; while Lucrezia stands tall before the bishop and directs a firm gaze towards him, the ladies seem distracted and whisper with each other, seemingly oblivious to the holy scene happening on the left of the picture plane.

Amongst them, Lucrezia stands out as a model and is the only figure, besides Ercole, who is privileged enough to experience the presence of Saint Maurelius. The image is a clear statement of status, succession, and the right to rule, although Lucrezia’s presence here is only due to the fact that she fulfilled her prime function as a wife, producing her husband an heir.60

The San Maurelio reliquary engravings, therefore, constitute the last part of Lucrezia

Borgia’s public image. From the early portrait in the Borgia apartments, where she was exalted by the analogy with the saints Catherine and Barbara to show her bridal purity, and from the nuptial poetry, strangely insistent upon her qualities of chastity and modesty,

Lucrezia does not anymore need to elevate her figure through analogies with deities and illustrious women from the past. For having been a good wife to Alfonso, for bearing him children, and for the propriety she manifested while duchess, her public courtly image was securely and unequivocally inserted within the range of virtuous femininity. In the Saint

Maurelius reliquary, her beauty and her privileged encounter with the protector of Ferrara testifies one last time to her goodness and her piety, and the magnificence of her clothing to her status. At last, she is presented as a pious and magnificent duchess, responsible for the continuation of the Este dynasty, becoming a moral exemplar in her own right.

60 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 91.

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THE MOST COMPLETE MORAL DEFORMITY

“Mankind is ever ready to discover the personification of human virtues and human vices in certain typical characters found in history and fable... The Borgias will never cease to fascinate the historian and the psychologist.”61

Gregorovius thus continued in the Introduction to his biography of Lucrezia Borgia, impeccably capturing at once the motive and the deep fascination felt over Lucrezia and her family in the first half of the 19th century. After her death during childbirth in 1519, the virtuous and morally exemplary character of Lucrezia seen in the Ferrarese productions underwent a complete transformation in the following centuries. Starting with some unflattering literary portraits made of her in the decades immediately following her passing, she quickly became not an emblem of propriety and decorum, but the personification of immorality and sin. Biographies and treaties on the Borgias became a popular subject matter all throughout the 17th and 18th century, but it was only in the 1800s that a true fever for the family swept through Europe. From screenplays to paintings, from poetry to scholarly research, the name of the Borgias became synonymous with cruelty and ambition, but at the same time also allure, charm, and seductiveness. The duality in their characteristics seems to be one prime motive for the interest in the family. Gregorovius explains it in religious terms:

“The Borgias had for background the Christian Church... the sharp contrast of their conduct with the holy state makes them appear altogether fiendish.”62 As a member of the family,

Lucrezia was viewed under the same light, so that when her name prominently reappeared and gained popularity in the European artistic scene of the early 19th century, her figure was unrecognizable from the flattering and magnificent portraits of her by Bartolomeo Veneto, or

Giannantonio da Foligno. Mashing together the binomial categories of the beautiful virtuous

61 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, xvii. 62 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, xvii.

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34 and the repugnant immoral, Lucrezia becomes the personification of ambiguity. The beautiful and magnificent exterior of her portraits are merged with the hideous representations made of her character after her death to create a completely new figure that has little to do with the historical person of Lucrezia Borgia. The name of Lucrezia Borgia becomes therefore elevated to identify more of a mythological femme fatale than an accurate figure from history.

This chapter will analyse nineteenth-century representations of Lucrezia that treat her figure as the site of two opposites, and the fascination over her figure will be explained using the framework of the Kantian sublime in relation to the beautiful. Kant wrote this of the two terms: “the beautiful is characterized by the finitude of its formal contours, as a unity contained, limited by its border. The sublime, on the contrary, is presented in terms of excess.” Contrary to Lucrezia’s beautiful, but contained, image in the sixteenth century, the nineteenth-century productions of the same subject are a disturbing mixture of beauty and immorality. To conclude, this chapter will outline the 19th progression of the representation of

Lucrezia Borgia, always underling how they depart from the previous idealized duality of virtuosity/immorality.

The first work of literature dedicated entirely to her name, and which introduced her to 19th century society, was the 1833 play Lucréce Borgia by the popular playwriter Victor

Hugo. “Who, actually, is this Lucrezia Borgia?” asks Hugo in the introduction to the play.

“Take the most hideous, the most repulsive, the most complete moral deformity; place it where it fits best—in the heart of a woman whose physical beauty and royal grandeur will make the crime stand out all the more strikingly…” The characteristics of the modern

Lucrezia as thus established as the conjuncture of moral wickedness, yet great physical beauty, and royal grandeur. In Hugo’s words, it is precisely the contrast between Lucrezia’s physical loveliness and moral ugliness that “makes the crime stand out all the more strikingly,” proving that the authors are attracted to this duality, a woman having a dark heart

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35 in a beautiful body, an affront to affront to human imagination. This “outrage on the imagination” is a key concept of the Kantian determination of the sublime in contrast with the idea of beauty. On one hand, the form of the beautiful is adapted to facilitate our faculty of perception and judgment and conveys a finality of form;63 this corresponds, in our case, to those ideals on beauty that saw a correspondence between physical beauty and positive moral qualities. The unity between internal and external qualities perfectly describes that finality of form and aids human perception in the recognition of what is good and moral. On the contrary, the idea of the sublime is a disturbance of these intellectual faculties, so that to a beautiful body is equated a wicked mind and vice versa. This experience with the sublime is not only accepted but is sought out by the author. In fact, as the greater the “outrage” on the imagination, the greater the sublimity of the experience. This translates to Lucrezia’s appearance for she is not beautiful but of royal grandeur, and morally she is not only evil but is “the most hideous, the most repulsive, the most complete moral deformity.” This exaggeration of Lucrezia’s qualities and her extreme behaviours transports her within the realm of the sublime. In fact, as remembered before, “the sublime is presented in terms of excess.” This way, the Lucrezia of the play surpasses the historicity of her character and becomes an otherworldly creature, governed by her whims and excessive passions.

The immediate success of the piece makes its author, Hugo, one of the principals responsible for the legend of Lucrezia as the personification of all crimes and vices of the

House of Borgia, of which she presents the most perverse form.64 The influence of the author in the art world and the public nature of the play, moreover, spread this new ambiguous version of the figure of Lucrezia in the same way that Renaissance medals perpetuated her virtuous image as well. As a rock that hits stagnant water, the Lucrecé Borgia created

63 Nead, The Female Body, 26. 64 Mariangela Miotti, “La Lucrèce Bogia di Victor Hugo,” in Lucrezia Borgia: Storia e Mito, ed. Michele Bordin and Paolo Trovato (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2006), 255-256.

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36 countless ripples, reinterpretations, paintings, and literary works even outside of France, permeating 19th century cultural circles and popular culture with the figure of Lucrezia as a wicked seductress. Hugo made clear the sources of his inspiration for the character: “The author will remain silent in the face of criticism… To those who reproach him for exaggerating Lucrezia Borgia’s crimes he will say ‘Go and read Tomasi, read Guicciardini and, above all, read the Diarium.’”65 However, the relationship between Hugo’s Lucréce and historical accuracy remains problematic. While the author claims to be working in the realm of history, portraying facts and not theatrical constructions, his character can be more easily equated with a mythological being than with a real, living person. Hugo, moreover, never questioned the very authors on whom he was relying, however problematic their agendas, or political convictions. The number of accusers among Lucrezia’s contemporaries was certainly not small: Sannazzaro, Pontanus, Matarazzo, Marcus Attilius Alexis, Petrus Martyr,

Priuli, Macchiavelli, and Guicciardini all charge her explicitly or by implication with various sins, from to incest and depravity. On the other hand, the ranks of her eulogists were also quite crowded with men no less famous than her detractors: Tito and Ercole Strozzi,

Pietro Bembo, Aldo Manuzio, Tebaldeo, Ariosto, the French biographer Bayard, and all the chroniclers from Ferrara. As Gregorovius notes, Lucrezia’s accusers and their charges only refer to the Roman period of her life, while her admirers speak of her second half of her life, which she spent in Ferrara as wife of Duke Alfonso d’Este.66 Of these critics, therefore, only those who resided or had contacts with the papal court in Rome should be considered as worthy of attention, and many are not.

Guicciardini, the historian whom Victor Hugo mentions, is not part of them, and neither is Tomasi, pseudonym of Gregorio Leti, writer of a 1670 biography on Borgia.

65 Ivan Cloulas, The Borgias, trans. by Gilda Roberts (New York: Franklin Watts, 1989), 340. 66 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, 113.

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Guicciardini himself drew upon other texts, principally Burchard and Machiavelli’s, and contemporary rumours, but without ever questioning their veracity. Of these, only Burchard can be considered an authoritative source, as he was the Papal Master of Ceremonies under

Alexander VI and his predecessors, and therefore bore of the many events that occurred while Lucrezia was in Rome, while Machiavelli was never in Rome for such an extended period of time before 1502, when Lucrezia definitively moved out of the Eternal

City to take her place in Ferrara. Burchard is the writer of that Diarium mentioned in the

Preface to the Lucréce; of him, Gregorovius notes that he records only facts, never rumours, and seems to be free from malice.67 In his Diarium there are two passages in particular which bear offence against Lucrezia, an episode with two stallions and four mares and an orgy at which she was supposedly present. While the content of these two unpleasant incidents will be fully revealed later, it is now time to investigate the only document, besides the Diarium, that recalls such events. This is the so-called “Letter to Silvio Savelli,” which also was mentioned in the first chapter as the most serious blow to Lucrezia’s reputation after many rumours had circulated about possible incestuous relationship she had with her father and brother. This letter, of which the authenticity still has yet to be proved, was written to baron

Silvio Savelli, one of those whom pope Alexander VI expropriated their wealth at the beginning of the year 1500. While the author of the letter is anonymous, the writing is said to have originated in and then to have been published in Germany, where it was transformed into an appalling pamphlet that widely circulated in Italy.68 Gregorovius believes the letter not to be a fabrication, since it was reproduced in full into Burchard and Marin

Sanuto’s diaries, and by Matarazzo da , who was however deemed by the same author

67 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, 114. 68 Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia, 122-123.

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38 as a questionable source in various precedent occasions.69 However, the German historian disregards the remarkable discrepancies between Matarazzo and Burchard’s relations of the scandal, and fails to consider that the pamphlet became so popular all throughout the peninsula that it is probable that Matarazzo came to hear of the scandal by the letter itself.70

Since this is not the place to enter into a digression into the veracity of such documentary sources, let us just say that this anonymous letter and Burchard’s Diarium agree on the occurrence of two episodes that involve Lucrezia while she was in Rome, the only two incidents that might shine an unfavourable light upon the would-be Duchess.

The first of these episodes relates to a supper given by in the Vatican to fifty prostitutes. As recalled by Burchard in an entry at the end of October 1500:

“On Sunday evening, the last day of October, there took place in the apartments of the Duke Valentino in the , a supper, participated in by fifty honest prostitutes of those who are called courtesans. After supper they danced with the servants and others who were there, first clothed, then naked. After supper the lighted candelabra which had been on the table were placed on the floor, and chestnuts thrown among them… The Pope, the Duke and Lucrezia, his sister, were present looking on.”71

Burchard specifically mentions the presence of Lucrezia at such a scandalous evening. The occurrence of the dinner is also reported by another source, the dispatch by the Florentine orator Francesco Pepi who reported that on November 4th the pope had not attended mass because of an indisposition, which did not stop him on Sunday night, the vigil of All Saints, from spending the night until the 12th hour with the duke (Cesare,) who had invited at the palace singers and courtesans: “Non perd lo impedi domenica nocte per la vilia (sic)

69 Only a few lines after Gregorovius regards Matarazzo to be an authority, he states: “The accusations of the Neapolitans and of Guicciardini are not substantiated… unless we regard Matarazzo as an authority, which he certainly was not.” Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, 115. 70 , The Life of Cesare Borgia; a history and some criticism (New York: Brentano’s, 1923), 308. 71 Johannis Burchardi, Diarium sive Rerum Urbanarum Commentarii (1483-1506), ed. L. Thuasne (, Ernest Leroux Editeur, 1885), 3:167. Translation provided in Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia, 120- 121

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39 d'ognisancti vegliare infino a XII hore con il duca, quale havea facto venire in Palazo la nocte ancora cantoniere, cortigiane, et tiicta nocte siierono in vegghia et balii et riso.” Pepi, however, whom is deemed by Sarah Bradford as the “most plausible” of all these sources, does not mention the presence of Lucrezia to such a lascivious event. Gregorovius doubts the presence of the soon-to-be Duchess to the matter; in a paragraph that evidently exposes the exculpatory intent of his biography, the author states that, while this episode is “doubtless based upon an actual banquet which Cesare gave in his palace in the Vatican,” where such orgy may have taken place, “who will believe that Lucrezia, now the legally recognized bride of Alfonso d’Este and about to set out for Ferrara, was an amused spectator of it?” In his

“Life of Cesare Borgia,” Sabatini points his finger upon another weakness of the story: Burchard does not say that he himself was a witness of the event he relates.72 Just a few days later, on November 2nd, Burchard reports another incident of heavy sexual connotations and specifically involving Lucrezia. The episode involved the furious and noisy fight of four stallions who were released upon two mares. In their fierce fight for the right to mount them, the stallions bit and kicked themselves and injured the mares with their hooves, all while

Lucrezia and the Pope laughed and enjoyed the scene from a window above the courtyard.

Regarding this incident, Sabatini caustically notes: “The improbabilities of the saturnalia of the fifty courtesans pale before the almost utter impossibility of this narrative,”73 while

Bradford finds a suspicious echo between this story and the rabidly anti-Borgia chronicler

Matarazzo.74 All in all, it has been shown how, of all the scandals involving Lucrezia, only a few can be trusted as plausibly occurring, while many others were partisan narratives that little have to do with historical accuracy. While this discussion does not want to become an apology of the figure of Lucrezia, but more an examination of the mythology surrounding

72 Sabatini, The Life of Cesare Borgia, 308. 73 Sabatini, The Life of Cesare Borgia, 307. 74 Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia, 54.

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40 her, it was deemed fundamental to understand where the rumours originated and how they were received.

Victor Hugo draws upon these secondary sources to compose his Lucréce Borgia. In the

Venetian panel of the first act that opens the drama, the author gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of Lucrezia. In a dramatic escalation that plays with the dichotomy between the ideal portrayals of victims and victimizers, Lucrezia is first a victim of her family and charged all the crimes committed by her brother. She appears, however, already as an “indéchiffrable” character and appears in the scene masked (for the Venetian carnival) and under a false name. Pressed by the questions of Gubetta, her loyal confidante, she reveals of wanting to: “Redeem my past, to wash away my fame, to erase the stains of all kinds that I have everywhere on me, and to change into an idea of glory, penance and virtue, the infamous and bloody idea that Italy attaches to my name” because “All off Italy hates me!

You are right! However, all of this must change. I was not born to do evil, I feel it now more than ever. This is the example of my family who have me trained.”75 Hugo immediately presents the duality of her character, the desire to change into the ideal of respectability given to women by “glory, penance, and virtue” contrasted by the evil crimes she committed, proving once more that the fascination for her character is given by her presumed deviation from the norms of ideal femininity. However, this first passionate and kind exchange only precedes the unmasking of the real Lucrezia; in the following scene, set in Ferrara, she comes back as a female monster who kills her children in her thirst for lust and blood.76 The old duality is therefore immediately surpassed and Lucrezia becomes “le comble de

75 Victor Hugo, Lucrèce Borgia (Paris: Ernest Flammarion Editeur, 1833), 19. 76 Miotti, “La Lucrèce Bogia di Victor Hugo,” 259.

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41 l’obscénité,”77 the same obscenity that is theorized by Nead as opposite to art and beauty and coincident with the sublime.78

Here again, it is important to specify that we are referring to the sublime in the precise

Kantian sense utilized by Nead to frame her discourse on the female body, rather than to the more popularized, nineteenth-century notion of the sublime as something awesome or uplifting. Beautiful but terrible, maternal but incestuous, Lucrezia is the “positive criminal character” typical of Hugo’s poetics. In fact, while the author successfully completes a first transformation of Lucrezia into a force of nature, he does not wander too far beyond the traditional, and reassuring, duality of virtue/vice and victim/victimizer. The play does not accomplish a full rendition of the sublime as a “disturbing category, for in its promise of form without limit it shatters... duality and reminds us of the social nature of all categories and boundaries”79 because Lucrezia, even in her role of theatrical transposition of the sublime, acts within society and is eventually punished for her sins. Instead of reminding of society’s role in the creation of certain ideals, the play upholds that social order and punishes Lucrezia for wandering outside of the “norm” of the acceptable feminine. However, this ultimate victory of virtue and morals was instrumental for Hugo’s vision of a “theatre for the people” where the audience is comforted by the punishment of vice.80 Regarding the matter of Hugo’s rendering of Lucrezia, Gregorovius was most firm: “The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the art, while the historian laughs at it; the poet, however, may excuse himself on the ground of his

77 “The height of obscenity,” as the French newspapers described her. Cited in Miotti, “La Lucrèce Bogia di Victor Hugo,” 255. 78 Nead, The Female Body, 25. 79 Nead, The Female Body, 26. 80 Miotti, “La Lucrèce Bogia di Victor Hugo,” 259.

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42 ignorance, and of his belief in a myth which had been current since the publication of

Guicciardini's history.”81

Poets and artists remained fascinated by Hugo’s rendition of Lucrezia and followed it in multiple directions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti adopted the play’s vision and brought it to fulfilment, eliminating that element of punishment that previously hindered Hugo in giving a full rendition of the sublime as a disturbing image outside social boundaries. Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, executed two works that feature Lucrezia

Borgia as their main character, and many versions and copies of them both. The watercolour

“Borgia” is chronologically the first, completed sometime between 1851 and 1860 and featuring Lucrezia together with her immediate family [Figure 13]. The work is a rendering of the previous “To Caper Nimbly in a Lady’s Chamber,” a pen-and-ink drawing from 1850 that draws its title, written at the bottom of the page, from two verses of Shakespeare’s play

Richard III: “He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber/ To the lascivious pleasing of a lute”

[Figure 14]. The suggestiveness of the title is the first hint to the presence of sexual content within the drawing, while the setting of the painting confirms the initial innuendo, suggesting at the same time that the subject of the work might be that of unpleasant sexuality.82 At the centre of the composition, a young woman is surrounded by three unpleasant male figures, who heavily lean on her and appear extremely focused on the soft forms of her pale body.

While one dumbly fixates his gaze upon her, and seems unable to act otherwise, the other caresses her hair. While their interest in the lady might not seem inherently sexual upon a first glance, their intentions are made visually an emblem through the lute that the girl is playing, as music was often used as a metaphor for sexual intercourse. Music, moreover, was thought to have a deleterious effect on the power of the female to resist seduction by the

81 Gregorovius, Lucretia Borgia, xviii. 82 J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in painting, poetry, and criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86.

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43 male.83 The lute, therefore, works as a metaphor for the activities that the protagonists would perform if the lady succumbed to the requests of the three gentlemen. The intriguing music of the instrument, however, seems not to be having whatsoever effect on the young girl, who sulkily ignores her suitors and whose body language betrays her uncomfortableness. The monkey, another symbol of lust, is presiding over the entire scene, confirming these interpretations, while two children dance in the foreground to the notes of the lute, another metaphor of initiation to the rites of adult sexuality. To Caper Nimbly was acquired by

George Boyce, Rossetti’s confidant in matters of painting and his partner in sexual adventures, sometime between 1853 and 1854. A few years later, Boyce was still close to

Rossetti and in an entry on December 27th 1858 of his Diaries records that his friend visited him and “… took away his “Caper Nimbly” to work upon at his own proposing… he wants to convert it into a Borgia subject. He said it was one of the best drawings he ever did.”84

The Borgia and To Caper Nimbly share many similarities: the many figures of the composition, the boy and girl couple in the front of the picture plane, the sexual overtones, the monkey in the right-side hand of the frame, the lute playing. However, the countenance of the figures, and especially of the female protagonist, is strikingly different. In the first version the young woman’s eyes were fixated on an unspecified spot beyond the foreground of the painting, her posture was stiff, and her demeanour suggested that she was probably not enjoying the interest shown her by her male companions. In fact, she seemed to be wanting to shrink away from them and her rigid shoulders revealed this intention. In the “Borgia” version of the drawing, the female character changes from a delicate and timid adolescent into a richly attired and voluptuous Lucrezia, relishing the embrace of her father and the caresses of her brother. Her gaze is not scared anymore, but languorously cast towards the

83 Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body, 86. 84 Victoria Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a catalogue raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:15.

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44 viewer. Instead of flinching from their touches, this Lucrezia savours the simultaneously incestuous solicitations of her father Alexander VI and brother Cesare. While also present in the previous version, food and drinks now become more prominent within the picture frame, appearing as fleshy accompaniments to the music and bringing a festive connotation to the scene. The nondescript room forming the setting of the scene does not betray the early years at the beginning of the 16th century when this scene is presumably taking place. The remoteness of the time period is only slightly suggested by the garments worn by the characters, most especially by Cesare Borgia, who is covered by a long tunic and colourful tights. In fact, like many other Pre-Raphaelite paintings that depict a sexualized female, the scene is not set in the painter’s contemporary times but located in a remote historical period.85

On the contrary of how the Lucréce Borgia was used by Hugo as a moralistic tale to reassure the audience on the standing of moralistic rules on virtue and vice, Rossetti’s indecipherable setting allows the figures to escape judgement on their actions. The Borgias inhabit a world of sexual freedom where they can abandon the constricting rules of purity and propriety imposed on sexual relations by society. Like that other work, however, this Lucrezia is also not a character from history but a similarly mythological figure that acts upon her whims and desires.

In Victor Hugo’s drama, the distance between the fictional account and the actual

Lucrezia was still in its infancy, as it occurred through the addition of dramatic and tragic elements to the character. Still, the author worked from what he believed to be historically accurate documents regarding the Borgia family, and placed the narrative of the play in a precise time period and in an easily recognizable Italian setting. The accurate curation of the

Renaissance setting and the conscious referral to the historical character also works to diminish the sublimity of Hugo’s Lucrezia still refers to a more universal type of motherhood

85 Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body, 89.

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45 and worked as a moral example for the public. The degrees of separation between the

Lucrezia-artwork and her historical counterpart deepen in The Borgia, when the painter is less and less consciously referring to the historicity of the characters. Relying on the Lucrezia described by Hugo, Rossetti elevates this new painterly figure beyond the boundaries previously set by the French author. As her connections with the Renaissance fade, her story stops being a cautionary tale and Lucrezia ceases to being set as a cautionary moral example.

Lucrezia was not, however, the only female character that was elevated by 19th century authors to become sublime representations of femininity. Representations of her are inserted within a larger series of paintings of these femmes fatales, usually overly sexualised portrayals of mythological or historical women. Dangerous but seductive these women are grouped by critics under the term “bad sublime.”86 They are witches, killers of children and husbands, active and powerful: Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Lucrezia Borgia, Medusa,

Helen of Troy or, as stated by Paul Mattick they take such forms as “, sphynx, and vampire.”87

Returning to Rossetti’s The Borgia, the depictions of the male suitors of Lucrezia are worth being analysed as much as the female character they are intensively pursuing. In fact, much is usually written about the female figures of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and little of their male counterparts, as if the art historians were respecting the direction of the interests of the painters. The potential judgment, positive or negative, of these analyses falls therefore exclusively onto the female figure. In The Borgia, Lucrezia is naturally placed at the centre of the composition, reflecting the heterosexual interest of the painter in depicting free and liberated female sexuality. As already said, her two companions are her brother Cesare,

86 This term is apply discussed in its theoretical implications, and literary precedents by J.B. Bullen, The pre-Raphaelite Body, 160-171 and by Paul Mattick “Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Construction of Art,” 299-300. 87 Paul Mattick, “Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Construction of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990): 300.

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46 known as the , and Rodrigo Borgia, who became pope with the name of

Alexander VI and father of both Lucrezia and Cesare. The latter, propped up against the bench where Lucrezia sits, offers her a gift and intently gazes at her white bosom. The same happens for Cesare, who leans heavily on the bench where she sits to get a better view of his sister’s breasts. While Lucrezia invites the viewers into the painting, attracting them with a firm gaze, the male characters seem to notice nothing else rather than Lucrezia’s bodily figure. In fact, they are so captivated that they do not notice that a young boy has opened the glass windows in the upper-hand side of the painting and is now voyeuristically observing the scene, undisturbed. While this is probably just a modern observation, which may sound anachronistic on our part, the solicitations start with the two male characters, but judgment falls exclusively on Lucrezia. However, the conversation regarding the mesmerized behaviour of the two men leads to a consideration of the political side of the eroticized female paintings in the work of Rossetti and of the Brotherhood, a side of the works that will be approached later.

Shortly after Rossetti worked on the second version of To Caper Nimbly, he embarked on another project featuring Lucrezia as protagonist. In 1860-61 he executed a watercolour drawing depicting a dark-haired, purposeful Lucrezia, attired in heavy robes, her large black eyes directed to the front, washing her hands in a basing after having administered a fatal dose of poison to her husband, Duke Alfonso Bisceglie.88 The watercolour entered the collection of B.W. Windus and it was acquired by Leyland after the auction at Christie’s of

Windus’ pictures in 1868.89 At this point, Rossetti probably repatched and repainted the work; in the original version, reproduced in Marillier’s “DGR: An Illustrated Memorial” from a photograph of the original design, Lucrezia is shown in a stiff pose, with brown hair

88 Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:77. 89 William Michael Rossetti, ed., Rossetti Papers: 1862-1870 (London: Sands & Co, 1903), 298.

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47 and a straight gown with puffed sleeves [Figure 15]. This more imposing figure was then exchanged with an elegant but strong young woman with strawberry blonde hair, attired in a magnificent golden dress [Figure 16]. In both versions, she is washing her hands from poison in a copper basin and her eyes are steadily watching something happen outside the picture. A mirror on the back wall reflects the scene at which she directs her gaze, where pope

Alexander is helping a weak young man walk on crutches. All these details are accurately described by the author himself, giving us a clear insight into his creativity: “The subject is the poisoning of her first husband Duke Alfonso of Bisceglia. You see him in the mirror, going on crutches and walked up and down the room by Pope Alexander VI, to settle the dose of poison well into his system. Behind these figures is the bed, as they walk the room, and

Lucrezia looks calmly towards them, washing her hands after mixing the poisoned wine and smiling to herself.”90 Below the circular mirror stands a table on which are placed a decanter, a wine glass, and a poppy, emblems of the crime that has just being committed [Figure 17].

The red hue of the poppy pairs perfectly with the tone of the wine, as if the malefic flower had transferred its essence into the liquid, poured from the decanter into the glass, then offered to the unfortunate Duke of Bisceglie. The composition of the 1868 Lucrezia Borgia is especially interesting, with the viewer potentially filling the position figurately occupied by

Lucrezia’s husband in the mirror. While the Duke is present in the painting, he is cast aside and shown only through his reflection, opening the painting to addressing the audience more freely. Placed in the position where Alexander and Alfonso stand, the viewers might alternatively identify with the poisoned or with the accomplice to the murder. In the first case, if the viewers were to take the place of the unfortunate Alfonso, the effect Lucrezia would be exerting on them would be the same she exercises on her relatives in The Borgia,

90 William E. Fredeman, ed., The correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 5:24-25.

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48 where both Cesare and Alexander were so enthralled by her presence to forget of their surroundings. The element of the poison, moreover, is believed to be also present in the precedent painting The Borgia in the flask on the table, beside which are placed two poppies, traditionally emblems of sleep and death [Figure 18].91 As Lucrezia is the one administering the poison, both paintings seem to propose a comparison between her, and all other women participating to the category of the “bad sublime,” and an intoxicating draught. The dangerousness of the feminine bad sublime is, therefore, enhanced, as not deliberate actions but simply their charming presence can beguile the senses and cloud the mind.

One other element of this painting of Lucrezia Borgia, not present in the previous painting The Borgia, is the masculinization of her figure. While this is a tendency that

Rossetti showed in several other paintings, here it seems more evident, and somehow symbolic. Lucrezia’s displays of manly arms, of a thick neck, and a masculine-set jaw might be due partially to Rossetti’s predilection toward masculinizing women, but more specifically it is a consequence of her masculine act of murder. In fact, traditionally “the beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it.”92 When Lucrezia shows qualities other that frailty and timorousness, her beauty as a woman is consequently put into question and she gains masculine traits. However, Rossetti’s does not allow for the more manly characteristics to overpower the feminine, but rather combined the attributes said to be found in each sex.

Again, we are faced by a process that combines binary elements inside a sublime portrayal, denying the previous boundaries. If Victor Hugo used Lucrezia’s body to depict the crash between proper and improper femininity, arriving at the sublime, Lucrezia is here the site

91 “The Borgia Family,” Victoria and Albert Museum, accessed March 5th, 2021, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O16494/the-borgia-family-watercolour-rossetti-dante-gabriel/ 92 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: John C. Nimno, 1887), 1:196. Cited in Nead, The Female Body, 29.

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49 where traditional masculine and feminine traits encounter. This connection between beauty and character is intimately connected with the gendering of the sublime and with the traditional category of proper femininity, according to Nead. As the beautiful was associated with feminine characteristics, and coincided with qualities such as passiveness and weakness, the sublime was seen to be characterized by masculine traits.93 In light of these beautiful and masculine portrayals of women, we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of this framework. The sublime was not simply a site for the definition of masculinity but is also where a certain deviant or transgressive form of femininity is placed out.94 When women waltz outside the pre-determined boundaries of the proper feminine, characterized by “female beauty,” chastity, loyalty, and passiveness, they encounter the masculine, action, and the sublime. In visual terms, Rossetti’s Lucrezia abandons the proper feminine when she accepts and relishes the attentions paid her in The Borgia, and when in Lucrezia Borgia she overpowers her husband and subjects him to her will, an interesting twist of accepted gender norms. The paintings act therefore as the visual representation of the titillating prohibited, but also of the fear of what is unknown. In fact, in both pictures Lucrezia becomes not only the personification of female liberation, but also the description of the dangers that come from it.

In this second painting on the subject, Rossetti therefore subverts the relation of the sexes from female dependency and male domination to one of female agency and male submission.

In this sense, the separation from the more historically accurate figure of Lucrezia could not be more marked, since from the contemporary documents of the time Lucrezia is shown as fully operating within what was allowed to her sex. Firstly, she was a supple instrument in the hands of her male relatives, betrothed twice before the age of 13 by her father, and educated according to the rules of piety and propriety typical of upper-class women. Secondly, in the

93 Nead, The Female Body, 29. 94 Nead, The Female Body, 29.

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50 shaping of her own public figure Lucrezia presented herself as a pious bride and a loyal wife, elevating her traits to fit the Renaissance ideas on virtuous femininity. Rossetti’s Lucrezia is only one of a series of depictions of the “bad feminine sublime,” through which he contributed to the heated political debate of the time around gender roles and their place within society. Rossetti’s Helen of Troy, Pandora, Proserpine, and many others are like this

Lucrezia: beautiful, powerful but dangerous. In visual terms, all these paintings portray the consequences to when women emerge from or rebel against the traditional norms of chastity, purity, and obedience imposed on them by society.

From Alfred Tennyson’s “The Princess” of 1847, to the article by John Stuart Mill

“The Subjection of Women” published in 1869, many authors and artists of the time touched on this subject. Tennyson’s poem, in particular, is centred upon the relationship between female education and the “proper” feminine in Victorian society.95 If, on one hand, he offers powerful and morally justified arguments in favour of women’s empowerment, on the other hand he instils the suspicion that such empowerment might masculinize them, render then unfit for childbearing or the support of men.96 The same duality is visually expressed in

Rossetti’s Lucrezia. The empowered woman is masculinized, physically, behaviourally, and morally by her newfound freedom, and because of it she ultimately turns against men. As much as Tennyson’s is ultimately a poem about sexual politics, so is Rossetti’s painting; to

95 Tennyson’s Princess, one of the more popular literary productions of Victorian England, is a great source to explore the depth and complexity of the issue of female education and empowerment. It tells the story of the heroic princess Idea who forswears the world of men and abandons to whom she was betrothed since infancy to fund a women’s university where men are forbidden to enter. After the prince manages to enter the university’s grounds and after fighting a battle for the princess’ hand, Ida returns to his love. One of the Victorian characters that helps create the setting for the telling of the heroic poem of the poem is Lilia, whose name sounds perilously similar to that of another popular heroine, the prototypical femme fatale . As visualized by the brief passage reported here, she embodies the dangerous ideas of female empowerment that had been starting to become popular in Victorian England. For a detailed analysis of the poem, its themes, and its relationship with the cultural debates of the time on gender and sexuality see Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 76-80. 96 Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body, 176.

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51 both applies Kate Millet’s claim: “the cloying sweetness, the frenetic sentimentality, all conspire to hide the fact that this is only candy-coated sexual politics.”97 Lucrezia, then, embodies a kind of response to the wishes of Lilia, the Victorian characters of Tennyson’s poem. Roused to anger by a paternalistic question of Sir Walter Vivian regarding where in the nineteenth century might the female warriors of legends be found, she replies:

There are thousands now Such women, but convention beats them down: It is but bringing up; no more than that: You men have done it: how I hate you all! Ah, were I something great! I wish I were Some mighty poetess, I would shame you then, That love to keep us children! O I wish That I were some great princess, I would build Far off from men a college like a man's, And I would teach them all that men are taught; We are twice as quick!' And here she shook aside The hand that played the patron with her curls.

Rossetti’s Lucrezia is that “something great” Lilia wishes she was; she is a princess of sort, daughter of the Vatican, and then Duchess and member of one of the most important families in all the peninsula. Lucrezia takes up Lilia’s desire to shame men, to do something outside of conventions. In killing her husband, she not only renounces her place within traditional society, but she also forsakes her chances of having a family, of bearing children, confirming

Victorian societal fears regarding the effects of women empowerment upon a social order constructed around families. The aforementioned article by Paul Mattick deals heavily with eighteen- and nineteenth-century preoccupations about gender roles. On the matter, the author reminds that it was not only a scholarly discourse on the relations of the sexes connected with familiar relations and childbearing, but it was a very practical question revolving even around national security. Through Burke’s account of the role of women in the mob of the French Revolution and mentioning Rousseau’s fear of the potential

97 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 79.

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52 consequences of woman’s insatiable sexual appetites, Mattick reminds of the “modern-

European association of the female... with the danger of social disorder,” a state where the category of the sublime, the potentially destructive, and the culturally and politically threatening is seized by women.98 In fact, the traditionally masculine category of the sublime was linked by Burke to “the ruin of monarchs, and the revolution of kingdoms.” When women wander outside of their allotted places and encounter the sublime, balance is irremediably lost and social disorders lie in wait.

The Lucrezia in The Borgia becomes the embodiment of a third popular fear. While in

Lucrezia the narrative revolves mainly around the subversion of female roles as wives and caregivers, in the first painting sexual freedom and its consequences are the main themes. In the world of this painting, where the female figure’s sexuality is left free, and she is allowed to exert her charm, men find themselves hypnotized, mesmerized, and unable to perform any task rather than pursuing that woman. Ultimately forgetting their duties and roles within society, their social standing (and that of all other men) is threatened. In the painting, Cesare

Borgia, a character notorious in history as a warrior ruthless in the accomplishment of his political designs, forgets the sword he is holding in his pursuit of his sister. In the same way, his father Rodrigo, who wears a black headdress to remind the viewers of his position as pope

Alexander VI, also seems oblivious of his duties and his vows of chastity, fornicating with his own daughter. Looking away from their social roles of warriors and leaders, enthralled by

Lucrezia’s charms, Cesare and Rodrigo embody the ultimate dangers of female sexual liberation. They, in fact, do not seem to be in control of their actions, but gravitate towards

Lucrezia as if they could not act otherwise, as flies attracted to sweet honey or bees seduced by the lethal beauty of a carnivorous flower. The underlying assumption, therefore, is that women’s sexuality must be controlled, and their charm bottled up, in order for society to

98 Mattick, “Beautiful and Sublime,” 298-299.

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53 continue progressing and for men to keep their leadership. Becoming part of this general discourse on female education and gender norms, Lucrezia assumes the traits of a moral teaching, more than of a historical, physical being. Her universal elevation perfectly relates with the atemporal setting of both paintings, which definitively relegate her to the fantasy world of fables. Sequestering Lucrezia and her sins within a box clearly outside of social norms allows Rossetti to reinforce the notion of the need for social rules regarding women’s sexuality, their importance and their standing. Therefore, upon a first glance Rossetti seems to depict the female sublime in a freer way than Hugo’s play, avoiding chastising Lucrezia for diverging away from the proper feminine; in truth, punishment is always present in his pictures. It is the entire society that suffers for Lucrezia and women’s wrongdoings.

As Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings quickly became a model inside the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood for both style and subject matter, the Lucrezia Borgia was the unfortunate pretext for the ending of a long friendship between Rossetti and Frederick

Sandys, on grounds of plagiarism practiced by the latter.99 Amongst those that were legitimately influenced by the painting is Edward Burne-Jones, another of Rossetti’s friends and close collaborators, who took inspiration from it for his Sidonia von Bork, an evil heroine also participating to the “bad feminine sublime.” Lastly, from within the Pre-Raphaelites it was the poet Swinburne who took up the subject, proving again how the interest towards

Lucrezia was not at all limited by fields of cultural production. In fact, the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm for the figure merges with the group’s greater “Romantic Italomania and

Victorian neo-medievalism,”100 with Lucrezia personifying a point of intersection between the two. Swinburne, born a decade later than his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, met the Pre-

Raphaelites at Oxford in 1857 when they had already a well-developed admiration for the

99 Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 394-395, 441-444. 100 Lakshmi Krishnan, “Amour Courtois: Swinburne, Boccaccio, and the Triameron,” The Modern Language Review 113, no. 1 (January 2018): 7.

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54 medieval femme fatale Guenevere who they envisioned as defiant, powerful, and sexualised, in contrast to Tennyson’s similarly named figure in The Idylls of the King.101 When Dante

Gabriel Rossetti took up the Borgia subject for the second rendering of To Caper Nimbly in

1858, Swinburne was already acquainted with the character, having read Hugo’s play at only

13 years old. In 1861, around the same time when his friend Rossetti was executing the first version of Lucrezia Borgia, Swinburne relived his adolescent erotic fantasies on Lucrezia, writing The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei. This work merges within a larger but lesser known oeuvre of prose writings that contrast with the current notions of Swinburne as a master of metre, rowdy and risqué balladist, enfant terrible of verse.102 Besides a collection of interlocking short stories he called The Triameron, inspired by the The Decameron of

Giovanni Boccaccio, he indulged in the writing of chronicles (The Chronicle of Tebaldeo

Tebaldei and The Chronicle of Queen Fredegond) and novels. These works, all imitations of fourteenth-century prose, and interpreted as a pastiches of late medieval and early

Renaissance narratives, are surely a coherent product of the Victorian, and Pre-Raphaelite in particular, interest in the medieval.103 In The Chronicle, Lucrezia initiates Tebaldeo, her 16- year-old pageboy, into sexual pleasures. Reliving his adolescent fantasies, the author transfers his own desires in the figure of the young Tebaldeo and vicariously lives them through the boy.

Besides this prose, Swinburne dedicates Lucrezia three central poems in his Poems and

Ballads: “A Ballad of Life,” “A Ballad of Death,” and “Love and Sleep.” The three works are the only of the entire collection directly or indirectly organized around a single person and are classed by the author himself in a division under the terminology of “transforming

101 Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body, 173. 102 Krishnan, “Amour Courtois,” 1. 103 Krishnan, “Amour Courtois,” 1.

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55 love.”104 The collection is opened by “A Ballad of Life” and its companion piece “A Ballad of Death,” both portraying a woman addressed as Borgia. While Swinburne coherently contributes to the Pre-Raphaelite’s italomania, his treatment of Lucrezia is very different than that of Rossetti. In the paired poems, he develops an unusually enigmatic version of Lucretia.

In “A Ballad of Life” he describes a beautiful, sweet songstress playing a cithern and envisions the life his lady brings to poetry as she plays on all the strings of the instrument, singing of love and pleasure, sin, and sorrow.105 The second ballad pictures mourning the same lady’s death. As per the identification of this mythological muse with Lucrezia, the poet specifically names the songstress “Borgia” at the end of the first poem, and in a letter he asked his publisher to print the phrase “In honorem D. Lucretiae Estensis Borgiae” under the first title and under the second “the same inscription, substituting the ‘obitum’ for

‘honorem.’”106 Swinburne certainly draws from Hugian and Rossettian sources, which blend literary, historical, and Pre-Raphaelite elements, to present this Lucrezia as his own Muse, an idealized goddess of poetry who transforms evil and ugliness into beauty. To construct his character, he draws from Hugo the elements of sorrow and death, from Rossetti beauty and pleasure, and the element of sin from both authors and common misconceptions. As all other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Swinburne was very intrigued by depictions, literary or visual, of the “bad feminine sublime,” and frequently commented on Rossetti’s eroticised pictures and constructed his poetry collection “eliminating all that was masculine... by the aids of his modern feminine lens.” His poems revolve around women that are powerful, alluring, dangerous, and sterile, all characteristics that we have seen associated with the category of the femmes fatales. In Swinburne’s, however, “the overtly sexual is

104 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Morse Peckham (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970), xxi. 105 Linda E. McDaniel, "Swinburne’s Borgian Muse: “A Ballad of Life” and “A Ballad of Death” Studies in English, New Series 4 (1983): 91. 106 The Swinburne Letters volume 3, 199-200

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56 stressed about the overtly political,” so that his female characters stand against the

“idealization of femininity, the sentimentalizing of love, the orthodox division of flesh and spirit” but they also have “no interest in the franchise, in reforming the divorce laws, or in female education.” In this matter, Swinburne and Rossetti share a similar approach; while their representations are consequence or cause of a larger political and social debate, they have also no interest in taking a primal active role in it. Presented at the forefront of the crowded ranks of powerful feminine figures, Lucrezia is given by Swinburne a place of the outmost prominence. On one hand, she summarizes to the reader the themes of the collection, on the other she takes the traditional place of the classical Muses, inspiring the author in his poetical task. With these poems, Lucrezia’s transformation seems therefore complete. From historical character, to dramatic heroine in Hugo’s play, she became a moral and political teaching inside Rossetti’s paintings. With Swinburne’s poems, she carries out what might appear to be the ultimate part of her journey, ascending to Mount Olympus to become a Muse whose death is lamented by Venus herself.

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BETWEEN MODERN MEDUSAS AND SECULAR SAINTS

The popularity Lucrezia Borgia reached in certain artistic circles, and the intriguing mythologies artists constructed around her name, ensured that she would not be forgotten.

Her popularity was not affected by the eventual diminished influence of those authors who turned her character into a myth, writers as Hugo or Dumas, and artists such as the Pre-

Raphaelites; on the contrary, her name obtained even greater fame in the decades at the turn of the century. The years after the mid-19th century saw a sharp surge in the interest around the character of Lucrezia, which brought on one hand the start of scholarly and documentary research on her life, and on the other an increased number of artistic and cinematic productions centred around her figure. While biographies and scholarly articles remained mostly in the background and confined in the world of academia, sensational movies and novels brought her name within popular culture. This second group of productions continued the legacy of , Victor Hugo and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, charming its public through the scandalous mythology of Lucrezia Borgia as an embodiment of beauty and vice, ambition and piety. If in the previous 19th century productions Lucrezia had been raised to the status of mythical heroine, epitome of sensuality and danger, these later productions allowed for this vision of her to seep outside the cultural circles of the French and English bourgeois and cemented it into the public’s opinion. The greater public, therefore, was never presented with the historical character of the Renaissance duchess, which only started to appear in some of the scholarly research of those years, shining through the mesh of the myth. Great space was given to Lucrezia especially in cinematographic productions, which for sheer number and pervasiveness quickly became the greater source of understanding of the character of

Lucrezia for the greater public.

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In the cinematic monolithic system of the early 1900s, based on large capital investment industry, the presence of women became an indispensable element of spectacle in narrative film.107 The 19th century association between Lucrezia and certain ideals of immorality and sexual freedom rendered Lucrezia the perfect bait to attract consumers and audience to these mass productions. Continuing a journey started earlier in the century, mass media products put the final nail in the coffin that transformed Lucrezia Borgia into a honeyed attraction that only serves consumerist products. In fact, Victor Hugo and Dante

Gabriel Rossetti had already started an exploitation of her figure, the former hiding a moral lesson behind her Renaissance gowns and the dramatics of her character and the latter using her as a smokescreen to spark a discourse on gender polarities and feminine freedom. In the

20th century, any secondary message is eliminated and she became a mere instrument of consumerism. However, if the fil rouge of commodification will be shown to tie many of the productions on Lucrezia Borgia of the late 19th and of the 20th century together, the terms

“commodification,” “capitalism,” and “consumerism” will not be treated as dirty words. This discourse, in fact, will not be implying that once a phenomenon, product, or cultural performance is touched by said economic processes, they have instantly and inevitably been devalued and degraded. The figure of Lucrezia was not debased by said productions, as much as she was not devalued by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings or by Hugo’s drama. As the previous chapter has attempted to prove, her figure was an instrument utilized by 19th century authors for definite purposes. This chapter will therefore continue to research the objectification to which Lucrezia was subjected; first, it will turn to new media of the cinematographic camera, analysing how her figure was transposed in popular culture and which purposes it served there, secondly, it will research the ways through which her figure is currently told by the museum that holds a unique relic of her.

107 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11.

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In the second half of the 19th century, the myth of the bloody, incestuous, poisoner

Lucrezia was rapidly consecrated as the whole identity of Lucrezia Borgia. While this mythology was permeating both artistic circles and popular culture between the end of the

1800s and the beginning of the new century, a few scholars started to feel the necessity of working against the grain and investigate the historical character of Lucrezia Borgia. Some hoped from the start to be able to separate her name from the image of a negative heroine.

The second half of the 19th century quickly became a particularly fertile time for historical analyses on the , as during and after the unification of Italy in 1861 the development of historical studies was supported by the newborn government through the institution of the Reali Deputazioni di Storia Patria.108 Lucrezia’s fame, thanks to her role in

Hugo’s popular play and Dumas’ novel, gave start to meticulous documentary research and archival work. However, the conclusions to which the researchers arrived were at times so contradictory that the historians who between the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth century grappled with her character have been grouped into the dichotomous categories of the

“accusers” and the “upholders.” In 1874 the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius published his sympathetic biography on Lucrezia, which put the rumors and the scandals under scrutiny and gave her, for the first time, the benefit of the doubt. Gregorovius, Maria

Bellonci, author of another apologetic biography, and the Italian Giuseppe Campori from

Modena, who defined Lucrezia Borgia “A victim of history”109 are only some of the

108 The National History Deputations are a series of local institutions founded in the 19th century, mostly after the annexation of the various territories to the Kingdom of Italy, and supported by the newfound Italian Government. Their main task was to promote studies on the history of the regions prior to their unification. For a complete history of the relations between research on Lucrezia Borgia and the National History Disputation see Gabriella Zarri, “Il Rinascimento di Lucrezia Borgia,” Scienza & Politica: Per Una Storia delle Dottrine 19 no. 37 (2010): 71-72. 109 Giuseppe Campori, “Una vittima della storia, Lucrezia Borgia,” Nuova Antologia (1866).

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“upholders.” Against them, Alessandro Luzio,110 Michele Catalano,111 and others gave new fuel to hypotheses of crime, supporting her fame of frivolity and lust. Notwithstanding this apparent even division of the scholars between those who supported the scandals and those who deconstructed them, cultural products of the early 20th century followed the path started by the artists of the 19th century. The following pages will try to account for the major productions that involved the figure of Lucrezia Borgia.

In the US, cinema changed into an industry in its own right, distinct from other entertainments, only in the first years of the 1910s; in those years, fixed auditoriums started to emerge, film production increased, and film distribution developed into an activity managed by large, specialized producers.112 Lucrezia Borgia was one of the first female characters explored by the cinematographic camera, featuring as protagonists of the 1917 movie The Eternal Sin [Figure 19]. As soon as their presence started to become an indispensable element of spectacle of narrative film, women characters have functioned on two levels: as erotic object of the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator in the auditorium.113 Lucrezia was the perfect character to function as an alluring presence, as her figure already carried heavy sexual overtones. In The Eternal Sin,

Lucrezia had a similar role as in Hugo’s play. In the silent movie, bearing the alternate titles

“Lucrezia Borgia” and “The Queen Mother,” she tortures, poisons, conspires, and seduces the audience with unnatural, almost beastly passions. The dramatic features of the narrative, such as Lucrezia administering lethal poison to her own son Gennaro and him killing his mother in a furious revenge, remind us of the tropes adopted by Victor Hugo. The Eternal Sin reclaims

110 Alessandro Luzio, Isabella d’Este e i Borgia con nuovi documenti e quattro tavole (Milano: L.F. Cogliati, 1915). 111 Michele Catalano, Lucrezia Borgia Duchessa di Ferrara; con nuovi documenti, note critiche e un ritratto inedito (Ferrara: Taddei, 1920). 112 Gerben Bakker, “The Evolution of Entertainment Consumption and the Emergence of Cinema, 1890-1940,” London School of Economics Working Papers (2007): 10-11. 113 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 11.

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Hugo’s moralistic elements, which are clearly present even in the piece’s title; first, it allures the viewers with a female character who is a “monster, thirsty for lust and blood,” and later saves them from her through an exemplary punishment. Back in the European sphere, in 1922

Lucrezia appeared again on screen in Germany in Lucrezia Borgia, a silent film produced by

UFA114 and based on a popular novel by Harry Sheff [Figure 20]. This second production featuring Lucrezia subverts the precedent rendering of Lucrezia and portrays her in a way close to that given in the biography by the German Gregorovius. In a style typical of the film making practised at UFA in the 1920s, the movie achieves psychological death and complexity, emotional inwardness, and dream-like obliqueness of the character’s motivation

[Figure 21].115 Lucrezia is clearly portrayed as a virtuous figure, pawn to her family’s ambitious schemes and victim of the perverted ways of Cesare, a monstrous villain who is infatuated by her.116 Lucrezia is not, however, powerless; her faith and dignity guide her in standing tall against the evil incarnate in Cesare. In one of the most iconic scenes of the movie, Lucrezia is seated tall on a princely throne, a beautifully attired in a virginal white gown and her head and hair are encrusted by pearly gems. Contaminating the peaceful atmosphere of the room where Lucrezia is attended by equally virginal maids, the emaciated and vampiric Cesare approaches the throne. He is as dark as Lucrezia is white, and evil as

Lucrezia is pure; his desire for her is evident, and artistically portrayed by capturing his hands dance over her body and chest, but she categorically refuses him. The movie, therefore, involves the “oedipal” tropes typical of the Weimar cinema: a triangulation of familiar

114 The Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, better known as UFA, was a Germany film company founded in 1917, the largest film corporation Germany ever had. When UFA reached its maximum popularity and success, during the 1920s, it competed with Hollywood for the quality of the its productions. For an extensive read on the subject see Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s history imagery (London: Routledge, 2000). 115 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s history imagery (London: Routledge, 2000), 121. 116 While Cesare was in reality Lucrezia’s brother, in the movie he is described as her cousin, eliminating part of the most scandalous accusations of incest from Lucrezia’s figure.

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63 conflicts, the acknowledged sexuality of ethereal fair ladies, a repeated incest motif as explicit motivation, and the horrifying but also petrifying spectacle of abuses of power and manipulation in the exercise of paternal authority.117 Ultimately, Lucrezia is transformed by the German industry into a more relatable character, a way for a big production house such as

UFA to target all segments of the audience of the time. Since the early 1920s, productions had to accommodate for the arrival of a new public, the white-collar workers of the emerging service industries, cinema in Germany became a public the instrument to display of décor and fashion, connected with the emergent life-style.118 In a style similar to that of 19th century productions, Lucrezia is created again as a role model, briefly escaping that process of commodification that brought her figure to become a bait to attract consumers to the movie theatres. Lucrezia is therefore reversed back into the traditional category of the respectable, virtuous feminine, in a portrayal clearly targeting the female public. Both in Europe and in the US, women were extremely engaged in movie culture of the silent era; they not only constituted the biggest share of the box offices but supported the entire industry through clubs, organizations, and by “fan culture.”119 Because of their extensive patronage and because of their position as gatekeepers of culture and morality, women played in the US a signature role in efforts to reform the movies at the height of their early success, turning their attention to the content of the film. In their positions as reformers and regulators, they took an interest in promoting “quality narratives” in the cinema industry between the 1920s and the

1930s.120

The German Lucrezia Borgia, which perfectly fit the new requests of the bourgeois female public, was exported in the United States to the 1928 and it was remade in 1935 by

117 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 73-74. 118 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 5-6. 119 Shelley Stamp, “Women and the silent screen,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 1-3. 120 Stamp, “Women and the silent screen,” 19.

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64 the famed French director Abel Gance starring future-legend Edwige Feuillèere [Figure 22].

In the same guise as victim of the wicked ways of her family, Lucrezia then appeared in 1940 in an Italian production, also titled Lucrezia Borgia, directed by Hans Hinrich and starring

Italian famous actress Isa Pola as the main character. In the French and Italian renderings, however, Lucrezia’s attributes return to be erotic and oversexualised, losing the psychological depth and the emotional intensity of the German Expressionist movie. Abel

Gance’s version was particularly scandalous for the 1930s, featuring Edwige Feuillèere first topless in the backyard pool of the Borgia palace and later sensuously describing her exiting completely naked from the water [Figure 23]. This bathing scene was apparently so significant in the overall narrative, that it was even featured in one of the advertising posters for the movie [Figure 24]. Sex is similarly used by Gance in connection with the character of

Cesare, who frequently emerges from his bedroom after having had multiple women entertain him for the night. Not only Lucrezia, but in general the female body emerges as an object to be displayed under the best, most erotic lights, proven by the prominence given to the bathing scene of the Italian film. The movie opens with an aesthetically pleasing scene that heavily reminds of the Orientalist “harem scenes” of the late 1800s. Several ladies, mostly young and athletic women in bathing suits gather around a shallow pool, set within a graceful and classicizing courtyard, to assist to a breath-holding competition between the Duchess and her young friend Barbara. The insignificance of the episode within the general plot, its placement and length, but especially the attention given by the camera to the breasts and legs of the young ladies are all indicators of the motives of the male director for including the scene.

Nudity and explicit sexuality were so ostentatious in these European productions that the

1935 French film was banned in the United States, as the American cinematic culture was at the time battling with the “quality” of the productions.

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After the 1920s, therefore, Lucrezia Borgia definitively entered the international movie scene as a character defined exclusively by her sensuality and sexuality; in fact, as the attributes of her character greatly varied, from moral virtuosity to ambition and perverseness, only her oversexualisation remained her defining element. Her popularity in American and

European culture of the time allowed for the rapid change of sides of her character, from villain to victim. Along with the constant sexual innuendos, the figure of Cesare also remained a reassuring (but evil) constant. His prominent portrayal is coherent with the popular structuring of the films around a main controlling masculine figure, with whom the heterosexual male spectator could identify. Cesare and other active male figures emerge to control the film sexual phantasies and act as screen surrogates of the audience, allowing them to exert their interest in the female spectacle in a more active sense.121 The eroticized portrayal of Lucrezia, therefore, is only complementary to the presence of her powerful male suitors/lovers. Similarly, the more sympathetic portrayal seems also to be enabled by the representations of more cruel behaviours, and vice versa. injustices she suffered at the hands of her family, and vice versa. On one hand, the abuses give reason to the cruel behaviours, and somehow even excused it; on the other, the injustice she undergoes at the hands of her brother might even be pictured as a sort of punishment, as if Dr. Jekyll had to redeem himself for Hr. Hyde’s wrongdoings. All in all, as Hugo portrayed in the first two acts of his play, the two representations of Lucrezia as victim and villain are complementary to one other. An alternative reading of the punishment or salvation of the female character in cinematic and visual productions is investigated by Laura Mulvey in her article “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema.” Starting from psychoanalytic terms, she understands the female figure as an embodiment of the male fear of castration. As through the visual terms of the cinematic camera women display their lack of a penis, the male unconscious has two avenues of escape

121 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 10.

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66 from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma, which he counterbalances by devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty object; or else complete disavowal of castration turning the represented figure into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.122 The binary treatment of Lucrezia as victim and victimizer fits Mulvey’s discourse of the first avenue of response to male preoccupation of castration, which has association with sadism in placing pleasure in the ascertaining guilt, asserting control, and subjecting the person through punishment or forgiveness.

Lucrezia Borgia’s popularity in American culture was not merely the compound product of multiple productions on the character, but derived in particular from an enormously successful screenplay, the 1926 Don Juan, in which Lucrezia had the role of primal villain [Figure 25]. Written by Bess Meredyth, one of the most successful and acclaimed screenplay writers of her time, and inspired by ’s epic poem of the same name from 1821, the movie starred two of the most acclaimed actors of the time, John

Barrymore as Don Juan and as Lucrezia Borgia. Don Juan is a famous lover and pursued by numerous ladies, including the powerful Lucrezia Borgia, one of many who try to exert their charms upon the protagonist. In a scene set in Rome in the earliest minutes of the movies, the Borgia are described as tyrants who have placed the city and its subjects under a cruel rule, “torturing and crushing those who opposed their regime.”123 Powerfully riding into the city, accompanied by a large retinue of soldiers, trumpeters, and ladies-in- waiting are the Borgias: Cesare, the “Head of the House of the Crimson Bull and the secret ruler of Rome;” Lucrezia, “his sister, the inspiration of his vicious crimes, beauty without pity, ambition without remorse;” and Count Giano Donati, a kinsman of the family [Figure

122 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 13. 123 “The Borgia,” Lucrezia Borgia, directed by Richard Oswald (1922; : UFA Templehof Studios), film.

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26, 27, and 28].124 Contrarily to the written captions that introduced the characters, not Cesare but Lucrezia is visually identified as the leader of the party, an effortless display of who truly sits on the secret throne of Rome. She is a dark-haired beauty, clothed in a dark velvet and brocaded dress, and adorned by jewels, a flamboyantly decorated hat, and plumes. Later in the same act, a comic scene of a monkey stealing an underwear camise from an open window prompts the introduction of the main male character, Don Juan: “A young Spanish , lately arrived from the University of . He is handsome and rich... and if rumour does not lie, half the fair ones of Rome have already succumbed to his charm... the great forgetful lover!” Lucrezia, clearly intrigued by her maid’s generous description of the gentlemen, declares that “there might be one he could not forget,” to which Giano Donati replies: “Only your illustrious highness would dare such a challenge.” Don Juan is the character that Laura

Mulvey titles “the active male figure,” the person constructed for the identification of the male spectator.125 Through him, Lucrezia vicariously seduces the audience, rendering the viewing of the movie an interactive event. She is playful with her sexuality, intrigue her, whims govern her decisions and passions and, most importantly, she is immediately associated with cruelty and tyranny. Jumping directly from painting to the film medium,

Lucrezia Borgia is the impeccable personification of the femme fatale, the archetypal character described by Rebecca Stott as: “A powerful and threatening figure, bearing sexuality that is perceived to be rapacious, or fatal to her male partners... she can be a prostitute, man- aristocrat, vampire, African queen, native (black) woman or murderess.”126 As femmes fatales became more and more popular on the silent screen,

Hollywood rebranded this female archetype with the simpler and univocal term “vamp”

124 “The Borgia,” Lucrezia Borgia, directed by Richard Oswald. 125 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 12. 126 Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death (Houndmills: The MacMillan Press, 1992), viii.

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(short for “vampire,”) which loosely referred to a category of predatory female characters.

The term seems to have derived from the character of “The Vampire” played by actress

Theda Bara in 1915 in the movie “A Fool There Was.” The very name of Theda Bara, anagram of Arab Death, exemplifies some of the elements of the new Hollywood femmes fatales; they are exotic, malicious, dangerous, and, most importantly, they act in an ancient and sometimes undefined past [Figure 29]. Not only their moral attributes were somewhat conventional, but even their aesthetics allowed for an easy recognition of their roles in the narratives: long, black hair was usually paired with black kajal around the eyes and exotic but revealing clothing. Theda Bara herself portrayed several of these roles, acting as Carmen,

Camille, Salome, Madame Du Barry, the Vampire, and Cleopatra. The interest in these mythological figures from the past and the title of the 1915 movie “A Fool There Was” proves the connection between the Hollywoodian Vamp and the femme fatale born in

European artistic circles. In 1897 Philip Burne-Jones exhibited in London and then in New

York his most famous painting, The Vampire, which was paired in the exhibition with a poem composed by the artist’s cousin, Rudyard Kipling, titled “A Fool There Was” [Figure 30].

The artist, son of Edward Burne-Jones, one of the prominent members of the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood together with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, portrays his late lover and actress Mrs.

Patrick Campbell leaning over the prostrate figure of a man. Transposing the image in poetry,

Kipling commits to paper the attributes of the Vamp. Physical beauty and sensuous dark hair pair with an obsession for the pursuit of the man, and with an excitement for the complete destruction of her victim. Lucrezia Borgia’s playful but obsessive pursuit of the male character in Don Juan rendered the duchess the ideal addition to the Hollywood culture of the

Vamp.

Don Juan was premiered with great fanfare at the Warner Theatre in New York city on August 5th, 1926. Marking the end of the era of silent movies, Don Juan was the first

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69 feature-length film to utilize the Vitaphone sound-on-disk system, which allowed for synchronized musical scores and sound effects to be played contemporary to the images. This innovation and the cast composed of the greatest stars of the time made the movie extremely successful at the box-office, with ticket sales amounting to earning of $1,693,000, the highest

Warner Bros had received up till that point.127 The tickets were sold for $10 for the Friday opening night, while the price was set at $3.30 for the other night performances- this also being the first time tickets were sold for over $3.128 Neither the price nor the negative reviews of New York’s critics scared the public away, as people stormed the theatre, galvanized by the new technical innovations. Lucrezia Borgia’s popularity could not have hit a luckier streak, and her character became forever part of the history of cinema. After the early decades of the 1900, after the psychological depth of the German Lucrezia Borgia and the sensationalism of Don Juan, Lucrezia’s character seems to be associated more with what

Mulvey describes as “fetishistic scopophilia.” On the contrary to the sadistic avenue that controlled the male fear of castration exerting control over the object of fear (women,) fetishist scopophilia uses female characters simply for their physical beauty as an object, transforming them into something satisfying to watch.129 This use of the body of Lucrezia as a pleasurable object had already started in the mid-1930s with the eroticised French and Italia renditions of Lucrezia Borgia, and it continued to be successful through the productions after the 1940s. The appeal of her name was so powerful that Lucrezia started to make fleeting apparitions even outside the realm of “historical” film. The use of her figure in the 1976 thriller movie The Shaggy DA proves, for example, how she and other femme fatale figures had descended into being eroticised objects of mystery and perversion for the enjoyment of the audience. Mentioning her as the original owner of a priceless scarab ring that allowed to

127 “Warners’ B’Way Sensation,” Variety Magazine 84 (August 1926): 6. 128 “Warners’ B’Way Sensation,” 6. 129 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 13.

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70 turn unfaithful lovers into dogs, the movie conjoins two famous femmes fatales: Lucrezia and the mythological witch Circe, goddess daughter of the Titan Helios popular for her role in

Odysseus’ voyage across the Mediterranean. In a process similar to that she underwent in the

19th century, the Lucrezia of popular culture also arrives to be completely separated from her historical figure, becoming for all intents and purposes assimilable to a mythical figure, an

Olympian goddess of sex combined with a sorceress figure, and possessed of the same dubious morality as the classical deities.

The assumption of Lucrezia Borgia to a status similar to that of a goddess seems to have been an international phenomenon, not exclusive to the Pre-Raphaelite artistic scene or to the world of Hollywood cinema. In the 20th century another production sanctioned her entrance in the highest sphere, the commission of a glass case to exhibit a lock of her hair preserved at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana of Milan. Documents attest that the blonde tress had been at the Milanese gallery from as early as 1685 and it was originally contained within one of nine letters, also part of the Ambrosiana Library collection, written by Lucrezia to Pietro

Bembo, the humanist scholar whom she befriended in Ferrara. However, the hair had been considered an interesting object until the first decade of the 19th century, and the rediscovery of the tress certainly heightened Lucrezia’s popularity. It is probably Lord Byron whom we have to thank for reminding the intellectual circles of 19th century London of the existence of the lock and of the correspondence. In a letter to his publisher John Murray, written from

Milan on October 15th 1816, Lord Byron recalls his trip to the Ambrosiana library: “I have been to the Ambrosian library- it is a fine collection- full of M.S.S. edited and unedited.”130

There he was made aware of the existence of the letters: “I have been most delighted with a correspondence of letters all original and amatory between Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal

Bembo. I have pored over them and a lock of her hair- the prettiest and finest imaginable- I

130 Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1976), V:116.

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71 never saw fairer- and shall go repeatedly to read the epistles over and over- and if I can obtain some of the hair... I have already persuaded the help librarian to promise me copies of the letters- and I hope he will not disappoint me. They are short- but very simple... the tress of her hair is long and as I said before beautiful.”131 The visit to the Ambrosiana must have so excited Lord Byron that he recounted the story to another dear friend and relative in London,

Augusta Leigh. In a letter dated also October 15th 1816, Byron writes: “What has delighted me most is a manuscript collection (preserved in the Ambrosian library,) of original love- letters and verses of Lucretia de Borgia and Cardinal Bembo; and a lock of hair- so long- and fair and beautiful- and the letters so pretty and so loving that it makes one wretched not to have been born sooner to have at least seen her...”132 Precursory of the fascination that others will later express for Lucrezia, his words speak of an interest that borders on obsession. His excitement over Lucrezia’s hair is a coherent product of 19th-century society’s peculiar interest for hair, especially in contexts of death and remembrance. The connection between the hair as an object and the identity and reputation of its owner must have constituted a powerful combination for Lord Byron, drawn so intensely to the tress that he stole a strand from it. He then enclosed the stolen hair in an envelope sent to another friend, Leigh Hunt; a note within it, beginning with a line from Pope, read: “‘And Beauty draws us by a single

Hair.’ The Hair contained in this paper belonged to Lucrezia Borgia and it was obtained by me from a lock of it which is preserved in the Ambrosian Library... Milan, Oct. 17th,

1816.”133 As hair-enthusiast and hair-collector, Leigh Hunt cherished the single hair, which he added to this collection of tresses. He writes: “The reader can hardly conceive the beauty of it without ocular demonstration. It is the only golden hair we ever saw, but answers so

131 Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, V:116. 132 Ibid, V:114-115. 133 John L. Waltman, “And Beauty Draws Us with a Single Hair: Leigh Hunt as a Collector,” The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 31 (January 1980): 64.

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72 completely to that supposed poetical phrase... It is like a thread of superfine shining, literal gold, and sparkles in the sun as if it had been cut yesterday.”134 Now hosted at the Harry

Ransom Centre of the University of Texas Austin, the collection of hair included locks from

21 authors and statesmen, including John Milton, John Keats, and George Washington.

The collection is a direct visualization of the deep fascination that Victorian culture had with hair. In the words of Galia Ofek, author of a large study on the representations of hair in Victorian cultural productions, “hair was the site where different definitions of fetish worship intersected and often overlapped, merging the commercial, the sexual and the social aspects of fetishism into an important cultural discourse.”135 When related to death and decay, hair was kept in lockets or bracelets as a way of remembering loved ones and became a tangible connection with the deceased, therefore turning into a relic. Not only in relation to hair, but nineteenth century Britain saw a general resurgence in the culture of relics, which became increasingly secular and personal.136 Rather than being a memento mori, Victorian practices of relic collection expressed the wish that the object, hair in this case, might mark the continued existence of the body to which it once belonged. To possess a piece of the beloved was to provide a link to that body lost, of which the relic constituted a trace.

Possession, therefore, as displayed by Bryon’s criminal behaviour, was fundamental for the relic to act as remembrance. At the same time, relics also served as frames or fragments of the moment of loss, showing a willingness to dwell in and with the moment of loss itself, and to linger over feelings of melancholy of the passing of time.137 Evidence of these multitude of meanings that hair presented to 19th century viewers is given by the description given by

134 Leigh Hunt, Wishing Cap Papers (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1873), 439. 135 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) 22. 136 Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011), 128. 137 Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us,” 128.

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George Byron of his feelings when confronted with Lucrezia Borgia’s lock at the

Ambrosiana. On one hand, the poet exalts the materiality of the hair: its look, its length and fair colour; on the other, he writes of the connection manifested by the relic with the original owner of the hair and with times long gone: “It makes one wretched not to have been born sooner to have at least seen her.” Not her portraits, not her autographed letters, but the strands alone can act as a juncture across time with the beloved dead, for which reason theft was the only means of prolonging that connection. The exaltation of the fairness of the tress is another significant element, a motif of praising women that predates 19th century culture and plunges its roots in Italian medieval literature and Petrarchan poetry. As seen before, beauty was an indispensable characteristic of a virtuous woman, as it was believed to be an expression of positive moral qualities; however, a pleasing appearance was connected to a specific set of characteristics. A combination of golden hair and white milky skin had been the accepted beauty standard ever since Petrarch set in his compositions the ideal description of female love objects. Golden-haired women were considered healthy, because the tonality of their tresses was considered a result of a correct balance of the four humours, according to the contemporary medical theories.138 Consequently, in literary and painterly conventions wicked women tended to be brunettes, in the “generally accepted tall, black-haired type of

Lady .”139 These ideals were forcefully upheld by early 19th century society through social conventions, visual imagery, and literary characters. In Charles Dicken’s 1859 A Tale of Two Cities, for example, the character of Lucie Manette was characterised as the ideal and ethereal woman through her description as a golden-haired . Byron embraces these conventions when he associates the fair colour of the strands with the beauty of the lock; in an abundancy of positive adjectives, the beauty of the blonde hue shines onto the love letters,

138 Janet Stephens, “Becoming a Blonde in Renaissance Italy,” The Journal of the 74 (2019): 3. 139 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, 185.

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74 which are visually described as pretty, and to the character of Lucrezia, whom Byron wishes he had met. No one, however, can successfully thread together this multitude of meanings better than poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864,) who composed an ode dedicated to the stolen strand, which he titled “On Seeing a Hair of Lucretia Borgia”:

BORGIA, thou once wert almost too august And high for adoration; now thou -rt dust; All that remains of thee these plaits unfold, Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold.

The poet condenses in four brief lines all the contradictions and qualities held by the thin keratinous polymer: its role in remembrance, its melancholic portrayal of the passing of time, its noble golden colour which acts as a synecdoche for the qualities of its original owner.

Towards the end of the century, however, this equation between golden hair, beauty, and moral virtue was challenged on a multitude of fronts. In the two years that followed the publication of Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, two sensational novels titled “The Woman with the Yellow Hair” employed the golden-hair trope to ridicule and criticize the values of the

Victorian bourgeoise, inverting the equation between colour fairness and angelic femininity.140 Subverting the traditional system, the protagonists of both novels are “the daintiest, softest, prettiest of blonde creatures” and at the same time negative models, “fair- haired demons,” concerned with greed and sexuality.141 In both novels, the physicality of the characters and the attention given to the description of hair correspond to a translation in prose of the model proposed by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in painting and poetry, which was becoming increasingly popular and influential in the 1860s.142 The Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood enthusiastically inserted itself in this fetishization of hair. Extreme care and prominence are given to the representation of female hair, which is usually painted strand by

140 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, 185. 141 Margaret Oliphant, Novels, 263-269. 142 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, 192.

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75 strand, in feathery masses of ringlets that shimmer with the warm tones of gold, deep hues of red, and silky notes of brown. Hair colour, however, does not reflect the angelic qualities or the wickedness of the subjects, defying the conventional modes of representation in painting as much as The Woman with the Yellow Hair does in prose. Pre-Raphaelite paintings such as

Gabriel Rossetti’s Helen of Troy establish this new convention that sees gold hair in connection with greed and explicit sexuality [Figure 31]. Helen displays all the qualities of a great beauty: delicate hands, milky skin tone and a great mane of silky, wavy golden hair.

However, as much as she remains within traditional ideals of beauty, Helen defies the viewer with a penetrating gaze that leaves no uncertainty regarding the fiendishness of her character.

While yellow hair became increasingly associated with greed, vice, and improper femininity, conventions were furtherly complicated by the representation of black-haired heroines in sensational fiction and in Pre-Raphaelite art.143 The Pre-Raphaelite poet and author of prose

Swinburne, whose fascination with Lucrezia is known, employs the new norm of fairness and wickedness. In a fascinating passage of his The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei, in a context imbued with sensuality, the author describes the sleeping Lucrezia through the lips of her lover and devotee Tebaldeo: “Only her mouth still quivered like a red flower that is rained upon (saving that her hair also vibrated like a golden-coloured great serpent with many throats and each breathing softly.)”144 Her fair locks, described only a few decades prior by a poet of the artistic stature of Lord Byron as the prettiest and fairest imaginable, become here a mythological reptilian monster, and Lucrezia a kind of Medusa or Lernaean Hydra. All in all, this excursus on hair symbolism only proves how hair can be too an instrument to frame female bodies within idealistic categories of virtue or vice, while the Victorian criticism proves the constructed, social origin of these conventions. As the 1860s challenged cultural

143 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, 198. 144 This passage of Swinburne’s Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei is cited in A.R. Chisholm, “Swinburne’s ‘Lucretia Borgia,’” The Australian Quarterly 16, no. 2 (June 1944): 86.

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76 norms associated with hair colour, the same cannot be asserted for the Hollywood cinema of the early 1900s, where the modern media persevered in displaying dark hair as a key feature of femmes fatales, led by the -haired beauty Theda Bara.

Back in Italy, ever since Lord Byron expressed his fascination for the tress, the

Ambrosiana became a coveted destination for the foreign, wealthy tourists arriving in Milan.

After Byron in 1816, illustrious visitors included the director of the French Royal Libraries

Valéry, who visited the institution three times between 1826 and 1828 and who referred to the lock as a “spicy singularity,” the popular author Gustave Flaubert in 1845, the De

Goncourt brothers, exponents of the realist school ten years later, and the art historian and critic Charles Blanch.145 Legend even narrates that prince George of Prussia sent two ambassadors to Milan to exclusively admire the tress and give a report back to him on its look. Lucrezia Borgia’s hair has been attested to be part of the Ambrosiana collection since at least the inventory of 1685, where the “letters of the Duchess of Ferrara directed to Pietro

Bembo” are remembered to be “in a volume covered with parchment with a tress of hair... found in the armoury or walnut dressers at the head of the gallery of paintings.”146 Then, it was Baldassarre Ostrocchi in his Dissertazione sui primi amori di Pietro Bembo of 1758 who relates again of the existence of the nine letters. Regarding the lock contained within them, he says: “vedesi una pergamena fina, raddoppiata a guisa di cartella, rinchiusa con quattro fettucce, che contiene una ciocca di capelli veri, biondi sottilissimi, ed assai lunghi, quali appunto assai lodar suole il Bembo sì nelle Poesie, che negli Asolani; e questi per costante tradizione si credono, e furono sempre a nostra memoria creduti capegli della Borgia suddetta.”147 At the end of the 19th century, when the tress had already become extremely

145 Alessandro Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia” in Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, ed. by Alessandro Rovetta, Marco Rossi, and Stefania Vecchio (Milano: Electa, 2007), 6:217-218. 146 Stefania Vecchio, Inventari Seicenteschi della Pinacoteca Ambrosiana (Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2009), 132. 147 Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 217.

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77 famous in certain artistic circles outside of Italy, the publisher of the letters Bernardino Gatti relates again of the conditions in which the tress was kept. From the thin parchment of the

1750s, the hair had been moved to a small glass box, which was housed in a showcase together with the letters, as the Dottori dell’Accademia were reticent in exhibiting the one without the other.148 Among the illustrious admirers of the tress of the new century is “Poeta

Vate” Gabriele d’Annunzio.149 After visiting the Ambrosiana on March 4th 1926, he testified of having experienced a great emotion “nel soppesare il pallore de’ capelli di Lucrezia

Borgia, che furono tratti per lui dalla teca, spezzandone i sugelli.”150 The sensibility of d’Annunzio, so similar to those of the great European poets and artists of the de siècle, is struck again by the pallor of the hair, which in his words seems to give the thin strands a certain heaviness, unknown if positive or negative. The following 8th March the poet visited again the Milanese institution, releasing a double promise to the newspaper Corriere della

Sera: “scrivere le sue impressioni sull’Ambrosiana e sui suoi tesori bibliografici e artistici, e un astuccio prezioso per racchiudervi le celebre ciocca di capelli di Lucrezia Borgia.”151 The vate never complied with his promises, but his idea of providing a suitable case for the hair

148 Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 218. 149 Gabriele d’Annunzio was one of the most prominent poet, playwriter, and novelist of the Italian literary scene between the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. He was at times referred to as Il Vate (“the Poet”) or as The Prophet (“the Prophet,”) two titles that he chose for himself and his poetry. Before his visit to the Ambrosiana, D’Annunzio had already taken a special interest in Lucrezia Borgia, the character who opens his long poetry collection Isaotta Guttadauro e alter poesie. In the Prologue that opens the entire collection, D’Annunzio presents the reader with a poetic account of Lucrezia’s nuptials, which envelops the reader in a heady atmosphere. As in the English and French portraits of her, the Vate develops Lucrezia into a sensuous visual experience. For a detailed account on the meaning of the collection within d’Annunzio’s larger poetry oeuvre see Emily Anne Rabiner, “The Decadent Renaissance: The Antimodern Seductions of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Vernon Lee” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2017.) 150 “On weighting up the pallor Lucrezia Borgia’s hair, which were taken for him from the glass box, tearing up the seals.” Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 218. 151 “Write his impressions of the Ambrosiana and its bibliographic and artistic treasures, and a precious case to enclose the famous lock of Lucrezia Borgia's hair.” “Una Visita di d’Annunzio all’Ambrosiana,” Corriere della Sera, March 7, 1926.

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78 might have inspired the 1926 commission to Alfredo Ravasco for a sophisticated glass box which may act as permanent housing for the relic.

Alfredo Ravasco’s glass case is the last step in a path that transformed the hair of

Lucrezia into a relic. If the 19th century English obsession with hair and relics started the process, the form, shape, and style of the case completed this transformation. From this point onward, therefore, the hair of Lucrezia will be analysed from the perspective of secular relics.

This terminology, however, has to be carefully utilized, given the religious context in which the hair was kept. Since the time of its founding in 1621 by the pious archbishop Federico

Borromeo, one of the main figures of the period known as the Counterreformation, the

Pinacoteca Ambrosiana has been characterized for its religious, Catholic perspective towards art. While not all pieces owned by the institution are religious in nature, the objectives of the

Ambrosiana have followed the model identified by its founder, and the head of institution has always had strong ties with the Milanese religious scene. In the Italian religious context, where relics have always had a special place in worshipping practices, and where the remnants of saints and holy figures have even been attributed miracle-working powers, speaking of secular relics might sound dangerously close to an oxymoron. The only element, however, that prevents a perfect equation between the lock and the definition of relic is the identity of its owner, as, after all, Lucrezia Borgia was never canonized or even considered a saint. The intrinsic characteristics of the lock of hair, however, is consistent with the qualities of relics. Moreover, the process of mythicization Lucrezia underwent in 19th century art and literature, and the similar transformation she endured at the hands of the early 20th century cinema, transformed her into a kind of secular saint revered for her sensuosity. Different media also intertwined her figure with other (pagan) deities and goddesses, such as Circe in

The Shaggy DA and Medusa in Swingburne’s The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei. As relics work as traces of a completed life and deceased body and are often objects of worship, so the

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79 tress is a material manifestation of the passage of Lucrezia on Earth, and as such, it became an object of profound veneration, albeit non-religious. Visitors from local communities and foreign countries arrived in procession to the religious spaces of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana to behold the lock, remaining ecstatic of the sight as reported by accounts such as Byron’s letters and Valéry’s comments. We might infer, therefore, that when the hair was enclosed in a glass case encrusted with precious gems, an object that is difficult not to define as a reliquary, the tress was irrevocably raised to the status of relic. The new glass case, provided with a secure support, allowed for the hair to be exhibited to the public and to become the centrepiece of many exhibitions, much as sacred relics are at times protagonists of processions and rituals.

Reliquaries in active use may assume a range of different forms, but some generalizations can be made: “speaking” or “body-part” reliquaries took the shape of the relic itself, for example a head or arm, others take the form of small coffins or caskets, while monstrance reliquaries served as elaborate display settings for relics.152 The case designed to house Lucrezia’s hair seems to belong to this last category of monstrance reliquaries, as the shape and materials used for the case accommodate for the exhibition of the relic. The reliquary was commissioned by the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in the summer of 1926 from

Alfredo Ravasco (1873-1958,) a successful goldsmith participating to that “most innovative spirit that characterized the Milanese arts during the first half of the Novecento”153 [Figure

32]. By the mid-1920s, Ravasco already boasted a wide production of jewellery, decorative pieces, and religious objects, where the artist experimented with original and avant-garde solutions in the use of different materials and hard stones with strong chromatism and

152 Diana Bullen Presciutti, “‘A Most Beautiful Brawl:’ Beholding Splendour and Carnage in Renaissance Italy,” Artibus et Historiae 36, no. 72 (2015): 73. 153 Paola Venturelli, Alfredo Ravasco. Orafo dei Principi. Principe degli Orafi (Milano: Skira, 2015), 15-17.

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80 minimalist geometric forms. The transparency of the medium used in the Ambrosiana case was far from the native chords of the artist, who specialized mostly in the creation of solid, opaque works that excelled for their coloristic qualities, but was essential to the purpose of showing off the hair and its blonde hues. Ravasco’s most famous works from the time, those he exhibited in the IV Triennial Exhibition of the Decorative and Industrial Arts in Monza, are almost exclusively decorative pieces designed with pure forms and executed with heavy, substantial mediums. Bowls, cigarette containers, boxes, and pendulum clocks are his typical productions of the 1920s and the 1930s. The small oval Box with Goldfishes exemplifies his style at the end of the decade, from the use of hard and coloristic stones as agate and coral, to the contrast between geometric shapes and natural decorative forms [Figure 33]. In this case, the attention to the pure oval shape of the outer contour is complemented by the sinuous forms of the two goldfishes that swim through the reflective flat surface of the agate to meet at the centre of the piece. The same principles animate the Oval Bowl with Bears from 1925, where the enamelled forms of two polar bears are placed balancing on the edges of the small cup, ready to jump in, competing for the viewers’ attention with the coloristic qualities of the agata and pearls of the bowl [Figure 34]. The glass box Ravasco executed for the Pinacoteca

Ambrosiana resembles not his secular, decorative pieces but his religious works, like the

Solar Ostensory he executed for the Catholic University of Milan in 1926, the same year of the Ambrosiana’s commission, or the golden monstrance from 1929, now held in the treasury of the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, also in Milan [Figure 35 and 36]. Both ostensoria are consistent in the use of transparent glass in their central portion, with only the handles and supports executed in metal, usually gold, silver, or gilded. The piece from 1929 features a central knot decorated with malachite, and its glass case is lavishly adorned with rays, flames, and spikes of stamped metal. Similarly, the case for Lucrezia’s hair was constructed with its main portion made of thin, transparent crystal and a sturdy support of

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81 coloristic malachite, dark ebony, and spiky silver decorations. The base of the San Celso ostensory and the Ambrosiana glass case are consistent in the use of geometric shapes, without the heavy decorative human figures of the Cattolica monstrance. The simplicity of the geometric shapes is contrasted again by the use of polychrome materials: green malachite, dark ebony, and brass in the Ambrosiana case, and coral and ruby for the Cattolica piece. All three pieces then share a design with flamboyant decorations, spikes and flames, always employed at the back of the central glass piece to create movement and to add an extravagant touch. The design of the Ambrosiana display case, similar to that employed by Ravasco for other religious Christian objects, is telling of the quasi-religious nature of the glass case.

Ostensoria, moreover, are those receptacles for the consecrated Host to be exposed to the congregation for adoration, a use that recalls the function of the Ambrosiana glass case, constructed for public display and maximum visibility of a relic of sorts. While these similarities in form and function between the Ambrosiana reliquary and Ravasco’s ostensoria are undeniable, the artist’s commented that: “It is needed to avoid that for such a secular object the case resembled a reliquary.”

In the creation of the case, the goldsmith paid specific attention to the remembrance of the owner of the hair, similarly to how in past reliquaries scenes of the lives of the saints were at times painted, incised, or referred to in the manufacturing of the containers. An illustrious example of this practice is, for example, the Milanese Golden Altar, reliquary and tomb of the bishop Ambrose and of Saints Gervaso and Protaso, which Ravasco worked on as a restorer between 1922 and 1924, just before receiving the commission from the

Ambrosiana. The grandiose golden exterior of the altar features carvings with the life of

Ambrose, remembering the saint for his good deeds and his dedication to the Milanese church. Similarly, Lucrezia is remembered by Ravasco on the small surface of the reliquary through a blaze of symbols. At either end of the glass case, two pendants feature the bull and

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82 the eagle, devices of House Borgia and House Este respectively [Figure 37]. The cameos add movement to the composition, as they are hung to the frame of the glass piece by shiny pearls and connected to the central support by a loose string also composed of small, round pearly beads. While this is only a speculation, we cannot help but notice that the materials used for these little elements perfectly reflect what Lucrezia was known for. Pearl and diamonds nets, in fact, were one of Lucrezia’s fashion trademarks in the Renaissance ever since her wedding day, when she entered Ferrara wearing a spectacular loose hairnet covered in pearls and diamonds.154 Moreover, the only secure portrait of the duchess, that by Bartolomeo Veneto, features the same loose strings hanging freely on her forehead and supporting a pearl in each end. While it has never been recorded that Ravasco ever saw the Veneto portrait, the original copy of the work was recorded at that time in the Rebuschini collection, a few kilometres from Milan, where it was photographed in colour just prior to World War II, during which it vanished.155 It is possible, therefore, that in his research Ravasco visited the collection to inspect Lucrezia’s portrait, subsequently drawing inspiration from it. It seems, in fact, no mere coincidence that the rich pearls that were famous for binding and hanging from

Lucrezia’s hair in life are now made into pendants for a relic of the same hair. However, one other artistic reference in the peal strings has been proposed by Alessandro Barbieri in his entry for a catalogue on the riches of the Ambrosiana. He sees the two strings of pearls set under the case as a “precise and punctual quote of the pearls that bind the four candlesticks placed on the arch of triumph surmounted by the Borgia bull in the background of the fresco of the Dispute of Saint Catherine of Alexandria... where in the same Saint Catherine we usually recognize the effigy of Lucrezia Borgia.”156

154 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 85. 155 Burgess Williams, “Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia,” 85. 156 Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 220.

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After the commission was received by Alfredo Ravasco in August 1926, the reliquary was delivered to the museum only in 1928, and then exposed (without the hair inside) at the

Venetian Biennial of 1930. While in Venice the reliquary received warm praises, the decision of the Ambrosiana to display it in its collection amassed some criticism. Luca Beltrami, senator and famous architect of the time, fervently disapproved of the display of the “tress of hair belonging to the sister of the fearsome Valentino as if it was a relic,”157 and even declared himself “disgusted” by the situation. In a scathing letter to the Ambrosian prefect

Galbiati dated April 17th 1928, when the glass case had already been delivered to the institution, he expressed thus his disappointment: “Volle il caso che stamane vedessi la custodia destinata a contenere la ciocca dei capelli di Lucrezia Borgia; e, indipendentemente da impressioni o giudizi sul lavoro d’arte, ho provato un senso di disgusto, che non mi consente indugio a reprimere lo sfogo dell’animo.”158 Beltrami’s letter is particularly significant in addressing not Ravasco’s manufacture as responsible for turning Lucrezia’s hair into a relic, but the act of enclosing the object in itself. The sole act of framing the object, independently by which materials and forms are used, of protecting it and displaying it, elevates the status of the hair and, especially, of its owner. As in Italy only saints and, more rarely, popular secular figures are given the honour of having relics preserved through time, when her hair is framed and exposed, Lucrezia’s rank is raised to pair that of Camillo Benso or Napoleon, two other secular figures whose relics had also been preserved by the

Ambrosiana.159 Criticism on the matter was therefore twofold. On one hand there was the

157 Venturelli, Alfredo Ravasco. Orafo dei Principi. Principe degli Orafi, 117. 158 “It so happened that this morning I saw the case intended to contain the lock of Lucrezia Borgia's hair; and, regardless of impressions or judgments on the work of art, I felt a sense of disgust, which does not allow me delay in repressing the outburst of soul." The letter is cited by Venturelli, Alfredo Ravasco. Orafo dei Principi. Principe degli Orafi, 30 and by Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 219. 159 The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana owns the gloves that Napoleon wore for the battle of Waterloo, while of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, eminent politician of the decades at the turn of the century, the hair were preserved and then enclosed in a reliquary in the early 1940s, also commissioned from Alfredo Ravasco.

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84 matter of Lucrezia being a woman, and a secular figure. On the other, there was her association with behaviours and morals not pertaining to the traditional ideas of respectable femininity. The matter is clearly expressed by Beltrami, when he complains that “the tress of hair of the sister of the fearsome Valentino” was being exposed as a relic. The architect does not even mention Lucrezia’s name, a practice of denying women of their name and individuality that was typical of the framing of women’s personalities as brides, mothers, sisters, or in general through the name of a male relative. The architect therefore dismisses, or is ignorant of Lucrezia’s accomplishments, and belittles her figure as worthy of being remembered together with Benso or Napoleon.

Scepticism regarding the legitimacy of the placement of the hair relic in a high-profile religious institution for the arts continued in the later decades of the 20th century. Angelo

Paredi, in his History of the Ambrosiana from 1967 reports that there was some pressure to permanently remove the hair relic, but “it was thought that it was wiser to keep it, first to exhibit something of the ‘tipo settaliano,’ something of the like of the museum-curiosity; secondly, to make visible the object of so much Romantic enthusiasm.”160 Probably unconsciously, Paredi reveals the exact moment when the relic became an instrument of consumerism. While on one hand the institution validates Beltrami’s perspective and believes the hair relic to be nothing more than a curiosity, and not as a legitimate object of remembrances, the Ambrosiana seems to sacrifice its educational purpose to accommodate the desires of the public. Its present-day installation in the glass showcases that separates the

“Sala della Medusa” from the adjacent “Sala delle Colonne” supports Paredi’s words, as the reliquary is exposed together with other miscellaneous objects and curiosities from different eras, such as armillary and an automaton with the figure of a hunting Diana by

160 Angelo Paredi, La Storia dell’Ambrosiana (Milano: Pozza, 1981), cited by Barbieri, “Teca con i Capelli di Lucrezia Borgia,” 219.

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Joachim Friess from 1630. The relic is therefore excluded from the Renaissance gallery of the

Ambrosiana and is permanently separated from the letters that used to house it, which reaffirm the historicity of Lucrezia’s character, her individuality, and participation within

Renaissance culture. The exhibition fails, then, to uphold the dignity of the lock as a token of affection and as a precious testimony of the traditions and practices of courtly love, as that was the nature of the relationship between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo. Furthermore, the absence of any descriptive labels in the modern display negates the historical significance of the hair in a twofold manner: failing to describe it as a token of affection, product of a courtly cultural practice, and secondly forgetting to refer to the Romantic excitement it sparked. Both the cinematographic productions and the Ambrosiana persevere, therefore, in the patriarchal exploitation of a woman’s character and sexuality to spike the consumers’ attention. While being such different media, both the movies and the current display of the hair relic are concord in their treatment of the character of Lucrezia Borgia. After the popularity of her figure reached a peak, she was later debased and sensationalised as a catchy attraction, useful for either feeding the morbid curiosity of museum visitors or for intriguing the audience of movie theatres. In both cases, the individuality and historicity of Lucrezia

Borgia’s character are completely overlooked, as noted for many other publications on her figure, and she is turned into an object for the pleasure of, in one case, the male gaze, and in the second of male intellectual curiosity. As the Hollywood productions answer to the need of consumerism, so the Ambrosiana renounces its educational purpose and fails in providing the relic and the character of Lucrezia the scholarly perspective and context she is due.

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CONCLUSION

Lucrezia and her family are still charming both the public and academics, as Gregorovius seems to have perfectly forecast: “The Borgias will never cease to fascinate the historian and the psychologist... everything about Alexander VI, Cæsar, and Lucretia Borgia, every little fact regarding their lives, every newly discovered letter of any of them, aroused our interest much more than did anything similar concerning other and vastly more important historic characters.” Even as research on Lucrezia has started moving past the binary perspective of the earlier biographies, abandoning the constant comparison of her figure with the traditional ideals of respectability and feminine propriety, in popular culture Lucrezia seems to be still exploited as a prototypical femme fatale. In 2011, the historical-fiction drama “The Borgia” employed all the traditional representations of Lucrezia and her family as sinful, ambitious, frivolous, immoral, but extremely attractive and seductive. Even in the contemporary setting of the TV-series, Lucrezia remained the incestuous seductress she was in 19th century. In contrast, contemporary biographical and academic research on Lucrezia has started exploring her character without referring to the traditional ideals of respectable femininity. For the first time, the Lucrezia who emerges from the more recent biographies, such as that by Rachel

Erlanger161 and by Sarah Bradford162, is “neither a poisoner nor a murderess, nor the victim of (or participant in) incestuous relations with her father and brothers.”163 However, as Diane

Ghirardo noted, “she still remains a relatively passive figure, a pawn of her family’s political games in Rome, and a faithful if often sickly wife in Ferrara without much independent character of her own.”164 A few recent studies, manifestations of a more widespread

161 Rachel Erlanger, Lucrezia Borgia: A Biography (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978). 162 Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: life, love and death in Renaissance Italy (New York: Viking, 2004) 163 Dianne Yvonne Ghirardo, “Lucrezia Borgia as Entepreneur.” Renaissance Quarterly 61 no. 1 (Spring 2008): 55. 164 Ghiardo, “Lucrezia Borgia as Entepreneur,” 55.

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87 academic interest on women’s historical acquisition of wealth and economic status, have started analysing Lucrezia as an active participant in politics and economy, examining her conspicuous financial and economic skills and her intense involvement in the government of the state of Ferrara and in war matters. Alongside Ghirardo, who inserted herself in this oeuvre of research exploring Lucrezia’s building commissions165 and astute financial activities, examining her figure as a “capitalist entrepreneur,”166 Gabriella Zarri explored

Lucrezia’s spiritual life, discovering a truly devoted figure interested in the most elaborate theological questions167 while Sergio Costola is currently investigating Lucrezia’s diplomatic skills.168 Notwithstanding these focused and revolutionary analyses, the mythology connected to Lucrezia’s name and the commodification of her figure have continued and spread in both popular culture and in the museal and artistic circles. Two instances stand out, in particular: the execution and installation in 1998 of a naked statue of her in front of the gates of the Old

University of , Spain, the native land of House Borgia, and the mysterious but sensationalized identification in 2008 of a painting of a Young Youth as a posthumous portrait of Lucrezia.

The statue, part of a larger installation by the Spanish sculptor Manuel Boix Alvarez, represents Lucrezia together with four other members of House Borgia [Figure 38 and 39].

The only woman of these five “most relevant” members of the dynasty, Lucrezia is also the only figure depicted naked and sexualised. She wears a Renaissance-inspired dress, with wide sleeves and a wide skirt, with a bodice that sits so low as to fully uncover her bust. The stiff

165 Dianne Yvonne Ghirardo, “Lucrezia Borgia’s Palace in Renaissance Ferrara,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 4 (December 2005): 474-497. 166 Dianne Yvonne Ghirardo, “Lucrezia Borgia as Entepreneur.” Renaissance Quarterly 61 no. 1 (Spring 2008): 53. 167 Gabriella Zarri, La religione di Lucrezia Borgia. Le lettere inedite del confessore (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2006). 168 Sergio Costola, “Lucrezia Borgia and Her Theatre of Diplomacy,” (unpublished manuscript, February 2021.)

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88 material of the corset frames and supports her bosom, while one of her sculpted hands cups and gently squeezes one breast, presenting it to the viewers. Adding to the sexualisation of the figure is the second hand, displayed urgently clasping her skirt in a place unmistakably close to her pubic area. Luring people through the forms of her firm breasts, this Lucrezia captivates the viewers and brings them closer to the five sculptures, where Cesare’s weapons are ready to make a massacre. The sculptural group becomes then a choral representation of the stereotyped Borgia family, with Lucrezia’s sculpture specifically embodying the objectification and commodification of a woman’s body through time; as Lucrezia’s body was in the Renaissance treated as an instrument of her family’s ambitions, in contemporary times is a tool to attract the masses’ attention.

Closely following this display of Lucrezia, and the handling of her figure by the

Ambrosiana Gallery, which uses her popularity and the Romantic oversexualisation of her name to attract and charm visitors, in 2008 the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne has ceremoniously announced the identification of the sitter of one Renaissance portrait in its possession as Lucrezia Borgia [Figure 40]. The public announcement published on the museum’s website speaks briefly of the detailed technical investigation executed on the painting that yielded the “astounding conclusion,” which makes the painting “the only surviving formal portrait of the famous Lucrezia”169. The “revelatory research,” which still has to be published and peer-reviewed, determined the painting as being a production of

Dosso Dossi, portraying the Duchess of Ferrara. Just after reporting the merry discovery, the announcement thoughtfully reported how the findings were attracting considerable international interest on the museum and its curatorial research, ultimately probably revealing

169 “NGV Solves Mystery of Renaissance Portrait,” National Gallery of Victoria Media Release, November 26, 2008, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/media_release/ngv-solves-mystery-of-renaissance- portrait/.

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89 the primary motivation that led the institution in making the identification, and reminded its readers of Lucrezia’s spicy reputation, which made her “the most famous (or infamous) woman of the Italian Renaissance.” The painting, however, seems to depart completely from the tradition established by other secure portraits of Lucrezia. After the author was identified as being Dosso Dossi, the sitter was understood as being a woman (though at first the work was thought to be a Portrait of a Youth), the background recognized as a myrtle bush, and the object held by the figure in their hands identified as a dagger, “a symbolic reference to another Lucretia, the sixth-century BC heroine of ancient Rome.”170 However, Lucrezia

Borgia’s portraits never employed the dagger to suggest a connection with the ancient noblewoman, as the dagger with its violent connotations was an element exclusive to male figures, and the duchess was determined to present herself within the boundaries of female respectability, presenting herself as chaste, pious bride and a loyal wife. In the strained political climate of the time, the dagger could have also been badly interpreted and would have probably brought forward the old scandals regarding the death of her former husbands.

When a connection with the ancient Lucretia was sought and suggested, the attention was focused mainly on the virginal and chaste moral qualities of the mythical character, instead of on her sacrifice, as suicide was still an action frowned upon by the pious Catholic culture of

Renaissance Italy. Lastly, posthumous portraits of Lucrezia, as this work was dated to the

1520s, would have carried on the image she established for herself and her house through the later portraits she commissioned for herself, e.g. the coazzone portrait medal and the San

Maurelio reliquary panels, which insisted on her role as duchess and mother of the heirs to

House d’Este and portrayed her as an emblem of propriety and respectability, of magnificence and nobility. In this painting, the sitter is shown as a virtuous woman, as seen in the symbolism of the myrtle bush and the chaste black dress that covers her torso

170 National Gallery of Victoria Media Release, “NGV Solves Mystery of Renaissance Portrait.”

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90 completely, but the details of her jewellery and garments do not suggest magnificence, nobility, and beauty, and nothing suggests the aristocratic status of the subject or ties to

House d’Este. Comparing this identification with the uncertainties that still revolve around other supposed portraits of Lucrezia, such as that by Pinturicchio, which is still not deemed as certain despite the secure dating, the definite identity of the painter, and iconographical elements that support the claim, the Australian museum seems to have moved very fast in announcing the discovery. The Guardian accidentally reveals another interesting aspect of the situation, which might have had a role in the matter: “The oval painting... was purchased in

London by the gallery in 1965 for 8.ooo pounds. If it is proved to be a portrait of Borgia, it could be worth millions.”171

While Boix Alvarez’s statue, together with the treatment of Lucrezia in the recent TV series, displays how prominent this mythology of Lucrezia as a femme fatale still is in popular culture, the circumstances of the National Gallery of Victoria discovery of a supposed new portrait prove how much it can still be exploited. In conclusion, much still has yet to be done to arrive at an historical portrayal of Lucrezia Borgia, devoid of oversexualized or one-dimensional attributes. The history of her character might, however, serve as a means of gaining access to a much wider range of issues concerning the female body and its representation in past and contemporary productions. Transformed first into an emblem of respectability, then into a moral lesson, and ultimately into an object for the pleasure of the male gaze, portrayals of Lucrezia from the Renaissance to the most contemporary years prove the use of artistic and literary representation of femininity as a tool of social control.

Therefore, more than for the sake of historical accuracy, or to vindicate the wrongs done to

171 Ellen Connolly, “Mystery portrait is Lucrezia Borgia, claims gallery,” The Guardian, November 25, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/nov/25/portrait-lucrezia-borgia-australia

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Lucrezia’s figure, research on her character provides a useful perspective to understand the power of representation and to recognize representation as a site where power is performed.

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APPENDIX I: LUCREZIA BORGIA’S BIOGRAPHY

- April 18th, 1480: Lucrezia is born in Subiaco.

- 1492-1494: Bernardino Pinturicchio is given commission to execute frescoes

celebratory of House Borgia in the Pope’s Apartments.

- February 2nd, 1493: Lucrezia’s betrothal to Giovanni Sforza, Duke of Pesaro, is

signed.

- June 12th, 1493: the marriage between Lucrezia and Giovanni Sforza is celebrated.

- September 1497: a papal commission dissolves the marriage between Lucrezia and

Giovanni Sforza on the grounds of the latter’s impotence.

- July 21st, 1498: Lucrezia is married to Alfonso of Aragon, son of the King of Naples,

Duke of Bisceglie and Prince of Salerno.

- November 1st, 1499: Lucrezia gives birth to Alfonso’s son, Rodrigo of Aragon.

- August 18th, 1500: Alfonso of Aragon is strangled to death in the Torre Borgia in the

Vatican Palaces by Michelotto Corella, confidant and right hand of Cesare Borgia.

- August 12th, 1501: the marriage contract for the nuptials of Lucrezia and Alfonso

d’Este, son of Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, is signed.

- October 30th, 1501: Lucrezia is said to participate in a scandalous supper with 50

prostitutes organized by her brother Cesare.

- November 2nd, 1501: Lucrezia is said to have watched and laughed at an incident

involving four stallions released upon 2 mares.

- November 1501: the pamphlet containing the “Letter to Silvio Savelli” is published

and circulated in Italy.

- December 30th, 1501: Lucrezia marries by proxy Alfonso d’Este.

- February 2nd, 1502: Lucrezia makes her sumptuous entrance in Ferrara.

- 1505: Lucrezia is involved in the production of a new portrait medal of her figure.

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- April 4th, 1508: Lucrezia gives birth to Ercole d’Este, son of Alfonso and heir to

House d’Este.

- 1508-10: Bartolomeo Veneto executes a sumptuous portrait of Lucrezia Borgia.

- 1514: commission is given to Giannantonio da Foligno for the execution of engraved.

panels celebratory of House d’Este for the San Maurelio reliquary.

- June, 24th, 1519: Lucrezia dies in childbirth.

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FIGURES

Figure 1. Pinturicchio, Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

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Figure 2. Pinturicchio, detail of Saint Barbara’s facial features The Martyrdom of Saint Barbara, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartments, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

Figure 3. Pinturicchio, detail of Saint Catherine’s facial features Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

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Figure 4. Pinturicchio, detail of the triumphal arch Disputation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

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Figure 5. Pinturicchio, Scenes from the life of Isis and Osiris, 1492-94, vault fresco with stucco and gold leaf. Borgia Apartment, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

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Figure 6. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Medal of Lucrezia Borgia and “Amor Bendato,” c. 1505, copper alloy, 5.9 cm diameter. Museo Schifanoia, Ferrara.

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Figure 7. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Medal of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, cast bronze medal, 5.5 cm diameter, 1501-02.

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Figure 8. Mantuan School in the style of Giancristoforo Romano, Portrait Medal of Lucrezia Borgia, ca. 1508-1510, copper alloy, 6.06 cm diameter. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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Figure 9. Ambrogio de Predis, Bianca Maria Sforza, ca. 1493, 51x32.5 cm, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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Figure 10. Bartolomeo Veneto, Lucrezia Borgia, ca. 1508–10, oil on canvas, 58x42 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes.

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Figure 11. Giannantonio da Foligno, Reliquary Panels of San Maurelius, ca. 1514, engraved silver. Church of San Giorgio fuori le mura, Ferrara.

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Figure 12. Giannantonio da Foligno, detail of Lucrezia Borgia Reliquary panels of San Maurelius, ca. 1514, engraved silver. Church of San Giorgio fuori le mura, Ferrara.

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Figure 13. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Borgia, 1860, watercolour, 52.2x54. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 14. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, To Caper Nimbly in a Lady’s Chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute, 1850, pen and ink, 21.5x15 cm. Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England.

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Figure 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lucrezia Borgia, 1860-61, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50 cm. Tate, London.

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Figure 16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lucrezia Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate, London.

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Figure 17. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, detail of the decanter and the poppy flower in Lucrezia Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate, London.

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Figure 18. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, detail of the glass and decanter of red wine in The Borgia, 1868, graphite and watercolour on paper, 4.38x2.50. Tate, London.

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Figure 19. The Eternal Sin, 1917, poster, Motion Pictures News.

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Figure 20. Armand Raprad, Lucrezia Borgia, 1922, poster, 24x36, Bauduin Impressions.

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Figure 21. Still from Lucrezia Borgia (57:55), 1922, film.

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Figure 22. Lucréce Borgia, poster, 1935.

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Figure 23. Still from Lucréce Borgia, directed by Abel Gance, 1922, film.

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Figure 24. Josep Renau Berenguer, Lucrecia Borgia, 1935, poster, 36x27 cm.

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Figure 25. Don Juan, 1926, poster, 24x36.

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Figure 26. Still from “The Borgia,” Don Juan (00:39), 1922, film.

Figure 27. Still from “The Borgia,” Don Juan (00:45), 1922, film.

Figure 28. Still from “The Borgia” Don Juan (00:32), 1922, film.

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Figure 29. Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917, photograph.

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Figure 30. Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897.

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Figure 31. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen of Troy, 1863, oil on panel, 31x26.5 cm. Hamburg Kunsthall, Hamburg, Germany.

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Figure 32. Alfredo Ravasco, Glass case with the hair of Lucrezia Borgia, 1926-1928, ebony, malachite, rock crystal, silver, enamels, pearls, emeralds, rubies, 30cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.

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Figure 33. Alfredo Ravasco, Box with Goldfishes, 1927-1930, agata, silver, coral, guilloche, pearls, 6x23x13 cm. Private Collection.

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Figure 34. Alfredo Ravasco, Oval Bowl with Bears, 1925, agata, enamel, sapphires, pearls, 5x9.5 cm. Private Collection.

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Figure 35. Alfredo Ravasco, Solar Ostensory, 1926, gold, silver, rubies, pearls, green gems, coral. Chapel of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan.

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Figure 36. Alfredo Ravasco, Ostensory, 1929, gold, cloisonnè, pearls, rubies, emeralds, topaz, malachite, coral, agata. Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso Treasury, Milan.

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Figure 37. Figure 31. Alfredo Ravasco, detail of the pearl strings and cameos of the Glass case with the hair of Lucrezia Borgia, 1926-1928, ebony, malachite, rock crystal, silver, enamels, pearls, emeralds, rubies, 30cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.

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Figure 38. Manuel Boix Alvarez, The Borja, 1995-1998, Corts Valencianes, Valencia, Spain.

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Figure 39. Manuel Boix Alvarez, Lucrècia Borja, 1995-1998, Corts Valencianes, Valencia, Spain.

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Figure 40. Dosso Dossi (attributed to,) Portrait of a Young Woman, 1519-1530, oil on wood, 74.5 x 7.2 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

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