A long and most interesting letter from Venice dated 10 February 1505, addressed to ‘Madonna N’ (Nicola dei Trotti) but intended for Lucrezia, seems to indicate that somehow Bembo had succeeded in seeing her and that their passion had been reignited. ‘As long as I live,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot recall ever receiving a letter as gratifying as that which your Ladyship gave me upon my departure and in which you proved to me that I abide in your favour . . . you must know the first hour I saw you that you penetrated my mind to such a degree that never afterwards have you been able to quit it . . .’ There is a great deal in the ‘star-crossed lovers’ vein which was, no doubt, part of the attraction for both: his ill fortune is ‘more than ever arrayed against me now’, he tells her,
yet I have no fear, for it could never make me so afraid that I could cease to love you and not count you the one true mistress of my self and my life, ever serving you with the purest and warmest loyalty that a valiant and steadfast lover can offer the woman he loves and honours above all things human. I do beseech you never to alter and never to lose heart in this love, though there are so many things which oppose and obstruct our desires. . . But endeavour rather to be ever more deeply inflamed with love the more arduous you see your resolve become. . . in spite of ill fortune I love you and. . . nothing can take this from me and I fancy, if there be likewise nothing that can make you not love me, in the end the day must come when we two shall triumph and vanquish ill fortune. . . and when that day comes it will be so lovely and precious for us to recall that we were staunch and constant lovers. . .
There is no doubt that Bembo was deeply concerned at the possibility that their correspondence might be discovered – presumably by Alfonso. ‘Above all,’ he implores her, ‘I beg you to take care that no one may know or discover your true thoughts lest the paths which lead to our love become even more restricted and thwarted than they are at present. Do not trust anyone, no matter whom, until I come to you, which in any case will be soon after Easter if I am alive. . .’ She could trust the bearer of this letter and reply via him. ‘Indeed I beseech you to do so, for since we can talk so little face to face please speak at length with me in letters and let me know what life you lead, and what thoughts are yours and in whom you confide, which things torment you and which console. And take good care not to be seen writing, because I know you are watched very closely.’ After kissing ‘one of those prettiest and brightest and sweetest eyes of yours which have pierced me to the soul, first and lovely cause, though not the only one, of my ardour’, he begged her to accept his favourite medal, an Agnus Dei: ‘Out of love for me sometimes please deign to wear at night the enclosed Agnus Dei which I once used to wear upon my breast, if you cannot wear it in the day, so that your precious heart’s dear abode, which I should gladly stake my life to kiss but once and long, may at least be touched by this roundel which for so long has touched the abode of mine. . .’ 11
Bembo, it seems, did see her, as he promised, once again when he passed through Ferrara in April en route to take part in a Venetian embassy to Rome. He may even have seen her on his return journey early in June when he went on to Mantua to be presented to Isabella. He never saw Lucrezia again thereafter, although they were in touch sporadically until the end of her life. Bembo spent six years at the court of Urbino where he featured as one of the characters in a dialogue on love in The Courtier before spending the rest of his life in Rome, becoming secretary to Pope Leo X.
Lucrezia, or ‘f.f.’, had taken an enormous risk with this relationship even if it was romantic in the fashionable tradition of ‘courtly love’ rather than actually physical. Several people knew about it – her ladies Nicola and Giovanna, Ercole Strozzi and Alfonso Ariosto. The Este had a reputation for ruthlessness in similar circumstances. The Torre Marchesana, one of the four towers of the Castello in which Lucrezia’s apartments then were, had been the scene of a grim ending to a tragic love affair, that of Ugo and Parisina. In the dungeons of this tower just eighty years earlier, on the night of 21 May 1425, Alfonso’s grandfather, Niccolò III d’Este, had ordered the beheading of his second wife, Parisina Malatesta, and of his favourite, illegitimate son, Ugo Aldobrandino, for committing adultery together. Danger, however, was something to which Lucrezia, as a Borgia, had become inured; she may even have derived a certain thrill from risk—as long as that risk was something which, with her experience and charm, she could control and circumvent.
Yet even as her romance with Bembo was on the wane, Lucrezia had embarked on another very different and more long-lasting relationship. She had first met Francesco Gonzaga when, as the hero of the battle of Fornovo, he had passed through Rome in March 1496 and called upon her and Cesare when she was still —just—Countess of Pesaro. Born in 1466 in Mantua, the son of Federico I, the third Marquis of Mantua, and Margherita of Wittelsbach, he had succeeded his father aged not quite eighteen and married Isabella d’Este, aged sixteen, in 1490. He was not handsome: the bust by Gian Cristoforo Romano in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua shows a man of exuberant carnality, with overblown, sensual lips, protuberant eyes and thick, wiry hair. Although he protected and helped Andrea Mantegna, whose greatest paintings were executed for the Gonzaga family, he was no intellectual. His overwhelming passion, apart from sex, was his stable of horses which was famous throughout Europe and won every race in Italy. Like most aristocrats of his time his chief preoccupations beyond the practice of arms and political survival were horses, hunting dogs and falcons. Beyond his undoubted military skills and extreme untrustworthiness, Francesco’s sexual overdrive was his most significant characteristic. Until at least 1497 he had openly kept a mistress, Teodora Suardi, by whom he had three illegitimate children, often accompanying her in public to the mortification of Isabella. His sexual interests were certainly not confined either to his wife or his mistress—young girls, who could be married to complaisant husbands, and young boys were equally desirable. Lodovico ‘Vigo’ di Camposampiero, with whom he carried on a scabrous correspondence for some years and who was with good reason hated by Isabella, acted as his pimp. One of his functions was to provide boys for Gonzaga. In October 1506 when Gonzaga was campaigning in leisurely fashion against his friends and connections, the Bentivoglio of Bologna, di Camposampiero wrote to him from Rome that he was sending him a boy: ‘As you are at war up there you will not be able to have all your usual comforts. . . you may not find him as beautiful as he has been depicted, but nonetheless he is at your command . . .’12
He revelled in the Rabelaisian, often actively pornographic letters of the distinguished Bolognese jurist Floriano Dolfo. The theme of many of Dolfo’s letters was sodomy, whether homosexual or heterosexual; Dolfo himself liked boys and despised women. He particularly enjoyed retailing the notorious practices at the Baths of Porretta near Bologna. He delightedly described an incident concerning Battista Ranuzzi, lord of the locality, ‘who, the other night, going to the baths with a nun, wanted to sodomize her in the water, and having placed his penis in her arse, both of them seated, he raised himself slightly to penetrate her further and both of them slipped right under the water; but thanks to the goodness of God who never inflicts an unjust punishment, knowing that this sin merited fire not water, both escaped the peril . . .’13 ‘The love of boys,’ Dolfo wrote, was ‘less wearisome, less dangerous and less expensive than the servile love of women.’ 14 Although careful not actually to say anything to the detriment of Isabella, he could not resist scurrilous fun at her expense. Condoling with Francesco that their firstborn, Eleonora, was a girl, he ‘comforted’ him, saying that as a girl her birth would have brought ‘less pain to the Most Illustrious Marchioness, and less stretching to her quim when she will have brought you a benefit and greater pleasure in your communal embraces, so that you won’t find such a large chamber that it would be like a dried pea in a rattle or a clapper in a bell’.15 Sodomy with either sex was not only a sin but a crime punishable by death by burning; only the rich, like Francesco’s brother Giovanni, married to Laura Bentivog
lio but nonetheless a practising homosexual, might escape by paying a hefty fine. Unsurprisingly given his relentless sexual activity, Francesco, like Alfonso, Cesare and even the Pope, Julius II, had syphilis; the disease eventually killed him.
Francesco had charm and a powerful sexual magnetism; he liked to flirt with women and knew how to talk to them. To Lucrezia he was far more like the men she had loved—her father and Cesare—than the refined, eloquent Bembo. Biographers have called her relationship with Bembo ‘the great love of her life’ but a study of the relevant documents indicates rather that Francesco was her passion. The fact that he was Isabella’s husband can only have added spice to the affair. Francesco admired his wife for her cool and subtle political instinct, so necessary in restraining his own impulsive temperament and capacity for getting himself into trouble. He was proud of her as a celebrated collector of antique statues and works of art, her patronage of the arts, her skill and accomplishments in entertaining and her taste in dress, all of which passions cost him more than he could afford on his income from Mantua, even supplemented by his successful career as a condottiere. There was no question that intellectually Isabella was far his superior but physically, over the next few years, his interest in her waned and after she had borne him eight children, including the longed-for heir, Federico, in May 1500, their relations ceased. Increasingly her bossiness and vanity irritated him as did her coldness towards her daughters, particularly Eleonora, and perhaps also a little her passion for their son, of whom she once wrote that she hoped he would not inherit the vices of his father.16 Francesco and his brother-in-law Alfonso shared a mutual contempt which gave an affair with Lucrezia additional piquancy.
Lucrezia’s first letters to Francesco date from the spring of 1502: and, unlike her letters of the same period to Isabella, they are written, not by a secretary, but in her own distinctive, legible, spiky hand. Her first letter, written on 11 April of that year, has a distinctly flirtatious note and, since she refers to a letter he has written her, they were already in correspondence. ‘My illustrious lord,’ she wrote,
being on the verge of the confessional, I received a letter from you for which I kiss your hand and ask your pardon for the tardiness of my answer although it was caused by not wishing to disturb Your Lordship in your devotions in these Holy Days [a reference to Easter Week] and because of this I make my reply about ‘your falcon’ as brief as possible. I am advised that he is very well, and better, to judge by appearances, and is often examined by others who had heard from the confessor some things which have happened, although I understand that all this may be said without offence to God. . . because I desire as much as my own health to hear that Your Lordship is renewed from now on in the fear and service of God: and as a good son of San Francesco, as am I, although unworthy, and a Patron of so many excellent friars as much as of their religion. I want in every way to do honour to such as a father [padre]. I know that Your Lordship ridicules me and my preaching which is the fault of Sister Eufrosina and Sister Laura who want me to spite the world by becoming a preacher and martyr. I thank Your Lordship for the other particulars of your letter which Count Lorenzo [Strozzi] has told me in person at greater length and which have given me the greatest pleasure. But the too kind terms which you use to write to me [cum suportatione de quella] I regret that it does not seem suitable to me, holding Your Lordship as Lord and brother as I do . . .17
This altogether mysterious letter was clearly intended to be properly understood only by Francesco; for important people to write personal letters to each other was a risky business. Strozzi, one could assume, would have provided the key, which centred on the ‘falcon’. Indeed, Lucrezia’s second letter of the same date was a passionate recommendation of Lorenzo, Ercole Strozzi’s brother, and his affairs in Mantua, pleading with Francesco to continue his protection of Lorenzo: ‘and to this end I am sending the present bearer to Your Lordship so that he may explain more fully my feelings towards the said count’. Lorenzo Strozzi, like Ercole, would act as go-between for Lucrezia and Francesco. Closely watched as they knew themselves to be, the letters Lucrezia and Francesco exchanged tended to be circumspect, and important messages would be delivered personally by trusted emissaries such as the Strozzi. Indeed, several letters of this period concern favours which she wanted Gonzaga to do for Lorenzo Strozzi. A letter to Francesco that year, written on 30 December, has a playful note:
May Our Lord God be thanked that we have here a pledge from Your Lordship that you will be constrained to let yourself be seen here sometimes for to tell the truth it has been too long since you have been here. I do not joke, My Lord, but I have not been able to be of more service to you than I have been. But it has not been possible for the reasons Count Lorenzo wrote to you: and if they are not enough to excuse me to you I ask a thousand pardons because certainly I desire to serve Your Lordship in everything possible. I thank you as much as I can for the good expedition you have given to the affairs of the said Count . . .18
From 1503 only one letter survives, written in a secretarial hand and asking Francesco to help a member of her household in his affairs at Mantua, while for the same year there are nine letters from Lucrezia to Isabella, all of an administrative nature; this is presumably because Francesco spent a great deal of his time that year with the French armies going against Naples, leaving Isabella in charge.
In the spring and summer of 1504, when Alfonso was on his travels and Duke Ercole was ailing, Lucrezia, following the example of the Duchess Eleonora, took a regular part in the Esame delle Suppliche (Examination of Petitions) and much of her correspondence arose out of the cases presented to her there. Many of the requests were for pardons or the release of prisoners held in Mantua. When Gonzaga did nothing about them, she repeated her requests firmly until he complied. While in Ferrara, he had promised to release to her a certain Bernardino della Publica, imprisoned for murder. When he failed to do so, she wrote insistently and several times, finally and sharply five months later: ‘I beg you to fulfil your promise . . . release [Bernardino della Publica] and send him to me as soon as possible . . .’ Her competence must have impressed Francesco because in one letter she thanked him for all the kind things he had said about her to Duke Ercole which had been repeated to her.
Towards the end of April, Gonzaga (with Isabella) again visited Ferrara for the annual St George’s Day races, inspiring flirtatious letters of regret on his departure from Lucrezia and her ladies. From the beginning, immediately after Gonzaga had left Ferrara, she and her ladies had entered into a conspiracy to seduce him. On 8 May 1504, her ladies wrote a collective lament for his absence, feeling themselves half alive, they said, for the lack of his ‘benign, kind, sophisticated and divine presence’, his ‘divine virtues and exalted and angelic manner’. Angela Borgia and Polissena Malvezzi were particularly concerned to do his bidding, ‘principally when we see the affection borne by our most excellent Duchess, who in all our conversations never ceases to hold the sweetest memories of you’. The letter was signed ‘the most dedicated damsels of the most excellent Duchess’.19 Polissena wrote the same day describing court festivities and adding, ‘But every delight gave little pleasure to Her Ladyship or to me, her servant, since Your Illustrious Lordship was not present.’
Lucrezia was anxious to please her brother-in-law whenever the opportunity arose. Typically, Francesco was anxious to have some fine horses of Cesare’s which were being kept in the Rocca di Forlì by the castellan, de Mirafuentes, as he had made clear during his May visit. Lucrezia immediately contacted de Mirafuentes, as she told Gonzaga in a letter of 11 May, enclosing the castellan’s reply: ‘I only beg of you to signify if there is anything else you need in this case and if I can be of help to you because I assure Your Excellency that you will find me always most prompt and well-disposed in this and in anything else you know that I can be of service to you,’ At the end of July, responding to further requests from Francesco about the horses, she told him that she had written immediately and wit
h the greatest urgency to the castellan and was sure that he would obtain what he desired.
As early as 1502 Lucrezia had taken under her protection the beautiful Barbara Torelli, maltreated wife of Ercole Bentivoglio, son of Giovanni, lord of Bologna. Barbara, a cultivated and intelligent woman of a noble family of Ferrarese origin, had taken refuge in Ferrara because of the Este friendship for her family and because she found the cultured Este court congenial. She seems to have been a difficult woman, and the nuns with whom she first lodged complained to Lucrezia that they did not wish to keep her, whereupon the compassionate Lucrezia had persuaded a Messer Alfonso Calacagnino to have her in his house,20 Two years later Francesco Gonzaga took up the cause of Ercole Bentivoglio at the instance of his own brother, Giovanni Gonzaga, who was related to Bentivoglio through his wife, Laura. He sent a trusted servant, Marcantonio Gatto, to request Lucrezia that Bentivoglio’s daughter, Costanza, be taken from her mother and sent to Mantua to Giovanni Gonzaga’s house. Lucrezia replied in the beautiful hand of Tebaldeo that she had hastened to do as he asked, despite her status as Barbara Torelli’s protector: ‘And in this case she has shown herself somewhat difficult: nonetheless, to satisfy Your Lordship’s desire, I have operated in such a manner that Madonna Barbara, her mother, has consented, albeit unwillingly. And so the girl will go with Marcantonio whom you sent here for this purpose . . .’ 21
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