Villa d'Este in 1740
From an etching by Piranesi
It does not seem to have occurred to Mureto that both of these men were looking forward to the papacy, and desired to emulate in their own pontificates that of Leo X. Each piece of sculpture acquired for their villas, every literary man attached to their service was a step toward that end. Ippolito II. was as keen a hunter of genius as his uncle had been of deer or boar; and having once bagged his game, as capable of availing himself without scruple of his trophies as Ippolito I. of tearing the antlers from a dying stag.
The princely Cardinal entertained on one occasion a house party of two hundred and fifty guests in his palatial villa, and established here a veritable court. The grandiose frescoes of Zuccari, Tempesta, Muziano, and Vasari still celebrate the glories of his family under the guise of the heroes of mythology garlanded by troops and bevies of cupids, "una copiosa quantita di Amorini." But the gods and demigods banquet all alone on the ceiling of the great hall where they once looked down upon the revels of the Cardinal's convives—noble or distinguished men all of them in their day, although the one name that comes to us of all who shared Ippolito's lavish hospitality and that sheds most glory upon his proud house is that of a poet, by turns patronised as a dependent, ungratefully neglected, and cruelly wronged.
The visitor is shown with pride the room so whimsically decorated with singing birds, where Tasso wrote his Amyntas, and the Fountain of Nature in the lower garden where the pastoral was presented with musical accompaniment before a distinguished audience.
That Leonora d'Este was among those who listened, and indeed had been her uncle's guest and Tasso's good and evil fate during the months which he spent at Villa d'Este, is the only conclusion possible for the thoughtful reader of the poem; and the idyl composed under such circumstances leads inevitably to the tragedy (enacted at that other villa) of Belriguardo, of which Goethe has given us so truthful and so masterly a transcription.
Cardinal Ippolito, as his portraits make him known to us, has none of the sensuality which stamped the face of his grandfather Pope Alexander Borgia, or the heaviness of jaw expressing the stubborness and brutality of the earlier D'Estes; on the contrary, every line of the slight figure is expressive of refinement, the delicate red-stockinged feet are as shapely as a woman's, the expressive, almost transparent hands might be those of an artist as they finger caressingly his collection of intaglios and luxuriate in the smoothness of jades and ivory carvings. His excessive pallor and thinness would give an expression of asceticism, almost of spirituality to the intellectual face were it not in a measure contradicted by the craft in the close-set, slanting eyes, which with the pointed, fulvous beard suggest a possibility of foxy cunning, and inspire in the beholder an uncomfortable, haunting feeling of distrust even when the Cardinal's manner is most condescending and cajoling.
So, robed in filmy lace over rosy velvet, we may see him in imagination tripping daintily down his monumental staircase, his train islanding his figure as in some ensanguined pool and slipping after him adown the steps like the drip of some trail of blood which strangely leaves no stain upon the white marble.
But his face is wreathed with smiles, for he genuinely loves his two beautiful nieces, Lucrezia, Duchess of Urbino, and the gentle Leonora, who are his guests, and he loves his villa, whose beauties he is pointing out to them.