But the most famous of all the artists then in Rome was Michael Angelo. He appeared there first in 1498, an ambitious young man of three and twenty. At that time the city of Rome was an enchanting environment for an artistic nature. The boundless immorality of her great past, speaking so eloquently from innumerable monuments of the pagan and Christian worlds; her majesty and holy calm; the sudden breaking loose of furious passions—all this is beyond the imaginative power of modern men, just as is the wickedly secular nature of the papacy and the spirit of the Renaissance which swept over these ruins. We are unable to comprehend in their entirety the soul-activities of this great race, which was both creative and destructive. For to the same feeling which impelled men to commit great crimes do we owe the great works of art of the Renaissance. In those days evil, as well as good, was in the grand style. Alexander VI displayed himself to the world, for whose opinion he had supreme contempt, as shamelessly and fearlessly as did Nero.
The Renaissance, owing to the violent contrasts which it presents, now naïvely and now in full consciousness of their incongruity, and also on account of the fiendish traits by which it is characterized, will always constitute one of the greatest psychologic problems in the history of civilization.
All virtues, all crimes, all forces were set in motion by a feverish yearning for immaterial pleasures, beauty, power, and immortality. The Renaissance has been called an intellectual bacchanalia, and when we examine the features of the bacchantes they become distorted like those of the suitors in Homer, who anticipated their fall; for this society, this Church, these cities and states—in fine, this culture in its entirety—toppled over into the abyss which was yawning for it. The reflection that men like Copernicus, Michael Angelo, and Bramante, Alexander VI and Cæsar Borgia could live in Rome at one and the same time is well nigh overpowering.
Did Lucretia ever see the youthful artist, subsequently the friend of the noble lady, Vittoria Colonna, whose portrait he painted? We know not; but there is no reason to doubt that she did. The curiosity of the artist and of the man would have induced Michael Angelo to endeavor to gain a glimpse of the most charming woman in Rome. Although only a beginner, he was already recognized as an artist of great talent. As he had just been taken up by Gallo the Roman and Cardinal La Grolaye, it is altogether probable that he would have been the subject also of Lucretia's curiosity.
Affected by the recent tragedies in the house of Borgia—for example, the murder of the Duke of Gandia—Michael Angelo was engaged upon the great work which was the first to attract the attention of the city, the Pietà, which Cardinal La Grolaye had commissioned him to paint. This work he completed in 1499, about the time the great Bramante came to Rome. The group should be studied with the epoch of the Borgias for background; the Pietà rises supreme in ethical significance, and in the moral darkness about her she seems a pure sacrificial fire lighted by a great and earnest spirit in the dishonored realm of the Church. Lucretia stood before the Pietà, and the masterpiece must have affected this unhappy daughter of a sinful pope more powerfully than the words of her confessor or than the admonitions of the abbesses of S. Sisto.
CHAPTER XV
MISFORTUNES OF CATARINA SFORZA
The jubilee year 1500 was a fortunate one for Cæsar, but an unhappy one for Lucretia. She began it January 1st with a formal passage to the Lateran, whither she went to make the prescribed pilgrimage to the Roman churches. She rode upon a richly caparisoned jennet, her escort consisting of two hundred mounted nobles, men and women. On her left was her consort, Don Alfonso; on her right one of the ladies of her court; and behind them came the captain of the papal guard, Rodrigo Borgia. While she and her retinue were crossing over the Bridge of S. Angelo, her father stood in a loggia of the castle, feasting his eyes upon his beloved daughter.
The new year brought Alexander only good news—if we except that of the death of the Cardinal-legate Giovanni Borgia, Bishop of Melfi and Archbishop of Capua, who was known as the "younger," to distinguish him from another cardinal of the same name. He died in Urbino, January 8, 1500, of a fever, according to a statement made by Elisabetta, consort of Guidobaldo, to her brother Gonzaga, in a letter written from Fossombrone on the same day.[74]