“Madonna Julia has grown fatter, having developed into a very beautiful woman. While I was there she unbound her hair and had it dressed. Once loose it fell to her feet; I have never seen anything to compare with it. Truly she has the most beautiful hair imaginable. She wore a thin lawn head-dress, and over it the lightest of nets interwoven with gold threads, shining like the sun.... Her dress was made after the style of the Neapolitans, and trimmed with fur. So was Madonna Lucrezia’s, who after a while went and changed hers, coming back in a gown made of purple velvet.”
VIRGIN AND CHILD
BY PINTORRICCHIO, IN THE HALL OF ARTS AT THE VATICAN
The reference to Lucrezia is singularly meaningless, but the letter itself is interesting. The child of fourteen and the deliberate wanton were evidently, at least, in constant companionship. “Wanton” is a strong expression, but Julia Farnese belonged to the type for whom no other word is equally applicable. She was young, fresh, beautiful, and Pope Alexander was an old corrupt man of sixty. But she became his mistress with the same tranquil publicity with which a woman might become the consort of a reigning sovereign. The fact of her soiled youth and abandoned domestic decencies weighed no more upon imagination, than the casual discarding of an uncared-for garment.
Pintorricchio, in his series of frescoes at the Vatican, is said to have painted her as well as Alexander and Lucrezia. There is, above the door of the Hall of Arts, a madonna and child, the madonna of which is supposed to have been Julia. If so—and it looks essentially like a portrait—she was very interesting as well as exquisite. There is character and a sort of intelligent carelessness about the face—the kind of carelessness that suggests an intuitive consciousness of the insignificance of most minor occurrences. The error made by Julia was in including ethics among the non-important contingencies.
As regards the question whether she and Lucrezia were really painted by Pintorricchio, there seems little doubt that, since the portrait of Alexander is incontestable, those of the two girls would have been included somewhere in the series of frescoes. Alexander must so certainly have desired them painted, and both would have been about the ages they look in the frescoes at the time Pintorricchio was at work upon the private apartments of the Pope. As a matter of fact, Pintorricchio laboured quietly for years in the rooms through which Lucrezia was constantly passing, and he must have become so much part of unchanging daily impressions, that one imagines all her after memories of life in Rome held as a sort of background the consciousness of the wonderful pictures in which the painter expressed, with perhaps more completeness than anywhere else, his special sense of loveliness.
Lucrezia must have known Pintorricchio from the time when she was little more than a child until her third marriage, though it is probable that she was at this period too engrossed and light-headed to take much notice of the wistful-looking man making beauty upon every side of her. Certainly the complicated nature of her own domestic drama was in itself sufficient to absorb anybody. Not long after her marriage Il Moro had drawn France into the Neapolitan adventure. Alexander VI. was vehemently opposed to this invasion, and was, besides, close friends with the King of Naples. Instantly the situation became difficult for Lucrezia’s husband; the policy of his house and that of his father-in-law had grown brusquely antagonistic.
Giovanni himself was acutely alive to the awkwardness of his own position. In 1494 he wrote to Ludovico that he had been asked by the Pope what he had to say to the situation, and had answered, “Holy Father, everybody in Rome believes that you are in agreement with the King of Naples, who is the enemy of Milan. If it is so, I am in a very difficult position, for I am in the pay of your Holiness and of the last-named state. If things are to follow this course, I do not see how I can serve the one without abandoning the other, though I desire to detach myself from neither.” He concluded the letter by a statement very unflattering to Lucrezia. “If I had known, monseignor,” wrote the distracted Sforza, “that I should find myself in my present position, I would sooner have eaten the straw of my bed than have made this marriage.”
As a young girl, Lucrezia obviously arrested nobody’s notice. This alone suggests that she was not wicked: wickedness always at least produces attention. To her first husband, when he wrote the above letter, she could have held no kind of significance. Shortly after sending it, however, Giovanni left Rome for his own town, Pesaro, taking the girl he so much regretted marrying with him. He was not yet openly on bad terms with the Vatican: in addition to his own wife, he had been given charge of quite a collection of the Pope’s ladies. Julia Farnese, Madonna Adrienne, and Madonna Vanozza were all included, an outbreak of the plague in Rome having terrified Alexander as to the safety of the two younger women. Giovanni, probably, would have preferred Lucrezia to have been less accompanied. Involved always in this crowd of feminine connections, she must, as a young girl, have worn almost a mechanical air of manipulation—have seemed little better than a mouthpiece for the Vatican opinions. While they were at Pesaro, however, husband and wife went through the momentarily uniting experience of falling equally under the Pope’s displeasure. They had, it seems, permitted Madonna Julia and Madonna Adrienne to leave them. Julia’s brother was seriously ill, and the two women had gone to nurse him. Upon this matter, Alexander, who could be very petulant when thwarted, wrote himself, and not at dictation, to Lucrezia. He wrote that he was much surprised at not having heard more often from them, and in a tense and irritated sentence ordered the girl to be more punctilious for the future. But this was not the real grievance, and he passed instantly to the departure of Julia and her mother. Lucrezia and Giovanni were both held to have behaved equally inexcusably in letting them go without permission from Alexander. He wrote as if they had been two disobedient children, whose deliberate frowardness had resulted, as they must have known perfectly from the beginning, in great annoyance to him personally. At the end of exasperated remonstrance, they were warned that for the future they would never again be trusted. A letter like this, including both in mutual disgrace, might easily have fugitively roused a slight bond of friendliness between so young a couple. The general opinion is, notwithstanding, that they were never sympathetic. At Pesaro, besides, though Lucrezia remained there a year, they were very seldom together. Giovanni held the position of officer in the Pope’s army, and it was a year of sharp anxiety for Alexander. It required Charles VIII.’s feeble return journey to France before the papal ground felt once more solid under the pontiff’s feet.