THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCREZIA BORGIA (343 pp.)—Mario Bellonc!—Harcourt, Brace ($5).
Who was Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things.
Now comes a woman's brief for Lucrezia. Author Maria Bellonci's argument: Lucrezia was no weakling; her tragedy lay in an excess of a virtue that all women used to be taught—womanly acquiescence to her family's menfolks. In her prize-winning (1939) life of Lucrezia, now translated into English, Italian Author Bellonci goes over the evidence with the thoroughness of a housewife at a serious job of spring renovation.
Papal Carpetbagging. Lucrezia's big trouble was her family. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a crafty, sensual and deceptively charming Spaniard, got himself elected Pope in 1492 as Alexander VI. Alexander was an unashamedly worldly pontiff who made no effort to conceal Lucrezia and his seven other bastard children — indeed, thought nothing was too good for them. For eleven years, in one of history's most painstaking carpetbagging expeditions, he virtually turned the papacy and its pos sessions into a family preserve.
Cesare, Lucrezia's brother, was the Pope's right-hand man in these endeavors. With his father's connivance, he poisoned, assassinated and generaled his way, temporarily, to supreme power in central Italy.— Lucrezia, as the young and marriageable member of ,the family, became a handy and well-used device in the family's dynastic ambitions.
At a nubile 13 she was married to Giovanni Sforza, of the powerful Milanese Sforzas. But for her father, this was just the beginning. Four years later he forced Giovanni to an annulment on the pretext (scandalously false) that the marriage had never been consummated. Soon Lucrezia was sent higher up the political scale by marriage to the bastard son of the powerful King of Naples. This one lasted two years. Then Cesare had the fellow murdered, and husband No. 3 was found for Lucrezia : Alfonso d'Este, son of the even more powerful Duke of Ferrara.
Cesare's Swordplay. Lucrezia grieved over such quick and bloody changes. (Says Biographer Bellonci: "She had al ways been contented with her husbands as long as she was able to keep them.") Still, although she tried desperately to save the life of her second husband, she forgave her brother for this and other crimes.
Why? Explains Author Bellonci: she was a Borgia, too, and the family ties of this fiery Spanish dynasty were, even for those days, remarkably strong. Enemies of the Borgias contended that the family ties extended to incest between Lucrezia and her father the Pope. But the few actual accusations of this crime came from bitterly hostile opponents and with no supporting evidence. Biographer Bellonci doubts their truth.