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The crackdown failed. Life was literally too short to skimp on pleasure and display. Untreatable diseases made 50 years an advanced age. The slow plague of syphilis is one of the smoldering subtexts of Simon's brimming narrative. Prostitutes gave the contagion to their customers, who passed it on to their wives. If women were not rendered barren by the bacterium, there were always the risks of childbirth and puerperal fever. Women were meant to provide heirs and cement profitable agreements through wedlock.
In her autobiography, Simon recalls her father's efforts to thwart her own intellectual curiosity. Here she writes with scarcely disguised bitterness of one promising Gonzaga daughter: "Her impressive knowledge of Virgil, every line, didn't matter, nor did her command of Greek, and so what if she could explain the propositions of Euclid? Her vocation was marriage."
Renaissance women like the connoisseur Isabella d'Este-Gonzaga, the poet Vittoria Colonna, the medical experimenter Caterina Sforza and Renee of France, who married into the court of Ferrara and founded a distinguished academy there, appear to have been the equal of their male counterparts in everything but the arts of war. But, as the determined faces in Simon's glittering tapestry suggest, many important victories were won in alcoves and bedrooms.