Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale

menagerie of exotic hunting animals, fishing for sturgeon in the lagoons at the mouth of the Po, and commissioning works of art.

      His special passion and expertise lay in weapons of war, which he collected, designed and helped to construct. His personal device was a smouldering grenade, and he had his court painter Dosso Dossi paint him on a battlefield surrounded by heavy artillery. He nicknamed one of his favourite cannon Il Diavolo, the Devil. It may be the weapon with which he posed, his hand resting on its muzzle as though it were a pet dog, for Titian’s first portrait of a foreign ruler.2 Alfonso pioneered some of the new powerful models of guns and cannon that changed the nature of warfare in the Renaissance. The Battle of Ravenna fought on Easter Day 1512, in which he served on the French side as a soldier and technical adviser against a Spanish and papal army, was the most alarming demonstration yet seen of the killing power of gunpowder. The power and deployment of his artillery routed the enemy forces, but killed nearly as many French, with the unintended result that the French were for a time driven out of Italy.

      Alfonso was twenty-nine in 1505 when he inherited the Duchy of Ferrara from his father Ercole. For all his eccentric ways he proved to be a reforming ruler of a government that had become corrupt, as well as a brave and resourceful soldier and a shrewd political strategist with an innate sense of timing that told him when it would be opportune to switch into or out of alliances with the larger powers that continually threatened the independence of his duchy. The city of Ferrara had been a self-governing papal fief for centuries before it fell under the control of the Este lords early in the thirteenth century. By the time of Alfonso’s rule the state comprised a vast hinterland, stretching 160 kilometres from the mineral-rich Apennines, where gold and silver were mined, through the productive farmlands of the Po Valley and on down to the Adriatic coast, the Po delta and the valuable salt marshes of Comacchio. It embraced the problematic towns of Reggio and Modena, which were historically imperial possessions. For most of Alfonso’s reign Reggio and Modena were used as political currency in the quarrels between successive popes and emperors.

      Five years after the death in childbirth of his first wife, Anna Sforza, daughter of the Duke of Milan, Alfonso bowed to the political necessity of marrying Pope Alexander VI’s adored twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, in the interests of warding off a threat by the pope to install his son Cesare as ruler of Ferrara. On the eve of their marriage in 1502 Lucrezia’s dowry of 100,000 ducats in cash plus 75,000 in jewels and other valuables was carried into the city on seventy-two mules covered with the Borgia colours of black and yellow. Historians differ about how well founded Lucrezia’s infamous reputation was – she was supposed to have murdered one or both of her previous husbands and to have had incestuous relations with her father and her brother Cesare. Whatever the truth of the dark rumours, as Duchess of Ferrara she contributed gaiety, fun and style to the court, surrounding herself with artists, musicians and writers – not least Pietro Bembo, who was one of her lovers, whether platonic or not we do not know. Her kindness and generosity won the hearts of the people and eventually, it seems, of her husband.

      In 1508 Alfonso joined the League of Cambrai on a promise from Pope Julius II to rid the city of occupying Venetian troops and to restore Rovigo and the Polesine, which had been surrendered to Venice in 1484. In the early stages of the war he fought in person with the French against Venice at the Battle of Agnadello. His brother, Ippolito d’Este, who had been made a cardinal at the age of fourteen and was, like several of Julius’ cardinals, a soldier and military strategist as well as a prince of the Church, assisted the emperor Maximilian with the initially successful siege of Padua. In December 1509 the two brothers commanded a spectacularly successful naval battle at Poleselle on the Po near Rovigo in which a Venetian fleet was routed and all but destroyed. Celebrated by the poet Ludovico Ariosto, who was in the service of Ippolito at the time, it was a turning point in the Cambrai war. But when, less than two years after the resounding Venetian defeat at Agnadello, Venice accepted Julius II’s invitation to join a Holy League against France, which the pope now perceived as the greater threat to the stability of Italy, Alfonso refused to join Julius and stuck by his French alliance.

      Julius, the ‘papa terribile’, was easily enraged by opposition. Machiavelli described him in The Prince as ‘impetuous in everything’, a man who ‘found the time and circumstances so favourable to his way of proceeding that he always met with success’. Vasari said of Raphael’s wonderful portrait of him painted when he was an old man that it made all who saw it tremble. This was the pope who had fathered three daughters while a cardinal, and who, dressed in silver papal armour, had led his troops in mostly successful conquests of cities which resisted his authority. Not a man to cross, he excommunicated Alfonso, imposed an interdict on Ferrara and, in February 1511 – the coldest winter in living memory – ordered two of his cardinal commanders to lay siege to the city. ‘I want Ferrara,’ he declared to the assembled troops. ‘I would rather die like a dog than ever give it up … And if by any chance I am beaten, then I will raise another army and so wear out [the French] that I’ll chase them out of Italy.’3 The interdict hurt, but the siege failed. Alfonso outmanoeuvred the papal troops, inflicted heavy losses on them while the lives of his own men were largely spared, and seized the enemy banners and guns. Julius retreated. Ferrara, in any case, was so well fortified in 1511 that a French commander described it as the greatest fortress in Christianity.4 Alfonso had further grounds for satisfaction in May when an occupying papal army was driven out of Bologna by French troops with the support of the people. In December the citizens of Bologna celebrated by toppling Michelangelo’s enormous bronze statue of Pope Julius from its pedestal on the façade of the church of San Petronio. Some of the metal was taken to Ferrara, where, so the story went, Alfonso kept the head for his collection and had the rest melted down and reforged as a cannon, which he named La Giulia.

      Nevertheless, the disastrous Pyrrhic victory on Easter Day 1512 at Ravenna, in which Alfonso played such a crucial role, put him in an exposed position and left him in economic difficulties. With his only allies, the French, temporarily driven out of Italy it would not be long before the papal armies attacked. The cost of refortifying Ferrara had to be met by selling off some of the ducal treasures, including some of Lucrezia Borgia’s jewels. When the table silver went too, the court was reduced to dining on ceramic plates and vessels painted by the ducal hand. By June Alfonso recognized the need to make his peace with the pope. Julius provided safe conduct as he travelled to Rome, accompanied by Ludovico Ariosto, to attempt reconciliation with the irate pope. While in the Holy City he took time off to inspect the Sistine Chapel ceiling, climbing the scaffolding with Michelangelo, whom he begged, unsuccessfully, to paint something for him. But he refused to listen to the pope’s demands, and the pope refused to be pacified. Alfonso and Ariosto were obliged to flee. Fearing for their lives and living rough, disguised sometimes as priests, sometimes as peasants, they made their way home through Umbria and Tuscany. Julius died in 1513, shortly after Alfonso had returned to Ferrara. But any hopes that the apparently more peaceable Medici pope Leo X would prove less of a threat to Ferrara were soon dashed. Leo, as it turned out, was as obsessed with regaining Ferrara for the papacy as his more openly bellicose predecessor.

      While Ferrara remained on a war footing, the warrior duke found time to indulge his keen appetite for acquiring and commissioning works of art. It was a passion he shared with his elder sister Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua and one of the most astute and formidable Renaissance politicians and patrons of art and learning. Their ancestors had collected antiquities and Flemish paintings and nurtured a school of Ferrarese painting that included Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti. Immediately after the death of his father, Alfonso began to rearrange and decorate the rooms he had chosen to be his private quarters in the long elevated building known as the Via Coperta, which links the castle to the ducal palace.5 A year or two later he brought to Ferrara the sculptor Antonio Lombardo,6 who spent two or three years carving beautiful relief sculptures for rooms described in later inventories as camerini d’alabastro, little alabaster chambers. One of them, a study next to the duke’s bedroom that was entirely lined with Antonio’s marble carvings, was unique in Italy.7