Rossetti lucrezia borgia biography
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Lucrezia married him when she was just thirteen, for the Pope’s political gain.
The papal court soon lost interest in the Sforzas, so the Pope ordered her husband’s execution. She fell seriously ill after the birth of her tenth child in June 1519, and died on 24th of that month.
The closest that we have to a portrait of Lucrezia is this panel attributed to Dosso Dossi, and claimed to show Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara from some time between 1519-30.
After her father became Pope, that was changed again to a second-rank count in the House of Sforza. Known as an Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora (c 1520), it does at least show a blonde, but the Duchess of Ferrara exposing her left breast?
Had those been the only paintings possibly of Lucrezia Borgia, she would hardly have made her mark in art.
Shown in cameo, in a reflection in the upper left, are Lucrezia’s father, the Pope, helping her husband to walk in order to hasten the effects of the poison and bring about his death. In Lucrezia Borgia (1860–61), he shows Lucrezia washing her hands in a small sink after she has poisoned her husband Alfonso d’Aragon in 1500.
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The second of Veneto’s paintings claimed to show Lucrezia is more scandalous, and was probably completed shortly after her death.
Provenance
Current Location: Tate Gallery
Catalog Number: 3063
Archival History: B.G. Windus; Christie's, Feb. 15, 1868 (lot 201), £73. Rossetti revised her face at a later date.
Ten years later, in 1871, Rossetti returned to this same scene and composition, and painted Lucrezia Borgia again.
All the figures look disturbingly sinister, particularly the man leaning on her right shoulder.
In 1860, Rossetti returned to her when his interest in her family was rekindled. Their name has become a byword for murder and treachery. The innocence of the children prettily dancing in the foreground is countered, indeed threatened, by the three principal figures watching them: the villainous Pope Alexander VI, his son Cesare, and, most notorious of all, his daughter Lucrezia Borgia.
The three adults are the villainous Pope Alexander VI, his son Cesare Borgia and his daughter Lucrezia Borgia. There are clues to the story in the picture: on a table in the background is a flask, which may contain the poison, and there are two poppies - traditionally emblems of sleep and death - beside it.
E.1159-2012
- Harrison, Colin, Newall, Christopher and Spadoni, Claudio, i Preraffaelliti.
Japan : Brain Trust, 2002
- Harrison, Colin, Newall, Christopher and Spadoni, Claudio,
72-1902
About this object record
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It’s generally thought that, while awaiting the annulment, Lucrezia had an affair resulting in her pregnancy, and the birth of a son, Giovanni Borgia, although two papal bulls were issued contradicting that, and one another.
When she was eighteen, Lucrezia was married a second time, to Alfonso d’Aragon, the Neapolitan half-brother of her brother-in-law.
But Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed an obsession with her, and revived her image on several of his watercolours in the late nineteenth century.
In the first, The Borgias painted in 1851, Rossetti has Lucrezia playing a lute in the midst of her family, two of her children dancing in front.
Production Description
Production Date: 1860-61, 1868
Exhibition History: Hogarth Club, c.
1, 77). However, neither husband nor wife was faithful in the slightest: Lucrezia had a long and thoroughly physical affair with her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, Isabella d’Este’s husband, which he had to terminate when his syphilis became too overt to hide any longer.
Lucrezia also had a more emotional affair with the poet Pietro Bembo, who is now commemorated in the font of that name.
Lucrezia warned him, enabling him to flee, and their marriage was annulled on the basis of non-consummation, sparing his life. Inevitably that remains a matter of dispute, and doesn’t match contemporary descriptions of her having long and thick blonde hair.
It has been proposed that Lucrezia modelled for the title role of Pinturicchio’s wonderful fresco of St Catherine’s Disputation in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican Palace.
She had no aspirations as a patron of the arts, and instead has been portrayed in several paintings.
Her father was Cardinal Rodrigo de Borgia, later to become Pope Alexander VI, and her mother was one of his several mistresses who were kept discreetly outside the city of Rome. It is likely they are plotting the eventual murder of the dancing children; coincidentally or not, infanticide also features in the original subject at the court of Richard III.
Rossetti revels in the rich colours and textures of the clothing (he had been to Hampton Court to look at Italian Renaissance portraits), and the crowded, hermetic atmosphere, which is stressed by the small open window on the right.
- Framed height: 52.2cm
- Framed width: 54cm
The Borgias were an ambitious family who were active in church and state affairs in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries.