The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (4 page)

Bernardino de Cupis clearly shared a background with the husbands chosen for Vannozza Catanei. He differed from them in that he was involved in several aspects of his stepdaughter’s life, even though it was fully recognized that Cardinal Giuliano was her father. There can be no doubt that Bernardino’s life and activities did in some way shape Felice’s own outlook and ways of doing things. He was unflinchingly loyal to the Rovere. For Bernardino, taking on a discarded Rovere mistress and her illegitimate child further sealed the bond with the family he served. At the turn of the sixteenth century he commissioned the Sienese artist Baldassare Peruzzi to paint a fresco in the apse of the church of San Onofrio up on the Janiculum Hill.
¹
San Onofrio was some distance from the de Cupis home in the heart of Rome. Its attraction for Bernardino was perhaps that it belonged to the Hieronymite monastic order, which derived its name from St Jerome, as did his employer, Girolamo della Rovere.

For San Onofrio, Bernardino chose images of the Madonna and Child, distinctly similar to those the more established painter Pinturicchio had depicted in
1483
at Girolamo’s burial chapel at the Rovere church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Bernardino chose as decorative device the acorn, the Rovere emblem, a reference to the meaning of the family name, ‘oak’, in the borders of his chapel’s painting. Bernardino himself is depicted as kneeling donor, every inch the prosperous bureaucrat, whose modern equivalent would be the company man.

The extent of Bernardino’s duties as a
maestro di casa
can be gleaned from a handbook, first published in
1598
, by Cesare Evitascandalo, entitled in English
The Maestro di Casa; which contains exactly how much and in which the Maestro di Casa must be instructed
. The manual contains over
380
‘notable points’, covering the nature of the
maestro di casa
’s authority over the rest of a cardinal’s servants, and how to deal with each one individually, including, among other issues, how to handle any fraud committed by servants, and what to do ‘when the cook is drunk’. He needed to know the rituals of the religious calendar and which vestments his master should wear on what days. The
maestro di casa
was responsible for the acquisition of every type of provision, barley for the horses, wax candles, sugar and wines. He needed to cultivate ‘someone at court who could advise him of the occurrence of any ill deeds’. In addition, he needed to be both his master’s ‘shield’ and ‘cover his own persona with that of his master’s’.
²

Bernardino came originally from the Umbrian hill town of Montefalco, the heart of St Francis country, and he was resident in Rome by
1462
. He had clearly received a good education, more than sufficient to succeed as a high-level bureaucrat, arguably one of the best positions in Renaissance Rome. The bureaucrats were the men who ran Rome; they had all the connections they needed to receive tips, advice and bribes that allowed them a more than comfortable existence. On the other hand, they were not so powerful that they had to be constantly on guard for rivals seeking to topple them. Bernardino performed his duties well. Girolamo Basso della Rovere had much in common with his Riario cousins, showing little interest in ecclesiastical politics but having a great love of magnificence and display. While Girolamo enjoyed the sumptuous life of a cardinal in Rome, Bernardino often assumed his master’s role. Girolamo received income as Bishop of the towns of Macerata and Rieti in the eastern province of the Marche. Like many Italian bishops of his day, he was not only a pluralist but he was continuously absent, leaving Bernardino to travel to the Marche to act on his behalf. Bernardino clearly did his job there to Rieti’s satisfaction. In
1486
, the community promised him that on the birth of his first male child they would present him with ‘the sum of
25
ducats from which to buy a gift for his wife’.
³
In
1499
, it was to Bernardino, not Girolamo, that the community of Macerata wrote to ask about obtaining a loan of
200
ducats.

Bernardino was clearly successful in donning the persona of his cardinal as if it were his own and he was personally well rewarded for his efforts on behalf of the della Rovere family. He could not only afford a chapel, whose frescos number among the jewels of early sixteenth-century Roman painting, but he also built a magnificent family home. If he did not live as lavishly as most cardinals, he certainly exceeded the standard of living of most ecclesiastical servants. It is likely that, in addition to his salary from Girolamo della Rovere, he received remuneration from Felice’s natural father, who would also have provided Lucrezia with a dowry when Bernardino married her.

Lucrezia’s dowry contributed to the cost of the house Bernardino built and in which Felice spent her earliest years. The large palace that was once Palazzo de Cupis is to be found on what is now the Piazza Navona, the long rectangular square adorned with Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers. The piazza’s shape derives from its original function in the ancient world, as the stadium of Domitian, built in
ad 92
, where foot races were held and whose ruins lie beneath the present-day square. In Bernardino’s time, the square was located in relation to the major church in the piazza, Sant’ Agnese in Agone, and was known as the ‘Platea [square] in Agone’ – from which the word ‘Navona’ derives – or the Campus Agonis. Bernardino chose Piazza Navona for his home partly for its proximity to his employer’s palace. Girolamo lived on the Via Recta, which extended out from the piazza, near to the church of San Agostino. But in other ways this piazza was a shrewd choice of location for a bureaucrat who wished to be at the centre of everything. Over the course of the fifteenth century Piazza Navona had gradually changed from an abandoned ancient sports arena into a highly prestigious Roman address.
⁴

Given that he was a servant, Bernardino built a palace for himself of remarkable splendour flanked by the Via dell Anima, across from the church of Sant’ Agnese in Agone. He took advantage of a bull passed by Sixtus IV,
Et si de cunctarum civitatum
(‘for the benefit of the city’), designed to promote regeneration and renewal in the city of Rome. The bull authorized the enforced selling of properties whose owners could not afford restoration and repair. Bernardino bought up a series of small houses and shops along one side of the Piazza Navona. He gutted them and concealed them behind a monolithic façade, in much the same way that the great architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti did for the Rucellai family at their famous palace in Florence. The eventual magnificence of the residence Bernardino created was such that the writer Francesco Albertini called attention to it in
De Mirabilibus
, his
1510
guide to Rome’s architectural marvels, ancient and modern. He described it as the ‘house of Bernadino di Montefalco in the square of Agonis, which has a most beautiful well’.
⁵
In Rome, easy access to fresh water was a great luxury. There was only one major public fountain, the Trevi. Most citizens depended on the Tiber river for their water, for both personal and industrial needs, from which its level of purity may be imagined.

Bernardino’s house was the home in which Felice della Rovere spent the first part of her life. Michelangelo, Felice’s senior by no more than a few years, and who will play his own part in her story, claimed he was destined to become a sculptor. He believed it because he had ingested dust with the breast milk of his wet nurse, the wife of a stonemason in the little village of Settignano, up in the hills above Florence.
⁶
In a similar fashion, the young Felice, living at the Palazzo de Cupis, absorbed the smells and sounds of Rome, right at the very heart of the city. Getting to know her city is another way that we can catch a glimpse of the young Felice, and understand the woman she would become.

chapter 5

Felice’s Rome

Visitors to Rome today often comment on the city’s multi-layered quality, the way the strata of different civilizations and periods exist side by side, quite different from anywhere else in the world. There is still an ancient Rome, visible in structures as vast as the Colosseum or the Pantheon, or as small as the antique columns embedded in doorways of less ancient buildings. The Rome of the era following the legalization of Christianity can be seen in such ninth-century churches as SS Cosmas and Damian or Santa Pudenziana with their vivid mosaics depicting the life of Christ and his saints. Medieval Rome is still apparent in the narrow streets, still called
vicoli
, tall houses and surviving towers, such as the thirteenth-century Torre di Conti, around which Rome’s English community lived. Renaissance Rome is present in the palaces and churches built in the re-appropriated classical language of ancient Rome, using travertine stone, once brightly gleaming and now darkened after a century or more of petrol emissions.

This is the Rome that Felice knew over the course of her life. The grandiose churches and palaces of the seventeenth century, the enormously wide city streets blasted through by Mussolini, so punishing in the summer heat, are part of a future that would have surprised, impressed and in some instances appalled her. But what she did experience was a Rome that grew and evolved and in many ways re-evolved in a way that it had not since it had been the capital of the ancient world. The Rome Felice was born into was one vastly different from the city of a century before her birth, and the Rome she died in was different again. Rome in the late fifteenth century changed dramatically in a way that the other great Italian cities, such as Florence and Venice, did not. Neither of those cities had had to transform itself from a war zone.
¹

Over the centuries, Rome has seen its fair share of invaders. The fifth-century Goths and Visigoths had torn apart much of what was left of the great ancient city, whose decline was marked by the Emperor Constantine moving the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople in
ad 330
. Most critically, the Goths had destroyed Rome’s hydraulic system, leaving only the underground aqueduct Acqua Vergine untouched. The resultant lack of water in many parts of the city caused a systematic population shift closer to the banks of the river Tiber, known as the
abitato
, ‘the inhabited’. The large abandoned areas of the city were called the
disabitato
, ‘the depopulated’.

Rome did, however, remain the capital of the Christian world. The pope’s residence was the Lateran Palace, adjacent to the church of San Giovanni in Laterano, founded in the fourth century on the edge of the city. It is San Giovanni that is still the cathedral, the bishop’s seat of Rome, and not the church of St Peter. Any new pope must still make a journey, a
possesso
, to the Lateran from St Peter’s before he can take possession of the papal tiara, his ‘tiered’ triple crown, the symbol of his power.
²

But by
1309
even the papacy, represented in some form in Rome since the time of St Peter, was forced to leave the city; it was not to return for more than a century. This time, the cause was not the threat of invasion but the city’s internal conflicts. A city so fractured by violence over the course of centuries had created a perpetual siege mentality. The most powerful Roman families did not live in the splendid palaces with ornate façades commonly associated with Renaissance Rome. Instead, they lived in barrack-like buildings, described as
insediamenti
. These palaces were like fortified cities within a city. Individual homes were built on the sloping terrain upon a mount, surrounded by thick walls. Two huge examples still stand in the city: Monte Giordano, property of the Orsini family, and the eponymous Monte dei Cenci. By the twelfth century, different families controlled different parts of the city: the Colonna ruled the Quirinal and Esquiline hills; the Frangipani family ruled the Palatine and the area around the Colosseum, and the Savelli ruled the Aventine hill and the stretch of the river Tiber at its foot. Over in Trastevere, there was an alliance of sorts between the families of the Pierleone, the Papareschi, the Tebaldi and the Normanni, Felice’s mother’s family. The Orsini family controlled the area around the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, one of the few bridges across the Tiber, as well as the heart of the
abitato
.

The intense rivalry between these families cannot be overstated. They make the relationship between Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets seem positively cordial. It was turf war, feirce and bloody. The popes and the governing body of Rome, the senate, supported and endorsed different families. Those that did not could meet with serious consequences. The Cenci family kidnapped Pope Gregory VII, a long-standing enemy, on Christmas Eve
1075
, and in
1145
Pope Lucius II was killed as a result of his opposition to a Roman government led by Giordano Pierleone.