Isabella De' Medici: The glorious life and tragic end of a renassance princess
By Caroline P Murphy
Faber
KEY POINTS:
The spendthrift hedonism, venality and corporate skulduggery of our own times are all on view in this biography of Isabella de' Medici, a stubbornly independent princess whose private vices bestowed public benefits on 16th-century Florence.
Like the party girls who became royal consorts in Britain in the 1980s, Isabella lived for pleasure. But instead of frittering away her funds on clothes, gym subscriptions and colonic irrigations, she acted as a patron and muse for poets and painters, and even convened seminars at which grammarians debated the niceties of the Tuscan dialect.
Like Princess Diana or Fergie, Isabella also laundered her image by showily playing Lady Bountiful. To persuade the citizenry that she was more than an adulterous floozy, she perambulated through Florence at night rattling a collecting box for charity. The nocturnal sortie was as shrewd a "public-relations exercise", in Murphy's telling phrase, as Diana's visits to Aids hospices or her tiptoeing forays into African minefields.
But Isabella depended on the compliance or complacency of men and her tragedy, in Murphy's judgment, is that "ultimately she was punished for being female". Her father, Duke Cosimo, subsidised her indulgences and protected her; her brutish husband Paolo Orsini stayed in Rome and allowed Isabella to amuse herself with lovers in her Tuscan hunting lodges. The conclusion, however, corresponds closely to Mohamed al-Fayed's lurid fantasy about the Windsor vendetta in the Pont d'Alma tunnel.
The cuckolded Paolo finally returned and removed his wife to a remote villa, where she suffered an accident. The story "spun" by his apologists was that she had "hit her head on the basin in which she was washing her hair", an apt comeuppance, perhaps, for a vainglorious beauty.
The truth, probably, is that he strangled her or sat on top of her and relied on his corpulent bulk to smother her. He completed his vengeance by displaying her blackened, bloated, fly-blown body in an open coffin, which licenses Murphy to imagine that Isabella's pampered flesh, given a cool and almost marmoreal pallor in Bronzino's portraits, now emitted "the sickly sweet odour of cheese left to ripen in hell".
The parallels between then and now are enticing and they extend to the marginal presence of a crocodile stepmother called, with a slight variation in spelling, Cammilla: she was Cosimo's mistress, who became, as Murphy says, his "trophy wife", and found herself summarily banished to a nunnery when her husband died.
Murphy's occasionally slangy diction makes the relevance of her story clear enough. She talks about Paolo's "sleazy lifestyle" and enumerates the prize stallions in his stable as if they were the garaged sports cars of an overpaid footballer; she comments on a plot to "take out" Isabella's lover and assesses the site cleared by Cosimo to build the Uffizi as "a prime piece of real estate".
She even mentions Savonarola's bonfire of the vanities - the incineration of irreligious books and other aids to profanity - which Tom Wolfe used as a symbol for the downfall of corrupt, greedy Manhattan in his novel about the glutted 1980s.
Isabella's life and death are easy to sensationalise. Webster's The White Devil examines an affair between Paolo and one of his courtesans, with Isabella implausibly reduced to pious simpering in the background, while Middleton in Women Beware Women deals with cat fights in his harem of harlots. But Murphy lacks the enthusiasm for refined Machiavellian treachery that the courtly environment should excite in a biographer; she is an art historian by trade, most comfortable when examining Isabella's cultural legacy - the madrigals fulsomely dedicated to her by the composers she employed, the carnival festivities she organised, or the impudent altarpiece she commissioned from the painter Butteri in which the members of her family (including her father and her favourite brother, with both of whom she was suspected of having incestuous relationships) wickedly impersonate saints. Murphy is dismayingly reticent on the subject of Isabella's supposed spectral return at the wedding of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, which took place in the castle at Bracciano, Paolo's titular fiefdom.
Cruise rented the premises for €1.5 million ($2.98 million) and freighted in Posh, Becks, J-Lo, Brangelina and a few hundred other intimate friends; according to tabloid reports, these vulgar arrivistes offended Isabella, who rose from the dead and stalked the corridors as the Cruises were consummating.
If only it were true! The past would once more have offered a preview of the present.
What is Hollywood, after all, but a latter-day Renaissance court peopled by more or less sacred monsters, embodiments of rapacious, shameless id who have the cheek to sanctify or deify themselves?
- OBSERVER
