Viragos on the march

Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her hair from a cabinet in Milan. Lucrezia’s 16-year correspondence with the Venetian poet and future cardinal Pietro Bembo moved Byron almost to tears: ‘The prettiest love letters in the world,’ he declared.

Unusually, Servadio ascribes the birth of the Renaissance to the invention of the printing press in 1456. As a result, books and new ideas were made widely available to women. (Most commentators date the movement’s birth to 1492, when Lucrezia Borgia’s father Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and Columbus discovered America.) Of course the intellectual energy of the Renaissance was not confined to books; quite as much thought went into politics.