lbani.

The creator of this paradise, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II., son of
Lucrezia Borgia, was, like his villa, a refined product of the later
Renaissance and must not be confounded with his uncle, Cardinal Ippolito
d'Este I.

This first Cardinal Ippolito was a man of very different fibre, as may
be seen from a single incident. Sent to Rome as his brother's envoy, on
the occasion of Duke Alphonso's marriage, he fell in love with a pretty
cousin of Lucrezia Borgia who accompanied the bride on her wedding
journey to Ferrara.

Unfortunately the coquettish girl praised the beautiful eyes of Giulio
d'Este, the Cardinal's younger brother, whereupon this prince of the
Church hired assassins who waylaid his brother and tore out his
offending eyes.

The Duke banished Ippolito temporarily, but Giulio brooded over the
injury and conspired to depose Alphonso and place another brother, Don
Ferrante, on the throne. For this act both Ferrante and Giulio were
condemned to be imprisoned for life. Ferrante died in confinement but
Giulio, after fifty-three years spent in a dungeon of the castle, was
finally released.

It might have been expected that the blending of d'Este brutality with
the unscrupulous Borgia craft would have given as a result only a more
refined cruelty; but if this was the case Cardinal Ippolito II.
completely deceived his contemporaries and has left the reputation
(through the pen of his panegyrist Mureto) of the utmost affable
condescension and magnificent patronage of men of genius. He was himself
a dilettante; and it was his ambition to pose as the most cultured and
brilliant of the great cardinals of his day. Ippolito I. had been a boon
companion of Leo X. in his hunting parties at the Villa La
Magliana, but it was not as a "_cacciator signorile_" or "sporting
gentleman" that Ippolito II. wished to eclipse the then illustrious
representative of the house of Medici, Cardinal Ferdinando, who was
attempting to rival him in his magnificent villa on the Pincian hill.

[Illustration: Villa d'Este in 1740

From an etching by Piranesi]

It does not seem to have occurred to Mureto that both of these men were
looking forward to the papacy, and desired to emulate in their own
pontificates that of Leo X. Each piece of sculpture acquired for their
villas, every literary man attached to their service was a step toward
that end. Ippolito II. was as keen a hunter of genius as his uncle had
been of deer or boar; and h