subsequently became famous as a pulpit orator and was made
a cardinal. The last maintained his connection with Lucretia while she
was Duchess of Ferrara. He exercised a deep influence upon the religious
turn which her nature took during this the second period of her life.

The youthful Duchess of Biselli certainly enjoyed the lively society of
the cultured and gallant ecclesiastics about her--Cardinals Medici,
Riario, Orsini, Cesarini, and Farnese--not to mention the Borgias and
the Spanish prelates. We may look for her, too, at the banquets in the
palaces of Rome's great families, the Massimi and Orsini, the Santa
Croce, Altieri, and Valle, and in the homes of the wealthy bankers
Altoviti, Spanocchi, and Mariano Chigi, whose sons Lorenzo and
Agostino--the latter eventually became famous--enjoyed the confidence of
the Borgias.

Lucretia was able in Rome to gratify a taste for the fine arts.
Alexander found employment for the great artists of the day in the
Vatican, where Perugino executed some paintings for him, and where,
under the picture of the holy Virgin, Pinturicchio, who was his court
artist, painted the portrait of the adulteress, Giulia Farnese. He also
painted portraits of several members of the Borgia family in the castle
of S. Angelo.

"In the castle of S. Angelo," says Vasari, "he painted many of the rooms
_a grotesche_; but in the tower below, in the garden, he depicted scenes
from the life of Alexander VI. There he painted the Catholic Queen
Isabella; Niccolo Orsini, Count of Pitigliano; Giangiacomo Trivulzio;
and many other kinsmen and friends of the Pope, and especially Caesar
Borgia and his brother and sisters, as well as numerous great men of the
age." Lorenz Behaim copied the epigrams which were placed under six of
these paintings in the "castle of S. Angelo, below in the papal
gardens." All represented scenes from the critical period of the
invasion of Italy by Charles VIII, and they were painted in such a way
as to make Alexander appear as having been victorious. One showed the
king prostrating himself at the Pope's feet in this same garden of the
castle of S. Angelo; another represented Charles declaring his loyalty
before the consistory; another, Philip of Sens and Guillaume of S. Malo
receiving the cardinal's hat; another, the mass in S. Peter's at which
Charles VIII assisted; the subject of another was the passage to S.
Paul's, with the king holding the Pope's stirrup; and, lastly, a scene