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Bandello, long before him, has said something like it; and the same sentiment must, in some shape or other, have frequently occurred to those, who, remembering the fate of other captives in that memorable state-prison, may have had but too much reason to anticipate their own.
The novelist Matteo Bandello, himself a friar of the Dominican convent of S. Maria delle Grazie at Milan, is never tired of singing Cecilia's praises, and of describing the pleasant company who met at the countess's palace in Milan or at her villa near Cremona.
Had Bandello allowed Botticelli to tell the tale, it would have been much more in keeping. Leonardo's days were too full of work to permit of his indulging in the society of roysterers his life was singularly dignified and upright. When about twenty years old Leonardo was a fellow-student with Perugino in the bottega of good old Andrea del Verrocchio.
From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in them.
It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists could reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of men to ridicule. Bandello not only treats this sorcery of a Lombard monk as a miserable, and in its consequences terrible, piece of knavery, but he also describes with unaffected indignation the disasters which never cease to pursue the credulous fool.
We must not omit to state that under Bartolomeo, the third of the Scaligers, that tragic end was put to the rivalry of the great families, Capelletti and Montecchi, which served Bandello as the foundation of one of his most popular novels, and Shakspeare as the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
Moreover, the all-pervading consciousness of the existence of Homer, Virgil, nay, Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique epic-monger, annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt as to whether Ariosto did not try to make all this nonsense serious, and this romance into an epic; all this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism, diverts my attention, turns paladins and princesses too much into tutor-educated gentlemen, into Bandello and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century.
The life of this queen has employed many pens, both on poetry and novels. Bandello has related her story under the title of the Inordinate Life of the Countess of Celant. The like story is related in God's Revenge against Adultery, under the name of Anne of Werdenberg, duchess of Ulme.
That the Massimi claimed descent from Q. Fabius Maximus, and the Cornaro from the Cornelii, cannot surprise us. On the other hand, it is a strikingly exceptional fact for the sixteenth century that the novelist Bandello tried to connect his blood with a noble family of Ostrogoths. To return to Rome.
A later work than any of his, the Novelle of Bandello, should be kept in mind for the writer was Bishop of Agen, and his work was translated into French as also the Dames Galantes of Brantome.
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