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Ariosto and the two Strozzi were there, likewise the Cardinal Bembo who became a somewhat too ardent admirer and Aldo Manuzio, and other men of distinction.
The newly discovered art of printing was also liberally encouraged by Lodovico, one of whose protégés, Alessandro Minuziano, set up a printing press in Milan before Aldo Manuzio had settled in Venice, and in the course of the year 1494, published twenty-two books, including a Latin dictionary by Dionigi Este and complete editions of Cicero and Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius, as well as the works of Filelfo and the Sonnets and Triumphs of Petrarch.
He was the intimate friend of Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, of Pietro Bembo and Aldo Manuzio, of Leonardo and Isabella d'Este. It was in these festive days, in the Castello of Pavia, that Lorenzo da Pavia first met both the great Florentine and the accomplished princess who set so high a store on his friendship.
All lovers of rare books are admirers of what they call Aldines and Elzevirs that is, books printed at the press of Aldo Manuzio and his family at Venice in the sixteenth century, and by the Elzevir family in Holland in the seventeenth century. We speak of a Bradshaw and a Baedeker to describe the best-known of all railway guides and guide-books.
History has at last done justice to the memory of this woman, whose long yellow hair was so beautiful, and whose character was so colorless. The legend which made her a poison-brewing Mænad has been proved a lie but only at the expense of the whole society in which she lived. The simple northern folk, familiar with the tales of Chriemhild, Brynhild, and Gudrun, who helped to forge this legend, could not understand that a woman should be irresponsible for all the crimes and scandals perpetrated in her name. Yet it seems now clear enough that not hers, but her father's and her brother's, were the atrocities which made her married life in Rome a byword. She sat and smiled through all the tempests which tossed her to and fro, until she found at last a fair port in the Duchy of Ferrara. Nursed in the corruption of Papal Rome, which Lorenzo de' Medici described to his son Giovanni as 'a sink of all the vices, consorting habitually with her father's concubines, and conscious that her own mother had been married for show to two successive husbands, it is not possible that Lucrezia ruled her conduct at any time with propriety. It is even probable that the darkest tales about her are true. The Lord of Pesaro, we must remember, told his kinsman, the Duke of Milan, that the assigned reasons for his divorce were false, and that the fact was what can scarcely be recorded. Still, there is no ground for supposing that, in the matter of her first husband's divorce and the second's murder, she was more than a passive agent in the hands of Alexander and Cesare. The pleasure-loving, careless woman of the Renaissance is very different from the Medea of Victor Hugo's romance; and what remains most revolting to the modern conscience in her conduct is complacent acquiescence in scenes of debauchery devised for her amusement. Instead of viewing her with dread as a potent and malignant witch, we have to regard her with contempt as a feeble woman, soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle. It is also due to truth to remember that at Ferrara she won the esteem of a husband who had married her unwillingly, attached the whole state to her by her sweetness of temper, and received the panegyrics of the two Strozzi, Bembo, Ariosto, Aldo Manuzio, and many other men of note. Foreigners who saw her surrounded by her brilliant Court exclaimed, like the French biographer of Bayard: 'J'ose bien dire que, de son temps, ni beau coup avant, il ne s'est point trouvé de plus triomphante princesse; car elle était belle, bonne douce, et courtoise
His honest nature and kindly actions made him singularly beloved, and a contemporary describes him as the most learned of good men, and the best of learned men; while his intimate friend, the great printer, Aldo Manuzio, has immortalized his memory in the beautiful epistle in which he dedicates the Moralia of Plutarch to this man, whose name, he prays, may go down to future ages linked with his own.
Wars of Venice and Ferrara Invasion of Ferrara Lodovico Sforza and Alfonso of Calabria come to the help of Ercole d'Este Peace of Bagnolo Prosperity of Ferrara, and cultivation of art and learning at Ercole's court Guarino and Aldo Manuzio Strozzi and Boiardo Architecture and painting The frescoes of the Schifanoia Music and the drama Education of Isabella and Beatrice d'Este.
Aldo Manuzio was quietly printing his complete edition of Plato, and Michelangelo was transferring the noble figure of a prophet or a sibyl to the plaster of the Sistine, while young Gaston de Foix was dying at the point of victory upon the bloody shores of the Ronco. Sometimes, however, the disasters of his country touched Michelangelo so nearly that he had to write or speak about them.
For even if I were to yield to the wish of Aldo Manuzio when he sets up his press at Venice, and give him the aid of my annotated manuscripts, I know well what would be the result: some other scholar's name would stand on the title-page of the edition some scholar who would have fed on my honey, and then declared in his preface that he had gathered it all himself fresh from Hymettus.
Among her intimate acquaintances were also the famous Latinist, Cortesi; the youthful Sardoleto, the familiar of Cardinal Cibò; young Aldo Manuzio; the intellectual brothers Rafael and Mario Maffei of Volterra; and Egidio of Viterbo, who 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.
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