Chapter III

A CELLINI CASKET

INTERLUDE

The trellis that once shut the forest trees
From the fair flowers, all torn and broken is,
Though still the lily's scent is on the breeze,
And the rose clasps the broken images.

William Morris.

NEGLECTED but not ruinous, its marbles mossy, its once unrivalled garden invaded by sweet wild-flower banditti which run riot among the gentle roses, its fountains dry, their cracks and crannies the homes of basking lizards, its charming loggia trodden only by enthusiasts for whom every spot touched by the genius of Raphael is a shrine of pilgrimage—the Villa Madama, though appealing in its desertion, is not a melancholy solitude.

The imagination is intoxicated as by some heady wine as one gazes outward upon the dazzling panorama which originally determined the site of the loggia; and when, fatigued by the flashing sunlight, our eyes turn to the interior they are soothed by the subtler beauties of the half-effaced frescoes, the floral arabesques which Giovanni da Udine lavished upon the spandrils, the pouting putti in Giulio Romano's frieze of cherub faces, carrying out a scheme of decoration which could have been designed by no other than Raphael. We are certain as we recognise in a more delicate line, or exquisite touch recalling the arabesques of the Vatican loggia, that just here the great impresario must have caught palette and brushes from the hand of his pupil with, "Me perdone Giovanino mio, let me frolic a while with these fairy creatures and show them to you as I saw them in my childhood dancing in the swaying vines that garlanded the pergolas of Urbino." And so they revel here, myths of the childhood of the race, monstrous creatures, half beast, half human; centaurs, fauns, tritons, mermaids, sphinxes, lamias, their grotesquerie no longer repulsive, for it is a foil to the utmost elegance and sumptuousness of Renaissance art, their multiplicity never wearying, because they are marshalled by the greatest master in decorative design that the world has known. They lurk in the convolutions of exquisite rinceaux, uncoiling themselves from the scrolls of acanthus foliage, where sport also more delicate hybrid flowers;—women, whose beautiful bodies rise like anthers from the calices of impossible blossoms, whose arms are coiling tendrils and whose limbs melt into the curves of exuberant leafage unknown to the botanist.

But the charm which holds the visitor who penetrates this delicious solitude is due not alone to the sense of sight. A haunting suggestiveness breathes from these surroundings, like the perfume exhaled when one unlocks a long-closed sandal-wood casket, once the depository of dainty feminine trifles. It needs not the name of the villa to tell us that a lady, sitting in this loggia, once duplicated Da Udine's traceries in her embroidery, gathered roses in the garden, and looked longingly toward Rome while awaiting the coming of her princely lover, and many a visitor has been piqued by the ignorance of the custodian of the villa to search history for this mysterious Madama.

Margaret of Austria, daughter of an Emperor, wife of the reputed son of one Pope and of the grandson of another, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and Duchess of Parma, quartered the imperial eagle upon the balls of the Medici and the lilies of the Farnese. That the bar sinister was conspicuous upon her escutcheon mattered little in the age in which she lived, for the Emperor Charles V. acknowledged and advanced the interests of his illegitimate daughter with the same lack of embarrassment shown by the popes in the favouritism of their "nephews."

A doubtful advantage this, but one with far-reaching consequences, for when Margaret was twelve years of age, Charles conquered Rome and the child's connection with Italy and the Villa Madama had its beginning.

The villa had been built by Raphael for Pope Clement VII., while he was yet only Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, as a pleasure casino to which he could retreat from the cares imposed upon him by his cousin, Pope Leo X. Later when as successor to the tiara he found that not the least burden in the heavy legacy bequeathed him was that of the guardianship of the Medici family, it became the resort of his Florentine relatives on their quieter visits to Rome and the home of a mysterious child, Alessandro, of whom the Pope announced himself the guardian.

When Lorenzo II., (grandson of the Magnificent) died, leaving but one legitimate child, Catherine de' Medici, the future Queen of France, Clement imposed Alessandro upon Florence as the natural son of Duke Lorenzo.

There lacked not shrugging of shoulders at this imputed parentage and Florence revolted against receiving a bastard and a mulatto as its sovereign.

But trouble was brewing both for Florence and the Pope. Charles V. had determined to make himself master of Italy; his forces closed around Rome, and Clement, fleeing through the underground passage from the Vatican, shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo, and from it beheld the horrors of the sack of the city.

From its parapets, too, he witnessed the occupation of his cherished villa by Bourbon's savage soldiery.

Benvenuto Cellini relates (with his characteristic self-laudation) his prowess in killing the Constable de Bourbon and in defending the castle of St. Angelo, and although his perspective is slightly forced from his habit of placing his own colossal figure in the foreground, no chronicle gives a more vivid account of these stirring events.

What a picture he might have painted for us of the meeting of the Pope and the Emperor after the pacification; when Clement crowned his late adversary and Charles, reinstating Duke Alessandro over Florence, betrothed his beautiful daughter Margaret to that base-born reprobate!

Cellini might also have told us much of the after-life of the Duchess, for he knew her well, and mentions her with admiration in his autobiography. He served Alessandro too in Florence, and boasts of the intimacy which he enjoyed in the ducal household.

There was no one living at that period so well qualified as he to relate the inner history of that tragical marriage and of the romance which effaced its memory and lingers still like an elusive perfume in her exquisite villa.

Judge, lenient reader, if Cellini had told that last story, would not its main facts have corresponded with those embodied in the following pages, though the tamer phrasing and more conventional attitude of the writer compared with the audacity of his racier chronicle

"Are as moonlight unto sunlight,
And as water unto wine."