Aeneas and his crew are ashore at Caieta (Gaeta), midway between Naples and Rome, where two of the survivors of Ulysses’ crew meet to tell stories from Homer’s Odyssey. Following Achaemenides’ account of their encounter with Polyphemus, he hands over to Macareus to tell of their transformation by the sorceress Circe.

Macareus starts with Aeolus and the bag of winds he gave to Ulysses. For nine days, they experienced favourable winds, but on the tenth the crew opened the bag looking for riches. In doing so they released the winds, which promptly blew the ship back to Aeolus. Then there were the cannibal Laestrygonians, who ate one of the three crew sent to meet them. Their chieftain led a party in pursuit of Ulysses, bombarding his ships with trees and rocks and sinking two of the three. The third ship containing Ulysses, Macareus and others escaped to safety.

They sailed on to Circe’s island, where the surviving crew refused to go beyond its beach. Lots were drawn to form a group to go to Circe’s palace, and they set off. On the way they came across enchanted animals, lions, bears and wolves, which rushed at them but didn’t attack.

Dosso Dossi’s Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape (c 1514-16) is a remarkably early and realistic mythological landscape, with deep rustic lanes, trees, and a distant farmhouse. Circe leans, naked, at the foot of a tree going through spells on a large tablet, with a book of magic open at her feet. Around her are some of the men whom she took a fancy to and transformed into wild creatures. There’s a spoonbill, a small deer, a couple of dogs, a stag, and up in the trees an owl and what could well be a woodpecker, in the upper right corner.

Macareus and his party were taken in to see Circe sat on her throne, busy making a herbal concoction that she had served to them in a barley drink. When she touched their heads with her wand they were all transformed into pigs, apart from Eurylochus, who had refused to drink. He returned to Ulysses and warned him of what had happened to his colleagues.

Briton Rivière’s painting of Circe and her Swine (before 1896) has been used as an illustration for several versions of the Odyssey, and unusually casts Circe as a magic swineherd, with her wand resting behind her.

Alice Pike Barney’s painterly portrait of Circe from about 1915 was most probably made in pastels. Her streaming golden hair almost fills the painting, and wraps the head of the large boar she is embracing.

Ulysses brought Circe a flower he had been given by Mercury, and she took him into her hall, where she tried to lure him to drink her concoction. Ulysses drew his sword, forcing her to back off.

Jan van Bijlert’s Ulysses and Circe from around 1640 shows the couple at the banquet, looking intently at one another. Circe holds her wand, and between them is a goblet containing her magic concoction. At the right, one of the serving maids looks directly at the viewer. At her heels are Ulysses’ crew, in the form of pigs.

Salomon de Bray makes this a more intimate meeting, in his Odysseus and Circe (1650-55). Ulysses is seated clutching a krater-like goblet into which a maid is pouring clear liquid from a bottle. The hero looks quite haggard, and decidedly unimpressed by Circe. Below Ulysses’ left arm, two pigs are drinking more of Circe’s concoction.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani, father and teacher of the great Elisabetta Sirani, painted his account of Ulysses and Circe at about the same time as de Bray, and advances the story a few moments to the point where Ulysses is about to draw his sword. Here Circe is still holding the glass she is trying to get him to drink, with her wand in the other hand. The crew are seen in the background, in the form of pigs. Another woman holding a wand is with them: this could represent their transformation into pigs, or back into humans, so forming multiplex narrative.

The last of the paintings from this period of popularity is Matthijs Naiveu’s Circe and Odysseus from 1702. This is set in a grand banquet inside Circe’s palace, with some peculiar clusters of figures alluding to her role as a sorceress. For example, there’s a table just to the left of the couple at which a satyr and a demon are engaged in conversation. Circe has moved forward from her throne to embrace Ulysses, whose sword is pointing at her body to force her back. The goblet from which she has been trying to get him to drink is held by a maid at the far right. A couple of boars are feeding from fruit laid on the marble floor.

John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus from 1891 is perhaps the most complex work showing this story. Circe sits on her throne, holding up the krater for Ulysses to drink, with her wand in the other hand. The viewer is Ulysses, seen in the large circular mirror behind the sorceress, preparing to draw his sword. On the left side of the mirror is his ship, and scattered on the ground at Circe’s feet are the herbs and berries she used to prepare the concoction to transform the crew. To the right, one of those pigs lies on the ground, behind a small incense burner.

Ulysses and Circe then married, and she took him off to her bed. As a wedding gift to him, she transformed his crew back into human form, to their great relief. They remained on Circe’s island for a whole year before resuming their journey.

To follow yesterday’s account of the painting patronage of Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Duchess of Mantua, today I look at her husband’s lover and one of the most famous femmes fatales, Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. She had no aspirations as a patron of the arts, and instead has been portrayed in several paintings.

Her father was Cardinal Rodrigo de Borgia, later to become Pope Alexander VI, and her mother was one of his several mistresses who were kept discreetly outside the city of Rome. She was born on 18 April 1480, and received an unusually broad education, becoming proficient in four main languages, as well as being able to read Latin and Greek.

Before she was even eleven years old, marriage was arranged for her, first with a Valencian noble, then with the Count of Procida. After her father became Pope, that was changed again to a second-rank count in the House of Sforza. Lucrezia married him when she was just thirteen, for the Pope’s political gain.

The papal court soon lost interest in the Sforzas, so the Pope ordered her husband’s execution. Lucrezia warned him, enabling him to flee, and their marriage was annulled on the basis of non-consummation, sparing his life. It’s generally thought that, while awaiting the annulment, Lucrezia had an affair resulting in her pregnancy, and the birth of a son, Giovanni Borgia, although two papal bulls were issued contradicting that, and one another.

When she was eighteen, Lucrezia was married a second time, to Alfonso d’Aragon, the Neapolitan half-brother of her brother-in-law. The following year it was she, rather than her husband, who was appointed governor of Spoleto, and a year later, in 1500, her husband was murdered, apparently on the orders of Lucrezia’s brother Cesare because of changing political allegiances.

Her father, the Pope, then arranged a third marriage, to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, which proved both more lasting and productive of eight children. However, neither husband nor wife was faithful in the slightest: Lucrezia had a long and thoroughly physical affair with her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, Isabella d’Este’s husband, which he had to terminate when his syphilis became too overt to hide any longer.

Lucrezia also had a more emotional affair with the poet Pietro Bembo, who is now commemorated in the font of that name. She fell seriously ill after the birth of her tenth child in June 1519, and died on 24th of that month.

The closest that we have to a portrait of Lucrezia is this panel attributed to Dosso Dossi, and claimed to show Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara from some time between 1519-30. Inevitably that remains a matter of dispute, and doesn’t match contemporary descriptions of her having long and thick blonde hair.

It has been proposed that Lucrezia modelled for the title role of Pinturicchio’s wonderful fresco of St Catherine’s Disputation in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican Palace. She would therefore be the woman wearing a red cloak over a patterned blue dress to the left of the centre foreground. As this was painted between 1492-94, she would only have been 12-14 at the time, and in the throes of her first marriage.

There are two other contemporary portraits claimed to be of Lucrezia, both painted by Bartolomeo Veneto, and otherwise unidentified.

Veneto’s early Portrait of a Young Lady, probably from about 1500-10, has been thought to have a Ferrarese origin, and one of the beads worn by her is inscribed ‘SAP’. Her hair isn’t blonde, and she’s dressed in sombre clothing bearing emblems of the Passion. If the dating of this work is correct, Lucrezia would have been in her twenties at the time.

The second of Veneto’s paintings claimed to show Lucrezia is more scandalous, and was probably completed shortly after her death. Known as an Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora (c 1520), it does at least show a blonde, but the Duchess of Ferrara exposing her left breast?

Had those been the only paintings possibly of Lucrezia Borgia, she would hardly have made her mark in art. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed an obsession with her, and revived her image on several of his watercolours in the late nineteenth century.

In the first, The Borgias painted in 1851, Rossetti has Lucrezia playing a lute in the midst of her family, two of her children dancing in front. All the figures look disturbingly sinister, particularly the man leaning on her right shoulder.

In 1860, Rossetti returned to her when his interest in her family was rekindled. In Lucrezia Borgia (1860–61), he shows Lucrezia washing her hands in a small sink after she has poisoned her husband Alfonso d’Aragon in 1500. Shown in cameo, in a reflection in the upper left, are Lucrezia’s father, the Pope, helping her husband to walk in order to hasten the effects of the poison and bring about his death. Rossetti revised her face at a later date.

Ten years later, in 1871, Rossetti returned to this same scene and composition, and painted Lucrezia Borgia again. The only minor change is the decoration on the tall pot under the sink.

Among Lucrezia’s children who survived to adulthood, one was the Duke of Ferrara for over fifty years, a second became Archbishop of Milan, and another – Leonora d’Este – was a nun and probably the composer of religious motets. The d’Este family, particularly Isabella, wife of Lucrezia’s lover and brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, were major patrons of art in the Renaissance. Isabella was patron to Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Dosso Dossi, and others, but it was Lucrezia who inspired artists as recent as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Reference

Wikipedia.