Lucrezia Borgia - Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy

Sarah Bradford

Viking USA

2004

400 páginas

13h 20m

ISBN-13: 9780670033539

The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance--incest, political assassination, papal sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, unscrupulous power grabs. Yet, as bestselling biographer Sarah Bradford reveals in this breathtaking new portrait, the truth is far more fascinating than the myth.

Neither a vicious monster nor a seductive pawn, Lucrezia Borgia was a shrewd, determined woman who used her beauty and intelligence to secure a key role in the political struggles of her day. Drawing from a trove of contemporary documents and fascinating firsthand accounts, Bradford brings to life the art, the pageantry, and the dangerous politics of the Renaissance world Lucrezia Borgia helped to create.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

“Even her death was not easy”

Let us start with a very brief reflection about gossip and rumours: they’ve played a vital part in the downfall of entire dynasties and empires just as in their ascent. In the case of the Borgias, they were definitely helpful in the sense that everything that was said about them created an atmosphere of mostly fear, respect and loathe, that persists well into our time. That’s not to say that they weren’t ruthless, conniving or rapacious, however, many things that were said about them are not backed up by evidence.

Second reflection: the fact that a portion of humanity has had the awareness and will to preserve any type of documents, letters, diaries etc. that have helped us as a species to know (and continuously rediscover) our past, never ceases to amaze me. In the present work those documents play a fundamental role. The descriptions of people, places, objects and situations are wonderful and the window that Sarah Bradford opens for us to see into that past is priceless.

That being said, this is not an easy read, there’s quite a lot of history, names and relationships that may be hard to follow at times, but they will leave the reader in awe from details and descriptions about people’s daily lives, including clothes, foods, celebrations and plagues and disease, all with a certain degree of intrigue and betrayal around it.

Finally, the only thing I would like to explore more is the medical / scientific aspect of the aforementioned plagues and disease, which were a big part of life back then, so it will definitely be interesting to know more about those facts based in modern science and medicine.