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Transcriber's Note.

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         QUEENS OF THE
          RENAISSANCE

              BY
      M. BERESFORD RYLEY


WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS


         METHUEN & CO.
     36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
            LONDON


   _First Published in 1907_




  [Illustration: BEATRICE AND LUDOVICO KNEELING
    ALTAR-PIECE BY ZENALE]




To B----




CONTENTS


                                    PAGE
  PREFACE                             ix

  CATHERINE OF SIENA                   1

  BEATRICE D'ESTE                     53

  ANNE OF BRITTANY                   104

  LUCREZIA BORGIA                    150

  MARGARET D'ANGOULÊME               202

  RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA          251




PREFACE


There are no two people who see with the same kind of vision. It is
for this reason that, though twenty lives of the six women chosen for
this book had been written previously, there would still, it seems to
me, be room for a twenty-first. For though the facts might remain
identical, there is no possible reiteration of another mind's exact
outlook. Hence I have not scrupled to add these six character studies
to the many volumes similar in scope and subject.

The book is called "Queens of the Renaissance," but Catherine of Siena
lived before the Renaissance surged into being, and Anne of Brittany,
though her two husbands brought its spirit into France, had not
herself a hint of its lovely, penetrating eagerness. They are included
because they help, nevertheless, to create continuity and coherence of
impression, and the six leading, as they do naturally, one to the
other, convey, in the mass, some co-ordinated notion of the
Renaissance spirit.

The main object, perhaps, in writing at all lies in the intrinsic
interest of any real life lived before us. For every existence is a
_parti pris_ towards existence; every character is a personal opinion
upon the value of character, feeling, virtue, many things. No
personality repeats another, no human drama renews just the same
intricate complications of other dramas. In every life and in every
person there is some element of uniqueness, some touch of speciality.
Because of this even the dullest individuality becomes quickening in
biography. It has, if no more, the pathos of its dulness, the didactic
warnings of its refusals, the surprise of its individualizing
blunders.

All the following lives convey inevitably and unconsciously some
statement concerning the opportunity offered by existence. To one, it
seemed a place for an ecstasy of joy, success, gratification; to
another, a great educational establishment for the soul; to a third,
an admirable groundwork for practical domestic arrangements and
routine; to Renée of Ferrara, a bewildering, weary accumulation of
difficulties and distress; to her more charming relative, an enigma
shadowed always by the still greater and grimmer enigma of mortality.
And lastly, for the strange, elusive Lucrezia, it is difficult to
conceive what it must have meant at all, unless a sequence of
circumstances never, under any conditions, to be dwelt upon in their
annihilating entirety, but just to be taken piecemeal day by day,
reduced and simplified by the littleness of separate hours and
moments.

In a book of this kind, where the intention is mainly concerned with
character, and for which the reading was inevitably full of bypaths
and excursions, a complete bibliography would merely fill many pages,
while seeming to a great extent to touch but remotely upon the ladies
referred to, but among recent authors a deep debt of gratitude for
information received is due to the following: Jacob Burckhardt, Julia
Cartwright, Augusta Drane, Ferdinand Gregorovius, R. Luzio, E. Renier,
E. Rodoconarchi, and J. Addington Symonds.

Finally, in reference to the portraits included in the life of
Beatrice D'Este, a brief statement is necessary. For not only that of
Bianca, wife of Giangaleazzo, but also those of Il Moro's two
mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lu