Portraits of the Borgia Dynasty Automatic translate

Borgia were famous patrons of art and attracted many artists and writers who lived at the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At a time when the Borgia clan reached the highest point of its power, numerous portraits of them were commissioned. In addition, a large number of works appeared that were thematically related to the family, but were created without their direct participation.

These are, first of all, numerous portraits of the brush of the great masters. In the Vatican halls of Borgia there are magnificent Pinturicchio frescoes (1454-1513), among them a portrait of Alexander VI and a portrait of an unknown lady, considered an image of Lucretia Borgia. Lucretius was depicted several times by another famous artist of the era - Bartolomeo Veneto. One of the images of Lucretia, emerging from under his brush, is a lady in black, another image is a portrait of the naked goddess Flora, for whom Lucretia herself could pose. Among other artists who painted Lucretia during his lifetime, one should name Dosso Dossi (1490-1542). However, the author of the most famous painting depicting the whole Borgia family was an artist who lived many generations later. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), an English pre-Raphaelite painter, nephew of John William Polidori, writer, doctor and friend George Byron (Polidori is known, among other things, for being the first to introduce the image of a vampire in romantic literature).

Cesare Borgia is captured in the “Portrait of a Nobleman” by Altobello Melone (c. 1491-1543). The personality of the son of Alexander VI was more often interested in writers. So, his image was inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), an outstanding Italian philosopher, historian and statesman, when he wrote his most famous philosophical treatise, The Sovereign. This book is a guide for a cruel, cynical and immoral ruler, by all means striving for power, which has become an end in itself. Machiavelli was free from political ambitions and, of course, did not follow the principles described by him. We have before us a rather philosophical program, which in literary form reflects the spirit of the times and sets out the principles to which the powers that be very often resort to today. Machiavelli completed the "Sovereign" in 1513, six years after Cesare’s death. The treatise was published only after the death of the author in 1532 and for many centuries was on the church list of forbidden books.

Natalya Abdullaeva