Alfonso I d'Este Duke of FERRARA

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Alfonso d'Este (21 July 1476 - 31 October 1534) was Duke of Ferrara during the time of the War of the League of Cambrai.


Lucrezia Borgia, 1518 Dosso Dossi[1]
He was the son of Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara and Eleanor of Naples and became duke on Ercole's death in June 1505. In the first year of his rule he uncovered a plot by his brother Ferrante and half-brother Giulio d'Este, directed against him and his other brother Ippolito. In September 1506 a trial for lèse majesté and high treason was held and, as expected, the death sentence was passed, but just as Ferrante and Giulio were about to mount the gallows they were informed that the duke had commuted their sentence to life imprisonment. They were led away to two cells in the Torre dei Leoni. Ferrante died in his cell after 34 years of imprisonment, while Giulio held on until he was pardoned in 1559, after 53 years of imprisonment. After his release, Giulio was ridiculed in the streets of Ferrara for his outdated clothes and died in 1561.

In the Italian Wars Alfonso preserved his precarious position among the contending powers by flexibility and vigilance and the unrivalled fortifications of Ferrara; he entered the League of Cambrai against Venice and remained an ally of Louis XII of France even after Pope Julius II had made peace with Venice; when the Bolognesi rebelled against Julius and toppled Michelangelo's bronze statue of the Pope from above the gate, Alfonso received the shards and recast them as a cannon named La Giulia, which he set on the ramparts of the castello: in 1510 Julius excommunicated him and declared his fiefs forfeit, thereby adding Ferrara to the Papal States; Alfonso then fought successfully against the Venetian and Papal armies, gaining the Battle of Polesella, capturing Bologna, and playing a major part in the French victory at the Battle of Ravenna (1512). These successes were based on Ferrara's artillery, produced in his own foundry which was the best of its time.[2][3] In both of his portraits by Titian, (Compare illustration above) he poses with his arm across the mouth of one of his cannon.

In 1526?1527 Alfonso participated in the expedition of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, against Pope Clement VII, and in 1530 the pope again recognized him as possessor of the forfeited duchies of Modena and Reggio.

Marriages
In January 1491, Alfonso was married to Anna Sforza, the niece of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In the same ceremony, Ludovico was married to Alfonso's younger sister, Beatrice d'Este, in a double wedding orchestrated by Leonardo da Vinci.

Politically, the wedding was designed to cement ties between the two families. Anna Sforza's death, on 30 November 1497, marked the end of those ties, as Beatrice d'Este had died in January of that same year.

Alfonso later remarried, to Lucrezia Borgia, in 1502.

After Lucrezia's death on June 24, 1519, he married Laura Dianti by whom he had an illegitimate son, Alfonso d'Este (later legitimized).

Art

Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan shore, painted by Dosso Dossi for Alfonso's camerino d'alabastro (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Like his brother Ippolito I, Cardinal d'Este, he was one of the great patrons of art of his time: for him the elderly Giovanni Bellini painted The Feast of the Gods in 1514, Bellini's last completed painting. He turned to Bellini's pupil, Titian, for a sequence of paintings. In 1529 Alfonso created the most magnificent gallery of his time, his studiolo or camerino d'alabastro ('small alabaster room'), now usually known as his "Camerino", in order to better display his works of art against white marble-veneered walls under a gilded ceiling.[4] The pallor of the marble led to the name of this room as the chamber of alabaster. There are documents from Mario Equicola on 9 October 1511, noting plans for painting of a room in Ferrara, in which six fables (fabule) or histories (istorie) shall be placed. I have already found them and have presented them in writing." A letter from Alfonso, dated 14 November 1514, authorized payment to Giovanni Bellini, the first painting completed for the chamber.

Titian is known to have painted two portraits of Alfonso: the first was widely acclaimed, singled out by Michelangelo and coerced as a diplomatic gift by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor; Alfonso induced Titian to paint a free replica, which the artist of the painting illustrated above has adapted for his model.[5] Over the next two decades, Titian added three more paintings: The Worship of Venus (Museo del Prado, Madrid), The Bacchanal of the Andrians (Prado, Madrid), and Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London). Dosso Dossi produced another large bacchanal, and he also contributed ceiling decorations and a painted frieze for the cornice, depicting scenes from the Aeneid, which gained immediacy by showing the heroes in contemporary dress (illustration, left). All the bacchanals in the Alabaster Chamber dealt with love, and some refer to marriage. After the Este family lost control of Ferrara in 1598, the Alabaster Chamber's paintings and sculpture were dispersed.

Alfonso inherited from Cardinal d'Este the poet Ariosto. Following in the lead of his father Ercole, who had made Ferrara into one of the musical centers of Europe, Alfonso brought some of the most famous musicians of the time to his court to work as composers, instrumentalists and singers. Musicians from northern Europe who worked at Ferrara during his reign included Antoine Brumel and Adrian Willaert, the latter of whom was to become the founder of the Venetian School, something which could not have happened without Alfonso's patronage.

History
When Alfonso's grandson Alfonso II d'Este?Robert Browning's duke of "My Last Duchess"[6]?produced no male heir, the main d'Este line died out. A grandson of Alfonso I and cousin of Alfonso II, Cesare d'Este had been born out of wedlock. He was recognized by the Emperor but not by the Pope, who took the Duchy of Ferrara by force. Nevertheless, the House of Este continued in Modena and Reggio.

Alfonso married Anna SFORZA in Jan 1491. Anna died on 30 Nov 1497. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Alfonso married Lucrezia BORGIA in 1502. Lucrezia died on 24 Jun 1519. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. Duke of Ferrara Ercole II D'ESTE was born on 5 Apr 1508; died on 3 Oct 1559.

Family/Spouse: Laura DIANTI. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

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Ercole I d'Este, KG (26 October 1431 - 25 January 1505) was Duke of Ferrara from 1471 until 1505. He was a member of the House of Este. He was nicknamed North Wind and The Diamond.[1]

Ercole was born in 1431 in Ferrara to Nicolò III and Ricciarda da Saluzzo. His maternal grandparents were Thomas III of Saluzzo and Marguerite of Roussy.

He was educated at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso, king of Aragon and Naples, from 1445 to 1460; there he studied military arts, chivalry, and acquired the appreciation for architecture all'antica and the fine arts, which would result in his becoming one of the most significant art patrons of the Renaissance.[2]

In 1471, with the support of the Republic of Venice, he became Duke on the death of his half-brother Borso, profiting of the absence of the latter's son, Niccolò, who was in Mantua. [3] During an absence of Ercole from Ferrara, Niccolò attempted a coup, which was however crushed; Niccolò and his cousin Azzo were beheaded on 4 September 1476. Ercole married Eleonora d'Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand I of Naples, in 1473. The Este alliance with Naples was to prove a powerful one.

In 1482?1484 he fought a war with the Republic of Venice, which was allied with Ercole's nemesis, the Della Rovere Pope Sixtus IV, occasioned by the salt monopoly, the War of Ferrara. Ercole was able to end the war by ceding the Polesine at the Peace of Bagnolo, and Ferrara escaped the fate of destruction or absorption into the papal dominions, but the war was a humiliation for Ercole, who lay sick and immobilized while the besieging army destroyed Este properties in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

After this, he remained neutral in the Italian War of 1494-1498, and tried for the rest of his rule to improve relations with the Papal states. He reluctantly agreed to the marriage of his son Alfonso to Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, a marriage that brought notable territorial donations.

His subsequent career as a patron may be seen to some extent as compensation for the early military setback: significantly, Ercole was the only Italian ruler who characterized himself as divus on his coinage, like a Roman emperor.[4]

The scale and consistency of Ercole's patronage of the arts was in part a political and cultural statement. He hosted theatrical representations with elaborate scenery and musical intermezzi, some of the first purely secular theatre in Europe since Antiquity[5] and was successful in setting up a musical establishment which was for a few years the finest in Europe, overshadowing the Vatican chapel itself.[6] For the next century Ferrara was to retain the character of a center of avant-garde music with a decidedly secular emphasis. In music history Ercole was one of the Italian nobles most responsible for bringing the talented Franco-Flemish musicians from northern Europe into Italy. The most famous composers of Europe either worked for him, were commissioned by him, or dedicated music to him, including Alexander Agricola, Jacob Obrecht, Heinrich Isaac, Adrian Willaert, and Josquin des Prez, whose Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae not only is dedicated to him, but is based on a theme drawn from the syllables of the Duke's name.


Grosh issued under Ercole I d'Este.
Ercole is equally famous as a patron of the arts, as much an expression of his conscious magnificence as his cultivated aloofness, grave and stern as befitted the new ducal rank of Ferrara (Manca 1989:524ff). He made the poet Boiardo his minister, and also brought the young Ludovico Ariosto into his household.

Under Ercole Ferrara became one of the leading cities of Europe; it underwent substantial growth in the Ercolean Addition, approximately doubling in size, under Ercole's direct guidance, producing the first planned and executed urbanistic project of the Renaissance. To enclose it, he extended the city's walls, hiring architect Biagio Rossetti for the work.[7] Many of Ferrara's most famous buildings date from his reign.

Ercole was an admirer of church reformer Girolamo Savonarola, who was also from Ferrara, and sought his advice on both spiritual and political matters. Approximately a dozen letters between the two survive from the 1490s. Ercole attempted to have Savonarola freed by the Florentine church authorities, but was unsuccessful; the reformist monk was burned at the stake in 1498.[8]

In 1503 or 1504, Ercole asked his newly hired composer Josquin des Prez to write a musical testament for him, structured on Savonarola's prison meditation Infelix ego. The result was the Miserere, probably first performed for Holy Week in 1504, with the tenor part possibly sung by the Duke himself.[9]

Ercole died on 25 January 1505, and his son Alfonso became Duke.[10]

Family and issue
Ercole and Eleonora had six children:

Isabella born 1474 (married Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua; leading patron of the Renaissance)
Beatrice born 1475 (married Ludovico Sforza, future Duke of Milan)
Alfonso (married Lucrezia Borgia)
Ferrante (thrown into prison by his brother Alfonso in 1506, where he died 34 years later)
Ippolito (cardinal)
Sigismondo d'Este
Ercole had two illegitimate children:

Lucrezia d'Este, born ca 1477 (married Annibale II Bentivoglio)
Giulio

Ercole married Leonora Of NAPLES in 1475. Leonora (daughter of Ferdinand I Of NAPLES and Isabella Of TARANTO) was born on 22 Jun 1450; died on 11 Oct 1493. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

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Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

She was consort to Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara and mother to Isabella d'Este and Beatrice d'Este. The later daughter was consort to Ludovico Sforza.