he model) with Alexander kneeling to her in
adoration, arrayed in full pontificals.

Such a thing would have been horrible, revolting, sacrilegious.
Fortunately it does not even amount to a truth untruly told; and well
would it be if all the lies against the Borgias were as easy to refute.
True, Pinturicchio did paint Giulia Farnese as the Madonna; true also
that he did paint Alexander kneeling in adoration--but not to the
Madonna, not in the same picture at all. The Madonna for which Giulia
Farnese was the model is over a doorway, as Vasari says. The kneeling
Alexander is in another room, and the object of his adoration is the
Saviour rising from His tomb.

Yet one reputable writer after another has repeated that lie of
Vasari's, and shocked us by the scandalous spectacle of a Pope so
debauched and lewd that he kneels in pontificals, in adoration, at the
feet of his mistress depicted as the Virgin Mary.

In October of that same year of 1493 Cesare accompanied his father on a
visit to Orvieto, a journey which appears to have been partly undertaken
in response to an invitation from Giulia Farnese's brother Alessandro.

Orvieto was falling at the time into decay and ruin, no longer the
prosperous centre it had been less than a hundred years earlier; but the
shrewd eye of Alexander perceived its value as a stronghold, to be used
as an outpost of Rome or as a refuge in time of danger, and he proceeded
to repair and fortify it. In the following summer Cesare was invested
with its governorship, at the request of its inhabitants, who sent an
embassy to the Pope with their proposal,--by way, no doubt, of showing
their gratitude for his interest in the town.

But in the meantime, towards the end of 1493, King Ferrante's uneasiness
at the ever-swelling rumours of the impending French invasion was
quickened by the fact that the Pope had not yet sent his son Giuffredo
to Naples to marry Donna Sancia, as had been contracted. Ferrante feared
the intrigues of Milan with Alexander, and that the latter might
be induced, after all, to join the northern league. In a frenzy of
apprehension, the old king was at last on the point of going to Milan to
throw himself at the feet of Lodovico Sforza, who was now his only hope,
when news reached him that his ambassadors had been ordered to leave
France.

That death-blow to his hopes was a death-blow to the man himself. Upon
receiving the news he was smitten by an apoplexy, and upon January 2