Chapter 10

Let’s skip back a little, to 10 August 1548. For the three years that have passed since the publication of The Great Art, an ever-more incensed Tartaglia has been trying to goad Jerome into a public debate. Jerome has refused every request, reasoning that he has nothing to gain. Jerome’s student, the hot-headed Lodovico Ferrari could not say the same, though, and so has repeatedly challenged Tartaglia himself. Tartaglia has steadfastly refused the young upstart; what could he gain from defeating such a nobody?

This impasse continues until Tartaglia comes across the opportunity of a lifetime: a lectureship in his hometown of Brescia. He applies for the post and is told it is his — on one condition. The faculty are aware of his feud with Jerome and Ferrari — everyone is — and have decided to have some sport. All Tartaglia has to do to get the job, they say, is to beat Lodovico Ferrari in a mathematical contest.

Everything in the Garden of the Frati Zoccolanti in Milan is ready for the duel. The arrangements are spectacular. Don Ferrante di Gonzaga, the governor of Milan, takes centre stage on the dais, presiding over the day’s festivities. He is flanked by everyone who is anyone in Milan — scholars, city officers, and the noblemen of the district, along with their families. Mathematics has never been so glamorous.

The church is looking beautiful and so is the garden. The carpenters have been hard at work. At the front of the stage are two desks, set facing each other. Behind each desk there is tiered seating for each man’s supporters. Between them, an arrangement of flowers is spread over the grass, a symbol of the sweet atmosphere that this scholarly tussle is meant to maintain.

Each competitor will answer sixty-two problems, scientific and mathematical, posed by his opponent. Ferrari, for instance, has asked:

Divide eight into two parts such that their product multiplied by their difference comes to as much as possible, proving everything.

and:

There is a cube such that its sides and its surfaces added together are equal to the proportional quantity between the said cube and one of its faces. What is the size of the cube?

The methods for solution of the problems could be derived from the algebra laid out in The Great Art. But that required some deep thinking, not all of which had been completed. Take this one, for instance:

There is a right-angled triangle, such that when the perpendicular is drawn, one of the sides with the opposite part of the base makes 30, and the other side with the other part makes 28. What is the length of one of the sides?

The Great Art contained an example of such a problem, but not a general rule for solving them. This latter problem even defeated Ferrari, as it turned out. According to the rules, that means Ferrari shouldn’t have set it. As Tartaglia points out. ‘It is a very shameful thing,’ he says, ‘to put forward such a question in public, and not to know how to solve it by a general rule. I have the same opinion of your Problems 26 and 19, but I reserved to myself my reply to you on them, in front of the referees …’

In front of the referees, it turns out, Tartaglia is himself somewhat shameful. He is irritable and poorly behaved. As the competition degenerates into a rowdy war of words, Tartaglia is repeatedly urged to ‘resume the dignified mantle of the scholar’ by the officials. By the end of the first scheduled day of the contest, Tartaglia has had enough. It is clear to him that Ferrari has worked harder at algebra than he, and has a better command of it. Some of Ferrari’s problems, he knows, are beyond his abilities. That night, Tartaglia leaves Milan. In the morning, Ferrari is announced as the victor.

The result is a tonic to the careers of both Jerome and Ferrari. The latter is offered a plum position as tutor to the son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It is a testament to Ferrari’s hot-headedness that he turns the job down, protesting that it is too poorly paid. Clearly impressed by the young man’s chutzpah, the Emperor improves his offer. Ferrari can, if he wishes, become tax assessor for Milan, one of the most lucrative positions in the Emperor’s gift. Decades later, Ferrari retires a wealthy man — though it is an enforced retirement. The position had involved a great deal of horse riding, which eventually gave Ferrari a career-ending fistula in one buttock.

There is a further sting in the tale of Lodovico Ferrari. Though he had risen from servant boy to Milan’s chief tax collector, he had not forgotten his family, and had brought his beloved sister, Maddalena, to live with him. However, she betrayed his generosity — and was herself betrayed.

In 1560, Maddalena poisoned Ferrari with white arsenic, inherited his riches, and refused to grieve — or so Jerome records it. Fifteen days after her brother’s death, she married a man who took possession of everything she owned. Within a short time he had abandoned her. Maddalena ended her life in abject poverty in a rural hovel. Jerome, in a break from his typical character, showed her not the tiniest indication of pity.

‘You cannot betray your family and expect to be pitied.’ Jerome’s expression is steel.

‘Even with a family like yours?’

Jerome stares at me, but he does not respond.

There was a time, as a young man newly qualified in medicine, when Jerome thought he would never father children. He made his doubts public — he didn’t balk at discussing sexual matters, especially his impotence. In On Subtlety, he notes that ‘it is a help to associate a great deal with pretty girls, and to read an erotic tale,’ but admits that he has on occasion spent three whole nights with a girl, making ‘energetic, if ineffectual, efforts to relieve his condition,’ as one biographer tactfully put it.

Eating scrapings of bull penis on an empty stomach didn’t help, as he had been assured it would. ‘I have not yet tested whether an oven-dried wolf penis, if chewed, can instantly kindle sexual desire and the power of having sexual intercourse,’ he writes. Clearly, he talks about the issue with others. He knows of a man who ‘would not erect unless he was being beaten, and many who would not unless they were giving a beating’. Others need to suck on a nipple to achieve orgasm. He tells of a man who used a herb imported from the Indus: ‘when he had chewed it, he could complete sexual intercourse seven times in a day’. But Jerome didn’t have this herb and didn’t know what might cure his impotence.

He hadn’t always had a problem. Some of his writings intimate that he’d had sex successfully with a girl when he was eighteen and had liaisons involving cunnilingus and fellatio — with males and females — before that. He writes about enjoying erotica and frequent masturbation. But, by the time he complains about his impotence in a letter to a friend, it has clearly been going on for some time. ‘I maintain that this misfortune is to me the worst of evils,’ he says. ‘I bitterly weep this misery, that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage must be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude.’ He is unable to explain the cause, but laments that it means he eventually shunned the society of women, bringing on himself suspicions of ‘still more nefarious practices’.

Nonetheless, the advent of the angelic Lucia cured him and he did have children: first Giovanni, then his daughter Chiara, and finally Aldo. All three brought him a share of sorrow.

Giovanni was born to a bad portent, with his curved spine, his webbed toes, and the wasp at his baptism. No wonder that, when Chiara is born, Jerome remarks with relief that the horrors of Giovanni’s early years were not repeated: ‘She was in no way disfigured as was our firstborn, nor was her baptism marked by any untoward incident.’ Her only bad luck was to be unable to conceive children. This was, in time, a severe blow to Jerome, who craved grandchildren. Nor did Giovanni or Aldo have children — but that was the very least of the problems they brought him.

For starters, Giovanni is quite simply a dullard. Somehow, with heroic effort and no small amount of string pulling, Jerome manages to push him through medical school. He then uses his influence to have Giovanni admitted to the Milanese College of Physicians. His son will make a hopeless doctor, Jerome knows, but even he doesn’t see just how hopeless. Soon after his practice begins, Giovanni inadvertently administers a fatal dose of poison to a local official. ‘That was, indeed, the beginning of all ills,’ is Jerome’s later description.

There is no proof that Giovanni meant to kill the clerk, but that is hardly the point. What matters is that details of the deed have fallen into the hands of the Seroni family.

The Seronis were once wealthy. However, the father, Evangelista, has spent every crown. Destitute and desperate, they have turned to crime. They have never been known to miss an opportunity for blackmail — it is something of a speciality — and Giovanni is an opportunity on a silver plate. The silverware in this instance belongs, as do many other desirable things, to Jerome. A proposition comes to Giovanni: you can have your crime exposed to the College of Physicians, or you can marry our Brandonia. Giovanni must have had to think hard. Brandonia Seroni is fat, plain, bad tempered, and widely known to be promiscuous. She is, as Jerome put it, ‘destitute of all good qualities’: marriage material only for someone who had no option. Giovanni accepts the proposal.

Jerome only learns of the marriage when it is a fait accompli. A breathless servant who had been looking for his master pants out the news: Giovanni has come home with Brandonia as his wife and is looking to set up a household under Jerome’s roof. That household, Jerome quickly learned, would include most of the Seroni clan. He can see that the Seronis’ plan is to bleed the wealthy doctor of all his money and so Jerome refuses to let Brandonia in the house. Giovanni is furious — and no doubt terrified at what might happen to him if the Seroni plot is foiled. His father refuses to back down, but writes him two books’ worth of advice — he calls the volumes Consolation and Adversity — and offers some financial support. His letters chastise Giovanni for bringing all this trouble upon himself: ‘for all the ills that now hang over you, your poverty, your wife, your ill repute, your absence from your father’s house, all these I say you have prepared for yourself willingly and knowingly’.

Perhaps that judgement is what drives Giovanni to kill his wife.

ψ

Jerome is in his university lodgings at Pavia when the letter from the rector of the Milanese College of Physicians arrives. His spidery scrawl states simply that Giovanni, his younger brother Aldo, and a servant have all been arrested in Milan for the murder of Brandonia Seroni. Jerome is to return to Milan immediately, the rector says. The good name of the College must be defended.

‘He said nothing about defending my sons’ names — nor my own,’ Jerome says.

‘Did you ever doubt they were innocent?’

Jerome gives me a long stare. ‘I never doubted Giovanni,’ he says. ‘My first thought was that Aldo must be to blame.’

Despite what I have read, I am still shocked at Jerome’s matter-of-fact tone. ‘You never thought Aldo might also be innocent?’

Jerome shrugs. ‘You don’t know my younger son, do you?’