The Garden Academies

The popes of the Counter-Reformation were serious men, intent on their work, with little trace of worldliness. They put people to death in volume, preferably slowly and before an audience, but always after a trial. They were thoroughly nepotistic and they trafficked in influence as readily as one wipes one’s nose on a cold day, but they had good reason: only family could be trusted, because if a pope left a flank exposed, any subordinate would slit his throat without trial. They had no mistresses or children; they wore sackcloth under their vestments; they smelled bad. They were great builders and tirelessly checked to see that not a single breast appeared in a single painting in any house of worship. They believed in what they did. They would never have been seen degrading themselves, at a tennis or fencing match; they didn’t go to the queeny parties that blared across the Tiber.

After nineteen years of ostracism, when Cardinal Montalto emerged in a golden carriage to occupy his rooms at the Apostolic Palace with the plans of the future city of Rome under his arm, he gave his sister Camilla Peretti the Boleyn ball.

Camilla Montalto di Peretti was an elderly widow, with the sorts of habits that might be expected of a cardinal’s closest confidante, but she had daughters who—unlike her and the recently anointed Pope Sixtus V—made a life for themselves at court and played tennis: it was what was expected of young and comely millionairesses. “It’s like a ball game,” said Jacinto Polo de Medina in 1630 in The Garden Academies, referring to the personal finances of princesses, “in which women like better to take service than to give it.”

Sixtus V and his sister were of truly humble origin: they were the children of a mule driver and a washerwoman and they had been orphaned early on, the ten brothers and sisters between them dead or gone. Camilla, fourteen years younger than the pope, had grown up in tow of her brother as he became altar boy, seminarist, and priest. Her first memories were of the years when he was already scaling the ties of the cardinal’s mantle, spurred on by extraordinary ambition but also by the responsibility of elder brothers toward those born after them, a force of nature in itself.

It was fear of want that made her brother beat all records for the raising of palaces and the reconstruction of roads in Rome, as if to expel the phantom of poverty from the city it fell to him to govern. It was not Camilla’s fate to face such a fear. She was a simple woman, who never minded acting as a kind of lady-in-waiting to Montalto, and who, though capable of enjoying the advantages of being sister to the pope, didn’t lose her head over them either. If she happily assumed the duties of Vatican princess, sharing in the ostentation of the Palazzo Montalto, it is also true that once her brother crossed the Tiber and changed his name to Sixtus, she wrote to her friend Costanza Colonna to ask for a place in her loggia, more modest and easier to oversee than the monstrous mansion where Montalto had put his theories on the redesign of Rome into practice. In addition to being discreet, Camilla was a cultured woman, so she loved the idea of retiring to the medieval mansion in whose gardens the poetess Vittoria Colonna had hosted gatherings frequented by Michelangelo.

Camilla accepted the slightly battered tennis ball given to her by His Holiness and moved to the loggia with her daughters. It’s funny—said her brother on one of the few occasions when he visited her after he was anointed—it was here that Pius gave me the ball that I gave you. What ball? The one made of the hair of the mad queen—do you still have it? It’s here somewhere. Don’t lose it; it was the good-luck charm that kept me alive through the years of darkness.

Camilla had left the ball—which in truth she found a little repellent—in the rooms of the loggia’s overseer: a priest of a certain rank at St. Peter’s who answered to the name Pandolfo Pucci and who had been Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s first employer in Rome. He’d given him work painting saints in landscapes that he later sold to village churches. None survive.