Once the outside of the building has been properly admired, the interior does not disappoint. Everything inside the rooms is of the finest materials, crafted in the most aristocratic taste — that is to say, nothing produced in our time comes anywhere near it. From the windows of the upper floors a serene, dream-like view opens out towards the haze of blue sunlight on the distant Tyrrhenian Sea. On one of the windows some poetical Englishman, or perhaps Englishwoman, has used a diamond ring to engrave Keats’s well-known line—A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
And like the refrain of a poem, two motifs confront you at every turn. The first is the family coat of arms, depicting two swords and an ostrich feather. The second is the face of the man who commissioned it, Marcantonio Sant’Agnese. The Duke’s portrait, with its prominent nose and meaty cheeks, and their suggestion of opulence, not to say ostentation, is by Rusticaia. The full-length painting, in which he poses before a half-drawn purple-brown curtain, is by Marzio Filiboni. Behind the curtain can be glimpsed a wide, blue-green Renaissance landscape, with rivers and lakes, and tiny, toy-sized mountains. With his brow wreathed in laurel and a purple cloak draped over his ceremonial armour, the Duke stands foursquare. He is magnificently obese. His obesity is even more striking in the equestrian statue, by Mastagli, that stands in pride of place on the main terrace in the ancient park. Next to it is a fountain, on whose rim sits a nymph holding a little elephant in her hand. The water tumbles out though the elephant’s trunk onto an assortment of tritons, who struggle to hold their spiral conches up beneath its downpour — or rather, would struggle, if the water were ever to flow from the spring again. The fountain is later than the statue, executed in the manner of Bernini in the middle of the seventeenth century. Naturally neither the full-length portrait nor the statue gives any clue to the Duke’s psychology, but seeing the portrait one can imagine that behind those two tiny and not very benevolent-looking eyes, between the self-confident and grandiose meatiness of the corpulent cheeks, lurks a strange sense of panic. And the viewer might perhaps wonder what sort of person Marcantonio Sant’Agnese could have been in real life — in his long-ago life, in that long-vanished time.
The origin of the Sant’Agnese family was derived by Renaissance scholars from Agnosos, one of the heroes of The Odyssey, who is known only from a synopsis of the great cyclical epic. It records that this Agnosos was rescued from the waves by Pallas Athene’s owl when the Four Winds were misguidedly let out of their bag and promptly capsized the Greek ships. By happy chance the bird brought him to Italy, where he founded the family line with the help of a mountain nymph. More reliable chronicles assert that the original forebear was a Lombard hero called Balmungo, who took an active part in the assassination of King Alboïn and was rewarded with extensive domains in the vicinity of Benevent. Other accounts propose descent from St Agnes herself, but considering the saint’s well-known virginity this argument runs into certain difficulties. Whatever the truth might be, the fact is that at no time in the sixteenth century did the family play a role of any significance in Italian history, until one of its scions, as Callixtus VII, attained the throne of St Peter. Thereafter his brothers and cousins became bishops, papal generals, treasurers, gonfalonieri (governors of the more distant Christian lands) and lords of various lesser dukedoms. The Pope’s one grievance was that in all his long and illustrious reign he never managed to acquire an independent little principality for his own family. Nonetheless the Sant’Agnese wealth grew in this period to such legendary proportions that it rivalled those other nepotistical dynasties the Borghese, the Barberini and the Pamfili.
Marcantonio Sant’Agnese, who was born in 1561, stepped easily into the possession of wealth, grand titles and princely self-confidence. Of his infancy and youth nothing is known, from which we can infer that he went through all the formative childhood experiences that scholars of the period would consider typical, though none left any discernible mark on his character. As a young nobleman he is known to have played a role both at the papal court and in the diplomatic machinations of the Roman aristocracy, and to have taken part in intrigues prior to papal elections. He forged a treaty with the Duke of Modena, negotiated an alliance with the Viceroy of Naples, took money from the wife of the Catholic Spanish King for working against the rather more Christian-like King of France, and from the King of France for working against the King of Spain… In a word, he was active in all the usual historical and political manoeuvrings of his time.
Such political dealings were conducted in this period partly through protracted and highly secret negotiations, including offers of bribes, and partly by the staging of grand parades and other public spectacles. From detailed contemporary reports we know, for example, that Marcantonio was involved in the procession of unparalleled brilliance arranged in honour of Hassan Bey, the Christian convert half-brother of the Prince of Tunis. Three liveried retainers bearing the huge family coat of arms led the way. Next, robed as Neptune and riding on a camel, was a herald holding aloft an embroidered silk banner depicting the martyrdom of St Agnes. Then came two soldiers, dressed as Moors in chains, followed by two knights in armour. These last carried a banner stretched out between them, printed with the words of a sonnet proclaiming that once the heathens had murdered St Agnes, but now they came to worship her — the point being that Hassan Bey had been received into the Church in Sant’Agnese dei Tre Torri, by none other than Matteo Sant’Agnese, the bishop-uncle of our hero.
There followed twenty noble members of the ducal court, on horseback, with lances at the ready, each lance bedecked with a little olive-green flag, and the heads of the horses and knights all resplendent with huge ostrich feathers. Next came the Duke himself, dressed from head to toe in olive-green brocade, as was his horse, down to its hoofs, with the famed Sant’Agnese jewels, fabulous emeralds, visible below the feathers on its head. Apart from the ring and the legendary clasp pinning the three olive-green ostrich feathers of such fantastic size to his cap, the Duke never wore jewellery himself. This was to signify his contemptus mundi, a fashion newly imported from Spain. His own horse and those of the courtiers in the line ahead had reinforcements of pure gold attached over the usual iron shoes, loosely, so that most of them would drop off during the procession, to the delight and advantage of the Roman populace.
In the footsteps of the Duke trundled a huge theatre-cart of the sort that you can still see in the carnival at Nice today. Drawn by four fully dressed horses, it represented the temple of the goddess Bellona, Marcantonio being a strong believer in military glory. In front of this classical-style temple rose a pyramid composed variously of lances, cannonballs and the decapitated heads of Turks. Behind it stood four women in immense hooped skirts embroidered with olive-green quivers, and wearing gold-embroidered headdresses. These were Bellona’s attendants. The age could not imagine any ladies of stature, whether human or divine, without (even in their more intimate moments) an accompanying flock of attendants.
Inside the temple, the Goddess herself, in the person of Imperia Ottomini, sat enthroned. She was robed alla antica, that is to say, rather scantily, to display her splendidly ample curves. Ladies at this time were much given to dressing up as classical deities, reasoning that as such they could afford greater pleasure to onlookers than would be possible in contemporary costume, which covered the person completely, apart from the face, and revealed nothing of the beauty of the female form. Hence Imperia Ottomini, enthroned as the Goddess of War. But neither she nor the Duke wished to present too grim or uniformly martial an aspect, and what emerged from her quiver was not arrows but little artefacts made of sugar, which she held out to a child and a tiny Maltese terrier standing in front of her. The banner above this scene proclaimed: The Blessings of Warfare.