Love played a large part in the life of Marcantonio Sant’ Agnese, that is to say, the love he bore to Imperia Ottomini. No doubt there were other liaisons too, but about those history is silent — in contrast to some fairly lively accounts of his relations with Imperia, which certainly did leave their mark in the pages of historical scholarship.
Imperia was the wife of a nobleman called Guiliano Ottomini. This Ottomini was a member of the Duke’s innermost circle. He made frequent journeys as his diplomatic representative, and in time became the chief overseer of all his domains. From which it clearly follows that he was not in the least troubled by his wife’s intimate relations with his employer, and no doubt took the same gentlemanly and accommodating line with her children, all of whom carried the Duke’s blood in their veins. Which makes it all the more surprising that in 1589 the Duke had this useful and extremely tolerant man murdered. This event is recorded in many sources, consistent in every important detail.
One night Ottomini, who was in Rome, was visited by a messenger on horseback, sent by Marcantonio to summon him urgently to Cortemiglia. The nobleman leapt onto his steed and set off at once. A few streets down the road, near the ill-lit Teatro Flavio, six desperadoes who had been lurking behind a corner leapt out in front of him, fired their pistols at him, then repeatedly stabbed him as he lay wounded. The papal police rushed to the sound of the shooting, and raced off after the killers. Three of them managed to take refuge in the palazzo of the Spanish legation, where they could not be pursued any further, since it enjoyed diplomatic immunity. But three were caught, among them the popular mountain bandit Luca Perotti, who was generally known to be in Sant’Agnese’s pay. The papal court sentenced the three men to death and, once it became clear that Sant’Agnese would make no objection, carried out the executions. A huge crowd followed Perotti on his last journey, and listened with deep emotion as he confessed his sins on the scaffold, in splendid verses, which he sang.
The reasons for this murder can be only surmised, and then very tentatively. There might possibly have been serious disagreements between the Duke and his steward over the accounts, as Konrad Schneyssen argues in his mighty tome Einführung zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Neffen (An Introduction to the History of Papal Nepotism), but that seems rather unlikely, since all the signs are that up to the very moment of his tragic death Ottomini enjoyed his master’s complete confidence and continued to carry out important assignments on his behalf. It is also difficult to imagine that after so many years he, for his part, would suddenly begin to disapprove of his wife’s conduct. We ourselves — though, in the total absence of hard fact, this is mere conjecture based on the way people thought at the time — would hazard the view that the murder of the unfortunate Ottomini was another example of Marcantonio’s gallantry towards Imperia, a sacrificial offering made by her lover. There is no doubt that Imperia was a very demanding lady, and the Duke did not stint in offering testimony of his passion, showering the woman he loved with jewels, estates, sonnets penned by his own fair hand and portraits of her; and when he could think of no other way to offer even greater witness of his adoration, he had her husband murdered, as proof for her and the whole world of the unquenchable and boundless force of his passion. The fair Imperia seems to have accepted this extreme manifestation of his love, for not long afterwards she finally moved into the Duke’s palazzo, and remained his loyal companion to the end of his days.
The murder of Ottomini seems to have produced a major spiritual convulsion in Marcantonio. His Court Chaplain, the Jesuit father Marcuffini, who was renowned for the great saintliness of his life, took the view that the only road to absolution lay in the sanctity of repentance, and insisted that he should now give Imperia up for ever, on the grounds that the nature of his ‘regrettable error’ meant that to persist in the relationship would expose his soul to continuing mortal danger. Marcantonio, as a deeply religious man, would no doubt have readily undertaken any humiliating act of penance, especially one of the more picturesque and public varieties favoured by the age, but he had no intention of leaving Imperia: time makes every man the slave of custom. His spiritual crisis lasted almost half a year. During that time he lost a great deal of weight and incurred vast expense for the constant attendance of his doctor. Quite how the crisis was resolved is not clear, but what is beyond doubt is that at the end of that half-year he took part in a large-scale religious ceremony in St Peter’s, which seems to confirm that by then he had indeed undergone the ‘sanctity of repentance’.
In his aforementioned work Konrad Schneyssen offers a rather different account of this episode, but we should bear in mind that, as a Protestant, his purpose is to use every weapon at his disposal to place the Church in a bad light. More recent historians have cast considerable doubt on his conclusions. For example, Aldo Lampruzzi, that outstanding representative of the sceptical spirit prevailing at the end of the last century, questions whether Sant’Agnese was implicated in the murder at all. He considers it simply a matter of contemporary gossip, unsupported by any documentary evidence or demonstrable fact. In more recent years, that elegant Neo-Catholic and Royalist French historian François de Kermaniac, in his celebrated Les Taureaux et les aveugles (The Bulls and the Blind), puts an entirely new complexion on the whole affair.
He begins by endorsing Lampruzzi’s argument that Sant’Agnese could not have known that the hired assassins intended to kill Ottomini. Next, the witty Frenchman continues, even if he had, he had no means of stopping them, since it is common knowledge that these brigands cared not a fig for those set in authority over them. But — and this is his most interesting contribution — even if we do think the worst and conclude that Sant’Agnese did have him murdered, we still have no right to affect moral outrage and judge his action in terms of our own altruistic, post-humanist, neo-puritanical, hypocritical and effeminate standards. The age in which Sant’Agnese — the blessed, divinely chosen Sant’Agnese — lived was the great heroic age of Europe, that is to say of the Latin part thereof, when great passions brought about equally great works and deeds, faith threw up cathedrals, Catholic solidarity raised armies against heathen and heretic alike, and love, that finest flower of the heroic spirit, swept aside all pettifogging, petty-bourgeois inhibitions (then unknown) and every other obstacle in the way, like a cleansing storm washing away so many squalid little hovels — or in this case, the smarmy little Ottomini, this “purblind, jumped-up buffoon”.
While we would not wish to endorse de Kermaniac’s somewhat one-sided enthusiasm, we too think it beyond doubt that there was a certain heroism, or at least an element of yearning after it, in Sant’Agnese, and that in the insatiable and sometimes almost grotesque forms this yearning took he was a true child of the age. Through the good offices of the Academy of Rome his surviving poems and letters have recently appeared in print. Among them we find plans for an epic poem the intention of which, judging from the tiny fragment in our possession, was to immortalise the military achievements of his Sant’Agnese forebears, though only a short mythological section was ever completed. In it, his ancestor Bradmart pays a visit to Venus on an Atlantic island. To commemorate the splendid night they have together she presents him with a magic root with the power to dispel even the most painful toothache within minutes.