Word: borgias
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Middle Ages, Titian painted colors that glow even today as the most perfectly bright pigments. Once, Alphonso d' Este, the Duke of Ferrara, third husband of Lucrezia Borgia, bargaining after the mysterious, Machiavellian manner of those times, for possession of two great cities with many thousand souls in fealty bound, ordered a painting of himself to be made and sent to His Holy and Imperial Majesty Charles V, as a token of goodwill that might facilitate the transfer of property. Titian made the picture about 1525, since when it has remained forever fair, though the cities...
...Born at Florence in 1469 at the apogee of Florentine glory under Lorenzo de Medici ("The Magnificent"), Niccolo Machiavelli remains the most celebrated commentator on the brilliant and ruthless statesmanship of the Borgia, Sforza and Medici. When the Prince was translated into English many an Anglo-Saxon was appalled that so many truths about the baseness of men and how to play upon it should ever have been set down in type. Machiavelli was suspected by simple souls of having been the devil himself, and the adjective "Machiavellian" was introduced into English with the connotation "diabolic." Machiavellian maxims...
...their daughter Edda, their sons Bruno and Vittorio. Round about stood in attitudes of somewhat disgruntled welcome, the 60 Grand Councillors of San Marino, an august senate from which the two regents are chosen twice a year. Well they might regard II Duce with suspicion, fear. Did not Caesar Borgia wrest the precious independence of the republic from it for an all-too-broad span of years? May not the republic's armed forces (1200 men, constituting the sturdy male population between 16 and 60) be called upon to sell their lives in attempting to repulse the possible aggression...
Senator Bruce declared that "the Volstead Act has converted the Federal Government, with its denaturing outfit of poisons and filth, into a more monstrous Caesar Borgia than any that medieval Italy ever knew. In other ways also, it has filled the stomachs of the people with deadly concoctions...
Biographers of this type claim to have established a school of analytical biography. They devote themselves to the principle that if Cesar Borgin is thought a villain and Nell Gwyn no better than she might have been, no more proof is needed for the theses that Borgia was an upstanding Christian gentleman, and Mistress Gwyn a cheerful creature with no harm in her at all. Thus these moderns display their lack of prejudice by becoming hide-bound on the unpopular side of any given question. Their purpose is clear enough. A customary treatment of Stevenson, for instance, would startle...