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A Woman in Full The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de' Medici BY ELIZABETH LEV HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, 316 PAGES, $27
Immortalized by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel, rumored to be the most beautiful woman in the world, the epicene countess who ruled Forlì and Imola for eleven years combined quattrocento beauty with the political instincts and will of a warrior-prince. She crossed verbal swords with Machiavelli, saw through his chicanery, and sent him away frustrated and chagrined. He later vilified her, "repelled by the idea that a woman could possess [such] qualities." In her first book, art historian Elizabeth Lev provides an absorbing account of a woman as captivating now as she was in her own day - a Renaissance woman in the age of Renaissance men.
Born in Milan in 1463, Caterina was the illegitimate daughter of the soon-to-be duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The Sf orzas had the unusual practice of training their female children in the arts of war. Yet Caterina's classical education and practical training were polished by the science of the saints. "From the legend of her namesake, Catherine of Alexandria, she learned that faith can make a young girl wiser than fifty philosophers."
As a young girl Caterina accompanied her father on state visits, turning heads everywhere they went with their ostentatious train. When her family sojourned in Florence with their friends, the powerful Medici family, whose library put even the Sforzas' to shame (though the Medici found their noble Milanese guests a bit gaudy), Caterina was especially impressed by Lorenzo the Magnificent, since he possessed an interest in Plato and poetry in addition to statesmanship and valor.
The politically motivated marital arrangements of the time would give even the most broad-minded of canon lawyers the jitters. Needing to shore up his own claim on Milan, Duke Sforza sought to unite his family to the pope's. He chose Girolamo Riario, a disreputable nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, for an eleven-year-old relation, Constanza Fogliani. The thirty-yearold debauchee's one nonnegotiable was that he could consummate the engagement forthwith. Constanza's protective mother refused to acquiesce. The duke, less scrupulous about the condition and seeing his plans disintegrating, decided to supply his...