Cardinal Rodrigo and Cardinal Giuliano both were cardinals and bishops at the time of the birth of Duke Cesare. Cardinal Rodrigo had wealth, illustrious ancestry, incomparable charm of manner, a sumptuous aspect. He was magnificent and invincible. Cardinal Giuliano as a boy had peddled onions in a boat between Arbisola and Genoa, he had no money except the revenues of a few benefices, he was of a saturnine habit of mind, repulsive to his fellow creatures. His portraits, as cardinal on his medal by Sperandio, as Pope by Il Caradosso (Ambrogio Foppa), shew him as a hatefully ugly man with satyr-brows, sunken and bleared eyes, fierce but haggard mien, and the animal appetites hugely predominant in the lips, the back of the head, and the curious little muscles which obliquely tend downward right and left in the region of the root of the nose. In the age of the Discovery of Man, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s physique did not qualify him to gain, or retain, the fidelity of any woman whom, inevitably, he would hunger to possess. Nothing is known against the character of Madonna Giovanna de’ Catanei except that she was the mistress, first of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, second of Cardinal Rodrigo de Lançol y Borja. A woman who indulges in systematic adultery _and sacrilege_ is liable to be as false to her lovers, as she is to her husband and her God, at least until she has repented of her crimes and sins, giving proof of her repentance by surceasing from those same to lead a godly righteous and sober life, as Madonna Giovanna did during the whole reign of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI, and especially in, and after, 1508, when she was converted, together with Madonna Fiametta, a leman of Duke Cesare’s, by hearing Frat’ Egidio da Viterbo preach the Lent in Rome. But history and rumour agree in this, that with the exception of these two separate intrigues lasting from 1473 to 1481 Madonna Giovanna de’ Catanei was “alioquin proba mulier” as even the rascally Paulo Giovio says, (Vita Gonsalvi 212)—otherwise, an honest woman.