Deprived of the society of Madonna Giovanna de’ Catanei, Cardinal Rodrigo, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, amused himself with the high-born maiden, Madonna Giulia Farnese, nicknamed in Rome _La Bella_, who was betrothed and afterwards married to Don Orso Orsini, himself of Borgian descent (v. suggestion for a genealogical tree). A faded representment of her marvellously brilliant beauty may be seen in the mannered fresco by Messer Bernardo Betti (detto Pinturicchio) in the Borgia Tower of the Vatican, where she was painted as Madonna; or on the tomb of her brother Alessandro (afterwards the Lord Paul P.P. III) in the Basilica of St. Peter, where she was sculptured in marble by Messer Guglielmo della Porta as a naked Truth (clumsily draped, after an erotomaniac Spanish student of theology had taken the statue for Lucian’s goddess Kuthereia). The fruit of her early intrigue with Cardinal Rodrigo was Madonna Laura, detto Orsini, born in 1489, and adopted by Don Orso Orsini, the husband of Madonna Giulia. The reign of the Lord Innocent P.P. VIII is notable for the extreme of lawlessness into which lax government had let Rome fall. The Sovereign Pontiff was a family man, Who openly acknowledged the paternity of seven bastards, and Whose chief concern appears to have been their settlement in life. A son, Don Franciotto Cibo, a silly avaricious weakling, He married to Madonna Maddalena, daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici; His daughter He married to Messer Gheraldo Usodimare, a rich merchant of Genoa; the wedding-feast took place at the Vatican, the Pope’s Holiness presiding; and so the world was made to lose sight of the high ideals of the Papacy, as exemplified by the Lord Pius P.P. II, and to regard the Supreme Pontiff in the light of a mere monarch, a mere man. Cardinal Piero Riario, in 1473, had bargained with Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza-Visconti of Milan to create him King of Lombardy, in return for money and troops, by the aid of which he himself might ascend the papal throne, his uncle, the Lord Xystus P.P. IV being willing to abdicate in his favour: and, but for the sudden death of Cardinal Piero, this abominable scheme would not have lacked completion. Nicholas had been a scholar and a gentleman; Calixtus, a zealous strenuous champion of an impractical cause; Pius, a gentle saintly genius and skilful statesman; Paul, a noble figure-head; Xystus, a plebeian nepotist; and Innocent was a lethargic paterfamilias. Naturally the condition of a kingdom, under such a series of sovereigns (considering the Popes in their temporal, and not in their spiritual capacity), would go from bad to worse.