Annotated Bibliography

Lucrezia Borgia has long played the role of Renaissance siren- poisonous, incestuous, and ambitious- and, more recently, the paradigmatic victim of patriarchal avarice and cunning. But for good or ill, she remains one of the most well-known personages of the Italian Renaissance; her fortunes inextricably tied to society's ever-changing attitudes about the culture in which she lived.

Walter Pater's famous phrase about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, that she embodied "the sins of the Borgias," indicates just how synonymous the name had become with decadence and moral turpitude. Thanks to the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, Johann Burchard, and Giorgio Vasari, her family's name was never forgotten through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it was in the nineteenth century that Lucrezia became a household name. Concurrently with the adoption of the term "Renaissance" to describe the time in which she lived, Lucrezia's image appeared in numerous poems, plays, novel, prints and paintings. Each of these works, some historical, others, purely imaginative, add another facet to Lucrezia's legend - one that continues to persist in the modern popular imagination.