The two men ought to have detested one another. They had loved the same woman; each had ample cause to believe himself aggrieved by the other. Yet, in the account Matteo Bandello left of the affair, their encounter did not end in a duel. They spoke. And their conversation revealed that Bianca Maria had besought each of them to put his rival to death.
The scene possesses all the cruel elegance of a Renaissance novella. It has not come down to us in the dry form of a judicial transcript: Bandello recounts a real affair with the instruments of a man of letters—his dialogues, his preferences, and his prejudices. Beneath this literary composition, however, there remain real names, real victims, and an authentic sentence. In Milan, in the year 1526, Ardizzino Valperga and his brother Carlo were assassinated; Bianca Maria Gaspardone, Countess of Challant, was executed as the instigator. Between these deaths lie differing accounts, unanimous regarding the blood that was shed, yet divided as to how justice obtained its proofs.
The Heiress and the Two Marriages
Bianca Maria came from Casale Monferrato. She had married Ermes Visconti, and subsequently, upon being left a widow, René de Challant. Her fortune rendered her alliance a matter whose ambitions far exceeded those of two mere lovers. Bandello evokes the suitors, the interventions of great personages, and the calculations prompted by a wealthy heiress. He likewise describes her entry into Milan in a magnificently adorned carriage, the gift of her first husband’s brother.
The storyteller had encountered her in person within the household of Ippolita Sforza Bentivoglio. He recalled a young bride eager to frequent festive gatherings, and a husband who severely curtailed her excursions. Yet this recollection, committed to paper long after the denouement, is already weighed down with a verdict. Bandello ultimately vindicates the jealous husband, as though the impending crime retrospectively justified every former suspicion.
He must be stripped of another convenient artifice. The biography established by Donatella Rosselli rectifies the base lineage he imputes to his heroine: the Gaspardone family had been raised to the nobility, and her mother belonged to a house of notable standing. Bianca Maria was by no means the low-born creature from whom the chronicler sought to deduce a sinister destiny. Archival records do not invariably conform to the moral design of novellas.
The second marriage did not endure in practice, though the legal bond remained unbroken. Bianca Maria quit her husband and established herself at Pavia. It is there that Bandello situates her liaison with Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino, an officer in the Emperor’s service. For upwards of a year, by his account, the two lovers scarcely concealed their mutual attachment. Then another man entered upon the scene: Roberto Sanseverino, Count of Caiazzo.
Confidences Returned to Light
The rupture with Ardizzino degenerated into open insult. The former lover spoke publicly of Bianca Maria; she came to learn of what he had uttered. The quarrel ceased to be confined to the lover’s private closet: it circulated abroad, borne along by those who took pleasure in repeating an offense while protesting that they deplored it.
Bianca Maria then solicited Sanseverino to make away with Ardizzino. In Bandello’s version, he promised much and performed nothing. He knew the Count of Masino, possessed no personal motive to slay him, and indeed continued in his company. The woman who awaited a bloody proof of devotion thus beheld him maintaining cordial relations with her designated victim.
She turned away from him. The chronicler next depicts a return to Ardizzino, accompanied by apologies and fresh promises. Yet this reconciliation does not conclude his plot: it reverses its direction. Bianca Maria is said on this occasion to have portrayed Sanseverino as an enemy bent on having Ardizzino murdered. She reportedly urged him to forestall the peril by striking the first blow.
Ardizzino was not to be persuaded. Rather than hiring ruffians, he went directly to speak with the alleged conspirator. The two former rivals compared the confidences they had received. In Bandello’s narrative, they discovered the very same request preferred from two opposing quarters. This alliance of discarded lovers aggravated Bianca Maria’s humiliation: that which she had sought to keep within the shadows of intimacy had become a tale bandied about to her detriment.
We cannot vouch for the exact tenor of these private exchanges. They nevertheless provide the internal logic of the novella’s version: the first men solicited refuse the murder, draw close to one another, and leave the countess to seek out a more pliant instrument. What follows departs from the realm of threats and enters that of a veritable ambuscade.
The Third Man
In Milan, Bianca Maria formed a connection with Pietro de Cardona, a young officer commanding a retinue of armed men. Bandello depicts him as an inexperienced gallant, dazzled to find himself preferred by a lady of such rank. The portrait plainly serves the purposes of his narrative; it explains the crime through the infatuation of a youth, while concentrating all the calculated malice of the deed upon the countess.
Cardona accepted that which the others had declined. Having learned that Ardizzino was to sup abroad, he laid an ambush along his return route. The former lover was walking in company with his brother Carlo and several servants. Armed men lay in wait. The narrow thoroughfare described by Bandello offered them virtually no means of evading the assault. Both brothers were slain.
Authority intervened without delay. Charles of Bourbon, who represented the imperial power in Milan, caused Cardona and subsequently Bianca Maria to be apprehended. From this juncture, the chronicles diverge fundamentally. Bandello has the countess denounced immediately by her lover. He adds that she sought to rely upon her wealth to purchase her liberty, and that she ultimately confirmed the accusation herself.
The chronicler Grumello, whose version is set forth in critical biography, assigns a very different weight to denunciation and the torture of the serving-women. The original acts of the trial have not survived. Confessions thus alter in meaning according to whether they appear as an unprompted disclosure or as the culmination of judicial violence. The condemnation is certain; not all the paths that led to it are equally clear.
On the twentieth of October 1526, Bianca Maria was beheaded at the Castello of Milan. Bandello asserts that Cardona had succeeded in escaping from prison; he concludes with a scene in which she continues to call upon his name. This final movement belongs as much to his novella as to the historical memory of the affair. It affords the author an impeccable conclusion: she who had demanded death cannot obtain the solace of beholding the living once more.
Execution did not, therefore, dispel the contradictions that already encompassed the prisoner at the hour of her death. Two brothers assassinated; a woman condemned; narratives that reduce every circumstance to the course of her amorous conduct. To recover Bianca Maria, one must pass through a double enclosure: the walls of the fortress where she suffered her punishment, and the sentences wherein the men of her age imprisoned her a second time.