Ercole Strozzi

Son of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, was born in Ferrara between 1470 and 1475 and was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in the same city in 1508. In 1506 he succeeded his father as a judge of the XII Savi (12 Sages) imposing absurd taxes on the people of Ferrara. He was a student of Aldo Manuzio, as was Alberto Pio da Carpi, was a close friend of Pietro Bembo and had close and cordial ties with Lucrezia Borgia. Renowned for his refined culture and his good looks, Ercole Strozzi published the Latin Elegies with Manuzio, in Venice in 1513, and composed five sonnets in Italian. The play staged at palazzo Strozzi in 1493 has instead never reached posterity. He married the beautiful Barbara Torelli. His relationship with Ludovico Ariosto dates back to infancy and adolescence when, in all probability, he attended the lessons of the humanist Luca Ripa with Ludovico in the period 1486-1489. Ariosto dedicated to Ercole Strozzi an elegy in which he morns the premature death of the Hellenising poet Michele Marullo, who had drowned in the River Cecina. Ercole Strozzi’s collection of elegies known as Venatio, which has since been lost, contained allusions to Ludovico’s youthful loves: in a fantasized hunt that fictitiously took place in 1496, a very young Ludovico is described as immersed in meditation over Pasifile’s elegies, raped by an uncouth rival. At dawn on 6 June 1508 Ercole was found on the ground with his throat slashed at the corner of the streets called Savonarola and Praisolo in Ferrara. The corpse was disfigured by twenty two wounds. This truculent episode led to much gossip and legend: the murder was perhaps commissioned by an abandoned and jealous Lucrezia Borgia or, as is more likely, by Ercole Bentivoglio, Barbara Torelli’s first husband. For sure Strozzi’s murder  was subsequently exploited by the enemies of the House of Este, as for example by the bellicose Julius II who, in 1510, in an audience conceded to the ambassador from Ferrara Ruini, threw upon Duke Alfonso I d’Este the ignoble and instrumental accusation of having been behind the murder of Ercole Strozzi.