ABSTRACT
Like others elites in Renaissance Italy, Caterina Sforza lived her life planning for the future. Her actions to ensure her regency, from maintaining a splendid lifestyle to cool-headed diplomacy, were ostensibly for her sons and their descendents, as was her attention to their educations and careers. Her secular and religious patronage was meant to establish a lasting reputation as a virtuous wife, mother, and widow that would similarly benefit her family. As the previous chapters have shown, Caterina was clearly adept in her own self-invention. Her life proved to be a fertile ground for later generations to sow their adaptations of her story. Donald Weinstein’s comment above suggests that Caterina exemplifies her age, but her various biographies have largely been products of their times and places, whether it be the princely courts of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy, the emergent nationalism of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Italy, or the field of gender studies in the present era. In this capacity her story reveals the way our understanding of “the Renaissance” itself is mutable, a product of changing historiographic trends as much as any truly accurate account of the era. This chapter traces the ongoing construction of the life of Caterina Sforza to examine the appropriation, manipulation, and misunderstanding of what is now a legendary biography. Her posthumous legend is indeed an invention, or, more specifically, a series of reinventions that have served the shifting political agendas of a range of players from Niccolò Machiavelli to Joan Kelly.
