ALEXANDER VI AND HIS BROTHER
Kennedy and Cæsar entered the first room, the Hall of the Mysteries, and the Englishman stopped in front of a picture of the Resurrection. “Here you have Alexander VI, on his knees, adoring Christ who is leaving the tomb. He is the type of a Southerner; he has a hooked nose, a long head, tonsured, a narrow forehead, thick lips, a heavy beard, a strong neck, and small chubby hands. He wears a papal robe of gold, covered with jewels; the tiara is on the ground beside him. Of the soldiers, it is supposed that the one asleep by the sepulchre and the one who is waking and rising up, pulling himself to his knees by the aid of his lance, are two of the Pope’s sons, Cæsar and the Duke of Gandia. I rather believe that the little soldier with the lance is a woman, perhaps Lucrezia. How does your countryman strike you, my friend?”
“He is of Mediterranean race, a dolichocephalic Iberian; he has the small melon-shaped head, the sensual features. He is leptorrhine. He comes of an intriguing, commercial, lying, and charlatan race.”
“To which you have the honour to belong,” said Kennedy, laughing.
“Certainly.”
“They say this man was a great enthusiast about his countrymen and the customs of his country. These tiles, which are remains of the original floor, and the plates you see here, are Valencian. A Spanish painter told me that several letters of Alexander VI’s are preserved in the archives of the cathedral at Valencia, one among them asking to have tiles sent.”
Kennedy walked forward a little and planted himself before an Assumption of the Virgin, and said:
“It is supposed that this gloomy man dressed in red, with a little fringe of hair on his brow, is a brother of the Pope’s.”
“A bad type to encounter in the Tribunal of the Inquisition,” said Cæsar; “imagine what this red-robed fellow would have done with that Jew at the Excelsior, Señor Pereira, if he had happened to have him in his power.”
“In the soffits,” Kennedy went on, “as you see, are repetitions of the symbols of Iris, Osiris, and the bull Apis, doubtless because of their resemblance to the Christian symbols, and also because the bull Apis recalls the bull in the Borgia arms.” “Their arms were a bull?”