ESTE. FAMILY of - Autograph of Ippolito II d'E., preserved in the State Archives of Modena (12 March 1571).
Giulio plotted, together with Count Albertino Boschetti and others, a conspiracy to kill Alfonso and Ippolito and give Ferrante the duchy. But in Alfonso’s absence, Ippolito, having discovered the plot, had its authors arrested. Boschetti was executed with other accomplices. The two Este brothers, spared their lives, remained in prison: Ferrante died there in 1540; Giulio emerged extremely old in 1559 and died two years later.
Ippolito maintained a very numerous court, and among his gentlemen were Celio Calcagnini, Annibale Collenuccio son of Pandolfo, Guido Postumo Silvestri, and many others named in the last canto of the Furioso; but the most celebrated was Ludovico Ariosto, who entered his service in 1503 and was dismissed by him in 1517 for having refused to follow him to Hungary. Ariosto dedicated the Furioso to him; but the fact that the cardinal would not forgive him his disobedience, the poet’s complaints in the Satire against the lord who had made him, «di poeta», «cavallaro», and the allegedly mocking appraisal of the poem, have given Ippolito the reputation of an overbearing and uncultivated prince. In reality, although he was violent and authoritarian in character, he possessed broad culture, a lively passion for music, and a love of the arts, as his cordial relations with Leonardo da Vinci attest. It is highly probable that the mocking phrase attributed to him is mere legend, since the earliest references occur only in seventeenth-century French authors, from whom the Italians reproduced it in the eighteenth century.
BBL.: G. Bertoni, L'Orlando Furioso e la Rinascenza a Ferrara, Modena 1919, passim; M. Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, Geneva 1931, passim.