Godfathers a Renaissance Tapestry: the Gonzaga of Mantua by Kate Simon Harper & Row; 309 pages; $22.50

By R.Z. Sheppard

Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks dragging through pools of blood, chivalric elegance living with bestiality in high places, the silver rose boxed with the dagger, fidelity bedded with perfidy, remain a collage whose fascination has never quite faded."

The names of the actors too linger like legendary godfathers and godmothers. Among them: Lorenzo ("the Magnificent") de' Medici, Ludovico ("the Moor") Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia, a victim of tabloid history's sensational headlines. Reports that Lucrezia was a sexual adventurer who mixed a heavy drink have never been adequately substantiated.

Simon concentrates on the less-known but equally compelling Gonzaga of Mantua, a city, she notes with subdued irony, that was dismissed in the 1923 edition of Cook's Guide as "of no interest except for art and history." The distinction between the two was not always apparent during the Renaissance. Like other leading families of the time, the Gonzaga schemed, fought and intermarried for almost three centuries to secure power and wealth, which they used to glorify their names with masterpieces. It was a good time for architects, painters, goldsmiths, furniture makers, costume designers and jewelers. According to the historian Charles Osman, Pope Leo X was so totally preoccupied with beauty and culture that his contemporaries "doubted even if he were a good Christian, but were certain that he was a good art-critic."

The extent of the Gonzaga art treasures was revealed in the mid-17th | century, a period marking the clan's decline. Smelling a credit crunch, dealers alighted in Mantua to bargain for works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Veronese and Van Dyke. Simon estimates that 700 paintings by these and other masters were sold, and eventually found various ways into the world's museums. One immovable prize was the Gonzaga pleasure palace at Te, the walls and ceilings of which bloomed with mural paintings that were forerunners of the mannerist style.

Even earlier, the lives of Mantua's rich and famous had grown so excessive that Cardinal Ercole, a Gonzaga, ordered controls. "His new rules," writes Simon, "called for severe restrictions in the consumption of peacocks, pheasants, and other game birds; only two kinds of roast and poultry were to be served at one time; no fish or oysters were to be offered with meats; dishes were not to be ornamented with figurines, fine inlays, bits of gold, as was the court custom." Women were limited to wearing "only one conspicuous gem" at a time.

The crackdown failed. Life was literally too short to skimp on pleasure and display. Untreatable diseases made 50 years an advanced age. The slow plague of syphilis is one of the smoldering subtexts of Simon's brimming narrative. Prostitutes gave the contagion to their customers, who passed it on to their wives. If women were not rendered barren by the bacterium, there were always the risks of childbirth and puerperal fever. Women were meant to provide heirs and cement profitable agreements through wedlock.

In her autobiography, Simon recalls her father's efforts to thwart her own intellectual curiosity. Here she writes with scarcely disguised bitterness of one promising Gonzaga daughter: "Her impressive knowledge of Virgil, every line, didn't matter, nor did her command of Greek, and so what if she could explain the propositions of Euclid? Her vocation was marriage."

Renaissance women like the connoisseur Isabella d'Este-Gonzaga, the poet Vittoria Colonna, the medical experimenter Caterina Sforza and Renee of France, who married into the court of Ferrara and founded a distinguished academy there, appear to have been the equal of their male counterparts in everything but the arts of war. But, as the determined faces in Simon's glittering tapestry suggest, many important victories were won in alcoves and bedrooms.