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prominent aristocrat in violating that ban, a collective rebellion of noblewomen that had the effect of doing away with the restriction for good.
    For the 1669 carnival season Marie undertook projects that were even more provocative. She was tired of the constant criticism of her French-style “liberty” and her refusal to conform to Roman norms that kept women and men from socializing openly together. By this time her sister Hortense, the Duchess Mazarin, had joined Marie in Rome and they both took pleasure in challenging the city’s conservative customs. It was in this spirit, and to assert her innocence and fortitude, that Marie decided to disguise herself as the warrior maiden Clorinda from her favorite work, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata . “Thus,” she wrote,
    in order to pass the time less gloomily, and to silence those who were grumbling about the liberties they saw me taking, I conceived of a masquerade in which I played Clorinda. Followed by thirty or forty horsemen dressed as soldiers, I went around tossing a madrigal about in the way that maskers do; my brother and a friend of his, a gentleman called Marescoti, had composed it based on that idea, and here are the words:
    Do not suspect this warrior lover
Of any lapse in decorum,
For even if I’ve a virile air,
I keep intact the treasure of my honor.

How many women in the world
Are Penelope outwardly, but at heart, Phryne! 14
    The madrigal playfully yet boldly asserted four identities—warrior, maid, faithful wife, courtesan—for the disguised Marie. And why would Marie think that such flaunting of her liberty would silence those who criticized her for it? Marie embraced the “warrior lover” identity that Clorinda represented: Clorinda, the foreign princess knight who was beloved of her enemy, Prince Tancredi, and whom Tancredi would tragically and unknowingly kill in a nighttime battle. Describing her own personality, Marie would later write that she “loved vivacity and novelty, and talk of arms and soldierly subjects, rather than a peaceful place and a pacific government.” 15 Her choice of theatrical disguises certainly helped keep this combative spirit alive. Lorenzo at first went along with even the most outrageous of Marie’s masquerade schemes. He had his own reasons for encouraging the curiosity of Roman onlookers, even for offering fodder to the scandal-hungry gazettes. His approach to publicity was decidedly modern—whether the media coverage was positive or negative, Prince Colonna seemed to think that being in the public eye was almost always good. Enhancing his public profile by sponsoring spectacles that were both magnificent and titillating became a project he embraced, and one he viewed as comparable to the strategic use of spectacle that his “cousin” Louis XIV was famously achieving at his new palace of Versailles.
    During the 1669 carnival season, the lively competition between Marie and the expatriate Queen Christina of Sweden was played out in masquerades the two women sponsored as part of an equestrian tournament held on the Piazza di San Marco. Six cavaliers, including Lorenzo Colonna and Philippe Mancini, competed to catch a ring on the point of their lances and strike a dark-skinned figure symbolizing the Saracens, ancient adversaries of the Crusaders.
Queen Christina presided over the event, watching from her box overlooking the piazza, surrounded by twenty-four cardinals. Marie’s contribution to the spectacle was daring and provocative: in keeping with the theme of the Crusades, but drawing on the more fanciful legendary characters from her favorite work of literature by Tasso, Marie entered the parade on horseback, dressed as Armida, the sorceress who seduces the crusading hero Rinaldo, and followed by twenty-four cavaliers dressed as Turks. “It was hard to tell,” wrote one amused and bedazzled chronicler, “which of the two had a more