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impressive following, Princess Maria Mancini with 24 Turks or Queen Christina with 24 Cardinals.” 16
    If anyone doubted Prince Colonna’s approval of his wife’s designs for carnival, the final masquerade in which he and Marie collaborated for the 1669 festivities laid those doubts to rest. It was unlike anything seen before. Seated on top of a huge rolling cage filled with animals, Marie presided, dressed as the sorceress Circe from Homer’s Odyssey, who had famously transformed Ulysses’s men into beasts. Lorenzo, masked as Ulysses, was among the gentlemen seated at her feet, holding dogs on leashes to represent the lovers Circe had transformed into animals. Drawings by the artist Pierre Perrin documenting the occasion illustrated Marie’s elaborate use of costumes, animals, and human actors. Circe, everyone knew, ultimately would be vanquished by the clever Ulysses, but his encounter with her was a familiar parable of male power vanquished by female seduction. Resplendent in her crown and holding a golden scepter on that February day in 1669, Marie was triumphant.
    The association of Marie Mancini with legendary enchantresses had begun with her liaison with Louis XIV ten years earlier. In choosing to represent Armida, Marie may have been remembering the whispers of those in France who thought she had “bewitched” the king. Anne of Austria’s lady-in-waiting Madame de Motteville had described Marie as Armida, and young Louis as the enchanted
Rinaldo, who had to be brought to his senses. As a young bride in Rome, Marie was compared in less ambiguous terms to the goddess of love, and her residence to the palace of Armida. At the palazzo Colonna, the art collections being amassed by Lorenzo and his wife included a painting depicting the legendary judgment of Paris, commissioned from the landscape artist Gaspard Dughet. Lorenzo posed as Paris, gazing in pride and adoration at the lovely Marie, who was Venus. Sometime in the year following the 1669 cavalcade, the Colonnas commissioned another painting of Marie by the portraitist Voet. This one, however, was much larger in scale and was a full-body portrait of the subject, dressed as an oriental queen in exotic furs and jewels. Everyone thought it was Armida.
    But the lavish celebrations at the palazzo Colonna and the public displays by a couple who collaborated in their patronage of the arts could not disguise the fact that their marriage was disintegrating. Foreign correspondents operating in Rome for the European gazettes sent reports of the breakdown in relations between the constable and his wife. 17 Marie began to spend more time in retreat in her library, poring over her collection of books on astrology. Predicting the future based on the alignment of the stars and planets had always fascinated her, and she had considerable expertise in the practice. During a difficult series of months in 1670, she wrote and published an astrological almanac. During the same period she felt her health declining, and by the late winter of 1671 she was seriously ill.
    Lorenzo was indifferent to her health. Even when she was crying out in pain for several nights, convulsed with stomach cramps, he exhibited no emotion. Though she recovered from this particular crisis, his indifference left her with dark suspicions that she could barely bring herself to share with those close to her. The Roman gazettes, though, did not hesitate to insinuate that Marie Colonna’s ailments might have been caused by poison. And some of Marie’s closest associates, including her longtime maidservant Morena,
brought her “evidence” of what they thought was a plot, hatched by Lorenzo, to do away with his wife. An anonymous letter addressed to the constable was intercepted and shown to Marie. In it the writer assured Colonna that his wife’s malady was incurable and urged him to find a new wife without delay. 18
    Meanwhile, as her estrangement from Lorenzo grew