Books: Scoundrels and Statistics

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PRINCES OF THE RENAISSANCE by Orville Prescott. 397 pages. Random House. $8.95.

"The capacity of women to love scoundrels," writes Orville Prescott, "is one of the abiding marvels of the world." Prescott may be right. In this compendium of scoundrels, he offers much evidence to prove his point. Galeazzo Sforza, for instance, was so cruel that he once had a courtier, fallen from favor, nailed up in a chest. Then, the story goes, he gleefully listened to the dying man's moans. Still, when assassins cut Sforza down at the door of a church, his wife, the Duchess Bona of Milan, mournfully wrote to Pope Sixtus IV, declaring that "after God," she loved Galeazzo above all.

Readers may not be quite so fond of Prescott's villains. Like the inhumanities catalogued in contemporary prison-camp memoirs, run-of-the-mill Renaissance crimes tend to numb rather than fascinate. The really memorable princes in Prescott's collection are those theatrical exceptions who distinguish themselves not by bloodiness but by generosity and whimsy. Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, for instance, was a king so loved that he could walk the streets of his capital without an escort —during a century when neighboring Rome reached a reported average of 14 murders a day. Gentle Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino liked to ride through his duchy with a band of trumpeters, drummers and Italian bagpipers spreading harmony as he went.

Fowls and Mistresses. As a historian, Prescott is something of an anomaly. In his 24 years as the respected if slightly stuffy daily book reviewer for the New York Times, he criticized many a history and learned well to separate fact from fable. This talent won him his current commission as special editor for a series of Doubleday books, Crossroads of World History. It is evident, too, in his debunking of some of the more cherished legends of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, Prescott is not quite so fastidious about his prose. His style is as crotchety as it sometimes was in his critical days, and often banal to boot.

Despite such shortcomings, Princes of the Renaissance offers modest rewards, as it could hardly fail to do considering the richness of the period. Even the statistics in such a book can be intriguing: the 800 mistresses of Niccolo d'Este, the Marquis of Ferrara (one cannot help wondering who counted them); the 2,000 oxen and 80,000 fowl reportedly consumed at the two-week wedding feast for Niccolo's son Leonello and Maria of Aragon; the 200 souls trampled to death in a traffic jam on Rome's Sant' Angelo bridge during the 1450 jubilee celebration.

Missed Drama. For the zealous reader interested in a genuine perspective, Jacob Burckhardt's masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published a century ago, is still unmatched for breadth and depth. Prescott's anecdotal effort does not bear comparison with it. Playing Leonard Lyons to the age, Prescott not only misses the central drama but often seems to substitute bizarre performance for more illuminating characterization. Perhaps it is simply that there are too many characters: in a book that revolves around famous families, there are no fewer than 29 d'Estes, 23 Sforzas, 23 Gonzagas.