Another friendship, of perhaps a yet closer and more intimate kind, was that which sprung up between Olympia and the Princess Lavinia della Rovere. This daughter of the Ducal family of Urbino had recently married Paolo Orsini, when, at the court of Ferrara, she became acquainted with Olympia. Lavinia, says the historian of her husband's family,[69] "was a lady of most excellent and cultivated mind, inasmuch as, besides her other rare and excellent qualities, she was devoted to philosophy and the other branches of profane literature;" "alla filosofia, e all'altre belle lettere humane." This, too, was a friendship for life; and, despite the wide difference in the social standing and circumstances of the two friends, was one, in which the most perfect equality of affection placed these two natures—highly gifted both—in the relative position to each other, which their respective calibre of intellect made the fitting and natural one, of guide and guided, as is seen from the letters of Olympia in after life.
The remarkable limitation in Sansovino's above quoted eulogy to excellence in philosophy and _profane_ literature, would seem to imply that Lavinia, at the time of which the writer is speaking, had paid no attention to the theological questions which were agitating the world. It may be, that the orthodox historian of the house of Orsini merely intended to indicate in a manner reflecting as little scandal as might be on the family of his patron, that in the province of religion there was little good to be said of the lady Lavinia. Either meaning on the part of a good Catholic would have done her little wrong at the time of her companionship with Olympia at the court of Ferrara.
The general movement of mind, and the ventilation of theological questions which was stirring society from the monk's cell to the lady's bower, had produced on both the friends a destructive, but as yet no constructive result. They had ceased to believe the incredibilities taught by the Church; and their emancipation had brought them to a state,—if not of entirely comfortable and contented indifferentism, yet to one of unanxious infidelity, in which their meditations were rather curious speculations, than struggles for vital truth.