Her family has been portrayed as evil.  She was painted with the same brush.  Dario Fo now tells her true story.

Lucrezia has long been portrayed as an incestuous femme fatale who poisoned her enemies. But the Nobel prize-winning writer Dario Fo is trying to rehabilitate the Renaissance aristocrat as a peaceful, courageous victim of her family’s misdeeds.

Fo, 88, has attacked the depiction of Borgia in books, plays and films; he singled out the television series The Borgias, starring Holliday Grainger as Lucrezia and Jeremy Irons as her father Pope Alexander VI, saying it “borders on pornography”.

“The focus is all on sex, the plots are coarse,” said Fo who publishes his own take on her, The Pope’s Daughter. “They make her out as a poisoner, a woman who slept with her father and her brother, an evil woman who just accepted the husbands her father imposed on her.”

Fo says Lucrezia was neither subservient, nor violent. “The accusations are all false,” he said.