Marchesa di Mantua, patron of artists and poets, prolific letter writer, instrumental musician and singer Isabella d’Este was the first of six children born to Duke Ercole I d’Este, second duke of Ferrara (1431-1505), and to the daughter of King Fer-rante of Naples, Eleonora d’Aragona (d. 1493). Her brother Alfonso I (1476-1524) succeeded Ercole as duke of Ferrara, marrying first Anna Sforza (d. 1497) and then Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519). Her sister Beatrice (1475-1497) married Ludovico (“il Moro”) Sforza (14511508) and became duchess of Milan. Their younger brother Ippolito (1479-1520) rose to the ecclesiastical rank of cardinal.
Isabella has been portrayed by many as a female counterpart to the multifaceted Renaissance men who made her century famous. Schooling by humanists and sustained contacts with artists, intellectuals, and diplomats during her childhood prepared her for regency as consort to Francesco II Gonzaga (1466-1519), fourth marchese of Mantua, to whom she was betrothed in 1480. Contemporary accounts describe the child Isabella as verbally and socially precocious, possessing a prodigious memory, an eager learner who enjoyed danc-
Isabella d’Este, Marchesa di Mantua and patron of artists and poets. Painting by Titian, ca. 1536. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (Francis G. Mayer/Corbis)
Ing, horseback riding, and card games as well as Latin and the reading of chivalric romances.
On 11 February 1490, Isabella married Francesco Gonzaga in the ducal chapel of Ferrara. On 15 February, she made her triumphal entry into Mantua as his bride. From that day until her death, she played a powerful role in the culture and politics of the region, first as marchesa of Mantua and then, after Francesco’s death, as an auxiliary figure in the government of their son and heir, Federico II Gonzaga (1500-1540). Isabella and Francesco produced six surviving children. Eleonora (1493-1550) became duchess of Urbino when she married Francesco Maria della Rovere. Federico II was named first duke of Mantua by Habsburg Emperor Charles V in 1530 and married Mar-gherita Paleologo. Daughters Ippolita (1502— 1570) and Paola (1508—1569) chose to enter monastic life, thwarting marriage plans on their behalf. The second son, Ercole (also known as Alvise, 1505—1563), pursued a career in the papal court, where he obtained the rank of cardinal; and the third son, Ferrante (1507—1557), became an officer in the imperial forces, marrying Isabella di Capua.
Isabella d’Este is best known as a patron and a collector, a reputation she earned in large part by realizing a single, compact, and spectacular project in Mantua’s Ducal Palace. Shortly after her marriage, she began to engage artists to decorate a special suite in her private apartments, designated for the display of paintings, antiquities, and other signs of her culture and her values. Its centerpiece consisted of a small studiolo (or study), which communicated via a short staircase with a smaller chamber below it, known as thegrotta (grotto). Together these two rooms (known as her camerini) constituted one of the most impressive expressions of personal culture to be elaborated in the Italian Renaissance. Inspired by the studioli of contemporary humanist princes, by medieval and ancient treasury chambers, and perhaps by her mother’s apartments in Ferrara, this signature space developed as both an intimate retreat for private meditation and a showcase for select visitors to the Gonzaga court. The studiolo featured seven large narrative paintings by Andrea Mantegna, Lorenzo Costa, Pietro Perugino, and (after relocation of her apartments in 1519) Correggio. Increasing the grotta’s symbolic density were a number of highly wrought intarsia panels as well as Isabella’s collections of books, ancient and all’an-tica sculptures, cameos, medallions, and other precious finds. Frescoes, sculpted doorways, gilded ceilings, and tiles bearing enigmatic emblems and mottoes further ornamented these quarters, contributing to an intricate network of significations designed to project an image of the Marchesa as a woman of sovereign taste, substantial learning, and impeccable virtue.
Her art collection included works by Giovanni Bellini, Giancristoforo Romano, Michelangelo, Francesco Francia, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and others. (Her portrait was executed by the last three.) Isabella’s self-described “insatiable desire for things ancient” and her “appetite” for beautiful things, however, contributed to the Gonzaga household debt; her jewels were pawned repeatedly and for extended periods.
Isabella also devoted enormous attention to the applied arts, insisting on peerless quality in her personal and household acquisitions. Fabrics, gloves, jewelry, crystal, flowers, and buttons were all inspected meticulously by Isabella herself. Many were returned to their purveyors when found inferior to her standards. Her correspondence detailing these purchases documents Isabella’s status as a pioneer of fashion, cosmetic, and domestic design. She collaborated in the production of perfumes and cosmetics, exchanged recipes for use in the court kitchen, and worked with advisors on inventions for her clothing and jewelry. The round hat she wears in her portrait by Titian was a signature piece of her wardrobe. Motifs from the emblems decorating the studiolo were worked into her jewelry and her gowns.
At the time of her death Isabella’s library contained one hundred and thirty-three volumes, including works of Greek philosophy, a wide range of Latin classics (Cicero, Ovid, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca, Juvenal, and Horace among them), books of music, chivalric romances, theatrical comedies, religious sermons, saints’ lives, biographies, and prophecies. Also present were vernacular writings by Dante, Petrarch, Jacopo Sannazzaro, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Pietro Bembo, as well as many minor contemporaries. Her literary friends included Matteo Maria Boiardo, Niccolo da Correggio, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Mario Equicola, Balde-sar Castiglione, Bernardo da Bibbiena, Gian Giorgio Trissino, Bernardo Accolti, Ludovico
Ariosto, and Matteo Bandello, several of whom wrote works in her honor.
Isabella was musically literate, a trained vocalist who studied the clavichord, the lute, the viola da gamba, the vihuela da mano, and the lira da braccio. Her regular correspondence with the master instrument maker, Lorenzo da Pavia (d. 1517), records her purchase of several fine keyboard and string instruments; she also bought and borrowed instruments from others for her amateur musical activities. She sang alone and in private court companies, both accepting as gifts and commissioning texts to be set to music, especially by the composers Mar-chetto Cara (d. after 1525) and Bartolomeo Tromboncino (ca. 1470—after 1535).
Privileged, prominent, and proficient as she was, Isabella was nonetheless constrained as a woman to limit her public activities to tasks performed in the name of her husband or that fell traditionally to women at court. While Francesco was away on frequent duty as a con-dottiere (hired officer) in the service of Europe’s most powerful princes, Isabella excelled in diplomacy and administrative astuteness, but she was careful to defer officially to her husband’s higher authority and to present her decisions as the results of his instructions. Her activism, pragmatism, and discerning judgment are evident in arenas ranging from the pursuit of justice, to the protection of the rights of Mantuan subjects, to the arrangement of marriages for court functionaries, to the defense of women’s safety and property. When Francesco was captured and imprisoned by the Venetians (August 1509—July 1510), Isabella acted as Mantua’s sole regent, successfully fending off foreign contenders for Gonzaga territories. Subsequent to these events, relations between Isabella and Francesco cooled, partly as a result of suspicions planted by his Venetian captors that Francesco’s wife had betrayed him politically. Another factor, however, may have been the marchese’s increasingly evident affliction with syphilis, which estranged Isabella from their marriage bed.
Isabella’s duties included presiding over the Mantuan court in her husband’s absence, but when Francesco was in residence, she herself relished travel on the Italian peninsula. Sometimes her trips were justified by religious pledges to visit holy shrines, as with her 1502 and 1523 travels to Venice; on other occasions her motivations were political, as was true of her 1525 journey to Rome in hopes of securing a cardinalship for her son, Ercole. In many cases she performed combined ambassadorial and social functions, as in her visits to Milan (1491, 1513) or her 1510 travel to Rome and Naples. At still other times, she journeyed merely for pleasure and recreation, as in the case of her regular summer expeditions to Lake Garda. In these contexts Isabella proved a passionate traveler, eager to see the world; an able diplomat with an innate sense of occasion and opportunity; and an excellent travel correspondent. Her descriptions of ceremonies, festivities, and theatrical productions are among the most detailed records to survive from the period. Among her closest friends and occasional travel companions were her sister-in-law, the duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga da Montefeltro (1471—1526), and Emilia Pia da Carpi (d. 1528), both of whom are immortalized in Castiglione’s 1528 Book of the Courtier.
Soon after Francesco’s death from syphilis in 1519, Isabella transferred her apartments to a less central location of the palace. In the next twenty years, she continued to travel, making several trips to Venice and witnessing the sack of Rome in 1527. In 1525, upon the death of her brother-in-law, Cardinal Sigismondo Gon-zaga (b. 1469), she purchased Solarolo, a small fief near Imola. There, for the first time in her life, she acted as sole regent and governed according to her own principles and procedures. She died on 13 February 1539 in Ferrara.
Though the Gonzaga-Nevers line ruled until 1707, the Gonzaga court at Mantua essentially vanished with the extinction in 1627 ofVincenzo II, the last heir of the original line. Vincenzo had sold the choicest works from the court’s art collection to Charles I of England (1600—1649), and any remaining treasures were carried off in subsequent years under Mantua’s domination by Austria and France. Paintings and other objects from Isabella’s magnificent camerini now reside in museums inVienna, Paris, London, and New York as well as in Mantua and other Italian cities.
Among the many remnants of Isabella’s court still remaining in Mantua, however, are secretarial copies of over twelve thousand of her letters, together with a rich array of Gon-zaga correspondence with persons in courts throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond. These documents tell remarkable tales, often in great detail, of the daily life and the extraordinary experience of Isabella d’Este and her generation.
Deanna Shemek
Relazioni familiari e nelle vicende politiche. Turin: Roux and Co., 1893.
Prizer, WiBiam F.“Una ‘Virtu Molto Conveniente a Madonne’: Isabella d’Este as a Musician.”
The Journal of Musicology 17, no. 1 (1999): 10-49.
San Juan, Rose Marie.“The Court Lady’s
Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance.” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1991): 67-78.
Shemek, Deanna. “In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Epistolary Desire.” In Phaethon’s Children:The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005.
Shemek, Deanna. “Isabella d’Este and the Properties of Persuasion.” In Form and Persuasion in Early Modern Women’s Letters Across Europe. Edited by Ann Crabb and Jane Couchman, 108-134. Brookfield, VT:Ashgate, 2005.
See also Art and Women; Borgia, Lucrezia;
Eleonora d’Aragona; the subheadings Letter Writing and Literary Patronage (under Literary Culture and Women).
Bibliography
Bellonci, Maria. Private Renaissance. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Morrow, 1989.
Brown, Clifford M. Per dare qualche splendore a la gloriosa cita di Mantua. Documents for the Antiquarian Collection of Isabella d’Este. Rome: Bulzoni, 2002.
Brown, Clifford M., and Anna Maria Lorenzoni.
Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da Pavia. Documents for the History of Art and Culture in Renaissance Mantua. Geneva: Droz, 1982.
Campbell, Stephen. The Studiolo of Isabella D’este: Reading, Collecting and the Invention of Mythological Painting. New Haven and London:Yale University Press, forthcoming.
Cartwright, Julia. Isabella d’Este Marchioness of Mantua, 1474—1539:A Study in the Renaissance. London: John Murray, 1907.
Ferino-Pagden, Silvia, ed. ”La prima donna del mondo”: Isabella d’Este, Furstin und Mdzenatin der Renaissance. Vienna: Ausstellungskatalog des Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1994.
Luzio, Alessandro. Iprecettori di Isabella d’Este. Ap-punti e documenti per le nozze Renier-Campostrini. Ancona, Italy:A. Gustavo Morelli, 1887.
Luzio, Alessandro, and Rodolfo Renier. Mantova e Urbino:Isabella d’Este ed Elisabetta Gonzaga nelle
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