Born: 18 May 1474, Italy
Died: 13 February 1539
Country most active: Italy
Also known as: Isabel, Isabeau, Isabella Gonzaga
What a Renaissance plate reveals about a woman who shaped literary history
Maria Clotilde Camboni, University of Oxford
The expression is: “handed to you on a silver plate”. But a recent breakthrough came to me on a painted ceramic one. Following the clues on that plate led me to solve a small historical puzzle: who once owned a Renaissance manuscript now held in Paris.
Known as a maiolica, the plate features three different imprese: that is, emblems used during the Renaissance as personal badges. Under a coat of arms is a music scroll bearing pauses and rests; on a balustrade in the foreground, the Latin motto Nec spe nec metu (neither by hope nor by fear), and, repeated twice, the most unassuming of all: a Latin numeral, XXVII.
I had seen that number years earlier, inside an embellishment on the first page of a manuscript at Paris’ Bibliothèque nationale de France, not far from where the plate was being shown, on a temporary loan from the V&A to the Al Thani Collection Foundation. The manuscript was a partial copy of a lost one, and I had been trying to figure out where it came from.
The coat of arms and the different imprese were all Isabella d’Este’s (1474–1539), Marchioness of Mantua, daughter of Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara and Eleanor of Aragon. The answer was suddenly obvious: the Parisian manuscript was originally in her personal library.
Despite marrying at just 16, Isabella was an extremely well-educated woman. This likely helped her to play her part in ruling Mantua, especially when her husband Francesco Gonzaga was away fighting in the Italian wars and then taken prisoner. She also had considerable personal financial resources, and was free to spend her money as she wished, enabling her to become the most significant female collector of the Italian Renaissance.
A patron of the arts, Isabella was portrayed in medals, paintings and drawings by several artists, including Leonardo da Vinci. To house her antiquities and artworks, she adapted some rooms within her apartments. One of them was known as her studiolo, a room dedicated to private reading and writing. Many leading artists were commissioned paintings to adorn it, as well as her new apartment in Mantua, where she moved after her husband’s death in 1519.
Isabella’s considerable library was also housed there. A partial inventory drawn up after her death reveals that it was more akin to the libraries of Renaissance elite men than courtly women. It consisted mostly of contemporary books and secular works, instead of inherited volumes and religious texts, and it contained an unusually high proportion of handwritten books.
During her lifetime, Isabella used at least eight different imprese. These could be marks of possession, as seen with the Parisian manuscript and the V&A plate, as well as the other 23 surviving pieces of its dinner service. However, they were also intended to convey coded messages.
A Renaissance impresa contained some sort of personal statement, concerning its bearer’s situation, philosophy, aspirations, personal qualities. Unlike coats of arms, which were inherited, it expressed nothing related to family lines or social standing, could be used by anyone who decided to design one and altered or discarded at will.
Since its true meaning required interpretation, an impresa was often ambiguous. Isabella’s pauses and rests on a musical scroll could signify silence, a traditionally feminine virtue, but also, being symmetrical, a visual representation of the principle of balance – not unlike her Latin motto. Whatever its meaning, it was one of those Isabella chose to adorn the gowns she wore for special occasions, namely, her brother Alfonso’s wedding to Lucrezia Borgia in 1502.
The marchioness did not appreciate overly complicated explanations of her imprese. In 1506, when the author Mario Equicola wrote a booklet on her Latin motto, she stated in a letter to the noblewoman who was protecting him at the time that “we did not have it created with as many mysteries as he has attributed to it”.
Isabella’s Latin motto was, unusually, reused by others, including one of her sons and a Spanish king. Not so the enigmatic XXVII. Its presence on the first page of the Parisian manuscript is therefore proof of Isabella’s ownership.
Other evidence was already known. The Parisian manuscript is a partial copy of the lost Raccolta Aragonese, an anthology of rare early Italian poetry, gifted by the statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici to Federico d’Aragona, son of the king of Naples, around 1477. The last sovereign of his dynasty, Federico went into exile in France with his books.
After his death, most of them passed to his widow, who settled in Ferrara under the protection of Isabella’s family. Her letters reveal that in January 1512 she managed to borrow the collection:
“The book of the first vernacular poets that Your Majesty was so good as to lend me I will hold in all due respect and reverence, and it will not fall into the hands of anyone else. As soon as I have finished with it, I will send it back to Your Majesty, whom I thank for her great humanity toward me.”
Isabella was not lying. She wanted the book because of the rarity of its contents, and she liked to be the sole or near-sole owner of texts. We could already hypothesise that she had commissioned a copy, and we now know this to be true. Thanks to her initiative, these rare poems enjoyed wider circulation; but this is a result neither she nor her correspondent could have anticipated.
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Maria Clotilde Camboni, Honorary Research Fellow, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This biography was originally published in the World History Encyclopedia and was written by Kelly Macquire. It is shared in line with the Encyclopedia’s policies under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Isabella d’Este (l. 1474-1539), was the leading lady of Renaissance Italy who funded the works of such renowned artists as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Many of the greatest Renaissance artworks would not exist today if not for the patronage of Isabella, who is also considered the female counterpart of the “Renaissance Men” who tirelessly worked to increase their knowledge.
Early Life
Isabella was the daughter of Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara and Eleanora d’Aragona who was the daughter of King Ferrante of Naples. Isabella was the eldest of six children; her sister Beatrice d’Este became the Duchess of Milan, and at the age of 6, Isabella was betrothed to Francesco II Gonzaga (1466-1519). Isabella lived her entire childhood knowing that she would one day be married to the Marquess of Mantua. Isabella was luckier than most girls of the Renaissance because her parents believed in equal schooling for boys and girls. This meant she grew up with the best classical education, becoming a talented singer, dancer, and lute player. She enjoyed horseback riding, card games, and was proficient in both Latin and Greek (although she only carried on with the Latin through adulthood).
On 11 February 1490, at the age of 15, Isabella married Francesco and became the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella and Francesco had five children who reached adulthood; their daughter Eleonora Gonzaga became the Duchess of Urbino, their son Federico II Gonzaga succeeded his father as Marquess and then became the first Duke of Mantua, and their son Ercole became a cardinal of the Catholic church.
Isabella as Co-Regent of Mantua
When her husband Francesco was called away as a hired officer for some of the most powerful princes of Europe, Isabella took to managing the diplomatic and administrative needs of Mantua. Isabella proved herself to be both pragmatic and proficient whilst in charge of the region, although she was careful to present the decisions and actions she made as per her husband’s orders. When Isabella was acting as co-regent, she used her position to make changes and advise upon a multitude of areas within her region, which included criminal justice and the justice system, agricultural and land management, public health, marriages for court officials, and the defence of women’s property and safety.
Although she was working within the limitations impressed upon women in the Renaissance period, Isabella still used what power and influence she could wield in the name of her husband as resourcefully as possible. Even with her need to work within the confines of her husband’s approval, Isabella still did a better job at running Mantua than Francesco. During their marriage, Francesco Gonzaga was engaged in an affair with Lucrezia Borgia, who was the wife of Isabella’s brother Alfonso, and the Duchess of Ferrara. It is thought that it was Francesco feeling like less of a man due to Isabella’s efficiency that was the catalyst for the affair. When Francesco was home, Isabella took the chance to travel as the diplomatic representative of their court and Mantua. She negotiated deals for the Gonzaga name and represented Mantua’s interests all throughout Italy.
The letters of Isabella d’Este give us a unique look into the lives of women in high positions in the Renaissance period. Throughout her life, Isabella wrote frequent correspondence to Francesco both when she was representing them at home and when she was travelling for business and pleasure. Her letters describing festivals and ceremonies from her travels are still some of the most detailed records to survive from her time. Isabella archived her letters, of which more than 12,000 survive, as if she wanted them to be preserved for as long as possible. Her correspondence while Francesco was away documented her activities in court as his proxy political leader in great detail.
In August 1509, Francesco was captured by the Venetians and held hostage, and during his time as a captive, until he was released in July of 1510, Isabella was the sole ruler of Mantua. During this time, Isabella successfully defended her region from foreign contenders for territories owned by the Gonzagas. When Francesco died in 1519, their son Federico succeeded his father as Marquess of Mantua and would eventually become the first Duke of Mantua. Since Federico was only 19 years old when his father died, Isabella took over the role of regent. For the next 20 years, she travelled both for fun and diplomacy, and in 1525 she purchased the estate of land known as Solarolo, where she acted as sole regent and could implement her own procedures and decisions. In 1527, she witnessed the sack of Rome and converted her home into a shelter for people needing refuge and ended up housing around 2,000 people. Perhaps in a stroke of luck, Isabella’s was one of the only homes which remained unscathed.
Patron of the Arts
Isabella was a skilled diplomat and was a formidable asset to the administrative and political landscape of Mantua, as saved for posterity through her letters with Francesco, but her legacy is as a patron and lover of the arts. It was not long after her marriage before Isabella began engaging with artists to decorate a special suite in her apartments, which she worked on for the next 20 years. This particular suite was for displaying the paintings, antiquities, cameos, portraits, books, and other precious items she had collected. The centre of her space was the studiolo or study which was decorated with paintings commissioned by Isabella, which boasted mythological scenes. The studiolo was connected by a staircase to a smaller room directly below it known as the grotta. This area was used to display her curated art pieces which exemplified her philosophical values her substantial learning and her personal tastes and virtues. It would have been a private space for Isabella to use to entertain select visitors of the court. After her husband died, she moved both the studiolo and the grotta to a different area of the palace.
To be a patron was to be a financial backer of a piece of art, and the patron was often also in control of the subject matter, size, and materials of the artwork. Isabella had her portrait painted by great artists such as Leonardo de Vinci and Titian and had art in her collection by Giovanni Bellini, Michelangelo, Francesco Francia, and many others. Isabella is also considered a potential subject for Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa.
Through her patronage of the arts and her general love of collecting pieces, she increased the debt of the Gonzaga family, and her artistic ambitions were more than she could afford. Luckily, she could use her status as an incentive for artists to produce work for her, since she was a prominent patron. This meant that prestige would be given to both the artist and the patron. Much like her correspondence to Francesco, Isabella also conceived detailed letters of her acquisitions which documents the extent and quality of her collection. These correspondences also give us the voice of Isabella in letter form, as well as an insight into art patronage and the processes of it in the Renaissance.
The following is excerpted from 400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
She constitutes the most perfect and accomplished type of the Italian princess in that period so famous for the development of art and letters called the Rinascimento. She was born in Ferrara from the family that governed this town. Exquisitely educated by the great revivers of ancient classical literature, among whom was the Guerino, she passed her first years amidst a crowd of writers and artists who convened to Ferrara from all Italy and abroad. She was only sixteen years old when, in 1490, she married the Duke of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga, a warrior and statesman of great power and nobility. Amidst the splendor and dissipation of her time, she was one of the few who matched her intelligence and culture with pious feminine manners and convictions.
Three great painters made portraits of her: Titian, Leonardo, and Rubens. Raphael made one of his loveliest Madonnas to adorn her rooms. She maintained herself an interesting correspondence with the greatest men of her time, to whom she often gave lights and who honored her by asking appreciations of their masterworks and doings. She was a great friend of her sister-in- law, Elizabeth Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, she, too, a remarkable woman of this period.