Ferdinando Gonzaga's Patronage of the Pictorial Arts: The Villa Favorita

Abstract

Ferdinando Gonzaga, sixth Duke of Mantua (1587–1626), was the last Gonzaga to add extensively to the great ducal collection before its sale to Charles I of England in 1627. His insatiable collecting of works of art, along with his famed extravagance,1 took such unremitting toll of the long overburdened ducal treasury that just a year after his death, the agent of the English king, Daniel Nys, succeeded in effecting what has been called “the greatest national sale until the tragedy of Charles I.”2 Ferdinando's collecting differed in an important respect from that of his father Duke Vincenzo (1587–1612) : it became focused, to the point of obsession, upon the embellishment of a villa that he had built on the outskirts of Mantua, the Villa Favorita. Although the Favorita is today reduced to a fragmentary shell,3 it remains an imposing ruin, and a number of the paintings that originally adorned it survive. To undertake a reconstruction of Ferdinando's patronage of the pictorial arts may serve to present a mor...