The Court Lady's Dilemma: Isabella d'Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance

Abstract

Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua, avid collector of art, and always a woman acutely concerned with her public image, has suffered a highly ironic fate at the hands of art historians. Unlike other female collectors who have virtually disappeared from discussions of Renaissance art patronage, Isabella d'Este survives, but in representations strikingly at odds with those constructed in the Renaissance. While 'that friend of illustrious deeds and fine studies, liberal, magnanimous Isabella', in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1512), is acknowledged as a biased topos of praise, the undiscerning, tyrannical and greedy Marchesa in recent histories of Renaissance art retains credibility as a scholarly evaluation.' Most of these negative representations of Isabella d'Este owe their particulars, and even their existence, to the survival of an unusually voluminous and vivid correspondence.2 In their scrutiny of these letters, historians have not always agreed on the choice of anecdotes or their interpretation, but what they invariably keep to is the basic framework of a particular personality.3 It is the very process of elaborating Isabella d'Este's personality, whether to attack or defend her, that has led to the marginalisation of her activities as an art collector. Certainly few steps have been taken to locate these activities within Renaissance patronage patterns, or to define Isabella d'Este's own prescribed social position and patronage options. The most elaborate representation of Isabella d'Este remains the Renaissance heroine of Julia Cartwright's 1904 biography who fully conforms to Edwardian norms of desirable middle-class female behaviour: