Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua: Matrons, Mystics and Monasteries 1409427528, 9781409427520

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Saints and the City
1 Popular Devotion: Isabella d’Este, the Beata Osanna and
Depictions of Female Sanctity in Mantua
2 Friendship and Devotion: Margherita Cantelma and Isabella d’Este
3 Partners in Piety: Margherita Cantelma, Isabella d’Este and the
Monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione in Tempio in Mantua
4 Daughters of Devotion: Suor Ippolita and Suor Paola Gonzaga in Mantua
5 Gonzaga Family Piety and Sisterly Affection: Margherita Paleologa,
First Duchess of Mantua
Appendix I: Wills
Appendix II: Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma
Appendix III: Selected Letters of Margherita Paleologa
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

WOMEN, ART AND ARCHITECTURAL PATRONAGE IN RENAISSANCE MANTUA “Hickson widens the scope of Isabella d’Este’s art patronage and explores its relationship to other court women’s commissioning of art by calling attention to the marchesa’s virtually overlooked spirituality and monastic projects and demonstrating their effect on her daughters and daughter-in-law. ...The interaction between the lay and religious Gonzaga women that the author proposes offers important insights into women’s artistic practices and the female networks that linked them during the ¿rst half of the sixteenth century. All in all, the book provides solid evidence that Isabella’s artistic endeavors were richer and more inÀuential than assumed in the existing scholarship.” – Jeryldene Wood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing new patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this study sheds new light the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth century. Author Sally Hickson combines primary archival research, contextual analysis of the climate of female mysticism, and a re-examination of a number of visual objects (particularly altarpieces devoted to local beatae, saints and female founders of religious orders) to delineate ties between women both outside and inside the convent walls. The study contests the accepted perception of Isabella d’Este as a purely secular patron, exposing her role as a religious patron as well. Hickson introduces the ¿gure of Margherita Cantelma and documents concerning the building and decoration of her monastery on the part of Isabella d’Este; and draws attention to the cultural and political activities of nuns of the Gonzaga family, particularly Isabella’s daughter Livia Gonzaga who became a powerful agent in Mantuan civic life. Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua provides insight into a complex and Àuid world of sacred patronage, devotional practices and religious roles of secular women as well as nuns in Renaissance Mantua. Sally Hickson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Guelph (Canada), where she teaches Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the ¿eld. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving ¿eld of study. Titles in the series Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage Edited by Katherine A. McIver Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period Regulating Selves and Others Edited by Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent Beard Fetish in Early Modern England Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value Mark Albert Johnston Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England Jennifer Heller English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 Edited by Micheline White

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in renaissance mantua matrons, mystics and monasteries

sAllY Anne hicKson University of Guelph, Canada

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2012 sally Anne hickson sally Anne hickson has asserted her right under the copyright, designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retri eval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data hickson, sally. Women, art and architectural patronage in renaissance mantua : matrons, mystics and monasteries. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Women art patrons – italy – mantua – history – 16th century. 2. Women art patrons – italy – mantua – history – to 1500. 3. Women mystics – italy – mantua – history – 16th century. 4. Women mystics – italy – mantua – history – to 1500. 5. Art and religion – italy – mantua – history – 16th century. 6. Art and religion – italy – mantua – history – to 1500. 7. religious architecture – italy – mantua – history – 16th century. 8. religious architecture – italy – mantua – history – to 1500. 9. isabella d’este, consort of Francesco ii gonzaga, marquis of mantua, 1474–1539 – Art patronage. i. title ii. series 709.4'528'09031 – dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data hickson, sally. Women, art, and architectural patronage in renaissance mantua : matrons, mystics, and monasteries / sally Anne hickson. p. cm. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-1-4094-2752-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. christian art and symbolism – italy – mantua. 2. church architecture – italy – mantua. 3. Art, renaissance – italy – mantua. 4. Architecture, renaissance – italy – mantua. 5. christian women saints – cult – italy – mantua. 6. isabella d’este, consort of Francesco ii gonzaga, marquis of mantua, 1474-1539 – Art patronage. 7. gonzaga family – Art patronage. 8. Women art patrons – italy – mantua. 9. Art patronage – italy – mantua. 10. Art and society – italy – mantua. i. title. n7952.m36h53 2012 704.9'48630945281 – dc23 isBn 9781409427520 (hbk)

2011021378

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Saints and the City 1

vii xi 1

Popular Devotion: Isabella d’Este, the Beata Osanna and Depictions of Female Sanctity in Mantua

17

2

Friendship and Devotion: Margherita Cantelma and Isabella d’Este

45

3

Partners in Piety: Margherita Cantelma, Isabella d’Este and the Monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione in Tempio in Mantua

65

4

Daughters of Devotion: Suor Ippolita and Suor Paola Gonzaga in Mantua

85

5

Gonzaga Family Piety and Sisterly Affection: Margherita Paleologa, First Duchess of Mantua

99

Appendix I: Wills Appendix II: Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma Appendix III: Selected Letters of Margherita Paleologa

137 157 165

Bibliography Index

169 187

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List of Illustrations

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Francesco Bonsignori, the Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, c.1519, oil on canvas, Museo della Città, Palazzo di San Sebastiano, Mantua, inv.11498. Bridgeman Art Library

2

Francesco Bonsignori, Isabella d’Este, drawing, c.1519, London, British Museum, Reg. No. 1895.0915.541. © Trustees of the British Museum

6

Unknown Lombard artist, the Beata Elisabetta Picenardi, fresco, last quarter of ¿fteenth century, Church of San Barnaba, Mantua. Photo: Author

24

Antonio da Pavia? the Venerable Maddalena Coppini, tempera on canvas, c.1480, Mantua, Museo della Città, Palazzo di San Sebastiano, inv.11496. Bridgeman Art Library

26

Master of the Baroncelli Portraits, Saint Catherine of Bologna with Three Donors, oil on panel, c.1470–1480, Courtauld Institute of Arts. Bridgeman Art Library

29

Giulio and Giacomo Francia, St Margaret’s Vision of the Dead Christ, signed and dated 1518, for the Church of Santa Margarita in Bologna, later in the Church of San Clemente, Almo Collegio di Spagna in Bologna, now Madrid, Prado, inv.143. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

33

Cosimo Rosselli, St Catherine of Siena as Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders of St Dominic, tempera and gold on panel, 1499–1500, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, NG 1030. Bridgeman Art Library

36

Francesco Botticini, St Monica Distributing her Rule, oil on panel, c.1487, Bini-Capponi Chapel in the Church of Santo Spirito, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

38

viii

9

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

Giacomo and Giulio Francia, Madonna and Child Enthroned in Glory with Saints Peter, Mary Magdalene, Francis and Martha and six Olivetan Oblates, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Photo Credit: Alinari Archives-Alinari Archive, Florence

41

10 Giacomo Francia, Madonna and Child with Saints Gervase and Protase, Catherine and Giustina and Four Benedictine Nuns, 1543, altarpiece for the church of the Benedictine convent of Santi Gervasio e Protasio in Bologna, now on deposit in the Brera, Milan. Photo Credit: Alinari Archives-Alinari Archive, Florence 42 11

Gian Cristoforo Romano (attributed to), Portrait of a Woman, probably Isabella d’Este. c.1500, terracotta, formerly polychromed, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo Credit: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY

51

12 Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, recto, gold with diamonds and precious stones, 1505, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

52

13 Detail showing the Cantelma Monastery, from the 1707 copy by P. Mortier of the View of Mantua, printed in 1596 by Gabriele Bertazzolo. The monastery is in the upper left-hand corner. Photo: Author

66

14 School of Giulio Romano (Battista Covo?), Cantelmo Monument in the Church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, late 1530s–early 1540s, moved from the interior wall of the entrance façade of the monastery church at Santa Maria della Presentazione in Mantua. Photo: Author

76

15 Present-day exterior of the former monastery of San Vincenzo in Mantua. Photo: Author

91

16 Façade of the former clarissan Church of Santa Paola, or Corpus Domini, in Mantua. Photo: Author 95 17 Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologa, c.1531, oil on panel, Royal Collection, Windsor, RCIN 405777. The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 107 18 Michelangelo, Cruci¿xion (drawing for Vittoria Colonna), black chalk, British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

119

List of Illustrations

ix

19 Copy after Michelangelo? Christ and the Woman of Samaria, bistre ink and gesso on panel, Liverpool Museums. © National Museums Liverpool

123

20 Titian, the Penitent Magdalene, c.1533, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Photo Credit: Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY

129

21 Ambrogio Oliva, the Madonna of the Rosary, Church of the Madonna of the Rosary, Occimiano (Alessandria); the women portrayed are (from left to right): Margherita Paleologa, her mother Anna d’Alencon and Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos (far right). Reproduced with the kind permission of Roberto Maestri, Circolo Culturale “I Marchesi di Monferrato”

134

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Acknowledgements

This book would never have been written were it not for the privilege of having Dr Clifford Brown as my professor. Professor Brown is a generous scholar, an expert on all things Mantuan and is responsible for my introduction to art history, to the Mantuan Archives and to all things Isabella. I would also like to thank my PhD advisor, Dr Cathleen Hoeniger, for all of her help, insight, and great friendship during my graduate and professional career. Special thanks go Dr Daniela Ferrari and all the staff of the Archivio di Stato in Mantua, because they are a joy to work with. Thank you to Anna Maria Lorenzoni, now retired from the Archive, who helped me work on my document transcriptions over the years. Also thank you to the Archivio Diocesano, the Museo della Città at the Palazzo San Sebastiano, and the wonderful staff at the house (now museum) of the Beata Osanna Andreasi in Mantua. Many thanks to Roberto Maestri of the Circolo cuturale “I Marchesi di Monferrato.” Also to staff at the Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, the Robarts Library and Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and the libraries at Brock University and at the University of Guelph. I also thank the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book Library and the Stirling Library at Yale University, where I spent some time thanks to the H.P. Krauss Fellowship in Early Books and Manuscripts. Thank you to Erika Gaffney and to the readers and editors at Ashgate Publishing. To the following, for help, insight and encouragement over the years: Molly Harris Bourne, Pierre de la Ruf¿niqre du Prey, Carolyn James, David McTavish. To the wonderful ladies of Mantua who made me feel at home there: Anna Maria, Claudia and Giuliana. To great art historians, colleagues and friends, “dottoresse” all: Andrea Bubenik, Sharon Gregory, Allison Morgan Sherman, Krystina Stermole. To Joe Gosset, who listened to every idea, encouraged me every second and read every single word. To Michael Thompson, Monroe Beatty and Claudia Persi Haines – angels on my shoulder. For Mom and Dad, and for Jenny.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Introduction: Saints and the City The image that inspired this book is rather simple. The Beata Osanna Andreasi of Mantua (d.1505), wearing the black and white habit of the Dominican order, stands at the centre of the painted canvas, holding a lily branch, an attribute that she shares with her spiritual ancestor, the Dominican tertiary St Catherine of Siena (Illustration 1).1 Osanna’s haggard and aged face is clearly drawn from the death mask still preserved in her home in Mantua. Crowned with the radiance of the beata, her features bear witness to the spiritual and physical suffering that characterized her life as a mystic, healer and prophetess.2 Like other mystics of the period, Osanna’s trances were ¿xated on the violence and physical suffering of Christ on the cross. The physical morti¿cations of the cruci¿xion were the central catalysts in her spiritual ecstasies. The episodes that she related in her visions were visceral and carnal, such as the drinking of blood that issued from the wound in Christ’s side. Such an experience would certainly have a particular resonance in Mantua, where the most important civic relic was that of the precious blood.3 At the height of her breast, coincident with the viewer’s sightline in front of the altarpiece, she holds a heart penetrated by a knife and a cruci¿x. The knife in the heart alludes to one of her most potent visions, a “transformation”, in which

1

Formerly at San Vincenzo and then in the collection of the Ducal Palace in Mantua, the painting by Francesco Bonsignori, the Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, is now in the Museo della Città di Palazzo San Sebastiano. The most recent discussions of this altarpiece, including a summary of controversies over dating, are summarized by Michele Danieli, catalogue for the exhibition Mantegna a Mantova 1460–1506, ed. Mauro Lucco (Milan: Skira, 2006), cat. 48, 160–1; and Paolo Bertelli in Osanna Andreasi da Mantova 1449–1505. L’immagine di una mistica del Rinascimento, ed. Renata Casarin (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2005), cat. 9, 134–43. 2 For the death mask, see Renata Casarin, “Maschera funebre di Osanna Andreasi,” in L’immagine di una mistica, cat. 5, 116–21; another polychrome terracotta bust, dated to between 1505–1510, has been in the collection in the house of the Beata Stafana Quinzani of Soncino since the eighteenth century, see Valerio Guazzoni, “Busto della Beata Osanna Andreasi,” L’immagine di una mistica, cat. 7, 126–9. 3 Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 204–29. Lewis suggests in passing that the popularization of manuscript depictions focused on the wound in Christ’s side in the medieval period in France could be related to the relic of the precious blood housed in the Ste Chapelle, 208.

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1

Francesco Bonsignori, the Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, c.1519, oil on canvas, Museo della Città, Palazzo di San Sebastiano, Mantua, inv.11498. Bridgeman Art Library

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Osanna claimed that her heart was literally broken and divided into four parts.4 This experience of transverberation, the mystical wounding of the heart, was an event she also shared with St Catherine of Siena.5 The positioning of Osanna’s body within the altarpiece speaks to her multiple identities in the devotional life of the city. Elevated on a central shallow platform, she balances on the back of a hybrid monster, half-animal and half-human. The subjugation of this demon signi¿es her struggles with the devil in the course of her spiritual battles. To either side she is Àanked by two groups of kneeling female worshippers. These women stand out in strong relief against the background of a red curtain that ends just above their heads, a barrier that divides the terrestrial realm of the worshippers from the celestial realm above. Only the body of the Beata Osanna traverses this boundary. In the sky above the level of the curtain, Osanna is also Àanked by two full-length ¿gures, embodiments of visions she encountered in the spiritual raptures recorded by her biographers.6 On her right a white-clad angel raises one hand in a blessing gesture and holds a lily branch in the other, while another white-clad ¿gure to her left approaches Osanna carrying a cross, a visual reiteration of the central importance of the cruci¿xion in her visionary ecstasies. The location of these ethereal ¿gures in the sky above the kneeling worshippers, against a blue sky punctuated with the rolling cumulous clouds that are so characteristic of Mantuan painting, indicate their

4

Roberta Ghirardini, “Nuove scoperte sulla Beata Osanna degli Andreasi, mistica mantovana del ‘400 nativa di Carbonarola,” La reggia, a.VII:4 (December, 1999), 5. 5 For af¿nities to the iconography of St Catherine of Siena see Renata Casarin, “Da Caterina ad Osanna: immagini della santità femminile nell’arte dal XV al XIX secolo,” in L’immagine di una mistica, 31–52. 6 Her confessor, Fra Francesco Silvestri of Ferrara, published a hagiographical account of her life the year that she died, Beatae Osannae Mantuanae de tertio habitu ordinis fratrum SUDHGLFDWRUXPYLWD (Milan: 1505), published in Italian as /DYLWDHVWXSHQGLPLUDFXOLGHOOD gloriosa vergine Osanna mantovana del Terzo ordine de’ Frati Predictori (Milan: 1507). Her life was also recorded by Girolamo [Scolari] Monteolivetano, 9LD SRUWDSDUDGLVL ac omnium virtutum (Mantua: Leonardo Bruschi, 1507) and in a second edition, Girolamo Scolari, Libretto della vita & transito de la Beata Osanna da Mantua nuovamente corretto FRQXQDQRYDDJJLRQWDFRPSRVWRGDO9HQHUDQGRSDGUHIUDWH+LHURQ\PR0RQWHROLYHWDQR (Bologna: Eredi di Benedetto Ettore Faelli, 1524). The biographies are discussed by Angelita Roncelli in “Fonti e leggende della beata Osanna Andreasi da Mantova” as well as in “I colloqui spirituali tra Osanna Andreasi e Girolamo Scolari. Struttura e contenuti principali,” both in Osanna Andreasi da Mantova 1449–1505. La santa dei Gonzaga lettere HFROORTXLVSLULWXDOL, ed. Gianni Feta and Angelita Roncelli (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2007), 25–88 and 111–24. A new biography, which drew on these earlier sources, was published by Ludovico Grazia in 1597, Vita, e morte della beata Osanna Andreasi Mantovana (Casale: per Bernardo Grasso, 1597). The only complete modern biographical account is Giuseppe Bagolini and Ludovico Ferretti, La Beata Osanna Andreasi da Mantova terziaria domenicana (1449–1505), (Florence: 1905).

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

4

essential status as apparitions summoned by Osanna’s prayers; invisible thoughts given visible form in order to awaken our perception of her sanctity.7 The kneeling female worshippers in the foreground are divided into two distinct groups. To Osanna’s right, two laywomen wearing widow’s weeds are depicted in strict pro¿le, kneeling one behind the other. The widow closest to Osanna on the right occupies the favoured position usually reserved for the male donor of a devotional work. This ¿gure has been clearly identi¿ed as the “¿rst lady” of Mantua, the Marchesa Isabella d’Este (1474–1540). It has been suggested that the woman who kneels behind Isabella, and who is identically dressed in widow’s clothing, is Margherita Cantelma, Duchess of Sora, Isabella’s lifelong friend.8 In fact, both of these women became widows in 1519. On 29 March 1519, Francesco II Gonzaga, who had suffered for many years from syphilis, died at Mantua.9 Shortly afterward, in the latter part of April 1519, Sigismondo Cantelmo, Duke of Sora, also died after a brief illness. 10 Bonsignori’s altarpiece is traditionally accepted to be his ¿nal work, completed just before his own death at Caldiero, near Verona, on 12 July 1519. The pairing of Isabella and Cantelma in this altarpiece emphasizes their mutual devotion and draws attention to Cantelma’s role as Isabella’s “partner in piety” throughout their lifetimes, which is one of the major subjects of this book. Among the group of Dominican nuns kneeling to Osanna’s left, our attention is immediately drawn to the upturned face of a young nun who gazes up at Osanna in reverence and awe. This youngest of the nuns has been identi¿ed as Ippolita Gonzaga (b.1501), a daughter of Isabella d’Este, who took her ¿nal vows on 6 April 1518 and spent her life at the convent of San Vincenzo in Mantua, once the

7

These ¿gures are subject to more precise identi¿cation in my Chapter 1. On the subject of clouds in Mantuan painting, see Hubert Damisch, $7KHRU\RI&ORXG7RZDUGD+LVWRU\ of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Damisch asks (although not with speci¿c reference to this image), “«do divine interventions, which open up this world to the beyond and, more generally, mystical – or even physical – exchanges between the earth and the sky provide matter suitable for representation?,” 111–12. 8 Jane Martineau identi¿es the ¿gures as Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma, in the catalogue for 6SOHQGRXUVRIWKH*RQ]DJD, ed. David Chambers and Jane Martineau (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), cat. 140, 178–9. 9 Julia Cartwright, ,VDEHOODG¶(VWH0DUFKLRQHVVRI0DQWXD±$6WXG\RIWKH Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1905), II:155–6, records the death and funeral of Francesco II Gonzaga, but does not say that he died of syphilis, although this fact is well known in the literature; accounts of syphilis are found throughout Kate Simon’s history of the Mantuan court, $5HQDLVVDQFH7DSHVWU\7KH*RQ]DJDRI0DQWXD (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 10 Regarding the death of Sigismondo Cantelmo, see Archivio di Stato di Mantova (ASM), b.2997, lib. 36, unnumbered (f.50v), 19 April 1519, Isabella d’Este to a certain “2SL]LRQL”: “«FXPPROWRJUDQ¶GLVSLDFHUKDYHPRLQWHVRLOSHULFXORGLPRUWHQHOTXDOHVL ritrova il Mr. Sigismundo Cantelmo.” Sigismondo died shortly afterward.

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home to this altarpiece.11 Although she kneels with her Dominican sisters, she is joined with her mother in mutual devotion to the cult ¿gure of the Beata Osanna, whose ¿gure at the centre both separates and unites them. There continue to be disputes about the date of the painting. Critics have variably assigned dates ranging from 1508–1519. A date earlier than 1515 seems untenable, given that Osanna is depicted with the radiance of a beata, a status she was only of¿cially granted by Leo X in 1515. If the altarpiece was made to commemorate Ippolita Gonzaga’s ¿nal vows at San Vincenzo, as is often suggested, then the date would have to be later than April of 1518.12 However, Isabella and Cantelma are both depicted wearing widow’s clothing, which would date the completion of the altarpiece to after late April 1519.13 It is possible, though, that Bonsignori started the altarpiece earlier – perhaps in 1515, to mark the beati¿cation; perhaps in 1518 to commemorate Ippolita’s ¿nal vows at San Vincenzo – and completed it in 1519, by which time Isabella and Cantelma were both widows. Although they may both have been included from the time of the original commission, Bonsignori elected to depict them in their contemporary state as the altarpiece neared completion. A later decision to either add or somehow alter his original plans could explain why Bonsignori made a preparatory study of Isabella’s ¿gure, in a drawing ¿rst identi¿ed by Philip Pouncey in the collection of the British Museum, in which she is depicted kneeling in pro¿le and wearing the same widow’s clothing that she wears in the completed altarpiece (Illustration 2). Pouncey determined that the drawing was a preparatory study, based on the overall spontaneity of the drawing style and the small SHQWLPHQWL that mark stages in the gradual development and re¿nement of aspects of the features.14 This individual study of Isabella’s ¿gure in isolation might also be the result of Bonsignori’s decision to alter some aspect of her appearance before incorporating her into the composition. In the painting, Isabella’s appearance has been re¿ned somewhat in comparison to the drawing and her features are more softened and idealized, as though Bonsignori edited her appearance for public presentation in the ¿nished work. Until such time as more speci¿c documents which attest to stages in the commissioning and completion of the work can be produced, there will continue to be controversies over dating. However, controversies over dating do not preclude an analysis of the work in the present context as a web of intricate relationships that speak to the complexity of female devotional life in Renaissance Mantua.

11

Martineau’s identi¿cation of this as Ippolita Gonzaga has been widely accepted in the literature, 6SOHQGRXUV cat. 140, 178–9. 12 The main arguments over dating are summarized in Mantegna a Mantova, cat. 48, 160–1. 13 Some critics argue that both women are simply “soberly” dressed in accordance with the devotional nature of the image, see Bertelli, L’immagine di una mistica, 134–43, but I see no reason to dispute that both lay ¿gures are dressed as widows, see Paola Tinagli, :RPHQ LQ ,WDOLDQ 5HQDLVVDQFH $UW *HQGHU 5HSUHVHQWDWLRQ ,GHQWLW\ (London and New York, Manchester University Press, 1997), 62–3. 14 Philip Pouncey, “A Drawing by Francesco Bonsignori,” %ULWLVK0XVHXP4XDUWHUO\ 16:4 (January, 1952): 99–101; and 6SOHQGRXUV cat. 140, 179–80.

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Francesco Bonsignori, Isabella d’Este, drawing, c.1519, London, British Museum, Reg. No. 1895.0915.541. © Trustees of the British Museum

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As a devotional document, the completed altarpiece of the Veneration of the Blessed Osanna Andreasi draws together mystics, matrons and monastics, weaving an intricate pattern of relations between sacred and secular and public and private devotion that forces the viewer to think about the richness and complexity of female religious life in sixteenth-century Mantua. This is not just a picture of a venerated local saint. It is a pictorial document of complex female relations centered on the body of that saint: lifelong friends bound by mutual devotion, private worries and popular piety, a mother and daughter, and a daughter with her monastic sisters. In short, the altarpiece is really a “city of women.” Although it is now housed among the Gonzaga treasures of the city in the civic museum that occupies the former Gonzaga palace of San Sebastiano, the altarpiece was once found in the female Dominican monastery of San Vincenzo in the city which, like so many of the monasteries of the early period, was suppressed during the Napoleonic era and subsequently fell into disrepair.15 Like most Italian cities, the modern fabric of Mantua is built around the monastic armature of the medieval and Renaissance city. Although some of the female monasteries that made up the city at the time this altarpiece was painted still do survive, converted to more practical modern uses as schools or cultural centers, many others have been subsumed by time. Mantua was once resolutely a city of churches, convents and monasteries, in which the life of the community was ruled over not only by the Gonzaga family but, on a daily level, by parish priests, abbots, abbesses, canons and canonesses, convents, cloisters, lay communities of tertiaries, and the miracles, ecstasies, visions and aura of sanctity and protection offered by local mystics, household saints and familiar relics. The Beata Osanna Andreasi was one of these local saints. Her family house in Mantua on the Via Frattini, just down the street from the much altered monastery of San Vincenzo, is now maintained as a museum, still under the care of the lay Dominicans to whom Osanna dedicated her life. In 2005, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Osanna’s death, the city instituted a series of public exhibitions around the ¿gure of Osanna, which included the restoration of the house and garden.16 The warren of small low-ceilinged rooms on the second and third Àoors of the house are now used as exhibition spaces for a number of cult objects and personal items associated with Osanna’s body and her life. In the con¿nes of the elegant Andreasi family palazzo in the heart of the city, Osanna lived as a holy recluse, wearing the black and white habit of the order, fasting and praying and revealing her mystical visions to her confessor. Under the habit she also wore a rough-textured cilice (now preserved in a glass case), designed speci¿cally to be 15

For the Napoleonic suppressions in Mantua see Leopoldo Camillo Volta, &RPSHQGLR FURQRORJLFRFULWLFRGHOODVWRULDGL0DQWRYDGDOODVXDIRQGD]LRQHVLQRDLQRVWULWHPSL, vol. 5 of &RPSHQGLRGHOOD6WRULDGL0DQWRYD(Mantua: Francesco Agazzi, 1838). 16 The house and museum are discussed in the small booklet published by the Dominican Order, La Casa del Beata Osanna degli Andreasi in Mantova (Mantua: Fraternità Domenicana, 2002).

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

8

worn around the breasts, providing constant cha¿ng and discomfort. Like many of the holy women of her time, Osanna sought to live in daily pain to demonstrate her identi¿cation with the suffering of Christ, whose cruci¿xion was the source of her daily meditation and the catalyst for her spiritual visions. When she ventured out of her house, it was to travel to the ducal palace to offer advice, consultation and miraculous acts of healing to the members of the Gonzaga family, who heeded her visions and implored her prayers. She travelled from the cloister of her home to the splendor of the court wearing the conventional dress of an aristocratic lay woman, so that she could pass unnoticed through the streets of the city. Remnants of one of her elaborate gowns are also preserved in her museum. Rich and poor revered her as a holy mystic and, moving freely between her own cloister and the court, she became a divine symbol of God’s presence in the city. As a tertiary, she moved between her home, the Gonzaga court and the cloister of San Vincenzo, bridging the boundaries between private enclosure and public disclosure.17 This book took shape when I stood in Osanna’s house and began to think about her movements through the city, between the cloistered environment of her home, the convent she frequented and the ducal court, as a kind of map of female experience. These movements inscribed themselves on the map of Mantua itself, creating a city-within-a-city, a “city of women” and a civic identity forged out of popular piety, woven out of the familial and familiar, manifested in convents, monasteries, churches, chapels and altars that honored women and where women honored each other. About halfway through writing this book, I coined the phrase “saints and the city” because it expresses my desire to examine how the lives, bodies and cults of saints were really meeting places for various groups of women that ranged from court to cloister to city square. The core of this book examines the religious patronage of the women who are included in Bonsignori’s painting. I begin by looking in general at female saints in the city, studying the proliferation of cults devoted to the Mantuan beatae within the broader context of what Gabriele Zarri has called the phenomenon of female “living saints,” examining how their popularity affected female relations surrounding religious expression in art as well as in everyday life.18 As Daniel 17

For Isabella’s relationship with the Beata Osanna see Angela Ghirardi, “Osanna Andreasi e Isabella d’Este. Tracce artistiche di un’amicizia,” in L’immagine di una mistica, 65–78. 18 Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 e ‘500 (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990); also by Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and 5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 219–303. See also the essays in Donne e fede: santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Gabrielle Zarri and Lucetta Scaraf¿a (Rome and Bari, 1994) and the essays in :RPHQDQG)DLWK&DWKROLF5HOLJLRXV/LIHLQ,WDO\ IURP/DWH$QWLTXLW\WRWKH3UHVHQW, ed. Lucetta Scaraf¿a and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). Other female beatae who enjoyed Mantuan patronage included the Venerable Maddalena Coppini (late ¿fteenth century), the Venerable

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Bornstein has shown, the female living saints were a kind of YR[ SRSXOL in the early sixteenth century, and their prophecies were powerful political tools that the princes of the city used as a protection against the enemies of Italy. The rise of these cults coincided with the Italian wars with France and the formation of the Imperial League of Cambray, which temporarily drove the French out of Italy. But during the fraught period after the initial invasion of Italy under Charles VIII in 1494, and the subsequent French occupations of Milan and Naples – and especially in the social, political and religious unrest stirred up by the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe which culminated in the Sack of Rome in 1527 – the princes of the vulnerable Italian city-states looked for signs of salvation. They found them in the spontaneous, dramatic and mystic visions of holy women whose spiritual suffering manifested in the bodily, bloody wounds of the stigmata. Their bodies and their visions ruled the hearts and minds of the people, and they became living relics collected by princes who sought to harness and propagate their power for the protection the state.19 The Beata Osanna was only one such living saint in Mantua, the object of a powerful popular cult enthusiastically supported through the patronage activities of the ruling Gonzaga family, especially Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, Marchesa of Mantua (1474–1539). Isabella d’Este is best known as the “¿rst lady of the Renaissance” because of the mythological paintings she commissioned and the antiquities she collected to decorate her private rooms in Mantua. But the Mantuan historian Leandro Ventura cautioned that in comparison to the abundant studies devoted to Isabella’s secular patronage, her patronage of devotional works has been largely neglected.20 Although a complete study of Isabella’s religious patronage is long overdue, my intention here is to probe only one signi¿cant aspect of that patronage by examining her lifelong friendship with Margherita Cantelma, Elisabetta Picenardi (+1468), and the Beata Stephana Quinzani of Brescia (+1530) who, like Osanna, was a Dominican tertiary; for Andreasi, Quinzani and their contemporary Lucia Broccadelli of Narni (+1501) see Dominican Penitent Women, ed. Maiju LehmijokiGardner, Daniel Ethan Bornstein and E. Ann Matter (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 2005). 19 Daniel Bornstein, “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy: History and Historiography,” in :RPHQ DQG 5HOLJLRQ LQ 0HGLHYDO DQG 5HQDLVVDQFH ,WDO\, 1–27. For insights into the role that Dominican mystics played in Savonarolan reform see Tamar Herzig, 6DYRQDUROD¶V :RPHQ 9LVLRQ DQG 5HIRUP LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH ,WDO\ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Herzig cautions that although the Beata Osanna was popularly associated by some with Savonarolan reform, neither Francesco II Gonzaga or Isabella d’Este were interested in Savonarola, 123. 20 Ventura writes: “A confronto con l’abbondanza di studi sulla committenza di corte, DWWHQGHDQFRUDGLHVVHUHVWXGLDWDFRQDWWHQ]LRQHODFRPPLWWHQ]DGL,VDEHOODOHJDWDDRSHUD di divozione,” see “Isabella d’Este. Committenza e collezionismo,” in Isabella d’Este. La SULPDGRQQDGHO5LQDVFLPHQWR, ed. Daniele Bini (Modena: Bulini edizioni d’Arte – Artiglio Editore, 2001), 94–108, at n.7, 104. A general overview of the religious practices of the Gonzaga is found in Elisabeth Swain, “Faith in the Family: The Practice of Religion by the Gonzaga.” -RXUQDORI)DPLO\+LVWRU\ (Summer 1983): 177–89.

10

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

Duchess of Sora (d.1532), whom I present here as Isabella’s “partner in piety.” This study attempts to address Isabella’s involvement in religious patronage not only in terms of objects she commissioned, but in the broader terms of its agency. As a secular patron, Isabella regularly relied on the advice and assistance of agents and intermediaries, most of them men, who helped her to secure commissions for works of art and to bargain for and buy antiquities for her collection in Mantua. Her religious patronage was accomplished through similar means, but the agents for the realization of her devotional projects were often the women in her family or her broader social circle. The most important of these was Margherita Cantelma. In addition to sharing a devotion to the Beata Osanna Andreasi, their friendship led to Isabella’s most conspicuous public religious monument, the building of the female Augustinian monastery dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, which Cantelma founded before her death in 1532. In her last will and testament, Cantelma made Isabella her universal heir and charged her with building the monastery. Permission was granted for the monastery by the Lateran Canons at Piacenza and the earliest residents were Augustinian canonesses and a number of aristocratic widows, like Cantelma, who chose to dedicate themselves to a form of semi-cloistered religious life; it therefore facilitated varying degrees of seclusion and inclusion within the city at large. Although the buildings that Isabella commissioned have long since disappeared, the history of the community at the so-called “casa Cantelma” can be traced through surviving archival documents.21 The monastery of the Presentation of the Virgin was a monument to the friendship between Cantelma and Isabella d’Este, a friendship traceable through letters in the Mantua archive. Cantelma’s surviving letters also offer a fascinating glimpse into how she used the language of spiritual devotion to describe her personal bond with Isabella – in some ways closely paralleling the language that contemporary female mystics used to describe their religious experiences. Isabella also gave Mantua a cardinal in the form of her son Ercole Gonzaga (1505–1563) and she gave two daughters to local monasteries; Ippolita (d.1570), a Dominican nun at San Vincenzo who appears in the Bonsignori altarpiece and 21 Various documents pertaining to the Cantelma monastery from its establishment in 1532 to its suppression in 1788 are found in ASM, Materie Ecclesiasticae No. 4, VII (b.3312), Monasterij delle Monache di Citta, MM. della Cantelma; also ASM, P.VII, 4, &RUSRUD]LRQHUHOLJLRVHVXSSUHVVH(Index No. 23), vol. 272, Madri della Cantelma rogiti diversi, 1530–1540; vol. 273, Madri della Cantelma Man. Rogiti diversi dal 1583–1625); vol. 274, Libro Mastro, 1580–1788; vols. 275–301, Investiture. Other documents are found in the Archivio di Stato di Milano (ASMi), Fondo Pergamene, cartella 250, S. M. della Presentazione, Mantova, o Casa Cantelma. Cantelma’s letters are largely unpublished; some of her correspondence with the Mario Equicola is found in Stephen Kolsky, Mario Equicola. The Real Courtier (Geneva: Droz, 1991); letters she wrote to her cousin the Augustinian canon Agostino Strozzi are analyzed by Carolyn James and F.W. Kent in “Margherita Cantelmo and Agostino Strozzi: Friendship’s Gifts and a Portrait Medal by Costanzo da Ferrara,” ,7DWWL6WXGLHV(VVD\VLQWKH5HQDLVVDQFH, 12 (2009), 85–115. I thank Carolyn James for sharing an advance copy of this essay with me.

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Livia (d.1569), who took the name Suor Paola and eventually became abbess of the clarissan monastery of Santa Paola in the city. Until now, these daughters have received very little attention in the context of Isabella’s life, and virtually no attention in terms of their own lives as nuns. As I explain at the beginning of Chapter 4, very few studies have been devoted to understanding sibling relationships, especially relationships between sisters, in the Renaissance.22 I am, therefore, interested in what we can learn about Ippolita and Livia’s identities as sisters within the Gonzaga family and as “sisters” within their respective communities. In this book I call them “daughters of devotion” to identify them both with Isabella d’Este but also as the daughters of their respective orders and daughters of the city of Mantua itself. I examine the roles they played in the cultural and religious lives of their respective religious communities, Dominican and Franciscan, and the role their convents played in the female religious life of the city.23 The study of these two sisters in the context of their respective communities provides a glimpse into Dominican and Franciscan piety in the context of their own lives within their monasteries, but also in the broader politics of Gonzaga piety as it was practised within the city itself. This notion of daughters and of sisterhood carries me to the ¿nal chapter, which is devoted to studying the religious patronage 22 While studies of patrilinear and bilinear devolutions of wealth, inheritance and property and the intricacies of property law pertaining to marriage, dowries, legitimacy and widowhood have all been frames within legalistic discourses of family, there remains a notable lack of research into the affective ties between and among family members, some aspects of which are considered by Giulia Calvi,,OFRQWUDWWRPRUDOH0DGULH¿JOLQHOOD7RVFDQD moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1994). For essays probing the importance of sibling relationships in the English Renaissance, see 6LEOLQJ5HODWLRQVDQG*HQGHULQWKH(DUO\0RGHUQ:RUOG Sisters, Brothers and Others, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). The role of the family in stabilizing civic society has been studied with particular application to Florence and Venice, for example Richard A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth LQ5HQDLVVDQFH)ORUHQFH$6WXG\RI)RXU)DPLOLHV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); F.W. Kent, +RXVHKROGDQG/LQHDJHLQ5HQDLVVDQFH)ORUHQFH7KH)DPLO\/LIHRIWKH &DSSRQL *LQRUL DQG 5XFHOODL (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, :RPHQ )DPLO\ DQG 5LWXDO LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH ,WDO\, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Thomas Kuehn, /DZ )DPLO\  :RPHQ 7RZDUGD/HJDO$QWKURSRORJ\RI5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Patricia Fortini Brown, )DPLO\/LYHVLQ5HQDLVVDQFH9HQLFH$UW$UFKLWHFWXUHDQG WKH )DPLO\ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Thomas Kuehn, +HLUV .LQ DQG Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Rather less attention has been given to families in the civic context of the northern Italian states like Mantua, Ferrara and Urbino. Moreover, interpersonal relations in these courtly states have largely been de¿ned in terms of the extra-familial structures of courtiership and personal strategies for social and political advancement described by Castiglione and Machiavelli. 23 For some discussion of Livia Gonzaga (“Suor Paola”) see Clinio Cottafavi, “Clarisse della famiglia Gonzaga in S. Paola di Mantova,” Le Venezie francescane, Series 1, 4.1 (1945): 5–26, and my Chapter 4.

12

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

of Margherita Paleologa (1510–1566), who married Isabella’s son Duke Federico II Gonzaga in 1531. The union made her the ¿rst Duchess of Mantua, daughter-inlaw to Isabella d’Este and sister-in-law to Ippolita and Livia Gonzaga. Margherita was the last princess of the Byzantine imperial line, and her marriage to Federico considerably enhanced the status of the Gonzaga by making them marquises – and eventually dukes – of the territory of Monferrato, north of Lombardy.24 When Duke Federico II died unexpectedly in 1540, Margherita was left as co-regent, along with her brothers-in-law Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and the military captain Ferrante Gonzaga, to the future Gonzaga princes Francesco, Guglielmo, Ludovico and Federico (with whom she was pregnant when her husband died) and to one daughter, Isabella Gonzaga. Devout by nature, Margherita’s co-regency of Mantua coincided with Cardinal Ercole’s increasing importance within the cause of Catholic Reform, culminating in his appointment as papal legate to the Council of Trent in 1561, a post he held until his death in 1563.25 As Daniel Bornstein has demonstrated, the male hierarchy of the church had always been more inclined to listen to female voices in times of spiritual crisis brought on by ecclesiastical disorder; the Great Schism of the fourteenth century had ushered in the cults of St Catharine of Siena and of St Bridget, and the tensions over Reform in the early sixteenth century gave rise to the mystic cults.26 The peace agreement signed at Cambray in August of 1529 between the Valois and the Hapsburgs cleared the way for Catholic renewal in the wake of the Augsburg Confession. It also ushered in a relatively peaceful period in which the wounds of the early sixteenth-century mystics seemed to heal and their voices fell increasingly silent. By 1530, as Protestant doctrine was being forged in Germany and 24 For the marriage see Stefano Davari, “Federico Gonzaga e la famiglia Paleologa del Monferrato.” Giornale linguistico dì archeologia, storia, e belle arti, 17–18, fasc. XI– XII (1890): 421–69; 18, fasc. I–II (1891): 40–76; 18, fasc. III–IV (1891): 81–109; Deanna Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco: Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua.” Renaissance Studies 16:3 (2002): 366–80 and my forthcoming essay “The Compromise Bride: The Marriage of Federico II Gonzaga and Margherita Paleologa of Monferrato,” in Marriage LQ3UHPRGHUQ(XURSH, edited by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (University of Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, forthcoming 2011). For the Paleologue dynasty in Monferrato, and the later history of Monferrato under the Gonzaga, see the essays in L’arrivo in Monferrato dei Paleologi di Bisanzio, 1306–2006: Studi sui Paleologi di Monferrato, ed. Roberto Maestri (Alessandria: Circolo culturale i marchesi del Monferrato, 2007); and Robert Oresko and David Parrot, “The Sovereignty of Monferrato and the Citadel of Casale as European Problems in the Early Modern Period,” in Stefano Guazzo e Casale tra Cinque e Seicento: atti del convegno di studi nel quarto centenario della morte. Casale Monferrato, 22–23 ottobre 1993, ed. Daniela Ferrari (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 11–86. 25 For Cardinal Ercole see Paul V. Murphy, 5XOLQJ3HDFHIXOO\&DUGLQDO(UFROH*RQ]DJD DQG 3DWULFLDQ 5HIRUP LQ 6L[WHHQWK&HQWXU\ ,WDO\ (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007); for his involvement with the Council of Trent, 196–244. 26 Bornstein, “Women and Religion,” 6–7.

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throughout Europe, Italy moved towards the troubled resolutions of the CounterReformation. While histories of art for this period are often concerned with matters of representation in the face of increasing Catholic orthodoxy, the ways in which Catholic Reform changed practical matters of religious life and observance – particularly in the female monasteries of Northern Italy – have received less attention. But Reform strongly affected the everyday lives of nuns.27 One thinks, for example, of the frequent visits that Margherita Cantelma made to the nuns at Corpus Domini in Ferrara, talking with some of them in their individual cells, discussed in Chapter 2, or the fact that in her widowhood, Margherita Paleologa spent periods of time in residence at the monasteries of Corpus Domini and San Vincenzo in Mantua. After 1530, piety became increasingly synonymous with the propriety of privacy and seclusion, and these changes were reÀected in the lives of the monasteries in which Isabella’s daughters rose to become abbesses. The gradual imposition of stricter rules of claustration on female religious communities even before the institutions of the Council of Trent in 1563 naturally changed life for the nuns, but it also altered what had previously been a much more open dynamic between women inside and outside the convent walls. One of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga’s chief preoccupations in Mantua, which I discuss in Chapter 3, was the regulation of the monasteries and particularly the physical transformation of the public spaces within female communities to increase the separation of the nuns from their visitors, closing them off from the eyes of the city. The period from the death of the Beata Osanna in 1505 to the convening of the Council of Trent in 1561 was an age of changing paradigms for the exercise of female spirituality in the social and civic context.28 The great female spiritual symbol of this early age of Reform was the poet and reformer Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). Colonna was not a mystic, but an active reformer who, in her widowhood, converted from a life of secular privilege to a life of fervent spiritual devotion. Her spiritual work manifested itself in the poetry that she published and in her active participation in the circle of cardinals devoted to Reform in Rome.

27

For some general insights into how Reform affected convent life see Pio Paschini, “I monasteri femminili in Italia nel’500,” in , SUREOHPL GL YLWD UHOLJLRVD LQ ,WDOLD QHO Cinquecento, Atti del Convegno di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, Bologna, 2–6 Sett. 1958 (Padua: Antenore, 1960), 41–61; Gabrielle Zarri, “Monasteri femminili e città (secoli XV–XVIII),” Storia d’Italia: annali 9 (1980): 357–429. For convents and Reform in speci¿c Italian cities see Silvia Evangelisti, “‘We Do Not Have It, and We Do Not Want It’: Women, Power and Convent Reform in Florence,” 6L[WHHQWK&HQWXU\-RXUQDO34:3 (Fall 2003): 677–700; Olwen Hufton, “Altruism and Reciprocity: the Early Jesuits and their Female Patrons,” Renaissance Studies 15:3 (July 2003): 328–53; and Jutta Gisela Sperling, &RQYHQWVDQGWKH%RG\3ROLWLFLQ/DWH5HQDLVVDQFH9HQLFH(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999). 28 For a history of the transformation of female religious life starting in the mid¿fteenth century and throughout the age of Reform see Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650,” in Women and Faith, 83–112.

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Much has been written about Colonna and Reform in recent years.29 One of my objectives in the latter part of this book is to demonstrate how Colonna’s spiritual work in the world inÀuenced Margherita Paleologa in Mantua – a pious widow who, for many years, was also the public partner of Cardinal Ercole in the coregency of Mantua and Monferrato.30 Carolyn Valone has written eloquently about the many widows of Paleologa’s generation, unburdened with the task of regency, who were seized by Colonna’s example to do good, to create spiritual work in the real world by commissioning the building and decoration of churches, chapels and monasteries.31 Far from the lyrical mysticism located in the bodies of saints, by mid-century women made concrete contributions to the practice of faith, relocating their devotion from interior passions to public monuments. As regent of her young sons, Margherita remained married to the state, fashioning herself in the public realm as a pious widow and, in the private realm, taking an interest in the devotions of her sisters-in-law and monitoring the activities of the nuns at monasteries in Mantua and in Monferrato. Unlike some earlier studies of religious patronage among women, this book provides insight into a complex and Àuid world of sacred patronage, devotional practices and religious roles both inside and outside the convent walls.32 Religious 29

For Colonna and Reform see Marjorie Och, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Religious Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” PhD diss.,, Bryn Mawr College, 1993; the catalogue for the exhibition Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Mandragora, 2005); Abigail Brundin, 9LWWRULD&RORQQDDQGWKH6SLULWXDO3RHWLFV of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2008). More on Colonna is found in my Chapter 5. 30 For Colonna’s role as an exemplar to other women involved in Reform see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 63–5. 31 Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill. Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” Art Bulletin 76 (March 1994): 129–46. Also by Valone, “Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15:3 (September 2001): 301–27. 32 The vast literature on women and religious patronage tends generally to separate the activities of nuns and convent patronage from the activities of secular patrons, although many recent works have examined the roles of aristocratic laywomen and tertiaries in the sponsorship of monastic and convent art and architecture, with some emphasis on friendship and familial relations inside and outside the convent walls. Recent works include: Katherine Gill, “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in (DUO\0RGHUQ(XURSH, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15–47; Renee Baernstein, “In Widow’s Habit: Women between Convent and Family in Sixteenth-Century Milan,” 6L[WHHQWK&HQWXU\-RXUQDO25 (1994): 787–807; Beth Holman, “Exemplum and Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola at Polirone,” Art Bulletin 81:4 (Dec. 1999): 637–64. For laywomen, religious patronage, the sponsorship of monasteries and civic identity see Gabriella Zarri, “Monasteri femminili e città (secoli XV–XVIII),” Storia d’Italia: annali 9 (1980): 357–429; Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Creating and Recreating Communities of Women: The case of Corpus Domini, Ferrara, 1406–1452,” Signs 14 (1989): 293–321; Marilyn Dunn, “Spiritual Philanthropists, Women

,QWURGXFWLRQ6DLQWVDQGWKH&LW\

15

patronage was a vehicle for the radical rede¿nition of female relations outside the traditional borders of marriage and family, and such patronage was fundamental to the formation of new social identities and communities within the developing urban context. The women of Mantua used religious patronage to de¿ne their private devotions, cultivate their public reputations as pious patrons and to situate themselves outside the family and household within a much larger female community of church, monastic and civic life. Silvia Evangelisti has pointed to the importance of understanding the integration of convents with the outside world, and has proposed that the supposed separation between the lay world and the cloister in the Renaissance was actually a fabric of connections that were much more permeable than we have so far imagined. This book examines those connections in the context of Renaissance Mantua.33 The approach in this book is essentially three-fold: primary archival research, contextual analysis of the climate of female mysticism and how this affected religious patronage among female aristocratic patrons and female monastic communities, and a re-examination of a number of visual objects, particularly altarpieces devoted to local beatae, saints and female founders of religious orders. By exploring these avenues of research, my objective is to demonstrate ties between women both outside and inside the convent walls. The overall approach is to look at female networks that shaped civic religious identity in Mantua in this crucial period leading up to and spanning the early period of Catholic Reform. As such, its geographic scope is limited to Mantua itself, and its temporal scope extends roughly from the birth of Isabella d’Este in 1474 to the death of her granddaughter, Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos, in 1579. From the moment of her widowhood in 1571, Isabella d’Avalos began to acquire her own reputation for personal sanctity, so that by the time of her death she was remembered in almost the same terms as the beatae of the earlier sixteenth century.34 In fact, within only a few generations, as Convent Patrons in Seicento Rome,” in :RPHQDQG$UWLQ(DUO\0RGHUQ(XURSH3DWURQV Collectors and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 154–88; Helen Hills, “Cities and Virgins: Female Aristocratic Convents in Early Modern Naples and Palermo,” Oxford Art Journal 22.1 (1999): 29–54; Jutta Gisela Sperling, &RQYHQWVDQGWKH%RG\3ROLWLFLQ/DWH5HQDLVVDQFH9HQLFH(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999); Anabel Thomas, $UW DQG 3LHW\ LQ WKH )HPDOH5HOLJLRXV&RPPXQLWLHVRI5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\,FRQRJUDSK\6SDFHDQGWKH5HOLJLRXV :RPDQ¶V 3HUVSHFWLYH (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ann Roberts. Dominican Women and Renaissance Art: The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2008). 33 Silvia Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows, and Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy,” +LVWRULFDO -RXUQDO 43:1 (March 2000): 233–47, at 245. 34 Accounts of the death of Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos are found in Ippolito Donesmondi, Dell’historiae ecclesiastica di Mantova, 1612–1616, 2 vols. (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1977), II:253 and Federico Amadei, Cronaca universale della Città di Mantova, 2 vols. (Mantua: C.I.T.E.M, 1954–1957), II:830.

16

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

under the inÀuence of Catholic Reform, the devotional impulse on the part of aristocratic women to publicly participate in the cults that worshipped the images, words and bodies of the beatae had turned increasingly inward. Acts of pious patronage gave way to an increased sense of personal pietism as these “daughters of devotion” moved from participating in the cults of saints to becoming revered almost as saints themselves.

Chapter 1

Popular Devotion: Isabella d’Este, the Beata Osanna and Depictions of Female Sanctity in Mantua

... you have been chosen with the desire that you remain outside the monastery, in order that you might be a mediator for the salvation of many souls ... Girolamo Scolari Monteolivetano, The Spiritual Colloquies of Osanna Andreasi of Mantua, 1507 1

Legend has it that Mantua was founded by Manto, daughter of Tiresias, the prophetess and sorceress, who was the ¿rst to envision a city cradled at the conÀuence of three rivers that issue from the River Mincio, which descends southward from the Lago di Garda.2 In the ¿rst century BCE, the city gave birth to its most famous native son, the poet Virgil. Blessed by the gods and the Muses, in the later Middle Ages the city lacked only the protection of native saints.3 The ¿rst medieval patron saint of the city was Anselm, the eleventh century Bishop of Lucca (1036–1086), who was born in Mantua and, as Papal Legate of Lombardy, was the spiritual guide of Countess Matilda of Canossa (1046–1115), foundress of the Benedictine abbey at San Benedetto Po, near Mantua.4 Around the same 1

“ti ho eletta a voglio che tu stia così fuori del monasterio, secundo è ordino perché tu sia mediatrice a la salute de molte anime,” Girolamo [Scolari] Monteolivetano, Via & porta paradisi: ac omnium virtutum (Mantua: Leonardo Bruschi, 1507) in “Colloqui Spirituali”, appendix to Osanna Andreasi di Mantova 1449–1505. La santa dei Gonzaga lettere e colloqui spirituali, ed. Gianna Festa and Angelita Roncelli (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2007), 205. 2 Accounts of the founding of Mantua differ in their details, but see Dante, Inferno, Canto XX. The decoration of the ducal palace in Mantua includes the Sala di Manto, with frescoes by Lorenzo Costa the Younger depicting the founding of the city, Jérémie Koering, “La ville per le détail: la sala di Manto au palais ducal de Mantoue,” Revue de l’Art 163 (2009): 35–44. 3 A synopsis of the legendary founding of Mantua is given by Kate Simons, A Renaissance Tapestry. The Gonzaga of Mantua (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 17. 4 “St Anselm of Lucca the Younger” at The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/01546a.htm (accessed July 1, 2008). For the development of the monastery at Polirone from its inception under Matilda of Canossa to its Renaissance renovatio see Beth Holman, “Exemplum and Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola at Polirone,” The Art Bulletin 81:4 (December 1999): 637–64.

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

18

time, the earliest of the local Mantuan beatae, the Blessed Giovanni Bono (1168– 1249), founded the Augustinian monastery of Sant’Agnese, near the river Mincio.5 In 1304, the city laid claim to the relics of St Longinus, whose body was discovered at Mantua along with the Holy Sponge stained with Christ’s blood.6 With the possession of such a precious relic, Mantua gradually became the locus for a renewed sense of civic piety, which manifested itself from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries in a burgeoning number of home grown saints, whose shrines and relics began to populate the growing city. The relic of the Precious Blood soon became the most important devotional object in the city, and the chapel consecrated to Saint Longinus in the modest monastery church dedicated to St Andrew rose to greater civic consciousness when Alberti redesigned the building in 1472, envisioning it as a splendid resurrection of Roman classicism. The building of Sant’Andrea was but one of the civic projects carried out under the patronage of the Marchese Ludovico Gonzaga whose rulership (1444–1478) consolidated Gonzagan power by centralizing the administration of all forms of civic government and social services. In 1450, for example, Ludovico closed all of the charitable institutions in the city, unifying them under the banner of the new hospital of San Leonardo. As Angelita Roncelli points out, the imposition of such centralized control effectively quashed the attitude of communal Christian charity that had formerly characterized the religious institutions of the city, and shifted their focus away from public social responsibility to more private and internalized devotional practices.7 However, the completion of Sant’Andrea, and the subsequent devotional fervor that gripped the city, also fostered the growth of a number of popular cults devoted to what Gabriella Zarri has called “living saints” – female tertiaries who, living between the convent and the city, became ¿gures of popular devotion.8 In other words, private and personal rituals of devotion found a 5

“Beato Giovanni Bono,” at The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.santiebeati.it/ dettaglio/74200 (accessed July 1, 2009). 6 An early chronicle of the relic of the Precious Blood in Mantua is found in Ippolito Donesmondi, Dell’historiae ecclesiastica di Mantova, 1612–1616. 2 vols. (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1977), Appendix to II, “Cronologia d’alcune cose,” 25–6. Reliquaries for the Precious Blood are discussed in Splendours of the Gonzaga, ed. David Chambers and Jane Martineau (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), cats. 211 and 213, 205–6. The sarcophagus of St Longinus is found in Sant’Andrea, in the chapel commissioned by Polissena Castiglione Boschetti (the sister of Baldassare Castiglione), see the entry by Giuseppe Pecorari in Giulio Romano. Saggi di Ernst Gombrich et al. (Milan: Electa, 1989), 442–3. 7 “Lo stato e la città di Mantova nella seconda metà del Quattrocento,” in Osanna Andreasi da Mantova. La Santa dei Gonzaga, 15–34, at 18. 8 Donne e fede: santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Gabrielle Zarri and Lucetta Scaraf¿a (Rome: Laterza, 1994); also Women and Faith. Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Gabriella Zarri and Lucetta Scaraf¿a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Gabrielle Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and

Popular Devotion

19

new way to become public through the ¿gures of these popular saints, who thrived in the civic consciousness through their living presences, their pious reputation and their posthumous miracles. Zarri further points out that, as potent manifestations of popular religious culture, these “living saints” were quickly seized upon and appropriated by the various rulers of the Italian city-states, including Mantua, as a means of consolidating their own public power.9 While much work has been done by Zarri to identify and contextualize the social and political implications of the proliferation of the beata cults, little work has been done to look at an evolving iconography of the beatae themselves. Although the suppression of the Mantuan monasteries in the eighteenth century destroyed or displaced many of the images of these neighborhood saints, there are still remnants of them spread throughout the city. In this chapter I delineate an evolving iconography of female venerables and beatae popular in Mantua, beginning with the completion of Sant’Andrea up to the early sixteenth century. Such a brief survey demonstrates how popular piety in Mantua was appropriated by the monasteries and the Gonzaga. It also enriches our understanding of an evolving iconography of female sanctity within the context of civic responsibility. I also make a connection between the evolving iconography of the beata altarpieces and the simultaneous reinvention of the iconography of female saints whose cults rose to prominence during the Great Schism of the church after 1378. The fourteenth-century break between Avignon and Rome rocked the hierarchy of the church to its very foundations, and it was during this period of uncertainty that ecclesiastical authorities were willing to listen to the voices of women, like St Bridget of Sweden and St Catherine of Siena, who were not only visionaries but, in the case of St Bridget, an authoritative founder of a female order that helped to rebuild the church.10 It is not surprising that during another period of great anxiety in Italy, brought on by the French occupation and the rumblings of reform in the north, that images of these female founders would also experience a renaissance of their own. While my intention here is not to extensively re-examine this renaissance in the iconography of female founders, who have been the subjects of excellent and comprehensive studies, I do see a connection between the visual

Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 219–303 and Gabrielle Zarri, Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 e ‘500 (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990). 9 For some discussion of the importance of local beatae cults in the politics of rulership at the northern Italian courts in this period see Gabriele Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, 219–303. 10 Daniel Bornstein, “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy: History and Historiography,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, 1–27; also Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650,” in Women and Faith, 83–128.

20

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

reassertion of their authority and some aspects of the development of the beata altarpieces in the same period.11 That Isabella, the great secular patron, would have herself depicted in an altarpiece for a local monastery speaks of her desire to inscribe herself on the community in which her daughter served and also to associate herself with an institution fundamental to the stabilization of Gonzaga civic power, especially in the face of the death of the prince and a growing Counter-Reformation anxiety.12 In this altarpiece Bonsignori combined the portraits of these highly recognizable women with visual codes, synthesized from contemporary trends in the representation of female saints and particularly of the beatae, in order to elevate a neighborhood saint into an image of divine piety, sanctity and authority. Although frequently mentioned as one of the very few examples of a religious commission on the part of Isabella d’Este, Bonsignori’s depiction of the Beata Osanna has never been fully examined in the context of what it reveals about the series of complex social relationships – familial, institutional, civic and devotional – that not only motivated the commission of the image but that actively played themselves out through the agency of the altarpiece itself. The objective of this chapter is to locate the Beata Osanna altarpiece within the evolving genre of beata images in this period. Such altarpieces are little studied and understood, but certainly the representation of the Beata Osanna shares characteristics with other representations of female mystics of this time. A particular example within the ambient of Lombardy, and especially in Mantua itself, is the panel depicting the Beata Maddalena Coppini (d.1472) by Antonio da Pavia (dated to the 1490s, now Palazzo di San Sebastiano, Museo della Città), made for the convent of San Vincenzo in Mantua, the same convent for which Bonsignori made the Beata Osanna painting. Another example is the fresco of the Venerable “living saint” Elisabetta Picenardi (d.1468), which is still found in the Servite Church of San

11 This Renaissance renewal of the cults of saints Bridget and Catherine, as well as St Elizabeth of Hungary and of St Monica, the mother of St Augustine, is discussed by Catherine Lawless, “‘Widowhood was the Time of her Greatest Perfection’: Ideals of Widowhood and Sanctity in Florentine Art,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Levey (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2003), 20–39, particularly 36–7. For the iconography of St Catherine of Siena, George Kaftal, Saint Catherine in Tuscan Painting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949) and Lidia Bianchi and Diega Giuna, ,FRQRJUD¿D GL 6DQWD &DWHULQD GD 6LHQD (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1988); for St Bridget of Sweden, Anthony Butkovich, Iconography: Saint Bridget of Sweden (Los Angeles: Ecumenical Foundation of America, 1969). 12 Isabella’s feelings towards Reform are largely unexplored, but Counter-Reformation anxiety played a large part in Mantuan politics in the succeeding generation, when Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga was papal legate to the Council of Trent, see Paul V. Murphy, Ruling Peacefully: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).

Popular Devotion

21

Barnaba in Mantua and attributed to an unknown Lombard painter.13 These depictions differ in content and style from the Beata Osanna altarpiece, but they are important precedents for understanding the social agency of beata images in the civic context. In terms of iconography and visual af¿nities, Bonsignori’s altarpiece may also be usefully compared to earlier works made to honour the cult of Caterina Vigri (d.1463), a Ferrarese mystic who began her vocation as a Franciscan tertiary and who eventually was permitted to establish a second-order monastery under the rule of St Clare, founding the convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara.14 In Bologna, Vigri was supported by the ruling Bentivoglio family and after her death gained an extensive popular following through biographies and her reputation for posthumous miracles, making her a forceful and “living” presence in the city.15 In establishing her monastery at Bologna, Vigri became the modern equivalent of St Catherine of Siena, the founder of the female Dominican order. Vigri was the embodiment of a new type of female saint of the ¿fteenth century, celebrated for her active and practical piety and for her more abstract gifts for ascetic spirituality and prophecy. Many other new female saints of the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries were secular or regular members of the third orders,

13

The panel of the Beata Maddalena Coppini was recently discussed by Paolo Bertelli in Osanna Andreasi da Mantova 1449–1505. L’immagine di una mistica del Rinascimento, ed. Renata Casarin (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2005), cat. 32, 252–9; and by Gianfranco Ferlisi, “Il monastero di San Vincenzo Martire,” in Chiese di conventi Domenicani, ed. Rosanna Golinelli Berto (Mantua: Associazione Monumenti Domenicani, 2007), 63–91. The Picenardi fresco has not been studied recently but was described in 1763 by Giovanni Cadioli, Descrizione delle Pitture, Sculture ed architetture che si osservano nella città di Mantova e ne suoi contorni 1763, ed. Giovanni Pescasio (Mantua: Editoriale Padus, 1976), 89–90. Picenardi is less well known than Coppini, but she is discussed at some length by Ippolito Donesmondi, Dell’historia ecclesiastica di Mantova, 2 vols. (Mantova, 1612–1616, reprinted by Bologna: Forni, 1977), I:352–3; The fresco of Picenardi is also in George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), 91. Carlo d’Arco says the fresco was originally in the corridor that led to the sacristy from the choir of the church, and at some point was relocated to the second altar on the left from the entrance, Mantova. Le Arte, 2 vols. (Mantua: Istituto Carlo d’Arco per la storia di Mantova, 1960 and 1961), II:349. According to Giovan Carlo Tiraboschi, when San Barnaba was suppressed in 1798, Picenardi’s remains were claimed by Giuseppe Colloredo, a devotee of her cult, and translated to his private chapel in Spineta. The remains were reclaimed by the Picenardi family in 1799 and brought to their private chapel at Villa delle Torre, outside Cremona, Famiglia Picenardi (Cremona: Presso Gisueppe Feraboli, 1815), 81–7. Much of Tiraboschi’s information comes from Isidoro Bianchi, Compendio della vita e miracoli della Beata Elisabetta Picenardi Mantovana (Mantua: Tip. Francesco Aguzzii nel Pal. dell’Accademia, 1805), which was not available to me. 14 Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Creating and Recreating Communities of Women: The Case of Corpus Domini, Ferrara, 1406–1452,” Signs 14 (1989): 293–321. 15 For Vigri’s importance in Ferrara see Gabriella Zarri, “Dalla profezia alla disciplina (1450–1650)”, in Donne e fede, 177–226, at 183–4.

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

22

like the Beata Osanna of Mantua, who were celebrated symbols of an emergent “laical piety of the devotio moderna who stood for spirituality in action.”16 Vigri’s status as a cult object of popular reverence is evident in early representations of her by both the so-called Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (now in the Courtauld Collection), by Francesco Francia, a painter associated with the Mantuan court and with Isabella d’Este (now in a private collection).17 These works helped to establish a typology in which the standing ¿gure of the beata is placed at the centre of kneeling donors, a place traditionally assigned to the Virgin in sacra conversazione imagery, and which stresses her function as intercessor and mediator, and makes her body the object of cultic devotion. The central placement of Vigri’s body, and the emphasis placed on supplicating donors, are clearly analogous to Bonsignori’s image of the Beata Osanna, establishing a sense of continuity in the depiction of these beatae in the Lombard context. In a broader context, Bonsignori’s altarpiece also has some visual af¿nities to emerging conventions in altarpieces devoted to female founders of religious orders and monasteries, particularly to altarpieces painted for other Dominican convents. The most pertinent example is the altarpiece by Cosimo Rosselli of St Catherine as the Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders of St Dominic, painted in 1499–1500, probably for the convent of San Domenico del Maglio, commonly called “Il Paradiso,” in Florence.18 St Catherine of Siena was the key exemplar of female sanctity within the Dominican order. In Rosselli’s altarpiece she is seated at the centre of the composition, Àanked by standing saints. With the defeated dragon ¿rmly controlled underfoot, signifying her victory over the devil, she hands out the book of Dominican Rule to one group and a scroll of regulations to the various nuns, novices and tertiaries that surround her. In many ways, Bonsignori’s altarpiece of the Beata Osanna echoes this image of St Catherine, who was her spiritual mother, and so it participates in an iconography of female sanctity and authority that was obviously part of the visual culture of female Dominican communities in the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

16

Zarri, “Dalla profezia,” 186. For the panel depicting Caterina Vigri by the Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Lee Collection, no.26) see Jereldyne Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 196–7, as well as Emilio Negro and Nicosetta Roio, Lorenzo Costa 1460–1535 (Modena: Artioli Editore, 2001), 34 and 36–7; Negro and Roio also discuss the Francia panel depicting St Catherine Vigri with Two Female Monastics (now in a private collection), Lorenzo Costa, ill. 57, at 34 and 36–7. 18 For Cosimo Rosselli’s St Catherine see Edith Gabrielli, Cosimo Rosselli, Catalogo ragionato (Turin and New York: U. Allemandi, 2007), cat. 34, 151–3. 17

Popular Devotion

23

Saints and the City: Images of Female “Living Saints” in Mantua c.1460–1530 The fresco depicting the Beata Elisabetta Picenardi (d.1468) is one of the earliest beata images to survive in Mantua. Painted for the Servite Church of San Barnaba in the third quarter of the ¿fteenth century, shortly after the Marchese Ludovico issued his edict to close the local charitable institutions, the fresco is located in the chapel along the left side of the nave which houses Picenardi’s relics (Illustration 3). Accounts of Picenardi’s life are structured according to standard female hagiographical patterns: the childhood call to devotion, the rebellion against patriarchal authority by refusing to marry, voluntary withdrawal to hermetic existence, recognition by contemporaries and an immediate reputation for miracles after her death. She was the daughter of a nobleman from Cremona who chose a life of chastity and devotion, and resisted her aristocratic father’s attempts to arrange her marriage. After her father died, she was free to live in isolation, withdrawn from the world and closeted in a room in her sister’s house, which was located immediately adjacent to the Servite Church of San Barnaba in Mantua. Under the inÀuence of her confessor, from whom she was permitted to receive communion in her cell, she chose to become a Servite tertiary. Because of her hermetic devotion, she enjoyed a popular reputation for piety in Mantua, where she was revered as an intercessor, oracle and prophet by residents of the neighborhood. Upon her death in 1468 a public procession was held to honour the translation of her body to the church next door. The Mantuan chronicler Donesmondi tells us that for many years after her death, the priests of San Barnaba healed the sick by dressing them in Picenardi’s Servite habit.19 The Servites’ possession of such a powerful relic nourished her cult and obviously prompted the execution of the commemorative fresco in the church. In this depiction, the standing Picenardi, wearing the habit of the Servite order, is accompanied by the ¿gure of a child who holds a banner of the resurrection, a reminder of the episode in which she saved an infant from drowning. According to the legend, the child had been underwater for several hours but was saved when his mother called on Picenardi, who miraculously appeared and rescued him.20 This appears to be the ¿rst popular shrine of a local beata in Mantua, and the popular appropriation of her person, her image and her relics speaks to a strong and spontaneous desire on the part of local residents to appeal to a recognizable and accessible protector who could be a focus for popular, public and communal worship.21 19

Ippolito Donesmondi, Dell’historiae ecclesiastica, I:152–3. The story of the rescue of the drowned infant is told by Donesmondi, who also reports that Picenardi’s body was originally housed in the church in a terracotta arca located to the right of the main entrance, and later moved to its present location in a chapel along the left nave, where the fresco is currently located, Dell’historiae ecclesiastica, 1:153. 21 The nineteenth-century historian Stefano Gionta recorded that on 3 July 1806, there was a “solemn ceremony” held in honour of Picenardi, who had been granted the right of public veneration by Pope Pius VII on 20 November 1804, I Fioretti delle Cronache di Mantova, ed. Antonio Mainardi (Mantua: Coi tipi dei fratelli Negretti, 1844), 522–3. 20

3

Unknown Lombard artist, the Beata Elisabetta Picenardi, fresco, last quarter of ¿fteenth century, Church of San Barnaba, Mantua. Photo: Author

Popular Devotion

25

In the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, images and relics of the beatae of Mantua were also used to negotiate relations between the convents and the city, particularly in the case of the Dominican monastery of San Vincenzo. Before its suppression in the eighteenth century, San Vincenzo housed the relics of two important local saints: the Margherita Torchi (d.1321), a nun who entered the monastery when it was founded in 1260, and the Maddalena Coppini (d.1472), who was also a nun at San Vincenzo. It was also home to Bonsignori’s altarpiece honouring the Osanna Andreasi (d.1505).22 Together, the three constituted a local history of Dominican piety. Moreover, stories about the miracles attributed to the holy women of San Vincenzo raised the civic pro¿le of the monastery, transcending the walls of its enclosure. While there is little information about the life of Margherita Torchi, her status as an original member of the community from its foundation in 1260 obviously made her relics important as a commemoration of the foundation of the community, and her reputation for piety encouraged public donations.23 Considerably more records survive to record the life of Maddalena Coppini of Mantua, widely revered for her gift of prophecy and credited with many healing miracles after her death. An image of Coppini, dated to about 1480 and once found in the monastery church of San Vincenzo, is now in the Museo della Città of the Palazzo San Sebastiano in Mantua (Illustration 4). Examining the iconography of this work reveals some of the ways public piety linked to the beatae was controlled by the monasteries which used their images and reputations as agents of civic and social order. The painting is now sometimes linked by Mantuan scholars to the workshop of the Veronese painter Nicolò Solimeno. It concentrates on the body of the saint, and presents a full-length depiction of Coppini standing beneath a round-headed arch supported on decorative pilasters painted to resemble graceful carved motifs of conjoined vases and candelabras. At the base of this strong, standing image are two predella scenes that depict Coppini’s most famous miracle, in which she healed a nun at San Vincenzo from an incurable disease.24 The panel, with its emphasis on Coppini’s standing ¿gure and its narrative panels depicting this miraculous act of healing, is visually structured to remind the viewer of the thaumaturgical power of the saint’s body, displayed for their reverence. Coppini wears the Dominican habit and holds a book open to a passage in the Psalms of David which can be translated to read “I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satis¿ed,

22

Torchi and Coppini are discussed by Simonetta Bitasi, Tre Domenicane Mantovane Venerabili, 3rd ed. (Mantua: Fraternitá Domenicana, Casa della Beata Osanna Andreasi, 2005); Bitasi also discusses Caterina Carreri (d.1557), who lived as a recluse in Mantua and who was buried in the Cathedral of Mantua, 16–19. 23 Torchi’s status as a beata was renewed by Francesco Gonzaga, bishop of Mantova from 1593–1610, when he included her in his Costitutiones Sinodales (1610), Tre Domenicane Mantovane, 11. 24 Osanna Andreasi da Mantova 1449–1505. L’immagine di una mistica del Rinascimento, ed. Renata Casarin (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2005), cat. 32, 252–9.

7KLV¿JXUHKDVLQWHQWLRQDOO\EHHQUHPRYHGIRUFRS\ULJKWUHDVRQV To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

4

Antonio da Pavia? the Venerable Maddalena Coppini, tempera on canvas, c.1480, Mantua, Museo della Città, Palazzo di San Sebastiano, inv.11496. Bridgeman Art Library

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when I awake in your glory” (Psalms 17:15).25 Contemporary accounts of the panel record that it was regularly displayed in the choir of the monastery church, near the arca that held Coppini’s relics, and Ferlisi concludes that the inscription was intended to reinforce the daily observances of the nuns who, worshipping in close proximity to the image would, on a daily basis, be able to renew their faith in the promise of salvation and resurrection after death. Once a year, however, on the anniversary of Coppini’s death, the arca was opened and both her body and her image were displayed for public veneration. On these occasions, the painting operated within the broader civic context, bridging boundaries between enclosure, exposure and disclosure and promoting the power of the monastery to operate in the realm of popular sanctity. Coppini’s relics and the panel by Solimeno were valuable propagandistic tools for the Dominicans at San Vincenzo, and were used as instruments of public piety in the communication between the convent and the city. The Iconography of the Bonsignori Altarpiece According to Catherine King’s analysis of gendered “regimes of representation” in altarpieces of this period commissioned by husband and wife donors, the place of honour at the right hand of the central devotional ¿gure would normally be occupied by the male commissioner. In the Beata Osanna altarpiece, Isabella d’Este occupies this place of honour, signaling her status as the commissioner of the work.26 The Veneration of the Beata Osanna altarpiece incorporates all of the symbolic, visionary and concrete signs of Osanna’s special status as a mystic, and it commemorates her role as the personal saint of the Gonzaga family and, especially, of Isabella d’Este. Vasari was full of praise for Bonsignori’s habits and abilities as a portrait artist and it was in this capacity that he served at the Mantuan court after arriving there from Verona in 1494.27 By the time he painted the altarpiece, he was thoroughly familiar with Isabella’s features, having created portraits of her when she was younger. One such portrait of Isabella, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, was painted by Bonsignori before 1505 for her friend, Margherita Cantelma. Bonsignori was also a specialist in devotional altarpieces, 25

The inscription is analyzed in Ferlisi, “Il monastero di San Vincenzo,” 81–2. King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 41–2. 27 Giorgio Vasari, Vite. The account used here is taken from the authoritative English edition, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects etc., ed. Gaston de Vere, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1912–1915), 6:29–35. There is no monograph on Bonsignori or on the Bonsignori family; the most complete catalogue of his work is found in Ursula Barbara Schmitt, “Francesco Bonsignori,” München Jahrbuch der Bildender Kunst (1961): 73–152; a biographical account is also found in B. dal Pozzo, Le vite de’ pittori scultori e architetti veronesi (1831–34), ed. G. Biadego (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1976, c.1861), 250–4. 26

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many of which he painted in Verona, before coming to the court of Mantua. In 1484, for example, he painted a Virgin and Child with saints for a Veronese noblewoman named Altabella Avogaro, for her funerary chapel in the church of San Fermo, Verona.28 In that altarpiece, a bust-length portrait of Altabella is placed in the position of donor in the lower foreground, making her present both in the picture space and in the viewer’s space and functioning as an intermediary between the Virgin and Child and the worshippers in the chapel. Altabella’s portrait within the altarpiece follows a tradition, popular since the thirteenth century, of including donor portraits in devotional paintings for commemorative purposes. Although this is quite different from the purpose for which Bonsignori created the Beata Osanna altarpiece, since we know that Isabella was very much alive when it was completed, Altabella’s carefully observed widow’s headdress and the position of her clasped, praying hands are similar to the costume and positioning of the ¿gures of Isabella and Cantelma in the Beata Osanna altarpiece. In Bonsignori’s altarpiece, Isabella is celebrated as a living donor and an ever-present reminder to the nuns of San Vincenzo that Osanna was of¿cially elevated to the status of a beata through Isabella’s own personal petitions to the Pope. Isabella’s presence in the altarpiece is, therefore, an assertion of political power as well as civic and personal piety, and her appearance in conjunction with the nuns of San Vincenzo undoubtedly conferred status and authority to the monastery. The altarpiece constitutes a perspicacious art of civic consciousness on Isabella’s part, one that required the talents of an artist who was both a portraitist and an experienced civic propagandist. Female Founder Saints Bonsignori presents Osanna as an object of devotion and a ¿gure of authority for the Dominican nuns in the convent of San Vincenzo, but she was also at the centre of a cult that translated beyond the convent walls into the Mantuan community at large. She was a saint for the city, and Bonsignori reinforced the authority of her cult by incorporating visual strategies borrowed from representations of contemporary beatae in other Lombard cities. For example, over the course of the ¿fteenth century, a similar iconography that featured the standing beata surrounded by supplicants had already developed in Bologna to honour the Beata Caterina Vigri (d.1463). An early depiction of Vigri, attributed to the so-called Master of the Baroncelli Portraits, usually dated to about 1480, is now in the collection of the Courtauld Institute in London (Illustration 5). The panel depicts Vigri standing at the centre of three kneeling donors, identi¿ed as the patron Giacomo Loiani, accompanied in the image by his former, deceased wife and his new living wife. Vigri’s upright and hieratic ¿gure, which stares out of the panel towards the viewer, placed at the centre of both departed and living donors,

28

King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 154–6 and plate 46.

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5

Master of the Baroncelli Portraits, Saint Catherine of Bologna with Three Donors, oil on panel, c.1470–1480, Courtauld Institute of Arts. Bridgeman Art Library

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is clearly presented as an intercessor for their salvation.29 The intercessory function of the saint, and especially of her body, is emphasized by the fact that the scene of this intercession is set immediately adjacent to the chapel in Bologna, which was the ¿rst location of Vigri’s relics. The corpse of Beata Caterina, exhumed by her fellow nuns only eight days after she died, is still preserved in her chapel in Bologna, enthroned under a rich gold and red canopy.30 Vigri’s role as mediatrix is repeated in a slightly different context in a later panel, which has been associated with the circle of the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia. The panel depicts Saint Catherine Vigri with Two Female Monastic Donors (now in a private collection). Again in this work, Vigri stands between two worshipping donors – in this case two nuns, who were undoubtedly residents of Vigri’s convent in Bologna.31 In 1511, Francia produced a woodcut image of Vigri for the frontispiece of an edition of some of her spiritual writings, and the panel has been associated with this frontispiece. The emphasis on the kneeling donors in the painting reinforces Vigri’s role as an important exemplar of female piety among the generations of nuns who followed her spiritual example and worshipped her relics in their monastery in Bologna. Vigri’s biography was one of spiritual transformation and transcendence from the privileges of secular aristocratic life to the rewards of spiritual ful¿llment through a life of devotion, as nun, painter, and spiritual writer and eventually as abbess of her own convent in Bologna. Vigri was born into a privileged Bolognese family and at a young age was sent to Ferrara as a companion to the princess Margherita d’Este. When Margherita married, Vigri chose to enter the convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara. Corpus Domini had been founded as a beguinage in 1406 and it was during Vigri’s career there that the convent came under the rule of the Franciscan Poor Clares.32 Despite her profession, Vigri struggled with her spiritual vocation, and during her time in Ferrara she composed a treatise about her spiritual conversion called the Seven Spiritual Weapons. The book detailed Vigri’s spiritual awakening when she was 29

For the panel by the so-called Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Lee collection, no. 26) see Jeryldene Wood, Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 196–7; and Emilio Negro and Nicosetta Roio, Lorenzo Costa 1460–1535 (Modena: Artioli, 2001), ill. 56, 34 and 36–7. 30 For a description of the modern shrine, Wood, Women, Art and Spirituality, 121–4. 31 The panel by Francesco Francia depicting St Catherine Vigri with Two Female Monastics (now in a private collection) is reproduced and discussed by Negro and Roio, Lorenzo Costa, ill. 57, 34 and 36–7. 32 King, Women of the Renaissance, 107–9, who says that “The blending of forms of female communitarian life in early Renaissance Italy is revealed in the history of the monastery of Corpus Domini in Ferrara,” 107. Schisms within the movement toward Franciscan reform in the mid-¿fteenth century led a splinter group from Corpus Domini to found an Augustinian convent in Ferrara in 1461.

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a young aristocratic woman, her subsequent life in the community at Corpus Domini and her initial resistance to, and then endorsement of, the conversion of the community there to Franciscan Reform. In the ¿nal chapter, Vigri envisioned herself among the saved at the Last Judgment and celebrated her presence there as a potent symbol of her own victory against spiritual doubt. It was this vision that persuaded her to abandon purely submissive obedience, to cast off the demons of self-doubt and to undertake the leadership of her own convent in Bologna. She attributed the achievement of this insight to the strength she had derived from her immersion in the community at Corpus Domini in Ferrara, emphasizing that monastic life had helped her ¿nally to accept her fate. To the other nuns, she especially stressed the crucial role that the monastic community could serve in the spiritual progress of each individual member, and she urged them to recognize each other’s struggles and to assist each other in waging war against spiritual weakness. In 1463, from her deathbed at the convent that she had founded in Bologna, Vigri sent a copy of this book, which she had long kept secret, to the community at Corpus Domini in Ferrara, hoping that the details of her own spiritual struggles could serve as a guide to her sister nuns.33 By sharing her own struggles through her writing, she became an exemplar of Franciscan piety, a teacher to the Poor Clares, and a true “community saint” to the nuns at Bologna and at Ferrara.34 The convent at Bologna retained possession of Vigri’s uncorrupted body as a symbol of her sainthood. However, through her Seven Spiritual Weapons, the nuns at Corpus Domini at Ferrara recognized the important role that their own community had played in her spiritual formation.35 In Francia’s little panel depicting her with her sister nuns, Vigri holds a cruci¿x aloft in one hand and an open copy of a book in the other – perhaps an allusion to her spiritual treatise.

33

For an analysis of Vigri’s life and writings in the context of clarissan piety, Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality, 121–44; for the text of Vigri’s treatise Wood recommends S. Caterina Vigri, Le sette armi spirituali, ed. Cecilia Foletti (Padua: 1985), n. 1, 247; Wood also discusses Vigri’s hiding of the manuscript and her direction that the nuns at Bologna make a copy to be sent to Ferrara, n.12, 249. See also Joseph R. Berrigan, “Saint Catherine of Bologna: Franciscan Mystic,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 81–98. Vigri was also a painter and illuminator, and her art has been the subject of many recent studies, see the essays in Caterina Vigri. La santa e la città, Atti del Convegno Bologna, 13–15 Novembre 2002, ed. Claudio Leonardi (Florence: SISMEL – Edizione del Galluzzo, 2004). 34 McLaughlin, “Corpus Domini,” 311–16. 35 Girolamo Savonarola, who was also from Ferrara, wrote a poem about Vigri and about the powerful inÀuence her body exerted on those who Àocked to see it in Bologna: “From a thousand directions the people run / To see your body, on the strength of only rumor. / Although you are dead, your body seems alive / And seems to recall your soul,” Berrigan, “Saint Catherine of Bologna,” 85.

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Bonsignori’s altarpiece of the Beata Osanna Andreasi can therefore be seen in the context of contemporary Lombard and Mantuan trends in the depiction of local beatae. However, aspects of the style and iconography of the work can also be examined in light of other developing trends in the representation of female sanctity at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In Bologna, the placement of a standing female saint at the centre of a sacra conversazione composition had been inÀuentially expressed by Raphael in his Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, commissioned in 1513 and by 1515 installed in the church of San Giovanni in Monte in Bologna, the city in which Francia lived and worked.36 The St Cecilia altar was commissioned from Raphael for the funeral chapel of the Bolognese patron Elena Duglioli dall’Olio (d.1520), a Bolognese aristocrat who was a devotee of St Cecilia’s cult and was herself a visionary prone to mystic ecstasies – another “living saint.” After Duglioli’s death, her funerary chapel and Raphael’s painting became the objects of a thriving local cult.37 As is well known, Vasari reported that the beauty of Raphael’s St Cecilia sent Francesco Francia into such a spiral of despair that he died almost immediately after he saw it.38 His sons, Giacomo and Giulio Francia, showed a rather more practical response by transmitting some of the essence of the St Cecilia into an altarpiece they painted in 1518 for Benedictine nuns at the Church of Santa Margherita in Bologna, depicting St Margaret’s Vision of the Dead Christ (signed and dated, now in the Prado, Madrid, Illustration 6).39 In this altarpiece, the Francia brothers retained Raphael’s sacra conversazione arrangement by placing the standing ¿gure of Margaret at the centre of the panel, Àanked by Saints Francis and Jerome. Margaret’s triumphant purity is signaled by the vanquished dragon beneath her feet – an allusion to the legend that she was swallowed by a dragon that was forced to disgorge her because of the cruci¿x that she holds aloft. Margaret’s miraculous rebirth from the belly of the dragon caused her to be popularly adopted as the patron saint of safe childbirth. The Francia altarpiece also associates Margaret with the visionary powers of the mystics, by focusing on the apparition of the cruci¿ed Christ above her head. Like St Cecilia, her upturned eyes signal her complete involvement with her inner, transformative experience, externalized for the viewer by the painter. Both the St Cecilia and the St Margaret altarpieces responded to 36

For Raphael’s St Cecilia, see the essays in Indagini per un dipinto: La Santa Cecilia di Raffaello, ed. Andrea Emiliani (Bologna: Edizioni ALFA, 1983). 37 Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, 167–71; for more on Duglioli see Gabriele Zarri, “L’altra Cecilia: Elena Duglioli Dall’Olio (1472–1520),” in Indagini per un dipinto, 81–118 and Regina Stefaniak, “Raphael’s Santa Cecilia: a Fine and Private Vision of Virginity,” Art History 14:3 (September 1991): 345–71. 38 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori [1568], edited by G. Milanesi, 9 volumes (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), III: 545. 39 Negro and Roio, Francesco Francia, point out the inÀuence of Raphael’s St Cecilia on the Francia brothers, cat. 83, 258. In the nineteenth century, the painting was in the sacristy of the convent church at San Clemente, part of the Collegio di Spagna in Bologna, and from there it was moved to the Prado.

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Giulio and Giacomo Francia, St Margaret’s Vision of the Dead Christ, signed and dated 1518, for the Church of Santa Margarita in Bologna, later in the Church of San Clemente, Almo Collegio di Spagna in Bologna, now Madrid, Prado, inv.143. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

trends in popular piety, emphasizing the visionary and ecstatic powers of female saints, strongly associated with the cults of the local “living saints.” Not long after this altarpiece was painted, Margaret’s popular reputation as an intercessory saint became of such concern that her cult was deliberately subdued by Catholic authorities. Andrea Cohen has suggested another way in which Bonsignori’s Beata Osanna altarpiece is related to an evolving iconography of female spirituality. She points out that the curious monster that Osanna stands upon is a human–animal hybrid,

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a kind of man/goat/satyr, similar to the kind of monster that is sometimes trampled by the Virgin in Immaculate Conception iconography of the period.40 In her examination of these hybrid monsters and their role in the iconography of female sanctity, she examines Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies (Florence, Uf¿zi), painted about 1517, around the same time as Bonsignori’s altarpiece. Like Bonsignori’s Beata Osanna, the Madonna of the Harpies was painted for a female audience, speci¿cally for the church of the nuns of San Francesco in Florence. In del Sarto’s painting, the Virgin stands like a statue on a high pedestal adorned with hybrid female monsters, the so-called harpies, symbols of temptation and vice trampled by the force of her immaculate nature. By trampling the harpies, who symbolize temptation, the Virgin redeems the sin of Eve, becoming a symbol for the salvation of women in general and “the advocate of consecrated women in particular,” who struggled daily, through sheer force of will, to overcome their own human vices.41 Osanna’s demon links her to the divine guidance of the Virgin but also signi¿es the constant exercise of human will that was necessary for her to maintain her vows as a tertiary, an exemplar for women both inside and outside the convent walls. Strong female exemplars of power, control and authority, the will to subjugate sin and the transumptive power of mystic experience, would all be largely eradicated by the representational strictures of the Counter-Reformation. The notion of communities of women united in devotional activism is also apparent in the development of the iconography of female monastic founders in conjunction with their followers of the Third Orders in the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Italy, the signi¿cance of such female founders in the realm of popular piety is seen in a resurgence of the cults of St Catherine of Siena (1347– 1380) and St Brigid of Sweden (1303–1373), who were now actively celebrated for their leadership among female followers at every level, from professed nuns to semi-religious laywomen.42 For this period, the most pertinent example of an altarpiece dedicated to a female Dominican founder, as well as to Dominican 40

Simona Cohen, “Andrea del Sarto’s Monsters: The Madonna of the Harpies and Human–Animal Hybrids in the Renaissance,” Apollo (July 2004): 38–45. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception was only accepted into the liturgical calendar in 1476, but remained controversial throughout the Renaissance; it was brought up at Trent and a simpli¿ed Of¿ce of the Conception entered the liturgical books in 1570, and only became of¿cial dogma in 1854, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art, ed. Peter and Linda Murray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 239–40. 41 Cohen, “Andrea del Sarto’s Monsters,” 44–5. 42 For a brief discussion of the phenomenon of female founder altarpieces in the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kate Lowe, “Nuns and Choice: Artistic DecisionMaking in Medicean Florence,” in With and Without the Medici. Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434–1530, ed. Eckhart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 1998), 129–153 and Catherine Lawless, “‘Widowhood Was the Time of her Greatest Perfection’: Ideals of Widowhood and Sanctity in Florentine Art,” Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Levy (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2003), 20–39 and the many comments found in Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious

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tertiaries, is Cosimo Rosselli’s St Catherine as the Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders of St Dominic, a work sometimes thought to have been painted for the convent of San Domenico del Maglio in Florence (now Edinburgh, National Gallery, Illustration 7).43 St Catherine of Siena was, of course, the key exemplar for female sanctity within the Dominican order, as exempli¿ed in the well-known late ¿fteenth-century fresco of St Catherine from the Church of Saint Dominic in Prato.44 In that work, Catherine is depicted with the radiance of the beata and also with the halo of a saint, dating the fresco to after her canonization in 1461. She is Àanked by two kneeling groups of Dominican tertiaries. In Rosselli’s altarpiece of about 1485, the composition has become more complex and varied. Catherine is depicted enthroned as the central ¿gure of a sacra conversazione arrangement, Àanked by the standing Saints Lawrence, Dominic, Peter Martyr and the Archangel Raphael with Tobias.45 She wears the halo of a saint and, with the defeated dragon sternly controlled underfoot, she hands a scroll of regulations to a group of women kneeling to her right and a book of Dominican rule to a second group of women kneeling to her left. According to Ian Holgate, this altarpiece was not commissioned for a convent, but for a group of tertiaries at the Church of Santa Caterina on the Via Gualfonda in Florence (“pinzochere di Santa Caterina”).46 He identi¿es the book Catherine holds as a volume of her own writings and the scroll that she hands to her followers as the Rule of the Third Order. Here, the status of the various women who kneel before St Catherine can be inferred from their costume. The professed nuns wear the habit of the order, one ¿gure wears a widow’s habit and another younger woman is depicted in lay clothing. However, as Holgate points out, the broad distinctions in dress do not immediately clarify more subtle distinctions that might be made among various types of female devotional practice, particularly among religious laywomen. As Holgate writes, “the distinctions between the women Communities of Renaissance Italy. Iconography, Space and the Religious Women’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 43 For Rosselli’s St Catherine see Gabrielli, cat. 34, 151–3. 44 Thomas, Art and Piety, 195–6. 45 Rosselli had experimented with the central placement of a female saint in an earlier altarpiece depicting Sts Barbara, John the Baptist, and Matthias Apostle, 1468–69, now in the Accademia in Florence, see Paula Nuttall, “‘La tavele Sinte Barberen’: New Documents for Cosimo Rosselli and Giuliano da Maiano,” The Burlington Magazine 127:987 (June 1985): 367–9, 371–2; Nuttall says little about the remarkable iconography of the work, in which St Barbara stands at the centre, atop the body of a defeated soldier in armour, who represents the forces of evil. The altarpiece was painted for the Chapel of the Confraternity of St Barbara in the church of the Annunziata in Florence. 46 Ian Holgate, “The Cult of Saint Monica in Quattrocento Italy: Her Place in Iconography, Devotion and Legend.” Papers of the British School at Rome 71 (2003): 181–206, at 201; he refers to A. Padoa Rizzo, “Sulla iconogra¿a e la destinazione di una importante tavola di Cosimo Rosselli,” in /D7RVFDQDDOWHPSRGL/RUHQ]RLO0DJQL¿FR politica, economia, cultura arte (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996), 277–88.

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Cosimo Rosselli, St Catherine of Siena as Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders of St Dominic, tempera and gold on panel, 1499–1500, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, NG 1030. Bridgeman Art Library

and the boundaries within which they lived and acted were probably less de¿ned than modern observers might imagine.”47 As Katherine Gill has demonstrated, religious laywomen were known by a wide variety of terms in the Renaissance: mantellate, pinzochiere, bizoche and sometimes even monache.48 Certainly the women Rosselli depicts here are intended to reÀect this array of religious practice, and the altarpiece was undoubtedly important to an equally broad audience of female worshippers. As in Bonsignori’s altarpiece of the Beata Osanna, Rosselli spins a web of relations that embraces mystics, monastics, matrons and maidens. Another female exemplar who emerges in this period, one who had particular resonance for the devotional aspirations of widows, is Saint Monica, the mother of St Augustine. Monica’s story was known chieÀy through Augustine’s Confessions, and her story was embellished in the thirteenth-century account of Augustine’s 47

Holgate, “Cult of Saint Monica,” 203. As established by Katherine Gill, “Penitents, Pinzochiere and Mantellate: Varieties of Women’s Religious Communities in Central Italy, ca.1300–1520,” PhD. Thesis, Princeton, 1994. 48

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life found in Jacopo della Voragine’s Golden Legend. Monica persevered through an unhappy marriage to a pagan husband and, as a widow, suffered through the moral transgressions of the young Augustine. Her prayers for Augustine were rewarded when she ¿nally witnessed his conversion and his baptism in Milan. She travelled with him to establish his community in North Africa, but died on the journey and was buried at Ostia. Monica’s immediate beati¿cation in the late fourth century acknowledged her important status as a symbol of female Christian fortitude and the trials and rewards of motherhood and widowhood. Although her cult waned in the late Middle Ages, it Àourished again in the late thirteenth century, during the Avignon papacy.49 In 1430, under Martin V and the return of the papacy from Avignon, Monica’s relics were translated from Ostia to a chapel in the Church of San Trifone in Rome. Not long afterward, she was ¿nally interred in a commemorative chapel in Sant’Agostino in Rome, in a monument designed in 1455 by Isaia da Pisa.50 Ian Holgate has observed that immediately after the installation of Monica’s relics in Sant’Agostino, she became the focus of an onomastic sorority and that her chapel was also frequented by more informal gatherings of Augustinian tertiaries. Meredith Gill has demonstrated that the original creation of the chapel in Sant’Agostino was largely the result of female initiative and that the ¿fteenth-century cult Àourished under the aegis of various holy women of Rome, who saw an opportunity for establishing the chapel as a locus of meaningful civic discourse and the performance of acts of public charity. In Gill’s words, the interactive relationship that the saint’s relics created between the Church leadership and the female community was “a new arena of power and worship in an urban setting.”51 Neither a mystic nor a contemplative, Monica was a model for civic spiritual activism. Monica’s particular attraction for tertiaries and for female members of the laity in the late ¿fteenth century is commemorated in Francesco Botticini’s Florentine altarpiece of about 1487, depicting St Monica Distributing her Rule to the Nuns of the Augustinian Order, now found in the Bini-Capponi Chapel of Santo Spirito in Florence (Illustration 8).52 According to documents, the altar was originally found 49

Monica was only of¿cially canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982. St Monica also appears in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes depicting episodes from the Life of St Augustine in the Church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano; for Gozzoli see Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 51 Meredith J. Gill, “‘Remember me at the Altar of the Lord’: Saint Monica’s Gift to Rome,” in Augustine in Iconography. History and Legend, ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt, OSA and Frederick Van Fleteren (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 549–76. 52 The clearest reading of the documents concerning the altarpiece and which ¿rmly establish a date of 1487 are discussed in A.C. Blume, “The Chapel of Santa Monica in Santo Spirito and Francesco Botticini,” Arte Cristiana 83 (1995): 289–92. See also Lisa Venturini, Francesco Botticini (Florence: Edi¿r, 1994), 48–50 and cat. 24, 109; and Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety, 63–4. Thomas proposes that the predella panels could be from an earlier altarpiece dedicated to Saint Monica, painted about 1470–1471 and, according to Venturini, argues for a date for the central panel later in the ¿fteenth century, 50

38

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

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Francesco Botticini, St Monica Distributing her Rule, oil on panel, c.1487, Bini-Capponi Chapel in the Church of Santo Spirito, Florence. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

in a chapel in Santo Spirito that belonged to the mantellate nuns of the Church of Sant’Agostino in Florence. Therefore, it was commissioned speci¿cally for a community of tertiaries. In this altarpiece, Botticini depicts Monica in an attitude similar to Rosselli’s St Catherine. She is seated on an elevated throne and she hands a scroll inscribed with the rule of the Augustinian order to a group of younger which Venturini considers “bizarre.” For the signi¿cance of this altarpiece to Augustinian tertiaries dedicated to St Monica see Holgate, “The Cult of Santa Monica in Quattrocento Italy,” and his ”Santa Monica, Venice and the Vivarini,” in Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy, ed. Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2007), 163–82.

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devotees who kneel to her right. To her right is a group of older women, who face a closed book that Monica balances on her knee. In this depiction, Monica is dressed in her traditional blue habit, which she adopted in imitation of the Virgin, and she also wears the leather belt of the Augustinian Hermits, an acknowledgement of the dispute for primacy between the Hermits and the Canons that raged at the end of the ¿fteenth century.53 The followers of Monica in this altarpiece also wear the blue mantle. For this reason, Holgate identi¿es the women here as tertiaries, the mantellate, named for the garment they wore.54 There are no standing saints in this altarpiece to connect the iconography to the traditional sacra conversazione genre. Instead, the communication is strictly between Monica and her female followers. The entire composition emphasizes the primacy of Augustinian rule and demonstrates Monica’s importance as a spiritual model for semi-religious and lay women associated with the Augustinian order. The cult of St Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century widow, mystic and founder of her own religious order, also gained new popularity in late ¿fteenthcentury Italy. Giovanni Antonio Sogliani’s 1522 altarpiece depicting St Brigid Imposing the Rule, now in the Museo del Cenacolo di San Salvi in Florence, was originally painted for the convent of San Salvatore e Brigida in Pian di Ripoli in Florence, often referred to simply as the “Paradiso.”55 The altarpiece shares certain compositional and iconographical strategies with Rosselli’s earlier altarpiece of St Catherine. Again, the central compositional focus is on the centralized body of the female saint and the explicit content of the altarpiece is the conferral of the founder’s authority – in this case Bridget’s rule – to her followers through the presentation of the book and the scroll. The standing ¿gure of Bridget is Àanked on either side by other standing ¿gures who have been identi¿ed as important contemporaries associated with the major events that marked her for sainthood: Pope Urban V, who actually conferred her rule in 1370, Alfonso da Valdaterra, Bishop of Jaen, who was the editor of her Liber Celestis, which might be the book that she hands to him here, and her daughter, St Catherine of Sweden, to whom she hands the scroll with the rules of her order.56 This altarpiece clearly celebrates the spiritual authority that Bridget derived from her visionary power and its inÀuence over her followers. To its convent audience, the political and dynastic messages that Sogliani conveyed here reinforced the

53

Holgate, “Santa Monica, Venice and the Vivarini,” 175. Holgate, “Cult of Saint Monica,” 191; he points out that much more work needs to be done on tertiary commissions, “Santa Monica, Venice and the Vivarini,” 200–1. 55 Fra Bartolomeo e la scuola di San Marco, ed. Serena Padovani et al. (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 262–5 and Giuseppina Bacarelli, “Le commissioni artistiche attraverso i documenti: novità per il Maestro del 1399 ovvero Giovanni di Tano Fei e per Giovanni Antonio Sogliano,” in Il ‘Paradiso’ in Pian di Ripoli. Studi e ricerche su un’antico monastero, ed. Mina Gregori and Giuseppe Rocchi (Florence: Centro Di, 1985), 96–103. 56 “St Catherine of Sweden,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent. org/ cathen/03448a.htm (June 2, 2009). 54

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legitimacy of the Brigittine Order in the face of growing Protestant unrest in early sixteenth-century Italy. The pairing of mother and daughter saints also emphasizes familial ties and spiritual dynasty; an inheritance that the Brigittine nuns no doubt also felt conferred special status on their order. In many ways, Sogliani’s St Bridget altarpiece also marks a climax for the assertion of this kind of hieratic female spiritual authority. Altarpieces that focused on the centralized ¿gure of a standing or seated female saint became increasingly rare. In fact, in the age of Catholic Reform to follow, female saints and their followers were primarily assigned roles on the margins of sacra conversazione groups focused on the Virgin. For example, the ¿rst work produced by Giacomo and Giulio Francia after the death of their father in 1517 was an altarpiece for the nuns of the Benedictine monastery of Santi Gervasio e Protasio in Bologna (now in the Pinacoteca in Bologna, Illustration 9). The work depicts The Madonna and Child in Glory with Saints Peter, Mary Magdalene, Francis and Martha with Six Female Olivetan Oblates.57 The six oblate sisters kneel next to St Francis in the foreground at the Virgin’s left hand, while St Martha stands protectively above them. Only the kneeling Magdalene, to the right of this group, looks upward at the apparition of the Virgin and Child. The oblates look out of the painting directly towards the viewer. Although the lack of context for the work makes it impossible to know whether it was commissioned as the main altarpiece for the church, the choice of female saints and the direct contact made between the oblate sisters and their audience clearly emphasizes that the altarpiece was created as a visual document of female spiritual experience and engagement. About 25 years later, in 1543, Giacomo Francia completed another painting for the Benedictine community at Santi Gervasio e Protasio – this time a work that was intended as the main altarpiece for the convent church, depicting Enthroned Madonna and Child with Saints Gervase and Protase, Catherine and Giustina and Four Benedictine Nuns (now in the Prado, Madrid, Illustration 10). In this altarpiece, the female saints and the nuns kneel in a circle at the centre of the grouping, with their hands clasped in prayer and their eyes focused on the apparition of the Virgin above them. The circle of women is Àanked on either side by the standing male saints, who look out at the viewer.58 Here, the attention of the nuns in the altarpiece has been turned more resolutely inward and become closed to the world, symbolic of the restrictions that Reform would impose on female religious communities in general. What the female founder altarpieces produced in the late ¿fteenth and early sixteenth centuries share with Bonsignori’s vision of the Beata Osanna is an emphasis on female piety, female authority and the urge to depict women who 57

Emilio Negro and Nicosetta Roio, Francesco Francia e la sua scuola (Modena: Artioli Editore, 1999), cat. 182, 257–8. 58 Negro and Roio, Francesco Francia, cat. 214, 274–5. After World War II the work was in the church of Santa Maria in Piazza in Busto Arsizio, Varese (north of Milan) and is now on deposit at the Brera.

Popular Devotion

9

41

Giacomo and Giulio Francia, Madonna and Child Enthroned in Glory with Saints Peter, Mary Magdalene, Francis and Martha and six Olivetan Oblates, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Photo Credit: Alinari ArchivesAlinari Archive, Florence

represented the wide variety of spiritual experience and engagement, especially those women who actively participated in the propagation of female cults, from nuns and tertiaries to widows to semi-religious and laywomen. The body of Osanna surrounded by kneeling female worshippers in Bonsignori’s altarpiece echoes Rosselli’s image of St Catherine, combining veneration with authority and emphasizing the important role assumed by individual Dominican tertiaries, like St Catherine and the Beata Osanna, as spiritual leaders for their cities at large and for their female followers in particular. It is clear that these altarpieces depicting female founders highlighted the relationships between saints, monastics and semireligious laywomen so fundamental to the practice of devotion and the multiplicity of religious identities that women assumed in this period. But to whom were such messages directed? As we have seen, virtually all of the works discussed here were made to address female communities of viewers, but they were not necessarily always exclusively restricted to female audiences. Speci¿cally, the fresco of Elisabetta

42

10

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

Giacomo Francia, Madonna and Child with Saints Gervase and Protase, Catherine and Giustina and Four Benedictine Nuns, 1543, altarpiece for the church of the Benedictine convent of Santi Gervasio e Protasio in Bologna, now on deposit in the Brera, Milan. Photo Credit: Alinari Archives-Alinari Archive, Florence

Picenardi in San Barnaba in Mantua was undoubtedly intended to communicate Picenardi’s virtues to other Servite tertiaries, who worshipped in the church, as well as to local laywomen; however, it seems equally to have been a propagandistic tool used by the Servite monks who, it will be recalled from Donesmondi’s account, used Picenardi’s habit as a healing tool. In addition, her relics in the church were widely held to possess intercessory powers. The story of her miraculous intervention to save a drowned child spoke to the tribulations and rewards of motherhood. Her power was clearly present in the public domain. The panel depicting Maddalena Coppini was usually only visible to the nuns of San Vincenzo, and contained messages to reinforce their daily devotional practices, but it was also displayed for public veneration once a year, in conjunction with her relics. At those moments, she transcended the cloister to become an active agent in civic healing.

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Osanna’s relics were continually displayed for public veneration in the arca commissioned by Isabella d’Este and designed by Gian Cristoforo Romano for the Church of San Domenico in Mantua. The altarpiece, however, was displayed in the monastery Church of San Vincenzo, where it was presumably only seen by the nuns who lived and served in that community. Like the other altarpieces depicting Saints Catherine, Bridget and Monica as spiritual authorities and exemplars, the women in Bonsignori’s altarpiece represent a range of female worshippers, from the professed nuns of San Vincenzo, to aristocratic lay protectors, to the central ¿gure of the Beata Osanna, whose status as a tertiary bound city and convent together. By presenting Osanna as the central object of devotion on the part of aristocratic devotees and dedicated nuns of the Dominican Order, the painting emphasized the transumptive power of Osanna’s presence in the city, unifying public and monastic piety. Furthermore, the representation of Osanna is the ful¿lment of God’s ordained plan for her, as articulated by Girolamo Scolari in the Spiritual Colloquies quoted at the beginning of this chapter; speci¿cally that it was ordained by God that she remain outside the monastery in order to be the mediator “for the salvation of many souls.” Isabella’s commissioning of the altarpiece depicting the Beata Osanna can be seen quite speci¿cally as an effort on her part to rede¿ne her persona, and to recreate herself in the image of a pious widow in a work destined for a devotional venue. The altarpiece marks a kind of turning point between the secular cultural obsessions of her youth, such as collecting antiquities and the commissioning of mythological paintings as a form of self-fashioning within the more strictly private con¿nes of her museum room and studiolo, in favour of the more public pro¿le she wished to convey as a widow. Moreover, the altarpiece consolidated the active role she took in the public promotion of the cult of the Beata Osanna. The altarpiece was not only commemorative but propagandistic. There could be no greater indication of Isabella’s commitment to the creation of a civic saint than the fact that her own daughter, Ippolita Gonzaga, had entered San Vincenzo in honour of the Beata Osanna. With its emphasis on widowhood, piety and worshipful contemplation, in some ways the Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi looks forward to later developments in Counter-Reformation art.59 It is a snapshot in time that represents the making of public and private female devotional identities linked to familial and friendship relationships, inside and outside the convent walls. It is also directly linked to the rise of female devotional activity in the realm of establishing new orders, building churches and monasteries and actively promoting devotional cults dedicated to women. Bonsignori’s altarpiece for San Vincenzo lent authority to Andreasi’s cult in Mantua, sanctioning and sanctioned by, the cultural power of Isabella d’Este. It is an image that is quite boldly concentrated on female authority by drawing together the sacred and the secular; mystics, matrons and monastics. It is a neatly synthesized piece of propaganda signaling 59

King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 179.

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Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

Isabella d’Este’s transition to her new role as pious widow and reinforcing her ties to the neighbourhood saint and to the local monastic communities from whom she sought solace and support.

Chapter 2

Friendship and Devotion: Margherita Cantelma and Isabella d’Este

But there is another thing which seems to me to create or take away greatly from reputation, and this is our choice of the friends with whom we are to live in intimate relations; for reason doubtless requires that persons who are joined in close friendship and in indissoluble companionship must be alike in their desires, in their minds, and in their talents. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier1

My main objective in this chapter is to lend greater authority to the identi¿cation of the woman who kneels behind Isabella d’Este in Bonsignori’s Beata Osanna altarpiece as Margherita Cantelma, Duchess of Sora, Isabella’s lifelong friend. I begin by demonstrating Cantelma’s involvement in the projects that Isabella undertook to popularize the cult of the Beata Osanna. In particular, she was in contact with the sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano in Milan when he was designing and building the arca of the Beata Osanna that Isabella commissioned in 1505. Cantelma and her husband, Sigismondo, were also the ¿rst employers of the humanist secretary Mario Equicola, who later served Isabella Gonzaga and produced a life of the Beata Osanna shortly after her beati¿cation. 2 Finally, Cantelma knew the painter Francesco Bonsignori and owned a portrait that he made of Isabella d’Este – a portrait that Cantelma came to venerate almost as though it were a religious image. The ardour she felt for Isabella’s portrait, expressed in her letters, transformed this secular image to a sacred icon, and in many ways her fervid descriptions of her devotion to Isabella’s image and to her physical presence echo the tenor of the ecstasies of the beatae of the era. As their friendship deepened in the early years of the sixteenth century, Cantelma made frequent visits to the nuns at the monastery of Corpus Domini in Ferrara and described herself as “ambassador” to the community there. She wrote letters describing her visits with the nuns and relayed to Isabella their requests for speci¿c gifts and donations that they intended for their personal or community use. In fact, in her later years, Cantelma lived as a semi-religious laywoman, eventually founding a monastery of 1

Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 124. 2 Documents attesting to the relationship between Cantelma and Gian Cristoforo Romano were ¿rst published in Adolfo Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” Archivio Storico dell’Arte, I (1888): 49–59, 107–18, 148–58; previously unpublished documents from the Archivio di Stato in Mantua are found in my Appendix II.

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Augustinian canonesses in Mantua, a project that would be carried out, after her death, under Isabella’s sponsorship. Friendship and Devotion When I think how far I am from that beloved camerino with its dear small door and from the sweet secret Grotta, the secret refuge of my lady, there descends on me such sadness that on the one hand my eyes are blurred and on the other my tongue curses this swamp-riddled Mortara of mine, and I am more harassed this summer than last because I am being deprived of going to see My Illustrious Lady and it seems that my body is to be deprived of yours (...) because I am to be deprived from going to see your Illustrious Ladyship and my body is to be deprived of you ... Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este, 1505 3

The circumstances of Margherita Cantelma’s adult life were, from the very beginning, bound up inextricably with Isabella’s own life and interests. She was born the daughter of a prominent notary named Bartolommeo Maloselli who served Ludovico II Gonzaga in Mantua. When her father and his only brother died in Mantua without any male heirs, Cantelma inherited all of the Maloselli properties and holdings in Mantua.4 Her economic status made her an attractive marriage prospect and she was soon betrothed to Sigismondo Cantelmo, the son of the Neapolitan nobleman Pietrogiampaolo Cantelmo, Duke of Sora.5 While waiting to inherit his title as Duke of Sora, Sigismondo earned his living as a condottiere in Ferrara, a post he won through connections to the Duchess Eleanora of Aragon, a distant relative and an unÀagging supporter of exiled Neapolitan nobility in the north. In 1485, to reward him for his service, Duke Ercole granted Cantelmo a house in Ferrara near the Church of San Francesco, which eventually became the ¿rst location of the Cantelmo family tomb.6 3

A quando io penso quanta distancia e dal quello beato camerino dal uscino caro e da la secreta Grotta dolce ricetto dela mia segnora, mi vene tanto dolore che son sforciata a sfocarlo parte per li occhij parte per la lingua biastemando e maledicendo questa padulosissima Mortara per mia se ch’el mi quasi così molesto questa estate come la passata solo per esser priva de andare e vedere Vostra Signora Illustrissima che mi pare havere private el mio corpo dala sua (…), ASM, Archivio Gonzaga (AG), b.1636, unnumbered, 1 June 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este. Mortara is in northern Lombardy, not too far from Casale Monferrato, situated on the pilgrimage route from Rome to Santiago de Compostela. 4 Carlo d’Arco, Famiglie Mantovane (ms., Archivio di Stato di Mantova), V:178–81. 5 A history of the Cantelma family, with its many branches in Naples, is found in P. Vincenti, Historia della famiglia Cantelma (Naples: n.p., 1604); a brief biography of Sigismondo is found at 54–8; see also Ascari, “Cantelmo, Sigismondo,” DBI, 18: 277–9. 6 For the granting of the Ferrarese property to Sigismondo Cantelmo, Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara. Ercole d’Este, 1471–1505, and the Invention of a Ducal Capital,

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Cantelmo’s service as a condottiere extended to the court of Mantua. In 1486, as a reward for his service to Francesco II Gonzaga, the marquis awarded him a large territory at San Matteo in Chiaviche, in the territory of Viadana (near Cremona), including the title to a mill and to two vital canals linking the territory to the Po River.7 In 1491, a year after Isabella d’Este arrived in Mantua and married Francesco II Gonzaga, Margherita Maloselli married Sigismondo Cantelmo in Ferrara. Since some early letters from Isabella to Margherita Cantelma are addressed to her in San Matteo, it can be assumed that the Cantelmi built a residence there and it is in connection with a feud over the San Matteo property that Cantelma ¿rst appears in Isabella’s letters.8 In 1496, just a year after Sigismondo had been instrumental to Francesco II in his victory over the French at the Battle of Fornovo, the marquis accused him of treachery and deception and seized back the properties he had previously granted at San Matteo. Evidently, Gonzaga felt that Cantelmo’s efforts to regain the Neapolitan properties his family had lost to the French invaders in Naples constituted treason. Margherita Cantelma interceded on her husband’s behalf by asking Isabella d’Este to persuade the marquis for clemency. On 23 July 1496, in response to Cantelma’s pleas, Isabella wrote to Francesco II asking him to restore the Cantelmo properties at San Matteo in memory of Margherita’s father and for the sake of the “innate goodness of Cantelma’s nature.” She added that (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), n. 88, 250; he cautions that Sigismondo Cantelmo, Duke of Sora, is often confused in the Ferrarese documents with Sigismondo Cantelmo de Trani who married the widow of Galeazzo Trotti of Ferrara in 1491, the same year Sigismondo of Sora married Margherita Maloselli, 311–12. The Cantelmo property in Ferrara is also discussed in Ferruccio Pasini Frassoni, Dizionario Storico-Araldico dell’antico Ducato di Ferrara (Bologna: Forni 1969, reprint of Rome, 1914), 115. The property granted to Cantelmo in Ferrara formerly belonged to a “Messer Diotesalvi da Neroni da Fiorenza”; the Cantelmo house eventually became the property of Alfonso I d’Este, who described it in his will of 1533 as a palace surrounded with abundant orchards and gardens, Testamento di Alfonso primo d’Este, 28 August 1533 (the collocation is given as Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, ms. Cl. I, 206), in Teodosio Lombardi, Gli Estensi ed il Monastero del Corpus Domini di Ferrara (Ferrara: Centro Culturale Città di Ferrara, 1980), 76–99, at 77. 7 San Matteo di Chiaviche was in the Diocese of Cremona, in the Vicariate of Viadana, Antonio Parazzi, Origini e vicende di Viadana e suo distretto, 5 vols. (Viadana: Comune di Viadana, 1992, reprint of Mantua, 1893–99), II:24. The only extant property that I can identify with the Cantelmi in the territory of Mantua is the Corte Cantelma near Sailetto di Suzzara, which is described as a typical country dwelling arranged around two courtyards, Dino Nicolini, Le corte rurale nel Mantovano (Milan: Silvana, 1984), 124, ¿gures 149, 150, 151 and 152; this property cannot be securely linked to Sigismondo Cantelmo. 8 A typical ¿fteenth-century central-block residence with some outbuildings survives in the present-day San Matteo Mantovano, but there is no evidence to suggest that the structure was built speci¿cally for the Cantelmi; the style of the surviving building is consistent with a late ¿fteenth-century country house, consisting of a central, square block surrounded by farm buildings, adjacent to the canal and lock system of the modern San Matteo.

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the restitution of the properties would be considered the act of a magnanimous prince, as well as a great personal favour to her (Appendix II).9 It is obvious from this letter that Isabella was deeply fond of Margherita. Although Francesco did eventually relent and restore the properties, the Cantelmi continued to struggle and throughout 1497 Isabella sent Margherita small monetary gifts to assist her in maintaining and administering the properties the couple owned in the Mantuan territories, including the canals and mill at San Matteo, which Isabella would later inherit through the terms of Cantelma’s will.10 The Cantelmi suffered another setback in 1497, when Pietrogiampaolo Cantelmo died in Naples and the French refused to honor Sigismondo’s claim to his hereditary rights to the family’s feudal territory of Sora. Although his brother in Naples – Giulio Cesare Cantelmo – was permitted to retain his title as Duke of Popolo, Sigismondo was unable to claim his birthright. Still alienated from the Gonzaga in Mantua, Sigismondo remained in Ferrara under the protection Ercole d’Este.11 Shortly after this disappointment, Margherita began to court Isabella’s favour in earnest through the agency of the family secretary Mario Equicola. Equicola’s literary brilliance and natural Àair for diplomacy had served him well in Naples, but the French occupation persuaded him to become personal secretary to Sigismondo in Ferrara, where he moved permanently in 1501.12 That year he also accompanied Sigismondo on an ill-fated visit to the French court at Blois, where 9 ASM, b.2992, lib. 7, no. 199, 23 July 1496, Isabella d’Este in Mantua to Francesco II Gonzaga. 10 For example, a letter from Isabella to the “Potestato Vitelliani” (the administrator of the territory of Viadana, near Mantua in Lombardy): “/D0DJQL¿FD0DUJDULWD&DQWHOPD ne ha facto intendere che le pischere se de Sto. Mattheo sono talmente damnegiate che la non può cavare utilità alcuna per ho volemo che faciati fare publica grido et comom. to sotto la pena anche se’ contene in li ordini et gride che prohibischo el pischare che persona alcuna non pischare in le pischere de la predicta Madama Margarita senza sua licentia,”ASM, AG, b. 2992, libro 11, no. 112, 26 March 1500. 11 For the Cantelmi in Popoli (Naples) and some of their holdings there prior to the French invasions, N.F. Faraglia, “La casa dei conti Cantelma in Popoli e il suo arredamento secondo un inventario del 1494,” Rassegna Abruzzese di Storia ed Arte I:4 (1900): 3–33. The palace at Popolo was described in the 1494 inventory as “una casa nova posta in la strade de Populi dove ci sono più membri«”, which Faraglia quali¿es as a “taverna vecchia,” a single-story house with a façade surmounted by a simple continuous cornice and a centrally-placed door with an ogival arch. The inventory lists considerable material assets; mounted jewels owned by the countesses of Popoli, historiated tapestries, gold reliquaries made for the chapel, a number of books (although there is no room identi¿ed speci¿cally as a library), textiles and clothing. At the time of his death in 1519, Sigismondo was serving as “consiglieri di Guerra e sopraintendente generale delle milizie Estenzi” under Duke Alfonso I d’Este, Pasini Frassoni, Dizionario Storico-Araldico, 312. 12 For a brief biography of Equicola see P. Cerchi, “Equicola, Mario,” DBI, 43:34– 40; a complete re-examination of Equicola’s career, with a great deal of insight into his relationship with the Cantelmi, is Stephen Kolsky, Mario Equicola. The Real Courtier (Geneva: Droz, 1991).

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the deposed Duke of Sora hoped to persuade Louis XII to restore his Neapolitan properties. But Sigismondo’s suit in Naples was consistently thwarted by the advent of new hostilities or broken promises, and Equicola began to distance himself from the prince and to more openly court the favour of Margherita, who was by then in Mantua in the company of Isabella d’Este.13 Stranded in Blois, Equicola began writing Margherita erudite letters on subjects ranging from philosophy to prophecy, laced with obscure classical allusions with which he hoped to school her in the rudiments of humanism but, more importantly, to win the attention and favour of the more culturally and socially sophisticated Isabella d’Este.14 For example, in a letter of 14 March 1501, Equicola wrote Margherita a letter about the unity of the body and the soul, peppering his prose with proofs from Plato, Plotinus and Macrobius. Kolsky characterizes the letter as a discourse on prophecy, framed by Equicola as a sort of dream, full of visionary imagery.15 A letter like this was probably intended to be read out loud and would have been enormously appealing Isabella, who showed a growing interest in “visualizing” the classical past through the acquisition of antique objects and the commissioning of allegorical paintings for her studiolo in Mantua. Equicola further Àattered Margherita by asking her advice about a little treatise he was writing in her honour – the De Mulieribus – which he published in 1501, modeled after the famous work by Boccaccio.16 In his treatise, he praised Margherita and Isabella as the most salutary modern exemplars of female 13

For Equicola’s unhappy relationship with Sigismondo see Kolsky, Mario Equicola,

7–86. 14

As is evident from a slightly later letter to Margherita dated 4 November 1505 (in Equicola’s hand) from Pavia: “…Non sia più alchuno che maraviglandose de Antiqui dica essi havere scripto cose false non deve essere incredulo de Andromade la quale essendo data in preda ad certo Marin Monstro resto senza spirito. Poi da Perso fo liberate. Non de Electra se admiri che intendendo lo (…) falso de Oreste. Resto senza anima do poi vendendolo salvo li fo redatta la vita pristine (…). Non de l’hasata Pelea se maravigli che con una medesema ferita de vita ad morte et de morte ad vita resuise Thelepho per che Signora mia altre volte trovandome immerse in questo errore a presente non so se dica bona o mala fortuna per experimento de altro ho voluto el provi che oldendo la grave et pernitiose informita di V.S. restai senza spirito senza anima et totalmente morta. Ma poi per quell medesimo messo, havendo la volla dela sua recuperate volitudine foi salda sicche V.S. Ill.a in me e Perseo, Oreste, et la Achillea basta.” Kolsky reports that between March and the end of December of 1501, Equicola wrote Margherita Cantelma at least 48 letters, and transcribes parts of these in Mario Equicola, I” 291–2; he concludes that these were intended as instructive, simpli¿ed commentaries on Neoplatonic philosophy written in such a way as to make them “palatable to circles often presided over by the ladies of the court,” 65. 15 For this letter ASM, AG, b.283, Mario Equicola in Ferrara to Margherita Cantelma in Mantua, 14 March 1501; discussed by Kolsky, Mario Equicola, n. 9, 65. 16 Conor Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women,” Italian Studies, 2 (1956): 30–47, reproduces Equicola’s letter of solicitation dated 25 March 1501, n. 22, 37. The third woman included for special praise was Cornelia Cantelma, a sister of Sigismondo,

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accomplishment. He added a footnote indicating that this work had been cut short at Margherita’s request because she had already commissioned a second longer work on a similar subject, called the Defensione delle Donne, from her cousin, the Augustinian canon Agostino Strozzi.17 In his 1501 letters from France, Equicola also kept Cantelma up to date on the activities of a mutual friend – the courtier, goldsmith and sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano – who also made his entrée into Mantuan circles at this time. Gian Cristoforo was born and trained as a goldsmith and sculptor in Rome, but by 1491 he was in Milan working for Duke Ludovico Sforza on the monument to Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the Certosa at Pavia. In 1491, he carved a small marble portrait bust of Beatrice d’Este, Isabella’s sister, who was the Duchess of Milan. After Beatrice died in 1497, and the French invaded Milan the following year, Romano Àed the city and sought asylum, as Equicola had, in Mantua. On his arrival, Isabella commissioned him to create an elaborate marble intarsia door frame to adorn the entrance to her cabinet of antiquities, affectionately called the Grotta.18 Prompted by the success of Gian Cristoforo’s likeness of her sister, Isabella also asked him to make similar portraits of both herself and her husband.19 The bust of Isabella has been identi¿ed with a terracotta bust of a young woman now in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (Illustration 11), an identi¿cation who became Countess of Montedorisi; according to Kolsky, Equicola was interested only in praising Cornelia’s social graces, Mario Equicola, 76. 17 For the donne illustri treatises, Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom, Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1991) and Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio. Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). For Equicola and Strozzi see also Kolsky, Mario Equicola, 67–76 and Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women,” who cites examples of two extant manuscripts of Strozzi’s Della defensione delle donne in Venice and in Florence, each bound with subsidiary works dedicated to Cantelma and to her sons Ercole and Francesco. Strozzi was an Augustinian Canon in Mantua; for an analysis of his relationship with Cantelma see Carolyn James and F.W. Kent. “Margherita Cantelma and Agostino Strozzi: Friendship’s Gifts and a Portrait Medal by Costanzo da Ferrara,” forthcoming in I Tatti Studies XII. I would like to thank Carolyn James for sharing this article with me. 18 The door frame, originally designed for Isabella’s ¿rst Grotta in the small Toretta di San Nicolò in the castle of San Giorgio, was moved to her new ground-Àoor suite in the Corte Vecchia when she transferred her apartments there some time after 1519; Ventura, “Gli appartamenti Isabelliani in Palazzo Ducale,” in Isabella d’Este. La primadonna del Rinascimento, 65–84 and Brown, Isabella d’Este in the Ducal Palace in Mantua (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005), 121–46. 19 The bust is discussed by Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” n .1, 52, and n. 1&2, 54; an additional letter is discussed by Norris, “The Tomb of Gian Galeazzo Visconti,” doc. 13, 290–1; see the catalogue for the exhibition La prima donna del mondo, ed. Syliva Ferino-Pagden (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1994), 90–1; the bust was acquired by the Kimbell in 2004, see Timothy Potts, Director of the Kimbell Art Museum “Gian Cristoforo Romano’s Bust of Isabella d’Este,” letter in Apollo (February 2005).

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7KLV¿JXUHKDVLQWHQWLRQDOO\EHHQUHPRYHGIRUFRS\ULJKWUHDVRQV To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

11

Gian Cristoforo Romano (attributed to), Portrait of a Woman, probably Isabella d’Este. c.1500, terracotta, formerly polychromed, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo Credit: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY

based on its resemblance to the famous drawing that Leonardo da Vinci made of Isabella in about 1500, now in the Louvre.20 In both works, the emphasis is 20

A chronology of ¿fteenth-century portraits identi¿ed as Isabella d’Este, with transcriptions of many of the relevant documents, is found in Alessandro Luzio, “I Ritratti d’Isabella d’Este,” reprinted in La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1627–28 (Rome: 1913, Bardi reprint, 1974), 191–2. The Luzio article is fundamental to other examinations of portraits of Isabella d’Este, most notably J.M. Fletcher, “Isabella d’Este, Patron and Collector,” in Splendours of the Gonzaga, 51–64; Rodolfo Signorini, “Isabella’s Persönlichkeit,” in Isabella d’Este. Fürstin und Mäzentin der Renaissance,

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7KLV¿JXUHKDVLQWHQWLRQDOO\EHHQUHPRYHGIRUFRS\ULJKWUHDVRQV To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

12

Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, recto, gold with diamonds and precious stones, 1505, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

on Isabella’s long loosely-bound hair and fashionable dress, and her features are given a delicacy and re¿nement that show her at the height of her youthful beauty. Isabella liked beautiful images of herself, and Gian Cristoforo Àattered her vanity in this bust and in a portrait medal that Isabella commissioned at about the same time. The medallic pro¿le is somewhat less idealized than the Detroit 71–144, especially “Isabella d’Este im Portrait,” 86–118; and Françoise Viatte, Léonard de Vinci. Isabelle d’Este (Paris: 1999); see also Stephen Kolsky, “Images of Isabella d’Este,” Italian Studies 39 (1984): 47–62 and Sally Hickson, “‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Giovanni Francesco Zaninello of Ferrara and the portrait of Isabella d’Este by Francesco Francia.” Renaissance Studies 23/3 (June 2009): 288–310.

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portrait bust but, nevertheless, Isabella was so fond of this image that she had a special copy cast in gold and embellished with enamel inlays and precious gems (Illustration 12). This medal was among the precious antiques and modern objects that she displayed in her Grotta.21 Less ornate bronze copies of the medal were widely circulated at the European courts, where Isabella’s portrait was highly praised. For example, in 1507 Jacopo de’Atri, a Gonzaga agent in Naples, reported that the medal had circulated among the ladies of the court there, including Beatrice of Hungary, the widow of King Matthew Corvinus of Hungary and Isabella Sforza, who were moved to kiss Isabella’s image and praised the medal “in glowing terms.”22 Mario Equicola and Gian Cristoforo Romano were courtiers who responded to the destabilizing effects of the ongoing wars with the French by placing themselves at the disposal of prominent female patrons, whose power at the northern courts was increased by the absence of their husbands on campaign.23 Mario Equicola also knew Gian Cristoforo and was fond of him. In May of 1502, Equicola wrote to Cantelma to report that the goldsmith had fallen deadly ill. Cantelma, who was in Mortara at the time, wrote immediately to Isabella demanding that Gian Cristoforo be brought to Ferrara, where he could be treated by a local physician.24 Although there is nothing in the correspondence to suggest that Gian Cristoforo produced art objects for Cantelma, she must certainly have been privy to his artistic activities in 1505, when he was designing the arca of the Beata Osanna. In fact, on 9 August 1505, it was Gian Cristoforo’s turn to report to Isabella that he was leaving Milan to attend to Cantelma, who had fallen gravely ill at her home in Mortara. After she recovered, Cantelma and her family joined Gian Cristoforo in Milan, and in the

21

For this medal see Splendours, cat. 109, 160; also Luzio, “I Ritratti, 19–3 and Luke Syson, “Reading Faces: Gian Cristoforo’s Medal of Isabella d’Este,” in The Court of Gonzaga in the Age of Mantegna: 1450–1550, ed. C. Mozzarelli et al. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 281–94. 22 Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, II:12–13, and Syson, “Reading Faces,” 287–8. 23 For more on Gian Cristoforo Romano’s career see Andrea Norris, “The Tomb of Gian Galeazzo Visconti,” 49–53 and “Gian Cristoforo Romano: The Courtier as Medallist,” Studies in the History of Art, XXI (1987): 131–41. 24 On 19 February 1502, Gian Cristoforo wrote to Isabella from Venice, Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” 108. On 4 May 1502, Mario Equicola wrote to Margherita Cantelma reporting Gian Cristoforo’s illness, ASM, AG, b.283, unpublished. The letter from Margherita Cantelma to Isabella d’Este requesting that she be allowed to care for Gian Cristoforo is also Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” n. 4, 59. Romano suffered from syphilis, as did the son of his close friend, Antonio Cammelli, better known as the poet Pistoia. On 10 January 1501, Pistoia wrote to Francesco II Gonzaga to complain that the doctor recommended by Gian Cristoforo Romano to treat his son had actually accelerated the boy’s death, see Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” 58–9. For Pistoia and Gian Cristoforo Romano see D. De Robertis, “Cammelli, Antonio, detto il Pistoia,” DBI, 17:277–86.

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weeks immediately afterwards, she must certainly have been privy to his plans for the Beata Osanna monument.25 At exactly the same time, Cantelma was involved in a new project with Equicola, commissioning him to write a small treatise in honour of Isabella d’Este. The booklet was intended to be a birthday gift for Isabella and celebrated one of her personal mottoes, the “nec spe nec metu,” meaning “neither hope nor fear”, an admonition to practise moderation in all things.26 Cantelma had most likely seen this motto carved into the decorative woodwork of the Grotta in Mantua , along with Isabella’s other devices and imprese. Margherita’s visits to these private spaces are recorded in her letters. In a letter of 17 June 1507, she speci¿cally praised the “blessed room with the dear little exit” which she called the “secret Grotta.” (Appendix II).27 The doorway singled out for praise was the marble portal designed by Gian Cristoforo Romano. Cantelma mentioned the Grotta again in a letter written from Gazzuolo in November of 1507; “Nothing relieves me of the desire to be in that sacred Grotta, in the venerable reÀection of the divine star whose merits I adore on earth.”28 Although studioli were a widespread cultural phenomenon in the Renaissance, there are relatively few eyewitness accounts of visits to these highly personal and private spaces.29 Cantelma’s accounts of Isabella’s studiolo, although brief, highlight its secret nature and the powerful nostalgia that even the memory of being in that place held for her. She associated the rooms with Isabella herself and her memory of being there was powerful enough to conjure Isabella’s physical presence. This kind of affective response must certainly have been one of the objectives that patrons hoped to achieve 25

For the letters concerning Cantelma’s illness in the summer of 1505, Venturi, “Gian Cristoforo Romano,” 112–14. 26 Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, I:280–2. Kolsky discusses the only extant edition of this work, dated to 1513, Mario Equicola, 94. 27 ASM, AG, b.1636, unnumbered, 14 June 1505, from Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este. 28 “Non per questo ad me se leva il desyderio de essere nella sacra grocta, nel conspecto venerando de la diva imagine de quella, la quale in terra meritamente adoro,” ASM, AG, b.1813, 15 November 1507. Kolsky says that the letter is not only in Equicola’s style, but is also in his handwriting, Mario Equicola, n. 13, 106. In 1509–10, after becoming Isabella’s secretary, Equicola wrote a brief description of her Grotta in Mantua, Stephen Kolsky, “An unnoticed description of Isabella d’Este’s Grotta.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989): 232–5. Cantelma took a genuine interest in these kinds of cultural spaces. On 1 June 1505, she wrote about a visit to Antonia del Balzo, Isabella’s aunt at the court of Gazzuolo, and mentioned that her tour of the palace there had included a viewing of the studiolo that belonged to Bishop-Elect Ludovico Gonzaga, ASM, AG, b.1636, 12 June 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este, see Appendix II. 29 For an overview of studioli in Italy, Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

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through the creation of these representative spaces. Cantelma would express a similarly strong emotional response, tied to memory and to the physical evocation of Isabella’s presence, when she wrote about Isabella’s portraits. The Reverence of Images: Portraits and Piety Isabella frequently sent portraits of herself as gifts to her female “courtiers.” In fact, the exchange of such portraits among the ladies of the court was a key form of acceptance into Isabella’s inner circle. For example, in 1495 the Countess Beatrice de’ Contrari of Naples wrote to Isabella to report that she often propped up her portrait of Isabella opposite her when she dined, so that she could imagine that Isabella was there with her.30 According to her letter of 1 June 1505, Cantelma took a portrait of Isabella along with her when she travelled. When she showed this portrait to her hosts in Milan, it became the inspiration for a conversation between friends about Isabella’s merits: “I spoke of my Signora, whose sacred and beloved portrait we have sometimes contemplated. How blessed is that portraitist Maestro Francesco who has served me so well!” (Appendix II).31 The “maestro Francesco” referred to in relation to this portrait is almost certainly Francesco Bonsignori. In his account of the painters of Verona, Vasari praised Bonsignori’s abilities as a portrait artist and it was chieÀy in this capacity that he served Francesco II at the Gonzaga court after his arrival there from Verona in 1494.32 In Mantua, he was ¿rst engaged to make a portrait of one year-old Eleanora Gonzaga, Isabella’s 30 “Come scia V.S. quando la ando a Urbino la Hypolita portò in qua un suo retrato et come vado a tavola lo fazio ponere suso una cadrega per scontro a me, che vedendolo me pare pure essere a tavola cum V.S.,” 10 April 1495, from Beatrice de’ Contrari in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este, Luzio, “I Ritratti,” 186. The letter is referred to frequently in the literature, see J.M. Fletcher, Splendours, 57. 31 “…quand’io parlava della Mia Signora, della quale contemplavamo qualche volta el piatoso et caro retraction. Che sia benedecto quel mastro Francesco retractatore che me ha cosi ben servita!,” 1 June 1505, ASM, AG, b.1636, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara near Mantua to Isabella d’Este; referred to by Luzio but not completely transcribed in “I Ritratti,” 192. 32 Vasari, Vite (1550, rev. 2/1568); the account used here is from the English translation of Vasari by Gaston de Vere, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects etc., ed. Gaston de Vere, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1912–1915), 6:29–35. There is no monograph on Bonsignori or on the Bonsignori family. The most complete catalogue of his work is Ursula Barbara Schmitt, “Francesco Bonsignori,” München Jahrbuch der Bildender Kunst (1961): 73–152; also B. dal Pozzo, Le vite de’ pittori scultori e architetti veronesi (1831–34), ed. G. Biadego (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1976, c.1861), 250–54; Clifford M. Brown, “Francesco Bonsignori: Painter to the Gonzaga court – New Documents,” Atti e memorie, Accademia virgiliana di Mantova 47 (1979): 81–96. For the Bonsignori family in Verona see Alessandra Zamperini, “Miti Familiari: Commissioni Veronesi per il Giovani Francesco Bonsignori,” Verona illustrata 16 (2003): 17–41; Sergio Marinelli, “Ipotesi per il primo Cinquecento Veronese,” Verona illustrata

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¿rst-born daughter, who was later Duchess of Urbino and, in 1495, he painted another Gonzaga child, the future Cardinal Ippolito. Beyond children’s portraits, he painted other Gonzaga family members, whose portraits were displayed at Francesco’s country palace at Marmirolo.33 He was planning a portrait of Isabella in 1495 when Francesco II Gonzaga asked him to travel to Fornovo instead to paint a battle scene commemorating Francesco’s victory there. Bonsignori must have taken up Isabella’s portrait after he completed the battle scene, since both Beatrice de’ Contrari and Cantelma clearly owned portraits of Isabella, and Cantelma’s attributed hers to “maestro Francesco.”34 Vasari points out that Bonsignori also habitually kept chiaroscuro copies of the portraits he made, likely to serve as models for new portraits or other projects, so it is possible that he created many copies of Isabella’s portrait. 35 In examining Cantelma’s letters, it is important to remember that the language she chose when discussing her attitude towards Isabella was couched in the conventional lexicon of social exchange between a devoted courtier and his lady, adapted to a female mode, and almost akin to contemporary love poetry. As Lauro Martines points out: “In dealings between clients and patrons, the lexicon of binding words is dominated – as in the imagery of the appropriate body language – by a vocabulary of love, Àattery, service, ¿delity…”36 The content and tone of some of Cantelma’s early letters to Isabella were also sometimes determined by Mario Equicola. In fact, a few early letters bearing Cantelma’s name and signature are written in Equicola’s hand, and he must certainly have used his literary background and familiarity with conventional court Àattery to craft the kinds of conventional humanistic sentiments that Isabella anticipated to receive in response

9 (1996): 51–7; R. Brenzoni, “Su l’origine della famiglia di F. Bonsignori,” L’Arte, lvii (1958): 295–300; and lviii (1959): 225–8. 33 Molly Harris Bourne, “Out from the Shadow of Isabella: The Artistic Patronage of Francesco II Gonzaga, Fourth Marquis of Mantua (1484–1519),” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1997, 177–8; this is now published as Francesco Gonzaga. The Soldier Prince as Patron (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005). 34 Bonsignori seemed to specialize in portraits of the children and ladies of the court. Around 1509, he created portraits of Elizabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino (Florence, Uf¿zi, no.1441) and Emilia Pia da Montefeltro (Baltimore, MFA, J. Epstein Collection); both were made at precisely the moment that Castiglione was representing them as the key female interlocutors in The Courtier, see U.B. Schmitt, “Bonsignori, Francesco,” DBI, 12:405–7. 35 There is also no comprehensive catalogue of surviving drawings by Bonsignori and many former attributions are now given to Mantegna, see Mantegna a Mantova 1460– 1506, ed. Mauro Lucco (Milan: Skira, 2006) and Mantegna e le arti a Verona, 1450–1500 (Venice: Marsilio, 2006). 36 Lauro Martines, Strong Words. Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15.

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to portraits of herself.37 In crafting Cantelma’s letters, though, Equicola was faced with the rather unique challenge of assuming a female “voice,” adopting a register that would be suitable to the expression of love and devotion of one court lady for another. In later letters, Cantelma’s devotion to Isabella’s image seems to have gone beyond courtly convention, and even affectionate friendship, into the realm of almost fervid religious devotion. The “affective” response to portraits was a Renaissance convention. In his treatise On Painting of 1436, Leon Battista Alberti famously con¿rmed that the strength of portraiture lay in its ability to make the “absent present,” to conjure up in the mind of the viewer the actual presence of the sitter: Painting possesses a truly divine power in that, not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.38

The statement implies that a portrait must not only suf¿ciently resemble the sitter so that the viewer might recognize him or her, but further suggests that the likeness could conjure an emotional response in the mind of the viewer. As John Shearman has stated, in the Renaissance, the portrait was the genre of painting which “gave the impression of the most frequent and the most varied communication with the spectator.”39 This kind of response to portrait art, in which the viewer regards the portrait as a living presence, became a poetic convention extremely popular among humanists at the northern Italian courts, particularly in Isabella’s circle. In Mantuan circles, the humanist Niccolò da Correggio, who was one of Isabella’s chief advisors at the court, wrote a number of sonnets that centered on the portrait as a living entity.40 37

For example ASM, AG, b.1636, 4 November 1505, from Cantelma in Pavia, but written in Equicola’s hand: “…Non sia più alchuno che maraviglandose de Antiqui dica essi havere scripto cose false non deve essere incredulo de Andromade la quale essendo data in preda ad certo Marin Monstro resto senza spirito. Poi da Perso fo liberate. Non de Electra se admiri che intendendo lo (…) falso de Oreste. Resto senza anima do poi vendendolo salvo li fo redatta la vita pristine (…). Non de l’hasata Pelea se maravigli che con una medesema ferita de vita ad morte et de morte ad vita resuise Thelepho per che Signora mia altre volte trovandome immerse in questo errore a presente non so se dica bona o mala fortuna per experimento de altro ho voluto el provi che oldendo la grave et pernitiose informita di V.S. restai senza spirito senza anima et totalmente morta. Ma poi per quell medesimo messo, havendo la volla dela sua recuperate volitudine foi salda sicche V.S. Ill.a in me e Perseo, Oreste, et la Achillea basta.” 38 Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting, translated by John R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966, c.1956), 63. 39 John Shearman, Only Connect…Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 108. 40 For an analysis of female portraits and the sonnets they inspired at the northern Italian courts, see Chrysa Damianaki Romano, “‘Come se fussi viva e pura.’ Ritrattistica

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Cantelma’s letters demonstrate an attempt to adapt these conventions in order to create an appropriately feminine response to female portraiture, revealing an unusual emotional depth and strength, a level of communicative response that reÀects the strong feelings she had formed for Isabella through their bonds of friendship and experience. Such feelings are expressed in a letter Cantelma wrote to Isabella in August of 1505, lamenting the fact that that her protracted illness had kept them apart for so long: “I know not whether I be alive or dead, only that while being deprived of the presence of Your Ladyship, when I feel as though I am lacking any hope of health, I am aided by that sweet portrait,” (Appendix II).41 Alberti’s view of portraiture as a physical surrogate, and as an evocation of memory and presence, is exactly the kind of emotional, responsive transaction that Cantelma writes about in her letters to Isabella.42 However, Cantelma’s responses sometimes also seem to speak of something beyond conventional courtly sentiment and even “affective” response. For example, in February of 1506, while in Pavia, and thus away from Equicola, Cantelma wrote another letter to Isabella focusing on the comfort she drew from Isabella’s portrait during their forced separation: “I burn to offer myself in nothing but perpetual servitude and incomparable obedience and in the continual reminder of Our Lady who is never parted from me but present to me, represented in every place in which I regard as my only objective her delicate image…” (Appendix II).43 In this case, Margherita was referring to a new portrait she had received before September of 1505, which Isabella had sent to Ferrara, via Equicola, to thank her for the little booklet celebrating her motto (Appendix II).44 e lirica cortigiana tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 60:2 (1998): 349–94; the sonnet by Niccolò di Correggio is no. 4, 384–5. Born in Ferrara, Niccolò da Correggio was a prominent humanist who worked at the courts of Milan, Ferrara and Mantua and wrote a number of contemporary plays; he designed personal mottoes for Isabella and also produced a verse translation of the tale of Cupid and Psyche for her, Farenga, “Correggio (Correggio Visconti), Niccolò Postumo,” DBI 29:466–74. 41 “Io non scio s’io sia morta o viva scio ben ch’el essere priva dela presentia di V.S. mi fa mancharo di grande sperancia di salute, mi aiutaro col caro ritratto…,” ASM, AG, b.1636, 5 August 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este. In a series of letters written during this period, Cantelma discusses her illness, asking Isabella to send her particular foods and medicines, all ASM, AG, b.1636, all unnumbered, all unpublished, dated 7 August 1505; 9 August 1505; 15 August 1505; 24 August 1505; 16 August 1505 from her physician in Mortara reporting to Isabella on Cantelma’s progress; 24 August 1505. 42 Jodi Cranston says that: “For Alberti, portraits enact, simulate, and stimulate the mental process of remembrance, temporal suspension and of encouraging and stimulating various modes of conversing among friends,” The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 65. 43 “non ardisco offerirme in altro che in una perpetua servitù et incomparabile obsequentia et continua memoria di Vostra Signora la qual non me absente che presente me representa in ogni loco ove io guardo com proprio obietto la dilicata suo imagine...,” ASM, AG, b.1637, no. 131, 1 February 1506, from Cantelma in Pavia to Isabella d’Este. 44 “…Al ritorno fece Mario da quella me porto il ritracto digno di omni veneratione…,” ASM, AG, b.1241, no.355, 15 September 1506, from Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este.

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The intensity of Cantelma’s response to the “delicate image” of Isabella that she had before her in February of 1506 elevated the portrait to the status of a talismanic token, enabling Cantelma to create, not only a mental a mental image of Isabella, but to evoke a physical presence that exerted a physical, curative power. It is an extension of the almost fetishistic attitude with which Cantelma approached Isabella’s physical being. At the end of each letter she wrote that she longed to kiss Isabella’s “dear sweet little hand.” Cantelma’s worship of Isabella is also linked to her own ever-increasing devotional fervor, which had taken hold during her long recovery from a recent illness: … in future times God will be merciful and help me and as always ... And with his good grace I will no longer be in¿rm so that I am able to ful¿ll my vow to dress all in white on the day of Our Lady, I beseech Your Ladyship to keep me in your thoughts and with that I say good night to My Lady and kiss your dear sweet little hand.45

Cantelma’s emphasis on the curative power of Isabella’s image, and her conviction that the contemplation of Isabella’s portrait would actually promote physical healing, lends the image thaumaturgical value. Cantelma evidently thought of Isabella’s portrait almost as a votive image, one which prompted a spiritual response, almost like the powers evinced by images of saints and the presence of holy relics. In 1509, Cantelma suffered intense agonies of grief over the death of her youngest son, Ercole Cantelmo, whose military service to the Count of Pitigliano ended on 30 November 1509, when he died ¿ghting at Rovigo against the Venetian forces.46 In the Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto reported that Ercole was captured by the Venetians, who decapitated, him while his father watched in horror:

45

“…et tempo futuro in certa sperantia che Dio per mercede me aiuta et ricommandarme sempre cum bon’ modo a Vostra Signora Illustrissima. In bon gracia della quale non me per essere inferma che per satisfare al voto me vestiro in biancho il dì della Nostra Donna supplico vostra Signorna tenga bona memoria di che dico bona notte alla Signora mia et basiar’ la dolce manina cara,” ASM, AG, b.1637, no.131, 1 February 1506, Margherita Cantelma in Pavia to Isabella d’Este. A further indication of Cantelma’s increasingly spiritualized concept of her relationship with Isabella is found in ASM, AG, b.1242, 27 March 1509, Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este: “(…) Speraria bene di potere essere cum V.S. in le moniche, ma ad Dio non piacia de farme tanta gratia. Non sera senza danno mio dela anima et del corpo quanto me rincrescha dallo Dio et sol io essendo V.S. quella amorevole et grata patrone anche. E la supplico ad agiurarme cum lei al men el venere sancto che quelle e proprio de per me essendo dedicato ad lachryme et colore ben che subito ch’el seria tanto l’alagrecia d’essere cum V.S. che superaria el dolor et passione de Christo et le mei particularij se me gli avesse potuto travare. Ma contra al ciel non vale ingegno humano…” 46 The letter is ASM, AG, b.1242, 27 March 1509, Cantelma to Isabella d’Este.

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Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua What counsel, Sora’s duke, was thine, what heart /When thy bold son thou saw’st of helm bereft, / Amid a thousand swords, when – dragged apart / Thou saw’st his young head from his shoulders cleft, / A shipboard, on a plank? I, on my part, / Marvel, that seeing but the murder done, / Slew thee not, as the faulchion slew thy son.47

Cantelma’s letter expresses her sorrow over Ercole’s death, and is a naked lament of intense maternal grief, beautifully articulated: … in every one of my actions the sweet memory of my dear Ercole returns to me; I weep for him, I breathe for him, I lament for him and dead and alive he appears before me; thinking I see him I speak to him. (Appendix II)48

This notion of summoning up apparitions, of having the dead speak, is on a continuum with Margherita’s perception of physical presence in the portraits she owned of Isabella d’Este. It also bears a striking resemblance to the kinds of intense, almost hallucinatory, visionary experiences described by contemporary female mystics. The accounts of these visions would have been familiar to Cantelma, who spent much of her time in communication with members of religious communities and who certainly must have read popular hagiographical accounts of contemporary female beatae and saints. Although we have no records of Cantelma’s library, we know that Isabella d’Este owned three different accounts of the life and spiritual ecstasies of the Beata Osanna Andreasi – one of them written by Mario Equicola.49 In 1515, in fact, at Isabella’s request, Equicola composed an oration in honour of Osanna’s elevation to the status of a beata in the diocese of Mantua. Isabella’s interest in the promotion of Osanna’s cult was political but it was also inspired by an increasingly personal interest in pious matters – an interest sparked, in part, by her friendship with Cantelma and Cantelma’s increased piety in the wake of her son’s death. 47 For this incident see Ascari, “Cantelmo,” 279; the verse is from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Stewart A. Baker and A. Bartlett Giamatti, trans. William Stewart Rose (New York: 1968), Canto XXXVI, vii:381. See also Lisa K. Regan, “Ariosto’s Threshold Patron: Isabella d’Este in the Orlando Furioso,” MLN 120:1, Supplement (January 2005): 50–69. 48 ASM, AG, b.1242, no. 771, 18 January 1510, from Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este. Equicola’s gift for hyperbole certainly affected Margherita Cantelma’s writing style at this time, and it is quite probable that he did inÀuence some of the language used here. Many letters written by Cantelma to Isabella around the time that Equicola went to Mantua as Isabella’s personal secretary in 1508, and in the period immediately afterwards, were certainly formulated by Equicola and some are even in his hand. 49 A. Luzio and R. Renier, “La coltura e le relazioni letterarie di Isabella d’Este Gonzaga. Appendice Prima. Inventarii di Libri,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana XLII (1903): 75–111; item no. 70, “libro della vita e transito della beata Osana in quarto coperto di coramo morello”; item 81, “le Orationi di Mario Equicola in onore della Beta Osana in quarto coperto di coramo morello indorato”; item 90, “Vita della Beata Osana latina in carta pecorina a stampa in quarto coperto di zanbelotto verde indurate.”

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Pious “Ambasatrice” – Isabella d’Este, Margherita Cantelma and the Monastery of Corpus Domini in Ferrara Beginning in the summer of 1508, Cantelma became a frequent visitor at the clarissan monastery of Corpus Domini (also called Corpus Christi) in Ferrara. In August of 1508, she reported to Isabella that: last Sunday I spent all day with our holy nuns of Corpus Christi, inside the monastery. And on behalf of Your Ladyship I visited them generally and in particular felt the presence of our dear Sister Laura and for a long time we conferred together in her cell. (Appendix II, 6)50

Sister Laura was quite probably Laura Boiardi, a cousin of the humanist writer Matteo Maria Boiardi of Scandiano, the author of the Orlando Innamorato. Boiardo frequented the Este court in Ferrara and was an intimate of the Duchess Lucrezia Borgia and of Isabella d’Este, as was his sister, the nun Suor Laura.51 When Osanna Andreasi died in 1505, Isabella wrote to Suor Laura describing her ¿nal moments: “one could not see a more miraculous thing.”52 Suor Laura was therefore another link between Isabella and Cantelma. Suor Laura lived at the Convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, an institution that was extremely important to the d’Este family. Isabella’s father and mother were buried there and the convent would also later house the remains of her brother, Alfonso I d’Este, and of his wife, Lucrezia Borgia.53 The monastery was also an important exemplar of female communitarian life. As explored in the previous chapter, Corpus Domini began as a beguinage and became a clarissan monastery 50

“… dominica fui tutto el dì con le nostre sancta monace del Corpo de Christo, dentro del monasterio. Et per parte de V.S. le visitare in universale et imparticulare alchune percipue la nostra chara sor Laura et per uno gran’ pezo rasonassemo insieme in ella sua cella,” ASM, AG, b.1242, 23 August 1508, from Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este. See also ASM, AG, b.1242, no.414, 25 January 1509, Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este, regarding another visit with “Sor Laura” at the monastery of Corpus Domini, Appendix II, 7. 51 Suor Laura Boiardi was also a familiar of the Duchess Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, Gabriella Zarri, La religione di Lucrezia Borgia (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2006), 73; she would go on become abbess of San Bernardino, founded by Lucrezia in Ferrara, Angela Ghirardi, “Oasnna Andreasi e Isabella d’Este. Tracce artistiche di un’amicizia,” in L’immagine di una mistica, 65–77, n.54, 77. 52 The letter, dated 21 June 1505, is transcribed in part by Ghirardi, “Osanna Andreasi e Isabella d’Este,” 77; she transcribes it from Bagolini-Ferretti, La Beata Osanna, Appendix II, n.V. 53 For the history of the monastery see Teodosio Lombardi, Gli Estensi ed il Monastero del Corpus Domini di Ferrara (Ferrara: Centro Culturale Città di Ferrara, 1980); also Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Creating and Recreating Communities of Women: The Case of Corpus Domini, Ferrara, 1406–1452.” Signs 14 (1989): 293–321; a brief history is also given in King, Women of the Renaissance, 108–9.

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and home to the inÀuential Caterina Vigri, who went on to found her own convent in Bologna in the late ¿fteenth century. Before the forced claustration brought on by the strictures of Catholic Reform, Corpus Domini was open to visits by aristocratic laywomen, and Cantelma was evidently free to come and go from the convent, visiting the nuns in their individual cells. Her visits there were often undertaken on Isabella’s behalf. In addition to the fact that the church housed d’Este family tombs, members of the d’Este family were nuns there, including Eleonora d’Este (d.1575), a daughter of Duke Alfonso I d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. For this reason, in his will of 1533 Alfonso gave Corpus Domini 6000 gold ducats for the maintenance of the Hospital of Santa Anna and for the care of the sisters of the convent.54 In letters written between 1508 and 1510, Cantelma actually referred to herself as Isabella’s “ambasatrice” to the convent and wrote reports of her visits, relaying to Isabella requests from the nuns for various kinds of food and supplies, donations of money and, occasionally, even art objects.55 For example, in February of 1509, as the result of a series of inquiries she made at the convent, Cantelma informed Isabella that while many of the nuns had asked for wine and almonds, Suor Laura especially desired “a Saint Barbara and a Saint Lucy like those French ones that were sent by Your Ladyship” (Appendix II).56 This must be a reference to dolls, since Isabella herself owned dolls like these. In her will of 1535 she left her daughter Ippolita, a nun at the monastery of San Vincenzo in Mantua, an “ivory doll, which our Lady … has in her oratory,” perhaps a reference to an ef¿gy of an infant Christ.57 In Suor Laura’s case, the dolls requested were representations of famous female saints. These kinds of “holy dolls” were sometimes given to young women to celebrate their marriages, either in the secular world or when they became “brides of Christ” in the convent.58 In the convent, such dolls were 54

Lombardi, Gli Estensi e il Monastero di Corpus Domini, 78. ASM, AG, b.1242, no. 414, 25 January 1509, Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este: “Ringratio V.S. quanto più posso che se sia signata elegierme per sua oratrice alla nostre sor Laura (…). Et ogni dì son ritornata ad redire quelle più belle parole ho saputo parte per satisfare ad quanto V.S. me commanda ma più per essere sollicitata da OD*ORULDFK¶LRWHQJKRGHWDORI¿FLRVHUYDUR«” 56 “una Sancta Barbara et una Sancta Lucia de quelle francese como forno quelle che V.S. gli mando,” ASM, AG, b.1242, no. 419, 8 February 1509, Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este (there is signi¿cant damage at the upper right-hand corner of the document that makes complete transcription impossible). 57 “Bambino d’avolio, quale ha essa Signora Testatrice nel suo oratorio,” Isabella’s will (ASM, AG, b.332) is completely transcribed in my Appendix 1. 58 Christine Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 310–29; also Karen-Edis Barzman, “Gender, Religious Representation and Cultural Production in Early Modern Italy,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. David, (London and New York: Addison Wesley, 1998), 213–33, who discusses a clay doll of the Virgin Mary owned by 55

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symbols of sanctity that aided in devotional practices. In the same letter, Cantelma reported that the nuns of Corpus Domini also requested “six jewels … to make their own obligations and those of the sisters of Murano in Venice” (Appendix II). This might refer to the Franciscan monastery of Santa Chiara at Murano, which was founded in the ¿fteenth century and renovated in 1519.59 The dedication that Isabella and Cantelma showed to the community at Corpus Domini must also have been related to its association with the early career of the Beata Caterina Vigri. As we have seen, Corpus Domini was instrumental in fostering and forging the exemplum of a potent contemporary female civic saint, one who had travelled from aristocratic privilege to sainthood. As such, the convent was a high pro¿le arena for new enactments of piety on the part of female aristocratic patrons from the community at large. Cantelma’s work on Isabella’s behalf as an ambassador to the nuns of Corpus Domini in Ferrara adds a new dimension to our understanding of the complex mechanisms of religious patronage that facilitated and nurtured the “spiritual” renaissance of aristocratic women in the broader context of their cities and communities. Isabella did not personally have to visit Corpus Domini in order to be “present” through Cantelma’s agency, and through this liaison was able to bestow goods and bene¿ts on the nuns there. The complex series of relationships which travelled back and forth between Isabella, Cantelma and the nuns of Corpus Domini, and which was often expressed in the provision of material goods on Isabella’s part and the reciprocating extension of the nuns’ protection through prayer to their benefactors, denotes a kind of spiritual activism that bound the monastery to the city and to the court. Moreover, their mutual devotion to Corpus Domini strengthened the friendship between Cantelma and Isabella, making them “partners in piety.” This was a bond that would be fully realized in the Augustinian monastery, dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple that would later be founded by Cantelma and built by Isabella in Mantua.

the nun Caterina de’ Pazzi in Florence, 220. At the request of her son Federico II Gonzaga during his residency at the court of France, Isabella also supplied a “fashion doll” that was sent to Francis I to demonstrate the latest fashion in Italy, Yanna C. Croizat, “‘Living Dolls’: François Ier Dresses His Women,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 94–130 59 After its suppression in 1826, Santa Chiara at Murano was converted into a glass factory which is now incorporated into the Murano Glass Museum, “The Churches of Venice: The Islands,” http://www.churchesofvenice.co.uk/islands.htm (accessed April 25, 2010).

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Chapter 3

Partners in Piety: Margherita Cantelma, Isabella d’Este and the Monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione in Tempio in Mantua Having understood what your illustrious ladyship has written to us concerning the testament of Signora Margarita Cantelma, and her desire to erect a new monastery of nuns under the direction of our order, we have directed our Rector General to visit your ladyship... Rector General of the Lateran Canons at Piacenza, to Isabella d’Este, 3 May 15321

All that remains today of the Augustinian monastery founded in Mantua in 1530 by Margherita Cantelma, Duchess of Sora, is a street sign, running off the modern Via della Conciliazione, which marks the location of the original Via Cantelma. In the famous bird’s-eye view of Mantua published by the cartographer Gabriele Bertazzolo in 1596, the monastery dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, more colloquially called the “Casa Cantelma,” is depicted as a rather modest walled complex, with a number of small monastery buildings, a church, and a small area of cultivated land (Illustration 13).2 According to this map, the property extended to the outer city wall of Mantua, where the Lago Superiore meets the Lago di Mezo, two of the three lakes that form a natural boundary of water around the city, fed by the Mincio River as it Àows south from Lake Garda. According to documents, the original monastery buildings survived until the eighteenth century, when they were badly damaged by the Austrian troops during the siege of Mantua. In 1797, under Napoleon, the monastery was suppressed and the remnants of the church and remaining buildings were destroyed, save for the Cantelmo family tomb. This monument, created especially for the interior façade wall of the monastery church, was dismantled shortly before the suppression and, 1

“Havendo inteso el tutto de quello ha scritto V.S. Ill.ma. circha al testamento et legato fatto per la Signora Margarita Cantelma de esser erecto uno novo Monastero de Monache sotto allo ordine nostro abbiamo datto comissione al Rx.do Generale de visitar V.S. Ill.ma…”, ASM, AG, b.1376, no. 18, from the 5HFWRUH *HQHUDOH HW 'LI¿QLWRUL 'H Canonici Regulari della Congregatione Laterense in Piacenza to Isabella d’Este, 3 May 1532. 2 For the Bertazzolo map see Giuseppe Pecorari, “La pianta di Mantova disegnata e incisa dal Bertazzolo nel 1596,” Civiltà Mantovana 11 (1977): 325–48. A copy of this map was published in 1707 by the Dutch publisher P. Mortier.

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13

Detail showing the Cantelma Monastery, from the 1707 copy by P. Mortier of the View of Mantua, printed in 1596 by Gabriele Bertazzolo. The monastery is in the upper left-hand corner. Photo: Author

under the supervision of the architect Paolo Pozzo, transported to a chapel in the transept of the Basilica of Sant’Andrea, where it is found today.3 It is the only monument in Mantua that still bears the Cantelmo name. Although there is little physical evidence of the former “Casa Cantelma,” documents for the monastery and for its founder do survive in the State Archives of Mantua and Milan. Working from these records – letters, wills, monastic records and legal documents – it is possible to resurrect the monastery and examine its signi¿cance as a personal monument to Cantelma herself – a symbol of her devotional partnership with Isabella d’Este – and its history in Mantua as public instrument of civic piety.4 3

Vittorio Matteucci, Le chiese artistiche del Mantovano (Mantua: Tip. Eredi Segna, 1902), 140. See also Amedeo Belluzzi, “Il monumento Cantelmi nel Sant’Andrea di Mantova,” in Giulio Romano. Saggi di Ernst H. Gombrich [et al.] (Milan: Electa, 1989), 566; and B. Carpeggiani and C. Tellini Perina, Sant’Andrea in Mantua. Un tempio per la città del Principe (Mantua: Pubblicazioni Paolini, 1987), 142–5. 4 Documents concerning the Cantelma monastery from its establishment in 1532 to 1788 are found in ASM, Materie Ecclesiasticae No. 4,VII (b.3312), Monasterij delle Monache di Citta, MM. della Cantelma; see also ASM, P.VII, 4, Corporazione religiose suppresse (Index No. 23), vol. 272, Madri della Cantelma rogiti diversi, 1530–1540; vol. 273,

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This chapter investigates Cantelma’s motivations for establishing this monastery, her role as its founder and the unique status of the Augustinian canonesses under whom the convent was administered. As many scholars have shown, by the early sixteenth century, the founding of a monastery on the part of wealthy aristocratic widows was a popular personal and public commemorative act and there are numerous examples of monasteries founded by women in this period.5 Carolyn Valone has written extensively about various Roman matriarchs who, in light of the new evangelism of the Counter-Reformation, founded monasteries in Rome, demonstrating the strength, persistence and continuity of this particular form of female patronage.6 Cantelma’s decision to found a monastery was probably also inÀuenced by local precedents in Mantua. The church and monastic complex of San Benedetto at Polirone near Mantua, was founded in the twelfth century by the famous Countess Matilda of Canossa. In 1500, this complex was signi¿cantly expanded through the bequest of the Mantuan noblewoman Lucrezia Piccola della Mirandola.7 Holman has demonstrated that Lucrezia undertook this expansion as a form of self-fashioning, modeling herself after the “exemplum” set by the Countess Matilda. The growth of the monastery at San Benedetto renewed civic awareness of female piety in an age of growing religious uncertainty, and Lucrezia, in her turn, undoubtedly became an exemplar for local aristocratic patrons. Lucrezia’s activities at San Benedetto would certainly have been known to Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma, since all of these women moved in the same social networks. Indeed, Lucrezia della Mirandola maintained a house in Mantua and left substantial bequests to the Franciscan Convent of Corpus Christi and to the Church of San Giovanni delle Carrette in Mantua. This small Church of San Giovanni was extensively rebuilt Madri della Cantelma Man. Rogiti diversi dal 1583–1625); vol. 274, Libro Mastro, 1580–1788; vols. 275–301, Investiture. Other documents, transferred to Milan after the Napoleonic suppression, are found in the Archivio di Stato di Milano (ASMi), Fondo Pergamene, cartella 250, S. M. della Presentazione, Mantova, o Casa Cantelma. 5 Catherine King emphasizes that it was quite common for widows to initiate commemorative projects like this one and to stipulate the terms in their wills, Renaissance Women Patrons. Wives and Widows in Italy c.1300–1550 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 83–97. 6 Cynthia Laurence, “Introduction” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe. Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Laurence (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 1–20, at 5; Carolyn Valone, “Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 15:3 (September 2001): 301–27; also “Women on the Quirinal Hill. Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” Art Bulletin, 76 (March 1994): 129–46 and “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella, Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2001), 317–36. 7 Beth Holman, “Exemplum and Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola at Polirone,” The Art Bulletin 18:4 (Dec. 1999): 637–64.

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in 1497 with funds donated by Isabella and Francesco II Gonzaga.8 Therefore, all of these women intersected in acts of piety intended to embellish the monastic foundations of the city. Cantelma might also have known about the monastery dedicated to Saint Vincent Ferrar that was founded by Isabella’s niece Barbara Gonzaga Sanseverino in the late 1520s outside Colorno, near Parma and now destroyed. 9 Barbara was the daughter of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga and Antonia del Balzo of the Bozzolo branch of the Gonzaga family, and the widow of Giovanni Francesco Sanseverino, Count of Caiazzo. In his dialogue called I Ritratti (1528), which he set at the house of Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara, the Veronese humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino hailed Barbara as one of the great beauties of the age.10 Barbara had accompanied the young Federico II Gonzaga during his sojourn at the French court in Milan and was at the centre of the brilliant society that surrounded Francis I; her portrait is found in a manuscript made for Francis in 1518 called Tutte le Dame del Re. Like many women of the age, Barbara spent her later years in quiet retirement, but unfortunately little is now known about the monastery she founded at Colorno. Widowed in 1519 and predeceased by both of her sons, at the time of her death in 1532 Cantelma had clear jurisdiction over all of her husband’s assets as well as her own dowry.11 There is little information in the literature concerning the legal status of aristocratic widows like Cantelma in the cities of Northern Italy at this time, or about their jurisdiction over property, but Cantelma seemed to enjoy unusual freedom to disperse her assets as she liked.12 Extremely wealthy, and 8 Holman, “Exemplum,” 643. There does not seem to be any modern study of the Church of San Giovanni delle Carrette, which belonged to a female Benedictine monastery; it is mentioned by Ippolito Donesmondi in Dell’historiae ecclesiastica di Mantova, 1612– 1616, 2 vols. (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1977), II: 86–7. San Giovanni delle Carrette was near the Churches of Sant’Ambrogio and Santa Maria Maddalena (a church with which Isabella d’Este had some connection) and also near the Church of the Madonna della Vittoria, which was erected by Francesco II Gonzaga. 9 Clifford M. Brown, “The Farnese Family and the Barbara Gonzaga Collection of Antique Cameos,” Journal of the History of Collections 6:2 (1994): 145–52, the convent is mentioned at 145. 10 The complete text of the Ritratti is included in Willi Hirdt, Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Porträt der Isabella d’Este. Ein Beitrag su Lukian-Rezaption in Italien (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981). 11 For more on widows and monasteries see Silvia Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows and the Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 233–47 and the essays in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Levy (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2003). Beyond visual and architectural culture see also Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 12 Marriage and dowry law have been more closely studied in Florence and Venice than in the area of Lombardy, see the sources cited by Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows,”

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without any family obligations, in her will of 1532 Cantelma chose to designate Isabella d’Este as her universal heir (Appendix I).13 This conferral of ¿nancial and territorial assets from one woman to another seems exceptional. Margaret King has observed that, “women commissioners who gave to those beyond their families could be viewed as acting outside the narrow scope of the feminine.”14 As Duke of Mantua at the time of Cantelma’s death, Federico II Gonzaga would have had legal jurisdiction over the Mantuan properties, and since assets in Ferrara might presumably have devolved to the ruling d’Este family, Isabella was designate for the ducal state. In light of the long friendship that his mother had shared with Cantelma, Federico II seemed content to leave Isabella to manage the Cantelma estate, con¿ning himself to the granting of ducal permissions for concessions of land and using his ducal privilege to grant formal approval for the building of the monastery in 1532. By making Isabella her universal heir and charging her with the responsibility of building Santa Maria della Presentazione, Cantelma was using her legacy to create a monument to her sons and herself, while at the same time associating Isabella with a major religious project in Mantua. If Isabella’s desire to advance the cult of the Beata Osanna had been a shrewd political move, allowing her to establish a reputation for public piety to add to her other diplomatic and political skills, the building of the Cantelma monastery was another milestone in her trajectory towards public piety. It was also the ¿nal act of pious partnership between Isabella and Margherita, one which consolidated their friendship through an act of civic patronage. The Foundation and Early History of the Monastery Margherita Cantelma ¿rst began making legal and administrative preparations for the establishment of her convent in 1530. On 27 January of that year she wrote to Isabella, asking her to petition Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, Isabella’s son and cardinal protector of the Lateran Canons in Mantua, to expedite the request Cantelma had already made for a concession of property on which to build an Augustinian monastery.15 She reported that in anticipation of the founding of her community, she had already brought four nuns from the monastery of Lateran canonesses at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Ferrara (also referred to locally as Santa Maria “di Mortara”) to live in her house in Mantua, where they would remain at n .13, 236–7. For some insights into female inheritance in Florence, Thomas Kuehn, “Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance,” in Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 238–58. 13 To the best of my knowledge, neither of Cantelma’s sons was married. 14 King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 17. 15 Paul Murphy, Ruling Peacefully. Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 67.

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until her monastery could be built.16 These nuns were Aurelia de Valesis – who would eventually become the ¿rst abbess of the Cantelma monastery – Brigid of Capriani, Hieronyma of Scandardo and Agnes a Datis, all of whom are mentioned in early documents of the community.17 In March of 1532, Margherita died, leaving responsibility for the actual building of the monastery in the hands of Isabella d’Este. The legacies speci¿ed by Cantelma in her last will and testament, drawn up in her house in Mantua on 6 March 1532, demonstrate that she was in the forefront of new patterns of patronage directed towards the celebration of female sanctity in the life of Mantuan religious communities. In addition to leaving funds for the foundation of her own monastery, she also left money and instructions for the decoration of a chapel devoted to Augustine’s mother, St Monica, which was to be built in the monastery church of the Augustinian brothers of Sant’Agnese in Mantua.18 She also made provisions for “vestments, props [presumably liturgical instruments] and all the necessary ornaments for the use of that chapel.”19 Her donation of a chapel in honor of Augustine’s mother acknowledges the general spread of the cult of St Monica in the late ¿fteenth century.20 Cantelma undoubtedly identi¿ed with Monica’s suffering as a widow and as a mother, evident from the grief she expressed over her son Ercole’s death in her letter to Isabella (see Chapter 2). Moreover, Monica was a logical choice, given Cantelma’s association with the Augustinian Canonesses. In her will, drawn up in Mantua by the notary Girolamo Augustona, Cantelma set aside 2,000 ducats for the establishment of her monastery in the San Giorgio quarter of Mantua and instructed that a number of silver vases from her collection be sold to pay for the decoration. She also made a special provision that a painting 16

ASM, AG, b.2514, unnumbered, 27 January 1530, Margherita Cantelma in Mantua to Isabella d’Este. S. Maria delle Grazie in Ferrara is brieÀy described by Cesare Barotti, Pitture e scolture che si trovano nelle chiese, luoghi pubblici, e sobborghi della città di Ferrara 1770 (Bologna: Forni, 1977), 164–5. 17 Federico Amadei, Cronaca universale della città di Mantova, edizione integrale, 2 vols. (Mantua: C.I.T.E.M, 1955), II:565. For the documents ASM, AG, Corporazione religiose suppresse, b.272, f.49v. 18 The former monastery of Sant’Agnese is now the home of the Museo and Archivio Diocesano of Mantua, but the church is no longer extant, having been destroyed in the Napoleonic suppressions, see Leopoldo Camillo Volta, Compendio cronologica di Mantova. Vol. 5. Compendio cronologico della storia di Mantova dalla sua fondazione sino ai nostri tempi (Mantua: Francesco Agazzi, 1838), 415–16. 19 The will says “…paramenta, fulcimenta et ornamenta necessaria pro usu dictae capella”, Ferrari, Giulio Romano Repertorio, 499–501 20 For altarpieces devoted to St Monica see Ian Holgate, “The Cult of Santa Monica in Quattrocento Italy. Her Place in Iconography Devotion and Legend,” Papers of the British School at Rome 71 (2003): 181–206 and ibid., “Santa Monica, Venice and the Vivarini,” in Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy, ed. Louise Bourduas and Anne Dunlop (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2007), 163–82.

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of the Virgin, “by the hand of St Luke,” which she evidently owned, be prominently displayed in her new convent. Cantelma allocated another 1,000 ducats for her own burial and for the design and building of a commemorative monument to be erected in the monastery church. Her only instruction for the monument was that it was to consist of three sepulchres, allowing her to be buried with both her sons, Ercole (d.1509) and Francesco (d.1528), whose bodies would have to be transported from the church of San Francesco in Ferrara.21 Her wish to create a Cantelmo family monument was prompted by commemorative and dynastic concerns, and was also driven by practical concerns and anxiety over the way her sons’ bodies, stored in cassone at the church of San Francesco in Ferrara, were being treated by the monks there. In August of 1532, the notary Augustona reported to Isabella d’Este that the bodies were still being kept in wooden cassone draped in silk and velvet cloth, but that the monks had removed the two large velvet drapes, embroidered in silver and gold with the Cantelmo arms, which had formerly hung on the wall of the sacristy behind the cassone.22 Augustona suspected the monks had sold them. There was, therefore, some anxiety about reclaiming the bodies and moving them to their new location in the monastery church of the Presentation of the Virgin. On 12 March 1532, Isabella wrote to the courtier Battista Stabellino expressing her “extreme displeasure” over the death of Margherita Cantelma, con¿ding that only Stabellino had really known how much love Isabella had felt for her.”23 21

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Ercole was killed and beheaded by the Venetians in 1509; Francesco Cantelmo died in battle in Naples in 1528, where he was ¿ghting to reclaim the family’s Neapolitan assets. He had served as an ambassador of the d’Este family to Francis I, Leo X and Charles V. He was the subject of an epistle written by Jacques Lefevre d’Estaples in 1505, see Eugene F. Rice, Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefévre d’Etaples and Related Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 130–2. 22 ASM, AG, b.1250, 28 August 1532, from Hieronimo Augustona in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este, in part: “…Lì a predicta Signora Margarita havea fatto collocare li corpi GLOLSRFRIRUWXQDWHVRL¿OLROLQHOODVDFULVWLDGL6WR)UDQFHVFRLQFHUWLFDVVRQLGLDVVHQHRQWL et adornati di drapi di seta et velluto (…) et havea fato attachare al muro di dreto ad esso due bellissimo coltrine di velluto carmosino riccamente riccamate d’oro et argento cum le lor’ arme, hora questi frati hanno levate via esse coltrine et io subbito ce ho inteso questo. Ho parlato con il guardiano et altri frati faccendoli intendere come questa cosa è molto spiaciuta a V. Ex.tia et che là non li vol comportare che habbiano spoliati questi poveri morti che non hanno et tenga la lor’ protectione et che voliano tornar’ le coltrine nel suo loco et non dar’ materiale che se dica che li frati di S.to Francesco spoliano li morti… ” Augustona is named in Cantelma’s will as “civem et notarium publicum Mantuae” and was obviously charged with settling aspects of her estate. 23 ASM, AG, b.3000, lib. 50, unnumbered (f.190r), Isabella d’Este to “Pignata” (Battista Stabellino), 12 March 1532: “…Havereti intesto forse a quest’hora per altra via la morte dela Sra. Marg.ta Cantelma nostra, la quale a mi è stata di quella displicentia che da noi medesimo potesti comprehendere come quello a cui meglio che ad alcuna altra persona nostra noto l’amore ch’io la portava…” For Battista Stabellino see my article “‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Giovanni Francesco Zaninello of Ferrara and the portrait of Isabella d’Este by Francesco Francia,” Renaissance Studies 23:3 (June 2009): 288–310.

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As a sign of her respect for Cantelma and for their friendship, she asked Stabellino to begin working on an appropriate humanist epitaph and her correspondence shows that she remained preoccupied with this matter for several months.24 Stabellino approached a number of court humanists in Ferrara and Mantua, – among them Ludovico Ariosto – asking them to compose a suitable verse. Isabella, not content with Stabellino’s progress, asked Celio Calcagnini, another prominent poet at Mantua and an acquaintance of Cantelma’s, to compose something suitable. Although Isabella conceded that Calcagnini’s efforts had produced something “suf¿ciently ornate” it seems, in the end, that his verse was not used.25 Concern over the condition and caretaking of the Cantelmi tombs in San Francesco is just one example of the plethora of administrative tasks that Isabella inherited along with Margherita’s estate. In fact, Isabella’s correspondence in the Mantuan archives for the period of 1532–1534 is full of references to the recuperation of Cantelma’s properties from creditors and to the management of the estate. In 1532, when her son Ferrante asked to borrow some money, citing Isabella’s windfall from the Cantelma inheritance, Isabella was quick to disabuse him of his illusions: “You evidently share the popular fallacy,” she wrote, “that Signora Cantelma’s bequest has greatly enriched me.”26 Yet, along with the monastery project and the considerable legal entanglements that issued from Cantelma estate, Isabella did inherit assets from which she bene¿tted personally. She assigned Cantelma’s house in Mantua, which she herself lived in occasionally in her later years, to her nephew Luigi Gonzaga, and gave the Cantelmo properties at San Matteo di Chiaviche – the same properties she had helped Cantelma regain in

24

For other epitaphs written to honour women in Mantua see Rodolfo Signorini, “Epitaf¿ di donne mantovane,” Civiltà Mantovana XXX (1995): 27–35. 25 The epitaph is ¿rst mentioned by Isabella in a letter to Battista Stabellino, 12 March 1532, ASM, AG, b.3000, lib. 50, unnumbered (f.190r). Isabella was still musing over the subject when she wrote to Stabellino again on 4 April 1532, to tell him that she would prefer that Calcagnino composed the epitaph because of his “stretta amicitia” with Cantelma, ASM, AG, b.3000, libro 51, ff.4r–4v. Shortly after this, Stabellino con¿rmed that he had given the commission to Calcagnino and Calcagnino evidently sent the verse in an enclosure (now lost) with a brief letter of 12 April 1532 but pronounced himself dissatis¿ed with the result and inadequate to the task, ASM, AG, b.1250, unnumbered. Evidently Isabella disagreed with his assessment of his own abilities since she wrote to him on 27 April 1532 to thank him for the verse, which she found “così ornato et tanto accommodato che più non l’haverei saputo desydarane,” ASM, AG, b.3000, lib. 51, f.12v. Nevertheless, a letter from Stabellino on 13 January 1533 demonstrates that he was still trying to get someone to compose an appropriate epitaph. He said that he had approached a certain “Floriano” to compose the epitaph, but he claimed he was too busy and recommended Ariosto, Calcagnino or Alessandro Guerrino, ASM, AG, b.1250, unnumbered. 26 Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este Marchioness of Mantua, 1474–1539. A Study of the Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1905), II:345.

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1496 – to her son Ferrante Gonzaga.27 Some jewels she inherited from Cantelma – a spinella (a red stone sometimes mistaken for a ruby) in a setting with an emerald and a pearl, a lily made of diamonds and a multi-faceted diamond – were left to her niece, Antonia Gonzaga.28 Having dispersed these assets, Isabella made provision for building the monastery and the Cantelmo funerary monument.29 As earlier cited, permission for the building of the Cantelma monastery in Mantua, which was to be a community of Lateran Canonesses, was quickly granted to Isabella on 3 May 1532 by the Regular Canons of the Lateran congregation in Piacenza.30 The of¿cial foundation document for the monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione in Mantua is dated 22 November 1535.31 The document speci¿es that the complex would include the monastery, a church and the three tombs that Cantelma had requested to house her own remains and those of her two sons. The consultants for the construction project were to be “the venerable sister Aurelia,” the abbess of the convent, a number of other priors and local ecclesiastics, and Nicolò de Cremona, the prior of the nearby Monastery of San Giorgio, the “Annunziata”, who acted as confessor to the nuns of Santa Maria della Presentazione.

27

Regarding Margherita Cantelma’s property in Mantua, see an, “Atti” of the Maloselli and Cantelma families, document dated 4 July 1519, identi¿ed as Donatio facta per Reverendissimo et Illustrissimo Sigismundo Cardinale Mantua Margherita Canteme [sic] di una domo posita Mantue in contrata Leopardi cum pacto q. solvate 400 d’unto Jo. Alberto de Striggis per residuo preceii dicte domus copitija sup. De cardinale, ASM, AG, b.277. This seems to refer to a second home that Cantelma owned in “contrata Leopardi” referred to in her will of 6 March 1532 which, according to the 1519 document cited above, must have been given to Cardinal Sigismondo Gonzaga. 28 In Isabella’s will, Antonia Gonzaga was identi¿ed as the daughter of Isabella’s son Ferrante Gonzaga, but I cannot ¿nd her listed in the Gonzaga genealogy. For the “spinella” see Danieli Ferrari, “Trascrizione del codice,” in Isabella d’Este. I luoghi del collezionismo, exhib. cat., Mantova – Palazzo Ducale, Appartamenti isabelliani, 26 maggio – 30 giugno 1995 (Modena: Il Bulino edizione d’arte, 1995), in the ‘Glossario,’ 29–32, at 32. With respect to Cantelma’s jewels, on 1 October 1532 “Nicolao da Milano e Mastro Sebastiano $YHUROGRRUH¿FL” were doing an evaluation of jewels and other objects “che Jacob ebreo di Mortaro doveva mettere alla ventura in Mantova,” see A. Bertolotti, Le arti minori alla corte di Mantova nei secoli XV, XVI e XVII (Bologna: Forni, 1974, c.1889), 39. Since their activity was taking place in Mortara, where Cantelma resided, and occurred after her death, it is possible that they were evaluating jewels from Cantelma’s estate. 29 “in caso che per essa signora testatrice non fussino sta extratti o non fussino fatte le ditte sepulture, le quale vole che in ogni modo siano fatte…,” see Isabella’s will, my Appendix I. 30 From the 5HFWRUH*HQHUDOHHW'LI¿QLWRUL'H&DQRQLFL5HJXODULGHOOD&RQJUHJDWLRQH Laterense in Piacenza to Isabella d’Este, 3 May 1532, ASM, AG, b.1376, 3 May 1532, Hieronimo Augustona in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este. 31 The foundation document for the Cantelma monastery is ASM, AG, b.3312, transcribed in Ferrari, Giulio Romano Repertorio, II:656–8.

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In her last will and testament, drawn up in 1535, Isabella devoted much attention to the assignment of assets she had derived from her long, devoted friendship to Margherita Cantelma and she spent her ¿nal years until her own death in 1539 insuring that the Cantelma Monastery was completed. Although there remains little physical evidence to attest to the speci¿c nature of the architectural fabric of the monastery, we can assume that the main architect was Battista da Covo and the main builder was his brother, the stonemason Agostino da Covo. Some insights into their style are evident from the surviving Cantelma tomb monument that is now installed in the Church of Sant’Andrea. Other insights can be gleaned from examining the records of the monastery in the archives of Mantua and Milan, and from the accounts of local chroniclers and historians who witnessed the growth of Mantua and who sought to preserve its cultural patrimony by recording the preservation, renovation and, quite often, the destruction of the city’s architectural and artistic treasures, including its churches and monasteries. The builder named in Isabella’s correspondence was the stonemason Agostino da Covo, who probably worked from a design by his more well-known brother, the architect Giovanni Battista da Covo.32 Battista da Covo, whose career remains little understood, ¿rst appears in Mantuan documents in 1522, when he worked on the renovations to the ground-Àoor apartments of the ducal palace, the Corte Vecchia, for Isabella d’Este.33 Isabella relocated to these new apartments soon after the death of her husband in 1519, leaving her former rooms in the castle of San Giorgio to her son, Federico II, who assumed his duties as marquis. Most of Covo’s work in the Corte Vecchia involved retro¿tting the actual architectural fabric of the rooms to accommodate the decorative ¿ttings and furnishings that were moved from their original location in the studiolo and Grotta in San Giorgio. These included the historiated wood panels from the Grotta as well as Gian Cristoforo Romano’s elaborate marble intarsia doorway, perhaps other window and door frames, the allegorical paintings from the studiolo and Isabella’s collection of antiquities. The only feature of the new apartment that might have been completely designed by Covo was the so-called “secret garden” built adjacent to the Grotta, a private outdoor enclosure that Isabella used as her retreat. The measured proportions and graceful classicism of this private retreat reÀect Isabella’s taste for the antique. The walls of the enclosure are encircled with attached Ionic columns on high plinths, creating a pattern of rectangular niches that once housed classical statues. The columns support a continuous entablature with a frieze carved in Roman capitals, dated 1522, which commemorates Isabella d’Este. The area was probably originally 32

For the career of Battista Covo, with references to his brother Agostino, see E. Amadei, “Covo, Battista,” DBI, 30:529. 33 For Covo’s work in the ducal palace see Clifford Malcolm Brown, Isabella d’Este in the Ducal Palace in Mantua. An Overview of Her Rooms in the Castello di San Giorgio and the Corte Vecchia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005), 138 and 353–4.

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planted with scented herbs and orange trees, creating an idyllic refuge from the intrigues of the court. After Giulio Romano arrived in Mantua in 1524, Covo worked for him on various projects for Federico II Gonzaga, contributing to renovations in the palace of San Giorgio, the famous Palazzo del Te, the Cathedral of Mantua and the Benedictine abbey at San Benedetto Po.34 Covo learned a great deal about Roman antiquity from Giulio, but he never really inherited the latter’s Àamboyant and experimental Mannerist style, always preferring a more strict and regularized approach to classicism. By the early 1530s, Covo had become Isabella’s favorite architect, and he was in charge of renovating her last major purchase, a castle in the town of Solarolo, near Faenza, now destroyed.35 He was, therefore, the logical choice to work on the Cantelma monastery. Because the monastery buildings of Santa Maria della Presentazione have all but disappeared, the only evidence that remains to testify to Isabella’s ful¿llment of Cantelma’s wishes – also giving some insight into what the buildings might have looked like – is the large-scale funerary monument, usually assigned to Covo, completed in the late 1530s or early 1540s.36 This tomb was saved from destruction when the monastery was suppressed in 1797 and moved to a large chapel in the left transept of Alberti’s Church of Sant’Andrea (Illustration 14).37 In 1902, the Mantuan historian Vittorio Matteucci praised the careful attention that the architect Paolo Pozzo, who supervised the move, had devoted to reassembling the tomb in Sant’Andrea, managing to save everything except the “climbing” elements of the original ensemble, presumably decorative Àourishes that had to be

34

For Covo see also Lina Negri, “Giovanni Battista Covo, l‘architetto di Isabella d‘Este,” Rivista d’Arte 3d series, 4 (1954): 55–99. He is discussed in connection with the renovations of the church at the Benedictine Abbey of San Benedetto Po by Holman, “Exemplum and Imitatio,” and in Beverly Louise Brown, “Veronese and the Church Triumphant: The Altarpieces for San Benedetto Po,” Artibus et Historiae 18:35 (1997): 51–64. 35 In the Archivio di Stato in Mantua there is an unpublished draft by Alessandro Luzio for an article on Solarolo, intended for the Corriere della Sera of Thursday, 20 November 1905; I thank Anna Maria Lorenzoni, formerly of the Archivio di Stato of Mantua, for bringing this article to my attention. 36 The date of completion for the monastery is given as 1539 by Donesmondi, Dell’Historia ecclesiastica, II:158; see also Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:565; the date of completion is given as 1544 by Paolo Carpeggiani and Chiara Tellini Perina, Sant’Andrea in Mantova. Un tempio per la città del Principe (Mantua: Publi Paolini Editore, 1987), 142. 37 According to Carlo d’Arco, Famiglie Mantovane (ms, Mantua, Archivio di Stato) the move to Sant’Andrea was undertaken at great expense to save the monument from the general destruction that occurred in Mantua under the Napoleonic occupation from 1797–99, 7:181.

14

School of Giulio Romano (Battista Covo?), Cantelmo Monument in the Church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, late 1530s–early 1540s, moved from the interior wall of the entrance façade of the monastery church at Santa Maria della Presentazione in Mantua. Photo: Author

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left behind because it had been impossible to transfer the entire entrance wall of the Cantelma church to the new location in Sant’Andrea.38 Standing two stories high, the large size, orientation and symmetry of the Cantelmo tomb in Sant’Andrea remind us that it was originally designed for the inside wall of an entrance façade.39 It is a simple and symmetrical two-storey architectural arrangement, sober and formal. A lower Doric order supports the taller Ionic order, crowned with a classical triangular pediment. Margherita Cantelma’s rectangular sarcophagus is placed into a recess at the centre of the upper level. To either side of her sarcophagus are portrait busts of her sons, Ercole (d.1509) and Francesco (d.1528), each with epigraphs below enumerating their military accomplishments.40 The rather unimaginative structure reÀects Covo’s 38

Vittorio Matteucci, Le chiese artistiche del Mantovano (Mantua: Tip. Eredi Segna, 1902), 140. The architect Paolo Pozzo was a key ¿gure in the restoration of Mantua under Austrian rule; some information about him is available in “Progetto per Paolo Pozzo per Porta Pradella,” La Reggia, Giornale della Società per Palazzo Ducale di Mantova, 10 sett. 1995, 10 accessed at http://www.societapalazzoducale mantova.it/La_Reggia/ar chiviopdf/1995/10settembre-1995.pdf (accessed September 20, 2005). Pozzo’s notes on the dismantling of the monument and its reassembly in Sant’Andrea are found in the Archivio Diocesano di Mantova, Basilica di Sant’Andrea in Mantova, Fabbrica della basilica di Sant’Andrea, b.378, “Cappella detta de’ Cantelmi: ristauri” (1799–1804); the busta contains a sketch, by Pozzo, dated 1799, of the monument as it appeared in the Cantelma church. The sketch of the monument is attached to a letter from Pozzo to the “Venerabile Compagnia del Preziosissimo in S. Andrea,” dated 14 Vendemiatore Anno VII della Repubblica, here transcribed in part: “Dovendosi levare dalla Chiesa della Cantelma quale Monumento ben ornato della famiglia Cantelmi, che ora sta collocato contro la facciata della Chiesa stessa, l’Amministrazione Centrale mi ha invitato di trattare con Voi, come già da gran tempo incaricata agli abbelimenti interni del Tempio di S. Andrea, acciò vogliate impegnarvi a far succedere il traslocamento di esso Monumento, permessa essendo l’Amministrazionestessa, che v’impegnerete anche a farlo inalzare nella Capella della Crociara, ora rustica, in ornamento della medesima ed in conseguenza dell’intero fabbricato di quel Tempio.” I thank my student, Kathleen Fric, for assisting me in my work at the Diocescan Archive in Mantua. 39 Amedeo Belluzzi, “Il monumento Cantelmi nel Sant’Andrea di Mantova,” in Giulio Romano. Saggi, 566; also Carpeggiani and Tellini Perina, Sant’Andrea in Mantua, 142–5. 40 In a letter of “16 Ventoso, VII Era Repubblica”, Pozzo wrote to the Compagnia del Preziosissimo of Sant’Andrea, who were in charge of the architectural fabric of the church, to report that he had made some adjustments to the actual proportions of the tomb to correct an error in measurement made by the muratore who had removed the tomb from its original location: “Il capo Maestro Pietro Vassali ha dato prinicipio ad inalzare nella notavi capella in S. Andrea il monumento che è stato levato dalla Cantelma. L’errore d’un braccio in larghezza che mi ha fatto il Capo Maestro muratore Giorgio Peteri (?) che ne prese le misure e che travagliava in quella caserma, mi ha obbligato di pensare ad un’analogo ripiego con cui restringere quel monumento senza renderlo deforme, ed anzi aggiungervi una migliore distribuzione delle parti, ed una piu elegante proporzione rispetto alla sua altezza,” Archivio Storico Diocesano di Mantova, Fabbrica della basilica di Sant’Andrea, b.378. According to a letter written by a Luigi Zanni, later painted additions were made in 1805:

78

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literal approach to classicism, but the serious and somber effects he achieves here are particularly suited to a commemorative monument. The preservation of the Cantelmo tomb is particularly remarkable if we recall that other, perhaps more important, monuments to Mantuan women, such as the arca of the Beata Osanna Andreasi and even the tomb of Isabella d’Este herself, once in the monastery church of Corpus Domini, have vanished almost without a trace. The establishment of this monastery of Augustinian canonesses in Mantua occurred during a period of great expansion of the female branch of the Augustinian Order in Italy. From the eleventh century onward, monasteries of Augustinian canonesses had grown up alongside their male counterparts. These houses were not formally bound to any priory, but were independently founded by women who wished to devote themselves to religious service in their communities. Kate Lowe, who has examined the status of the Augustinian canonesses in the monastery of Le Vergini in Venice, writes that, “the rather rari¿ed position of canonesses is only imperfectly understood,” because it is often dif¿cult for historians to distinguish between secular and regular canonesses of the order.41 Lowe observes that the canonesses constituted an “exceptional” case among female religious communities in general, since they were neither regulars nor tertiaries, but something in between. Like Margherita Cantelma, many were aristocratic women who simply wished to devote themselves to a life of religious service but who did not have a particular desire to take ascetic or monastic vows. Although the canonesses did promise obedience and live communally, Lowe points out that in Venice, many of them did not renounce their personal wealth, hosted visitors at the monastery, and were able to move freely about in the city.42 The openness of the community is demonstrated by the fact that in 1502, Isabella d’Este and her sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, “Ricevo io sottoscritto a nome dal Sr. Giambattista Marconi dal deputato Sig. Antonio Bertinati lire duecento nostre, e a conto delle opere dipinte nella Capella Cantelmi come da scrittura di contratto fatta col Sig. Francesco Gervasoni,” also Archivio Diocesano di Mantova, b. 378, no. 378. 41 Kate Lowe offers comments on the status of the canonesses in ¿fteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy in her study of the convent of Le Vergini in Venice, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 186–7. More recent research on Le Vergini is found in her “Power and Institutional Identity in Renaissance Venice: The Female Convents of S.M. delle Vergini and S. Zaccaria,” in The Trouble with Ribs: Women, Men and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anu Korhonen and Kate Lowe (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2007): 128–52. For a history of the nuns of the Augustinian order in this period see David Guttierez, The Augustinians in the Middle Ages 1357–1517, trans. Thomas Martin (Villanova University: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1983), 199–223 and, idem., The Augustinians from the Protestant Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia 1518–1648, trans. John J. Kelly (Villanova University: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1979), 241–76. 42 Lowe, Nun’s Chronicles, 186–7. For their vows see David Dunford, “Canoness,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/0325b (July 2, 2008).

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visited the convent of Le Vergini in Venice, where they were allowed to attend a service and to hear the canonesses sing.43 In 1519, long before the Council of Trent, such unprecedented freedom among women who professed a devotion to religious service was curtailed in Venice through the imposition of stricter rules of enclosure.44 In Mantua, letters written by Cardinal Ercole in 1531 chronicle the dif¿culties he had regulating the canonesses in the Augustinian monastery of the Annunziata in the San Giorgio quarter of the city, noting that many of them regularly Àed the convent.45 Cantelma’s association with the Augustinian Canons was almost certainly prompted by her long and close relationship to her cousin Agostino Strozzi, who was an Augustinian canon at the Monastery of Saint Bartholomew near Mantua. According to Conor Fahy, Strozzi was made one of the Visitors General of the Canons and Abbot of another church of St Bartholomew, this one near Fiesole.46 The foundation documents for the Cantelma monastery show that it was indeed founded under the jurisdiction of St Bartholomew in Mantua, with the permission of the Lateran Canons at the provincial headquarters in Piacenza. Agostino Strozzi was a powerful force in Cantelma’s life, writing treatises for her in defense of women, as well as on the nature of friendship, which he dedicated to her son, Ercole Cantelmo. Their long friendship is attested to in letters and sonnets Strozzi wrote to Cantelma in the late 1490s, in which he addressed her almost as his Petrarchan muse, but to whom he also offered spiritual consolation and philosophical instruction during her period of personal crisis over the schism between her husband and Francesco II Gonzaga. To help her climb the ladder of contemplation that he assured would help her to overcome her adversity, he even sent her a portrait medal of himself as a kind of living consolation. There was, then, a real bond of friendship between the two that, as Carolyn James has demonstrated, transcended gender and perhaps, in the 1490s, might even have been perceived as quite improper, given Strozzi’s role as a cleric.47 While Cantelma’s friendship with Strozzi might have been instrumental in her decision to found a community of canonesses in Mantua, her decision was undoubtedly further reinforced by her familiarity with the Augustinian canons of Mortara, a city in northern Italy, not far from Pavia, where she occasionally resided. Some letters Cantelma wrote to Isabella in 1505 were addressed from 43

Lowe, “Power and Institutional Identity,” 41. Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, 194–9. 45 Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, 91. 46 Conor Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women,” Italian Studies 2 (1956): 30–47, at 41. Fahy also provides some insights into Strozzi’s ecclesiastical career. 47 For Strozzi and Cantelma see Carolyn James with F.W. Kent, “Margherita Cantelma and Agostino Strozzi: Friendship’s Gifts and a Portrait Medal by Costanzo da Ferrara,” in Renaissance in Friendship: A History, ed. B. Caine, accepted for publication by Equinox Publishing, London, 2007. I thank Carolyn James for sharing this article with me in advance of its publication. 44

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Mortara, which was situated along the pilgrimage route from Rome to Santiago de Compostela. Since 1082, the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Mortara had administered to pilgrims at the church and hospice they founded in the city. By 1448, however, the Canons Regular were no longer welcome in Mortara and the community joined the Lateran Canons.48 Cantelma may have been associated with the Lateran Canons of Mortara during her stays in the city. In fact, Margherita brought the ¿rst canonesses who would inhabit the Cantelma monastery in Mantua from the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Ferrara, which was known locally as Santa Maria “di Mortara,” because it was founded in 1499 by Ercole d’Este, who populated it with canonesses he brought to the city from Mortara in 1501.49 There is, then, a direct line of descent from Mortara to Cantelma’s monastery in Mantua. Although Cantelma’s monastery existed outside the formal registry of convents of the Second Order, its foundation corresponded with a general pattern of growth in the number of female Augustinian houses founded in Italy at this time. By 1560 there were approximately 125 monasteries of Augustinian nuns in Italy, forty of which were in fact founded after 1518. Many of these houses were located in Lombardy and independently established by religious women and were only gradually transformed into houses of the Second Augustinian Order.50 This appears to have been the case with an earlier female Augustinian convent established in Mantua in 1456. In that year, two daughters of the physician Francesco Neri used their dowries to buy land and found a small oratory dedicated to the Annunciation in the San Giorgio quarter of the city. Donesmondi reports that the sisters – one of whom was named Veronica – decided to live “in the manner of a convent” and, on June 14 of that same year, enclosed themselves to pursue a monastic way of life, accompanied by three nuns who came from the community of Lateran Canons at San Giovanni in Verona. One of these was Marina dei Marcelli, who became 48

For the early history of the Canons Regular at Mortara see Cristina Andenna, Mortariensis Ecclesia. Una congregazione di canonici regolari in Italian settetentrionale tra XI e XII secolo (Berlin, Lit. Verlag, 2007); see also “About the Canons Regular of St Augustine – History of the Canons” at http://www.augustiniancanons.org (accessed June 20, 2009). 49 Guiseppe Antenore Scalabrini, Memorie istoriche delle chiesi di Ferrara e de’ suoi borghi (Ferrara: Carlo Coatti, 1773), 232–4; Antonio Frizzi, Guida del forastiere per la città di Ferrara (Ferrara: Francesco Pomatelli, 1787), 85–6; Santa Maria delle Grazie “di Mortara” is also described brieÀy by Cesare Barotti, Pitture e scolture che si trovano nelle chiese, luoghi pubblici, e sobborghi della citta di Ferrara, 1770 (Bologna: Forni, 1977), 164, and in an eighteenth-century manuscript guidebook to Ferrara, now published as Carlo Brisighella, Descrizione delle pitture e sculture della città di Ferrara, ed. Maria Angela Novelli (Ferrara: Spazio Libri Editori, 1991), 435–7. 50 Guttierez, Augustinians in the Middle Ages, 198 and, for the proliferation of female Augustinian monasteries in Lombardy, 206–7. A partial list of Italian locations of Augustinian convents is also in Guttierez, The Augustinians from the Protestant Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia, 243–35.

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Abbess of the Mantuan branch, which soon boasted eleven members.51 In 1459, a papal bull declared that San Giorgio would be home to both the Lateran Canons and Canonesses in Mantua, following the decline of the Canons’ former monastery at San Vito in the Borgo San Giorgio of Mantua.52 In 1531, at about the same time that Cantelma initiated her plans for Santa Maria della Presentazione, Federico II Gonzaga wrote to his brother, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, to complain about the behavior of the canonesses at San Giorgio, who appeared to interact rather too freely outside the monastery.53 The Cardinal was rather slow to respond, and only in 1537 issued a set of capitoli, or regulations, which recommended that the local bishop exercise greater oversight of convents in the city and monitor the comings and goings of priests, superiors and confessors to the nuns at the various convents, in addition to inspecting any baskets and gifts left by visitors. Paul Murphy emphasizes the rather conservative nature of these restrictions, which did not inhibit or interfere with any activities, but which really only established gate-keeping practices to restrict contact between the residents and the outside world.54 Such restrictions undoubtedly affected the canonesses at San Giorgio. Donesmondi notes that in 1538, only a short time after the issuance of these capitoli, the original oratory at the Annunziata, which had always been “imperfectly built,” was torn down to make way for a new church and monastery. This new structure would prove to be equally “imperfect,” because Cardinal Ercole issued another series of capitoli in 1541. These were designed to enforce stricter rules of enclosure on the women of the Annunziata. The orders decreed that a series of public rooms in the monastic complex, which had previously been shared by both the female and male inhabitants there, would be restricted to the nuns and that new keys were to be made for the abbess and for a few designated female members of the community. The nuns were also to be separated from their visitors through the installation of new iron grills in the parlatori. Black curtains were hung on the windows of the visiting room so that outsiders could not peer inside “as is done in other monasteries in the city.”55 The 1541 capitoli were clearly designed to limit and restrict physically what had once been a much more open, communal space, creating a strong distinction between the nuns, their visitors and the city at large.

51 Donesmondi, Dell’Historia Ecclesiastica, II:69–70; also Amadei, Cronaca universale, II: 573. 52 According to Amadei, in 1459 Barbara of Brandenburg, Marchesa of Mantua, decided that the declining numbers of Regular Canons at San Vito and the similarly small number of canonesses at the Annunziata demanded that both monasteries be given over to the Lateran Canons. The monastery of San Ruf¿no, near Porto, was also given over to the Lateran Canons, Amadei, Cronaca Universale, II:111–14. 53 Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, 91. 54 Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, 93–4. 55 ASM, AG, b.3312, the capitoli are dated 9 February 1541.

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Cardinal Ercole’s edicts of separation responded to local anxieties over the public perception of the nuns of the Annunziata, but similar concerns about female Augustinian communities had already surfaced in other Italian cities. Guttierez reports that in 1515, Giles of Viterbo, prior general of the Augustinian order in Naples, issued an edict at the Augustinian monastery of St Ursula, Toledo, forbidding the friars, who served as chaplains at the convent, from even eating with the nuns. What Giles feared was “gossip among the laity,” demonstrating his awareness of how the monastery was perceived in the context of the city.56 Margherita Cantelma’s decision to found her monastery in Mantua was made at precisely the time that new the restrictions were being enforced on the community at the Annunziata. It is possible that Santa Maria della Presentazione was intended by Cantelma to correct the errors of the community at San Giorgio. Certainly, the dedication of the monastery to the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple signaled a desire to establish a community that would be a model of living for young novices; according to popular legend, the Virgin had been consecrated to the temple by her parents when she was a child and remained there until puberty.57 Early records for the monastery suggest that the ¿rst novices at the Casa Cantelma were daughters of the Mantuan elite and minor Lombard nobility. On 20 October 1536, Violante d’Arco, the daughter of the prominent Mantuan poet and humanist Count Niccolò d’Arco, entered Santa Maria, bringing with her a large dowry and other monetary donations. Another novice was Antonia Pusterla, daughter of Gregorio Pusterla, a member of a noble family of Milan.58 Records show that until the end of the sixteenth century Santa Maria della Presentazione received many donations and investitures, which considerably expanded the land that the monastery owned in the city. In addition, the monastery continued to be cared for through the legacy of its primary patron, Isabella d’Este. In December of 1541, Margherita Paleologa, Isabella’s daughter-in-law and ¿rst Duchess of Mantua, asked that funds be distributed to the nuns at Santa Maria della Presentazione in Isabella’s memory.59

56

Gutierrez, Augustinians in the Middle Ages, 204. The story of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple was largely derived from the Protevangelium of James and the Golden Legend; while it was popular in the Eastern tradition, it only rose to prominence in the West after the fourteenth century (there are a number of Italian images from the ¿fteenth century) and became an of¿cial feast in 1585, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Peter and Linda Murray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 408; also The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12400a.htm (May 26, 2009). 58 ASM, AG, b.272, Monasterie soppresse, 63v–65v. 59 ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, no.302, 92r, 7 December 1541, Margherita Paleologa in Mantua to the Beccaria of Mantua. 57

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The Later History of the Monastery Although the community at Santa Maria della Presentazione seemed to thrive in the years immediately after its foundation, the architectural fabric had begun to deteriorate as early as 1569. The abbess of the convent, Dona Isabella, wrote to Duke Guglielmo to ask that he provide building materials in order to repair the crumbling garden enclosure that faced outward toward the city walls and the Lago di Mezo.60 Records from the seventeenth century demonstrate the extent to which the canonesses had constantly to adapt, not only to a growing city but to a changing urban landscape and to troubled relationships with their neighbors. In December of 1633, the abbess wrote to the Duke concerning certain women of “mala vita”, who lived next to the cloister, whom she accused of habitually uttering “parole disonest” against the nuns there. She denounced them as regular trespassers and accused them of tearing down part of the garden wall and forcibly entering the cloister.61 In the same year, the canonesses of the Casa Cantelma entered into litigation with a certain “Abramo Angelo hebreo” who lived in the Ghetto and who objected to the fact that nuns of the Cantelma monastery had decided to sink a well on property adjacent to his. The nuns countered his protests by pointing out that the well was not only for their own bene¿t, but also to the advantage of their landlord, who could charge more rent for the property. Furthermore, to counter Abraham’s argument, they argued that the well would contribute to the “abbillamento della cittá.”62 There are few records regarding the later history of the monastery. Giovanni Cadioli, who wrote a description of the various churches of Mantua in 1763, singled out only one feature of Santa Maria della Presentazione – an altarpiece by Domenico Fetti depicting the Agony in the Garden – located on the ¿rst altar to the left of the entrance of the church (now in the Narodni Gallery, Prague). Although no documents exist with respect to the commission for this altarpiece, it must be dated to the period 1614–1622, when Fetti was active in Mantua.63 The creation of such an altarpiece indicates that the community at the Casa Cantelma was still suf¿ciently important in the early part of the seventeenth century to merit new decorations for their church. The general decline of Mantua affected the fate of the Cantelma monastery. Complicated Gonzaga marriage alliances in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries led to conÀict between French and Hapsburg claimants to

60

ASM, AG, b.3312, Materie Ecclesiastiche, letter of 17 March 1569. ASM, AG, b.3312, Materie Ecclesiastiche, letter of 20 November 1633. 62 Ibid., letter of 13 September 1633. 63 Giovanni Cadioli, Descrizione delle Pitture, Sculture ed architetture che si osservano nella citta di Mantova e ne suoi contorni 1763, ed. Luigi Pescasio (Mantua: Editoriale Padus, 1976), 88–9; the work is now in Prague, Narodni Galerie, inv. DO5356, see Domenico Fetti 1588/89–1623, ed. Eduard A. Safarik (Milan: Electa, 1996), cat. 24, 129–131. 61

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the city, leading to the War of Mantuan succession in 1628–1631, after the death of Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga. The city – also severely handicapped during a virulent outbreak of plague in 1630 – was brutally sacked by both armies in this period. All of these events led to the gradual decline of Gonzaga rule, which ¿nally ended with the defeat of the last Duke of Mantua, Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga IV, who was forced into permanent exile in January 1707 by the Austrian Hapsburg supporters. He died in the Veneto the following year.64 It was during this same conÀict that the Cantelma monastery was damaged by Austrian troops, who used it as a barracks. The city did, however, experience a brief cultural renewal under Austrian rule, which included the refurbishment of some of the monasteries that had been damaged in the sack of 1620–1631. In February of 1736, the nuns from the convent of the Annunziata in the Borgo San Giorgio were actually moved to the Cantelma monastery and remained there until April of 1737, while a campaign of construction and redecorating was undertaken at San Giorgio. This included repairing, repainting and gilding of architectural elements in the church, and rebuilding in the refectory and the nuns’ quarters.65 The repairs at San Giorgio, which speak to a desire to preserve the community there, might well have been undertaken speci¿cally because it had developed a reputation as a centre for tapestry production.66 In the period from 1796 to 1814, when Italy was a client state of the French Republic under Napoleon, many of the Italian monasteries were suppressed, their contents and archives scattered and the buildings themselves destroyed. In a dire state of disrepair since the Austrian occupation in 1797, the “Casa Cantelma” was dismantled, the Cantelmo monument moved to the basilica of Sant’Andrea, and the church and monastery buildings destroyed. In 1807, the monastery of the Annunziata was suppressed and the buildings torn down, and in 1809 the entire San Giorgio quarter of the city was completely dismantled, leaving no trace of the communities of Augustinian canonesses that had once Àourished in the city.

64

Kate Simons, A Renaissance Tapestry. The Gonzaga of Mantua (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 281–3. 65 The letter from Francesco Coccapanus is ASM, AG, b.3312, 20 June 1707. 66 “1HOVL¿QLGLGLPROLUHLOERUJRGL6DQ*LRUJLRLOTXDOHFRQWDYDSLXGLFDVH e circa 800 anime, con un’antichissimo chiesa parrocchiale ed un convento di Monache lateranensi, ed era un tempo assai rinomato per le sue fabbriche d’arazzi,” Stefano Gionta, I Fioretti delle Cronache di Mantova, ed. Antonio Mainardi. (Mantova: Coi tipi dei fratelli Negretti, 1844), 523; this is the only mention I can ¿nd of the nuns of the Annunziata as tapestry weavers.

Chapter 4

Daughters of Devotion: Suor Ippolita and Suor Paola Gonzaga in Mantua In the previous chapters, I have examined the forging of female communities through religious patronage, focusing on friendships between women who helped to bridge the convent walls and create communities of women committed to the spirit of devotion. The Beata Osanna was the subject of public veneration through the circulation of her biographies and the arca that held her body in San Domenico. She was also a ¿gure for more private female contemplation through the painting made for the nuns of San Vincenzo. Some time after San Domenico was suppressed in 1798, her body was moved to San Vincenzo and then later transported to the cathedral of Mantua.1 In all cases, public and private, she existed as a devotional meeting place for women. The friendship and spirit of collaboration that existed between Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma had found its ¿rst expression of mutual piety in the cult surrounding the Beata Osanna Andreasi and it became a “partnership in piety” that led to the establishment of the Mantuan Monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione. The Augustinian canonesses of the “casa Cantelma” started as an elective sisterhood, initially bound only through the mutual desire on the part of some women to pursue a life of spiritual devotion. The history of that monastery, however, demonstrated the seismic shifts in female spiritual practices brought about through the pressures of Catholic Reformation, where female communities, like the one at the Presentation, were increasingly sequestered within the con¿nes of their individual monasteries, the clamorous public voices of the mystics and their devotees were quieted, and to some extent, the spiritual avenues for women were made straighter and narrower. These more conventional devotional paths were clearly demonstrated in the lives of two of the daughters of Isabella d’Este. The sisters Ippolita (d.1570) and Livia Gonzaga (d.1569) spent their lives as nuns in Mantua. Very little attention has been given to the subject of Renaissance mothers and daughters in general, but Isabella’s relationship with her own daughters has really not been commented on in the literature.2 Examining Isabella’s daughters in the context of religious patronage 1

Jessica Pedrazzini, “Il convento di San Domenico,” in Chiese di Conventi Domenicani, ed. Rosanna Golinelli Berto (Mantua: Associazione monumenti Domenicani, 2007), 7–27, at 11. 2 In her magisterial biography of Isabella, Julia Cartwright does mention Isabella’s daughters and their religious vocation, but does not examine Isabella’s relationship with them. The role of the family in stabilizing civic society has been studied with particular application to Florence and Venice, for example Richard A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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in Mantua helps to illuminate Isabella’s own politics of piety and because she was careful to commit her daughters separately to convents maintained by the two most prominent mendicant orders in Italy. Ippolita entered the Dominican Convent of San Vincenzo and Livia the Franciscan Convent of clarissan nuns at Santa Paola, where she lived as Suor Paola. A commitment to both communities was a politically astute move on Isabella’s part, enhancing the Gonzaga reputation for piety and extending Gonzaga inÀuence within the convents themselves. Although the sisters lived somewhat secluded lives within their respective communities, they hardly passed into obscurity. As the historian Gianfranco Ferlisi points out – and as Isabella herself must have known – monastic life was a viable career choice for young aristocratic women, a profession through which they could hope to achieve some sense of independent success, rising up through the ranks of monastic management to become abbesses. In fact, both the Gonzaga sisters were able to effect changes within their convents, each rising to the rank of prioress, and both were later publicly commemorated for their piety and devotion. And even as nuns, the sisters were not so completely circumscribed as to lose touch with their family, especially with their brother, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga (1505–1563). As papal legate to the Council of Trent, Cardinal Ercole was a key ¿gure in Catholic Reform, which led him to institute many changes in local churches in monasteries.3 In addition to his ecclesiastical responsibilities, following the death of his brother, Duke Federico II Gonzaga in 1540, the cardinal 1968); F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The family life of the Capponi, Ginori and Rucellai (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family & Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Patricia Fortini Brown, Family Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Thomas Kuehn, Heirs, Kin and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Rather less attention has been given to families in the civic context of the northern Italian states like Mantua, Ferrara and Urbino. Moreover, interpersonal relations in these courtly states have largely been de¿ned in terms of the extra-familial structures of courtiership and personal strategies for social and political advancement described by Castiglione and Machiavelli. While studies of patrilinear and bilinear devolutions of wealth, inheritance and property and the intricacies of property law pertaining to marriage, dowries, legitimacy and widowhood have all been frames within legalistic discourses of family, there remains a notable lack of research into the affective ties between and among family members, some aspects of which are considered by Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale. Madri H ¿JOL QHOOD 7RVFDQD PRGHUQD (Bari: Laterza, 1994). For individual essays probing the importance of sibling relationships in the European Renaissance see the essays in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World. Sisters, Brothers and Others, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2006). 3 For Cardinal Ercole and Reform see Paul V. Murphy, Ruling Peacefully. Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007).

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served as co-regent, along with his brother’s widow Margherita Paleologa, of the young princes of the Gonzaga family. His role as the Gonzaga patriarch basically extended from his brother’s death in 1540 through the tutelage of his nephew Francesco Gonzaga (b.1533) – who died unexpectedly in 1550 – until 1556, when Guglielmo (b.1538) reached the age of majority and assumed responsibility for the state. Cardinal Ercole was, therefore, both a secular patriarch and a patriarch of Reform, a powerful ¿gure in the lives of his sisters and two illegitimate daughters, as well as a spiritual father to the convent communities of the city. The sisters and daughters of Cardinal Ercole, who were part of the community of San Vincenzo, became vehicles for his spirit of Reform within their respective convent communities. Family Ties Isabella and Francesco II Gonzaga had six children who survived to adulthood, three of whom were girls. Their ¿rst-born was a daughter Eleonora (1494–1570), named in honor of her grandmother Eleonora of Aragon, Duchess of Ferrara, and referred to colloquially as Leonora. The palpable disappointment that Isabella felt in 1496, when she gave birth to a second girl, who died in infancy, rather than to a male heir, is expressed in a letter she wrote to her husband shortly after the birth, telling him to cancel the planned baptismal celebrations: “It is not merited,” she wrote, “because it is a girl.”4 This bitterness and sense of failure lasted until 1500, when Isabella gave birth to Federico II Gonzaga, heir to the marquisate and later named the ¿rst Duke of Mantua by Charles V. Isabella’s second son, Ercole Gonzaga (b.1505) was pledged to an ecclesiastical career, became a cardinal in 1527 and served as papal legate to the Council of Trent from 1561 until his death, at Trent, in 1563. Ferrante Gonzaga (b.1507) pursued a military career, eventually becoming governor of Milan (1546–1555) and founder of the Guastalla line of the Gonzaga family.5 4 Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 21 July 1496, in which Isabella says the baptism “non lo meritando per essere femina,” ASM, AG, b. 2992, lib. 7, n.193. When a certain “Madonna Laura” (probably Laura Bentivoglio, wife of Giovanni Gonzaga, son of the Marchese Federigo Gonzaga of Mantua) gave birth to a male child in August of the same year Isabella again wrote to Francesco II to express her jealousy: “io ho piacere de questo suo contento, ma non sono senza invidia,” ASM, AG, lib. 7, no. 217, 3 August 1496. 5 For Ercole Gonzaga, U. Mazzone, “Gonzaga (Ercole),” in Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de Géographie Ecclésiastiques, ed. R. Aubert, 28 volumes (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1986, reprint of Paris, 1912), 21:620–8 and Paul V. Murphy, Ruling Peacefully. Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007). For Ferrante Gonzaga, G. Brunelli, “Gonzaga, Ferrante,” DBI 57: 734–44; for all three as artistic patrons Clifford M. Brown and Guy Delmarcel, Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole and Ferrante Gonzaga 1522–63 (Seattle and London: College Art Association in association with University of Washington Press, 1996). Federico II Gonzaga is often studied in connection with his patronage of

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In 1509, at the age of 16, as the result of her father’s political ambitions, Leonora made a successful marriage to Francesco Maria della Rovere, the nephew of Pope Julius II and adopted heir to the Duke of Urbino.6 In her role as Duchess of Urbino, Eleonora Gonzaga carried on the cultural legacies she had inherited from her d’Este grandparents in Ferrara and her mother in Mantua, and the rich civic and courtly tradition of artistic sponsorship that had made Urbino one of the gems of the early Renaissance. Following in the tradition of secular patronage that she had inherited from her mother, Leonora’s greatest contribution to the artistic life of the Urbino court was her supervision of the expansion and redecoration of the della Rovere Villa Imperiale at Pesaro, carried out by the architect Girolamo Genga.7 Isabella’s two remaining children, who are seldom mentioned in studies of the family, were Ippolita (1501–1570) and Livia (1508–1569). Both of these sisters to Leonora were pledged to Mantuan monasteries at a very young age and lived out their lives in relative seclusion from the immediate family, renouncing the luxuries, privileges and intrigues of court life. It is not completely clear why Isabella and Francesco II Gonzaga did not arrange suitable marriages for their two youngest daughters, but there were certainly practical reasons for choosing the monastery over marriage. One reason was diplomatic. In his active military years, Francesco II was frequently away from court. After claiming victory as leader of the army of the Italian League against the Emperor Charles VIII at the Battle of Fornovo in 1495, Francesco brieÀy headed the Venetian army, which he promptly left in order to lead the French troops under Louis XII. Following a period in service to Florence, he joined Julius II against Bologna and it was in 1505, while serving in this capacity, that he began the arrangements for Leonora’s marriage to Francesco della Rovere. By the time of the actual marriage in 1509, Giulio Romano at the Palazzo del Te and his commissions to Titian, but merits a fulllength biographical study in English; in Italian see Stefano Davari, “Federico Gonzaga e la famiglia Paleologa del Monferrato,” Giornale linguistico dì archeologia, storia, e belle arti, 17–18, fasc. 11–12 (1890): 421–69; 18, fasc. 1–2 (1891): 40–76; 18, fasc. 3–4 (1891): 81–100; Alessandro Luzio, “Federico Gonzaga ostaggio alla corte di Giulio II,” Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria 9 (1887): 509–852; Diane Bodart, Tiziano e Federico II Gonzaga. Storia di un rapporto di committenza (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998). 6 Francesco Maria was the son of Giovanni della Rovere, prefect of Rome and the nephew of Pope Julius II. Giovanni della Rovere had been made Lord of Senigallia by his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, and married the daughter of Federico da Montefeltro. Giovanni della Rovere entrusted his son Franceso Maria to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who made Francesco Maria Duke of Urbino. Guidobaldo’s wife was Elizabetta Gonzaga, the sister of Francesco II Gonzaga; for more on the family in Urbino see the essay by Marinella Bonvini Mazzanti, “I della Rovere,” in I Della Rovere. Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, Tiziano, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2004), 35–50. 7 For Eleonora as a cultural patron in Urbino, Catherine King, “Architecture, Gender and Politics: The Villa Imperiale at Pesaro,” Art History 29/5 (November 2000): 796–826. The documents for the Villa Imperiale were ¿rst published by George Gronau, Documenti Artistici Urbinati (Florence: G.G. Sansoni, 1936).

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however, Francesco Gonzaga was ¿ghting against Julius, who had decided to join the Venetians against the League of Cambray while Francesco still led the French forces. In 1509, unable to lure Francesco to their side, the Venetians decided to imprison him and he remained in Venetian custody until 1510.8 These reversals of fortune, and particularly the conÀicts that arose because of Francesco’s shifting papal and military alliances, probably help to explain the rather strained relationship between Isabella and Leonora.9 They also left little room to negotiate marriage arrangements for Ippolita and Livia. In the years between his release by the Venetians and his death in 1519, Francesco became increasingly detached from affairs of state, choosing instead to become absorbed in completing the decoration of his private palace of San Sebastiano in Mantua, a personal refuge away from the court.10 In his ¿nal years, the ravages of syphilis deprived him of any true involvement in Mantuan affairs, much less in the politics of marriage for his two youngest daughters. There was also little to be gained through marital alliances in a changing political economy. In purely practical terms, of course, it is also quite probable that adequate dowries for one or both girls would have been impossible to secure after Francesco’s long imprisonment. The fates of Ippolita and Livia Osanna Gonzaga were, therefore, largely left in the hands of their mother, who chose quite a different path for them by pledging each of them to a religious life while they were still children. Her decision to do so was most certainly motivated by her continuing dedication to her campaign on behalf of the sainthood of the Beata Osanna Andreasi. Ippolita, the older of the two girls, entered the Dominican monastery of San Vincenzo, where Osanna was particularly venerated, and Isabella named her youngest daughter Livia Osanna, who entered the clarissan monastery of Santa Paola, in honour of Andreasi. In addition to advancing her own agenda for the elevation of the Beata Osanna to sainthood, Isabella’s choice of monastic life for her female children certainly enhanced her own reputation for devotion, and it created a public perception of Gonzaga piety in the civic context. The commitment of her daughters to religious life in the city promoted popular respect for the monasteries themselves as institutions fundamental to the maintenance of the public good and urban order.11 8

For a summary of the military career of Francesco II Gonzaga, with some comments on its implications for diplomatic activities in Mantua, see Molly Harris Bourne, “Out from the Shadow of Isabella: The Art Patronage of Francesco II Gonzaga, Fourth Marquis of Mantua, 1484–1519,” PhD diss., Harvard, 1997, 31–40; now published as Francesco Gonzaga. The Soldier Prince as Patron (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005). 9 Although Catherine King does not discuss what I perceive to be an estrangement between mother and daughter, she does brieÀy discuss the political implications of Eleonora’s cultural patronage in light of these shifting papal loyalties, “Architecture, Gender and Politics,” 798. 10 Bourne, “Out from the Shadow,” 37. 11 Gianfranco Ferlisi, “Il monastero di San Vincenzo Martire,” in Chiese di conventi Domenicani, ed. Rosanna Golinelli Berto (Mantua: Provincia di Mantova, 2007), 63–87, at 65.

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Ippolita Gonzaga at San Vincenzo Ippolita Gonzaga (b.1501) is said to have expressed a personal interest in devotional life even as a young child, but such stories must, of course, be regarded with some suspicion; a predilection for sanctity was often a convenient retrospective and purely apocryphal quality assigned to those who were committed to a religious life for practical, and not necessarily spiritual, reasons. Nevertheless, Ippolita was ¿rst sent to live at San Vincenzo for instruction from the nuns in 1509, when she was eight years old. Her entry to the convent coincided with her father’s incarceration in Venice and at the peak of her mother’s campaign for the beati¿cation of Osanna Andreasi, factors which might have motivated Isabella’s decision to send her daughter to San Vincenzo (Illustration 15). Ippolita lived at the convent until she was ready to take her ¿nal vows, but accounts vary as to when those vows of¿cially took place. Some sources say she took her vows in 1514, the same year that Leo X agreed to elevate Osanna Andreasi to the status of Beata in the Diocese of Mantua. Recently, however, Gianfranco Ferlisi has re-examined all of the documentary evidence for Ippolita’s career and has demonstrated that her ¿nal vows did not, in fact, take place until 6 April 1518.12 Relatively little is known about the speci¿cs of Ippolita’s life at San Vincenzo, but we do know from a surviving document that by 1546 she was prioress of the nuns there.13 In her role as prioress, she seems to have overseen many improvements to the fabric of San Vincenzo. In fact, Ippolita wrote to her brother Duke Federico II Gonzaga in 1537 about the renovation and the enlargement of the cloister and the dormitory at San Vincenzo, which had been undertaken “by means of the most reverend monsignor, our brother,” a reference to Cardinal Ercole.14 The seventeenth-century Mantuan chronicler Federigo Amadei recorded the inscription on Ippolita’s tomb, now lost, which stated that she had “embellished and ampli¿ed this residence under St Dominic with great honor and devotion, with faith, honesty and wisdom.”15 12

Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este Marchioness of Mantua, 1474–1539. A Study of the Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1905), says Ippolita entered the convent at the age of eight, I:263. A summary of her life in connection with her residence at San Vincenzo is provided by Gianfranco Ferlisi, “Il monastero di San Vincenzo Martire,” 63–87, who says she took her ¿nal vows on 6 April 1518, 65–7; this date is also given by Federigo Amadei, Cronaca universale della città di Mantova, Edizione integrale, 2 vols. (Mantua: C.I.T.E.M, 1955), II:783. Ippolita did not, as is sometimes asserted, take the name “Suor Livia” but remained Suor Ippolita until her death, also Ferlisi, 65. 13 Some original documents for San Vincenzo are found in the Archivio di Stato di Milano (ASMi); Fondo Pergamene, cartella 248, San Vincenzo di Mantova; doc. 86 (old numbering), dated 1546, calls Suor Ippolita “priorissa divi Ven. Soror et monasterii S.ti Vincentij de Mantua.” 14 Ferlisi, ‘Monastero di San Vincenzo,” 66–7. 15 “che abbelli ed amplio questa dimora sotto l’istituto di San Domenico con grandissimo onore did devozione, di fede, di onesta e di saggezza,” Ferlisi, “Monastero

15

Present-day exterior of the former monastery of San Vincenzo in Mantua. Photo: Author

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Amadei further reports that Ippolita’s epitaph at San Vincenzo was actually composed by her cousin Anna Gonzaga, an illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Ercole, who was also a nun at San Vincenzo, as was her younger sister, Leonora. Both Anna and Leonora were evidently guided and tutored at San Vincenzo by Suor Ippolita.16 The community at San Vincenzo was, therefore, closely bound by family ties and the “patriarch” of this generation of convent women was clearly Cardinal Ercole. The complexity of the family relationships centred on San Vincenzo is commemorated in the altarpiece depicting the Deposition of Christ in the Sepulchre with Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, attributed to the painter Ippolito Costa, and probably painted between 1557 and 1563. Although the painting is now found in the church of Sant’Egidio in Mantua, documentary sources show that it was originally painted for a chapel dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre located in the convent church of San Vincenzo.17 This is the only living portrait of Cardinal Ercole, who is depicted in the left foreground, facing the viewer in the chapel and gesturing towards the sepulchre into which Joseph of Arimithea, Nicodemus, St John and attendants lower the body of Christ. Behind Cardinal Ercole stands St Dominic, and to the other side of the sepulchre the swooning Virgin is supported by another Mary. Behind them is a standing ¿gure of a Dominican nun holding a lily.18 While some art historians have identi¿ed this nun as the Beata Osanna, Maria Giustina Grassi has recently suggested that this might be a portrait of Suor Ippolita Gonzaga. She bases her identi¿cation on the resemblance between the woman here and a portrait, now in a private Mantuan collection, that has been identi¿ed as a copy of an original portrait of Suor Ippolita painted in 1542, now in

di San Vincenzo,” n. 26, 88. The complete inscription reads: “HIPPOLITAE GONZAGAE, FRANCISCI IV MANTUAE MARCHIONIS FILIAE, QUAE SUB DIVI DOMINICI INSTITUTO AEDES HAS LIX ANNIS RELIGIONIS, FIDEI, PROBITATIS AC PRUDENTIAE SUMMA CUM LAUDE EXORNAVIT, AMPLIFICAVITQUE, ANNA GONZAGA MAERENS AMITAE DILECTISSIMAE POSUIT. VIXIT ANNOS LXIX MENSES V DIES VIII. OBIIT XVII KALENDAS APRILIS MDLXX,” Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:783. 16 Paul Murphy, Ruling Peacefully, brieÀy discusses Anna and Leonora as well as the Cardinal’s other children, 64–5. 17 The altarpiece was moved from San Vincenzo to Sant’Egidio in the eighteenth century, see Maria Giustina Grassi, “La deposizione con il Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga in S. Egidio a Mantova,” Civiltá Mantovana 28/8 (September 1993), 45–61, at 48. Grassi concludes that it was originally made for a chapel in the Cathedral of Mantua to honor St Dominic. Ferlisi argues that it was originally made for San Vincenzo, see “Monastero di San Vincenzo,” 83–5. 18 For an alternative interpretation of this ¿gure as St Thomas Aquinas see C.M. Brown, “Paintings in the Collection of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga: Other Michelangelo Vittoria Colonna Drawings and by Bronzino, Giulio Romano, Fermo Ghisoni, Parmigianino, Sofonisba Anguissola, Titian and Tintoretto,” in Giulio Romano. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi su Giulio Romano e l’espansione europea del Rinascimento, (Mantua: Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana, 1989), 203–26 at 206, n.15 at 224.

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the Ambras collection in Vienna.19 Technical examination of the Deposition during restoration revealed that this ¿gure seems to have been added to the original composition. At some point the ¿gure of a woman wearing a Dominican habit and kneeling beside the tomb, partially obscured by the ¿gures of the swooning Virgin and her attendant in the foreground, was removed and presumably replaced with the present portrait. Grassi suggests that this original ¿gure was also Suor Ippolita, who was moved to a more visible and prominent position in the altarpiece. She suggests that the change was made at the request of Suor Anna Gonzaga, daughter of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, whom she identi¿es as the commissioner of the work on the basis of the inscription “S.A.G.V.” found on the painting. Grassi suggests that this inscription means “soror Anna Gonzaga voluit” – that Suor Anna ordered the painting in honour of her father, Cardinal Ercole, and her aunt, Suor Ippolita. After Ercole’s death in 1563, the painting became a commemorative token and when Suor Ippolita died in 1570, Suor Anna had her ¿gure moved to a more prominent position in the composition and also commissioned her commemorative inscription for the chapel. Inside the Monastery of San Vincenzo, the altarpiece honouring Cardinal Ercole and Suor Ippolita became an object of reverence for the community and the painting, along with the inscription, reinforced the familial and ecclesiastical ties that bound the Gonzaga family to the community at San Vincenzo. These ties also bound the monastery to the politics of the church and the city.20 Such relationships were already manifest at San Vincenzo in Bonsignori’s altarpiece depicting the Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, another work that reinforced the familial, friendship and devotional ties by which the community inside San Vincenzo was bound to the city outside its walls. Suor Ippolita’s presence within the monastery also expedited the founding of other Dominican communities under the auspices of Gonzaga patronage. In 1525, at the request of Ippolita’s sister, Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, Duchess of Urbino, a number of nuns from San Vincenzo were transferred to Pesaro to found the new monastery of Santa Caterina Martire.21 The monastery was founded by Bartolommea da Briggio of Pesaro, who was evidently charged through the terms of her husband’s will, to build a Dominican monastery.22 In addition, Ippolita’s long residence in San Vincenzo prompted gifts in the form of bequests and bene¿ces from members of the Gonzaga family. In her will, Isabella d’Este left Ippolita all of the proceeds from the grain produced at a mill in Montagnara for the sustenance of the sisters of San Vincenzo. Other members of Ippolita’s immediate family were even more generous in their support. Her brother, Duke Federico II Gonzaga, gave 3,000 ducats a year to San Vincenzo and his daughter, Isabella Gonzaga (who is further discussed below) left an annual bene¿ce of 100 gold

19 20 21 22

Grassi, “Deposizione,” 53. Grassi, “Deposizione,” 52 and Ferlisi, “Monastero di San Vincenzo,” 85. Ferlisi, “Monastero di San Vincenzo,”65? Amadei, Cronaca Universale, II:506.

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scudi to be paid to the monastery every year on the 30th of September.23 The fact that Ippolita was a nun at San Vincenzo prompted acts of practical piety on the part of the Gonzaga and was a sustaining element in the continuity of the community there.24 The lines of piety, patronage and practical spirituality consolidated the cults of female mystics who had established the spiritual history of the community at San Vincenzo, not only the Beata Osanna Andreasi, but also Margherita Torchi (d.1321) and Maddalena Coppini (d.1321), whose venerated relics were among the most important devotional items the convent possessed.25 Suor Paola Gonzaga According to Julia Cartwright, Isabella declared at the moment that Livia Osanna Gonzaga was born on 1 August 1508 that she would be professed to the clarissan Convent of Corpus Domini in Mantua, known colloquially, in honour of its founder Paola Gonzaga Malatesta, as Santa Paola (Illustration 16).26 Livia was born only a few months after the body of the Beata Osanna was ¿nally placed in the tomb designed by Gian Cristoforo Romano in the church of San Domenico in Mantua, so Isabella’s decision to commit her to religious life was undoubtedly a continuation of her larger campaign for Osanna’s sainthood. Accounts vary as to when Livia actually entered the cloister of Santa Paola. Amadei reports that she took the habit VHUD¿FR at the age of nine and was professed in 1522, at the age of 14, adopting the name “Suor Paola” in honour of the original founder.27 23

Ferlisi, “Monastero di San Vincenzo,” 67. For some comments on Dominican women and monastic patronage through family ties in Pisa see Ann Roberts, Dominican Women and Renaissance Art. The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2008), 213–20. 25 Ferlisi reports that just before the monastery was suppressed in 1813 the remains of both nuns were translated to the Duomo of Mantua, “Monastero di San Vincenzo,” n.10, 88. Today they are kept in the house of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, a museum devoted to her and also to the convent of San Vincenzo. See my Chapter 1 for a panel representing Maddalena Coppini, formerly in San Vincenzo and now in the Museo della Città at the Palazzo di San Sebastiano in Mantua. 26 The history of Santa Paola and of the Gonzaga women who were nuns there is found in Clinio Cottafavi, “Clarisse della famiglia Gonzaga in S. Paola di Mantova,” Le Venezie Francescane, Series I, 4/1 (1935): 5–26. For Paola Malatesta’s patronage of Corpus Domini see Evelyn Welch, “The Art of Expenditure: The Court of Paola Malatesta Gonzaga in Fifteenth-Century Mantua,” Renaissance Studies 16:3 (2002): 306–17. For this convent in the broader context of Italian clarissan convents, Jeryldene N. Wood, Women, Art and Spirituality. The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 90–6. Julia Cartwright says that Isabella pledged Livia to the convent the moment she was born, Isabella d’Este, I:311–12. Cartwright also reports that in 1501 Isabella gave birth to another daughter named Livia but that this child died at the age of six, I:186 and 306. I can ¿nd no other traces of this child. 27 Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:778–80. 24

16

Façade of the former clarissan Church of Santa Paola, or Corpus Domini, in Mantua. Photo: Author

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To mark the occasion of her full acceptance into the clarissan order her brother, Duke Federico, arranged to have the relic of the Precious Blood brought in a solemn procession from the crypt at Sant’Andrea to the monastery of Corpus Domini, so that Livia, now Suor Paola, might see this most important of Mantuan relics.28 Although the ceremony was ostensibly staged to honour Suor Paola, such a public procession was also, of course, a useful political opportunity to publicize Gonzaga piety. The historian Clinio Cottafavi reports that from Paola’s earliest period in the convent her father, Francesco II Gonzaga, visited her regularly, often bringing her and her sister Ippolita at San Vincenzo gifts of food. When Francesco II died in 1519, he also left each convent 3,000 ducats.29 There is little evidence to suggest that Isabella visited her daughters with any regularity, and no correspondence survives to attest to her involvement with, or interest in, their early lives in their respective communities. In her will of 1535, she made arrangements, in the name of her daughter, to provide Santa Paola with regular disbursements of speci¿c quantities of grain. On a more personal note, she also left Suor Paola an ivory cruci¿x from her own private oratory, a personal token intended to keep her in her daughter’s prayers.30 Amadei reports that when Suor Paola’s tomb was opened in September of 1608 – although the body had not survived uncorrupted because of the constant inundation of Àoodwaters – a cruci¿x, possibly the one left to her by her mother, was found on Paola’s breast.31 During her years in the convent, Suor Paola was revered by her contemporaries as a living model of piety. Her sister nuns reported that Paola engaged in constant prayer and observed the strictest rules of Franciscan poverty and self-denial. The poverty of the nuns at Corpus Domini was widely known in Mantua and Paola regularly solicited food for the nuns from her nephews, the successive dukes of Mantua.32 Cottafavi reports that by 1530, her popularity and reputation for sanctity had even reached the ears of the Emperor Charles V, who visited her in the convent during his sojourn in Mantua that year.33 By 1567, she had become the abbess of Corpus Domini, a position she retained until her death in 1569. Paola’s reputation inspired popular hagiographic legends surrounding her life and devotional practice. Nuns from the community reported that when Paola prayed at night in the chapel, she was surrounded by a nimbus of light. At the moment of her death on 22 April 1569, the nuns assembled at her bedside claimed that they heard heavenly music and choruses of angels who heralded the opening of the 28

Donesmondi, Storia Ecclesiastica, II:226. Cottafavi, “Clarisse,” 20. 30 ³,WHP LQ RJQL PLJOLRU PRGR ODVVD DOOD SUHIDWD 6RU 3DXOD XQ &URFL¿[R GH DYROLR qual essa Signora Testatrice ha nel suo oratorio, aciòche habbi a tener memoria di essa in le sue oratione,” see Isabella’s complete last will and testament, Appendix I. 31 Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:779. 32 Cottafavi, “Clarisse,” 7. 33 For this and for the procession of the relic of the Precious Blood, Cottafavi, “Clarisse.” 29

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gates of Paradise, Àung wide to receive her soul. Of course, these are standard hagiographical legends, but they resulted in the perpetuation of Paola’s presence in the city, and the reinforcement of female Franciscan piety. Donesmondi reports that Paola’s portrait was included among the Franciscan beati in a painting once found in the sacristy of the church of San Francesco in Mantua. He also recorded that another portrait of Paola was included in an image of Saint Clare among the nuns sheltered under the saint’s protective mantel, a painting once found in the choir of the monastery church of Corpus Domini. Unfortunately, both images have since disappeared.34 Finally, the details of her life and spiritual legend were preserved in a biography, reportedly written by her cousin, another Suor Ippolita Gonzaga, this one a resident of Corpus Domini. This later Suor Ippolita became Paola’s con¿dant and brieÀy succeeded her as abbess at Corpus Domini, where she died in 1570.35 Unfortunately, this account has also disappeared. In honour of her family ties and her important role at Corpus Domini, Suor Paola was buried in the Gonzaga family sepulchre, once located in the monastery church. This monument also held the bodies of Isabella d’Este and Duke Federico II Gonzaga. It has since disappeared, having been dismantled during the Napoleonic occupation of the city, but it was described by Amadei and by later chroniclers of the suppression.36 In her will of 1563, the ¿rst Duchess of Mantua, Margherita Paleologa, the widow of Federico II Gonzaga, expressed her desire, upon her death, to be buried in the family crypt at Santa Paola in Mantova. Margherita had come to Mantua as the bride of Federico II Gonzaga in 1531, and only then as the result of the death of her elder sister, Maria, who had been Federico’s ¿rst choice of bride. By 1540, Margherita was a widow with ¿ve young children, and for many years afterward she ruled as co-regent of Mantua in the company of her brother-in-law, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga. This partnership naturally drew her closer to church affairs, and she seems to have developed her strongest affective ties, as she grew older, with her sisters-in-law, Suor Ippolita at San Vincenzo and Suor Paola at Corpus Domini, whom she affectionately referred to as her own “sisters.” In her will, Margherita left an annual provision of grain to the nuns of Corpus Domini in exchange for perpetual prayers for the Gonzaga buried in the monastery church, under the protection of the clarissan community and her own beloved “sister,”

34

Donesmondi, Storia Ecclesiastica di Mantova, II:225–8. This Ippolita was the daughter of Pirro Gonzaga of Bozzolo, Cottafavi, “Clarisse,” 24. 36 The inscription on the tomb is recorded by Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:780. The inscription still existed when Santa Paola was suppressed in 1782, and the records of the suppression are found in ASM, Archivio di Corporazioni Religioisi Soppressi, V. Inventario 23, a copy of the original record which is now housed in the Archivio di Stato in Milan; the entries on Santa Paola are found at 293–332. For reconstructions of Santa Paola and the records of the suppression see Fiorella Battesini, Maria Fernanda Saletti, Il monastero di Santa Paola: Le clarisse e la loro storia (Mantua: Comune di Mantova Settore Pubblica Istruzione e Museo Civico Palazzo Te, 1998/99). 35

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Suor Paola Gonzaga.37 The ¿nal chapter examines the religious patronage of Margherita Paleologa, whose natural inclination towards piety would be shaped and guided by the powerful Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga.

37 “Illustrissima et. Benedetta Signora suor Paola similmente soa cognata et sorella di bon anima professa nel monasterio di S. Paola di Mantoa, sacchi cinquanta di formento, tutto il tempo della vita di essa Signora suor Paola, et doppo la morte di quella habbi a darli al detto monastero di S. Paola ogni anno in perpetuo acciòche nel luoco ovè servanno H FRUSL GHOOL GHWWL ,OOXVWULVVLPL 6LJQRUL ,XJDOL HW RYH q LO FRUSR GHO ¿JOLROR SULPRJHQLWR V¶KDEELPHPRULDGLGLU¶SHUSHWXDPHQWHRI¿WLMHWRUDWLRQLSHUOHDQLPHOXRURHWGHOOL6LJQRUL suoi attenenti pregando essa Signora Suor Paola che nelle soe orationi voglia haver simile memoria,” Margherita’s will, see my Appendix I. For the Gonzaga tombs in Santa Paola, Rodolfo Signorini, “Gonzaga Tombs and Catafalques,” in Splendours of the Gonzaga, eds David Chambers and Jane Martineau (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), 3–13.

Chapter 5

Gonzaga Family Piety and Sisterly Affection: Margherita Paleologa, First Duchess of Mantua

I am grateful for the letter that you have written me and extremely grateful for your composition on the life of St Catherine which you have also sent me, being an excellent subject and, having being recounted by you, I know that the book could be nothing less than excellent. 1 Margherita Paleologa to Pietro Aretino in Venice, 3 January 1541

At the age of 21, Margherita Paleologa left her home in Casale Monferrato as the bride of Federico Gonzaga of Mantua. Nine years later, on 28 June 1540, Federico died, leaving Margherita a widow with ¿ve children, the eldest of whom, Francesco, heir to the title of Duke of Mantua, was only seven. Aretino’s life of St Catherine, which he sent to Margherita in January of 1541, was intended to console her as she carried out the dif¿cult duties of widowhood. Until Francesco Gonzaga came of age, the ducal family, Mantua, and the newly annexed state of Monferrato, would be governed by a co-regency, consisting of Margherita and her brothers-in-law – the powerful and popular Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Ferrante Gonzaga, Lord of Guastalla, whose career as a condottiere in service to Charles V in Italy was eventually rewarded with a post as Governor of Milan. The co-regency positioned Mantua favourably between Church and emperor, and Margherita’s primary role was to serve as the public face of Gonzaga rule in Monferrato, which continued to resist the Mantuan alliance. Privately, during the years of her widowhood, Margherita turned to her sisters-in-law, Suor Paola at Corpus Domini and Suor Ippolita at San Vincenzo, for solace and support. She sought refuge at their convents, asked for their prayers and, while acting as coregent, contemplated her own eventual retirement into pious widowhood. In 1545, the humanist Giuseppe Betussi published an expanded version of Boccaccio’s Donne Illustri to which he added the biographies of several contemporary Gonzaga women, including the reigning Duchess, Margherita Paleologa. He used her biography to bolster her popular reputation, praising her political acumen and acknowledging how successfully her actions served

1 ASM, AG, b.3001, libro 4, f.13r, Coppialettere di Margherita Paleologa, 3 January 1541, Margherita Paleologo in Mantua to Pietro Aretino in Venice.

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to preserve the Gonzaga state.2 Martha Sue Ahrendt has, in fact, characterized Margherita’s widowhood as a period of “patronal stewardship,” during which her most important function in Mantua was the curation of the Gonzaga assets rather than the exercise of her own political will or her personal patronage power.3 However, as we shall see, Margherita did manage to use her widowhood as an opportunity to nurture and stabilize Gonzaga power, while at the same time establishing some independence in the arena of pious patronage. Her natural inclination toward reserve and piety were assets to Cardinal Ercole, whose status as papal legate to the Council of Trent placed him among the leading ¿gures of Catholic Reform. Under his tutelage, Margherita molded herself into an appropriately pious widow – a suitable public consort for the Mantuan state – by nurturing her private inclination to devotion and cultivating her public reputation for piety. Through speci¿c acts of cultural patronage, he encouraged her to model herself after the princess, poet, pious widow and Reformer, Vittoria Colonna, Duchess of Pescara, whom Cardinal Ercole knew through their mutual participation in Reform circles in Rome. This chapter investigates the inÀuence of Colonna’s reputation on Margherita’s self-fashioning, and explores some of the ways that women of Margherita’s generation reinvented public piety in the face of Catholic Reform. Marriage and Widowhood In May of 1539, Margherita Paleologa wrote to her sisters-in-law, Suor Ippolita at San Vincenzo and Suor Paola at the Monastery of Corpus Domini in Mantua, to apologize for the fact that recent preoccupations had prevented her from writing to them on a more regular basis (Appendix 3).4 These preoccupations must certainly have been related to the recent death of Isabella d’Este on February 13, and the many new duties that Margherita had subsequently assumed as the new “¿rst lady” 2 Giuseppe Betussi, Additione al libro delle donne illustri (1545); Paleologa’s biography in this work is published as an Appendix to Stephen Kolsky, “Donne Gonzaghesche nella Additione al libro delle donne illustri di Giuseppe Betussi (1545),” Civiltà Mantovana 107:33 (November 1998): 71–88. At the Beinecke Library at Yale University, I also consulted Giuseppe Betussi, Libro delle donne illustri, tradotto per Messer Giuseppe Betussi, con una additione fatta dal medisimo delle donne famose dal WHSRVLF GL0*LRYDQQL¿QRjLLJLRUQLQRVWUL>DQG@DOFXQHDOWHUVWDWHSHULQDQ]LFRQOD YLWDGHO%RFFDFFLR>DQG@ODWDYRODGLWXWWLO¶KLVWRULH>DQG@FRVHSULQFLSDOLFKHQHOO¶RSUDVL contengono. Venice, n.p., 1558. 3 Martha Sue Ahrendt, “The Cultural Legacy and Patronal Stewardship of Margherita Paleologa (1510–1566), Duchess of Mantua and Marchesa of Monferrat,” PhD diss., Washington University, 2002. 4 The letters are ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 3, no.239, to Suor Ippolita from Casale, 23 May 1539 and b.3001, lib.3, no. 240, the same to Suor Paola; for an index of Paleologa’s letters see &RUULVSRQGHQ]D*RQ]DJKHVFD&RSLDOHWWHUHGL03DOHRORJD, ed. Maria Luisa Aldegheri with the collaboration of Sonia Gialdi (Mantua: Archivio di Stato, 1994).

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of the court. Although Margherita had been Duchess of Mantua since 1531, at home and abroad she had largely continued to be overshadowed by Isabella’s presence. Even after her death, Isabella continued to exert power over Margherita through the terms of her will, in which she ordered that Margherita serve as caretaker of the precious and hard-won collections of art and antiquities displayed in her beloved studiolo and Grotta. Isabella had de¿ned her personal identity through these possessions, and Margherita’s stewardship would guarantee that these objects, and Isabella’s role in accumulating them, would become the primary cultural legacy of the Gonzaga court.5 And although Isabella also left Margherita her country palace at Porto for private use, she decreed that this, too, would become a court legacy, which would pass to succeeding generations of Mantuan duchesses. In effect, Margherita was to act as the curator of Isabella’s legacy. On 28 June 1540, while Margherita was still settling into her new role, Federico II Gonzaga suddenly died.6 Since the heir apparent, Francesco III, was only seven, until he reached the age of majority Margherita would be co-regent of Mantua in the company of her brothers-in-law, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Ferrante Gonzaga, Lord of Guastalla. This arrangement lasted until 1550, when Francesco was 16, but his accidental death the following year once again left the state in the care of the co-regency, a situation that would persist until 1556, when Guglielmo Gonzaga was ¿nally able to assume his duties as duke of Mantua.7 The Monferrato public, however, had never been advocates of the Gonzaga union, and although they remained loyal to Margherita because of her Paleologa legacy and her status as a Byzantine princess, they resisted Guglielmo’s attempts to exert any kind of authority. The reasons for Monferrato’s continual resistance to Gonzaga rule are explained, to some extent, by the labyrinthine circumstances that led to the Gonzaga–Paleologa alliance. The 1531 marriage between Federico and Margherita Paleologa had been largely engineered by the formidable Anna d’Alençon, Marchesa of Monferrato, and by Isabella d’Este.8 The union marked the culmination of a seemingly endless 5

Ahrendt uses the term “stewardship,” “Cultural Legacy and Patronal Stewardship of Margherita Paleologa.” 6 Like his father, Federico suffered from syphilis; the subject of syphilis at the Mantuan court is dealt with, to some extent, by Alessandro Luzio and Roldolfo Renier in “Contributo alla storia del mal francese,” Giornale storici della Letteratura Italiana, V (1885): 408–32. 7 Only four months before his death, Francesco III had married Catherine of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I. 8 For the protracted negotiations over the marriage see Stefano Davari, “Federico Gonzaga e la famiglia Paleologa di Monferrato,” Giornale Linguistico (1890): 419–69 and (1891): 40–67, 81–109 and Deanna Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco: Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua,” $UWDQG&XOWXUHLQ5HQDLVVDQFH0DQWXD5HQDLVVDQFH6WXGLHV16:3 (2002): 366–80. For a re-examination of the marriage from Margherita’s point of view, see my forthcoming essay, “The Compromise Bride: The Marriage of Federico II Gonzaga and Margherita Paleologa of Monferrato,” in Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Jacqueline

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series of bizarre negotiations that had taken place over many years between the courts of Monferrato and Mantua. These began in 1517 when, while residing at the French court in Milan, Federico II Gonzaga traveled to Monferrato to meet the six year-old princess Maria Paleologa. The hope was that the visit would result in some sort of marriage arrangement between the two states. Federico, however, took matters further by participating in a “marriage” ceremony which, even by Renaissance standards, was somewhat peculiar, given the tender age of the “bride”. According to Davari and Shemek, the ceremony that took place in Monferrato observed “both civil and ecclesiastical norms;” the couple exchanged vows in front of witnesses, the bride received a ring, and the arrangement was evidently sealed with a kiss.9 But there is some question as to whether the marriage was actually a marriage or simply a preliminary contract for future marriage. As Brundage reports, in Italy during the late medieval period, the exchange of vows, and even the giving of the ring to the bride to indicate her status as a sponsa, were all acts of betrothal, but the crucial act of sexual intercourse was required to consummate the marriage. Shortly after Federico’s ceremony in Monferrato in 1517, Protestant and Catholic Reformers alike placed the whole notion of marriage under new scrutiny. Protestants questioned the status of marriage as a sacrament, and the legality of the mere act of consent, emphasizing the necessity for parental consent. In response, the ¿nal edicts of the Council of Trent actually reiterated that under canon law, the free exchange of consent between the parties did constitute marriage.10 Nevertheless, betrothal vows did constitute a legal obligation between the parties which could only be broken – and often was – when it was later demonstrated that one or the other had since secretly married someone else.11 In this case, the union was doubly questionable because canon law usually stipulated that boys had to be 14 and girls at least 12 for any such contract to be legal; Maria was only six.12 It was agreed that the marriage would be ¿nalized with the necessary physical consummation in 1524, when Maria would be delivered to Mantua at the age of 15. This left seven years for Federico to further contemplate the pros and cons of the Paleologue arrangement. His time in Rome, and later in the company of Francis I, fed Federico’s aspirations to princely status and the Paleologue union promised Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (University of Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, forthcoming). 9 Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco,” 374. For an examination of the instability of the verbal troth, which asserted “the enduring power of words over people and things,” see T.G.A. Nelson, “Doing Things with Words. Another Look at Marriage Rites in Renaissance Drama and Fiction,” 6WXGLHV LQ 3KLORORJ\ 95:4 (1998): 351–73, especially 373. On the question of the ceremonies of marriage see also Deborah L. Krohn, “What Constituted Marriage in the Italian Renaissance?” in $UWDQG/RYHLQ5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\, 11–13. 10 Ibid., 563. 11 James A. Brundage, /DZ 6H[ DQG &KULVWLDQ 6RFLHW\ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 497; for clandestine marriages as a means to dissolve unwanted betrothals, 501–2. 12 Ibid., 433.

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him an opportunity to elevate the status of the Gonzaga through the reÀected glory of Byzantine imperial power. Furthermore, Davari reports that by 1518, Maria’s father had been prepared to insure that she would inherit the state of Monferrato, but he died before he could formalize these arrangements. Accordingly, Maria’s brother, Bonifacio VI, inherited his father’s title, with his mother acting as regent until he could reach the age of majority.13 Almost immediately after his ceremony with Maria, Federico could see Monferrato slipping from his grasp, and he began contemplating the legal loopholes that might free him from his promised marriage to Maria Paleologa. When Francesco II Gonzaga died in 1519, Federico turned his attention to his new duties as Marquis of Mantua, and to a new romantic liaison, this time with Isabella Boschetti, who was the wife of Giovanni Calvisano of Mantua. Despite the fact that Isabella was married, their affair was notoriously public. In a history of Mantuan imprese the historian Paolo Giovio wrote pityingly that Isabella d’Este was most unfortunate to have a son whose “innamorata” walked haughtily around Mantua accompanied by a crowd of admirers.14 By 1524, Maria Paleologue was still in Monferrato, presumably because of Federico’s public dalliance with Boschetti. Whether or not the luxurious rooms of the Palazzo del Te, transformed by Giulio Romano into Federico’s private pleasure palace and featuring lascivious frescoes of the loves of the gods centred on the wedding celebrations between Venus and Mars, were really intended to mirror the liaison between Federico and Boschetti remains somewhat problematic.15 Nevertheless, the images speak to Federico’s hedonistic side, which was quite well known at court, particularly to Giulio Romano and to the poet Pietro Aretino. Both men had been expelled from Rome with Giulio due to their collaboration on the pornographic prints and verses of the sex manual I Modi, and both took refuge in Mantua, where they fed Federico’s appetites.16 Guido Rebecchini cites a letter that Aretino wrote to Federico from Venice in 1527, in which he offered to send the prince the statue of a Venus made by Jacopo Sansovino, “so true and alive that she ¿lls with lust whoever looks at her.”17 13

All from the summary by Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco.” Shemek indicates Giovio’s reference to the affair, citing his Imprese via Luzio, “Aretino’s Marescalco,” 373; the whole passage is found in Paolo Giovio, Delle imprese (Lyon: Giulio Roviglio, 1559), 123–5. 15 Verheyen supported this view in his 3DOD]]RGHO7HLQ0DQWXD,PDJHVRI/RYHDQG Politics (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977); the premise is questioned by Charles Davis, review of Verheyen in the -RXUQDORIWKH6RFLHW\RI$UFKLWHFWXUDO+LVWRULDQV 38:1 (March 1979), 56–8. 16 Cartwright rather archly claims that Federico’s hedonistic tastes had developed in the Roman milieu, where he had been exposed to “orgies of Cardinals and monkish buffoons,”,VDEHOODG¶(VWH0DUFKLRQHVVRI0DQWXD±$6WXG\RIWKH5HQDLVVDQFH (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1905), 2:80. 17 Guido Rebecchini, “Exchanges of Works of Art at the Court of Federico II Gonzaga With an Appendix on Flemish Art,” 5HQDLVVDQFH6WXGLHV 16:3 (September 2002): 381–91, at 383. 14

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By the middle of the decade Federico was a young man with considerable responsibility at home and anxious for political advancement beyond Mantua. Accordingly, he declared his political loyalties in the ongoing conÀict between France and the emperor that had destabilized the Italian peninsula by siding with Charles V. Charles was extremely receptive to Federico’s support, particularly leading up to and during the imperial Sack of Rome. Seeing greater possibilities for himself beyond the marriage to Monferrato, Federico appealed to Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage to Maria, which had not been consummated. In 1529, the pope, rendered helpless by the sack, granted Federico’s petition for annulment. Given a new lease on his ambition, Federico began to consider other marriage candidates, proposed to him both by the French, who still hoped to sway him against Charles, and by the emperor. In recognition of the importance of Federico’s endorsement of imperial power in Italy, Charles V made him Duke of Mantua and offered him the imperial princess, Giulia of Aragon, daughter of Frederick IV, the deposed King of Naples. Since Giulia was already 38, Charles further agreed that, should she be unable to produce a Gonzaga heir, he would exercise his power of juridical recognition as emperor to legitimize the son that Federico already had with Isabella Boschetti.18 These arrangements set the stage for the emperor’s visit to Mantua in March of 1530, during which Charles was entertained by the vistas, views and the dazzling display of the wedding banquet of &XSLGDQG3V\FKH in the luxurious accommodation offered to him at the Palazzo del Te. However, in June of 1530, Federico’s circumstances suddenly changed. Bonifacio VI Paleologo, heir to the duchy of Monferrato, was accidentally killed in a hunting accident. Monferrato passed to Bonifacio’s uncle Gian Giorgio Paleologo who, without heirs and on the brink of death from a fatal disease, declared that Monferrato be designated a feudo femminino, allowing rulership to pass to the eldest female descendant of the family, Maria Paleologa. Federico now saw a clear opportunity to annex Monferrato successfully to Mantua, and became anxious to reassert the legality of his betrothal to Maria. He approached the pope again, this time asking him to reverse the earlier annulment. Clement, undoubtedly exhausted by Federico’s constant changes of mind, quietly acquiesced to the demand. In the meantime, of course, Federico had also to reverse his promise to marry Giulia of Aragon, an offense that Charles V seems to have taken rather personally, since in 1533 the matter would again become a matter of some contention. Unfortunately, in the midst of preparing for her triumphant departure to Mantua, Maria Paleologa also promptly died, leaving her younger sister, Margherita Paleologa, heir to the state of Monferrato and the sudden object of much marital competition in Italy. At this point, Anna of Alençon, regent of Monferrato since her husband’s death in 1518, entered into the fray by advocating that Margherita marry Federico. Her endorsement of Federico at this point in the proceedings seems rather 18

Robert Oresko and David Parrot, “The Sovereignty of Monferrato and the Citadel of Casale as European Problems in the Early Modern Period,” in 6WHIDQR*XD]]RH&DVDOH WUD&LQTXHH6HLFHQWRedited by Daniela Ferrari (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 11–86, at 17.

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surprising, given his failure to carry through with his original promise to Maria, but Federico evidently strong-armed Anna by implicating her in an intricate plot (probably largely invented) to poison his mistress, Isabella Boschetti.19 Federico was also being pushed towards marriage by his own mother, who was especially anxious to prevent Alessandro – Federico’s illegitimate son with Boschetti – from being recognized as a legal heir. Isabella wanted the Gonzaga patrimony to pass to legitimate offspring.20 She saw marriage to the 20 year-old Margherita Paleologa as the most immediate and advantageous strategy for solving the problem of the Gonzaga inheritance. Supported by Isabella d’Este, negotiations between Anna d’Alençon and Federico began in earnest. That Federico’s involvement with Boschetti continued to be a major impediment to sealing the deal is revealed in an inventory of the legal documents that Margherita Paleologa left behind when she died in 1566. Along with the concession granted by the pope for her marriage to Federico, the papers also include a declaration made by Federico, dated April 1531, stating that he had no legal marriage contract with anyone else, and a further declaration, signed by Isabella Boschetti, that she had not legally married anyone after the death of her own husband, Francesco Gonzaga of Calvisano.21 Calvisano had already been neatly disposed of as part of the poisoning plot against Boschetti. The denials of any clandestine marriage on the part of either party were likely demanded by Anna d’Alençon and Isabella d’Este. The wedding between Federico and Margherita ¿nally took place in Monferrato and the new duchess traveled to Mantua. Before her arrival, Giulio Romano had renovated Isabella’s former suite in the castle of San Giorgio, expanding it through the addition of the so-called “SDOD]]LQD3DOHRORJD.” This small independent, threestorey structure was added onto the tower of San Nicolò – the exact location in which Isabella d’Este had established her ¿rst studiolo and Grotta shortly after her own arrival as a Mantuan bride.22 To receive her daughter-in-law, Isabella helped to 19 Davari, “Federico Gonzaga,” 432–3, also summarized by Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco,” 374. 20 Shemek, “Aretino’s Marescalco,” 375, says that Isabella managed to nullify the agreement to legitimize Alessandro Gonzaga, and cites Alessandro Luzio, “Isabella d’Este e il sacco di Roma,” $UFKLYLR6WRULFR/RPEDUGR X (1908): 5–107 and 361–425, at 105. In fact, Isabella’s continued preoccupation with Alessandro’s status is expressed in the terms of her will of 1539, in which she took great care to specify that any inheritance would pass only to Federico’s legitimate and natural ¿rst-born son. 21 ASM, Magistrato Camerale, BBII, 1558–1704, among the list of documents in Casale Monferrato, 8 February 1567: “8QD SDWHQWH GHOO¶(FFPR 6U 'XFD )HGHULFR GHO SULPR G¶$SULOH  SHU OD TXDOH GLFKDUD QRQ KDYHU FRQWUDWWR PDWULPRQLR DOFXQR,” followed by “8Q¶DOWUDIHGHIDWWDSHUOD6UD,VDEHOOD%RVFKHWWLSHU" LQFDUWDSHFRULQDGL QRQKDYHUFRQWUDWWRPDWULPRQLRGRSRPRUWHGH0[)UDQFHVFR*RQ]DJDGD&DOYLVDQR.” 22 The structure was destroyed in 1899 when Mantuan authorities tore it down in order to restore the original pro¿le of the medieval castle of San Giorgio. For a reconstruction of the original sequence of rooms, see C. Cottafavi, “R. Palazzo Ducale di Mantova. I gabinetti della ‘Paleologa’,” %ROOHWLQRG¶$UWH Anno IX, Serie I, Fasc. VI (December 1929):

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choose the paintings that decorated Margherita’s private camerino: a 6W-HURPH by Titian, a 6DLQW&DWKHULQH by Giulio Romano and Mantegna’s famous )RUHVKRUWHQHG Christ (‘Cristo in scurto’), among other works.23 In contrast to this array of pious works, the larger and presumably more public Camera delle Arme, a reception room at the heart of the suite, was hung with portraits, among them Titian’s portrait of Federico II and Andrea del Sarto’s copy of Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X.24 Giulio also commemorated Margherita’s arrival in Mantua by painting her portrait, which is now in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (Illustration 17).25 Here, Margherita is depicted three-quarter length, seated and with her hands resting on the arms of her chair, all aspects of decorum associated with state portraiture of women.26 The rich costume, headdress and jewels she wears symbolize the liberality of the magni¿cent, noble sitter. In fact, aspects of Margherita’s marvellous costume signal her identi¿cation with Isabella d’Este. She wears a black velvet gown made of an elaborate pattern of knots, the “vinci” pattern, which was designed for Isabella by the humanist Niccolò di Correggio. Her ornate slashed sleeves are abundantly embroidered in white and gold thread, and she also wears a turban (or “]D]DUD”’) of a type popularized by Isabella. Most signi¿cantly, Margherita wears a lapis rosary identical to the description of a rosary that Federico gave her as a wedding present.27 In her splendid costume, Paleologa is obviously being celebrated as the ¿rst lady of the court, and her choice of costume would certainly have been a suitable way to honor her predecessor, Isabella d’Este.

276–85; see also the summary by Amedeo Belluzzi, “La Palazzina di Margherita nel castello di Mantova,” in *LXOLR 5RPDQR 6DJJL, 85–7 and E. H. Gombrich, “‘That rare Italian Master…,’ Giulio Romano, Court Architect, Painter and Impresario,” in 6SOHQGRXUV RI WKH *RQ]DJD, ed. David Chambers and Jane Martineau (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981), 76–85, especially 79–80 and plates 82–5. The spaces are analyzed in detail by Ahrendt, “Cultural Legacy and Patronal Stewardship,” 58–125. 23 The Mantegna painting referred to as the &ULVWRLQ6FXUWR is the Dead Christ, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, and is discussed in the context of the preparations made for Paleologa’s arrival in 6SOHQGRXUVRIWKH*RQ]DJD, cat. 33,123. 24 Cartwright, ,VDEHOODG¶(VWH0DUFKLRQHVVRI0DQWXD, II:336–48. 25 Giulio Romano, 3RUWUDLW RI D /DG\ (traditionally called Isabella d’Este), London, Hampton Court, most recently identi¿ed as Margherita in 7KH $UW RI ,WDO\ LQ WKH 5R\DO Collections: Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Lucy Whitaker and Martin Clayton (London: Royal Collection, 2007), cat. 38, 136–8. See also 6SOHQGRXUVRIWKH*RQ]DJD, cat. 110, 160–2. 26 For notions about the representation of female political power in Renaissance portraits see Marvin Lunenfeld, “The Royal Image: Symbol and Paradigm in Portraits of Early Modern Female Sovereigns and Regents,” *D]HWWHGHV%HDX[$UWV 98 (April 1981): 157–62 and Joanna Woodall, “An Exemplary Consort: Antonis Mor’s Portrait of Mary Tudor,” Art +LVWRU\ 14:2 (June 1991): 192–224. For reÀections on the importance of dress, Mary Rogers, “The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting,” 5HQDLVVDQFH6WXGLHV2:1 (1988): 47–88. 27 The jewel is identi¿ed in 6SOHQGRXUVRIWKH*RQ]DJD, 161.

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Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologa, c.1531, oil on panel, Royal Collection, Windsor, RCIN 405777. The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Through the secondary ¿gures included in the background, Giulio also emphasizes Margherita’s place in the female dynasty of Mantua. Over her left shoulder, a group of women enter a separate, contiguous room through a doorway hung with a curtain being held aside by an attendant. An ornamental vase is perched

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on the classical cornice that crowns this doorway, offering a brief glimpse of the kind of luxurious, decorated interiors characteristic of Isabella’s suite in the palace. In fact, the sequence of spaces visible in the portrait is evocative both of Isabella’s Grotta and adjacent studiolo, and of the warren of the decorated camerini created by Giulio Romano in Margherita’s SDOD]]LQD. Of the visiting trio of women in the background, two have tentatively been identi¿ed as Isabella d’Este, accompanied by her close friend Margherita Cantelma, formerly the Duchess of Sora, pictured here in the habit of a nun because she had, by this time, retired to religious life and turned her attention to founding her monastery in Mantua.28 The inclusion of these women in the background emphasizes female dynasty in Mantua and also clearly communicates the enormous cultural expectations placed on Margherita as the successor to Isabella d’Este. Although by 1533 Margherita was ¿rmly ensconced as Duchess of Mantua, a ¿nal twist in the long marriage plot occurred in April of 1533, when Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, helped to arrange a marriage between the rejected Giulia of Aragon and Margherita’s ailing uncle, Gian Giorgio Paleologo. The arrangement was evidently initiated by Charles V, who agreed that should the union not produce heirs, Monferrato would ¿nally pass to Federico II.29 The emperor had evidently never forgiven Federico for breaking his engagement to Giulia. However, given Gian Giorgio’s dire state of health (in fact, he died just eight days after the wedding) and the age of the bride, an heir was frankly impossible. At this point, Giulia’s age made her rather more of a burden than an asset in the imperial marriage game, and it is entirely possible Charles also hoped that the marriage would guarantee Giulia ¿nancial support from the Paleologo family. In fact, an index of the documents that Margherita left after her death includes notices of payments made to Giulia of Aragon.30 These expectations were expressed in Isabella’s last will and testament of 1535. While she made Federico II her universal heir, she stipulated that the Duchess Margherita would be the de-facto custodian of the collections and paintings in the studiolo and antiquities cabinet housed “nel loco chiamato la Grotta posto in la Corte Vecchia.”31 Shortly after Federico’s marriage, these treasure rooms had been moved from their original location in the small torretta of San Giorgio to a 28

This identi¿cation is made by Jane Martineau in 6SOHQGRXUVRIWKH*RQ]DJD, cat. 110, 161–2. 29 Oresko and Parrot in 6WHIDQR*XD]]R, 19. 30 ASM, Magistrato Camerale BBII, 1558–1704, 8 February 1567, contains an undated note (probably referring to a payment date in the 1540s, as per the dating of other documents on the sheet) which reads: “8QDFRSLDGLPDQGDWLGLGDQDULSDJDWLDOO¶,OOPD 6UD'RQQD*LXOLDGL$UDJRQDSHUOLVFXWL[LLLPHWLQVLHPHDOWULGDQDULHWDUJHQWLPDQGDWL D&DVDOHSHUODVRPPDGHVFXWLLQFRSLD” 31 “Le quale cose della Grotta vole che cusì in vita del soprascriptio su universal +HUHGHFRPRGRSRLODPRUWHGDO,OOPD6LJQUD'XFHVVDGH0DQWXDVXSUDVFULSWDOHKDEEL a godere, et tenere in custodia et governo per suo diletto…”; the will is transcribed in my Appendix I.

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ground-Àoor suite in the wing of the palace known as the Corte Vecchia. Given that Paleologa’s own interests lay primarily in devotional works, it is unlikely that she would have taken the same pleasure in these collections that Isabella did, but she did move to the Corte Vecchia suite after Federico’s death, and documentary evidence demonstrates that she took her caretaking duties very seriously. For example, in a letter of 1541 she apologized for leaving Mantua with the key to the Grotta, an oversight that had prevented an important guest from being able to visit these rooms, which were regularly shown off to important court visitors.32 Of course, Isabella was shrewd enough to know that by making Paleologa custodian of the collections, she was also preventing their appropriation, removal or dispersal by her surviving son or grandsons. But these more prosaic motivations were balanced by Isabella’s obvious desire to single out the duchess as a worthy successor to her cultural legacy, and to recognize the cultural responsibilities of the role of Duchess of Mantua in general. She also conferred upon Margherita ownership of her private country villa at Porto which, according to the terms of the bequest, was to become the property of each successive Duchess of Mantua.33 During the nine years of her marriage, Margherita probably had little time to think about Isabella’s legacy, or to indulge in many cultural diversions of her own. In 1533 she gave birth to her ¿rst son, Francesco, quickly followed by their only daughter, Isabella, and then by Guglielmo, Ludovico, and ¿nally Federico. The death of Federico II in 1540 initiated the long years of co-regency. Because Ferrante’s military duties kept him away from Mantua, Cardinal Ercole became de-facto governor of the state. In this position, he actively nurtured Paleologa’s natural inclination towards devotional imagery and encouraged her public 32

Paleologa ’s letter regarding the key to the Grotta, written to Carlo Nuvoloni, Captain of the Guard at Mantua, 12 October 1541, is found in Giulio Romano. Repertorio di fonti documentarie, 2 vols, ed. Daniele Ferrari (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, Uf¿cio Centrale per i Beni Archivisti, 1992), II:943. Other letters Paleologa wrote to Nuvoloni regarding the possible identity of this visitor to Mantua have been overlooked, including ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, dated between 25 October and 12 November, “«'LTXDQWRFLKDYHWHVFULWWRGHOODYHQXWDGHOO¶,OOXVWULVVLPR$VFDQLRYLFRPHQGLDPR«” A second is ASM, AG, b.3001, libro 4, no.218, f.85v, dated 12 November 1541, to Nuvoloni: “1HSLDFHFK¶HO6$VFDQLRVLDULPDVWREHQVDWLVIDWWRGHOOD*URWWDHWFRVLSHQVDPRIDUDGLO resto.” I am tempted to identify this visitor as Ascanio Colonna, the brother of Vittoria Colonna, who was Àeeing Paul III at this time, and who was corresponding with Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, see F. Petrucci, “Colonna, Ascanio,” DBI, 27:271–5. 33 For Isabella d’Este’s considerable additions to the palace at Porto, see Clifford M. Brown and Anna Maria Lorenzoni, “‘Al suo amenissimo Palazzo di Porto,’ Biagio Rossetti and Isabella d’Este,” $WWLH0HPRULHGHOO¶$FFDGHPLD1D]LRQDOH9LUJLOLDQD 58 (1990): 33– 41. Paleologa left both “LOSDOD]]RGL6DQ=RU]R,” and “LOSDOD]]RHWJLDUGLQLGL3RUWRFRQOH SRVVHVVLRQLYLFLQHHWFRQRPQLHWTXDOXQTXHPLJOLRUDPHQWLHWHGL¿FLMIDWHJOLSHUHVVD6LJQRUD 7HVWDWULFHFROPHGHPDREOLJRFKHIXGDOOSUHGLFWD,OOPD6LJQUD0DUFKHVDODVFLDWRSHU suo testamento,” to her son Guglielmo’s wife, Eleanora of Austria. The phrasing regarding the palace at Porto indicates that Paleologa had continued to make improvements there. See the transcription of her will, Appendix I.

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self-fashioning as devoted and devout widow, roles that complemented his own efforts to promote the cause of Catholic Reform. The success of his efforts was celebrated by Margherita’s biographer Giuseppe Betussi, who lauded her modest and almost saintly character, and suggested that her political acumen was greatly enhanced by her modesty and piety: She does not care to be lauded for her good works, but desires to work good of a kind that will not be displeasing to God in this life and might not be of harm in the next. These are some of the virtues that earn an eternal crown for the Magnanimous Margherita, and that are a greater ornament than the diadems and royal crowns of many others, for whom ambition is their mother, vices their father and brothers, sensuality their mirror and vanity their exemplar.34

Pious Widowhood In the early years of her widowhood in Mantua, under the weight of the co-regency that required her constant attention to the public responsibilities of Church and state and to the private governance of her children, Paleologa sought personal consolation from her sisters-in-law, Suor Ippolita at San Vincenzo and Suor Paola at Corpus Domini. On 19 October 1541, she wrote to each of them about a pilgrimage she had recently undertaken, with her mother Anna of Alençon, to the famous shrine of the Madonna in Crea, located in the mountains to the north of Casale Monferrato (Appendix III).35 The shrine was founded when Saint Eusebius returned from a crusade in Jerusalem in the fourth century, bringing with him a statue of the Virgin that he erected at Crea. According to local chroniclers, in the 34

“1RQVLFXUDG¶HVVHUHORGDWDGHOOHEXRQHRSUHVXHPDGHVLGHUDEHQHGLRSUDUHGL VRUWHFK¶D,GGLRQRQVSLDFFLDQRHDOSURVVLPRQRQVLDQRGLGDQQR4XHVWHVRQRSDUWHGLTXHOOH virtù che ordiscono eternal corona alla magnanima Margherita e che lei orneranno più che QRQIDUDQQRLGLDGHPLHOHFRURQHUHDOLPROWHDOWUHDOOHTXDOLO¶DPEL]LRQHqPDGUHLYL]LL padre e fratelli, la lussuria specchio e la vanità essempio,” Giuseppe Betussi on Margherita in his Additione al libro delle donne illustri (1545), Kolsky, “Donne Gonzaghesche,” 88. 35 ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, no.200, f.64r, 18 October 1541, Paleologa from Pontestura to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, see my Appendix III for the complete transcription: “Ill.mo DQGHWF'DO0FR=DIIDUGRFKHSDUWLKLHULGD&DVDOH9RVWUD,OOXVWULVVLPD6LJQRULDKRUD LQWHVRGHOO¶DQGDWDFKH0DGDPD,OOXVWULVVLPDPLD6LJQRUDHW0DGUHHWLRHUDPRSHUIDUDOOD FKLHVDGL1RVWUD6LJQRUDOD0DGRQQDLQ&UHDSHUVRGLVIDUHDOXQYRWRJLjDOTXDQWRDQQL fatto. Così hieri sera se ne venissemo qua al Pontestura ove siamo state la notte poi questa PDWWLQDSHUWHPSRFLVLDPRLQFDPLQDWHHWFRQGXFWHFLLQFDUHWWD¿QDOSLH>GH@GHOODFROLQD VXTXDOHqLOOXRJRGRYHSHUHVVHUODPRQWDWDXQSRFRDVSHUDSHUODFDUHWWDPRQWDVVLPR LQOHWLFD(OOXRJKRqVXODFRVWDGHOODFROLQDDVVDLDOWDHWYLqXQDEHOODFKLHVDFRQVHJQL GLPROWLPLUDFROLIDWWLLYLSHUOD0DGRQDGLTXDOHYLqXQDVWDWXDFRO¿JOLRORLPEUD]]RFKH GLFRQRHVVHUGLPDQRGL6DQ/XFD(XI¿FLDWLSHUOLFDQRQLFLUHJXODULFKHYLKDQQRDVVDLEHO PRQHVWRULRHWGLOuVLYHGHJUDQSDUWHGHOSDHVHHWFDVWHOOLGLTXDQWRVWDWRHWDQFRG¶DOWULq discosto di qua quarto miglia et poco più ve sono di qua a Casale satisfatto al voto et doppo disenar udito el vespro se ne siamo ritornate ad allogiar qua.”

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thirteenth century, Guglielmo VIII Paleologa (1253–1290) expanded the existing structure and by the sixteenth century, the sacro monte at Crea was an enormously popular pilgrimage site, drawing visitors from all over Europe. In the 1570s, the humanist Stefano Guazzo – for a time a Gonzaga secretary in Casale – reported that he was planning a pilgrimage to Crea in thanks for his young daughter’s recent recovery from a serious illness.36 In 1590, at the height of the CounterReformation, the site was again signi¿cantly expanded when rosary chapels marking the stages of Christ’s Passion were erected along the pilgrimage route.37 When Margherita Paleologa undertook her journey in October of 1541, reaching the chapel of the sacred Madonna required a long and arduous ascent through dif¿cult terrain. Writing to Cardinal Ercole after her return to Pontestura, a town at the foot of the sacred mountain, she describes how their party ascended ¿rst by carriage and then on foot, before arriving at the shrine, at that time maintained by the Augustinian Canons. At the shrine of Saint Eusebius, Margherita and her mother prayed to the beautiful statue of the Virgin and Child. The church, she wrote, was full of “signs of the many miracles” performed by the Madonna, and the monastery at the top of the mountain afforded beautiful views of the castles dotting the countryside. It is evident from the letter that Margherita was stirred by the journey, the landscape and the meditative contemplation evoked by the ancient image of the Virgin in this remote and sacred place. Shortly after returning to Casale from her Crea pilgrimage, Margherita wrote to her sister-in-law Suor Paola in Mantua and thanked her for allowing the young prince Guglielmo to visit her at the convent of Corpus Domini during his mother’s pilgrimage. She also expressed her pleasure at the progress being made by the new novitiates at Corpus Domini and assured Suor Paola that she would take care of the payment for an unidenti¿ed quadro – probably a work commissioned for the monastery before her departure for Crea (Appendix III).38 The letter demonstrates that Margherita was on intimate terms with activities inside the convent and con¿rms that Corpus Domini was not under strict rules of enclosure in the early 1540s, since the duchess and her children were evidently frequent visitors. By 1550, however, these unregulated visits had become of such concern to Suor 36

Stefano Guazzo, /HWWHUH GHO 6LJQRU 6WHIDQR *XD]]R *HQWLOKXRPR GL &DVDOH GL Monferrato (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1590), 259. 37 For Crea see Rudolf Wittkower, “‘Sacri Monti’ in the Italian Alps,” in Idea and ,PDJH6WXGLHVLQWKH,WDOLDQ5HQDLVVDQFH (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 175–83, who mentions Crea at 182–3. For the expansion of the complex in the late sixteenth century, Guido Genile, “Evocazione topogra¿ca, composizione di luogo e tipologia dei sacri monti,” also in 6DFUL0RQWL, 89–110, at 97; also Pier Giorgio Longo, “Il santo sepolcro di Varallo e il sistema dei santuari prealpini tra Piemonte e Lombardia tra XV e XVI secolo,” in 6DFUL0RQWL'LYR]LRQHDUWHHFXOWXUDGHOOD&RQWURULIRUPD, edited by Luciano Vaccaro and Francesco Riccardi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1992), 371–8, at 372 and n.3, 377. In 2003 the Sacro Monte at Crea was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. 38 ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, n. 232, f.72r, 25 October 1541, Margherita Paleologa in Casale to “Suor Paola.”

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Angelica, the abbess at Corpus Domini, that she wrote to Cardinal Ercole seeking a papal dispensation to demand that any visitors be admitted only if they were accompanied by a regular companion known to the convent, and suggested that even such accompanied visits be more severely regulated.39 Margherita’s affective attachment to both nuns was often expressed in terms of a nostalgia linked to particular places and events from the past. In September of 1555, while staying at the Gonzaga country retreat at Goito, accompanied by her mother and her son Guglielmo, Margherita wrote to both Suor Paola and to Suor Ippolita, reminding them about the delights offered by Goito and nearby Cavriana, Gonzaga retreats near Lake Garda where the sisters had themselves spent many happy childhood hours. Along with her letters, she sent each of them a basket of fresh fruit which she hoped would allow them to share in the pleasurable memories associated with these beautiful places (Appendix III).40 Margherita’s dedication to her “sisters” was also practical. In her last will and testament, drawn up in 1563 (see Appendix I), she made provisions for them and for their respective monasteries. In addition to leaving annual investitures to all of the monasteries of the mendicant orders in Mantua, she singled out the nuns of San Vincenzo, Santa Paola and those in the Augustinian Convent of the Annunziata in San Giorgio, all of which were home to several Gonzaga women.41 In terms of personal tributes, she left Suor Ippolita at San Vincenzo an annual income of 50 ducats for her personal care and provided a continuance of that amount for the monastery itself after Ippolita’s death.42 She also left an annual amount in grain to Suor Paola and to the nuns of Corpus Domini, and other small annual stipends and gifts of food and grain to various female cousins who belonged to convents in Mantua, Casale Monferrato and Ferrara. Because Margherita’s mother, Anna of Alençon, spent the ¿nal years of her life living in the Dominican convent of St Catherine of Siena in Monferrato, Margherita also provided for the nuns there, leaving them an annual income of 50 scudi.43 These provisions were an extension of the stewardship she had provided to various religious communities in Mantua and Monferrato during her period of co-regency. In Chapter 2 I mentioned the 39 Paul Murphy, 5XOLQJ3HDFHIXOO\&DUGLQDO (UFROH*RQ]DJDDQG3DWULFLDQ5HIRUPLQ 6L[WHHQWK&HQWXU\,WDO\ (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 94–5. 40 ASM, b.3003, v.10, #27, 16 September 1555. 41 “TXHOOLGL69LQF>HQ]@RGL63DRODGL6*LRDQQLHWGHOOD$QQXQWLDWDQHOERUJRGL 6*HRUJLRSHUHVVHUYLSURIHVVHVRQRGLTXHVWD,OOXVWULVVLPDFDVD*RQ]DJD,” see her will, Appendix I. 42 Margherita had ties to other nuns at San Vincenzo, among them the painter Elena Anguissola, a sister of the more famous Sophonisba, who might have made a portrait of herself in the guise of the Beata Osanna Andreasi, a work now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, see Angela Ghirardi in2VDQQD$QGUHDVLGD0DQWRYD±/¶LPPDJLQHGLXQD mistica del Rinascimento, ed. Renata Casarin (Mantua: Casandreasi, 2005), cat. 15, 170–3. 43 “E più lascia al monastiero della Madonna de Madama Illustrissima sua madre GHO RUGLQH GL 6 &DWKHULQD GD 6LHQD QHOOD FLWWj GL &DVDOH VFXWL FLQTXDQWD,” see her will, Appendix I.

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capitoli governing the monastery of the Annunziata in Mantua that were co-signed by Margherita and by Cardinal Ercole.44 In December of 1541, Margherita also wrote to the Mantuan treasury asking for a disbursement of funds to the monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione, the Cantelma monastery in Mantua, in the name of Isabella d’Este (Appendix III).45 It is obvious that when she married into the Gonzaga family, and particularly during the dif¿cult and long period of widowhood that she endured after 1540 until her own death in 1566, that Margherita sought friendship outside the court, and found solace and community among the sisterhood of the various convents in Mantua and Monferrato. Ferlisi reports that even while Federico II Gonzaga was still alive, Margherita chose to spend long periods of time in residence at the peaceful cloister of San Vincenzo, presumably alongside her sister-in-law, Suor Ippolita.46 This impulse was nurtured, in part, by her natural inclination towards devotion, which is revealed through her letters, her commissioning of art on religious subjects, and her collecting practices, which focused primarily on devotional objects, particularly reliquaries. The biographer Giuseppe Betussi praised Paleologa’s highly developed sense of familial duty: “having no desire to enjoy the embraces of a new husband, she remained the governess of her son Francesco”. 47 Sharing this supervision with her brothers-in-law – especially with Cardinal Ercole – Betussi was careful to emphasize Margherita’s virtue: “Modesty was in her heart and in her actions; her children were her spouse, companion, sustenance and consolation in her widowhood.”48 Betussi’s account dispels any sexual or marital desirability that Margherita might have had as a 30 year-old widow. In fact, he stresses that as regent over her children, she was really still married. In many ways, of course, she was. Because of her duties to her young children and the responsibilities of her co-regency, she could not – as many older widows did at the time – choose to enter a monastery. Nevertheless, she did maintain extremely close ties with local religious communities, frequenting the cloisters of Corpus Domini and San Vincenzo of Mantua. In her early widowhood, she seems to have a lived in a state of constant compromise between her public duties as regent – especially as Marchesa of Monferrato, where she was indeed the ruler of the state – and her more private, pious inclinations. Her inclination towards this kind of patronage also emulated the activities of her grandmother, Margaret of Lorraine (1463–1521) who, after becoming a widow in 1492 (just four years after she married Duke Rene 44

ASM, AG, b.3312, the capitoli are dated 9 February 1541. ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, no.302, 92r, 7 December 1541, Paleologa in Mantua to the Beccaria of Mantua. 46 Ferlisi, “Il monastero di San Vincenzo,” 66. 47 Betussi, “Margherita Paleologa Marchesana di Monferrato, et Duchessa di Mantova,” in his Libro delle donne illustri (1545), 205r–206v. Some aspects of Margherita’s regency in partnership with Cardinal Ercole are discussed in Murphy, 5XOLQJ3HDFHIXOO\ 48 Betussi, Libro delle donne illustri (1558), 205v. 45

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of Alençon), and even while raising her children, practised a strict asceticism. When her eldest son reached maturity in 1513, Margaret of Lorraine was ¿nally free to become a Franciscan tertiary, and founded a convent at Argentan. Although she was revered as a beata in her lifetime, Margaret was only of¿cially named a beata in 1921.49 Named for her grandmother, Margherita Paleologa followed her example of familial duty and obligation in combination with extreme piety and devotional fervor. An inventory of Margherita’s personal documents, made soon after her death, records that shortly after assuming his papacy in 1559, Paul IV issued a brief ¿nally allowing her to enter the monastery at Corpus Domini, then under the governance of her sister-in-law, Suor Paola Gonzaga, who had risen to the rank of abbess there.50 In her active years as a public widow, before her retirement to Corpus Domini, her co-regent, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, actively guided her in the dutiful exercise of pious widowhood. In the course of their partnership as co-regents, the cardinal nurtured Paleologa’s natural predisposition for piety, and he seems actively to have encouraged her to model herself after the most famous contemporary exemplar of pious widowhood available in their immediate circle – the poet and Reformer Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). Vittoria Colonna, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Margherita Paleologa Vittoria Colonna’s biography is well known. 51 The daughter of Fabrizio Colonna of Naples, Vittoria was betrothed at the age of four to the Marchese of Pescara, the condottiere Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos of Naples. She became a widow in 1525 when her husband sustained fatal injuries defending the Imperial forces at the Battle of Pavia. His death prompted Colonna to write and publish a number of secular Petrarchan sonnets devoted to his memory. This poetry soon turned from

49

Ferdinand Holböck, 0DUULHG6DLQWVDQG%OHVVHGV7KURXJKWKH&HQWXULHV (Ignatius Press, 2002), 309–10. 50 ASM, Magistrato Camerale BBII, 1558–1704, 8 February 1567, “&RSLD G¶XQD FRPLVVLRQHIDWWDSHU3LRD0DGPD([PDGLSRWHUHHQWUDUHQHOPRQDVWHULRGL6WD3DROD” 51 The most comprehensive biography of Colonna in English, with some translations of the sonnets, is still Maud F. Jerrold, 9LWWRULD &RORQQD :LWK 6RPH $FFRXQW RI +HU )ULHQGVDQG+HU7LPHV (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1906). See also Marjorie Och, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Religious Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1993, 1–20, who offers a very comprehensive bibliography of sources for Colonna. A good biographical summary is found in 6RQQHWVIRU0LFKHODQJHOR A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–13. For Colonna’s role as an exemplar to other women involved in Reform, Abigail Brundin, 9LWWRULD &RORQQD DQG WKH 6SLULWXDO 3RHWLFV RI WKH ,WDOLDQ Reformation. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), especially 63–5; she also discusses Colonna’s &DQ]RQLHUH6SLULWXDOH for Michelangelo and his reciprocal drawings, 67–100.

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private concerns to passionate devotional verses that became the mechanism for Colonna’s reinvention in widowhood, and she used her poetry to draw the faithful to Christ becoming, in the process, an exemplar of devotion. By the late 1530s, when she lived primarily in a convent at Viterbo, Colonna stood at the centre of a group of Catholic Reformers in Rome, headed by Cardinals Gian Matteo Giberti of Verona and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa of Naples, but also frequented by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga.52 Although she never took monastic vows, she began to practise a doctrine of strict self-denial and undertook devotional exercises. She wrote about her faith in the 1530s and 1540s, particularly in her 6SLULWXDO3RHPV and in the 7ULXPSKRI&KULVW¶V&URVVa tract devoted to the image of the suffering Christ.53 It was also at this time that Colonna formed her famous friendship with Michelangelo.54 The two participated in the Reform debates of the period, forming an intimate personal bond, forged by their mutual interest in spiritual matters. At the time, Roman Reformers were deeply attracted to the Pauline doctrines. In 1536, at the invitation of Cardinal Ercole, Colonna spent ten months in Ferrara at the convent of Santa Caterina, where she was visited by prominent clerics.55 At this time, the members of the Roman Reform circle – sometimes called evangelicals or spirituali – were deeply attracted to the idea of “justi¿cation by faith” found in the writings of St Paul: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).56 Early Catholic Reformers actively discussed the Pauline doctrines, and were ready to accept the view that faith was a gift conferred directly on the believer by God. Such beliefs brought them into conÀict with the bureaucracy of the Church and the liturgy, which

52

For the cardinals in Rome in Colonna’s circle see Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 142. 53 Both of these are found in Vittoria Colonna. Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Rome and Bari: Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1982). For reÀections on Colonna’s writings in the context of Reform see Joseph Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, Poet,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katherina M. Wilson (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 22–46. 54 The relationship between Michelangelo and Colonna has recently been most fully explored in the essays and catalogue for Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Mandragora, 2005), especially Monica Bianco and Monica Bianco and Vittoria Romani, “Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,” 145–64. See also Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) which offers important insight into their friendship, at 143–7. 55 For Cardinal Ercole in Pauline circles in Rome see Clifford M. Brown, “Paintings in the Collection of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga,” in Giulio Romano: Atti del Convegno ,QWHUQD]LRQDOHGL6WXGLVX*LXOLR5RPDQRHO¶HVSDQVLRQHHXURSHDGHO5LQDVFLPHQWR. Mantua: Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana, 1991), 203–26, 206 and note 12, 223–4. Colonna’s visit to Ferrara is discussed in Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, 209. 56 The quote is used by Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 170.

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recognized faith only through participation in the ritual acts and ceremonies of the Church, not through the expression of individual feeling.57 Like Colonna, Michelangelo was deeply sympathetic to Pauline thinking. As Howard Hibbard said of Michelangelo, he thought of faith as the “gift of gifts” and that the true manifestation of this gift, freely given to man by God, was the sacri¿ce of Christ on the cross.58 As part of their correspondence on these matters of faith, Michelangelo was moved to create some highly personal drawings for Colonna.59 We know from their letters that these included drawings of the Pietà, now identi¿ed with a drawing on the subject in the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston, and Christ on the Cross, now in the collection of the British Museum.60 A third drawing made by Michelangelo for Colonna, now in a private collection, depicts &KULVWDQGWKH:RPDQRI6DPDULD.61 The ¿rst two drawings were 57

For the Roman cardinals and Reform, Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 143–7 and 169–87. For a broader analysis of the Roman cardinals and the implications of their interest in the doctrine of justi¿cation by faith, see Massimo Firpi, “The Cardinal,” in Renaissance Characters, ed. Eugenio Garin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 46–97, especially 89–90. Insights into the spirituali and the idea of internal reform as a path to institutional Reform in the Church are found in Barry Collett, A Long DQG7URXEOHG3LOJULPDJH7KH&RUUHVSRQGHQFHRI0DUJXHULWH'¶$QJRXOrPHDQG9LWWRULD &RORQQD ± (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000), 85–103. The effects of the new ideas on the practice of the Eucharist, for example, were troubling to Cardinal Ercole and the subject of many letters addressed to him from associates in Rome, in Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” 5LYLVWD6WRULFD0DQWRYDQD(1885): 1–52, at 43–4. 58 Howard Hibbard uses the phrase “gift of gifts” in precisely the context of these drawings in Michelangelo (2nd edn, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985): 255. 59 In addition to the extensive discussion of the drawings in the catalogue for Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, see Hugo Chapman, “Michelangelo and Catholic Reform,” in the catalogue for Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 249–57. For another view of the aesthetics of these drawings as an expression of Reform ideals, see Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna and the Aesthetics of Reform,” 5HQDLVVDQFH4XDUWHUO\ 59 (2006): 90–129. 60 These are all reproduced in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo; Michelangelo, Pietà, black chalk, 1540s, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Inv. Nr. 1.2.o/16 {1.4o/60}, ill. 29, 153; 7KH&UXFL¿[IRU9LWWRULD&RORQQD, or Christ on the Cross, black chalk, 1540s, London, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Inv.-Nr. 1895-9-15-504 at cat. 49, 165–7. My analysis of the meaning of Michelangelo’s drawings for Colonna in the context of Catholic Reform is drawn from Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, especially 143–7; see also Marjorie Och, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Religious Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome,” who highlights early scholarship on the drawings that saw them in the context of the development of Michelangelo’s style, and emphasized Neoplatonic readings of their iconography, 147–84. 61 The drawing, formerly in the Bodmer collection, was offered at auction in New York in January of 1998, for which see “Christ and the Woman of Samaria, with a separate sketch of a man looking up (Black and white chalk),” 7KH %XUOLQJWRQ 0DJD]LQH 140 (January 1998): vi. An analysis of the drawing while it was in the Bodmer Collection

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elucidations of their meditations on the sacri¿ce of Christ, meditations popularized by the publication of the %HQH¿FLR GL &ULVWR, or 7KH *LIW RI &KULVW, written by Benedetto of Mantua, which became the most popular text of early Reform, and was later suppressed during the Inquisition. The work popularized the notion of “justi¿cation by faith” as a gift freely given through the sacri¿ce of Christ.62 As Alexander Nagel has shown, the very making of these drawings by Michelangelo, conceived internally and spontaneously, paralleled this interpretation – drawn from the Pauline doctrines – on the nature of faith, freely given and accepted.63 Colonna also explored these subjects in her poems, particularly in her collection of 6SLULWXDO3RHPV and in a second collection, called 7KH7ULXPSKRI&KULVW¶V&URVV. As Nagel has pointed out, in making and then giving these drawings to Colonna, Michelangelo transformed their reÀections on the gift of faith into an actual gift.64 Again according to Nagel, it was most likely in accordance with this speci¿c context of gift giving that Colonna elected to give a version of Michelangelo’s drawing of the Pietà to her own spiritual advisor, Cardinal Reginald Pole. Cardinal Pole extended the chain to other members of the Roman circle of Reform, giving his copy of Michelangelo’s drawing to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga.65 Cardinal Ercole chose to continue the cycle of gift giving by having Michelangelo’s drawings copied into paintings. In 1547, he asked Fermo Ghisoni, then court artist at Mantua, to make a copy of Michelangelo’s Pietá, which he indicated was intended

is found in Noel Annesley and Michael Hirst, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria,” 7KH %XUOLQJWRQ0DJD]LQH123 (October 1981): 608–14; also reproduced in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ill. 30,116. 62 For a clear analysis of the %HQH¿FLR GL &ULVWR, written by Benedetto of Mantua, published in 1543 and suppressed in 1549, see Barry Collett, ,WDOLDQ%HQHGLFWLQH6FKRODUV DQGWKH5HIRUPDWLRQ7KH&RQJUHJDWLRQRI6DQWD*LXVWLQDRI3DGXD(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 157–86. Nagel’s analysis of gift giving in the circle of Michelangelo and Colonna in Rome is found in Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 170–1. He summarizes the importance of the treatise in transforming the popular perception of faith in ritual contexts to one of direct prayer: “The public processions and liturgies, the miraculous relics and the venerated saints that were held up as symbols of the city, the pomp of private and confraternity chapels – in short the ‘ritual setting’ … stands in stark contrast to the direct relation between believer and God celebrated in the %HQH¿FLR, a relation mediated only by the ¿gure of Christ cruci¿ed,” 145–6. Hibbard, Michelangelo, also examines the importance of the %HQH¿FLRGL&ULVWRto Michelangelo’s drawings for Colonna, 258. 63 Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 170. Collett, $ /RQJ DQG 7URXEOHG Pilgrimage, disagrees with some of Nagel’s theories concerning the emphasis on individual revelation and salvation, since he feels that: “For the spirituali, religion of communal coherence is not replaced by individualism; it is simply transferred on to a smaller and more intimate scale of a different type – a community of believers,” 88. His comments are speci¿cally in response to Nagel’s “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” 7KH$UW Bulletin 79:4 (December 1997): 647–68. 64 Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 169–71. 65 Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 171 and note 6, 266.

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for Margherita Paleologa.66 Not long afterwards, the Cardinal paid Ghisoni for this Pietà and for two &UXFL¿[LRQV. Like the Pietà, at least one of the &UXFL¿[LRQ paintings was also based on a copy of a drawing that Michelangelo had originally made for Vittoria Colonna. A &UXFL¿[LRQ by Ghisoni, still in situ in the Nuvoloni Chapel in Sant’Andrea in Mantua and ultimately derived from the Michelangelo drawing, is probably similar to the work Cardinal Ercole gave to Paleologa (for the Michelangelo drawing, Illustration 18).67 As one of the recipients of this chain of gifts that drew like-minded Reformers together, Paleologa was brought into the Pauline circle which extended to her from Vittoria Colonna, the woman who stood at the spiritual center of the Catholic Reform movement.68 The Duchess and Reform According to Vera Bugatti, Paleologa was herself the dedicatee of several Reform tracts that propagated Erasmian sentiments in Italy. Among these was a 1542 treatise by Marsilio Andreasi called 7UDWWDWR GLYRWR HW XWLOOLVLPR GHOOD GLYLQD misericordia, a work based on Erasmus’s De immensa Dei misericordia. Bugatti points out that Andreasi was anxious to avoid any anti-Protestant sentiment, and considerably modi¿ed the tone of the original Erasmian tract.69 In a similar vein, the poet Marco Bandarini dedicated his Opera nuova spirituale (1547), a prolonged mediation on the Cruci¿xion, to Paleologa. Bugatti characterizes this work as being closely linked to the %HQH¿FLRGL&ULVWR. In the climate of anti-Protestant sentiment sweeping across Italy, works like these were dangerously close to being considered heretical, and Margherita was aware of this. In 1554 she wrote a letter to the Count of Mirandola (Ludovico II) decrying the entry of heretical books into Italy from Switzerland, showing her awareness of the Index and the need to suppress blatantly Protestant propaganda which, she feared, could corrupt

66

In 1552, Ghisoni also did at least one work commissioned directly by Paleologa herself, a copy of a painting owned by her mother in Casale, depicting the Virgin and Child ZLWK6DLQW-RKQWKH%DSWLVW, for which see Appendix III. 67 B. Carpeggiani. and C. Tellini Perina. 6DQW¶$QGUHDLQ0DQWXD8QWHPSLRSHUOD città del Principe (Mantua: Pubblicazioni Paolini, 1987, 131–2. 68 On this cycle of gift giving see also Brundin, 9LWWRULD &RORQQD DQG 6SLULWXDO Poetics, 67–73. 69 This work, along with the tract by Marco Bandarini, are mentioned by Vera Bugatti, review of Martha Sue Ahrendt, “The Cultural Legacy and Patronal Stewardship of Margherita Paleologa (1510–1566), Duchess of Mantua and Marchesa of Monferrat,” Washington University diss., 2002 (Ann Arbor, Mich. Univ. Micro¿lms, 2002), at http://www. Veneziacinquecento.it, 6HJQDOLEUR, http://www.veneziacinquecento.it/Segnalibro/ahrendt. htm, (12 July 2004). The subject is further elaborated by her in “Orizzonti spirituali nella trattatistica dedicata alla Paleologa,” Civiltà Mantovana 41:121 (2006): 6–22.

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18

Michelangelo, Cruci¿xion (drawing for Vittoria Colonna), black chalk, British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum

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“the souls of simple people,” (Appendix III). 70 Although Paleologa’s own devotion to Reform sometimes seemed very close to the sentiments of the spirituali, and thus to the tenets of Lutheranism, she feared that the uneducated and unworldly might not be able to discern between Catholic Reform and Protestant heresy.71 Her anxiety that such books would fall into the wrong hands clearly elucidates a conÀict that was inherent in the Reform movement, between what Paul Murphy calls “piety and privilege,” the notion that heresy was bound to proliferate among the uneducated, who should be punished, but was less clearly de¿ned, and even frequently overlooked, among princes, consorts and cardinals.72 The Woman of Samaria and Female Reformers According to Michelangelo’s biographers, Vasari and Condivi, in the course of his friendship with Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo also made a drawing depicting &KULVW DQG WKH :RPDQ RI 6DPDULD. This work by Michelangelo has received relatively little attention in the context of his relationship with Colonna. It has been identi¿ed with a drawing sold by Sotheby’s to a private collector in 1998. 73 Since this subject was rarely depicted independently in sixteenth-century Italian art, its appearance among the Colonna “gifts” warrants closer scrutiny, as does the 70 ASM, AG, Copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, b.3003, lib. 9, n.80, 32r, 8 June 1554, from Margherita Paleologa, to the Conte della Mirandola , “Essendosi inteso qua FRPHFRQTXDQWHJHQWLGHOSDHVHGL6XL]]DULHW*ULVRQL>*ULVRQL"@VRQRVWDWLSRUWDWLOLEUHWWL VRWWRGLYHUVLWLWROLFKHVRQRLQHIIHWWLGLKHUHVLD/XWHUDQDQRQVLqPDQFDWRSHU0RQU,OOPR di ordinarla provisione che ricerca il bisogno in quanto stato, con far che tali libri siano in PDQRGLFXLVLYRJOLDKDEELDQRGDHVVHU¶SRUWDWLLQPDQRD0RQV6XIIUDJDQR>"@GLPDQLHUD che non possano essere tirrati in errore gli animi delle simplici persone...” 71 According to Paul Murphy, Cardinal Ercole occupied a similar middle ground, neither a true “spirituality” nor an adherent of strict orthodoxy, see “Between ‘Spirituali’ and ‘Intransigenti’: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” 7KH&DWKROLF+LVWRULFDO5HYLHZ 88:3 (July 2002): 446–69. 72 Paul Murphy discusses the inherent conÀict between piety and privilege that Reform provoked in wealthy Renaissance prelates in “A Worldly Reform: Honor and Pastoral Practice in the Career of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga,” 6L[WHHQWK &HQWXU\ -RXUQDO 31:2 (Summer 2000): 399–418. Paleologa, required to serve as regent but devoted to Reform, undoubtedly walked the same line between worldliness and piety, as did Colonna, who was suspected of heresy near the end of her life but was never tried. 73 For the drawing see Noel Annesley and Michael Hirst, “‘Christ and the Woman of Samaria’ by Michelangelo.” 7KH %XUOLQJWRQ 0DJD]LQH 123 (October 1981): 608–14; on its sale, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria, with a separate sketch of a man looking up (Black and white chalk).” 7KH%XUOLQJWRQ0DJD]LQH 140 (January 1998): vi. The drawing is reproduced in the catalogue Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ill 4, 156; for the copies, Nicholas Béatrizet, &ULVWRHOD6DPDULWDQD, engraving, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, cat. 54, 174–5 and Marcello Venusti, &ULVWRHOD6DPDULWDQD, painting, Siena, Pinacoteca nazionale, inv.535, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, cat. 55, 176.

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proliferation of this theme in the broader context of Reform. In the story, told only in the Gospel of St John (4:1–30), Christ, weary from his travels, stops in the region of Samaria at the well of Jacob, and asks a local woman who is drawing water to give him a drink. Despite the Samaritan hostility to the Jews, she complies, and in the course of their exchange, Christ tells her about the power of a new faith, which he calls “the living water” that will vanquish spiritual thirst. Listening to his words, she recognizes him as the Messiah and calls the other Samaritans, who are converted.74 The story of the unnamed Samaritan woman highlights the evangelical potential that a woman could have in the propagation of the faith. By calling converts to Christ, the woman of Samaria became a symbol of conversion, a disciple and a messenger of faith – a model for spiritual action. In a sonnet about the Samaritan woman, Vittoria Colonna wrote, “so in haste you ran to tell the wise / to come with their hearts, souls and minds / ready to honour that wondrous and joyful day.”75 Here, Colonna celebrates the woman’s ability to call the faithful to Christ, a role that she tried to emulate through her writing and through her participation in Roman Reform circles. Apart from the persuasive model of conversion available to women in the form of the Magdalene – a theme popular among female Reformers – there were few persuasive female exemplars for active spiritualism; the Samaritan woman became this exemplar. There is much evidence to support the fact that, like Colonna, Margherita Paleologa also assigned particular importance to the story of Christ and the :RPDQRI6DPDULD. A framed copy of the work is listed in the 1567 inventory of her estate at the palace of Porto.76 In addition, the inventory taken of the Gonzaga holdings before their dispersal in 1626–27, when they were sold to Charles I in England, lists two versions of this subject in the Gonzaga collections.77 It is dif¿cult to know from the cursory descriptions that the inventories provide to what extent these works derived from the :RPDQRI6DPDULD that Michelangelo 74

See the interpretation of the story given in 7KH,93:RPHQ¶V%LEOH&RPPHQWDU\, eds Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary J. Evans (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 599. For the Gospel of John and Pauline theology see D. Moody Smith, 7KH7KHRORJ\RI the Gospel of John, Series: New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 93–9. 75 Translated by Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, note 40, 78. 76 Excerpted from ASM, AG, Magistrato Camerale, Bb II, 1558–1704, 15 April 1567, ‘ ,QYHQWDULRGHOOLEHQLPREELOLULWURYDWLQHOODKHUHGLWDGLSU>HGLF@WD0DGPD(FFPDJLj 'XFKHVVD GL 0DQWRD GL IH>GH@ PHP>RULD@ DO SDOD]]R GL 3RUWR LQ PDQR GL 0[ %DW 'HO %UROORIDWWRUGLHVVRSDOD]]R« ,’ listed as item 20 under the list of paintings, “8Q¶DOWURFRQ ;SR>&KULVWR@HWOD6DPDULWDQDDOSR]]RLQFRUQLVDQGRHWDGRUDWR.” 77 Alessandro Luzio, /DJDOOHULDGHL*RQ]DJDYHQGXWDDOO¶,QJKLOWHUUDGHO±, Documenti degli Archivio di Mantova e Londra raccolti ed illustrate da Alessandro Luzio (Rome: Bardi, 1974), inventory no. 16, “Un quadro depintovi N.S. et la Samaritana, opera di mano del Palma Vecchio,” and inventory no. 197, “Un quadro dipintovi N.S. et la Samaritana.”

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drew for Colonna, since that work is known only from a preparatory study with Michelangelo’s signature sold from the Bodmer collection to a private collector in 1998.78 In Michelangelo’s drawing, Christ is depicted seated on the edge of the well, addressing the Samarian woman who stands to his right. The emphasis in the drawing is on Christ’s strong gestural appeal to the woman, whose extreme contrapposto signals both attention and imminent Àight. A copy of this work was the source for an engraving made by Nicolas Béatrizet. Béatrizet adds a number of details: a blossoming tree behind the well and the pro¿le of the city of Samaria, perched on a hill in the background behind the woman’s ¿gure. Christ still gestures and instructs, and here the woman gestures back, obviously engaged in the conversation. The small poplar panel in the Liverpool Museum drawn in bistre ink on a gesso ground is clearly modelled after the composition by Michelangelo, and repeats many of the added details from the Béatrizet engraving (Illustration 19).79 Although extant copies of this engraving are undated, the work was probably made in the late 1540s, since it was reproduced after this by other painters.80 It is, therefore, quite probable that the paintings of the subject that were part of the Gonzaga estate were copied after these engravings. Although we no longer have any painted versions of the subject that can be clearly linked to the Gonzaga holdings, there is one image derived from the Michelangelo drawing that is explicitly connected to Margherita Paleologa. Vera Bugatti has discovered a woodcut image of a composition strikingly similar to Michelangelo’s which was used as the frontispiece to Andrea Bandarini’s Opera 1XRYD6SLULWXDOH, a work dedicated to Paleologa and printed in Mantua in 1547. According to Bugatti’s analysis of this image, the woodcut depicts Jesus and Mary, with Mary in patrician dress and without a halo, “in order to negate her own sanctity and to draw attention to her grief.” She bases her interpretation on the fact that such an illustration would be consistent with the subject of Bandarini’s treatise. However, the juxtaposition of the seated ¿gure of Christ and the woman who stands before him is actually strikingly similar to the Michelangelo drawing and the Béatrizet engraving of &KULVWDQGWKH6DPDULWDQ:RPDQ.81 The reproduction of the scene as the frontispiece to a Reform tract dedicated to Paleologa indicates its signi¿cance as a model for the evangelical role of women in spreading the doctrine 78

Annesley and Hirst, “‘Christ and the Woman of Samaria’,” and, on its sale, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria, with a separate sketch of a man looking up (Black and white chalk).” 7KH%XUOLQJWRQ0DJD]LQH 140 (January 1998): vi. 79 http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue 2&id 73, accessed April 17, 2009. 80 For example, the engraving was used as the basis for the painting by Marcello Venusti, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena (inv. 535), reproduced in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, cat. 55,176. 81 The woodcut is published online by Bugatti in her review, “Martha Sue Ahrendt, “The Cultural Legacy,” http://www.veneziacinquecento.it/ Segnalibro/ahrendt.htm. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate a copy of this work for reproduction.

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19

Copy after Michelangelo? Christ and the Woman of Samaria, bistre ink and gesso on panel, Liverpool Museums. © National Museums Liverpool

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of Reform, and provides another link between the subjects of the drawings made by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna and works based on those same subjects made for Paleologa in Mantua. Paleologa’s preoccupation with religious imagery is also clearly detectable in the existing records for paintings she owned, speci¿cally itemized in an inventory of her possessions at the Palazzo di Porto. The inventory, dated 15 April 1567, was made by the caretaker at Porto, Battista da Brollo, who must have been asked to make a list of the assets there shortly after Margherita’s death, which occurred between 28 and 29 December 1566 at Casale Monferrato.82 After a brief illness, Margherita died in the company of her son, Guglielmo Gonzaga, her daughter Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos and Diana Borromei, one of her favorite ladies-inwaiting. Duke Guglielmo ordered that her body be brought from Casale to Mantua, and she was buried in the choir of the Monastery of Corpus Domini. Her son Ludovico Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, ordered an epitaph celebrating his mother’s virtues.83 Porto, of course, had been Margherita’s own private retreat, and all of the paintings Brollo inventoried there were of religious subjects, including Christ and WKH :RPDQ RI 6DPDULD. Both her will of 1563 and this 1567 inventory of her assets also addressed the fate of the many elaborate reliquaries that she owned.84 82

ASM, AG, Magistrato Camerale Antico, B.b.II, beginning “Inventario delle gioili et altre cose di precio particular di Madma. Illma. la Duchessa di Mantua: Marchesa di 0RQIHUUDWRVFULWWRGLFRPLVV>LRQH@GL6(FFD$OTXHVWRGLGLIHEEUDULR.” Davari, ³)HGHULFR*RQ]DJDHODIDPLJOLDGL0RQIHUUDWR,” partially transcribes her inventory, with emphasis on the tapestries, 107–9. The list itemizes Paleologa’s jewels, her decorative and more practical silver items, her tapestries and her linens. For the tapestries see Clifford M. Brown and Guy Delmarcel. 7DSHVWULHV IRU WKH &RXUWV RI )HGHULFR ,, (UFROH DQG )HUUDQWH*RQ]DJD± (Seattle and London: College Art Association in association with University of Washington Press, 1996),130. In the margins of the inventory are notes referring to the individuals to whom she wished to consign particular items. All of the lists are con¿rmed and witnessed with Paleologa’s signature, and there is a note indicating that they were to receive her seal. Porto appears to have become Paleologa’s semi-permanent residence outside of Mantua, and the inventory of her goods there includes reference to several paintings, most of which have proved to be untraceable in terms of the artists who painted them or the circumstances of their commission. 83 Federico Amadei gives the full inscription, which has since disappeared: “0$5*$5,7$(*8/,(/0,3$/(2/2*,$8*867$((;$11$5(*,$()5$1&2580 67,53,6 $/$1621,6 '8&,6 ),/,$( )('(5,&, *21=$*$( 0$78$( , '8&,6 8;25,6 48$( 9,580 $(5(',7$5,$ '27( 0$5&+,21$78 0217,6)(55$7, (7 (;,0,$ 62%2/( $8;,7 48,33( 75(6 '8&(6 8180 &$5',1$/(0 3,6&$5,$( 0$5&+,21,66$0(',',79,52$00,6629,'8$/,%(526383,//26(7875,8648( ',7,21,6 3238/26 6800$ ),'( 6$1&7,021,$ 6$3,(17,$ %(1,*1,7$7( ',8 787$7$(672%,,7$112$(7$7,668$(/9,6$/87,6+80$1(0'/;9,,” Cronaca universale della Città di Mantova (Mantua: C.I.T.E.M, 1954–1957), II:766. 84 According to my interpretation of this will, a sealed list of Paleologa’s reliquaries and their intended recipients was given to the nuns of Santa Paola in Mantua and to the

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A sealed list of these, along with notations concerning their intended recipients, was left with the nuns of Corpus Domini in Mantua, presumably in the care of her sister-in-law Suor Paola, and another list was left with the nuns of Santa Caterina in Monferrato, where her mother was buried in 1562. Most of these reliquaries were bequeathed to her daughter, Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos, Marchesa of Pescara, although they were left in Monferrato in the care of the nuns of Santa Caterina. Margherita also made provisions for other valuable objects, including elaborate historiated tapestries made by the Karcher brothers and a number of embroideries and altar cloths, among them an altar cloth depicting the Pietá, which had decorated her private chapel in Casale Monferrato.85 Some Thoughts about the Duchess and Reform Paleologa was obviously drawn to Reform because of Cardinal Ercole, but she was equally inÀuenced by the ¿gure of Colonna as a powerful role model for pious widowhood – a role that was actively emulated by other women in Paleologa’s immediate circle. These included her sister-in-law in Urbino, the Duchess Leonora Gonzaga (1493–1570), who was actively involved in Catholic Reform during her widowhood and became part of a circle of aristocratic women who followed the sermons of the evangelical Bernardino Ochino, an early member of the observant Capuchin order founded in 1534. The evidence suggests that Paleologa’s relationship with Leonora was somewhat more distant and formal than the affectionate exchanges she had with her other sisters-in-law but, in 1538, she did commission the artist Ippolito Costa to paint Leonora a “Christo molto bello” which she then sent to Urbino. 86 It is obvious from their correspondence that Margherita intended the painting to effectively substitute for a long-promised meeting between the two women. Such exchanges of gifts between women naturally reinforced their familial and affective bonds and allowed them to meet through the agency of the gifts themselves, a system of exchange the historian Diane Bodart has called doni familiari. 87 It is also possible that Paleologa saw this exchange in the same spirit as the gifts of faith exchanged in the Pauline circles of Rome. Another important Gonzaga widow associated with Reform was Giulia Gonzaga (of the Gazzuolo branch of the Gonzaga family, 1513–1566). The widow of Vespasiano Colonna of Fondi, Giulia was the chief female disciple of the leader nuns of Santa Caterina in Monferrato, who were to see that the reliquaries were well taken care of. If there were no male Gonzaga heirs to act as Dukes of Mantua, she speci¿ed that the reliquaries were to become the property of her daughter, Isabella Gonzaga, Marchesa of Pescara. 85 See Appendix I – Last Will and Testament of Margherita Paleologa. For provisions for other tapestries, see also Brown and Delmarcel, 7DSHVWULHV, 130. 86 Diane Bodart, 349, doc. 11, 353 and docs. 16 and 17, 354–5. The painting itself is untraceable. 87 Ibid., 349–55.

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of the Neapolitan Reform movement, Juan de Valdes. She was also close to Vittoria Colonna and maintained strong ties with Leonora Gonzaga in Urbino.88 All of these women of Paleologa’s generation were widowed at a young age and were thus able to live independently, channelling their wealth into religious foundations and actively involving themselves in movements to re-establish Catholic orthodoxy in Italy.89 Carolyn Valone has pointed out that the movement towards Catholic Reform in the 1530s marked a distinct turning point in the cultural policies of aristocratic women all over Italy. It was during this period of renewed Catholic piety that many aristocratic women turned away from the demonstrations of wealthy secularism that had distinguished the golden age of Isabella d’Este, and turned instead to devotional images and to acts of art and architectural sponsorship directed towards the foundation of monasteries and the support of convents and monastic orders.90 In Chapter 2, we saw how Margherita Cantelma channeled her patronage interests into the ful¿llment of devotional commissions, both for herself and on behalf of Isabella d’Este. In many ways, Reform reignited the devotional fervour that had Àourished under the aegis of the female beatae during the earlier part of the century. By the 1530s, many daughters of aristocratic families entered more strictly enclosed monastic orders, turning their backs on luxurious lives at court in favour of cloistered lives as nuns, devoting themselves to contemplation and prayer, while also assuming powerful roles as abbesses and spiritual leaders. In this period there was also a greater emphasis on the ef¿cacy of prayer, the ritual worship of relics and the bodies of saints in the Mantuan monasteries and convents.

88

Giulia Gonzaga was from the Gazzuolo branch of the Gonzaga; for her relationship with Colonna see Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 143–4. A complete study of Giulia Gonzaga is Mario Oliva, *LXOLD *RQ]DJD &RORQQD WUD 5LQDVFLPHQWR DQG &RQWURULIRUPD (Milan: Mursia, 1985); for Giulia Gonzaga’s role in Reform and her relationship with Colonna see also Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, 250–1. Giovanna of Aragon (1502–1575), the widow of Vittoria Colonna’s brother Ascanio Colonna, was also a follower of Valdes; for her religious patronage see Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630,” Art Bulletin 76 (March 1994): 129–46, at 130–1. 89 For the importance of Vittoria Colonna, Giulia Gonzaga and Giovanna d’Aragona in the literary salons of Naples that promoted Reform ideology see Diana Robin, Publishing :RPHQ 6DORQV WKH 3UHVVHV DQG WKH &RXQWHU5HIRUPDWLRQ LQ 6L[WHHQWK&HQWXU\ ,WDO\ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), particularly 1–40. 90 Carolyn Valone, “Architecture as a Public Voice for Women in Sixteenth-Century Rome.” 5HQDLVVDQFH6WXGLHV 15:3 (September 2001): 301–27, at 301–2. For the “widening gulf between sacred and profane” in women’s lives in sixteenth-century Italy, see $+LVWRU\ of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, III: Renaissance and (QOLJKWHQPHQW 3DUDGR[HV, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 146.

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Post-script: Isabella Gonzaga, Marchesa of Pescara In 1556, Margherita and Federico’s only daughter, Isabella Gonzaga (1537–1579), married Francesco Ferdinando d’Avalos (1531–1571), Marchese of Vasto and Pescara.91 Francesco’s father, Alfonso d’Avalos, was a famous condottiere, leader of the Imperial army in Italy and a hero on the battle¿eld at the battle of Pavia in 1525. He was a close friend of Duke Federico, who had also claimed a share in the victory at Pavia, although his actual participation in the battle is still a matter of conjecture.92 The victory over the French at Pavia had been a de¿ning moment for many young Italian men of Federico’s generation, and his claim to share in the victory was part of his princely mythology.93 In the early 1530s, as the result of their friendship, Federico had also assisted Alfonso d’Avalos in obtaining a number of commissions from Titian, including the famous Allocution of the Marchese del Vasto, now in the Prado, in which the nine year-old Ferrante – the future husband of Isabella Gonzaga – stands beside his father.94 Alfonso d’Avalos was also the cousin of Vittoria Colonna’s husband was Ferrante d’Avalos, who died of wounds suffered in the Battle of Pavia. After the death of Alfonso in 1546 and the death of Vittoria Colonna the following year, Francesco Ferdinando d’Avalos inherited the territories of both Pescara and Vasto.95 The 1556 marriage between Isabella Gonzaga and Francesco d’Avalos, which had probably been arranged by their fathers, linked the Gonzaga in Mantua to the legacy of Vittoria Colonna in Naples. Moreover, it strengthened Gonzaga ties to the Spanish Catholic throne and made them a powerful political presence in Naples, where Ferrante eventually gained the title of Vicere. After the marriage, Isabella Gonzaga and Francesco d’Avalos took up residence in Palermo, where they remained until Ferrante’s death in 1571. His will made Isabella regent of their young son and steward of the entire d’Avalos inheritance, 91

For a history of the d’Avalos in Naples in the ¿fteenth and sixteenth centuries, see the preface to Flavia Luise, ,'¶$YDORVXQJUDQGHIDPLJOLDDULVWRFUDWLFDQDSROHWDQDQHO 6HWWHFHQWR(Naples: Liguore editore, 2006), 27–38. 92 Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), brieÀy discusses Federico’s desertion at the Battle of Pavia, 30–3. 93 I am currently preparing a study of Federico’s life and patronage called )HGHULFR,, *RQ]DJD: 3DWURQDJH3RZHU3RUQRJUDSK\DQGWKH,PDJHRIWKH3HUIHFW5HQDLVVDQFH3ULQFH 94 Titian, 7KH $OORFXWLRQ RI $OIRQVR G¶$YDORV 0DUFKHVH GHO 9DVWR 1539–1541, Madrid, Prado, in Harold E. Wethey 7KH 3DLQWLQJV RI 7LWLDQ &RPSOHWH (GLWLRQ ,, 7KH Portraits (London: Phaidon, 1971), cat. 10, 79–80, plate 57; for his biography G. De Caro, “Avalos, Alfonso,” DBI, IV:612–13. 95 For the d’Avalos cultural patrimony see Rita Bernini, “La collezione d‘Avalos in un documento inedito del 1571,” 6WRULDGHOO¶$UWH 88 (1996): 384–445. Alfonso d’Avalos died in 1546, Colonna a year later in 1547, leaving Francesco d’Avalos as sole heir to the estate of his father and presumably to the Neapolitan properties owned by his uncle, Ferrante d’Avalos, which accrued to him through the death of his aunt, Vittoria Colonna. For his biography see R. Zapperi, “Avalos, Francesco Ferdinando,” DBI, IV:627–35.

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now housed at Palermo and Vasto. The Vasto holdings included the material assets amassed by both Alfonso d’Avalos and Vittoria Colonna. According to an inventory of Ferrante’s possessions, made after his death, the palace at Vasto contained numerous paintings, tapestries, and decorative items. Among the paintings listed, one particular work is of particular interest in linking Isabella Gonzaga in Naples to the legacy of her grandmother Isabella d’Este in Mantua: the most famous painting ever made for Vittoria Colonna, the Penitent Magdalene, painted by Titian in Venice in 1531. Letters from March of 1531 indicate that Federico II was aware that Colonna had been seeking an image of the Magdalene, and he commissioned a painting on this subject from Titian.96 In his letter, he stressed that the Magdalene be “as tearful as possible.”97 The commission was completed quickly, since Colonna wrote to Federico II on 25 May to thank him for the painting.98 Although the original Magdalene that Colonna received is now considered lost, most art historians agree that Titian’s Magdalene for Colonna must have closely resembled the one now in the Pitti collection in Florence – the tearful, penitent sinner described by Colonna in her own verses, the emblem of human weakness turned to conversion and strength under the impetus of divine love (Illustration 20).99 Colonna described just such a tearful and repentant Magdalene in a work called the 7ULXPSK RI &KULVW¶V &URVV – a work that shares the same essential characteristics of sensuousness and tearful piety expressed in Titian’s painting, which might well have been inspired by Colonna’s poem: At the holy feet I saw that other Mary, The Magdalene, burning with joyous love, Her radiant golden hair Àowing forth. 96

The documents are all published in the Appendix to Marjorie Och, “Vittoria Colonna and the Commission for a Mary Magdalene by Titian,” in %H\RQG ,VDEHOOD 6HFXODU :RPHQ 3DWURQV RI $UW LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH ,WDO\ ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2001), 193–224; for other analyses of the commission see Bernard Aikema, “Titian’s Mary Magdalene in the Palazzo Pitti: An ambiguous painting and its critics,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 48–59; Jeryldene M. Wood, “Vittoria Colonna’s Mary Magdalen,” in Visions of +ROLQHVV$UWDQG'HYRWLRQLQ5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\, ed. Andrew Ladis and Shelley E. Zuraw (Georgia Museum of Art: University of Georgia, 2001), 195–212. For an analysis of the 1531 commission for Colonna of the Magdalene in the context of the relationship between Federico II Gonzaga and Titian, see Bodart, 7L]LDQRH)HGHULFR,,*RQ]DJD, 85–98, who publishes all of the relevant documents numbered 101–20. 97 Och, “A Mary Magdalene by Titian,” Appendix 1, 207, dated 5 March 1531. 98 Ibid., Appendix 14, 212. 99 There are seven versions of the Magdalene listed in this inventory, including no. 88 “Item uno quadro dela madalena de ticiano,” which Bernini identi¿es with the Titian commission of 1531, “La collezione d’Avalos,” 433 and 409–10. Bodart, 7L]LDQR H)HGHULFR,,*RQ]DJD, agrees that the Magdalene in the d’Avalos inventory was the one made for Vittoria Colonna in 1531, note 177, 87–8.

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20

Titian, the Penitent Magdalene, c.1533, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Photo Credit: Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY True piety moved her to weep here; And thus heaven will, that, with equal measure, She now reap the seeds of glory, not of sorrow.100

100 Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna,” 43. She also composed a sonnet on the image of the Magdalene for Michelangelo, for which see Brundin, 6RQQHWVIRU0LFKHODQJHOR, 76–7.

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By the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Colonna was seeking her picture from Titian, this “glorious” Magdalene had become a powerful symbol of the female apostolic calling among aristocratic women Reformers.101 Letters written by Colonna and by her female contemporaries clearly articulate that their affective responses to images of the Magdalene are clearly linked to the devotional fervour of Reform. For example, the poet Veronica Gambara, Marchese of Correggio, wrote to Isabella d’Este in 1528 and described the image of a kneeling and penitent Magdalene that had been painted for her by the artist Correggio: The picture represents the Magdalen in the desert in a dark cavern, whither she has Àed in her penitence. She kneels on the right, lifting clasped hands to heaven and imploring pardon for her sins. Her beautiful attitude, and the expression of deep but noble sorrow on her most lovely face, are so striking that every one who has seen the picture is ¿lled with wonder.102

Gambara’s letter had no doubt been prompted by her awareness of Isabella’s own particular reverence for the ¿gure of the Magdalene. In 1517, Isabella had undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Magdalene at Ste Baume, in Provence. She travelled with a small company that included her court secretary, Mario Equicola, who left an account of the journey in a treatise published in Mantua shortly after their return.103 In part, Isabella undertook her pilgrimage to follow in the footsteps of the young Federico II Gonzaga, who had been sent as a kind of goodwill ambassador to the court of François I the previous year. At that time, Federico travelled in the much larger entourage of the king and his mother, Louise of Savoy, to visit the Magdalene’s shrine, and afterwards the entire party travelled to Avignon where they witnessed the performance of a VDFUD UDSSUHVHQWD]LRQH that included the Magdalene. Aristocratic visitors to Ste Baume were driven both by spiritual and secular motivations, perhaps remembering that Petrarch himself had visited the same shrine in the 1330s. Certainly a mission that combined sacred pilgrimage with secular, intellectual concerns, and that had been endorsed by royal decree, appealed to the social sensibilities and cultural pretensions of

101

For the signi¿cance of the Magdalene among female Renaissance patrons, see Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, “Models of Female Sanctity in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy,” in :RPHQ DQG )DLWK &DWKROLF 5HOLJLRXV /LIH LQ ,WDO\ IURP /DWH $QWLTXLW\ WR WKH Present (Cambridge and London, 1999), 159–75, esp. 164–9. 102 The translation is from Cartwright, ,VDEHOOD G¶(VWH II:281. Veronica Gambara (1485–1550) was an admirer of Colonna and dedicated at least two Petrarchan sonnets to her, see Richard Poss, “A Renaissance Gentildonna: Veronica Gambara,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katherina M. Wilson (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 47–66, especially 53–4. 103 Mario Equicola, Isabellae estensis Mantuae principis iter in Narbonensem Galliam (Mantua: Francesco Bruschi, n.d.), copy consulted in the Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. The account is not particularly informative, since it is written in Equicola’s most ornate and learned style.

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Isabella d’Este. The art historian Maddalena Spagnolo has published letters that Isabella wrote describing her pilgrimage and her experience at the shrine of the Magdalene. She described long periods lost in prayer in front of a beautiful statue of the Magdalene, which depicted her lying on her side in a grotto, her head propped up on her open right hand, reading a sacred text.104 While still in France and entranced by this statue, Isabella ordered some paintings of this type of Reclining Magdalene. This remained her favourite iconographical type of Magdalene until the end of her life, probably because, given her exactitude in all matters aesthetic and her enthusiasm for accurate copies of genuine antiquities, she thought of it as the most truly “authentic” depiction of the saint. After her return home, ultimately dissatis¿ed with the copies she had been able to obtain at Lyon, both she and Federico continued to order paintings of the Magdalene after this French type. According to Spagnolo’s analysis, Isabella might ¿nally have obtained a depiction of the desired subject from Correggio, who had earlier painted the kneeling Magdalene described to Isabella by Veronica Gambara.105 Upon her return from Ste Baume, on the feast of the Magdalene on 22 July 1517, Isabella and Federico attended a representation of scenes from the life of the Magdalene acted by a group of Mantuan friars on a stage erected near the Porte Pradella of the city.106 In 1533, knowing that Vittoria Colonna was still interested in the Magdalene and perhaps hoping to provide her with a new iconographical type to add to her collection of images of the saint, Isabella wrote to Colonna to offer her a copy of a painting of the Magdalene from her own collection in Mantua. The fact that she offered a copy would seem to suggest that this painting was the Correggio Reclining Magdalene.107 The 1627–1628 Gonzaga inventory lists several paintings of the Magdalene – a testament to Isabella’s attachment to the subject as well as to the fact that copies undoubtedly continued to be added to the collection after her death. Among these works is a version described as a copy of the Magdalene by Titian, a painting which must certainly have been known to Margherita Paleologa.108 Paleologa would also have known that this work, like the works she also owned that were copied after Michelangelo, was a subject that had been speci¿cally created for 104

Maddalena Spagnolo, “Correggio’s Reclining Magdalen: Isabella d’Este and the Cult of St. Mary Magdalen.” Apollo 157 (June 2003): 37–45, reports on both Federico’s and Isabella’s journey to the Magdalene’s shrine, 38–9. 105 Correggio’s work, in oil on copper, was formerly in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, but is now only known through seventeenth-century copies, for which see Spagnolo “Correggio’s Reclining Magdalene.” 106 Cartwright goes on to report that the wooden platforms built for the audience collapsed, causing the crowd, including Isabella and Federico II, to fall into the water, ,VDEHOODG¶(VWH, II: 133–5; also Spagnolo, “Correggio’s Reclining Magdalene,” 39. 107 For this letter of March 1533, see Och, “A Mary Magdalene by Titian,” Appendix 16, 213. The name of the artist is not mentioned. 108 “8QTXDGURFRSLDGHOOD0DGDOHQDGL7LWLDQR,” Luzio, /D*DOOHULDGHL*RQ]DJD, item no. 106, 96.

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Vittoria Colonna. Therefore, when Isabella Gonzaga became for a brief period the steward of the original painting of the Penitent Magdalene in the d’Avalos del Vasto collection in Naples, she shared in a circle of sacred patronage that extended from Vittoria Colonna to her grandmother Isabella d’Este and ¿nally to her mother, Margherita Paleologa in Mantua. Through the ¿gure of the Magdalene this network of women, bound by faith and family, met to renew their mutual devotion and to meditate on the ¿gure of the Magdalene as a singular, powerful and distinctly female symbol of patience, penitence, transformation and Reform.109 Although very little is known about Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos, in many ways her widowhood serves as a kind of postscript to this history of female forms of piety and religious patronage in Renaissance Mantua. In his will, Francesco expressed his “singular love” for Isabella, and praised her “in¿nite virtues,” giving her control of her dowry and charging her, “in the fullness of time,” to use funds that he had designated to build a chapel in his memory in the Cathedral of Sant’Andrea in Amal¿, dedicated to Saint Andrew.110 He also directed that his eldest son, Alfonso Felice d’Avalos, would be heir to the family fortune and remain under the tutelage of his mother. Isabella was made co-regent of Pescara and Vasto with Ferrante’s brother, Innico d’Avalos, Bishop of Mileto (commonly called the Cardinal d’Aragona) until Alfonso reached the age of majority.111 In many ways, in her role as steward of the d’Avalos collections and as co-regent with a powerful cardinal, Isabella reprised the role that her own mother, Margherita Paleologa, had assumed during her widowhood in Mantua. Isabella Gonzaga was pregnant at the time her husband made his will in July 1571, and records of the d’Avalos family indicate that she did have a second son, Tommaso, who eventually became Bishop of Lucera.112 It is not entirely clear why, then, shortly after her husband’s death, Isabella elected to move – presumably with both of her sons – from Palermo to the Gonzaga holding of Casalmaggiore,

109

Brundin points out that in her letters to Michelangelo, Colonna explored the idea of the Magdalene and St Catherine of Alexandria, along with the Virgin, as “positive role model(s) for Catholic women,” 6RQQHWV IRU 0LFKHODQJHOR 23. For other reÀections on Colonna and the image of the Magdalene see Barbara Agosti, “Vittoria Colonna e il culto della Maddalena tra Tiziano e Michelangelo,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 71–81. 110 “Prego la marchesa mia, che con la comoditá di tempo, che allei piacerá faccia HGL¿FDUH GH¶ EHQL GHOOD KHUHGLWi QHOOD FKLHVD GL 6DQWR$QGUHD G¶$PDO¿ SHU O¶DQLPD PLD XQDFDSHOODVSHQGHQGRQHOO¶HGL¿FLRHWQHOODGRWDWLRQHLQ¿QDODVRPPDGLGRPLODVFXGLHW dedicandola sotto il titolo di santo Andrea,” Bernini, “La collezione d’Avalos,” 418. 111 Ibid. He goes on to say that their child should dedicate his life to military service. For Innico d’Avalos d’Aragona (1535/36–166), see “The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church Biographical Dictionary,” http://www2.¿u.edu/a mirandas/bios1561.htm (May 15, 2010). 112 “Libro d’Oro della Nobiltà Mediterranea,”, under ‘d’Avalos, Marchesi del Vasto e di Pescara,’ http://www.genmarenostrum.com/pagine-lettere/letteraa/avalos.html (May 15, 2010).

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near Cremona, then under the rule of Vespasiano I Gonzaga of Sabbioneta.113 She remained in Casalmaggiore for the rest of her life, although there are few notices regarding her activities there. In 1576 she summoned the cleric Rinaldo Lanzi, a priest from Cremona who served her in Naples, to preside over religious instruction for one of her sons, presumably Tommaso.114 By the time of her own death in 1579, Isabella had gained a reputation for personal sanctity through the practice of extreme asceticism. She was remembered in almost the same terms as some of the beatae of the earlier sixteenth century. Donesmondi reports that in 1579: The most Excellent lady Isabella Gonzaga, daughter of the late Federico, Duke of Mantua, and widow of Francesco Ferdinando d’Avalos, Marchese of Pescara, was lost from this life, having retired to Casalmaggiore and having inÀicted herself constantly with starvation, corporal penitence and the cilice, completely given to prayer, to begging for alms and to the contemplation of heavenly causes and, in short, to all pious Christian matters, leaving behind a reputation for great sanctity.115

Isabella’s portrait is included in an altarpiece that depicts the Madonna of the 5RVDU\, painted in c.1580 by the artist Ambrogio Oliva for a church in Occimiano, in the province of Alessandria in Piedmont, a town not far from the Paleologa stronghold in Monferrato (Illustration 21). The work was commissioned by Isabella’s brother, Guglielmo Gonzaga, who was Duke of Mantua and Monferrato at the time of his sister’s death. Beneath the central image of the Madonna of the Rosary are a number of portraits, among them Margherita Paleologa, her mother Anna d’Alençon, Pope Pius V, the Emperor Charles V, Guglielmo Gonzaga and his sister, Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos.116

113 Casalmaggiore was acquired from Milan by Ludovico Gonzaga of Bozzolo (d.1540), and later passed to Luigi Rodomonte Gonzaga (d.1532) and then to his son, Vespasiano I Gonzaga, Prince of Sabbioneta (d.1591), Amadei, Cronaca Universale, II:360–1. 114 Giovanni Romani, 0HPRULH 6WRULFKH(FFOHVLDVWLFKH GL &DVDOPDJJLRUH (Casalmaggiore: Per i Fratelli Bizzarri, 1829), 64–5. 115 Ippolito Donesmondi, 'HOO¶KLVWRULDH HFFOHVLDVWLFD GL 0DQWRYD ± (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1977), II:253; see also Amadei, Cronaca universale, II:830. 116 V. Natale, “Vicende di un’iconogra¿a pittorica,” in3LR9H6DQWD&URFHGL%RVFR $VSHWWLGLXQDFRPPLWWHQ]DSDSDOH, ed. Carlenrica Spantigati and Giulio Ieni (Rome: Orso, 1985), 399–443, also cat. 8, 0DGRQQDRIWKH5RVDU\, attributed to Ambrogio Oliva, c. 1580, Chiesa del SS. Nome di Gesù, Occimiano, Italy, 436. The portraits in the lower quadrant of the altarpiece are identi¿ed as Margherita Paleologa, Anna d’Alençon, unidenti¿ed female pro¿le, the Emperor Charles V, the humanist Stefano Guazzo, Pope Pius V, Bishop Ambrogio Aldegatto of Casale, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, Guglielmo Gonzaga and his sister, Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos, in I. Grignolio and L. Angelino, I tesori delle chiese del 0RQIHUUDWR±(Villanova Monferrato: 1994), 72–3.

21

Ambrogio Oliva, the Madonna of the Rosary, Church of the Madonna of the Rosary, Occimiano (Alessandria); the women portrayed are (from left to right): Margherita Paleologa, her mother Anna d’Alencon and Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos (far right). Reproduced with the kind permission of Roberto Maestri, Circolo Culturale “I Marchesi di Monferrato”

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These ¿gures were selected to reÀect the legitimacy of Gonzaga rule in Monferrato, which had ¿rst been established under Charles V through the marriage of Margherita Paleologa and Federico II Gonzaga, and to suggest Guglielmo’s continuity with the imperial Paleologue line. Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos was undoubtedly included as an act of commemoration, since the altarpiece was painted so soon after her death, but also because of the aura of piety that had accrued to her during her widowhood. The altarpiece is also remarkable in that it draws together three generations of women of the Paleologue family; Anna d’Alençon, Margherita Paleologa and Isabella Gonzaga d’Avalos. Like Bonsignori’s altarpiece of the Beata Osanna in Mantua, Oliva’s altarpiece draws together mothers and daughters and becomes a family portrait inscribed and described within a common language of devotion.

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Appendix I

Wills Margherita Cantelma (6 March 1532) Isabella d’Este (22 December 1535) Margherita Paleologa (21 May 1563) A Note on Transcriptions Except where indicated, the transcriptions are my own, made from documents in the Archivio di Stato in Mantua. I have transcribed the documents as written, maintaining the original orthography and most of the original abbreviations. Any interpolations, contained in square brackets, are added to amplify and clarify abbreviated words or phrases. Passages that I found illegible or unreadable are marked by (…), as are lacunae in the original documents and sections that I have omitted at the beginning or end of documents. Any errors or omissions are strictly my own. Last Will and Testament of Margherita Cantelma ASM, AG, Archivio Notarile, notaio Gianfrancesco Sartori, Imbreviature anno 1532, Last will and testament of Margherita Cantelma, 6 March 1532, Mantua. As published in Giulio Romano. Repertorio di fonti documentarie, edited by Daniela Ferrari, 2 vols., Series: Pubblicazione degli Archivi di Stato, Fonti XIV (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, Uf¿cio Centrale per i Beni Archivisti, 1992), I:499–501. Excerpt (…). In Christi nomine amen. Anno Domini a navitate eiusdem millesimo quingentesimo trigesimo secundo, inditione quinta, tempore serenissimi principis et domini domini (sic) Caroli divina sibi favente clementia Romanorum imperatoris et simper augusti, die mercurii sexto mensis martii, inte horam sextam et horam septimam noctis sequientis, in domo habitationis infrascriptae illustrissimae dominae testatricis et in eius camera cubiculari, sita Mantuae in contrata Leopardi (…) Ibique illustris et excellens domina domina Margarita de Malosellis, uxor quondam illustris et potentis domini domini Sigismundi Cantelmi, olim ducis Sorae, civis et habitatrix Mantuae in dicta contrata Leopardi, sana mente, sensu et intellectu, licit sit corpore languens, (…) nolens intesta decedere (…), per

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presenens nuncupativum, idest sine scriptis, testamentum facere procuravit ac fecit (…). In primis nanque prefata illustris domina testatrix animam suam omnipotenti Deo ac gloriosissimae semper virgini Mariae et toti caelesti curiae (…) devote commendavit; corpus vero suum, cum ab eo anima separate fuerit, sepelliri seu deponi iussit, voluit et orinavit in ea ecclesia et loco ubi decentius et magis congue videbitur et placuerit infrascriptae illustrissimae et excellentissimae dominae marchionissae, eius illustrissimae dominae testatricis heredi, et cum exequiis, funeralibus et of¿ciis honori¿cis ad arbitrium et voluntatem eiusdem illustrissimae dominae eius heredis (…). Item iussit (…) prefata illustris domina testatrix quod infracripta illustrissima et excellentissima domina, eius heres, teneatur et obligate sit, post mortem ipsius illustris dominae testatricis et quam citius poetrit, erigi, construe et aedi¿cari facere in civitate Mantuae et in loco ubi magis placuerit ipsi illustrissimae dominae, eius heredi, monasterium mnialium ordinis canonicorum regularium sancti Augustini de quo, ut ipsa dixit, ¿t mention in quodam instrumento, inter eam clebrato et verabilem matrem sororem Aureliam oridinis predicti (…), rogato per dominum Hieronymum de Augustonibus, civem et notarium publicum Mantuae, sub anno, mense et die in eo contentis, ad quod se remittit, expedendo, ac per ipsam illustrissimam dominam, eius heredem, expendi vult et mandate prefata illustrissima domina testatrix in fabrica et aedi¿ciis ipsius monasterii erigendis, faciendis et construendis ducatos duo mille ex denariis ipsius illustris dominae testatricis (…) in quibus quidem ducatis duobus mille ipsa illustris domina testatrix computari vult et intendit scutos mille quadraginta a sole quos, ut asseruit, dono habuit a chisstianissimo tege Francorum; quod quidem monasterium ipsa illustris domina testatrix erigi iussit, voluit et ordinavit sub titulo Presentationis Sanctae Mariae in Templo, (…). Item legavit et iure legati reliquite predicto monasterio et supra construendo omne argentums seu omnia vasa argentea cuiuscunque sortis ipsius illustris dominae testatricis, quod et quae habet tam penes prefatam illustrissimam dominam marchionissam quam penes se et in quocunque alio loco necnon et eius ancoam pictam imagine Mariae virginis et argento minitam et ornatam, nunc existentem penes ipsam illustrem dominam testaricem, quam ipsa domina testatrix credere dixit pictam fuisee manu sancti Lucae. (…). Item, iussit, voluit et ornavit prefata illustris domina testatrix quod infrascripta illustrissima et excellentissima domina, eius testatricis heres, teneatur et obligate sit, postquam monasterium predictum constructum fuerit, in ecclesia exteriori ipsisus monasterii, in loco condigno et decenti construe facere tres sepulturas, unam scilicet pro ipsa domina testatrice et alias duas pro quondam illustribus dominis, eius dominae testatricis ¿liis, iam defunctis, expendendo in fabrica et ornamentis earum saltem scutos mille auri et etiam ultra, ad libitum prefatae illustrissimae dominae eius heredis (…), in quibus quidem sepulturis, postquam constructae fuerint, ipsa illustris domina testatrix voluit, iussit, mandavit et ordinavit nedum cadaver suum et ossa sua, sed etiam cadavera et ossa prefatorum quondam illustrium dominorum, eius ¿liorum, reponi et colocari. (…). Item legavit et iure legati reliquit eadem illustris domina testatrix venerabilibus priori et fratribus conventus et monasterii Sanctae Agnetis de Mantua totum et integrum

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creditum, quod ipsa habet inpresentiarum cum domino Francisco de Rognonibus, hospite in Mantua ad hospicium Solis, (…), gravando ipsos venerabiles priorem et fratres quod ipsi teneantur et obligate sint expenderi ipsos omnes denarios (…) tam in fabricando, construendo et ¿nendo (…) capellam Sanctae Monicae fundatam in dicta ecclesia Sanctae Agnetis (…) quam in emendo paramenta, fulcimenta et ornamenta necessaria pro usu dictae capella. (…). Last Will and Testament of Isabella d’Este ASM, AG, b.332, last will and testament of Isabella d’Este, as written by the notary Odoardo Stivini (Testamento originale di Isabella d’Este rogato dal notaio Odoardo Stivini), 22 December 1535. One of six copies, this one is dated 4 January 1783. New transcription of the complete document. For a partial transcription, see Giulio Romano. Repertorio di fonti documentarie, I:663–4. Testamentum Illma. Et Ex.ma D[omi]na Isabella Estensis Marchionissae Mantua. Ex Rogitibus Egregii D[omi]ni Notarii Odovardi de Stivinij di Arimene Nel nome di Dio, et della Beata Virgine Maria et de Tutta la Corte Celeste Triumphante comendo l’anno della Natività del Nostro Salvatore Signor Ieus Christo mille cinquecento trentacinque Imperante el Sermo Carlo quinte et Dio gratia Imperatore Romano sempre Augusto, a Dì vintidue de Decembre. Indictione octava nella Città da Mantua nel loco che qui de sotto, et in ¿ne del presente Testamento serà espresso presente di Infrascripte Testimonij quali si sotto scriveranno de sua mane. La Illustrissima et Excellentissima Signora la Signora Isabella da Este ¿gliola già dell’Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signor, Hercule Duca de Ferrara et vidua delicta dell Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signor Francesco Gonzaga Marchese de Mantua de fe: me: [fede memoria] et Marchesana de Mantua. Considerando la humana fragilità, et che niuna cosa alli mortali in questo mondo è più certa della morte, ne più incerta dell’hora de epsa morte, colendo mentre e sana del Corpo el della mente ordinare le cose sue como alli prudent, et savij di conviene per questo suo ultimo Testamento nuncupativo, in questo modo ordina (…). In prima cum ogni debita Reverentia et sumissione umilmente accomanda l’anima sua all’altissimo omnipotente Dio pregando, et, supplicanda a Sua Divina Maiestà, che quando l’anima sua serà separata dal corpo et digni per sua cle[me] ntia chiamarla et colorcarla in loro de Beatitudine. Qual corpo suo vole ordina et comanda che sia sepolito in la Chiesia de Sancta Paula della Città de Mantua, posta dentro dal Monasterio del Santa Paula denanti all’Altar grande della ditta chiesia di dentro. Item vole, et comanda, che immediate doppoi la morte di epsa Signora Testatrice si facino dire messe sei millia in remissione delli peccati de epsa

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Signora Testatrice, et la elimonsina de quelle si habbi a pagare per la terza parte per l’Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signore Duca de Mantua suo primogenito infrascripto et per un’altra terza parte per lo Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Monsignor Hercule Cardinal de Mantua suo secondo genito, et l’altra terza parte per l’Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrando suo terzo genito. Item con¿rme alli ven: Monasterio, et Frati de Sancto Dominico de Mantua, ordine de Predicatori li livelli assignatoli de Ducati quindece l’anno cum la gravezza che in cadauno anno nel dì della morte de epsa Signora Testatrice in la loro Chiesia et habbi a dire per li Frati proprij uno solemne of¿tio de morti cum expressa commemoratione de lei Signora Testatrice et nel giorno della morte sua occoresse intale dì che non fusse conveniente far tal of¿tio posci transferire ad un altro giorno vicino, secundo parerà al Priore del detto Monasterio et ancora cum (…) ditti Frati a dire, o far dire, ogni giorno una messa per l’anima di predetta Signora Testatrice oltra il ditto of¿tio inperpetuo, et similmente con¿rma alla (…) Monasterio et Frati de Sancto Francescho di Mantua li livelli assignatoli de Ducati quindeci ogni anno cum la medesema gravezza de celebrare imperpetuo cadauno anno nel giorno che sarà occursa la morte di epsa Signora Testatrice in la lor chiesia per li proprij Frati un of¿tio solemne cum expressa commemoratione di essa Signora Testatrice et etiam ogni giorno una messa per l’anima de predetta Signora Testatrice, e como de sopra nel precedente legato a con¿rmatione de Frati de Sancto Domenico e stato detto gravando ancora l’infrascripto suo universal Herede a far celebrare ogni anno nel medesemo giorno nel qual serà occursa la morte di Lei Signora Testatrice e como di sopra in la Chiesia de Sancto Petro della Città de Mantua uno of¿tio solemne cussi expressa comemoratione de prefata Signora Testatrice. Item lassa all’Hospitale grande de Mantua scuti venticinque in remission de suoi peccati. Item lassa a tutti et singuli Monasterij delle Sore della Città de Mantua et Borghi et Suburbij scuti vinticinque d’oro dal sole per cadauno di essi Monasterij et alle Sore de Sancto Ioanni oltra li predetti, lassa altri vinticinque scuti aciò che tutti li sopraditti Monasterij habbiano a dire, a far dire, uno of¿tio per cadauno Monasterio per l’anima di predetta Signora Testatrice, et di continuo pregar Dio per essa. Item vole lassa et dispone che infra li suoi servitori et servitrici non comprendendo in questo numero le Donzelle siano detti et distribuiti scuti d’or dal sole dece millia delle Intrati che si ritrovaranno in casa o ricolte alla morte di Essa Signora Testatrice. Et non essendo a suf¿cientia delle Intrate, che si ricogliaranno da poi in modo che di quello che mancharà a pagarsi sopra le dette Intrate che si ritrovaranno in casa, o recolte, como di sopra, una terza parte de paghi delle Intrate, che doveriano pervenire al predetto Illustrissimo Signore Duca, un altra terza parte delle Intrate che doveriano pervenire al prefato Illustrissimo Monsignor Cardinale et l’altra terza parte delle Intrate, che doveriano pervenire al prefato Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrando. Volendo, ed expressamente dechiarando, che li prefati suoi Illustrissimi et Excellentissimi Figlioli non possino, ne habbino

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haver’ Intrata alcuna della heredità, et beni di essa Signora Testatrice sino per cadauno di loro respettivamente non seranno satisfatti, et (…) li lassi soprascritti delle messe sei millia et li legati de sopra fatti all’Hospitale et alle Monasterii di Sore et satisfatti alli servitori et servitrice li scuti due millia predetti secundo che cadauno de sopra e stato gravato et la soprascripta distributione di scuti due millia se habbi a fare secundo il consilio, et parere dell’Illustrissima Signora Ducessa di Mantua et molto Reverdissimo Monsignor Archivescovo Arrivabeno et del Magni¿co Messer Aloisi da Gonzaga et Reverdissimo Messer Lodovico da Bagno, et Magni¿co Messer Tommaso Strozzi li quali o due de essi insieme cum la Signora Ducessa havuta informatione dalli of¿ciali pratichi della casa di essa Signora Testatrice secundo la qualità et conditioni, et tempo della servitù, et qualità de servitij, et quantità habbino a fare la ditta distributione secundo che parerà alle loro conscientie. Item vole, dispone, et comanda, che de’ frutti che si ritrovaranno in casa o recolti como di sopra, in caso che satisfatti le soprascritti dua millia scuti ge ne restasse et in quanto non ge ne restasse o non (…) el presente legato per quello che mancharà delli frutti futuri, che doveriano pervenire alli Illustrissimi Figlioli Duca Cardinale et Don Ferrante per la terza parte per cadauno como nel precedente capitolo et col medemo caricho di non poter pigliar frutti per che (…) satisfatto al presente legato sia per li soprascritti suoi ¿glioli integramente satisfatto et pagate le Dote delle Donzelle di essa Signora Testatrice che seranno maritate per quella parte, quale se ritrovasse al tempo della morte di essa Signora Testatrice non esser stata satisfatta. Item vole (…) che alle Donzelle che non saranno maritate al tempo soprascripto, lo infrascripto Illustrissimo Universal Erede paghi le dote conveniente secundo che alle altre Donzelle seranno state dote considerando il tempo, che seranno state al servitio di sua Excellentia et prega l’Illustrissima Signora Ducessa che li presti ogni favore a maritarsi et avere la dote, come de sopra. Item lassa a Catterina sua Donzella che attende alla persona di essa Signora Testatrice in caso che altempo della morte di Lei Signora Testatrice non fusse maritata, et si ritrovi perseverare al servitio de Sua Eccellentia la possessione (…), et pertinentie, che è al presente di essa Signora Testatrice, ma quando si ritrovasse maritata si osservi in lei quello che da sopra è stato ditto delle Donzelle maritate. Item teneramente et cum tutto il core raccomanda all’Illustrissimo Signore Duca suo infrascripto universale Herede tutti et singuli suoi servitori, e servitrici, et all’Illustrissima Signora Ducessa li raccomanda tutte le sue Donzelle et quelle che sono state alli servitij di essa Signora Testatrice et specialmente la Brogna, et la Trotta, alle quali piacerà donagli alcuni delli quadri di essa Signora Testatrice secundo che allor più satisfarà per lor devotione, et a tutte l’altre serà contenta farli tutti quelli piaceri che sua Excellentia faria ad essa Signora Testatrice. Item non volendo la prefata Signora Testatrice che alchuno de quelli che hanno, et haveranno manegiato le Intrate, et denari suoi sia molestato per tal causa libera quieta, et absolve tutti et singuli Fattori et Thesaureri così generali como particular che haveranno sino al dì della morte sua per alcuno tempo manegiate sue Intrate,

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o denari da ogni regione che ne dovessi rendere et da tutti et singuli dichiara esser integramente satisfatta et se alcuna cosa li restaria per il presente legato li rimette pregando et gravando el prefato infrascripto suo Illustrissimo Universal Herede a non molestarli in conto alcuno per le ditte cause in qualunque modo. Item expressamente con¿rma, et dove sia di bisogno di novo, da, et concede tutto quello ch’essa Signora Testatrice a dato, et donato alla Isabella et alla Paula come appare et (…) per publici Decreti. Item vole, et lassa che l’Illustrissimo Signore Duca suo universal Herede dia, et paghi alla Magdalena Spagnuola scuti trento di sole ogni anno in¿no che la viverà. Item lassa, et vole, che lo Illustrissimo et Reverdissimo Cardinale Signore Hercule, suo ¿gliolo dia, et paghi alla Gambacurta scuti trenta di sole ogni anno sino che la viverà. Item lassa et vole che l’Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrando, suo ¿gliolo dia et paghi alla Beatrice Spagnola sino che la viverà scuti trenta simili ogni anno. Item essa Sigrnora Testatrice di bon core raccomanda Morgantino al prefato Illustrissimo Signore Duca et quando non potesse o non volesse stare cum sua Excellentia vole che li dia scuti cinquanta ogni anno ¿no ch’el vive. Et similmente molto raccomanda la Delia alla Illustrissima Signora Duchessa sua nora dilettissima, volendo che quando non volesse o non potesse stare cum sua Excellentia che quella li dia scuti cinquanta ogni anno sino che viverà. Volendo ancora et expressamente disponendo che tutti li servitori et servitrici et homini et donne della casa sua al tempo della sua morte siano per lo infrascripto suo universal Herede vestiti de veste lugubre secundo la convenientia. Item lassa al Magni¿co Cavaliere Messer Aloyso ¿gliolo già del Magni¿co Messer Zoan Petro da Gonzaga per esserli sempre stato molto affezionato servitore la casa che fa già della Ilustrissima Signora Margarita Cantelma in la qual abitava essa quandam Signora Margarita quale essa Signora Testatrice nomina la casa della Montagna cum le sue ragione et pertinentie et sotto le sue con¿ne posta nella città de Mantua in la contrata [...] quale dopoi la morte di esso Messer Aloysio vole che sia del maggior ¿gliolo de età maschio legittimo e naturale et di legittimo matrimonio nato da esso Messer Aloisio intendendo de legittimi come di sotto in altra parte et dechiarerà. Item avendo essa Signora Testatrice in memoria che la predetta Signora Margarita nel suo Testamento lasso che epsa dovesse far fare trei sepolture, como se contene in esso Testamento per observantia de tal dispositione, vole che li mille ducento Ducati de quali essa Signora Cantelma era creditrice de Monsignor proposito de Beccharia Nobile Pavese, et per li quali nuovamente esso Signore proposito a consignato ad essa Signora Testatrice alcune terre nel territorio di Pavia cum patto de poterle recomprare infra certo tempo extrahendoli delle ditte terre o havendoli dal detto Signore proposto si debbino expendere in le ditte trei sepolture da farsi secundo la dispositione della prefata Signora Cantelma et in questo se agì diligentia per lo infrascripto Illustrissimo Herede universale, (...) in extrahere li danari, como in fare le sepolture in caso che per essa Signora Testarice

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non fusseno stati extraherli o non fussino fatte le dette sepolture le quali vole che in ogni modo siano fatte. Item ricordandosi essa Signora Testatrice che ha dato in godimento alla Illustrissima Signora Margarita ¿gliola naturale del quondam Illustrissimo Signore Francesco da Gonzaga Marchese de Mantua et suo dilettissimo et honorandissimo consorte, et signore de grandissima memoria, el palazzo posto nel Borgo de Santo Georgio, et volendo che la predetta Signora Margarita habbi quante li ha consegnato, lassa alla prefata Signora Margarita sino che viverà el predetto palazzo, et dopoi la morte sua vole chel detto palazzo cum sue pertinente sia dell’Illustrissima Signora Ducessa di Mantua sua nora dilettissima. Item per resone de insitutione et per ogni melio modo che puo lassa all Illustrissima e Reveredissima Sor Hyppolita ¿gliola di essa Signora Testatrice in vita sua, et da poi la sua morte al Monasterio di Sancto Vicentio nel quale se trova detta Sor Hyppolita, el Molino di essa Signora Testatrice della Montanara cum sue cagione et pertinentie cum questo se accadesse ch’el detto molino, ò per interessi ò satisfatione delli gentil homini et cittadini che pretendono che li sia danaro per altra causa si levasse o si impedisce che non macinasse al solito, debbi lo infrascripto suo universal Herede farveli fare o (…) un altro di rendita al meno de Ducati cento ogni anno, et sino a tanto che li sia assignato habbino detta Sor Hyppolita et successivamente il detto Monasterio il molino di essa Signora Testatrice di Castiglione Mantuano, cum supplimento ¿no alla summa de Intrata de Ducati cento l’anno, cum questo che ogni dì sia dillo of¿tio de morti l’anima di essa Signora Testatrice per una delle dette sore, et ogni mese una volta sia ditto il predetto of¿tio per tutte le Sore del detto Monasterio insieme o separatamente como meglio li parerà. Item per lo medesemo modo lassa alla predetta Sor Hyppolita un Bambino d’Avolio, quale ha essa Signora Testatrice nel suo oratorio, acciò che recordandosi continuo di essa preghi Dio per ella. Item per ogni melior modo che può lassa et vole che al’Illustrissima et Reverendissima Sor Paula, ¿gliola di essa Signora Testatrice ¿no che la viverà et dopoi la sua morte al Monasterio, et Sor de Santa Paula della Città di Mantua dell’ordine de Sancta Clara, nel qual se ritrova ditta Sor Paula al presente, siano dati ogni anno per elimosina sacchi cento de fromento in questo modo, sacchi venticinque per la Illustrissima Signora Ducessa de Mantua, sacchi venticinque per lo Illustrissimo e Revernedissimo Signore Cardinale suo ¿gliolo, et sacchi venticinque per lo Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrando, et sacchi venticinque per lo Illustrissimo Signore Francesco Marchese de Viadana suo dulcissimo nepote. Cum questo carico che ogni giorno par una delle dette sore sia detto l’of¿tio de morti per l’anima di essa Signora Testatrice et ogni mese una volta sia ditto il predetto of¿tio per tutte le sore del ditto Monasterio ò insieme, ò separatamente, como meglio li piacerà in remissione de peccati di essa Signora Testatrice. Item in ogni miglior modo lassa alla prefata Sor Paula un Croci¿xo de avolio qual essa Signora Testatrice ha nel suo oratorio, aciòche habbi a tener memoria di essa in le sue oratione.

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Item sapendo essa Illustrissima Signora Testarice siccome la Illustrissima Signora Isabella Duchessa de Urbino di grata memoria (…) per ¿gliola la Illustrissima Signora Duchessa al presente d’Urbino ¿gliola di essa Signora Tesatrice, ma ancora si come ¿gliola l’ha trattata et exercitata in lei lo of¿tio materno, par acciò che di continuo tenga memoria di essa Signora Testatrice ha voluto et (…) de Institutione ed in ogni melior modo che può, li lassa la sexta parte de Ducati vinticinque millia a essa Signora Testatrice dati in dote. Quale sexta parte de Ducati venticinque millia vole che sia pagata per un terzo di essa sexta parte dallo infrasripto Illustrissimo Suo universal Herede in termine de due anni dopoi la morte di essa Signora Testatrice. Cum questa dichiaratione però, che se accadesse ch’essa Signora Testatrice manchasse prima ch’el preditto Illustrissimo Suo Herede (…) di pagare ad essa Signora Duchessa de Urbino, o suo Illustrissimo Signore Consorte, el resto della dote della prefata Signora Duchessa in quel caso li dui anni soprascritti non incommentiano se non ¿nito tempo del pagamento della ditta dote secundo la conventione novamente fatta infra loro o loro agente, della quale è sta rogato Adoardo de Arimine notaio e cancelliere del Ducale senato de Mantua, et notaio infrascripto. Et l’altra terza parte della detta sexta parte vole che alla detta Signora Duchessa de Urbino sia paga dallo Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Hercule, Cardinale de Mantua suo ¿gliolo, infra il termine de anni trei della morte di essa Signora Testatrice. Et l’altra terza parte della detta sexta parte vole che li sia pagata dallo Illustrissimo Signore Ferrando suo ¿gliolo infra il medesemo termino de anni tre como di sopra. Cum questa dechiarazione che se la preditta Signora Ducessa di Urbino manchasse (…) ad essa Signora Testatrice tal legato sia extinto et non passì nelli Heredi de essa Signora Ducessa de Urbino. Item per ragione di institutione et in ogni miglior modo lassa all’Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferando suo ¿gliolo Carissimo la Corte de Sancto Matheo, che fu già dell’Illustrissima Signora Margarita Cantelma con tutte le sue possessioni, peschere, regione et pertinente nella Potestaria de Viadana, cum tutti li Bestiami di essa Signora Testatrice che si ritrovaranno al tempo della morte di essa Signora Testatrice suso detta Corte, et possessioni, cum caricho de pagare li sacchi venticinque de formento ogni anno per elemonsina all Illustrissima Sor Paula et al Monasterio di Sancta Paula di sopra lassatole gravandolo ancora a satisfare tutte le gravezze et cariche che li sono per essa Signora Testatrice (…) imposte nel presente Testamento. Item lassa alla Illustrissima Signora Donna Antonia, ¿gliola del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrante, uno gioiello cum una spinella cum uno smeraldo sopra et una perla. Item un siglio de Diamati. Item uno simile de Diamanti, et uno Diamante in ponta [punta] fatto a faciette, le quale gioie sono pervenute ad essa Signora Testatrice per la heredità della soprascripta Signora Margarita Cantelma. Item per regione di institutione, et per ogni altro melior modo che può, lassa allo Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Hercule da Gonzaga dignissimo della

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Santa Chiesa Romana, suo ¿gliolo dilettissimo, el Castello di Solarolo, posto nella parte de Romagna nel Territorio di Faienza cum tutte le sue pertinentie, Iurisdictioni, Regioni et adjacentie et cum tutte quelle regioni che li ha essa Signora Testatrice, col carico de pagar li sacchi venticinque de frumento ogni anno per elimonsina alla Illustrissima Signora Sor Paula, et al Monasterio di Sancta Paula di sopra lassatoli, gravandolo ancora a satisfare tutte le gravezze et cariche che li sono per essa Signora Testatrice, stati imposti nel presente Testamento. Pregando anchora esso Signore Cardinale che sia contento de tener nello of¿tio et governo del detto Castello Messer Leonello Marchesi sino che viverà, quale li racomanda. Et qual Castello di Solarolo cum le ditte ragione pertinentie et adiacentie et conditione, et cum le cariche soprascripto, dopo la morte di esso Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale ordina detta Signora Testatrice et vole, et commanda, che havendo lo Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signore Federico Duca di Mantua più di uno ¿gliolo maschio legittimo, et naturale, intendendo legittimo et naturale come di sotto, sia de uno de ditti ¿glioli ad electione de esso Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale non potendo però ellegere il Primogenito, al quale per dover succeder nel Ducato di Mantua anchora che summamente l’a[ni] mi parendoli non aver bisogno de tal legato non vole che in tal caso il detto Castello cum suoi regioni ut supra pervenga, ma ad uno delli altri come di sopra. Et non elligendo sua Signoria sia del secundo genito, intendendo secundo genito quello che serà secundo a quello che doverà succedere nel Ducato de Mantua. Et quando al tempo della morte di esso Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale non li fusse alcuno ¿gliolo o descendente maschio legittimo, et naturale, ut supra dillo prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca de Mantua, o ne fusse solo uno, in detti case vole che il ditto Castello cum sue regione, et ut supra, vadi alli ¿glioli maschi legittimi, et naturali ut supra dell’Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrante suo ¿gliolo di quali possa esso Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale in tal caso ellegere quel li parerà. Et se al ditto tempo della morte di esso Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale non se ritrovasse più de uno ¿gliolo maschio, o descendente legittimo et naturale como di sopra, dell’Illustrissimo Signore Duca Federico suprascritto, ne si ritrovasse alchuno ¿gliolo maschio legittimo, et naturale ut supra del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrante, vole ch’el ditto Castello vada a quell’uno ¿gliolo, et descendente del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca di Mantua, che si ritrovarà viva a quel tempo, non obstante che havesse a succedere or (…) nel Ducato de Mantua. Et quando al ditto tempo non si ritrovasse alcuno descendente maschio legittimo ut supra del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Duca Federico, ne del prefato Signore Don Ferrando, et si ritrovasse vivo el prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico, vole che a lui devenga il ditto Castello, cum tutti sue regioni, et ut supra. Et non essendo vivo il prefato Signore Federico, et essendo superstite el detto Signore Don Ferrante a lui pervenga. Ma se al ditto tempo della morte del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Cardinale non si ritrovasse alchuno descendente del Prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico, ne dal prefato Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrante maschio legittimo, et naturale como de sopra, ne el prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico, ne il prefato Illustrissimo Signore Don Ferrante in tal caso

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vole chel detto Castello cum tutti le sue regioni ut supra cum ditte pertinentie et cariche, sia delle ¿gliole femmine legittime, et naturale, come de sopra, del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca di Mantua delle quale essendo più de una posci il Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale preditto lassarlo ad una quelle li parerà. Et non essendo viva alcuna vole che sia delle ¿gliole femine legittime et naturale del prefato Signore Don Ferrante delle quale, essendo più de una, possa il Reverendendissimo Signore Cardinale elleger qual li parerà di lassarlo. Et quando al tempo della morte del Reverendissimo prefato Signore Cardinale non fusse vivo alcuno ¿gliolo maschio et femina delli ditte Signori Illustrissimi Federico et Don Ferrante legittimi et naturali, ne essi Illustrissimi Signori Duca Federico e Don Ferrante, vole essa Signora Testatrice et despone che el ditto Castello cum pertinentie, et cariche, come di sopra, sia del’Illustrissima Signora Eleanora Ducessa di Urbino sua ¿gliola soprascripta. E dopoi la morte di essa Signora Duchessa anchor che havesse et lassasse ¿glioli, vole che in tal caso vada allo Illustrissimo Signore Don Francesco da Este suo delectissimo nepote et fratre, et a suoi descendenti legittimi, et naturali. Volendo però ch’el prefato Signore Cardinale in ogni caso di necessità sia licito disponere de ditto Castello et alienarlo como li parerà, per subvenire in tal necessitate, a non obstane li soprascripti fedi commissi. Et perchè de sopra in molti loci se facta mentione de ¿glioli legittimi et naturale per dechiaratione detta sua voluntà, essa Signora Testatrice dechiara che intende et vole che siano legittimi et naturali nati de legittimo matrimonio a principio, in modo che per via o modo alcuno non sia mai compresso alcuno nato bastardo anchora che fusse legittimato per qualunque causa, modo, o via, o da quali voglia legge, o persona per qualunque autorità che havesse ancora che fusse dal Papa, o Imperatore et ancor (…) esso Papa o Imperatore o tutti due fusse legittimato perchè sua ferma, et constantissima intentione è che mai alcuno Bastardo da Natività sotto pretesto de qualunque legittimatione possa in modo alcuno succedere in alcuni di beni di essa Signora Testatrice. Et così et di tali vole che se intenda in ogni loco, ove di ¿glioli o descendenti, ha fatto mentione o farà nel presente suo Testamento. Item lassa al prefato Illustrissimo Reverendissimo Signore Hercule Cardinale soprascritto uno smiraldo intagliato cum una testa de uno Christo cum littere grece quale hebbe dall’Illustrissimo Signore Duca de Ferrara suo Patre. Item uno sparaviero da letto di lensa (…) lavorate de seta cremesina. Item una capsetta nella quale sono panigelli lavorati de seta et d’oro et li ditti panigelli. Item di paramenti et le fornimenti de argento per la capella et per la messa. Item vole che li sia restituito uno quadro hauto da sua Signora Illustrissima et Reverendissima dove è dipinto Moìse quando cava l’acqua della pietra per el populo di Israel. Item ordina, commanda et dispone che tutti et singuli prenotati suoi ¿glioli et ¿gliole così ecclesiastici et monache como secular, debbano star et stano taciti et contenti di quanto li lassa essa Signora Testatrice in quest suo Testamento, et niente di più per alcun tempo mai possino o debbino domadar tanto per regione di

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successione o leggittima alcuna, o suplimento de legittima quanto per qualunque altra regione o causa o cagione, qual pensare or imaginare si potesse, et così satisfacti li dicti lasciti a cadauno di loro fatti siano tenuti et obligati far ¿ne quietatione, et liberatione all’Illustrissimo suo infrascipto universal Herede in valida, et autentica forma. Item lassa all Illustrissima et Excellentissima Signora la Signora Margarita di Monferrato, Duchessa di Mantua sua nora delectissima, el palazzo et loco di Porto cum suoi giardini, et possessioni vicini, et la columbara de Moscatelli cum tutte le lor pertinentie, et el molino di Porto et el palazzo et loco di Ungaria, el qual palazzo et loco de Porto cum sue pertinentie, vole essa Signora Testatrice ordina che sia continuamente delle Illustrissime Ducesse de Mantua della Illustrissima Casa de Gonzaga per lo piacere, et di Porto, et con caricho sempre de dare alla Illustrissima Reverendissima Sor Paula et Monasterio de Sancta Paula li sacchi vinticinque de formento de sopra per elimosina lasciatoli gravando essa Signora Duchessa satisfare a tutte le gravezze datoli nel presente Testamento. Item lassa all Illustrissimo Signor, el Signor Francesco de Gonzaga, primogenito dello Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca di Mantua, Marchese di Viadana, et nepote dulcissimo di essa Signora Testatrice, la Corte di essa Signora Testatrice de Castione [Castiglione] Mantovano, et el Molino, che ha in detto loco senza preiuditio, però del legato fatto di sopra alle sor de Sancto Vincentio, quale vole che habbi il suo effetto non obstante il presente legato. Item lassa al prefato Illustrissimo Signore Francesco Marchese di Viadana suo nepote tutti li argenti che si ritrovaranno di essa Signora Testatrice al tempo della sua morte, excepti quelli che de sopra sono lassati allo Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Cardinale. Item lassa al soprascritto Signore Francesco uno ¿lo de perle grosse, quale essa Signora Testatrice porto seco quando venne a Marito, il qual ¿lo vole che sia conservato per la Signora Duchessa di Mantua sua Matre, et per il detto Signore Francesco sia donato alla sua consorte quando lo piglierà. In tutti li altri suoi bene mobili, et immobile et (…) de qualunque sorte, vogliano essere o siano al ragioni et actioni et cagioni in qualunque loro siano et si ritrovino esser lassa et instituisse suo herede universale lo Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo signor, el Signor Federico de Gonzaga, Duca di Mantua su ¿gliolo honorandissimo, al quale quando cum[un]que el moresse, sustituisse in ogni melior modo che può el soprascripto Illustrissimo Signore Francesco, ¿gliolo primogenito del prefato Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca de Mantua, anchora che avesse altri ¿glioli quanto sia però in li beni immobili, et in tutti le antiquità adornamenti et gentilezze, quali essa Signora Testatrice ha nel loco chiamato la Grotta, posto in la Corte Vecchia in la Città de Mantua, excepto le lassate di sopra. Le quale cose della Grotta vole che cusì in vita del soprascriptio suo universal Herede, como dopoi la morte, da Illustrissima Signora Duc[h]essa de Mantua suprascripta, le habbi a godere, et tenere in custodia et governo per suo diletto, et piacer, essendo però la proprietà et dominio del soprascritto Signore Francesco primogenito, et non li essendo lui delli altri ¿glioli et descendenti maschi del

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prefato Signore Duca legittimi et naturali como di sopra. Et quando cum[un]que manchasse el soprascritto Signore Federico Duca de Mantua senza ¿glioli maschi legittimi, et naturali, como de sopra, vole et ordina la detta Signora Testatrice che la sua heredità, et roba, vada all’Illustrissimo et Reverendissio Signore Hercule Cardinale et Illustrissimo Signore Ferrante suoi ¿glioli soprascritti, et alli ¿glioli et descendenti maschi legittimi et naturali del ditto Signore Don Ferrante ut supra. Et questo vole essa Signora Testatrice che sia el suo ultimo Testamento qual vole et commanda che prevalia ad ogni altro Testamento, che havessi fatto anchor (…) clausula derogatoria alle future ultime voluntà, et anchor che fuisse inter liberos, perchè ogni altra sua precendent ultima voluntà et Testamento et (…) revoco et annulla et vole ch’el presente vaglia per (…) Testamento, et non valendo al presente o per lo advenire per vigore de Testamento vole che vaglia per vigore de Codicillo et successivamente di donatione causa mortis, et per qualunque via et modo che di ragione (…) così al presente come per lo advenir. Appresso la prefata Signora Testatrice cerchiarando melio il legato soprascritte, como de sopra, fatto alla Illustrissimo et Reverendissima a Signor Sor Ippolita de sua Excellentia ¿gliola, et successive al Monasterio preditto de Sancto Vincenzio preditto del molino della Montanara dice, vole, et dichara che in caso ch’el molino predetto della Montanara come di sopra lassato alla predetta Signora Sor Ippolita, et Monasterio soprascritto, fusse distrutto, et levato del loco (…) presente et trasportato in altro loco et fabricato in laudibili forma che esso molino così trasportato et fabricato in altro loco sij et debba essere della predetta Sor Ippolita et succesive del Monasterio predetto. Et in caso ch’el fusse trasportato et fabricato in altra loco et fusse de (…) rendita et entrata de Ducati cento ogni anno, vole, et aggrandir’ soprascritto Illustrissimo Suo Universal Herede a supplire ad essa Sor Ippolita, et Monasterio predetto, sino alla summa predetta de Ducati cento d’oro ogni anno de intrata. Et in caso che detto molino fusse destrutto, et non fusse fabricato in altro loco, vole et expressamente comanda che prefata Signora Sor Ippolita et successive el Monasterio preditto habbi el molino de Castion [Castiglione] Mantovano cum il suplimento della intrata sino alli Ducati cento, como di sopra nel suo legato sta espresso, et cum il caricho, che in esso legato se contiene. Item prefata Signora Testatrice, vole, ordine et expresamente commanda, che per modo, causa, o respetto alcuno ch’el suo corpo dopoi la morte sua non sia tagliato, nè aperto et così dichiara esser sua ferma intention, et voluntà. Item ancora predetta Signora Testatrice dechiarando melio il legato de sopra fatto a Morgantino, dice et dichara, e per sua ferma voluntà et intentione, ch’el detto Morgantino habbi dai beni di essa Signora Testatrice Ducati cinquanta le intrata ogni anno, et de ditta proprietà possi disponeva como la parerà, a conto, et per parte de qual contrata per regione de legato, et como de sopra lassa al ditto Morgantino il Loco di predetto Signora Testatrice (…) comissariato de [...] appresso la sue con¿ne et como per dicta Signora Testatrice il qual e de intrata vinti ogni anno, quali ducati vinti vole che siano detratti dalli detti ducati cinquanta, et che per el resto, cioè per Ducati trenta de intrata ogni anno, il prefato Illustrissimo Signore

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suo universal herede gli provveda della proprietà como a sua Excellentia parerà, et piacer, et così conseguita la proprietà per esso Morgantino, a revoca il legato delli cinquanta Ducati ogni anno ad esso Morgantino in vita sua lassati, atiòche li detti Ducati cinquanta non se duplicasseno, per che intende solamente conseguire il presente legato, et non il soprascritto. Qual Morgantino di buon core recommanda al prefato Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signore Duca suo universal herede, et como de sopra et sin tanto, che li assignarà la proprietà predetta, vole che sua Excellentia ogni anno li dia li detti Ducati trenta. Item prega prefata Signora Testatrice il prefato Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Signor suo universal Herede voglia altra la recomandazione de suoi servitori, haver recomandati Georgio Moro de prefato Signora Testatrice (…) et Anteo Moro suo staffero et per esser forestieri et cadauno di essi dare uno of¿tio che possino vivere. Item prefata Signora Testatrice prega la prefata Illustrissima et Excellentissima Signora Duchessa de Mantua, sua nora dilectissima, voglia haver raccomandato Zoan Andrea fattor al Palazzo de Porto et tenerlo per fatto al ditto loco di Porto sin che viverà. Item prefata Signora Testatrice prega il prefato Illustrissimo ed Excellentissimo suo Herede universale voglia dar un of¿tio a Philippo de {...} servitor de sua Excellentia, e di ante il quale possi vivere, quali per esserli sta longo tempo servitor, et fedele, molto lo raccomanda a sua Excellentia. Item lassa alla Isabella, della quale serà mentione de sopra, uno delli cinti d’or battuto, che è solita de portare essa Signora Testatrice, o la valuta d’uno di essi cinti d’or battuto, da esser dato ad essa Isabella ad arbitrio della prefata Illustrissima et Excellentissima Signora Duchessa sua nora dilettissima dopoi la morte de prefata Signora Testatrice. Et prefata Signora Testatrice dice, et dichiarà, che questi ultimi legati vole che valiano nel modo, che pono volere et in quel medesimo modo, che valiano et pono valere li altri legati soprascritti et il presente soprascritto Testamento como di sopra, anchor che siana sta fatte et scripti et posti da poi la institutione de lo herede universale. Et così dice, et dichiarà esser sua ultima voluntà quale vole et comanda, che valia et como de sopra è sta appresso et cusì prefata Signora Testatrice ha ordinato di (…) lassato instituito et substituto et ordina dispone vole lassa commenda recommanda instituisse et ... como de sopra nel presente suo Testamento se contiene in presenti del molto Reverendo Monsignor Episcopo Messer Antonio da Cappo, et Reverendo Messer Lodovico da Bagno, Testimonij chiamanti, et adhibiti per prefata Signora Testatrice qual lei insieme cum li infrascripti altri cinque testimonij per detta Signora Testatrice chiamati ed adhibiti cum li predetti Monsignor Episcopo da Capp[ell]a, et Messer Lodovico alla infrascripta sottoscriptione, et dechiarazione de sua propria mane et sotto scriveranno. A qual testamento è sta ordinato et sottoscritto per la prefata Signora Testatrice, et per le Testimonij infrascripti, nella casa dell prefata Signora Testatrice et a le lassate pare la Signora Cantelma posta nella Città de Mantua nella contrada [...] et in la camera terrena prima di essa casa, dechiarando anchora preditta Illustrissima Signora

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Testatrice che le soprascritte trei sepulture si habiamo a fare del arbitrio della prefata Illustrissima Signora Duchessa et suprascripti distributori quali insieme cum sua Excellentia habbiano a disponere la danari, et farli fare, et ¿nire comidi sopra. Io Isabella Marchessa di Mantua ho ordinato et fatto (…) lo soprascritto mi Testamento del parte ne (…) li dui Testimonij in ¿ne di esso nominati in questa carta, et per più per mezza in ¿ne ho posto il mio nome di mani propria nel quali ha instituito Herede universale lo Illustrissimo Signore Federico Duca di Mantua mio ¿olo Carissimo, et cuse como in esso in tutto ordino, et dispono vaglio lasso et constituisco et substituisco como di sopra si contene. Qual testamento de mia comessione et voluntà è stato scrito per Odoardo de Arimini, notaio infrascripto, et in fede ho sottoscritto a mia propria mano nel loro soprascripto et presente li infrascripti testimonij, quali se sottoscriveranno die soa propria mano da me per Testimonij chiamati, adhibiti, et pregati adì XXII de Decembre 1535. (Ad of¿tium publici Regio Ducalis Registri eiusdem Civitatis et Ducatus attestor premissam copiam ¿delitor transcriptam fuisse ab alia copia registrata in volumine anni 1535 Fol. 1425, et p... accurata confrontatione ... concordantem invenisse. In quon[du]m testimonium hic me authentice ¿rmavi. Hac die 4 Iannuarij 1783). Testamentum Illustrissimae Dominae Isabellae Estensis Marchionisse Mantuae. Last Will and Testament of Margherita Paleologa ASM, AG, b.332, D.VIII N.o 10a, Testamentum Ill.me et Ecc.me Dne . Marg[ari]te Paleologa Gonzaga Ducisse Mantue et Marchionisse Mtonisferrati, 21 May 1563. (Previously unpublished). [...] Ibid. Ill.ma et Ex.ma Dna Dna Margaritta Paleologa de Gonzaga Ducissa Mantj. Merit.ma et March.issa Montisferrati Nata re: me: q. Ill.mo et Ex.mo Dni Dni Guglielmi Marchionis Montisferrati. Vidua relicta fe: me: quon’ Illmo et Ex.mo prin.s Dni Dni Federico Gonzaga primi olim Mantue Ducis et Marchion[i] s Montisferrati, sana Deij onmipotentis gra’ mente sensu intellectu et corpore Non imemora Fragilital. Humane, vitamq mortaliu’ morte terminari (…) et ipsius mortis diem esse omnibus incertum, Ex.q egritudinis corplis vehementia mentem pleninq adeo ob.... ut nedu’ templum rez, sed sui ipsius cogat ipsa languoris vehementia penitus obliuisu Nollens intestata deceder’ sed du’ corpus vivibus, et mens rone’ viget, volens ronis instinestu (…) in primis saluti provider’, et de rebus suis deinde talem ordinationem facer’, ut nulla rixa nulla ve de illis discordia post eius obitum valeat exoriri (…) dicitus Testamentum materna et vulgari lingua conceptum, pro eius clariori et faciliori intelligentia in hunc qui seguit.r modu’ facer’ procuravit condidit et fecit. In prima, Raccommanda humilmente et devotamente l’anima sua a Nostro Signore Dio, alla gloriosa Vergine et Madre Maria sua pia advocate, et a tutta la corte celestiale. Secondo, vole che il corpo suo quando l’anima serà separata da

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quello sij sepelito nella sepultum medema dove è quello del Illustrissimo Signore Duca suo consorte la cui anima in gloria sia, trovandosi anco nella medema chiesa delle Reverende suori di S[an]ta Paola di Mantoa quello dell’Illustrissimo Signore Duca sua ¿gliolo esse le occoresse mancar’ in Monferrato, o, altrove sia fatto condur’ in qua il corpo et posto come di sopra. E più lassa per limosina al spedal grande di Mantoa cento scudi da essegli datti per una sol volta per lo Illustrissimo Signore suo herede universale subito che serà morta. Et al spedal della Misericordia nel medemo modo lassa altri cento scudi et altri cento a quello delle Convertite da essergli date come di sopra. E più, a tutti li monastieri de suori et frati mendicanti della cità di Mantoa et paramente a quelli che sono di fuori di detta Cità, dentro però delle cinq[ue] miglia a quali non si fanno da basso lassi particolari, lassa venti scudi per cadauno da essergli dati come di sopra, di subito per una sola volta. Ma quelli di S. Vinc[enz] o di S. Paola di S. Gioanni et della Annuntiata nel borgo di S. Georgio a anali si fanno lassi particolari, per esservi professe sono di questa Illustrissima casa Gonzaga, non siano conpresi in questo legato ne manco quelli di S. Spirito et S. Dominico, a quali si lassa come da basso. E più alla Illustrissima et Revernda Signora Suor. Hippolota Gonzaga sua cognata et sorella di bon anima professa nel monastero di S. Vincenzo di Mantoa, lassa che siano dati ogni anno cinquanta ducati per lo Illustrissimo Signore suo herede universale, sin tanto che durava la vita di essa Signora suor Hippolita per suo servicio, et che doppo la morte di essa si assegni per lo Illustrissimo Signore suo ¿gliolo et herede al predicto monastero di San Vinc[e]nzo una bona et (…) proprietà, nel dominio Mantovano della quale si possano comodamente cavar’ ogni anno in perpetuo ducati cinquanta, pregando la predetta Signora Suor Hippolota che si degni nelle sue orationi et nelle orationi delle Reverende Monache di quel monastiero di haver memoria della anima di essa Signora Testatrice, Consorte, et Figliolo. E più lassa, per ragion di prelegato, all’Illustrissimo Signore suo herede infrascripto il molino di Porto con ogni ragioni et pertinente soe, con obligo di dar’ ogni anno alla Illustrissima et. Benedetta Signora suor Paola similmente soa cognata et sorella di bon anima professa nel monasterio di S. Paola di Mantoa, sacchi cinquanta di formento, tutto il tempo della vita di essa Signora suor Paola, et doppo la morte di quella habbi a darli al detto monastero di S. Paola ogni anno in perpetuo acciòche nel luoco ovè servanno e corpi delli detti Illustrissimi Signori Iugali et ove è il corpo del ¿gliolo primogenito s’habbi memoria di dir’ perpetuamente of¿tij et orationi per le anime luoro et delli Signori suoi attenenti pregando essa Signora Suor Paola che nelle soe orationi voglia haver simile memoria. E più lascia alla Ser.ma Signora Leonara di Austria di Gonzaga, Archiduchessa di Austria Duchessa di Mantoa et Marchesa di Monferrato, Nuora sua diletissima et honorandissima, il palazzo di San Zorzo con tutte le soe ragioni et pertinente, et questo non già perchè la cosa sia ben degna de l’altezza sua, ma per dargli

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occasione et sogetto di raccordarsi alle volte di essa Signora Testatrice. Et volendo anco seguir la voluntà della Fe. Me. di Madama Illustrissima la Signora Isabella già Marchesa di Mantova, suocera sua osservandissima le lascia medemente per suo piacer, et di Porto il palazzo et giardini di Porto con le possessioni vicine et con ogni et qualunque miglioramenti et edi¿cij fategli per essa Signora Testatrice col medema obligo, che fu dalla predicta Illustrissima Signora Marchesa lasciato per suo testamento. Et più lascia alla Illustre et D.da S. Donna Camilla Gonzaga, professa nel monastero di S. Giovanni di Mantoa et alla Illustre S. D. Angela Gonzaga professa nel monastero della Anuntiata di S. Georgio di Mantoa, scuti trenta per caduana da essergli dati per una sol volta come di sopra, con¿dandovi che non macheranno di far’ et far fare orationi per l’anima di essa Signora Testatrice et de signori defunti della casa. Et caso che al tempo della morte di ess Signora Testatrice non sopravivessero, lascia che li sudetti trenta scudi siano come di sopra datti alli già detti monasterij et a ciascun di loro, con carico che le Reverende Monache di essi Monasterij nelle luoro orationi tengano memoria dell’anima di essa Signora Testatrice et de altri della sudetta casa. E più lascia al monastiero della Madonna de Madama Illustrissima sua madre del ordine di S. Catherina da Siena nella città di Casale scuti cinquanta. Et alle Benedette Monache del monasterio di San Bartolomeo del ordine di S. Agustino et della Madalena del ordine di S. Francesco et anco alli quatro monastieri di frate, tutti della Città di Casale, scuti diece per cadauna da essergli dati per una sol volta come di sopra pregando dette monache et frati che nelle sue orationi habbino memoria dell’anima di essa Signora Testatrice. E più al monastero della Madonna d’Alba, per esserci stata professa la Illustrissima Signora sua sorella, lascia inquanta scudi per una sol volta, acciòche le Reverende Monache di detto monastero habbino nelle luoro orationi memoria dell’anima di detta Illustra Signora sua sorella et Signora Testatrice. E più lascia alla Illustre et Reverenda Signora suor Angelica Gonzaga, sua Carissima Cugina professa nel sudetto monastero di S. Paola scudi dieci. Alla Signora suor Cornelia Gonzaga et suor Anna M.a Bazana (?), ambe professe come di sopra, scudi otto per cadauna. Alla Benedetta Signora Theodora di Ferrara del detto monastero professa scudi cinque da esser luoro datti ogni anno et a ciascuna di loro, mentre viveranno per lo infrascritto Illustrissimo Signore suo herede. E più lascia alli Bendetti frate di San Spirito et S. Domenico di Mantova ducati quindeci ogni anno per caduana di dette religioni da essergli dati per il predicto infrascritto signor suo herede, con carico di celebrar’ tante messe ogni anno a quelli tempi et nelle dette chiese, overo di S. Paola et S. Vincenzo di Mantova ad ellettione et comodità delle Benedette monache di detti monasteri et questo in salute del anima di essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice delli predicti Illustrissimi signor Consorte et ¿gliolo predefuncti. E più lascia alli illustrissimi et Reverendissimo Signori il Signore Federico Cardinale di Mantoa et il Signore Ludovico, suoi ¿glioli dilletissimi, et allo Illustrissimo Principe il Signore Vincenzo ¿gliolo primogenito del predicto

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Illustrissim Signore suo herede infrascritto, Nipote suo carissimo, l’entrata di duamillia scudi per cadauno di luoro di Beni et ragioni che tiene essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice, così per conto della dotte sua come altrimente nel dominio Mantuano et ancho nelli Beni che tiene nel stato di Monferrato, con obligo a detti Illustrissimi Signori di osservar’ tutto ciò a che si trovaranno (…) nella cedula de che si dira da basso di mano di essa Signora Testatrice et col suo sigillo piccolo che porta suo sigillata. E più lascia vole et ordina che le Sante Reliquie portate di Monferrato con li ornamenti di qualunque sorte che vi sono intorno, et Gioie, corone di prezo di diverse sorte, argenti, ornamenti da letti paramenti da Camera, et Biancherie di essa Signora Testatrice de quali vi sono sta fatti li Inventarij sottoscritti di man di Sua Eccellenza et sigillati del suo sigillo piccolo che porta seco che si troveranno, come essa ha detto et aserito presso la Benedetta Madre del monastero predicto de Santa Paola, et del monastero della Madonna del ordine di S. Catherina in Casale, cioè quelli che si ritroveranno all’hora sino destribuiti et dispensati a tutte quelle persone quali si ritroveranno descritti da Mano di predic]a sua Eccellenza nelli margini di detti Inventarij. Quali Inventarij o descriptioni vole et comanda che siano osservati et esseguiti come se fossero fatti per publici et solemnni instrumenti, et che le predette reliquie si habbiano da tenere con la Reverenza che si deve. Et se manchasse la linea et descendenza di predicta soa Eccellenza nei maschi che Dio nol voglia vole dispone et ordina che tali reliquie solamente siano della Illustrissima Signora Donna Isabella Gonzaga Marchesa di Pescara, sua dilettissima ¿gliola et de suoi descendenti se ce ne eranno senon che restino a quello che sarà Duca di Mantoa. Et più alla prefata Illustrissima Signora Donna Isabella Marchesa di Pescara, oltra li diecimillia scudi che essa Signora Testatrice le ha già dati si come nel instromento dotale haveva promesso dargli, lascia quelle gioie et oro Batuto et altri ornamenti et mobili che di già le ha consignati, con altri che le destinarà nelle Margini de sudetti Inventarij di maniera che di dette gioie, oro batuto et altri mobili essa possi disporre come la piacerà, de quali sua Signoria Illustrissima per la sua modestia, sapendo quanto gli sij per compre, stata essa Signora Testatrice amorevole, et amando essa Signora Testatrice come per sempre le ha dimostrato, ne restarà con l’amorevolezza sua sodisfatta non havendo per hora altro che lasciarli (…) possa dimostrargli quanto sij suiscerato l’amor’ che gli porta attesi li molti meriti suoi. E più vole et ordina che siano adempuiti per lo Illustrissimo Signore Duca suo universal herede il medemo anno che essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice manchera, tutti quelli legati et ordinationi con le conditioni che in essi si contengono, li quali si ritroveranno espressi, in una cedula in mano di essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice sigillato del sudetto suo sigillo piccolo che porta seco, la qual cedula insieme con li inventarij, di che si è detto di sopra si ritroveranno presso la predicta Reverenda madre del predicto monastero di S. Paola, o, della Madonna del ordine di S. Catherina predicta li quali vole essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice che si (…) alli infrascritti suoi comissarij Testamenarij, o, suoi legittimi Agenti et non ad altri.

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E de grani, et de altre provisioni che si trovassero fatte per casa di Sua Eccellenza alla morte di essa, et così anco delle entrate che lasciarà, non vole che detto Illustrissimo Signor suo herede habbi da dispore in conto alcuno sin che no’ havera (…) sodisfatto a detti legati et debiti infrascritti. Et parimente piega che quando prima si debba per esso Illustrissimo Duca suo herede sodisfar’ alli debiti di essa Signora Testatrice, et del entrate del stato di Monferrato, sodisfar anco a quelli del Illustrissimo Signor suo Fratello che in gloria sia il Signore Marchese Bonifacio, che non fossero pagati, de quali se sarà conto alla Tesoreria di detto stato. Et raccomanda teneramente et di bon cuore al predicto Illustrissimo Signor Duca tutti li suoi servidori et servitrici pregando sua Eccellenza voglia haver la sua protectione in tutte le cose honeste et ragionevoli. Ma in tutti li altri suoi Beni, Mobili, Imobili, et che si movono ragioni et attioni presenti et Futuri, siano dove si vogliano et apresso qualunque si ritrovano et espressamente del stato di Monferrato, et di ogni ragion altra ch’habbi in essi et altri stati, lascia et instituisse suo herede universale et con la soa bocha propria ha nominato et nomina lo Illustrissimo et Eccellentisimo Signore Nostro Il Signore Gulielmo Duca di Mantoa et Marchese di Monferrato, su ¿gliolo dilettissimo. Al quale caso che manchasse, che Dio nol voglia senza ¿glioli maschi legitimi et naturali concetti et nate di legittimo matrimonio gli sustituisse il predicto Illustrissimo Signor Ludovico suo ¿gliolo al quale manchando senza ¿glioli maschi concetti et nati come di sopra, sostituisse Il predicto Illustrissimo et Reverendissimo Signore Federico suo ¿gliolo esortando essi Illustrissimi Signori et haver per racc.ti per sempre li vasali et subditi di quel stato di Monferrato. Et se manchassero tutti li maschi che Dio nol voglia lascia, che secondo la concessione della Investitura succeda nel stato predicto di Monferrato, et così sustituisse la predicta Illustrissima Signora Donna Isabella Marchesa di Pescara sua ¿gliola overo suoi ¿glioli in detto stato di Monferrato. Et oltre che molto si con¿di essa Illustrissima Signora Testatrice nella somma Bontà del predicto Illustrissimo signor suo herede, lascia et constituisse suoi comissarij et exegutari di questo suo ultimo Testamento il molto Reverendo et Magni¿co Vicario del Vescovato di Mantoa, et li magni¿ci consiglieri Ducali, che di presente sono et per l’avenir’ seranno alli quali da et concede piena licentia et libera et assoluta podestà et general mandato con libera auctorità et potestà di esseguir il presente suo testamento, et ultima voluntà qualunque volta loro piaccia. Pregando sua Ecc.a che presti il suo benigno consenso a detti essegutori. Et questo suo Ultimo Testamento, et questa sua ultima volontà, esser et voler che sij asserisse et protesta essa Ilustrissima Signora Testatrice il quale et le quale vole et comanda che voglia per ragion di Testamento et ultima volontà, et se per ragion di Testamento et ultima volontà non valesse, non valerà, o non puotesse valer’, et tener’, vole et comanda che vaglia et tenga per ragion di codicilli overo di Donatione per causa di morte et per ogn’altro miglior modo via, forma, et causa col quale et quali più meglio più validamente et più ef¿cacemente podra di ragion valer’ et tener’. Purchè nelle cose soprascritte et ciascuna di quelle (…) il suo effetto cessando, revocando et anullando tutti le altri Testamenti fatti per

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essa Signora Testatrice per qualunque notaio rogati, ancorche contenessero parole che per il presente di dovessero esprimer’ et a quelle necesssariamente di dovessi derogar’, et spetialmente uno rogato per me notaio. Il quale in (…) et di comission espressa di essa Signora Testatrice presenti anco li sudetti testimonij liquali furno pariemente presenti al detto testamento sì come sono stati a questo, fu (…) adì soprascritto a quali tutti vole et comanda che il presente prevaglia pregando me notaio anci succedendomi et prieghi suoi a comandamenti, comandandomi che di tutte le sudette cose, et di ciascuna di quelle io faci, uno et più se sera bisogno instromente ad eterna memoria di questa sua ultima volontà.

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Appendix II

Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma 1. ASM, AG, Copialettere of Isabella d’Este, b.2992, lib. 7, n.199, f.75v and 76r, 23 July 1496, Isabella d’Este to Francesco II Gonzaga Concerning the fact that Francesco II Gonzaga has seized back properties in San Matteo dei Chiaviche (Viadana) formerly given to Sigismondo Cantelmo. Isabella is here referring to the discord between Francesco II Gonzaga and Sigismondo Cantelmo that erupted after Francesco’s self-declared victory over the French at the Battle of Fornovo (1495), when Sigismondo attempted to renew relations with France to recover his patrimony in Naples. Margherita had pleaded for the properties to be returned, and Isabella intervened on her behalf, appealing to Francesco II on the basis of the service of Margherita’s father, Bartolommeo Maloselli, to the Mantuan court. La Magni¿ca Margarita Cantelma essendo a Ferrara, et havendo presentito esser stato tolto la tenuta de tutti li soi bene ch’el ha in Mantuana a nome de Vostra Excellenza, subito è transferita qua per intendere la causa. Et essendo si portata a me, no’ senza lacrime et molto cordolio se doluta, che la sia privata dela dote et heredità paterna. Ossessa già più de dosento anni per li Processori soi sotto el governo de questa Illustrissima casa, et che molto più gli cencresse[?] havere anche in uno tracto perso la gratia di Vostra Excellenza, dela quale se fu più caro cha de quanta roba e almondo. Sapendo lei no’ havere facto, dicto ne pensato mai cosa che dovesse esser molesta a Vostra Excellenza. Perchè, quanto bene Mx. Sigismondo suo marito in queste guerre dove per recuperar’ el suo e militate, havesse in alcuna cosa facto contra el desyderio de Vostra Signore, lei no’ gli ha colpa, ne in sua libertà seria de retenerlo (1). Et poì no’ gli pare che justamente possi perdere la roba sua et la gratia de Vostra Excellenza insieme, comemorando la fede et servitù antiqua del patre suo, et sua propria cu’ li Illustrissimi progenitori de Vostra Signore. Et cu’ lei quale molto bene scia quanta devotione gli ha sempre portato, pregandome cu’ queste cu’ molte altre rasone ch’io volesse farla in protectione sperando lei cu’ ogni poco delo favore mio essere restituita a gratia de Vostra Excellenza, per la suma bontà et natura sua. Quale no’ solamente è justa verso li innocenti como lei e me è anche misericordiosa, verso li delinquenti cu’ tante lacrime cu’ tanta modestia et cu’ tante rasone ha saputo dire el facto suo ch’io no’ solamente me sono mossa a compassione, ma sono necessitatà piliare el patrochio suo cu’ Vostra Excellenza. Sperando che quando consyderara ch’io sono donna et allevata cu’ Madonna Margarita, no’ me imputarà se ad un’altra

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donna et mia domestica porto compassione. Maxime no’ intendendo che lei contra la persona stato, ne honora de Vostra Excellenza habia perpetrato, che quando ne havesse una minima scintilla gli seria capitare inimica et cu’ le mane propre ne voria far’ vindicta. Cessando andunque questo respecto, prego et supplico a Vostra Signore che per mio amore se digni restituirli la roba et la gratia sua, attento che como ho dicto Mx. Sigismondo no’ gli ha afare niente. Ne la mogliere per el marito debe patire et io la reputaro per una dele singulare gratie che mai da Vostra Excellenza habia obtenuto, ultra che la fara acto da magnanimo principe como lei. In bona gratia de la quale me raccomando sempre. 2. ASM, AG, b.1636, Unnumbered, 1 June 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este Regarding her travels to Gazzuolo (Mantovano) and to Milan. She mentions her visit to the studiolo at Gazzuolo, which belonged to Bishop-Elect Ludovico Gonzaga (an uncle to Isabella’s husband). In Gazzuolo, Cantelma was greeted by Antonia del Balzo, the widow of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Lord of Bozzolo. In the letter she praises the portrait of Isabella made for her by “maestro Francesco” (Francesco Bonsignori). Illustrissima Signora et patrona mia observandissima. Come scio narrasse tucto el progresso del mio viagio dubito serria molesto ad Vostra Illustrissima Signora el scrivendoli el dolor ho havuto et ho di absentarme et lontanarme tanto da quella (…) li causaria lacrime. Ma per no’ molestare li pietosissimi occhi et le humanissime sue orecchie, ne passaro succinctamente narrandone una minima particella per satisfare ad me medesma desiderosa che ogne actione mia sia nota ad Vostra Signora Illustrissima. Mercodi adì vii de Magio, si como volse mia disgratia, me parti da Mantua con incomprehensibile dolore di lassare la mia signora. Venni ad Gazolo la sera, dove Madonna Antonia con multe belle parole se (…) confortarme, tucto el resto di nostri ragionamenti foronno di quelli de sempre mai Et ogni una de noi parlava copiosamente di chi più ama. Sua S. Monsignore et tucti le altri ne ferono grande careze. Vidi el studiolo et multe altre cose et parte per terra et parte per acqua per la via de Cremona ce condussimo Piacenza, dove prima che giongessimo Roccabertina ne mando in contra ad convitarne al suo allogiamento benche el Signore mio assai recusasse pur tanto replico che foforfza de allogia col lui. Et ultra el volere nostro ne (…) di forono facti multi ragionamenti, el Signore mio parlava di guerra, lui et io parlavamo della mia patrona et facendo longi discorsi et rivoltando Spagna et Francia, et multi altri paesi quali lui ha visto concludessimo quello pare et pare ad noi essere vivo. Et io commemorando el propinquo sacro di natalitio de Vostra Signora, et dolendome esser lontana da quella, volse particularmente intendere la, cu’ che induceva ad dolerme potendolo celebrare così absente como presente. Li resposi che con multo mia maiore satisfatione haveria facto questo of¿cio presente lei, et prolongandose

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le ragionamenti nostri circa questo me permese anchora lui ha vere quell dì per venerando et sacro. Et da questo anno in poi el celebrava di sorte che anchora che fosse duceto (….). De longi sensa suo aviso le intendero. Lo haveria anchora facto questo anno sel no’ fosse stato così propinquo et benchè no’ (…) far feste publici per la brevita del tempo, no’ mancava di observarlo con venerarlo et celebrarlo. Io, Hercule et Francesco fessimo el medesemo. Loro compossero versi et io girlande. Me dolsi et doglio no’ essere con Vostra Signora per poterli offerne et imprecarli bono augurio, benchè al uno satisfare da lontano al altro satisfarro al mio ritorno. In Milano trovai uno sonecto che me indirizava el se narraro pur in laude del gloriosissimo et Sacro di. Ordinare ad M. Mario la mandasse in mano di Vostra Signora et acciò quella no’ manche haverlo, lo mando con questo incluso. In Milan ci fermassimo cinque dì in uno bello allogiamento che ne se dare Monsignore dela Paliza et me vene ad visitare et io parlando di Vostra Signora. Me refermo no’ haverla mai vista et li venne anchora la prima (…) et Madonna Margarita de San Severino una et l’altra desiderano visitare Vostra Signora. La principessa ha un poco del vero della Marchese de Cotrona, el resto reservano ad dire ad bocca. La Duchessa di Traiotto se recomando ad Vostra Signora. Me piaque più parlare con la Hisabella Trocta et con Alfonso che con niuna altra persona fosse in Milano perchè era con affectione ascoltato quand’io parlava della mia Signora delle quale contemplavamo qualche volta el piatoso et caro retracto che sia benedetto qual maestro Francesco retractatore che me ha così ben servita! Un dì de poi del Corpo di Xo [Christo] ce partissimo da Milano et ¿nalmente ce condussimo in Mortara dove sto no’ po’ piccolo. Mio dolore et ben posso dire como el ingenioso poet anche passare mai solitario alcun testo. (…) Signora mia, serio volesse andare poetezando no’ ¿nisca hogi de scrivere essendo (…) de Vostra Signora tucto el mio refugio e questo povero Petrarca che quasi è tucto straciato se io sto multo ad tonare me serra necessario mandarene ad (…). Una forma ad verità el signore mio domane se parte lui et io ce recomandamo a bona gratia de Vostra Signora et le baso mille volte la dolce manina me era (…) data scriver ad Vostra Signora che me fermai tre di in Pavia, vidi el castello, quello che ne sua quella ne è ben riformata fui visitata da alcun gentil homini et gentil donne della terra assai belle et cortese mostrano essere bone discipule de scolar, mando faldiglia secundo dicono per pagura desfrati(…). 3. ASM, AG, b.1636, Unnumbered, 17 June 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este Regarding her feelings on being parted from Isabella, and how Isabella’s portrait comforts her (edited). Benchè per molti segni la innata bonitate de Vostra Signora da qui in Brescia mi sia stata nota al presente con molta mia satisfactione mo e più che notissima vedendo se sia dignata scrivereme che mi (…) no’ piccola remmercatione de mia servitù mei grandissimo che solo che Vostra Signora se aricorda ch’io sia sua et creda se come è vero che mia servitate verso lei sia perseverantissime mi trovo de tale

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modo (…) che no’ bastaria absolverlo con exponere la propria vita e quella di tutti mei ¿lgioli in ogni extremo periculo et quasi a certa morte in servitio di Vostra Signora Illustrissima ala quale per un’altra mia ho advisato el successo del viagio nostro. No’ gli ho scritto ne scrive el dolore mio che no’ solo e inn(…)ma e ancora incomprehensibile solo causata dal essere absentio da Vosta Signora et se la partita del Signore mio melo aug(…) essendo presente ad Vostra Signora se minneria e forsi se resolveria in tutto. A quando io penso quanta distancia e dal quello beato camerino dal uscino caro e da la secreta Grotta dolce ricetto dela mia segnora, mi vene tanto dolore che son sforciata a sfocarlo parte per li occhij parte per la lingua biastemando emaledicendo questa padulosissima Mortara per mia se ch’el mi quasi così molesto questa estate come la passata solo per esser prima de andare e vedere Vostra Signora Illustrissima che mi pare havere privato el mio corpo dala sua (…). O Dio, che mi vene tanta colero che se Vostra Signora mi ne desse gli pareria esser calata el tercio e poco più che stia qui, mi resolvero come(…). Perho supplico Vostra Signora proveda no’ perda si ¿dela serva el piatosissimo ritratto quanto è possibile cu’ representarano la viva presentia mi conforta. Ma molto più mi confortaria la suavissima voce. Et de quello che mi priva mia disgratia Vostra Signora cu’ la sua soleta humanissimi gratia si dignara farme gratia cu’ farme scrivere vincere el mio adverso fato che ne sia in tutto priva di Vostra Signora Illustrissima in bona gratia dela quale sopra ogni numero eternalmente me ricomando, e con la mente et animo et ogni mio affetto basio la delicatissima e dolce manina cara vinta dal dolore faro sino ad queste mie affanate parole sencia fenire mai di ricomandarme in buona gratia di Vostra Signora Illustrissima. Mortara. 4. ASM, AG, b.1636, Unnumbered, 5 August 1505, from Margherita Cantelma in Mortara to Isabella d’Este Regarding the comfort she derives from a portrait of Isabella d’Este (edited). Io no’ scio s’io sia morta o viva. Scio ben ch’el essere priva dela presentia di Vostra Signora mi fa manchare di grande sperancia di salute. Mi aiutaro col caro ritratto al più che mi sera possibile, supplico Vostra Signora mi aiuta con li soi soliti e delicati cibi (…) li quali mi pare impossibile poterme risanare. Quello vorria ne mandaro una (…) a Madonna Alda. Pregho Vostra Signora manda ogni cosa in mane del Vismara quando più presto gli piaccia(…). 5. ASM, AG, b.1241, n.355, 15 September 1506, from Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este Regarding the portrait of Isabella sent via Mario Equicola to thank Margherita for the Nec Spe Nec Metu volume that Equicola had composed, at Margherita’s request, for Isabella’s birthday (edited).

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Illustrissima Signora Mia. Poi basato le belle et delicate mano ad Vostra Excellentia me recomando. Al ritorno fece Mario da quella me porto il ritracto digno di omni veneratione. Haveva deliberato no’ redarla gratie se no’ ad bocca con umiltà et reverentia (…). 6. ASM, AG, b.1242, n.43, 23 August 1508, from Margherita Cantelmo in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este Regarding her visit to the monastery of Corpus Domini in Ferrara (edited). Illustrissima Signora et Patrona mia etherna per che voglio che Vostra Signora me sia patrona et del corpo et del animo me fo licito usar; questo nome de ethernita. Havendo Vostra Signora participato de qualch’uno mio despiacer’. Le voglio anchor participar’ quesslo magior piacer’ io ho hauto per uno dì doppo ch’io sono in Ferrara. El qual è che dominica fui tutto el dì con le nostre sancta monace del Corpo de Christo, dentro dal monasterio. Et per parte de Vostra Signora le visitor in universale et imparticulare alchune percipue la nostra chara sor Laura. Et per uno gran pezo rasonassemo insieme in ella sua cella. Et la magior parte deli nostri rasonamenti fu de Vostra Signora et de quella sorte forono che ne obligava le cose occurete et l’amor et servitù che l’una e l’altra ha ad Vostra Signora. Tute quelle (…) sa ricomandano ad Vostra Signora ma percipue noi due con basarle la mane summamente sa ricomandamo in sua bona gratia (…). 7. ASM, AG, b.1242, n.414, 25 January 1509, Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella in Mantua Regarding further dealings with the nuns of Corpus Christi in Ferrara (edited). Illustrissima Mia Signora perpetua Patrona. Ringratio Vostra Signora più posso che se sia signata elegierme per sua oratrice alla nostra sor Laura cu’ la Reverencia de la quale ho fatto quanto Vostra Signora me commanda, et dove è manchato la suf¿cientia ha supplito eri la sollicitudine. Et ogni dì son ritornata ad redire quelle più belle parole ho saputo, parte per satisfare ad quanto Vostra Signora me commanda, ma più per essere sollicata da la Gloria ch’io tencho de tal of¿cio servarò el grado dele mia dignita ¿n tanto che Vostra Signora no’ me ne priva et acciò che no’ gli venghi tal desiderio me sforciarò ogni dì imparare piu belle parole per potere fare in questo honorato of¿cio bon pro¿tto. No’ dubito consegro mio intento parlando ogni dì cu’ la matre sor Laura dala qual intendo tanto ornate rasonamenti et così ordinate oratione che bastaria ad insignare ad uno mutto. Me sono affatichata in questo sol per persuadere ad Vostra Signora che no’ proveda d’altro ambasciatore ch’io sperio in questo of¿cio farme suf¿cientissima benchè per anchor no’ mi basta l’ovio de mettere in scritto libelli ragionamenti che mi fa la matre sor Laura percipue circha ad lo amare et laudare Sua Signora ben ch’io

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in questo ho pocho bisogno de maestro. La nostra sor Laura ha hauto gran piacere deli ringratamenti de Vostra Signora et che la sua bona mano sia grata del quella grata gli pare perho no’ essere necessario ringratiarla per essere ogni cosa sua de Vostra Signora et percipue le sue oratione che altro no’ ha da darli (…). 8. ASM, AG, b.1242, n.419, 8 February 1509, Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este (partly damaged at upper right) Suggestions as to what kind of donations Isabella might make to the nuns of Corpus Domini in Ferrara (edited). (…) più del sollito freguintato de andare al sacro claustro dele nostre dilette monache el delor ho quasi fatto capituol quale et examinatole per la magior parte per intendere da chi el bisogno et da chi el desiderio dela matre Sor Laura. Finalmente dopo multi examine ho inteso da Sor Aufrosina che Sor Laura desidera una Sancta Barbara et una Sancta Lucia de quelle francese como forno quelle che Vostra Signora gli mando. Da Sor Paci¿cha che la governa ho inteso che la necessità sua seria d’havere uno baratello de vino dolce biancho et uno pocho de mandole [mandorla] per questa quadragessima perchè lei no’ mangia de niuna sorte de cibo quadragesimale et el peso glie e noi (…). De ambo dui queste cose Vostra Signora ne potra essere ben servita in Capriana ma io no’ essendo ben satisfatta dela relatione, de altre gli ho datto molte bataglie per intendere da Sua Reverencia quello vorria et prometendome de hogi in dimane de dirmelo megli ha fatto andar da circha vinticinque a trenta volte et ¿nalmente hogi se resolute. Prima cu’ molte belle parole excusando la sua prosuntione dela qual niuno altro ch’a (…) me dise che per queste Vostra Signora da sua parte gli mandasse sei gemme de bella (…) da fare dele disciplne per loro et per le sor da Morano da Venetia (…). 9. ASM, AG, b.1242, n.771, 18 January 1510, Margherita Cantelma in Ferrara to Isabella d’Este Mourning the death of her son, Ercole Cantelmo. Io no’ conoscessi Illustrissima Signora e Patrona mia altramente la profundità dela piancha de che morte me ha percosso. La lettera de Vostra Signora me ne potria far certa quando le exhortatione et consolatij parole di Vostra Signora che già v soleano ogni mio nubiloso pensiero, raserenare di lor bona intentione fallite l’acerbo mi pianto rinovellino no’ che alleviando lo acquietino. Ma como in questo cosà anchora in moltre altre cose mi accorgo di la profondità e tale che questo è veramente il colpo di che morte m’ha morto. Perho che in quelle egritudine dove gli rimedij che solevano giovare porgono angustia et dolore comunamente, stimassi no’ vi essere speranza di saluto per il che assai mi dole che le parole di Vostra Signora no’ habbiano quella ef¿cacia che la vorria, et ch’io no’ possi satisfarla in

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darli bona informatione del essere mio si perchè ne lire ne parole ponno aguagliare l’acerbità dela mia vita. Como anchor anche mal volentieri de ciò che del mio stato potria dire la faccio participe per no’ attristarla. Per d’uno, no’ potria dire in scrivere parola sopra ciò che no’ fosse amaricata et lachrymose ne del mio stato altro signi¿carli se no’ che in ogni tempo e in ogni mia actione son molta nela dolce memoria del mio charo Hercule, piangendolo, sospirandolo, lamentandolo, et vivo et morto intorno agli occhij formandomelo pensando qua lo viddi la gli parlai qua giacque la stete. Et in mille altri modi imaginandomelo fare a ognuno de quali divento giaccio et pioggia inguisa ch’io stessa no’ vedo comio basti al dolore. Et questo seria quello che del viver mio. Vostra Signora da me potria intendere se dela mia vita li volesti dare noticia ma perch’io vorria si miserabil vita rapresentandoli attristarla, no’ mi curo dirli sopra ciò altro persuandendomi che li affarri mei gli dogliano, ma quello ch’io ne posso ne voglio. Per tal rispetto scrivere Mx. Mario potrà imparte racontarlo ben ch’io no’ scio, che bisogni dimandarme del essere mio quando ¿n la mia sorte gridi che altutto, e pur la mia speranza persa la quale se altutto no’ sia verace. Serà perchè in la Illustrissima Gratia de Vostra Signora le religede mie morte speranza se riserbano, ringratio quella anche di me tengha in cortese memoria. Alla quale me offerreria se morte no’ havesti e mei pensieri et la mia vita dato impreda a morte, et se pur cosa è, in me che in suo potere no’ sia quella ad servitij de Vostra Illustrissima dispono, et a lei cu’ bassarle la mano, de continuo me ricomando.

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Appendix III

Selected Letters of Margherita Paleologa 1. ASM, AG, Copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, b.3001, libro 4, f.13r, 3 January 1541 Margherita Paleologa in Mantua to Pietro Aretino in Venice Thanking him for sending her a copy of his Life of St Catherine. (…) La lettera che mi havete scritte mi è stata molto grata et gratissima la compositione Vostra che mi havete mandata della vita di Sta. Catherina di che essendo il sugeto bello et detto da voi so ch’el libro no’ po riuscir senon benessimo de l’un e l’altro vi rendo molte gratie (…). 2. ASM, AG, Copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, b.3001, lib. 4, n.200, f.64r, 18 October 1541, Margherita Paleologa in Pontestura to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga in Mantua Regarding a pilgrimage she made with her mother to visit a shrine at Crea (north of Casale Monferrato) to worship a statue of the Virgin said to be by the hand of St Luke. Ill.mo and etc. Dal M.co Zaffardo che parti hieri da Casale Vostra Illustrissima Signoria hora inteso dell’andata che Madama Illustrissima mia Signora et Madre et io eramo per far alla chiesa di Nostra Signora la Madonna in Crea per sodisfare al un voto già alquanto anni fatto. Così hieri sera se ne venissemo qua al Pontestura ove siamo state la notte poi questa mattina per tempo ci siamo incaminate et conducteci in caretta ¿n al pie[de] della colina su quale è il luogo dove, per esser la montata un poco aspera per la caretta, montassimo in letica. El luogho è su la costa della colina assai alta et vi è una bella chiesa con sogni di molti miracoli fatti ivi per la Madona di quale vi è una statua col ¿gliolo imbrazzo che dicono esser di mano di San Luca. E uf¿ciati per li canonici regulari che vi hanno assai bel monestorio et di lì si vede gran parte del paese et castelli di quanto stato et anco d’altri, è discosto di qua quarto miglia et poco più ve sono di qua a Casale satisfatto al voto et doppo disenar udito el vespro se ne siamo ritornate ad allogiar qua. (…). 3. ASM, AG, b.3001, lib. 4, n. 232, f.72r, 25 October 1541, Margherita Paleologa in Casale to Suor Paula Inquiring after the health of various nuns there, and assuring payment for a certain “quadro” that perhaps was made for the church or monastery there. Sister Paola

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was the youngest daughter of Isabella d’Este (born Livia Osanna) and was a clarissan nun at the convent of Santa Paola in Mantua, also called Corpus Domini. (…) Ho havuto la lettera di V. Reverenda Signoria di xix che mi è stata carissima. L’amorevole dimostratione per lei usata in mandar di continua a visitar Gulielmo mio ¿glio et voler intender dil star suo mi è stato scritta predicta che adesso così gli ne rendo gr[ati]e si come faccio et alle altre madri delle orationi in ciò fatto et la priego a ringratiar in mio nome il padre qual non accade che scriva se non ha da scriver per altro che per visita. Me incresce del mal della nostra sour Marta essendo in termine la si contentara farla visitar in mio nome. Mi piace che le Nostre Novizze si comportino bene. N.S. Dio gli dia gratia di perserverare di ben in meglio. Al pagamento di quadro si sodisfarà. Io sono dio grata sana et il medemo è di Madama Illustrissima mia Signora et madre. Et di Dona Isabella così di continuo sia di v. Signoria alla quale di compagnia ci raccomando. 4. ASM, AG, Copialettere Margherita Paleologa, b.3001, lib.4, n.302, 92r, 7 December 1541, Margherita Paleologa in Mantua to the Becharia of Mantua Asking that payment be made to the convent of Santa Maria della Presentazione, according to the wishes of the recently deceased Isabella d’Este. This was the monastery that was founded by Margherita Cantelma, Duchess of Sora (d.1532) which Isabella made provision for in her own will of 1535 (see my Chapter 2, the wills of Cantelma and Isabella d’Este in my Appendix I, and associated letters in Appendix II). (…) Fin a tanto che si è potuto de buon animo V.S. è stata accomodata oltre il termine nel pagamento del denaro ch’ ha da sborsar per le ven[erabili] Suori della Presentatione qui di Mantova secon[do] l’ordine di Madama Illustrissima ch’ in Santa Gloria sia hora è apparsa occasione d’un acquisto commodo et molto utile al monestiero per la quale è di bisogno valersi di quei denari. Però ho voluto scrivergline con farle intender che la voglia metter ordine che senz’altra dilatione se ne faccia el pagamento acciò si possi voler di questa occasione a bene¿cio di quelle madri, i quali quanto più presto el denaro si haverà ne seguira tanto maggior commodo. Così n’aspetto l’effecto. (…). 5. ASM, AG, b.3002, copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, lib. 8, n.83, f. 31v-32r, 5 July 1552, from Paleologo in Mantua to Violante Papazzona, presumably in Casale Monferrato Asking that Fermo Ghisoni be commissioned to copy a painting of the Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist that her mother owned, which was still at Casale. She wanted the painting to be of a precise size, because she intended to hang it in a speci¿c location.

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Deseridamo molto d’haver la copia d’un quadro di pittura che ha Madama Illustrissima nostra madre et signora nel quale vi è la Madonna col ¿glio picciolo in braccio et un San Giovanni coli agnelletto da canto. Però volemo che trovandosi anchor a Casale M. Fermo Pittore, pregate S. Ec. a contentarsi che ci ne cavi la copia, et lo avvertirete lui che volemo chel quadro sij insieme col cornisamento della larghezza che vedrete per la misura di secco che con questa vi si manda. Chel cornisamento ci si poi la misura di secco che con questa vi si manda. Chel cornisamento ci si poi la misura de che siamo solita fargli fare alli nostri quadri. Et volemo che col cornisamento non eccedi questa larghezza, dell abbozza poi ci potra farlo come gli paria, che consiegna alla porpotione (sic) che il luogo ovè lo vogliamo ponere non a astringe nell’altezza, come fa … nella larghezza, et gli direte che dalla misura infuore lo faccia precisamente come che quello di Madama Illustrissima senza giugnervi o lasciarvi cosa alcuna. Et che al ritorno lo porti in rotulo, che qua lo farà poi in cornisare. Farete le mie raccomandi a S. Ecc. et solutamente la Nostra diletta Figlia. 6. ASM, AG, Copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, b.3002, lib.8, n. 92, f.33v, 18 July 1552, from Paleologo in Mantua to Madonna Violante Papazzona in Casale Monferrato Regarding the Ghisoni copy of the painting of the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist in her mother’s collection, stating that now she did not mind if the copy were smaller or larger than the actual painting, since she would hang it in a different location. Ne è stato molto caro veder’ quanto colla vostra di viii di questo ci haveti scritto et alla ca’ di Madama Nostra et Madre ha sarete la mano del quadro che ci volea mandar. Nel che si satisfa’ meglio con la copia facendosi fare per accomodarlo in un luogo ovè non si affatico quando fosse di grandezza minore o maggiore della misura che si è mandata et perchè il Sec.rio della Torre con sa cum satisfara a bocca il quel che occorre non ci stenderemo con questa in altro se non che attendiate a conservarvi sana. 7. ASM, AG, Copialettere di Margherita Paleologa, b.3003, lib. 9, n.80, 32r, 8 June 1554, from Margherita Paleologa, to the Conte della Mirandola Regarding the Lutheran heresy and its incursion into Italy in the form of various books that had come into the country from Switzerland. Essendosi inteso qua come con quante genti del paese di Suizzari et Ghisoni [Grisoni?] sono stati portati libretti sotto diversi titoli che sono in effetti di heresia Luterana, non si è mancato per Mon.r Ill.mo di ordinarla provisione che ricerca il bisogno in quanto stato, con far che tali libri siano in mano di cui si voglia

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habbiano da esser’ portati in mano a Mons. Suffragano [?] di maniera che non possano essere tirrati in errore gli animi delle simplici persone. Et avenga che mi venga certa che V.S. secondo gli che porta il debito della cura ch’ogni Signore deve haverà della salute di suoi sudditi, era per pigliar vi anch’ ella la provision che si deve, non dimeno con l’amor ch’ella sa ch’io le porto, non meno che se lo fossi propria madre, non ho potuto mancare di pregarla, et esshortorla come face io con tutto il cuore a’ farlo per ogni modo, et farlo di sorte, che et li sudditi suoi non habbino da restare infetti di così mala contagione et che suo prono. Il Re che tiene il nome di Christianissimo, et che nel suo paese e tanto rigoroso conirò? Quelli che vorriano infettare di questa contagion le persone, intendendo che in questa parte V.S. non manchi di quel che se le convien di fare, habbia causa di haverla tanto più accetta, et di aumentar il favoro, et la gratia in che la ha, et così nella priego quanto (…) strettamente.

Bibliography Abbreviations ADM ASM ASM, AG ASMi DBI

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6LEOLQJ5HODWLRQVDQG*HQGHULQWKH(DUO\0RGHUQ:RUOG6LVWHUV%URWKHUVDQG2WKHUV. Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2006. Signorini, Rodolfo. “Epitaf¿ di donne mantovane.” &LYLOWj0DQWRYDQD 30 (1995): 27–35. Simon, Kate. $5HQDLVVDQFH7DSHVWU\7KH*RQ]DJDRI0DQWXD. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Smith, D. Moody. 7KH7KHRORJ\RIWKH*RVSHORI-RKQ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Spagnolo, Maddalena. “Correggio’s Reclining Magdalen: Isabella d’Este and the Cult of St. Mary Magdalen.” $SROOR 157 (June 2003): 37–45. Sperling, Jutta Gisela. &RQYHQWVDQGWKH%RG\3ROLWLFLQ/DWH5HQDLVVDQFH9HQLFH Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999. 6SOHQGRXUV RI WKH *RQ]DJD. Edited by David Chambers and Jane Martineau. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981. 6WHIDQR *XD]]R H &DVDOH WUD &LQTXH H 6HLFHQWR DWWL GHO FRQYHJQR GL VWXGL QHO TXDUWR FHQWHQDULR GHOOD PRUWH. Casale Monferrato, 22–23 October 1993. Edited by Daniela Ferrari. Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Strocchia, Sharon. “Naming a Nun: Spiritual Exemplars and Corporate Identity in Florentine Convents, 1450–1530.” In 6RFLHW\DQG,QGLYLGXDOLQ5HQDLVVDQFH )ORUHQFH. Edited by William Connell. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 215–40. Swain, Elisabeth. “Faith in the Family: The Practice of Religion by the Gonzaga.” -RXUQDORI)DPLO\+LVWRU\ (Summer 1983): 177–89. Syson, Luke. “Reading Faces: Gian Cristoforo Romano’s Medal of Isabella d’Este.” In 7KH&RXUWRIWKH*RQ]DJDLQWKH$JHRI0DQWHJQD± Edited by Cesare Mozzarelli et al. Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. 281–94. Tamalio, Raffaele. /D 0HPRULD GHL *RQ]DJD 5HSHUWRULR ELEOLRJUD¿FR *RQ]DJKHVFR±. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1999. Terpstra, Nicholas. “Mothers, Sisters and Daughters: Girls and Conservatory Guardianship in Late Renaissance Florence.” 5HQDLVVDQFH6WXGLHV 17:2 (June 2003): 201–29. Thomas, Anabel. $UWDQG3LHW\LQWKH)HPDOH5HOLJLRXV&RPPXQLWLHVRI5HQDLVVDQFH ,WDO\,FRQRJUDSK\6SDFHDQGWKH5HOLJLRXV:RPDQ¶V3HUVSHFWLYH. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Thornton, Dora. 7KH 6FKRODU LQ +LV 6WXG\ 2ZQHUVKLS DQG ([SHULHQFH LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH,WDO\. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 7LPH 6SDFH DQG :RPHQ¶V /LYHV LQ (DUO\ 0RGHUQ (XURSH. Edited by Anne Jacobson Schutte et al. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2001. Tinagli, Paola. :RPHQ LQ ,WDOLDQ 5HQDLVVDQFH $UW *HQGHU 5HSUHVHQWDWLRQ ,GHQWLW\. London and New York, Manchester University Press, 1997. Tiraboschi, Giovanni Carlo. )DPLJOLD 3LFHQDUGL Cremona: Presso Gisueppe Feraboli, 1815. Trissino, Giangiorgio. 'L0*LRYDQ*LRUJLR7ULVVLQR/D6RSKRQLVED/L5LWUDWWL (SLVWROD. Venice: Augstuno Bindoni, 1549.

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Index

Alberti, Leon Battista 18, 57, 58, 75, 177 d’Alençon, Anna (Duchess of Monferrato) ix, 101, 104–6, 110, 112, 114, 133, 134, 135 Alfonso da Valdaterra (Bishop of Jaen) 39 Andreasi, Marsilio, Trattato divoto et utillisimo della divina misericordia 118 Andreasi, Osanna (Beata) v, 5, 13, 17, 45, 53, 60, 61, 69, 78, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 135, 171, 180 Bonsignori altarpiece of 20–28, 32–4, 40–43 house of, Mantua 7–8 Isabella d”Este and vii, 2, 4–9 monument to 43, 45, 53, 78, 85 Angelo, Abramo (“ebreo”) 83 “Annunziata”, see San Giorgio, convent of, Mantua Anselm, Bishop (saint) 17 Antonio da Pavia vii, 20 The Venerable Maddalena Coppini (Palazzo di San Sebastiano, Museo della Città, Mantua) 25–7 d’Aragona, Eleanora (Duchess of Ferrara) 46, 87 d’Arco Nicolò (Count) 82 d’Arco, Violante 82 Aretino, Pietro 99, 103, 165, 181 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 59 d’Atri, Jacopo 53 Augustine (saint) 36–7, 70, 170, 173 Augustinian canons 79, 111 canonesses 10, 46, 49, 84 hermits 39 Order 10, 18, 30 n.32, 37, 38, 39 tertiaries 37 Augustona, Girolamo 70–71, 73 n.30 d’Avalos, Alfonso 127, 128 d’Avalos, Alfonso Felice 132 d’Avalos, Ferrante Francesco 127

d’Avalos, Francesco Ferdinando (duke of Pescara and Vasto) 127 d’Avalos, Innico (Bishop of Mileto, Cardinal d’Aragona) 132 d’Avalos, Isabella Gonzaga 15, 132–5 d’Avalos, Tommaso (Bishop of Lucera) 132 Avignon 19, 130 Avignon papacy 37 Avogaro, Altabella 28 del Balzo, Antonia 54 n.28, 68, 158 Bandarini, Andrea, Opera Nuova Spirituale 118 Battista da Brollo 121 n.76, 124 Battle of Fornovo 47, 88 Battle of Pavia 114, 127 beatae 8, 15–16, 19–44, 45, 60, 126, 133 Beatrice of Hungary 53 Béatrizet, Nicolas 120 n.73, 122 Benedetto da Mantua, Beneficio di Cristo 117, 118 Benedictine Order viii, 17, 32, 40, 42, 68 n.8, 75, 172 Bentivoglio (family) 21 Bentivoglio, Laura 87 n.4 Betussi, Giuseppe 110, 113, 170, 177 Donne Illustri 97 Blois 48, 49, 99, 100 n.2, 170 Boccaccio, Giovanni 49, 99, 100 n.2, 170 Boiardi, Laura (“Suor Laura”) 61, 62, 161, 162 Bono, Giovanni (Blessed) 18 Bonsignori, Francesco vii, 6, 10, 36, 45, 55, 56, 93, 135, 158, 171, 181 Veneration of the Beata Osanna Andreasi 2, 20–28, 32–4, 40–43 Borgia, Lucrezia 61, 184 Borromei, Diana 124 Boschetti, Isabella 103–5 Boschetti, Polissena Castiglione 18 n.6 Botticini, Francesco 171, 183

188

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

St Monica Distributing her Rule (Capponi Chapel, Church of Santo Spirito, Florence) vii, 37–9 Broccadelli, Lucia (beata, of Narni) 8 n.18 Brollo, Battista da 124 Bridget of Sweden (saint, also “Brigid of Sweden”) 12, 19, 34, 39, 40, 43, 172 Brigid of Capriani 70 Brigittine Order 40 Calcagnini, Celio 72 Calvisano, Francesco Gonzaga da 103 Cantelma, monastery, see Santa Maria della Presentazione, monastery of, Mantua 66, 84 Cantelma, Margherita (Duchess of Sora) viii, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 27, 28, 85, 108, 113, 126 funerary monument viii, 65, 76, 78, 84 and Isabella d”Este 45–84 last will and testament 137–9 letters of 157–63 monastery commissioned by 65–84 Cantelmo family 65, 71, 174 Cantelmo Monument (Sant”Andrea, Mantua) viii, 65, 76, 78, 84 Cantelmo, Ercole 59, 77, 79, 162 Cantelmo, Francesco 71 n.21, 77 Cantelmo, Pietrogianpaolo 46, 48 Cantelmo, Sigismondo (Duke of Sora) 4, 46–8, 157 Capuchin Order 125 Caraffa, Giovanni Pietro (cardinal) 115 “Casa Cantelma”, see Santa Maria della Presentazione, monastery of, Mantua) Casalmaggiore 132–3 Castligione (Mantovano) 143, 147, 148 Castiglione, Baldassare 11, n.22, 45, 56 n.34, 86 n.2, 172 The Book of the Courtier 56 n.34, 86 n.2 Castiglione Boschetti, Polissena 18 n.6, Cathedral of Sant”Andrea (Amal¿) 132 Catherine of Siena (saint) vii, 1, 3, 19, 21, 22, 34, 35, 36, 172, 180 Cavriana 112 Certosa at Pavia 50

Charles I (king) 121 Charles V (Emperor) 21 n.71, 87, 96, 99, 104, 133, 135 Charles VIII (King of France) 9, 88 Christ and the Woman of Samaria 121–4 Clement VII (pope) 104 Colonna, Ascanio 109 n.32 Colonna, Fabrizio 114 Colonna, Vespasiano 125 Colonna, Vittoria x, 13–14, 100, 109 n.32, 114–18, 119, 120–32, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 180, 183 and Michelangelo and Titian Spiritual Poems 117 Triumph of Christ”s Cross 117, 128 Colorno 68 Conciliazione (via del, Mantua) 65 Condivi, Ascanio 120 Coppini, Maddalena (the Venerable) vii, 8 n.18, 20, 25–17, 26, 42, 94 Corpus Domini, Ferrara (monastery of) 13, 30–31, 45, 67, 78, 161, 162, 177, 178, 179 Margherita Cantelma and 61–3 Corpus Domini, Mantua,monastery of, see Santa Paola, monastery of, Mantua Correggio 130 Correggio, Niccolò da 57 Corvinus, Matthew (King of Hungary) 53 Costa, Ippolito 92 Costa, Lorenzo 17 n.3, 22 n.17, 30 n.29 and n.31 Council of Trent 12, 13, 79, 86, 87, 100, 102 Counter Reformation 13, 20, 34, 43, 67, 111, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184 da Covo, Agostino 74 da Covo, Battista viii, 74–7 de’ Contrari, Beatrice (countess) 55 Crea (pilgrimage of Margherita Paleologa to) 110–11 a Datis, Agnes 70 della Rovere (family) 88, 173 della Rovere, Francesco Maria (Duke of Urbino) 88 della Rovere, Giovanni 88 n.6 Deposition of Christ in the Sepulchre with Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga 92–3

Index Dominican Order 1, 7 n.16, 11, 21, 22, 35, 43, 93, 173, 174, 181 Dominican tertiaries “dona Isabella” (abbess of Santa Maria della Presentazione, Mantua) 83 Duglioli dall”Olio, Elena 32 Eleonora of Aragon (Duchess of Ferrara) 46, 87 Equicola, Mario 10 n.21, 45, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 60, 130, 160, 177 De Mulieribus 49 Isabellae estensis Mantuae principis iter in Narbonensem Galliam 130 n.103 letters for Margherita Cantelma 56–7 Nec Spe Nec Metu 54, 58 d’Este, Alfonso I (Duke of Ferrara) 61 d’Este, Beatrice (Duchess of Milan) 50 d’Este, Isabella (Marchesana of Mantua) and art collecting 43 daughters of 4, 10–11, 43, 85–98 last will and testament 139–50 and Margherita Cantelma 45–63 d’Este, Eleonora 62 d’Este, Ercole (Duke of Ferrara) 46, 48, 80 d’Este, Isabella (Marchesa of Mantua) v, 43 art collecting and 43, 113 Beata Osanna and vii, 4–9, 17–28 daughters of and 85–9 Ippolita Gonzaga and 89–94 last will and testament 139–50 Livia (“Suor Paola”) and 94–8 Margherita Cantelma and 4–10, 45–84 Paola Gonzaga and Eleanora of Aragon (Duchess of Ferrara) 46, 87 Fetti, Domenico, The Agony in the Garden (Narodni Gallery, Prague) 83 founder saints (female) 19, 21, 22, 28–44 Francia, Francesco 22, 32, 40, 176, 180 Saint Catherine Vigri with Two Female Monastic Donors (private collection) 30–31 Francia, Giacomo Madonna and Child with Saints (Brera, Milan) viii, 42 Francia, Giacomo and Giulio

189

Madonna and Child Enthroned in Glory with Saints and Six Olivetan Oblates (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) viii, 40, 41 St. Margaret”s Vision of the Dead Christ (Prado, Madrid) vii, 32, 33 Francis I (King of France) 62 n.58, 68, 71 n.21, 102 Frattini (via, Mantua) 7 Frederick IV (King of Naples) 104 Gambara, Veronica 130 Gazzuolo 54, 125, 158 Genga, Girolamo 88 Ghisoni, Fermo 117 Gian Cristoforo Romano viii, 43, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 74, 75, 94, 180, 182 Giberti, Gian Matteo (cardinal) 115 Giles of Viterbo 82 Giovanna of Aragon 126 n.88 and n.89 Giulia of Aragon 104, 108 Goito 112 Gonzaga, Alessandro 105 Gonzaga, Anna 92 Gonzaga, Antonia 73 Gonzaga, Antonio 73 Gonzaga, Barbara (Barbara Sanseverino, countess) 68 Gonzaga, Eleanora (Duchess of Urbino) 87, 88, 93, 126 Gonzaga, Elisabetta 78 Gonzaga, Ercole (Cardinal) 10, 12, 13, 14, 69, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90, 97, 98, 99, 125, 165, 171, 174, 175, 179 illegitimate daughters of 92–3 Margherita Paleologa and 100–118 Gonzaga, Federico II (Duke of Mantua) 12, 68, 69, 74, 75, 81, 86, 87, 90, 93, 96, 97, 108, 109, 113, 127, 133, 135, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 171, 178 marriage negotiations 101–5 marriage to Margherita Paleologa 105–6 Penitent Magdalene for Vittoria Colonna 128–30, 129 Gonzaga, Federigo (Marchese of Mantua) 87 n.4

190

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

Gonzaga, Ferdinando Carlo IV 84 Gonzaga, Ferrante (Lord of Guastalla) 12, 72, 73, 87, 99, 101, 109, 144, 145, 146, 148, 171 Gonzaga, Francesco III 12, 87, 99, 101, 109, 113, 147 Gonzaga, Francesco (Bishop of Mantua) 25 n.23 Gonzaga, Francesco II (Marchese of Mantua) 47, 48, 53 n.24, 55, 56, 68, 79, 87, 88–9, 96, 103, 139, 143, 157, 171 Gonzaga, Gianfrancesco (Lord of Bozzolo) 68, 158 Gonzaga, Giovanni 87 n.4 Gonzaga, Giulia 125 Gonzaga, Guglielmo (Duke of Mantua) 87, 101, 109, 111, 112, 124, 133, 135 Gonzaga, Ippolita v, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 43, 62, 85–9, 90–94, 99, 100, 110, 112, 113, 148, 151 Gonzaga, Ippolito (Cardinal) 56 Gonzaga, Leonora (or “Eleonora”, Duchess of Urbino) 92 Gonzaga, Livia (called “Suor Paola”) v, 11, 12, 85–9, 94–8, 99, 100, 110, 111, 112, 114, 125, 151, 165–6 Gonzaga, Ludovico (Duke of Nevers) 124 Gonzaga, Ludovico II (Marchese of Mantua) 46 Gonzaga, Luigi 72 Gonzaga, Vespasiano I (Duke of Sabbioneta) 133 Gonzaga, Vincenzo II 84 Great Schism 19 Grotta 46, 50, 53, 54, 74, 101, 105, 108, 109, 147, 160, 177 Guastalla 87 Guazzo, Stefano 111, 133 n.116, 175, 177, 182 Hieronyma of Scandardo 70 holy dolls 62–3 Isabella (“dona”, abbess) 83 Isaia da Pisa 37 Jacopo della Voragine 37 Juan de Valdes 126 Julius II (pope) 88

Karcher brothers (tapestry weavers) 125 Lanzi, Rinaldo (of Cremona) 133 Lateran canons 10, 65, 69, 73, 79–81 Le Vergini (monastery, Venice) 78 League of Cambray 9, 88, 89 Leo X (Pope) 5, 90, 106 Leonardo da Vinci 51 “living saints” 8, 9, 18, 19, 23, 33, 184 Loiani, Giacomo 28 Longinus (saint) 18 Louis XII (king) 49, 88 Louise of Savoy 130 Lyon 131 Madonna of the Harpies 34, 172 Madonna of the Rosary 133–5, 134 Maloselli, Bartolomeo 46 Maloselli, Margherita, see Cantelma, Margherita Malatesta, Paola Gonzaga, founding of Santa Paola in Mantua 94 Mantegna, Andrea 106 Manto 17 dei Marcelli, Marina 80–81 Matilda da Canossa (countess) 67 mantellate 39 Manto 17 Margaret of Lorraine 113–14 Master of the Baroncelli Portraits vii, 22, 28, 29 Matilda of Canossa (Countess) Michelangelo 131, 169, 171, 172, 173, 176, 179, 183 Christ and the Woman of Samaria (drawings after) ix, 123 &UXFL¿[LRQ(drawing, British Museum, London) 119 drawings for Vittoria Colonna 115–25 Milan 37, 42, 45, 50, 53, 55, 66, 68, 74, 87, 99, 102, 158, 159 Mirandola, Ludovico II (Count of) 118 Monica of Sweden (saint) vii, 20 n.11, 36–9, 38, 43, 70, 139, 171, 176 Mortara, Margherita Cantelma in 46, 53, 54 n.28, 55 n.31, 58 n.41, 73 n.28, 79, 80, 158, 159, 160

Index Mortara, Santa Maria delle Grazie Called “di Mortara”, see Santa Maria delle Grazie, church of, Ferrara Naples 9, 53, 55, 82, 114, 115, 127, 128, 132, 157, 176 Cantelmo family in 46–9 Napoleon 65, 84 Neri, Francesco 80 Nicolò di Cremona 73 Oblate Order 40 Occimiano (Alessandria, Piedmont) 133 Ochino, Bernardo 125 Oliva, Ambrogio Madonna of the Rosary, Church of the Madonna of the Rosary (Occimiano, Alessandria) 134 palazzina Paleologa Palazzo del Te 75 Paleologa, Margherita (Duchess of Mantua) v, viii, ix, 13, 14, 82, 87, 87, 98, 99–136, 137, 169, 171, 173 and Isabella d”Este 108–10 last will and testament of 150–55 letters of 165–8 marriage to Federico Gonzaga 105–6 pilgrimage to Crea 110–11, 165 portrait of, by Giulio Romano viii, 106–8, 107 Paleologa, Maria 102 Paleologo, Bonfacio VI 103 Paleologo, Gian Giorgio 104 Paleologo, Guglielmo VIII 111 Paleologue (family) 102, 108 Palermo 128 Paola, Suor, see Gonzaga, Livia Parma 68 Pauline doctrines 115 Pavia 49 n.14, 57 n.37, 58, 59 n.45, 79, 127, 142, 159, 180 Penitent Magdalene 128–32 Pesaro 88 Petrarch 130, 159 Piccola della Mirandola, Lucrezia 67 Picenardi, Elisabetta (venerable) vii, 20, 21 n.13, 23, 24, 42, 182

191

pilgrimage 45 n.3, 80, 110–11, 130–31, 165, 172 Pius V (Pope) 133 Pole, Reginald (cardinal) 117 Poor Clares 30, 31 Porto 101 Pozzo, Paolo 66 Precious Book (relic of) 18 Provence 130 Pusterla, Antonia 82 Pusterla, Gregorio 82 Quinzani, Stephana (beata, Brescia) 9 n.18 Raphael 32, 106 Reform (Catholic) 9, 12–14, 16, 40, 62, 86, 87, 100, 110, 114–18 Margherita Paleologa and 118–32 Rene of Alençon (duke) 114 Romano, Gian Cristoforo, see Gian Cristoforo Romano Romano, Giulio 75, 76, 103, 137, 139, 175, 176, 181, 182 Portrait of Margherita Paleologa (Royal Collection, Windsor) viii, 75, 76, 103, 105–9, 107, Rome 19 Rosselli, Cosimo 31, 38, 39, 41, 180 St Catherine as the Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders of St Dominic vii, 22, 35–6 Rovigo 59 Sack of Rome 104 sacra conversazione 39 Samaritan Woman, see Christ and the Woman of Samaria San Barnaba (church of, Mantua) 21 San Benedetto Po (abbey of, Mantua) 17 San Domenico del Maglio (convent, Florence) 35 San Domenic (church of, Prato) 35 San Domenico (church of, Rome) 43 San Francesco (church of, Ferrara) 46 San Giorgio, castle of, Mantua 105 San Giorgio, convent of, Mantua (also called the “Annunziata”, Mantua) 73, 79, 112, 113

192

Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua

and Santa Maria della Presentazione, Mantua 84 capitoli for 81–2 San Giovanni delle Carrette, church of, Mantua, 67–8 San Giovanni in Monte (church of, Bologna) 32 San Matteo in Chiaviche (Mantovano) 47, 48, 72, 157 San Salvatore e Brigida in Pian di Ripoli, convent of, Florence 39 San Sebastiano, palace of, Mantua, San Vincenzo, monastery of, Mantua Sanseverino, Giovanni Francesco (Count) 68 Sansovino, Jacopo 103 Sant’Agnese, monastery, Mantua 18 Sant’Agostino, church of, Rome 37 Sant’Andrea, church of, Mantua viii, 18, 19, 66, 96, 118, 172 Cantelma Monument in 74–8, 76 Santa Caterina, church of, Monferrato 125 Santa Chiara, monastery of, Murano 63 Santa Margherita, church of, Bologna, 32 Santa Maria della Presentazione, monastery of, Mantua (also called “Casa Cantelma) v, viii, 10 n.21, 65–84, 85, 113, 166 Santa Maria delle Grazie, church of, Ferrara (also called “di Mortara”) 69, 80 Santa Paola, monastery of, Mantua (also called “Corpus Domini” and “Corpus Christi”) viii, 13, 67, 78, 95, 99, 100, 124, 125, 166 Livia Gonzaga (“Suor Paola”) and 94–8 Margherita Paleologa and 110–14 Santi Gervasio e Protasio, monastery of, Bologna viii, 40, 42 Sarto, Andrea del 172 Madonna of the Harpies 34, 106 Sartori, Gianfrancesco 137 Scolari, Girolamo 17, 43 Servite Order 20, 23 Servite tertiaries 42

Sforza, Ludovico (Duke of Milan) 50 Sogliani, Giovanni, St Brigid Imposing the Rule, 39–40 Solimeno, Nicolò (attributions to) 25, 27 spirituali 115, 116 n.57, 117 n.63, 120, 179 Stabellino, Battista 71, 72 stigmata 9 Strozzi, Agostino 79 Strozzi, Agostino Defensione delle Donne 50 studiolo 43, 49, 54, 74, 101, 105, 108, 158, 172, 183 “Suor Laura” (or “Sor Laura), see Boiardi, Laura “Suor Paola”, see Gonzaga, Livia Switzerland 118 tertiaries 7, 18, 22, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 78 Tiresias 17 Titian 88 n.5, 106, 127, 169, 184 Penitent Magdalene (Florence, Palazzo Pitti) 129 Toledo 82 Torchi, Margarita (Blessed) 25, 94 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 68, 176, 182 Tutte le Dame del Re 68 Urban V (Pope) 39 Vasto 128 de Valesis, Aurelia 70 Vasari, Giorgio 27, 32, 55, 56, 120, 183 Venice 63, 70, 78, 79, 90, 99, 103, 128, 165 Le Vergini, convent of, Venice 70, 78–9 Verona 4, 27, 28, 55, 80, 115, 178 Vigri, Catherine (saint) 21, 22, 28–31, 63, 172 Vigri, Catherine, The Seven Spiritual Weapons 30–31 Vincent Ferrar (saint) 68 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception 34 Visconti, Gian Galeazzo 50 Woman of Samaria, see Christ and the Woman of Samaria