Patronage and Piety: portraits of Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia
These two portraits of Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, probably painted within the same decade and less than a hundred kilometres apart, could not reveal more strikingly different personalities and values, nor more divergent intentions on behalf of the artists who painted them. Seen together, they reveal something of the contrasting cultural priorities co-existing within the illustrious courts of northern Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.
Fig. 1 Dosso Dossi, Battista Dossi (attributed) ca. 1519-30. Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara. Oil on wood panel, 74.5 x 57.2 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1966 © National Gallery of Victoria.
Fig. 2 Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), ca. 1534-36. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua. Oil on canvas, 102.4 x 64.7cm. Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum © KHM-Museumsverband.
Fate determined that the lives of the two most famous women of the Italian Renaissance would become intertwined through a series of unanticipated political, personal and dynastic events within Ferrara’s House of Este. As the daughter of Duke Ercole I d’Este, Isabella (1474-1539) was born into one of northern Italy’s oldest and most distinguished dynasties. At sixteen years of age she married Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, thereafter moving from Ferrara to its rival and neighbouring city state, where the strong-willed, enlightened patronage that came as part of her d’Este birthright would see Mantua rival Ferrara as a powerhouse of Renaissance culture.
Similarly, Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519) was born into a family of the highest political elite. Lucrezia’s father Rodrigo Borgia had for decades been one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the Catholic Church in a career which culminated with his elevation to the Papal throne as Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Lucrezia grew up with all the privileges and obligations of a court princess. Like Isabella, she was married at an early age with the clear purpose of consolidating her family’s dynastic ambitions. However, her early life of marriage was fraught with peril due to the instability and shifting political fortunes of her father and her infamous brother, Cesare Borgia. It was not until her third marriage in 1502 to Isabella’s brother Alfonso that Lucrezia found the relative stability she had been seeking. She became the Duchess of Ferrara upon Alfonso’s accession to the duchy in 1505 and in many ways inherited the mantle of first lady of Ferrara that Isabella had enjoyed, even from afar in Mantua. By most accounts, the relationship between the sisters-in-law over the following seventeen years was polite and respectful though not close. Adding to the complexity of their sisterly relations was the fact that for years Lucrezia enjoyed a close relationship with Isabella’s husband Francesco.
There are numerous descriptions of Isabella and Lucrezia by their contemporaries and allies, however one which conveniently encapsulates their status within the same family context is Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in which the poet, in flattery of his d’Este patrons, dedicated verses of praise to the prominent women of the House of Este. Of the ‘Fair Isabella, liberal and wise’ he writes:
And there, in honourable rivalry
With her most worthy husband she’ll engage
To ascertain which of the two shall be
The greatest host and patron of the age;
(XIII, 60) [1]
Lucrezia is honoured as her era’s incarnation of the Ancient Roman heroine Lucretia:
Lucrezia Borgia with all honour named,
Whose loveliness and virtue Rome should prize
Above her ancient namesake’s, likewise famed
(XLII, 83) [2]
These verses attest that even during their lifetimes Isabella was characterised by her wisdom and her sophisticated artistic patronage, whilst Lucrezia was singled out for her moral virtue and beauty. Historians over the centuries have in many ways built upon these foundations in their assessments of the two women, emphasising an essential divergence in character between the two.
Isabella has continued to be identified with her fierce intelligence, her insatiable collecting and patronage, and her lifelong passion for fashion, jewellery and antiques. Lucrezia’s legacy is more elusive and has been split into two opposing portrayals: one actual and the other fabricated. The actual Lucrezia was a noblewoman widely admired for her beauty, piety, intelligence and political astuteness, who over the last decade of her life was acclaimed for her religious patronage and business acumen. The fabricated Lucrezia is the figure who became popularised in the nineteenth century through the lurid mythologising of the admittedly colourful Borgia family. Still today this fictitious characterisation involving poisoning, murder and incest figures prominently in the public’s perception of Lucrezia.
But what do the portraits tell us? Before addressing that question, we first need to recognise that neither portrait is the simple visual record of its subject that it appears to be. Each painting is unconventional, even within the sophisticated genre of early sixteenth-century portraiture.
Titian’s portrait of Isabella was painted between 1534 and 1536, within the last five years of her life, when she was about sixty-two years old (Fig. 2, above). Isabella was said to have been dissatisfied with a previous portrait of her that Titian had made around 1523. Instead of asking the artist to once again paint her from life, Isabella commissioned him to show her in her youth, based on a portrait that the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia had made some forty years earlier. However, the clothing she wears in Titian’s portrait is very much according to 1530s fashion, making it a deliberate attempt to blur time and appearances in order to please the patron, in what amounts to Isabella’s attempt to curate her image for posterity. Revealingly and ironically, Titian’s portrait makes her appear decades younger than her daughter Eleonora Gonzaga, who was herself painted by the same artist around the same time.
Isabella was strongly aware of the power of portraiture and eagerly sought portraits of herself and her family members throughout her life, going to great lengths to enlist the services of Italy’s greatest artists. Most famously, she engaged in a fruitless six-year long attempt to have her portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci, which never got beyond an exquisite preparatory drawing made during his visit to Mantua in early 1500 (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1500. Portrait of Isabella d’Este. Chalk on paper, 61 x 46.5cm. Paris, Louvre © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado.
Isabella’s insistence on seeking out Italy’s greatest artists tells us something in itself about her character and priorities: outward-looking, highly ambitious and eager to be presented as a member of the front rank of European aristocracy. These qualities were projected through the ostentatious display of luxurious clothing in her portrait. Every inch of Isabella’s costume denotes wealth and privilege, from her famous balzo or zazara headdress with its central jewelled pin, her teardrop pearl earrings, the extravagant tailoring and embroidery of the sleeves of her gamurra (or zupa as dresses were sometimes called in northern Italy) (Fig. 4), her fine white camicia and not least, the ermine stole draped over her left shoulder. In this respect, Titian’s portrayal of Isabella is no different to other iconic female portraits of the era such as Bronzino’s Eleonora of Toledo from the following decade, in which the splendour of the sitter’s costume is as fundamental to the work as the sitter herself.
Fig. 4 Isabella’s sleeve, detail of Titian, ca. 1534-36. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua. Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum.
Lucrezia Borgia’s portrait is, like Isabella’s, something of a memento portrait (Fig. 1, above). The stylistic and technical qualities of the work dictate that it was painted not during Lucrezia’s lifetime, but sometime in the decade following her premature death in 1519. Dosso and Battista Dossi, court artists to the d’Este, had known Lucrezia over several years and would have been uniquely placed to paint her portrait.
In stark contrast to Isabella, there has been a complete lack of credible painted portraits of Lucrezia until the relatively recent discovery of this portrait. There is a reason for this. In two letters written in 1516 Lucrezia revealed her reluctance towards having her portrait painted [3]. This is directly attributable to her strong religious beliefs, which became a major force in her life from around 1507. In contrast to her earlier life as the belle of the Borgia court and the inspiration of Ferrara’s humanist poets, Lucrezia fell under the influence of a succession of Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian preachers, who encouraged women to forego personal vanity and adopt modest clothing not unlike the type we see in her portrait. Ferrara, which had been the hometown of the firebrand Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, was turned into a centre of important religious patronage under Duke Ercole I. He was succeeded in this role by Lucrezia, who became the most prominent standard bearer for religious devotion in Ferrara and demanded the same of all the women of her court. The intensely religious atmosphere surrounding Lucrezia and her donzelle (ladies) was so pervasive that visitors to the ducal court felt that the women in it lived like nuns.
Fig. 5 Lucrezia Borgia, detail of Dossi, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1966.
In keeping with this fervour, Lucrezia is presented in her portrait with minimal embellishment or concession to fashion. She has no head covering, nor jewellery of any type and wears sombre clothing apart from her white shirt (Fig. 5). Her hair is parted down the middle and tied back, with only a single lock of hair falling down beside her left cheek. If Isabella’s portrait represents the height of fashion, Lucrezia’s is an anti-fashion statement, a refutation of material trappings of wealth, one very much in keeping with her beliefs and lifestyle during the last decade of her life.
Lucrezia’s portrait has additional layers of symbolic and literary meaning that round out the message it relates to the viewer. Securely grasped in her hands is a dagger, an unmistakable reference to the ancient Roman heroine Lucretia, who during the Renaissance became enshrined as an icon of female virtue. Paired with this motif is the encroaching visual presence of a myrtle bush behind her. Myrtle was an unambiguous symbol of the goddess Venus, so its presence along with that of the dagger tells the viewer that the sitter in the portrait possessed both the beauty of Venus and the virtue of Lucretia, which is emphasised even more clearly in the gilded inscription resting on the parapet below (Fig. 6):
CLARIOR HOC PULCRO REGNANS IN CORPORE VIRTUS
Brighter is the virtue reigning in this beautiful body
These sentiments closely match Ariosto’s characterisation of Lucrezia cited above and several others composed by Roman and Ferrarese humanist poets. Moreover, Dosso’s austere portrayal of Lucrezia finds its literary counterpart in a further verse from Orlando Furioso:
Between this, and that statue which portrays
The Borgia I have mentioned in my rhyme,
On a tall figure now they fix their gaze,
In alabaster carved, and so sublime,
No other form is worthier of praise.
Veiled and in black, adorned with neither gem
Nor gold, yet no less lovely she appears
Than Venus does among the other stars.
(XLII, 93) [4]
Though Ariosto’s description and Lucrezia’s portrait suggest a subdued ambience around Lucrezia and her court, they nevertheless stress the notion that a greater beauty exists than that which can be found in beautiful material objects or appearances. Isabella on the other hand appears unconcerned by such introspective thinking as she uses her portrait to celebrate the creative ingenuity and brilliance of the greatest talents of her generation. That these dichotomies co-existed within the same family says much about the multi-layered patronage of the Estense court and ultimately demands that the two strains be recognised together as separate parts of a larger whole.
Carl Villis, National Gallery of Victoria
Fig. 6 Detail of Dossi, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1966.
NOTES
[1] ^ Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, (1516-1532), trans. Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
[2] ^ Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, (1516-1532), trans. Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
[3] ^ Letters from Lucrezia Borgia to Sigismondo Trotti (Estense ambassador to the French court), 24 June 1516, and 2 August 1516, Kindly provided to me by Professor Diane Ghirardo, to be published in her forthcoming volume, Lettere di Lucrezia Borgia (1494-1519), compiled in collaboration with Enrico Angiolini.
[4] ^ Op. cit. at note 2, above.
