Female patronage and the language of art in the circle of Isabella d'Este in Mantua (c. 1470--1560)

This dissertation is concerned with female artistic patronage at the northern courts in Italy among women in the circle of Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua (1474--1539). Accordingly, in my Introduction I examine the growing body of literature devoted to studying Isabella's own patronage, and that of other Italian women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in order to demonstrate how women interacted within female patronage networks. I propose that such a network existed around Isabella herself. In Chapter One I demonstrate that all of the individual women presented here are united through the literature of the donne illustri, which flourished most strongly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. I examine how the canon of illustrious ladies of antiquity first introduced by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century in his Donne Illustri was expanded in this period to specifically acknowledge the important contemporary contributions of many of the women I take up as individual patrons throughout the rest of my study.;Also in Chapter One, as a counter-point to the literary tradition of the donne illustri, I examine the setting for the donne illustri at court by looking generally at the use that women themselves made of the donne illustri theme in the decoration of their personal spaces.;Chapter Two is a specific case study in which I examine the contributions made to Isabella's patronage in Mantua by her life-long friend, Margherita Cantelma, Duchess of Sora.;In Chapter Three I further examine the ways that women contributed to the formulation of Isabella's image as an 'illustrious woman' by looking at the contributions that some women made to the creation of portraits of Isabella d'Este.;In Chapter Four I return to a specific case study and examine Isabella's legacy as a patron by looking at the art patronage of her daughter-in-law, Margherita Paleologa, the first Duchess of Mantua and an important patron in her own right.;My main objective in this dissertation is to offer new strategies for the examination of female patronage in the Renaissance by proposing that women be placed in the context of other women. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).