Isabella and Leonardo: The Artistic Relationship between Isabella d'Este and Leonardo da Vinci, 1500-1506

by Francis Ames-Lewis

Overview

Isabella d'Este, the marchioness of Mantua, was a collector of antiquities, a patron of art, and one of the most vivid personalities of the Italian Renaissance. Her artistic relationship with Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is charted through the letters that they exchanged over the course of about six years. Beginning in late 1499, Leonardo spent several months in Mantua, where he met Isabella and produced a finished portrait drawing of her. In the years that followed, the marchioness wrote to the artist to ask him to undertake other paintings and projects. Though little came of these requests, da Vinci did produce a drawing of some classical hard-stone vases to assist her search for collectible antiques and also started work on a painting of Christ as a twelve-year-old boy at her request.

The story of their relationship is explored in depth for the first time in Isabella and Leonardo. This illuminating story raises interesting and important questions about relationships between artists and patrons, and about women as art patrons at the beginning of the 16th century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300121247
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	06/26/2012
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Francis Ames-Lewis is emeritus professor of the history of Renaissance art at Birkbeck, University of London.

Table of Contents

Preface viii

I Isabellas Intellectual Preoccupations 1

II Isabella and her Artists 19

III The Arts in Mantua around 1500 41

IV Leonardo's Portrait Drawing of Isabella 101

V Isabella and her Collection of Antiquities 163

VI Leonardo's Last Project for Isabella 193

Appendix: Letters to and from Isabella d'Este concerning Works for her by Leonardo da Vinci 223

Notes 241

Bibliography 263

Index 277

Photograph Credits 289

Editorial Reviews

A study of the Renaissance art patron Isabella d'Este, Ames-Lewis's latest (after The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist) is a slow-building accumulation of historical details and highly specific minutiae. While ostensibly focused on the relationship between Isabella and Leonardo da Vinci, the book actually functions more to contextualize Isabella's collection and interests in their historical artistic moment, if only because the relationship between herself and Leonardo was limited to correspondence, some drawings, and one portrait over six years. It is with vast and exacting detail that Ames-Lewis examines this patronage and the unique role Isabella held as the most significant female art patron of the time; unfortunately, that research is rarely put to any particularly illuminating use. Asides—such as that on the use of geology by the painter Mantegna—might momentarily perk interest, but the text quickly plunges back into clumsy organization and dry cataloging. Scholars interested in the critical practice of paragone or in the role of the studiolo in Renaissance life might find some of this information engaging. For the most part, however, the perhaps fascinating story of Isabella is only hinted at, and the book remains fixated on its own exhaustively specialized research. Color illus. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A cultural icon of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), the marchesa of Mantua, was a major patron of the arts in 16th-century Italy. Here Ames-Lewis (art history, emeritus, Birbeck, Univ. of London; The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist) details her pursuit of a work by Leonardo da Vinci to decorate her famous studiolo, a room full of art by Renaissance masters. She sought to commission a color portrait of herself or a small devotional painting by the master, but Leonardo, who spent a mere 25 days in Mantua, was distant and unresponsive, though ever courteous. His well-known chalk drawing of her profile (now in the Louvre) and a similar one in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, are the only known likenesses of her by the artist. VERDICT Ames-Lewis well describes d'Este's studiolo and the Renaissance portraits and sculpture that furnished it as well as her pursuit of the work of other great artists such as Andrea Mantegna. This book is best for academic readers interested in d'Este's role as patron of the arts.—Ellen Bates, New York

Library Journal