ABSTRACT
From the late fifteenth century, some women also acted as patRons of the arts. The most famous example is Isabella d’Este, daughter of the duke of Ferrara and wife of the duke of Mantua. A veritable trendsetter for noble elites, she created her own camerino [treasure chamber] with precious objects ranging from cameos and jewels to medals and ancient sculptures. To satisfy her cravings, she issued famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci with detailed requests (Cole 1995). Isabella recognized the growing significance of art in European court culture, where distinction came to depend on ever more complex criteria of taste and refinement. By the early seventeenth century several princes and courtiers possessed large collections of paintings and sculptures, composed of both the works of Renaissance masters – whose value had steadily increased – and those of contemporary artists. Connoisseurship and the capacity to discriminate in artistic matters became new attributes of nobility, adding a cultural dimension to their traditional sources of power. Following Isabella’s lead, the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua amassed one of the richest and most renowned art collections in Europe. Lacking in political power, but endowed with great dynastic ambitions, they used artworks to boost their international prestige. In 1627-28, during a period of financial difficulties, Duke Vincenzo II sold many of his best pieces to Charles I of England for the fabulous sum of £30,000, more than the king’s annual landed revenue. This was the largest art transaction that Europe had ever seen and it provoked outrage: the citizens of Mantua complained about the humiliating loss of lustre, while English bankers had to divert money destined for the support of French Huguenots at La Rochelle. Charles’s agents Nicholas Lanier and Daniel Nys, early representatives of a new early modern profession, played fundamental roles in the transaction. As international art dealers, they acted diplomatically, and at times illegally, to secure the best masterpieces for their clients. Indeed, it was mostly these agents who satisfied the craze for art collecting, especially in England, where it gripped not only the royal family but also leading courtiers. The king’s favourite George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, built up a collection of four hundred paintings and one hundred statues in just five years (Box 1). However, following the establishment of a republic in 1649, the Puritans saw such collections as symbols of Catholic culture and disposed of the royal possessions in the so-called Commonwealth Sale: around 1,570 paintings oiled the wheels of the international art market, to the joy of dealers acting for private collectors and other crowns, especially the Spanish (Brown 1995). This ‘cannibalization’ of an enemy’s cultural patrimony was by no means unique. During the bitter religious struggles of the first half of the seventeenth century, conquests of cities or territories commonly resulted in the confiscation and
relocation of art treasures. In 1648, for example, Queen Christina of Sweden may have ordered her army to hasten the attack on Prague to secure Rudolph II’s famous art collection before the signing of the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War (Trevor-Roper 1970).
