ABSTRACT
Mantegna's two mythological paintings executed for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este around 1500, Parnassus and Pallas and the Vices (Figs 5.1, 5.2) have been regarded as somewhat the worse for their learned character. In most accounts, artistic invention is seen to operate under a kind of tyrannical constraint - in the person of a domineering female patron, on the one hand, and in the form of directions imposed on the artist by her literary advisors, on the other. If the paintings succeed, they are now seen to do so despite the unpromising nature of their literary subject matter, which supposedly con sists of erudite and boring allegories of the marchesa's chastity and virtuous accomplishments.1 The mythologies for the studiolo are invariably discussed in terms of the assumed priorities of the patron, and in accordance with a less than sympathetic assessment of her personality. Yet, the personality of the Marchioness of Mantua may also have provided a rather constricting frame through which to view Mantegna's imagery, however necessary it might be as a starting point. Her identity, or self-fashioning, was not the only one at stake in the studiolo. Those charged with giving the appropriate form to Isabella's self-image had an agenda of their own, and their task in part lay in demonstrating to Isabella that their concerns and values were also hers.2 A picture such as the so-called Parnassus, the focus of the present essay (which will serve as a prolegomenon to a more extensive treatment of Isabella's mythologies), is the product of an encounter between two ideologies, and two notions of value, which increasingly reinforced each other. On one hand was the culture of display and collecting which motivated patrons like Isabella; and on the other, the less obviously material kinds of cultural capital in which the humanists were invested: the claim to knowledge grounded in an unearthing and decoding of the classical past and the restoration of ancient authority, undermined by the ravages of time or the hostility of Christian culture.
