ABSTRACT
Isabella d’Este (Ferrara, 1474-Mantua, 1539) was famously acquisitive. As a child, she lived surrounded by the luxuries of the Este city of Ferrara, one of the most refined and learned courts of the Italian Renaissance.1 From an early age she was carefully trained by humanist educators (among them Battista Guarino), acquiring from them the sensibility for harmony, measure, and detail that would make her, as marchesa of Mantua, an extraordinarily discerning collector of antiquities and other precious goods.2 Isabella’s selfdescribed ‘insatiable desire’ for things ancient and her constant attention to the purchase of highly specific items for personal and court use (crystal glasses, fabric, tableware, writing paper, cosmetics, wines, jewelry, gloves etc.) have been widely discussed, particularly because she distinguished herself as the first woman to found a personal Renaissance studiolo.3 The studiolo, as a concentrated space for the display of collected objects of high culture, learning, and style, was only one arena for Isabella’s art of conspicuous consumption, however, for an intense relation to material goods permeated her
1 Among the numerous biographies of Isabella, see Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este Marchioness of Mantua 1474-1539: A Study in the Renaissance (London: John Murray, 1907); George Marek, The Bed and the Throne: The Life of Isabella d’Este (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Maria Bellonci, Private Renaissance, trans. William Weaver (New York: Morrow, 1989); and Daniela Pizzagalli, La Signora del Rinascimento. Vita e splendori di Isabella d’Este alla corte di Mantova (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001).
