Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [16]
The Medici of Florence were not the only ruling family who identified themselves with the new culture—fortunately so, for it was the very competitiveness of the independent cities, and the regimes and rulers who strove to bolster their power with the embellishments of scholarship and art, that gave the Renaissance its thrust. It was one of the few times in human history when success in the world’s game—the struggle for military supremacy and political dominion—was judged at least in part on cultural performance. Often cultural patronage (like hypocrisy) was the homage that vice paid to virtue. Italian city rulers were often ruthless. Bernabo Visconti, who consolidated the power of his family in Milan in the fourteenth century, was barbarously cruel, and his nephew Gian Galeazzo (1351–1402) was an unscrupulous operator who extended Milan’s rule to cover the whole of Lombardy, parts of Piedmont and even slices of Tuscany. But he was a generous and discerning collector, a friend of scholars and a patron of the new learning. The Sforza family, who succeeded the Visconti in Milan, were notable patrons of Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante. Another humanist city was Ferrara, controlled by the Este family. It was a characteristic of humanism to pay almost as much attention to the education of ladies as of gentlemen. Ercole, duke of Ferrara from 1471 to 1505, had two beautiful and talented daughters, Isabella and Beatrice, both of whom received a thorough classical education. Isabella (1474–1539) married Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and lived there for nearly half a century. For much of the time she acted as regent for her husband, a professional soldier or condottiere. In the process she became the greatest of all female collectors and patronesses of the Renaissance. Her studiolo—a combination of study and collector’s cabinet of curiosities—became one of the finest in Italy, was decorated by Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Correggio and other major artists, and became so crowded with books and objets d’art—jewels, medals, small bronzes and marbles, pieces of amber, a “unicorn’s horn” and other natural curiosities—that she added onto it a “grotto,” one of the earliest instances of what remained a fey but often charming art form of the rich for the next three hundred years. She owned a Michelangelo and a Jan van Eyck, and the inventory compiled after her death lists more than sixteen hundred items, from medals to stone vases.
An even more famous studiolo was constructed for Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–82), one of the great characters of the Renaissance, whose unmistakable profile, with its jutting nose, the bridge of which had been indented by a sword blow, figures on many a Renaissance masterpiece. Like various other rulers of petty Italian states, he hired himself and his soldiers out for pay, and became one of the most successful of all the bloodstained condottieri, the outstanding master of what was then an honored profession. His family had dominated Urbino since the thirteenth century, and he ran the city for nearly forty years, the last eight as duke. This millionaire mercenary had acquired a good knowledge of Latin and much other learning, together with excellent taste, and in his retirement from war he expiated his sins by a great deal of discerning patronage of the arts and even a little religious piety. He transformed the old medieval home of his ancestors in Urbino into one of the finest palaces in Italy, military in external appearance but with magnificent