Eleonora's desires and attitudes

In the absence of any payment record or other documentation, it remains uncertain whether the duchess commissioned the De laudibus mulierum or whether Goggio wrote it on his own for her to gain her favor. At any rate, he must have sensed Eleonora's desires and attitudes, and this leaves us wondering how the duchess came to embrace such views. We will never know all of the personal factors behind Eleonora's attitudes, which can be characterized as proto-feminist, if indeed Goggio and Roberti were flattering her interests accurately. It must be noted that she outranked her husband, as her father was a king, while Ercole I's was only a lord (Borso, his half-brother and predecessor, became the first Estense ruler to hold the title of duke). In the Life of Brutus (XIII:3-11), apparently the literary source upon which Roberti based his picture, Plutarch tells us that Portia's high birth made her feel worthy of sharing in Brutus' political activity. Similarly, Eleonora brought a higher purpose and active function to her role as duchess, and various moments of political turmoil in Ferrara, as we have mentioned, provided particular opportunities to do so. Like the famous women of antiquity, she met these challenges, and her fame in Italy was based largely on her own acts of constancy, decisive action, and physical bravery.

Eleonora's personality, too, was consonant with the attitude found in both Goggio's treatise and Roberti's paintings. Born and raised in Naples, Eleonora was not reared in the more epicurean court of Ferrara, and contemporaries recognized her devout and stoical nature. While in Ferrara, she was described as saintly and as having avoided dances and other court festivities. She was a flagellant, and when she died she was at her request buried barefoot and in penitential robes, the church bells kept silent. (25) For the tough, seignorial Duchess of Ferrara, Goggio's text and the paintings by Roberti mirror her own life and actions, and stand as rare examples in the Renaissance when women were glorified to such a high degree.

Eleonora, as Duchess of Ferrara, occupied a rarified world indeed, and her accomplishments, including paintings online, were possible only in these unusual conditions. In Ferrara, as elsewhere in Italy, the courtly setting promoted the advancement of aristocratic women, and this was best encouraged when sheer power politics were involved. In this case, in a duchy the status of the wife was of great importance, and when the ruler was ill or absent, as happened with Ercole I on several occasions, his wife had an opportunity to step forward and act with authority. We associate forward-looking social change with progressive societal structure, but it should be recognized how a traditionalizing, even feudal society centered around the courts of North Italy could encourage selected examples when a woman could experience an elevated status in political and intellectual matters. The arguments in favor of the virtues of women that appear in Baldassare Castiglione's Cortegiano of the early Cinquecento also were stated by an author who himself flourished in a North Italian court and who saw how women could in those circumstances advance themselves.

Eleonora d'Aragona was, of course, hardly the only woman of the Renaissance who benefited from being in a noble, ruling family and having the opportunity to be actively engaged in political and cultural activities of the highest levels. In addition to causes having to do with her status and political role, her own personal attitude and preferences seem to have been behind her activity as a sponsor of artworks for sale. For whatever personal reasons, Eleonora especially flourished at the Estense court, and it seems that she passed on her knack for ruling and commanding as well as her penchant for art to Isabella d'Este, who became Marquess of Mantua a few years before Eleonora's death. Isabella is noted for the extent to which her interest in artworks far surpassed that of her husband. In this light, it is noteworthy, as Thomas Tuohy pointed out, that there were more painted decorations in the rooms of Eleonora than there were in the chambers of her husband, Ercole I. Isabella's mother was, in the eyes of contemporaries, the social superior of her husband. Isabella had also married "down" (her father was a duke, her husband a marquis), and she had learned how to keep her patronage separate from her husband's. Eleonora's relative social status in Ferrara, and her actions in times of emergency as a ruler, must have instilled in Isabella a sense of the potential power of women in courtly society. In the realm of art, just as Eleonora had sponsored the building and decoration of rooms and loggias in the Castello Vecchio in Ferrara, Isabella went to Mantua after her marriage in 1491 and set out to adorn a series of important rooms there with works by leading artists or with significant works of art from classical antiquity. There were important differences: in looking at Isabella's career as a whole, we can see that her contribution was, compared to Eleonora's, to carry out her art patronage in a more aggressive way, to concentrate on a certain kind of secular imagery, and to live longer than her mother did and therefore have more chances to act as a patron. At any rate, we should see mother and daughter as a continuum, both products of the fertile courtly world of fifteenth-century Estense Ferrara.