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拍品專文
The portrait depicts a youngish, quite pretty, woman with luxuriant wavy hair, neatly combed and worn lose, falling behind her shoulders. Her slightly recessive, incipient double chin below a pointed nose with a discernible bridge closely resembles Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing in the Louvre of Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua (1474-1539). The drawing was executed in 1490, the year Isabella married Francesco Gonzago. Isabella d'Este, the noted patroness of humanist learning and the arts, was renowned for her luxuriously flowing hair, the most remarkable and subtly rendered feature of the present portrait. This feature was frequently commented upon, as illustrated by Equicola in his De mulieribus of 1501 and again by G.G. Trissino in his I Ritratti delle Bellissime Donne d'Italia, written in 1514.
The slashed sleeves and beribboned shoulders of her court dress are recorded more legibly in a copy in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The sculptor's interpretation varies very slightly in giving his sitter a less rounded tip to the nose and in the distance of the eyebrow above the eye itself, but no more than is to be expected in renderings of a particular subject by different artists in diverse media.
Leonardo's drawing is more flattering than contemporaneous portrait medal of Isabella by Gian Cristoforo Romano. Comparison of this marble relief with the clearest example of Romano's medal, the gold cast set in a diamond ornamented frame that is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (1981 cat., plate 49), reveals great similarity. The crisply incisive cutting and confident rendering of volumes, as well as the emphasis on the accurate description of fashionable women's attire, in the present portrait also recall the masterly bust by Gian Cristoforo of Isabella's younger sister Beatrice, Duchess of Milan (d. 1497), that is now in the Louvre.
Another close comparison can be made with the terracotta bust thought to be of Isabella attributed to Gian Cristoforo Romano now in the Thyssen Collection. The facial features, the treatment of the hair and the costume are similar. The artistic intent in both the present marble relief in profile and the fully conceived terracotta bust appeal to the sitter's vanity without idealizing her looks.
The slashed sleeves and beribboned shoulders of her court dress are recorded more legibly in a copy in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The sculptor's interpretation varies very slightly in giving his sitter a less rounded tip to the nose and in the distance of the eyebrow above the eye itself, but no more than is to be expected in renderings of a particular subject by different artists in diverse media.
Leonardo's drawing is more flattering than contemporaneous portrait medal of Isabella by Gian Cristoforo Romano. Comparison of this marble relief with the clearest example of Romano's medal, the gold cast set in a diamond ornamented frame that is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (1981 cat., plate 49), reveals great similarity. The crisply incisive cutting and confident rendering of volumes, as well as the emphasis on the accurate description of fashionable women's attire, in the present portrait also recall the masterly bust by Gian Cristoforo of Isabella's younger sister Beatrice, Duchess of Milan (d. 1497), that is now in the Louvre.
Another close comparison can be made with the terracotta bust thought to be of Isabella attributed to Gian Cristoforo Romano now in the Thyssen Collection. The facial features, the treatment of the hair and the costume are similar. The artistic intent in both the present marble relief in profile and the fully conceived terracotta bust appeal to the sitter's vanity without idealizing her looks.