Lot Essay
The portrait depicts a youngish, quite pretty, woman with luxuriant wavy hair, neatly combed and worn loose, falling behind her shoulders. She has a slightly recessive chin, with an incipient double chin below and a pointed nose with a discernible bridge. In all these particulars she resembles the famous drawing in the Louvre made in 1490 by Leonardo da Vinci of that great patroness of humanist learning and of the arts, Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua (1474-1539), who had married Francesco Gonzago in 1490. Isabella's flowing hair was remarked upon as early as 1501 in Equicola's De mulieribus and again by G.G. Trissino in his I Ritratti delle Bellissime Donne d'Italia, written in 1514, and the hair constitutes the most most remarkable and subtly rendered feature of the present portrait.
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 that the contemporaneous documented medallic portrait of Isabella by Gian Cristoforo Romano, the clearest example of which is the cast in gold set in a frame ornamented with diamond that is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (1981 cat., plate 49). It has much in common with the present rendering in marble.
The crisply incisive cutting and confident rendering of volumes, as well as the emphasis on accurate depiction of details of fashionable women's attire, in the present portrait also recall the similar features in 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 that the contemporaneous documented medallic portrait of Isabella by Gian Cristoforo Romano, the clearest example of which is the cast in gold set in a frame ornamented with diamond that is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (1981 cat., plate 49). It has much in common with the present rendering in marble.
The crisply incisive cutting and confident rendering of volumes, as well as the emphasis on accurate depiction of details of fashionable women's attire, in the present portrait also recall the similar features in 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.