Three Little-Known Portraits of Beatrice d’Este and Isabella d’Este as a Commissioner of Family Portraits

This article aims to draw attention to three little known portraits of Beatrice d’Este (1475–1497). These are a manuscript portrait (British Library, Additional MS 21413) assigned to Giovan Pietro Birago, and two painted portraits in the Uffizi Galleries, Florence, and in the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford. These works have not yet received the attention of modern scholars despite their considerable artistic value and historic importance. Examination of style and technique of all three portraits was carried out in situ and the character of the works is here investigated within the artistic, cultural and social contexts of the late fifteenth-century Milanese, Ferrarese and Mantuan courts with particular emphasis on Beatrice’s versatile character, social projecting and notorious promotion of court ladies’ fashion in Milan. The author also advances the hypothesis that the Oxford portrait may have been commissioned by Beatrice’s sister Isabella d’Este. This is substantiated by Isabella’s lesser known commissions of portraits of her Este relatives. This aspect of her artistic patronage, mainly deriving from the scrutiny of her letters, has not been highlighted in modern scholarship; it may reinforce her powerful image as a patron of the arts, her pride in the Este ancestry and Ferrarese visual culture.