Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Mantua, "forlorn upon her lakes," but I would just single out his comments on Isabella
By far the largest and by far the most interesting building in the Piazza is the vast Reggia or Palazzo Ducale, which stretches away from here to the Lago Superiore….The façade, with its portal, is in the Gothic style, but within we find the Renaissance, in the splendid apartments of Isabella d’ Este, which have largely escaped the vandalism of the Austrians… We see what the extraordinary barbarism of these foreigners achieved almost at once on entering the Reggia. For there on the ground-floor only the so-called Scalcheria remains, with its pagan hunting scenes and grotesques by Giulio Romano, of all the Appartamento della Grotta which that extraordinary craftsman decorated for Isabella. Here, ‘in the fair Cortile della Grotta, with its slender marble columns and pavement of majolica tiles, each with a separate device and meaning,” as Bembo described it to the Duchess of Urbino, Isabella had gathered all her treasures of sculpture and painting. Here were the grisailles of Mantegna, as well as his Parnassus, one of the glories of the Louvre to-day. Here were the allegories of Correggio, the works of Costa, the old court painter, a Holy Family of Giovanni Bellini, a Romance by Dosso Dossi, and some wonderful Titians, more than one Holy Family and some marvellous portraits. Here were the antique sculptures that Isabella had collected with so much pains, and the putto which Michelangelo had carved and Cesare Borgia had sent her. Nor was this all. For in the Grotta Isabella had placed the alabaster organ which Castiglione had sent her from Rome, cases of Murano glass chosen by Leonardo from the collection of Lorenzo de Medici, mirrors of crystal, cabinets of porphyry and lapis lazuli, and lutes inlaid with ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl, and viols by Lorenzo da Pavia.
Here too, was her library, the precious manuscripts we shall never see, Aldines tall and clean and new from the press, French and Spanish romances, an illuminated Boccaccio, the very book of verses Petrarch had left behind him.
From the Scalcheria one is led up a great seventeenth century staircase to the upper floor, and so through the vast series of state apartments. How mysteriously lovely they are in the falling light of late afternoon! One feels like a ghost among ghosts, and expects at every moment the clouded mirrors to give up some vision of the beauty they have reflected and cannot altogether have lost. … And if this is so in all these great shadowy rooms with their fading mirrors, their emptiness and silence, it is a feeling almost impossible to describe that assails one in the Appartamento del Paradiso, those four little rooms that were Isabella’s own, with their early Renaissance decoration, the work of her time, still fit to be seen. How graceful they are, and since she loved them and spoke of them so much and always with a smile, how lovely they appear? They were her home, the most present thing and perhaps the dearest in all that long and vital existence…. How often did she stand, I wonder, in that inner room looking over the garden and the lake, gay enough then, so hopeless now, and waiting there perhaps for the cool evening, question herself of this and of that and of her thoughts about it all. They are all gone into that deep pool where she watched one evening when the moon shone, the petals of her lilies heavy with perfume, falling and sinking one by one, till one of her dwarfs called her to play, and she passed through the Hall of the Mirrors to watch the masques in the great room where hung Mantegna’s cartoons for the triumph of Julius Caesar, and to greet her guests. But later, as we see, that assurance was eclipsed, and in another room we read the very secret of the indecision of her heart graven everywhere, “Forse che Si, Forse che No,” many times. ***
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*** Maybe Yes, Maybe No.
Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 213-215.
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