Studiolo of Isabella d'Este

The Studiolo of Isabella d'Este was a decorative scheme in the Corte Vecchi apartments in the Ducal Palace in Mantua. They were moved there between 1519 and 1522 from the castello di San Giorgio. As its name suggests, the scheme was produced for Isabella d'Este.

Born in Ferrara and educated by some of the most notable humanists of the era, the sixteen-year-old Isabella arrived in Mantua on 12 February 1490 to marry Francesco II Gonzaga. She was given apartments on the main floor of the castello di San Giorgio, close to the Camera degli Sposi. Shortly after her arrival she selected two rooms in these apartments for private use. Badly-lit and with no fireplaces, these two rooms were in the San Niccolò tower - the upper one became her "studiolo" and beneath it her barrel-vaulted "grotta", accessed via a staircase and doorway decorated in marble. She was probably inspired by the Studiolo of the Palazzo Belfiore, designed for her uncle Leonello d'Este, and those in Urbino and Gubbio, both of which she could have got to know via her sister-in-law and close friend Elisabetta Gonzaga, wife of Federico da Montefeltro.

Isabella used the studiolo for leisure pursuits, writing, study and correspondence as well as for displaying the highlights of her collections, initially only archaeological items but latter moving to contrast modern artworks with ancient ones. She loved music, poetry and art and was nicknamed the "tenth Muse". There were also several images of the muses in Mantegna's paintings for the studiolo and on the doorway into the grotta, which contained her antiquities. From 1492 she commissioned a series of allegorical, mythological and literary paintings for the studiolo from the most notable painters of the era, along with others praising the Este and Gonzaga families. She began in 1497 with Mantegna's 1497 Parnassus, followed in 1499-1502 by his Triumph of the Virtues. He also painted two trompe l'oeil bronze reliefs for the scheme, recorded in 1542 but now lost.

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