Studiolo of 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.

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 Guidobaldo 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.

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.

Next came works by other artists such as Perugino's The Battle Between Love and Chastity (a literary subject) and Lorenzo Costa's Allegory of Isabella d'Este's Coronation and Reign of Comus.

Between 1519 and 1522, after her husband's death, Isabella moved into new rooms on the ground floor of the so-called "Corte Vecchia", built by the ducal architect and "Prefect of the Gonzaga Buildings" Battista Covo.

The studiolo was paved with polychrome tiles from the workshop of Antonio Fedeli of Pesaro, originally bought by Francesco II Gonzaga for his residence at Marmirolo - once he had used those he needed, he sold the surplus to his wife to help her keep down the mice in her apartments.

The pavement tiles were lifted and sold off separately and are now in several Italian and foreign museums, including the applied art collections at the Castello Sforzesco,[4] the Louvre, the Museo Bardini in Florence[5] and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London[6] She had a great passion for collecting ancient sculpture, limited only by her lack of money and the papal ban on exporting such sculptures from Rome.

However, thanks to help from the knight of Malta Fra Sabba da Castiglione, she was able to acquire original ancient Greek sculptures from Nasso and Rodi and fragments of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.

She acquired small bronzes by Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi reproducing some of the famous statues of antiquity - one of these, Hercules and Antaeus, is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.