Bestselling author Sarah Dunant joins us to talk about the foremost female art collector and patron of the Renaissance — Isabella d’Este, the Marchesa of Mantua. The Marchesa is a bold, new history that blends fiction with biography and art.
Born in 1474, the Marchioness of Mantua Isabella d’Este ran a famed court as a powerful artistic patron, a fashion icon and a cunning political operator. She left behind a magnificent collection of paintings, sculptures, books, instruments, and curiosities, long since lost or dispersed. What little remains includes the treasure trove of her correspondence - thousands of letters preserved in a deconsecrated church and convent, which house the State Archive of the city of Mantua. The Marchesa is Renaissance history at its most vivid, an immersive, multi-layered experience, and also offers a meditation on our attitudes to history itself, challenging how far we can set aside our own values and moral certainties when it comes to understanding those in the past who grew out of very different cultural soil.
Sarah Dunant studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge from where she went on to become a writer, broadcaster, teacher and critic. She has written twelve novels, four of which have been shortlisted for awards, and edited two books of essays.
‘Dunant has a storyteller’s instincts for thrilling detail and the broad sweep of history.’ - The Times
