BEATRICE D'ESTE
DUCHESS OF MILAN
1475-1497
A STUDY OF THE RENAISSANCE
BY
JULIA CARTWRIGHT
(MRS HENRY ADY)
Author of "Madame," "Sacharissa," "J. F. Millet"
1910
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
First Edition, November, 1899
Second Edition, June, 1903
Third Edition, November, 1903
Fourth Edition February, 1905
Fifth Edition, July, 1908
Sixth Edition, May, 1910
All rights reserved
PREFACE
During the last twenty years the patient researches of successivestudents in the archives of North Italian cities have been richlyrewarded. The State papers of Milan and Venice, of Ferrara and Modena,have yielded up their treasures; the correspondence of Isabella d'Este,in the Gonzaga archives at Mantua, has proved a source of inexhaustiblewealth and knowledge. A flood of light has been thrown on the history ofItaly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; public events andpersonages have been placed in a new aspect; the judgments of posterityhave been modified and, in some instances, reversed.
We see now, more clearly than ever before, what manner of men and womenthese Estes and Gonzagas, these Sforzas and Viscontis, were. We gainfresh insight into their characters and aims, their secret motives andprivate wishes. We see them in their daily occupations and amusements,at their work and at their play. We follow them from the battle-fieldand council chamber, from the chase and tournament, to the privacy ofdomestic life and the intimate scenes of the family circle. And werealize how, in spite of the tragic stories or bloodshed and strife thatdarkened their lives, in spite, too, of the low standard of morals andof the crimes and vices that we are accustomed to associate withRenaissance princes, there was a rare measure of beauty and goodness, ofculture and refinement, of love of justice and zeal for truth, amongthem. As the latest historian of the Papacy, Dr. Pastor, has wiselyremarked, we must take care not to paint the state of morals during theItalian Renaissance blacker than it really was. Virtue goes quietly on[Pg vi]her way, while vice is noisy and uproarious; the criminal forceshimself upon the public attention, while the honest man does his duty insilence, and no one hears of him. This is especially the case with thewomen of the Renaissance. They had their faults and their weaknesses,but the great majority among them led pure and irreproachable li