Beatrice d'Este

Beatrice d'Este made the most brilliant court in Italy and died at twenty-one. She was a daughter of Ercole d'Este of Ferrara, raised at Naples in her grandfather's court until she was ten, and married in 1491 to Ludovico Sforza, who ran Milan on behalf of a nephew he had displaced. She was sixteen and he was forty, and the match had originally been arranged for her elder sister Isabella. What she did with five years is why she is remembered. She made the Milanese court the centre of Italian fashion and patronage, employed Leonardo - who painted her husband's mistress and designed the decorations for her festivals - and Bramante, and set a style in dress copied across Europe. She was also used as a diplomat: she argued Ludovico's case before the Venetian senate at nineteen, and negotiated with the emperor Maximilian. Her judgement about the French was better than her husband's. Ludovico invited Charles VIII into Italy in 1494 to secure his own position, which began sixty-five years of foreign war and eventually cost him Milan and his liberty. She died in January 1497 after giving birth to a stillborn son, hours after dancing. Ludovico is said to have shut himself in a black-hung room for weeks, and to have gone to her tomb daily until the French drove him out. He lost Milan within three years, was taken to France, and died after eight years in a dungeon at Loches. Her effigy by Solari survives at the Certosa di Pavia, moved there after Napoleon's troops used the church she was buried in as a stable, and it is one of the finest pieces of Lombard sculpture of the period. Her sister Isabella d'Este, who married into Mantua and outlived her by forty-two years, is the one the histories usually foreground.

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