Sarah Dunant: The Marchesa

Known as ‘The First Lady of the Renaissance’, Isabella d’Este was the first female art collector and patron of her time. Born in 1474 into one of Italy’s most illustrious dynasties, she owned and commissioned work from Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, Perugino and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as indulging her passion for Roman antiquities which were all the rage at the time. 

Smart, forceful, educated, a consummate shopper and fashionista as well as a canny political operator, her voice sings out from some 33,000 letters she wrote and received, all now preserved in the archive of Mantua. 

Writer and broadcaster Sarah Dunant spent four years researching and writing her novel “The Marchesa”, which blends fiction, biography and wonderful art and is based on the life of this most formidable female character of the Italian Renaissance. Join Sarah for a lavishly illustrated lecture in which she will bring the remarkable Isabella d’Este to rich life.