Page:Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539 volume 1 (1905).djvu/16

x and virtues in their sonnets and canzoni. Castiglione gave her a high place in his courtly record, Ariosto paid her a magnificent tribute in his "Orlando," while endless were the songs and lays which minor bards offered at the shrine of this peerless Marchesa, whom they justly called the foremost lady in the world—"la pritna donna del mondo."—"Isabella d'Este," writes Jacopo Caviceo, "at the sound of whose name all the Muses rise and do reverence."

In her aims and aspirations Isabella was a typical child of the Renaissance, and her thoughts and actions faithfully reflected the best traditions of the age. Her own conduct was blameless. As a wife and mother, as a daughter and sister, she was beyond reproach. But her judgments conformed to the standard of her own times, and her diplomacy followed the principles of Machiavelli and of Marino Sanuto. She had a strong sense of family affections, and would have risked her life for the sake of advancing the interests of her husband and children or brothers, but she did not hesitate to ask Cæsar Borgia for the statues of which he had robbed her brother-in-law, and danced merrily at the ball given by Louis XII. while her old friend and kinsman Duke Lodovico languished in the dungeons of Loches. Like others of her age, she knew no regrets and felt no remorse, but lived wholly in the present, throwing herself with all the might of her strong vitality into the business or enjoyment of the hour, forgetful of the past and careless of the future.

Fortunate in the time of her birth and in the circumstances of her life, Isabella was above all fortunate in this, that she saw the finest works of the Renaissance in the prime of their beauty. She knew