Sometimes truth is more intoxicating than myth. An illustrated lecture by Sarah Dunant.

Visitors welcome on the door. £10.00

Wine reception to follow.

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Join Sarah Dunant, live on Zoom with Paola's Studiolo, as she discusses one of the most fascinating women of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella d'Este.

Saturday 28th June 2025.

6pm London | 7pm Florence |10am Los Angeles | 1pm New York

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In Dunant's own words: "Over the last four years, I have been researching and writing a novel about one of the most formidable female characters of the Italian renaissance, Isabella d’Este.

Born in 1474 into one of Italy’s most illustrious dynasties in Ferrara, she was married at fifteen into another. Her husband , Francesco Gonzaga , Marquis of Mantua, was a warrior and a philanderer, but their partnership lasted for a quarter of a century and their mutual independence allowed her to become the first female patron and art collector of her time, as well as ruling the state in his absence. She collected work from Michelangelo, Mantegna, Perugino, Titian and Leonardo as well as indulging a passion for Roman antiquities which were all the rage at the time. An icon of fashion, her court was filled with writers and poets and she had a personally designed studiolo, at a time when only men had such places.

Her clever, educated and occasionally overbearing voice (!) sings out from some thirteen thousand letters preserved in the archive of Mantua, all of which allowed me to write ‘The Marchesa,” a mix of fiction, biography and the most wonderful art, to bring alive this most flamboyant and influential of Renaissance women."

Free entry.

The Sunday Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels, The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan and Blood and Beauty, has an exceptional talent for breathing life into history. Now Sarah Dunant turns her discerning eye to the foremost female art collector and patron of the Renaissance — Isabella d’Este, the Marchesa of Mantua — in a bold, new history that blends fiction with biography and art.

The book will be available to buy from Rossiter Books on the day.