Constructing Identity: Image-Making and Female Patronage in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This thesis will use a case study approach with the purpose of analyzing three female patrons from the early modern period, each serving as individual models for locating forms of identity and self-fashioning through the art they respectively commissioned. As women in unique positions of power, Isabella d' Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, Bess of Hardwick, the second wealthiest woman in Elizabethan England--second only to the queen--and Marie de' Medici, Queen of France, each constructed and maintained a visual program of self-identity through art and architecture. Through an examination of the patronage of these women from different geographical and chronological moments it becomes evident the way in which powerful women were especially capable of exploiting marital and familial circumstances. Twentieth-century Renaissance scholarship has been greatly influenced by the study of individuality and by an effort to understand a uniquely Renaissance experience and manufacturing of identity. I have selected these three particular patrons, from three distinct countries and generations of the early modern period to draw out similarities in their collective experience as women in positions of power. The notion of constructing identity through patronage will be explored in an effort to locate the common factors that further illustrate the fact that in the Renaissance both the internal, subjective experience of self and the more objective experience of collective social, political and religious forces be considered to create a cohesive explanation of the Renaissance formation of identity.