Among the most intriguing and original secular visual representations of women that survive to us from the Italian Quattrocento are three panels by Ercole de’ Roberti (d. 1496) depicting classical women worthies, painted in Ferrara at some point between 1486 and 1493. Most critics now concur in associating the paintings with the patronage interests of Eleonora d'Aragona (1450–93), Duchess of Ferrara from 1473 following her marriage to Ercole d'Este (1431–1505).Footnote ¹ The subjects of two of the panels in Roberti's series are relatively clear: one, now at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth (fig. 1), depicts Portia, the wife of Caesar's assassin Brutus, in the company of her husband, while the other, in Modena's Galleria Estense, shows Lucretia with her husband Collatinus and Lucius Junius Brutus (fig. 2). The subject of the third panel (fig. 3), in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is more obscure, but critical consensus has settled on the wife of the Carthaginian commander Hasdrubal, who killed herself along with her children rather than submit to captivity under the Romans. The question of what precisely connects the panels’ subjects other than the generic theme of female worth has been the subject of debate, although the virtues of fortitude and constancy have recently been plausibly proposed.Footnote ² The theme of death before dishonor has also been suggested, although this applies more clearly to some of the three figures than others: while all three women's lives ended in suicide, only in the cases of Lucretia and Hasdrubal's wife does avoidance of dishonor seem the motive, while Portia's suicide is more usually attributed to her grief following Brutus's death.Footnote ³ A further connection that has been noted between the three subjects is that all three heroines exemplify feminine moral courage within a political context: Portia acts as confidante to her husband during his plot against Caesar, while Lucretia inspires Collatinus and Brutus to overthrow the tyrannical rule of Tarquinius Superbus, and Hasdrubal's wife embodies a desperate political integrity in the face of Carthage's defeat. Setting aside the republican context of the first two exempla, this political contextualization of feminine virtue had a clear relevance to the works’ probable patron, Eleonora, who was at this time assuming an ever more prominent public role in the affairs of Ferrara at the side of her spouse.Footnote ⁴

Figure 1 Ercole de’ Roberti. Portia and Brutus, ca. 1486–93. Forth Worth, Kimbell Art Museum. Photo credit: Kimbell Art Museum/Art Resource NY.

Figure 2 Ercole de’ Roberti. Lucretia with Collatinus and Brutus, ca. 1486–93. Modena, Galleria Estense. Photo credit: Archivio Fotografico SPSAE di Modena e Reggio Emilia. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali.

Figure 3 Ercole de’ Roberti. Hasdrubal's Wife with Her Children, ca. 1486–93. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art.

A problem that has traditionally confronted interpreters of Roberti's Famous Women sequence, especially those concerned with the paintings’ patronage context, is the discrepancy between the marital ethos shown in the familiar exempla of Portia and Lucretia, and that of the more arcane figure of Hasdrubal's wife. While Portia and Lucretia were both chaste wives to heroic husbands, and Portia in particular a much-cited paragon of marital devotion, the classical sources for the story of Hasdrubal's wife have a very different story to tell. In Livy, Appian, and Valerius Maximus, Hasdrubal's wife figures as a woman whose masculine fortitude stands as a reproach to the pusillanimity of her husband. She is represented as killing herself to avoid the shame of captivity and servitude, while Hasdrubal — “the most effeminate of men,” as his wife berates him in Appian — instead surrenders to the Romans and is paraded in triumph.Footnote ⁵ As Margaret Franklin has recently noted, it is difficult to square this implied theme of husbandly inadequacy in the Hasdrubal's Wife panel with Eleonora d'Aragona's position as patron and with her customary persona of loyal wife.Footnote ⁶ The problem is resolved, however, if we take the example of Hasdrubal's wife as reflecting the tradition not of Livy and Appian, but of Jerome, who cites her in the first book of his Adversus Jovinianum in a discussion of exemplary wives. Jerome radically revises Hasdrubal's wife's motive for her suicide, having her kill herself not in reproach of her husband, but rather, Lucretia-like, to escape the sexual dishonor she fears she may suffer at the hands of the Romans.Footnote ⁷ The likelihood that Jerome is the source for the Roberti panel is increased by the appearance of Lucretia and Portia slightly later in the same list of exempla, as Jerome is the only known literary source in which these three heroines coincide in such close proximity.Footnote ⁸ Identification of Jerome as the source for the paintings opens up the possibility that Eleonora herself may have made the initial selection of exempla, even if humanist advisers later contributed on matters of narrative detail. Certainly, we know her to have been an admirer of Jerome, as were many elite women in this period: her personal library, inventoried after her death in 1493, contained two works of his in vernacular translation, and she may have been responsible for commissioning Matteo da Ferrara's volgarizzazione of Jerome's Epistles, published in Ferrara in 1497.Footnote ⁹

Of the three paintings in Roberti's sequence, those representing Portia and Lucretia have more in common with each other than Hasdrubal's Wife has with either. Aside from the Roman setting and the political context of tyrannicide, the episodes depicted in these two panels are connected by the motif of self-wounding: Portia, immediately before the incident portrayed, has wounded herself in the foot with a knife to test or to demonstrate her physical courage, while Lucretia, immediately after the episode depicted, fatally stabs herself to restore her honor, which has been besmirched by her rape. A further, genealogical connection between the two episodes is supplied by the involvement of the two Brutuses, whom classical writers such as Plutarch represent as related, with Portia's Marcus Junius supposedly a distant descendent of Lucretia's avenger Lucius Junius.Footnote ¹⁰ In compositional terms, while the contrapposto of the main figures supplies a formal connection between the Portia and Hasdrubal's Wife panels, the resemblances between the Portia and Lucretia panels are also striking.Footnote ¹¹ Both are relatively static in character, by contrast with the writhing dynamism of Hasdrubal's Wife, and both present their female protagonists flanked by male figures who compete for our attention: a symmetry underlined by the close resemblance in stance and affect between the two Brutuses, both portrayed with downturned, frowning mouths. The presence of companion figures of this kind represents a departure from the conventions of the uomini famosi tradition, which generally portrayed its heroes and heroines in statuesque isolation, abstracted from the narrative context in which their virtues were concretely demonstrated. Here, by contrast, narrative is foregrounded, as is these women's social position as the wives of significant political actors in Roman history, to whom they serve as faithful supporters and confidantes (Portia) or as moral stimuli to political virtus (Lucretia).

Besides those already mentioned, a further shared feature of Roberti's Portia and Lucretia deserves particular notice: in a departure from iconographic tradition, both portray their female protagonists engaging in speech. All three of Roberti's heroines are portrayed with their mouths open, Portia and Hasdrubal's wife quite significantly so.Footnote ¹² This motif, however, demands to be interpreted differently in the Hasdrubal's Wife image than in the other two panels. In the case of Hasdrubal's wife, it seems most appropriate to read her open mouth as indicative of bewailing or lamenting, given her dramatic circumstances and the other visual clues to her distress, such as her violent motion and loosened hair.Footnote ¹³ By contrast, the calmness of stance and expression of the other two Roman heroines suggests rational speech, as does the attentiveness of their male companions. This is very clearly the case in the Portia image, which shows the heroine in declamatory mode and gesticulating. Roberti's Lucretia is less patently speaking, but the symmetry between the two paintings encourages us to read the expression of Lucius Junius Brutus, like Marcus Brutus, as that of a listener, while consultation of Livy's narrative of the episode confirms that we are seeing Lucretia at the moment in which she concludes her poised valedictory speech before taking her knife to put an end to her shame.Footnote ¹⁴

The choice of these moments in the narratives of Portia and Lucretia is anything but conventional within the tradition of visual representations of these figures. While Lucretia's suicide was a common subject in fifteenth-century art, depictions of it predictably tended to focus on the actual moment of her death, rather than the moment preceding it. Roberti's representation is thus highly unorthodox in foregrounding the moment of Lucretia's communication of her ordeal.Footnote ¹⁵ Portia is less frequently represented in art than Lucretia, but when she is, it is again her suicide (by eating burning coals) that is generally depicted. Roberti instead chooses a more recondite scene found in Valerius Maximus, and, with differences in emphasis, in Plutarch's Life of Brutus, in which Portia deliberately injures herself prior to Caesar's murder, either to prove her worth as a confidante to her husband (in Plutarch), or to test her physical courage in advance of the suicide she already envisages as necessary in the case that her husband's plans fail (in Valerius Maximus).Footnote ¹⁶ While not completely unknown as a subject in art in this period, the episode was far from common; indeed, only one other independent painting of the scene is known from the period.Footnote ¹⁷ The selection of two such rarely-depicted scenes, both privileging speech, is striking enough to be deserving of comment, especially when one of the narratives in question, that of Lucretia, offers such well-explored resources of action and graphic corporeal pathos. It seems reasonable on this basis to suggest that one of the thematic focuses of the series, along with women's capacity for moral virtues such as fortitude and constancy, is their capacity for persuasive speech.

A review of the literary sources of the two panels supports this hypothesis. Livy's description of Lucretia's speech before her death has already been mentioned. Of particular interest to the Portia panel is Plutarch's Life of Brutus, which seems Roberti's most likely source for the narrative, even if, presumably for reasons of decorum, Roberti displaces Portia's wound from her thigh (where Plutarch places it) to her foot.Footnote ¹⁸ Plutarch's narrative differs from Valerius Maximus's — and from Boccaccio's in De claris mulieribus (ca. 1361–62), where he follows Valerius's account closelyFootnote ¹⁹ — in its emphasis on Portia as speaker, and in the dramatic character it gives to her speech. In Valerius's version of the anecdote, Portia injures herself in order to test her courage. She has nothing to prove to her husband, who has already admitted her to his confidence prior to the episode, and the short speech Valerius accords to her is relatively inert in narrative terms, serving solely to clarify the motives for her act.Footnote ²⁰ In Plutarch, by contrast, Portia is excluded from her husband's political confidence at the time of the episode, and injures herself precisely to demonstrate her worthiness to be admitted to it. Her speech is highly dramatic and enacts a successful persuasion: her words, along with the visual rhetoric of her self-wounding, convince Brutus to accept her as a companion and equal. Her words, familiar to us from their reworking in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (2.1), deserve to be quoted in full: “Brutus, I am Cato's daughter, and I was given to you in marriage not just to share your bed and board like a concubine, but to be a true partner in your joys and sorrows. I have no reproach to make to you, but what proof can I give you of my love if you forbid me to share the kind of trouble that demands a loyal friend to confide in, and keep your suffering to yourself? I know that men think women's natures too weak to be entrusted with secrets, but surely a good upbringing and the company of honorable men can do much to strengthen us, and at least Portia can claim that she is the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus. I did not know before this how either of these blessings could help me, but now I have put myself to the test and find that I can conquer pain.”Footnote ²¹

As Joseph Manca has recently noted, Portia's speech in Plutarch has a special resonance in connection with Roberti's Portia and Brutus, given the close correspondences between Portia as she is represented here and the work's putative patron Eleonora d'Aragona.Footnote ²² In Portia's speech we see a woman arguing for a partnership with her husband that transcends common notions of domestic companionship, and that extends to her assumption as confidante in the most momentous matters of state. She argues this case at the most immediate level through the visual rhetoric of her self-wounding, displayed as empirical evidence of her ability to transcend the supposed feminine weakness that excludes women from public affairs. Beyond this, Portia also advances a causal explanation for this anomalous virility in her filial and marital association with Cato and Brutus: in Shakespeare's version of the equation, “being so fathered and so husbanded,” she cannot be other than “stronger than [her] sex.”Footnote ²³ The similarities with Eleonora's situation are clear. The notion of marriage as political partnership mooted in Portia's speech was certainly of the greatest relevance to Eleonora: she attained a position of considerable authority in Ferrara alongside her husband over the course of her twenty-year marriage, in the face of widespread prejudice regarding women's capacity to participate effectively in public affairs.Footnote ²⁴ Also relevant to Eleonora is the question of the genealogical transmission of virtus from father to daughter. Like Portia, Eleonora was the daughter of a famous father, the King of Naples, Ferrante I d'Aragona (1423–94), head of the only royal house in the Italian peninsula and one of the most powerful men in Italy in these years. This lineage was crucial to Eleonora's standing in Ferrara, especially in the early days of her marriage. As the daughter of a king, she was superior to her husband in birth, though subordinate to him in marriage, while the value of the diplomatic connections she brought with her, in addition to her considerable wealth, lent her a remarkable political capital at court. By the time that Roberti's Portia and Brutus was painted, Eleonora, like Portia, had had the opportunity to prove her fortitude empirically through her actions, especially in the course of Ferrara's desperate war with Venice in 1482–84, during which her husband was immobilized with sickness at one point. Nonetheless, Eleonora's royal descent remained an important factor in her prestige in Ferrara, and her Aragonese connections the source of considerable political leverage — at least until the very end of her life, when her husband began to be drawn into the anti-Aragonese political ambit of his powerful son-in-law Lodovico Sforza of Milan (1452–1508).Footnote ²⁵

Besides clarifying the appositeness of image to patron, a reading of Roberti's panel in light of its probable Plutarchan source can be helpful in illuminating the visual language through which the artist expresses his subject's virtus. Roberti's Portia is exceptional within the conventions of fifteenth-century representations of women as an image of a woman engaged in declamatory speech. Feminine decorum generally mandated strict control of the limbs, which should properly rest still and close to the body. Emphatic gesticulation of the kind deployed by Roberti's Portia was generally encoded as masculine: in terms of Sharon Fermor's analysis of gendered movement based on visual representations, courtesy texts, and dance theory, Portia displays the masculine defining character of gagliardia — boldness, vigor — rather than the feminine leggiadria, or grace.Footnote ²⁶ Elegant as it looks to the modern eye, Portia's gesture would thus probably have registered to a contemporary observer as gender-transgressive. The virility of her depiction contrasts with the bodily decorum of Brutus, who is shown demurely listening to her speech with his hands clasped before him and his head deferentially inclined. Brutus stands a little behind Portia, who dominates the pictorial space: Brutus occupies only around a third of the width of the image, a disproportion carefully measured by the folds in the green backcloth that hangs behind the couple. Nor is his third of the image even intact, given that Portia's extended right hand intrudes into his space. Portia's physical dominance of the scene and the angle of her gesticulation — away from her husband and toward the viewer — clearly mark her speech as oratorical, despite its ostensibly domestic and conversational context. The device references the image's didactic function by conscripting the viewer as the audience for her implied words and the moral message they convey.

The extent to which Roberti figures Portia's delivery as oratorical is best seen by comparing his image with other contemporary representations of this episode. The only other independent panel painting to feature Portia's self-wounding scene is a work of disputed authorship in the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow (fig. 4) datable to around the same period as Roberti's own Portia.Footnote ²⁷ It shows Portia, knife still in her foot, whispering the reason for her self-wounding in her husband's ear, while alarmed onlookers run to her aid. Broadly similar in its representation of the scene, though dispensing with third parties, is a lost cassone panel by Jacopo da Sellaio (ca. 1441–93), formerly in Berlin, that includes the scene of Portia's self-wounding in a series of three episodes associated with the assassination of Caesar (fig. 5).Footnote ²⁸ Here we see Portia, wounded in the chest, decorously indicating her injury, and appraising her husband of her motives. She does not whisper as in the Krakow painting, but her tone still may be inferred from the positioning of the figures as conversational rather than declamatory. The only representation that hints at a more emphatic delivery of Portia's speech is a woodcut found in a number of early printed editions of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus from 1473, which shows the self-wounding episode paired with Portia's suicide, both events framing Brutus's assassination of Caesar (fig. 6).Footnote ²⁹ Here Portia sits while Brutus stands, and points with her right hand to her wound, while gesturing up toward him with her left hand. The posture foregrounds the act of speech more than the Krakow or Berlin paintings, and conveys the impression that Portia is speaking with a certain rhetorical force. The image also partially foreshadows the ambiguity of address that we see more fully realized in the Roberti panel: Portia turns to speak to her husband, but the orientation of her body and the direction of her gestures have the effect of secondarily implicating the viewer — or, here, the reader of the book — as an external audience to her speech. However, we are still at a considerable distance here from Roberti's eloquent portrayal of Portia as speaker, with her expansive, oratorical gesticulation, which is perhaps emblematic of rhetorical competence, as the open palm was traditionally a symbol of the art.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 4 Portia and Brutus, date unknown. Krakow, Czartoryski Museum. By permission of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation.

Figure 5 Jacopo da Sellaio. Scenes Relating to the Assassination of Caesar, ca. 1485. Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm [now Bode] Museum (lost). Photo credit: Art Resource NY.

Figure 6 Scenes from the Life of Portia. In Giovanni Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus, 1473. London, British Library, IB 1993, fol. 108^v.

Plutarch's text can help us read this extraordinary image by recalling Portia's status as Cato's daughter, a point that, as we have seen, is fundamental to her speech. Cato was famed as an orator as well as a statesman — to the extent that it is possible to separate the two roles in a Roman context — figuring as an orator, for example, in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, where he is shown defeating Caesar in a Senate debate.Footnote ³¹ Portia's portrayal here as oratrix serves not only to illustrate her speech to Brutus in the episode narrated by Plutarch, but also, more obliquely, to reference the content of this speech and, specifically, its allusion to her descent from Cato. This descent is visually encoded in her oratorical stance and implied eloquence, which serve, more generally, to evoke by synecdoche her sharing in Cato's political virtus. This reading would have been facilitated for humanistically educated viewers by the existence of a celebrated parallel in the father-daughter oratorical pairing of Quintus Hortensius Hortalus and his daughter Hortensia, the former a contemporary of Cicero's and his opponent during the corruption trial of Verres, the latter celebrated for a speech she delivered before the Second Triumvirate that defended Roman matrons from an imposition of taxes. Like Portia, Hortensia is accorded an honorary virility by virtue of her paternal descent, which — following a dynamic in Roman culture that has been discussed by Judith Hallett — was considered compensatory for her weakness as a woman.Footnote ³² This is precisely the formula evoked by Portia in the speech Plutarch attributes to her, though with the rhetorically diplomatic addition of her husband. Hortensia's status as heir to her father's prowess is underlined by Valerius Maximus, who speaks of Hortensius “living again” in his daughter and “inspiring her words.”Footnote ³³ The gender-transgressive elements in Roberti's portrayal of Portia assume a precise significance within this discursive tradition: if Portia's corporeal gagliardia visually transcribes the masculine quality of her eloquence, this in turn stands as testimonial to her genetic virility as Cato's daughter and his moral and intellectual heir.

Hortensia was a reasonably familiar figure in fifteenth-century humanistic culture, and would have been imaginatively available to Roberti and his advisers in 1480s Ferrara. Besides her mention in Valerius Maximus, in a chapter devoted to women who pleaded cases in public, she finds honorable mention in Quintilian, who writes of the text of her speech as still in circulation at the time of writing; and in Appian, who recreates her oration before the triumvirs in his Civil Wars.Footnote ³⁴ As so often in such cases, Hortensia's postclassical fortunes may be traced to Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, which gives her a laudatory biography, praising her not least, interestingly enough, for her “forceful delivery” (vigor pronuntiandi), a quality Boccaccio notes as often lacking in learned men.Footnote ³⁵ Subsequent to this, Hortensia surfaces frequently in fifteenth-century humanistic writings as a legitimizing precedent for modern eloquent women, along with such figures as Sappho, Cornelia, and Diotima.Footnote ³⁶ Hortensia's speech before the triumvirs also inspired a direct humanistic imitation in the 1450s oration attributed to Nicolosa Sanuti of Bologna protesting a sumptuary law.Footnote ³⁷ She is also referenced in two works dedicated to Eleonora d'Aragona in the 1470s and ’80s by intellectuals at the court of Ferrara. The first is the Del modo di regere e regnare (ca. 1478–79) of Antonio Cornazzano of Piacenza (1429–ca. 1484), where we find Hortensia cited twice, in lists of classical figures displaying the leadership virtues of prudence and learning.Footnote ³⁸ The second, especially interesting in this context, is the treatise De laudibus mulierum (ca. 1487) by the Ferrara-based humanist and notary Bartolomeo Goggio, a figure often cited as a likely candidate for Roberti's iconographical advisor for the paintings discussed here.Footnote ³⁹ Goggio does not simply mention Hortensia in passing, unlike Cornazzano, but devotes an entire chapter to her in a segment of the work devoted to women who have excelled in letters and learning. Goggio's presentation of Hortensia's oratorical skills is unusually assertive in that he makes her not merely the equal of her father, but his superior: if Hortensius was, in his day, second as an orator only to Cicero, Hortensia was the equal of Cicero himself.Footnote ⁴⁰

Besides the classical precedent of Hortensia, more proximate cases of female orators may also be considered in reconstructing the context of Roberti's oratorical representation of Portia. The most immediate, coinciding quite closely with the painting in terms of date, is that of the Venetian humanist and orator Cassandra Fedele (1465[?]–1558), who caused a sensation in 1487 by delivering an oration at the University of Padua on the occasion of the award of a degree to her relative Bertuccio Lamberti.Footnote ⁴¹ Fedele's speech and her polished performance of it won her the applause of numerous humanists, and the text was published several times over the following years.Footnote ⁴² It seems quite certain that the fame of Fedele's oration reached the court of Ferrara: a letter of 1488 written to Fedele in the name of Eleonora d'Aragona makes it clear that the duchess has heard of the young humanist's many qualities through report, and not merely inferred them from Cassandra's letters to her.Footnote ⁴³ Aside from Fedele, a female orator certainly known to Eleonora was her sister-in-law Ippolita Sforza d'Aragona (1444–89), a woman noted for her humanistic learning and famed for a youthful oration delivered in 1459 before Pope Pius II.Footnote ⁴⁴ Given the contacts between their families, Eleonora may also have known by reputation Ippolita's cousin and rival in eloquence, Battista Sforza da Montefeltro (1446–72), who was similarly celebrated for an oration to Pius II that she delivered in 1461.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to these contemporaries or near-contemporaries, Eleonora and her circle may well also have been aware of the oratorical feats of earlier noblewomen such as Battista da Montefeltro Malatesta (1384–1450) and Costanza Varano (1426–47), who had pioneered the modern tradition of female oratory in Italy in the 1430s and ’40s. Aside from possible oral sources, we find the eloquence of these women celebrated in texts like Giannantonio Campano's 1472 funeral oration for their descendant Battista Sforza, while the Bolognese humanist and Este client Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (1445–1510) includes an admiring account of the oratory of the two Battistas in his Gynevera, de le clare donne (ca. 1489–90).Footnote ⁴⁶

It may well be that in creating his eloquent Portia, Roberti had this recent tradition of female public speaking in mind: certainly, the figure of the female orator, though still indubitably exotic, was far from unknown in this period. In addition, we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that Roberti's allusion to female eloquence in the figure of Portia was inspired by Eleonora herself. This may at first sound improbable, given that Eleonora is not credited with particular erudition in contemporary sources, and she does not appear to have known Latin, which would have limited her access to rhetorical texts.Footnote ⁴⁷ We should be wary of concluding for this reason, however, that she had no pretensions to eloquence: the example of Ceccarella Minutolo's Lettere of the 1470s — two addressed to Eleonora herself before her marriage — demonstrate very clearly the level of vernacular rhetorical competence possessed by some noblewomen within the Neapolitan cultural sphere.Footnote ⁴⁸ Contemporary encomia of Eleonora emphasize her speech skills in their more general discussions of her contributions to government. The most emphatic tribute in this regard is found in the funeral oration written for her by the poet and humanist Baptista Mantuanus (1448–1516), who makes extended mention of Eleonora's eloquence in his discussion of her public virtues, describing her in lavish Ciceronian terms as capable of “possessing the souls of her listeners and holding the hearts of her listeners in her hands.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Mantuanus acknowledges that Eleonora's eloquence was not attained through study, but rather through observation and practice; but he makes a merit of this, stating that she attained a degree of eloquence through these means that made her the equal of the most famous learned women of antiquity.Footnote ⁵⁰ We find no such grandiose tribute to Eleonora's eloquence in her other funeral oration by Battista Guarini (ca. 1435–1503), but Guarini does praise in passing the duchess's capacity to respond to visiting ambassadors during her husband's absences with “eloquence, graciousness, and promptitude.”Footnote ⁵¹ Outside the context of laudatory literature, we find evidence for Eleonora's familiarity with public speaking in a letter of hers to her husband of May 1493, reporting on a speech she delivered to the doge and signoria of Venice during a visit to that city accompanied by her niece Isabella d'Aragona (1470–1524), Duchess of Bari, who also spoke.Footnote ⁵² While she is concerned primarily in the letter with the content of her speech, Eleonora remarks in passing on the “charming mode and manner” of her niece's delivery, a comment suggestive of her alertness to the performative dimensions of speech.Footnote ⁵³

Besides this routine activity of formal public speaking, on one occasion Eleonora distinguished herself as an orator in more dramatic circumstances, in an episode that attained quite a degree of currency in the chronicles and biographies of the time. The event occurred in November 1482, during the worst crisis of the war with Venice, when the enemy was practically at the gates of the city and Ercole d'Este lay incapacitated with sickness, rumored dead. On the testimony of the chronicler Bernardino Zambotti (ca. 1460–after 1504), who appears to have been an eyewitness, Eleonora summoned to the ducal palace an ample cross section of the male population of the city — “gentlemen, magnates, citizens, and plebeians of all kinds”Footnote ⁵⁴ — and spoke movingly to them in her husband's name, reassuring them that aid would shortly be at hand for the stricken city from its allies, and enjoining them to their traditional loyalty to the Este.Footnote ⁵⁵ Zambotti presents Eleonora's “sweet” words, delivered with great pathos, as having moved her audience to tears and having secured the loyalty of the populace at this moment of crisis — although not before she had provided evidence to her skeptical audience that Ercole was not dead by displaying him on his sickbed to the assembled crowds.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition to Zambotti's account, we find a second narrative of the episode in a Latin history of the war by the Venice-based Corsican humanist Pietro Cirneo (1447–ca. 1507), who reports Eleonora's speech in a resonant and humanistically embellished form.Footnote ⁵⁷ A similarly high-flown reworking of the episode is found in the biography of Eleonora by the Bergamasque humanist Giacomo Filippo Foresti (1434–ca. 1520) in his De claris selectisque mulieribus of 1497.Footnote ⁵⁸ This account may reflect Ferrarese oral tradition, since Foresti appears to have been in Ferrara in 1492.Footnote ⁵⁹ Besides these direct narratives, it is also possible that this episode of Eleonora's salvation of her country through her eloquence may have inspired Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti to attribute a similar feat to her mother, Isabella di Chiaramonte, Queen of Naples (1423–65), in the biography of her that he included in his Gynevera. In Sabadino's account, Isabella effectively salvages the regime of her husband Ferrante I during the 1459–62 baronial-Angevin uprising that followed his accession, when she uses the power of her eloquence to persuade her uncle Giovanni del Balzo Orsini (d. 1463), one of the rebel leaders, to change his allegiance to the king.Footnote ⁶⁰ Sabadino emphasizes Isabella's salvific eloquence, recounting her speech in full, as Cirneo and Foresti do with Eleonora's, and comparing her intervention to that of Coriolanus's mother Veturia when she dissuaded her son from his proposed attack on Rome.Footnote ⁶¹ We may be certain that Sabadino was writing with Eleonora in mind, as he sent her a copy of the biography in 1491.Footnote ⁶²

In view of this evidence, it seems a hypothesis worth considering that Ercole de’ Roberti's evocation of female eloquence in his Portia and Brutus may have been intended as a compliment to his patron, and perhaps a direct recollection of a heroic moment in her political life.Footnote ⁶³ Whether or not this narrower hypothesis is accepted, however, a broader point seems clear: Roberti worked within a culture in which female oratory was a recognized phenomenon, and his choice to portray Portia in oratorical guise must be read in this context. As was noted above, a striking aspect of the painting is the enargeia with which it renders the physical act of speaking in the figure of Portia. Aside from her gesticulation and the poised contrapposto of her stance, her speech is vividly evoked by the detail of her open mouth, a motif reinforced by the contrast with Brutus's resolutely sealed lips to her right. As well as self-referentially alluding to the skill of the artist, by challenging the paragone topos of the painted human image as silent, the figure of Portia vividly represents the new and seductive neoclassical ideal of the eloquent woman, which was currently attaining its literary apotheosis in the humanist response to Cassandra Fedele. Seen from this perspective, the image compares interestingly with previous fifteenth-century depictions of articulate women that tend to present them with a dialectical, rather than an oratorical, paradigm in mind. A well-known example is Masolino's depiction in San Clemente in Rome of Saint Catherine of Alexandria's dispute with the pagan sages, where she is shown in the manner of a scholastic philosopher, counting off a series of points on her fingers (fig. 7).Footnote ⁶⁴ Catherine's gesture is consonant with the subject of the painting, but we find, more incongruously, the same dialectical hand-gesture in manuscript illuminations of Hortensia addressing the triumvirs, where a more oratorical delivery would logically be required (fig. 8).Footnote ⁶⁵ Roberti's Portia is unusual, if not unique, for the period in presenting us with an image of a woman speaking according to the classical canons of oratorical performance, perhaps in a manner not dissimilar from Fedele herself, who was complimented on her “seemly movement of the body in delivery.”Footnote ⁶⁶ It is difficult to think of any precedent for this, other than possibly the rather distant one of Andrea da Castagno's gracefully gesticulating Cumaean Sybil of ca. 1450, whose stance, with raised hand and upward-pointing finger, has been associated with Roman oratorical practice (fig. 9).Footnote ⁶⁷

Figure 7 Masolino da Panicale. Saint Catherine Disputing with the Philosophers, 1429–32. Rome, San Clemente. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource NY.

Figure 8 Hortensia Addressing the Triumvirs. In Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cleres et nobles femmes, early fifteenth century. London, British Library, MS Royal 16 G V, fol. 98.

Figure 9 Andrea da Castagno. Cumaean Sybil, ca. 1450. Florence, Uffizi.

The positive evocation of female eloquence that we encounter in de’ Roberti's Portia and Brutus has a particular claim on our attention in that it offers a challenge to the commonplace in recent scholarship that humanist attitudes to articulateness in women were characterized by hostility and suspicion. This view urgently demands to be reexamined, as it rests on a highly selective consideration of the evidence. The humanist texts most frequently cited on the question of the propriety of female public speaking are two: Francesco Barbaro's De re uxoria of 1416 and Leonardo Bruni's De studiis et litteris, usually dated between 1422 and 1429. In a chapter specifically devoted to the question of speech, Barbaro insists on taciturnity as the only proper speech decorum for a respectable matron, and congratulates the ancient Romans on their wisdom in banning women from oratorical performance.Footnote ⁶⁸ Barbaro makes a strong connection between a woman engaging in public speaking and sexual impropriety: a connection memorably expressed in his much-quoted dictum that such verbal self-exposure in a woman may be equated with the public display of her flesh.Footnote ⁶⁹ No such association between eloquence and sexual indecorum is found in Bruni's De studiis et litteris, but the female student of the humanities is nonetheless deterred from devoting herself to the study of rhetoric on the grounds that it will be of no practical use for her, given her lack of involvement in the civic life of the forum. Bruni singles out the art of oratorical delivery as a rhetorical doctrine whose irrelevance to women is laughably obvious, stating in a frequently cited passage that: “the art of delivery, which the Greeks call hypocrisis and we pronuntiatio … is so far from being the concern of a woman that if she should gesture energetically with her arms as she spoke and shout with violent emphasis, she would probably be thought mad and put under restraint.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Barbaro's and Bruni's pronouncements have often been presented as representative of Italian humanists’ views on the propriety of public speaking and of the study of rhetoric in women. But this was by no means the case. Aside from Bruni, there is no evidence that any humanist sufficiently enlightened to condone a classical education for women believed that this education should not encompass rhetoric: indeed, there are grounds for believing that this was not something that Bruni was advocating in all seriousness himself.Footnote ⁷¹ It is certainly true that a substantial moralizing literature existed that extolled silence as a virtue in women and censured loquacity, especially in public.Footnote ⁷² This was not, however, without nuance: even a figure like Boccaccio, notoriously equivocal in his gender attitudes, was prepared to concede, in his life of Hortensia in De claris mulieribus, that “as much as silence in public was a praiseworthy quality in a woman, still, when the occasion required it, an elegant and seemly flow of language deserved to be extolled.”Footnote ⁷³

Boccaccio's formula “if the occasion demands it” implies, of course, that for a woman to speak in public was something acceptable only in exceptional circumstances, such as we see in the case of Hortensia and of Eleonora d'Aragona during the War of Ferrara. The two earliest recorded speeches by fifteenth-century women correspond to this exceptionalist model. The first, delivered in August 1433 by Battista da Montefeltro, was a plea to the Emperor Sigismund (1368–1437) to assist in restoring her deposed husband to his hereditary lordship of Pesaro and in negotiating the release of her imprisoned son-in-law. The second, delivered in 1442 by Battista's granddaughter, Costanza Varano, was similarly dramatic in its circumstances and subject matter, calling on Bianca Maria Visconti (1425–68) — or, through her, her condottiere husband, Francesco Sforza (1401–66) — for help in restoring the deposed Varano to Camerino.Footnote ⁷⁴

From the 1450s, however, a routinization of female oratory was beginning, which presumably reflected a growing acceptance of women's erudition and its display. In rhetorical terms, this is marked by a shift from the deliberative to the demonstrative genus dicendi, the former defined by classical theorists as functional in character and typically political in its subject matter, the latter more self-consciously artistic and moral in its focus, and reserved for ceremonial occasions. An early example of a demonstrative speech by an Italian woman is the oration in praise of Saint Jerome delivered in 1453 by Isotta Nogarola (1418–65) on the invitation of the incoming Bishop of Verona, Ermolao Barbaro (1410–71).Footnote ⁷⁵ A later case is found in Cassandra Fedele, who, after her famous oration at the University of Padua in 1487, was invited by the rhetorician and philologist Giorgio Valla (1447–ca. 1500), presumably in his capacity as professor of rhetoric at the School of San Marco, to give a second oration before the doge and senate of Venice.Footnote ⁷⁶ These two cases of prominent humanists soliciting speeches from women should in themselves be sufficient to illustrate that male intellectuals of the period did not universally regard public speaking in women with opprobrium. In fact, far from inevitably condemning public eloquence as inimical to feminine decorum, humanists often show themselves inclined actively to promote female oratory, presenting it, Hortensia in mind, as a sign of modern humanistic culture's approximation to classical ideals.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is important to underline this, not least because the narrative of humanism's progressive acceptance — and, indeed, celebration and mystification — of the eloquent woman is indicative of a broader ideological shift crucial to an understanding of women's place in Italian elite culture at this time. As is well known, the Aristotelian understanding of gender identity, dominant in the scholastic culture of this period, proposed a sharp dichotomy between the social roles of the two sexes and the sets of virtues thought proper to them. Aristotle regarded these differences as essential, in that they derived from the supposed biological differences between the sexes.Footnote ⁷⁸ This strictly dichotomized model of gender roles, which had evolved within the ancient Greek polis, mapped fairly seamlessly onto the social practices of the medieval Italian city-republics.Footnote ⁷⁹ It was, however, patently inadequate as a model for the increasingly powerful and culturally assertive princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy, in which women of the ruling dynasties were frequently called on to perform masculine leadership roles. The question of eloquence is a case in point: where Aristotle had regarded this as a masculine virtue whose feminine equivalent was silence, this was a dichotomy that made sense only within a model of gender identity in which civic space was regarded as the proper domain of men and women were confined to the domestic sphere. Within the context of the princely courts, the model of womanhood as chaste, silent, and obedient was clearly not sufficient, especially where the key figure of the dynastic consort was concerned. While chastity was nonnegotiable, the requirements of silence and obedience were quite urgently in need of reframing, as was, more generally, the requirement that the decent woman be self-effacing and chary of notice, a tortoise ever ready to retreat into her shell.Footnote ⁸⁰

Nowhere in the late Quattrocento was this process of gender redefinition taking place more energetically and self-consciously than in the Ferrara of Eleonora d'Aragona, where the intellectuals of the court had before them a woman who represented a living confutation of Aristotelian gender norms. Not only did Eleonora deputize for her husband during his absences from Ferrara — as was relatively common in the case of dynastic consorts — but she also appears to have taken an unusually prominent administrative role even when the duke was at home.Footnote ⁸¹ She held audiences for her subjects, hearing complaints and supplications, and oversaw the finances of the vast ducal household. During Ercole's absences she embodied the authority of his regime for both the populace and visiting dignitaries.Footnote ⁸² Such a reality could not be comfortably squared with a gender ideology that conceived of women as predetermined by nature as subordinate, and possessed only of the qualities of body and soul that fitted them for a lifetime of domesticity and submission. A more capacious feminine identity was required, one capable of embracing masculine leadership virtues such as justice, fortitude, eloquence, and prudence.

We see this Ferrarese project of gender revisionism most impressively at work in Bartolomeo Goggio's De laudibus mulierum, notable as the first Italian querelle text to engage with the task of refuting scholastic philosophical and theological arguments for female inferiority, rather than limiting itself to assembling exempla from classical history of women who had “exceeded their sex.”Footnote ⁸³ A second, less radical querelle text that may be more conjecturally connected with Eleonora's patronage is Giacomo Filippo Foresti's De claris selectisque mulieribus, the most substantial compendium of ancient and modern famous women produced in Italy up to this time.Footnote ⁸⁴ In addition to these specialized works on women, two political advice books addressed to Eleonora, Antonio Cornazzano's Del modo di regere e di regnare and Diomede Carafa's I doveri del principe (ca. 1473–77), may both be seen as engaging more implicitly with gender issues, as the first humanistic writings on princely government to be framed with a female ruler in mind.Footnote ⁸⁵ Cornazzano, in particular, shows himself consistently alert to the gender dimension of this exercise, carefully mingling male and female exempla in his illustration of the virtues of the prince.Footnote ⁸⁶ Besides these four works, all of which have received some attention in recent years, a full consideration of the discourse on gender associated with Eleonora also needs to embrace lesser-known encomiastic writings, such as the two important funeral orations composed for her by Battista Guarini and Baptista Mantuanus, both of which appeared in print at the time.Footnote ⁸⁷ A final significant posthumous work in the encomiastic vein is Foresti's biography, written shortly after Eleonora's death in 1493.Footnote ⁸⁸

It is within this rich discursive context that we must locate Ercole de’ Roberti's Portia and Brutus, which depicts the new ideal of female and wifely virtue that the above texts collectively craft. This ideal is at once both challenging and reassuring: challenging in its emphasis on women's capacity for political virility, yet reassuring in its positing of such prowess as compatible with chastity and marital devotion. Perhaps the text that most perfectly illustrates this rhetorical strategy is Guarini's: composed, perhaps significantly, by a Ferrarese-born intellectual who had been close to Eleonora in life.Footnote ⁸⁹ Guarini starts the most substantial part of his oration, his disquisition on Eleonora's “virtues of mind,” by announcing that “although she possessed every quality that might be expected in an excellent matron,” he will concentrate exclusively on those virtues that she manifested in her governmental activities.Footnote ⁹⁰ He then analyzes these leadership virtues, beginning with the all-important quality of prudence, and proceeding through temperance, affability (facilitas), humanity, liberality, and piety. Eleonora is presented here in terms that are strikingly uninflected by gender; military prowess aside, Guarini's template for the description is clearly the quintessentially masculine one of the ideal prince. His treatment of the virtue of temperance is indicative in this regard: while Eleonora's impeccable chastity is inevitably lauded, it is not given particular salience. Rather, in a notable departure from the emphases of conventional treatments of female virtue, Guarini gives only as much weight to sexual continence in his treatment of Eleonora's temperantia as he does to more gender-neutral sub-virtues such as frugality and abstemiousness.Footnote ⁹¹

Equally unconventional is Guarini's section on Eleonora's “bodily gifts” (corporis dotes), which passes with diplomatic swiftness over the subject of beauty to stress instead the deceased duchess's remarkable bodily strength and the stamina that allowed her to work long hours in government without any need for sustenance or rest. Guarini's comment on this point is telling in view of the Aristotelian tradition that grounded male political excellence in men's superior physical strength: Eleonora's physical robustness was such that “she seemed to have been framed for rule by nature's very hands.”Footnote ⁹² Eleonora is explicitly portrayed here as a leader of men, possessed of all the moral and physical capabilities that leadership demands. The same insistence on women's capacity for rule is found in Cornazzano's Del modo di regere e di regnare, in a passage that praises the prudence of Francesco Sforza and Ercole d'Este in allowing their consorts to share in their government. Cornazzano's language is explicit: he speaks of Sforza “dividing the worthy office of rule with his wife.”Footnote ⁹³ Scholarship has not sufficiently recognized this notion of spousal coregency, which might be used, for example, to interpret the pendant portraits of ruling couples that are a feature of late Quattrocento court art.Footnote ⁹⁴ The ideal of the heroic ruling couple also appears in literature, most notably in the Orlando innamorato (1483 and 1494) of the Ferrarese courtier-poet Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434–94), where the fictional founding couple of the Este dynasty, Bradamante and Ruggiero, are represented, not as demure princess and warrior on the Virgilian model of Lavinia and Aeneas, but, rather, as two warriors, one female, one male.

Although this ideal of the ruling couple is attained by assimilating the female partner to the dominant model of virility, this does not mean that gender difference is entirely collapsed. The novelty of Guarini's masculinized portrayal of Eleonora is tempered by his emphasis on her devotion to her husband, whom she is said to have “loved as a brother, revered as a father, and venerated as her lord.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Guarini cites this conjugal pietas as the original motivation for Eleonora's unusually close involvement in matters of state: “When she observed that her noble consort, dear to her above all things … was burdened with many arduous and difficult tasks, having regard to his health, on which she knew the well-being of his subjects to rely, she diligently and cautiously took upon herself the charge of the treasury and the other revenues of state.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Eleonora's involvement in the government of Ferrara is here presented as a natural extension of a wife's proper solicitude for her husband's health. This is a well-calculated move on Guarini's part. In the politically active Eleonora, he is aware of presenting his readers with a potentially challenging reality: indeed, one that he acknowledges “may seem incredible to many, and exceeding the capacities of the female sex.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In this context, his emphasis on the duchess as an exemplary wife performs an important rhetorical function, drawing what might otherwise have been perceived as a monstrous regiment (to use John Knox's phrase) into a seemlier and more conventional frame.

It is illuminating to juxtapose the visual rhetoric of Roberti's Famous Women with the verbal rhetoric of Guarini's oration — especially so in the case of the Portia and Brutus, in many regards the ideological key to the sequence. In Portia and her companion women worthies in Roberti's sequence, we see figured precisely the type of the uxorial virago as we see constructed by Guarini in his oration: possessed of masculine capabilites of mind and body, yet content with her feminine role as loyal wife. Portia's striking and unwonted portrayal as oratrix perfectly encapsulates this gender tension, expressing her Catonian virility within a narrative context that frames this virility as an expression of conjugal concern. This was not the only way in which Eleonora chose to have herself represented (if we can take the figure of Portia as a moral self-portrait): a miniature, perhaps by Cosmè Tura, in the Morgan Library that adorns the title page of the presentation copy of Cornazzano's Del modo di regere e di regnare shows her alone in profile in regal guise, grasping a scepter that is being handed down to her directly by God (fig. 10).Footnote ⁹⁸ Roberti's Portia and Brutus speaks a more discreet language, one closer to the rhetoric of Eleonora's courtly encomiasts, placing her not as a ruler herself but as the subordinate partner in a ruling couple that draws its strength from its pooling of talent. While this may seem less radical as a statement than the Tura portrait, it is nevertheless far from conventional. We are far from the Aristotelian view of the sexes as oppositely abled by nature to fit man to power and woman to subjection. Rather, in the fifteenth-century model of the heroic ruling couple, the relation between the pair is not contrastive, but specular, with both partners manifesting equally, or near equally, a divine fitness for rule.

Figure 10 Cosmè Tura [?]. Eleonora d'Aragona, ca. 1478–79. Title page of Antonio Cornazzano, Del modo di regere e di regnare. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 731.

This vision of the virile, yet socially acceptable, woman originated within the highest social circles to accommodate the anomalous social reality of the politically empowered Quattrocento dynastic wife. The distance of this model of womanhood from traditionally sanctioned models served as signifier of social distinction: dynastic women could be other to conventional models of femininity because they were other, more generally, to nonnoble humankind. That this model originated within these elevated circles, however, does not mean that it was destined to stop there. Of course, women outside the ranks of the ruling dynasties could not aspire to govern a country in the manner of Eleonora d'Aragona. However, where eloquence — the most accessible masculine sphere of endeavor for woman — is concerned, the practice of female oratory, originating among the dynastic families of the Montefeltro, Varano, and Sforza, had by the late fifteenth century migrated down to the relatively modest social level of the Venetian cittadina Cassandra Fedele.Footnote ⁹⁹ This process continued in the century that followed, accelerating as the vernacular displaced Latin as the dominant literary language in Italy. By the mid-sixteenth century, the public display of eloquence in women — mainly in the form of vernacular poetry — was considered not simply acceptable, but even praiseworthy in wide segments of the Italian elite, down to the families of the minor urban nobility and professional men.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This, ultimately, is the historical importance of the processes of courtly cultural negotiation, which we see embodied with such elegance in the vocal yet virtuous figure of Roberti's Portia. The Quattrocento courts established the principle that public eloquence in a woman could, pace Francesco Barbaro, be compatible with “honesty.” The remarkable flowering of women's writing we see in the following century in Italy would be incomprehensible without this ethical base.