Francesco II Gonzaga and maps as palace decoration in renaissance Mantua

Abstract

Francesco II Gonzaga, fourth Marquis of Mantua (1484–1579), commissioned sophisticated painted cycles of maps and city views for his two country palaces at Gonzaga and Marmirolo and for his Mantuan townhouse, the Palazzo di San Sebastiano. Archival research enables us to reconstruct these lost cartographical ensembles, which constitute important early examples of a genre of palace decoration which became fashionable in Renaissance Italy. Francesco's efforts to collect the highest‐quality cartographical materials for the creation of these map cycles are chronicled in his correspondence, which reveals him to have been a well‐informed patron, capable of uncompromising standards and discriminating taste.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.