After an excellent education, she married the Duke of Mantua, and started collecting paintings, most commissioned in great detail for her private study.
Correggio
Stories of the origin of the Italian pine and cypress trees, and a far more dubious account of Jupiter’s abduction that’s found in an advert for beer.
Jupiter wants Io, but after raping her turns her into a cow for safe-keeping. Juno suspects, though, and puts the cow under the watchful hundred eyes of Argus.
Two birds associated with myth: Zeus’s eagle, often used to indicate his presence in disguise, and the symbol of night and wisdom, the owl.
Wisdom, crafts including weaving, and warfare, she’s a popular figure in paintings from Mantegna to Klimt, and a contestant in the Judgement of Paris.
Many myths concern his endless adulterous rapes of mortals and subsequent pregnancies, but there’s also Philemon and Baucis.
Claimed to have had a constellation of major artists paint for her, what is the truth?What impact did she have on the Renaissance?
The Eclectic Light Company 