Lady of Asolo: A Pictorial HIstory of the Life and Times of Caterina Cornaro.

Rochester, New York: Published by the Author, (1985). First Edition. Quarto, softbound (stiff, stapled, gilt-illustrated green wrappers), v, 55 pp. Fine. From Introductoin: We in this modern age can still find particular fascination and delight in the chronicles of the lives of the illustrious women of the Renaissance. From such excursions into biography, history and art, the appealing attributes of these long-gone figures can come alive and be vibrant once more ---- the diving beauty of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci whom Botticelli immortalized as “Flora” in his painting, “Primavera” or “Springtime”: the exquisite artistic taste and the avid love of collecting of Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, whose beautiful profile Leonardo da Vinci captured in a delicate drawing; the savoir faire of Caterina de Medici, the descendant of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who brouth many of the fine (As well as culinary!) arts of Florentine fame to the French Court; the gaiety and sprightliness of Bona Storza, her Milanese counterpart, who contributed similarly to a welcoming Polish royal house; the spirituality and intellectual brilliance of Vittoria Colonna who exchanged sonnets with the incomparable Michelangelo in his twilight years; Leonora d’Este, gentle muse of Torquato Tasso’s ill-starred poetical genius... And on and on one could go, to the many other ladies of the splendid courts of Italy. Yet, perhaps no one of these could ever come to capture our imagination and, in certain ways, our sympathy, as does Caterina Cornaro, the “girl-queen” of Cyrpus and “Lady of Asolo,” a lovelyk delicate and fragile flower of the High Renaissance as it bloomed in the sumptuous and colorful splendor of Venice. The life of Caterina was but a brief moment -- a footnote in Venetian history -- as one commentator put it. Still, her memory lives on. Caterina’s era -- the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- was the period of triumphant early commercial captialism as well as prodigious and unparalleled artistic vitality in Italy, and many of her contemporaries are everlastingly enshrined as the luminaries of all time, among them: da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Columbus, Lorenzo the Mangificent, Palladio, Politian, Titian. Caterina’s life bridged the period of the Republic’s glittering zenith as a sovereign maritime power in the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean seas as well as the dawn of its decline from greatness.