the bust carved on the Portal of the room of the sink of the Certosa di Pavia, which was of exclusively male use. Her taste in dress particularly struck the French courtiers following Charles VIII, who spent themselves in extensive descriptions; the poet André de la Vigne, in his work in verse Le Vergier d'honneur, remembers his excessive ostentatious luxury: Patronage Beatrice d'Este belonged to the best class of Renaissance women, and was one of the cultural influences of the age; to a great extent, her patronage and good taste are responsible for the splendour of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Certosa of Pavia, and many other famous buildings in Lombardy. Beatrice was mainly interested in poetry and gathered around her an excellent circle of poets in the vernacular, which included, among others, Vincenzo Calmeta, Gaspare Visconti, Niccolò da Correggio, Bernardo Bellincioni, Antonio Cammelli and Serafino Aquilano. According to some, this is a sign of the fact that she did not master Latin, although she had as a tutor the humanist Battista Guarino, in any case she favored the affirmation of vulgar literature in Milan. Music was a family passion, and therefore in her travels she was always accompanied by musicians and singers. She was a player of viola, lute and clavichord, and learned dance and singing from Ambrogio da Urbino and Lorenzo Lavagnolo. She left an epistolary of at least four hundred surviving letters, which out of habit she almost always wrote by his own hand and not by means of secretaries, as was customary at the time. Many were lost or destroyed, especially in relation to 1496, perhaps as a result of the high political content, but some appear notable for their exquisite descriptions or burlesque and irreverent tone. She appreciated the Latin and Greek comedies and tragedies, but above all the Provençal chivalric poems and the Carolingian cycle, which in those years Matteo Maria Boiardo kept alive. She especially loved to listen to the commentary on the Divine Comedy held for her by Antonio Grifo, a passion also shared by her husband who often stopped to listen to her readings. She used her position as a lady of one of the most splendid courts in Italy to surround herself with men of culture and exceptional artists. Her court was frequented by painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ambrogio de Predis, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Andrea Solari, architects