Willing Patronesses: Choosing, Loosing, and Binding in Venetian Noblewomen’s Wills

This essay is inspired by Ben Kohl’s 2001 article on Fina Buzzacarini da Carrara as wife, mother, and art patron in fourteenth-century Padua. Ben examined Fina’s collaboration with her husband, Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, her bequests to her children and other persons, and her expenditures for the construction of a tomb for herself and her husband in Padua’s Baptistery. He showed the many ways in which a woman of substance, in this case the wife of the lord of Padua, could use her wealth to give expression to her loyalty to family, church, and city. Shifting the focus from signorial Padua to republican Venice, this essay will survey the benefactions of a sample of patrician women from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. While all such bequests can be gathered under the umbrella of patronage, the different kinds of benefactions and the different categories of legatees were expressions of different motivations: piety, family loyalty, personal disposition. As with Fina da Carrara, drawing up a testament confronted women, as it did men, with the need to sort out their hierarchies of affection, loyalty, responsibility, and encouragement. They thus provide a measure of shifting loyalties as women moved from natal to marital family; in the cases of women who wrote wills at different stages of their married and widowed lives, they also display the evolution of the women’s social and religious preferences over time. The argument is that, as Ben Kohl showed, patronage was protean and selective. In the case of Venetian patrician women writing their wills, it also reflected the effects of time, changing social environments, and personal choice