Francesco Bonsignori

On 6 July 1495, at Fornovo on the river Taro near Parma, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, led the army of the Italian league against the French king Charles VIII and claimed the day as his victory. His wife, Isabella d'Este, had been planning to sit for a portrait by Francesco Bonsignori that year. It was put off, because the marquis wanted the painter to record his battle first.

Bonsignori was a Veronese, born between about 1455 and 1460. After early years in Verona and Venice he was working for the Gonzaga by 1492, at the court where Andrea Mantegna was the leading painter, and portraits became his speciality. That year he was painting a Triumph of Fame at the family's residence at Marmirolo, and in 1494 he portrayed a Turkish envoy there. Most of what he made for Mantua is lost. A portrait of a senator, signed and dated 1487, survives in the National Gallery in London.

One of his last altarpieces, for a church in Mantua, shows the local holy woman Osanna Andreasi venerated by Dominican nuns and two laywomen. The one kneeling at the front is Isabella d'Este, in a widow's dress, so it was finished after her husband died in March 1519. Bonsignori died a few months later at Caldiero near Verona, where he had gone to take the thermal waters.