DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42861#0170
134
ISABELLA’S PET DWARFS
In March 1496, just when Isabella was corresponding
with Lorenzo da Pavia about the clavichord, she
wrote to beg her father to allow the French clown,
Galasso, and Fritello, the wonderful dwarf who
danced and sang, and turned somersaults in the air,
to the delight of all the Este family, to come and
amuse her, saying that she was as cold as ice and
as dull as ditch water in her husband’s absence!
Her only pleasure, she declared in another letter, was
to make Mattello dictate letters to the Marquis.
One day she nearly died of laughing at the sight
of Mattello imitating a tipsy man; another time he
appeared in a friar’s habit, and was announced as
the venerable Padre Bernardino Mattello.1 When
Alfonso d’Este was ill and sad, in 1498, after his
wife’s death, the Marchesa sent Mattello to amuse
him, and her brother wrote in return that he could
not express the delight which the buffoon had
afforded him, and that he esteemed his presence a
greater boon than the gift of a fine castle. Great
was Isabella’s dismay when soon after his return to
Mantua, this pet dwarf fell ill and died, to the grief
of the whole court. She visited him repeatedly
during his last illness, and told her husband the jokes
which the poor fool made on his death-bed. “ Most
people,” wrote Francesco in reply, “ can be easily
replaced, but Nature will never produce another
Mattello.” Il primo matto nel mondo, “ the foremost
fool in the world,” as Isabella called him, was interred
in S. Francesco, the favourite burial-place of the
Gonzaga princes. Tebaldeo wrote his epitaph, and
Bonsignori painted his portrait, while the bard
Pistoia composed an elegy, in which he says: “If
1 Luzio, Buffoni, &c., in Nuova Antologia, 1891.
ISABELLA’S PET DWARFS
In March 1496, just when Isabella was corresponding
with Lorenzo da Pavia about the clavichord, she
wrote to beg her father to allow the French clown,
Galasso, and Fritello, the wonderful dwarf who
danced and sang, and turned somersaults in the air,
to the delight of all the Este family, to come and
amuse her, saying that she was as cold as ice and
as dull as ditch water in her husband’s absence!
Her only pleasure, she declared in another letter, was
to make Mattello dictate letters to the Marquis.
One day she nearly died of laughing at the sight
of Mattello imitating a tipsy man; another time he
appeared in a friar’s habit, and was announced as
the venerable Padre Bernardino Mattello.1 When
Alfonso d’Este was ill and sad, in 1498, after his
wife’s death, the Marchesa sent Mattello to amuse
him, and her brother wrote in return that he could
not express the delight which the buffoon had
afforded him, and that he esteemed his presence a
greater boon than the gift of a fine castle. Great
was Isabella’s dismay when soon after his return to
Mantua, this pet dwarf fell ill and died, to the grief
of the whole court. She visited him repeatedly
during his last illness, and told her husband the jokes
which the poor fool made on his death-bed. “ Most
people,” wrote Francesco in reply, “ can be easily
replaced, but Nature will never produce another
Mattello.” Il primo matto nel mondo, “ the foremost
fool in the world,” as Isabella called him, was interred
in S. Francesco, the favourite burial-place of the
Gonzaga princes. Tebaldeo wrote his epitaph, and
Bonsignori painted his portrait, while the bard
Pistoia composed an elegy, in which he says: “If
1 Luzio, Buffoni, &c., in Nuova Antologia, 1891.