As María José Redondo’s research has already made clear, painting played a very small role in her possessions. These were extraordinary, truly outstanding, in other fields, such as jewelry, clothing, and furnishing. Her dowry included an impressive array of gold and silver work, amounting 64,500 of the dowry’s total 900,000 doblas. The sheer opulence of this ensemble marveled the Spanish court. It was later increased by further presents and acquisitions, as well as by the continuous production of Isabel’s gold- and silversmiths: Luis Fernández, Hernán Pérez, Francisco de León, Alejo Ortiz, and especially Jerónimo González. In this way, Isabel kept a Portuguese flair in her queenly identity, since the Portuguese court was renowned for its luxury. In the same sense can be understood her leaning for exotic objects mostly Asian, whose best examples were distributed in Europe through Lisbon.
What I would like to stress, however, is the extraordinary importance she attached to costumes. Although they cannot be compared, in strict monetary terms, to the value of her jewels, those were her most cherished belongings. Moreover, while her jewels usually left the royal collection as required by Charles’s many military enterprises, clothes or fabric were seldom pawned, and thus formed a more permanent, though changing possession. They were important enough to deserve a separate, detailed inventory, containing all clothes that she brought from Portugal, as well as the transformations made to them. This is totally exceptional in the documentation given to us about Spanish queens of early modern times, and shows the careful control of her wardrobe.
Costumes were not universal: chroniclers observed the slight differences between Portuguese and Spanish fashion and, although Isabel quickly adapted herself to Spanish and Flemish ways, she also kept Portuguese traits in her clothing. Far from being only a matter of personal likings and taste, dowries and costumes had clear political overtones. Attention was paid to this particular in her very marriage agreements.
Isabel was herself an avid buyer of rich fabrics, mostly Venetian. Her orders in 1532 included damask, satin, velvet, many times in the most expensive crimson dye; various types of brocades, some of them spun with gold or silver; pure gold thread. The ambassadors and her merchants reported on the negotiations and searches for the best quality available in the market. She even paid some painters in Lucca and Florence for their designs for heraldic decorations in brocades that were later produced in Genoa. As regards complete clothes, the aforementioned inventories describe an overwhelming variety of clothes, in abundance of rich textiles, in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Flemish fashions, whose transformations were often recorded in detail.
After her death, her possessions were mostly divided among her son and daughters. Costumes received the usual attention from her. In her will, she gave great importance to her wish to donate three of her best clothes and a golden bracelet to the monastery of Guadalupe, as well as other pieces to two Portuguese convents.
That is almost her only explicit, material legacy (leaving aside those within the royal family). In this way, what had been her bodily adornment in life was transformed into a sacred vestment after her death, returning to God some of the secular glory that had been temporarily diverted from him. She also had some nuns in Madrigal prepare extraordinarily rich ornaments, to be sent to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. She carried out herself a piece of sacral clothing, the alb that her husband wore at his coronation in Bologna.
It seems clear that Isabel invested costumes and textiles with a personal significance, to a greater extent than jewels or other precious and rare objects. She was not alone in this regard: Charles himself made a habit of presenting high-rank women with the best Spanish brocades, in what almost became a Habsburg feminine hallmark. In the already amazingly rich fashions used by European aristocracy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spaniards and Portuguese stood out by their own merit. The formation of a dazzling appearance for the royal person and her surroundings was an art mastered in the Iberian courts. In part, previous queens had set the model for Isabel. In Spain, Isabel la Católica had formed the most powerful image of a ruling woman for the coming centuries. She also had a taste for sumptuous costumes, and she bequeathed some of the best to the monastery of Guadalupe, too. Both queen and empress could spin, and did occasionally so with their maids, fulfilling biblical roles of wifely virtue.
- Jorge Sebastián Lozano, Choices and Consequences: The Construction of Isabel de Portugal’s Image
