Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino.

The Duchess presides over the discussions in Castiglione's The Courtier (which also defines the female courtier), and this is a major illustration of the high intellectual potential of Renaissance women, which is also seen in Shakespeare's Princess in Love's Labour's Lost. More professional skills are also shown by female characters in other plays: Portia as lawyer in Merchant of Venice and Helena as doctor in All's Well, not to mention Queen Margaret as politician and general in Henry VI. Of course, in the 16th c. there was rule in Western Europe by four queens: Mary Queen of Scots, Regent Queen Catherine de'Medici of France, and Mary Tudor, followed by Queen Elizabeth I, in England. Such women had enormous impact on the arts, thought, and politics of the period. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)