Extensive, splendid and extraordinarily energetic is the legacy of the Mendoza Ladies. As builders and patrons, they erected palaces, erected funerary chapels, planned cities, sponsored convents, hired the best architects..., to thereby build the historical memory of their lineage. As collectors and patrons, they exhibited the fame and prestige of their lineage and reinforced the humanist and Renaissance cultural tradition of their family. They sought their own identity committed to a religiosity that encouraged reforms, they became the economic support of poetesses and reformers and they themselves were. They also found loneliness when their independent performance led to their being shut out of their own lives and imprisoned.