A Companion to Vittoria Colonna [1 ed.] 9789004322332, 9789004310735

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A Companion to Vittoria Colonna

The Renaissance Society of America Text and Studies Series

Editor-in-Chief Ingrid De Smet (University of Warwick) Editorial Board Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto) James Hankins (Harvard University) Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University) Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis) Lía Schwartz Lerner (CUNY Graduate Center)

Volume 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa

A Companion to Vittoria Colonna Edited by

Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Anonymous Neapolitan painter, Madonna del Soccorso (detail of Vittoria Colonna), Ischia Ponte, Church of S. Antonio da Padova. Photo credit: John Palcewski. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brundin, Abigail, editor. | Crivelli, T., editor. | Sapegno, Maria  Serena, editor. Title: A companion to Vittoria Colonna / edited by Abigail Brundin, Tatiana  Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Renaissance society of  America texts & studies series ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references  and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031139 (print) | LCCN 2016032342 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004310735 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004322332 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Colonna, Vittoria, 1492–1547—Criticism and interpretation. |  Women and literature—Italy—History—16th century. | Italian  literature—Women authors—History and criticism. lassification: LCC PQ4620 .C66 2016 (print) | LCC PQ4620 (ebook) |  DDC 851/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031139

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-3091 isbn 978-90-04-31073-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32233-2 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Figures vii Timeline: Vittoria Colonna in Context xi Note on the Text xiii Bibliographical Abbreviations xiv About the Editors and Contributors xix

Part 1 Vittoria Colonna: Life and Letters Introduction 3 Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno 1 Vittoria Colonna’s Epistolary Works 11 Adriana Chemello

Part 2 The Poetry 2 Vittoria Colonna in Manuscript 39 Abigail Brundin 3 The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime 69 Tatiana Crivelli 4 The Rime: A Textual Conundrum? 140 Maria Serena Sapegno 5 Vittoria Colonna and Language 195 Helena Sanson

vi

contents

Part 3 Vittoria Colonna and the Arts 6

Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence 237 Gaudenz Freuler

7

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings 270 Maria Forcellino

8

Musical Settings of the Rime 314 Anne Piéjus

Part 4 Vittoria Colonna and Religion 9

Prudential Friendship and Religious Reform: Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini 349 Stephen Bowd

10

Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino 371 Emidio Campi

11

Religious Prose Writings 399 Eleonora Carinci

Part 5 Vittoria Colonna as Literary Model and Authority Figure 12

The Lyric Voices of Vittoria Colonna and the Women of the Giolito Anthologies, 1545–1559 433 Diana Robin

13

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna 467 Virginia Cox

Bibliography 503 Index 543

List of Figures 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11

Title page, with dedication to V. Colonna and erroneous attribution to Cherubino da Spoleto, of Pietro da Lucca, Opera santissima, Brescia, Turlino for Ippolito da Ferrara, 1538 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria) 81 Title page of Tre primi canti di battaglia del divino Pietro Aretino, Venice, Zoppino, 1537. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 93 Title page of Vittoria Colonna, Rime [Venice, Zoppino,] 1539. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 93 Marco Salvioni’s mark in Rime-2 1539 (by Niccolini da Sabbio?) (Edit16: CNCM 2433). By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 94 Title page of Rime 1540. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 106 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime 1540. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 106 Title page of Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 107 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 107 Title page on f. 55r of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 108 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 108 Printer’s mark on f. 55r of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 108

viii 3.12

list of figures

Francesco de Grado, portrait of Vittoria Colonna as a wise virgin keeping vigil for her husband with burning lamp (Matthew 25, 1–13) and dedication by the editor in Rime 1692, c. 1v, not numbered (National Library of Naples, Online Digital Collection) 130 3.13 Wencelaus Hollar, Ritratto de S. Vittoria Colonna fatto de Sebastiano del Piombo Discepolo Congionto col Titiano dal Gran Giorgione (University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection) 131 3.14 Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Young Woman as a Wise Virgin, ca. 1510. Oil on hardboard transferred from panel, Washington National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1952.2.9 132 6.1 Anonymous Neapolitan painter, Madonna del Soccorso, Ischia Ponte, Church of S. Antonio da Padova. Photo credit: John Palcewski 241 6.2 Anonymous Neapolitan painter, Madonna del Soccorso (detail of Vittoria Colonna), Ischia Ponte, Church of S. Antonio da Padova. Photo credit: John Palcewski 243 6.3 Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of Simona Vespucci?, Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Inv. 936. © Städel Museum—U. Edelmann— ARTOTHEK 244 6.4 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 248 6.5 Italian, Medal of Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 248 6.6 Coin with portrait of Emperor Aurelius Probus. ©Livius.org 249 6.7 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ideal Head of a Woman in Profile (“la Marchesa di Pescara”), London, British Museum 1895,0915.493. ©Trustees of the British Museum 250 6.8 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Zenobia, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, 598 E 251 6.9 Francesco Bacchiacca, Sibyl after Michelangelo’s drawing of Zenobia, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Inv.-Nr. GG 2682. Source: Wikimedia Commons 251 6.10 Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Barcelona, Cambó collection (Inv. 64984). Source: Wikimedia Commons 254 6.11 Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Lady (Vittoria Colonna as Artemisia?), ca. 1526. Leeds, Harewood House, Earl of Harewood Collection. Photo: reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood Will Trust and the Trustees of the Harewood House Trust 258

List Of Figures

6.12

ix

Cristoforo dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi 263 6.13 Giovanni Battista Naldini, Portrait of Petrarch, Milan, private collection. Image courtesy of the Zeri Foundation 264 6.14 Anonymous Italian artist, ca. 1550–60, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Rome, collection of the principi Colonna, Inv.361 266 6.15 Anonymous Florentine artist, ca. 1575, Portrait of Dante, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, n. 1871.85. Source: Yale University Open Access Collections 266 6.16 Portrait of Vittoria Colonna. Frontispiece of Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved 268 6.17 Matteo di Giovanni, Saint Catherine of Siena receiving the stigmata, Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, Inv. M.I. 578. © Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon 268 7.1 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Crucifixion, London, British Museum, black chalk drawing, 371 × 270mm, inv. 1895-9-15-504r. © The Trustees of the British Museum 271 7.2 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, black chalk drawing, 289 × 189mm, inv. 1.2.0/16. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 272 7.3 Philippe Soye, Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross, Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, engraving, 535 × 367 mm, inv. F.C. 68870, vol. 44 H 1. By kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo 293 7.4 Nicolas Beatrizet (?), Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross, Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, engraving, 420x270mm, inv. F.C. 70795, vol. 44 H 22. By kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo 295 7.5 Michelangelo Buonarroti (?), Crucifixion, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (on loan from Campion Hall, University of Oxford), oil on board, 51.4 × 33.6 cm 299 7.6 Michelangelo Buonarroti (?), Ragusa Pietà, private collection (US), tempera on board, 64 × 46 cm 310 13.1 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art 472 13.2 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 480

x

list of figures

13.3 Italian, Medal of Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 480 13.4 Italian, Medal of Caterina Sforza, 1495. London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum 482 13.5 Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, 1505 (recto). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 484 13.6 Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, 1505 (verso). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum 484 13.7 Andrea Cambi, called Bombarda, Leonora, Wife of Andrea Cambi, the Medalist, late sixteenth century. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art 485 13.8 Andrea Mantegna, Detail of Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, ca. 1520. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Gérard Blot, courtesy of Réunion des musées nationaux/Art Resource, New York 489 13.9 Italian, Vittoria Colonna Medal, sixteenth century (recto). London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum 492 13.10 Italian, Vittoria Colonna Medal, sixteenth century (verso). London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum 492 13.11 Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Lady (Vittoria Colonna as Artemisia?), ca. 1526. Leeds, Harewood House, Earl of Harewood Collection. Photo: reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood Will Trust and the Trustees of the Harewood House Trust 495

Timeline: Vittoria Colonna in Context 1490

born in Marino to Fabrizio and Agnese da Montefeltro (daughter of Federico, Duke of Urbino). 1509 on 27 December, at age nineteen, marries Ferdinando (Ferrante) Francesco d’Avalos, Marquess of Pescara, to whom she has been engaged in a dynastic alliance since the age of seven. 1511 Julius II forms a league against the French, which includes the King of Naples; Fabrizio Colonna and Ferrante d’Avalos take up arms against the French. 1512 both men participate in the rout of Ravenna, and are taken prisoner. One of Colonna’s earliest known poetic works is directly linked to this event, the poetic Epistola addressed to her husband. During these years Colonna frequents the Aragonese court and cultural circles of Naples and the island of Ischia: she meets Jacopo Sannazaro, Il Cariteo, Galeazzo di Tarsia, Girolamo Britonio and Capanio (Iacopo Campanile). 1520 travels to Rome to pay her respects to Pope Leo X, who has made her cousin Pompeo Colonna a cardinal. While in Rome, Colonna meets Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Bembo and Iacopo Sadoleto. 1521 renewed outbreak of hostilities between Charles V and François I. 1525 Ferrante d’Avalos, at the peak of his military career, leads the imperial army against the French in the victorious battle of Pavia. In November, he falls ill in Milan due to wounds sustained in the battle. Colonna leaves Rome and travels north to join him, but she learns of his death in Viterbo on 3 December. 1530 in Naples, Colonna frequents a circle around Juan de Valdés, attuned to the ideas of the Reformation, which includes Marcantonio Flaminio, Pietro Vermigli, Isabella Breseña, and Giulia Gonzaga. 1531 Colonna moves between the island of Ischia, her family home in Marino, and Rome, where in 1534 she is actively involved in the argument relating to the order of Capuchins, defending the new order to the pope. 1534 meets the reformed preacher, Bernardino Ochino, in Rome. 1537 in April Colonna travels to Ferrara, where John Calvin had stayed in the spring of the previous year. There she is hosted by the reformer Renée de France and her husband Duke Ercole II d’Este. It may have been here that she came to know Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I, who was also drawn to the Reformation, and with whom Colonna

xii

1538

1541

1544 1546 1547

timeline: vittoria colonna in context

continued to correspond subsequently. Bernardino Ochino is also in Ferrara, and gives sermons on Franciscan humility which Colonna attends. on 26 February Colonna is in Bologna, and then in Pisa, in order to hear sermons by Ochino. She then travels to Lucca, where she meets Ochino, Vermigli and Pietro Carnesecchi. The first edition of the Rime is published in Parma by Pirogallo. deteriorating relations between the Colonna family and the pope lead to the “salt war.” Colonna takes refuge in Orvieto on 17 March. On 26 May the Rocca di Paliano, the family’s last stronghold, is taken, and the family’s estates in the papal states are confiscated. Colonna returns to Rome in August. After Cardinal Pole is named papal legate to Viterbo on 12 August, Colonna moves to the convent of Santa Caterina in the same city. In Viterbo she participates actively in the reformed circle around Pole. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini dies in August, following his unsuccessful attempt at the Diet of Ratisbone to heal the rift between Catholics and Protestants. Bernardino Ochino leaves Italy for Zurich. The Roman Inquisition is founded under the direction of Gian Pietro Carafa. Gradually the group in Viterbo breaks up. in the summer Colonna leaves Viterbo and returns to Rome, where she lodges in the convent of Sant’Anna. She is in close contact with Michelangelo Buonarroti during the final years of her life. edition of the Rime spirituali is published by Valgrisi in Venice. Colonna dies on 25 February after a period of illness.

Note on the Text In quoting from sixteenth-century texts, we have introduced a minimal amount of normalization, distinguishing v and u, expanding abbreviations in square brackets, eliminating the etymological h, normalizing ti into zi, and introducing accents, spaces and punctuation where necessary. Some chapters were originally written in a language other than English and have been translated by the following: – William Bromwich and Abigail Brundin (T. Crivelli, “The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime”); – Anna Brown (A. Piéjus, “Musical Settings of the Rime”); – Lucy Hosker (E. Campi, “Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino”; E. Carinci, “Religious Prose Writings”; M. Forcellino, “Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings”); – Iolanda Plescia and Abigail Brundin (M. S. Sapegno, “The Rime: A Textual Conundrum?”); – Beatrice Priest (A. Chemello, “Vittoria Colonna’s Epistolary Works”) In all other chapters, where translations of poetry and prose works have been provided that are not taken from published sources, these have been translated by Abigail Brundin. The editors are extremely grateful for the editorial work carried out by Sibilla Destefani, Rosa Pittorino, Gianna Conrad and Michael Schwarzenbach, all at the University of Zurich, in the preparation of this Companion, as well as the work on the index conducted by Veronica Copello at the University of Pisa. They also extend their warm thanks to John Palcewski, who generously allowed use of his beautiful photographs of the Colonna altarpiece on the island of Ischia to illustrate this volume.

Bibliographical Abbreviations References to the works most frequently cited are given in abbreviated form, listed in alphabetical order below. For the readers’ convenience, the printed works and manuscripts not described in the critical edition of Colonna’s Rime by Alan Bullock are marked by an asterisk. Bembo: Lettere Pietro Bembo, Lettere, critical ed. by Ernesto Travi, 4 vols. (Bologna, 1987). Bembo: Prose e rime Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, 3rd ed. (Turin, 1992). Brundin 2005 (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime—modern edition) Sonnets for Michelangelo, bilingual edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005). Bullock: Rime Vittoria Colonna, Rime, critical edition by Alan Bullock (Rome, 1982). Carteggio Vittoria Colonna, Carteggio, ed. Ernesto Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller, supplement by Domenico Tordi (Turin, 1892). Cas1 (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime) Biblioteca Casanatense, 897 (D.VI.38), Rome. Cor (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime) Biblioteca Corsiniana, 263 (45.D.9). Dbi Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960–). Dionisotti: Appunti Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna,” in Miscellanea Augusto Campana, vol. I (Padua, 1981), 257–86. Edit16 Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI sec. http://edit16.iccu. sbn.it. F1 (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime) Biblioteca Nazionale, II.IX.30, Florence. Gsli Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana (Turin, 1883–). L (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime) Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashburnham 1153, Florence.

Bibliographical Abbreviations

xv

Na* (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime—modern edition) Sonetti in morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos marchese di Pescara. Edizione del ms. XIII.G.43 della Biblioteca nazionale di Napoli, ed. Tobia R. Toscano (Milan, 1998). Rime 1538 Rime de la divina Vittoria Colonna marchesa di Pescara, novamente stampate con privilegio (Parma, 1538) [ed. Viotti]. Rime 1539 Rime della divina Vettoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo ristampate, aggiuntovi le sue stanze, e con diligenza corrette (n.p., 1539). Rime 1540 Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna de Pescara inclita marchesana, novamente aggiuntovi XXIIII sonetti spirituali, e le sue stanze, ed uno Trionfo de la croce di Cristo non più stampato, con la sua tavola (Venice, 1540) [ed. Comin de Trino for Zoppino]. Rime 1542 Rime della diva Vettoria Colonna de Pescara inclita marchesana, novamente aggiuntovi XXIIII soneti [sic] spirituali, e le sue stanze, ed uno Trionfo de la croce di Cristo non più stampato, con la sua tavola (Venice, 1542). Rime 1543 Dichiarazione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della divina Vittoria Collonna [sic] marchesana di Pescara da Rinaldo Corso alla molto Illust. Mad. Veronica Gambara da Correggio ed alle donne gentili dedicata, nella quale i sonetti spiritali [sic] da lei fino adesso composti ed un Trionfo di Croce si contiene. Con la tavola sua (Bologna, 1543) [ed. Faelli]. Rime 1544 Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna de Pescara inclita marchesana, nuovamente aggiontovi XXIIII sonetti spirituali, e le sue stanze, ed uno Trionfo de la croce di Cristo non più stampato, con la sua tavola (Venice, 1544) [ed. Imperatore]. Rime 1546 Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna di Pescara inclita marchesana, novamente aggiontovi XXIIII sonetti spirituali e le sue stanze, ed uno Trionfo de la croce di Christo non più stampato, con la sua tavola (Venice, 1546) [ed. Guadagnino]. Rime 1548 Le rime spirituali della illustrissima Signora Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, non più stampate da pochissime infuori, le quali altrove corrotte, e qui corrette si leggono (Venice, 1548) [ed. Comin da Trino].

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bibliographical abbreviations

Rime 1552 Le rime della Sig. Vittoria Colonna marchesana illustrissima di Pescara. Corrette per M. Lodovico Dolce (Venice, 1552) [ed. Giolito]. Rime 1558 Tutte le Rime della illustriss. et eccellentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna, marchesana di Pescara, con l’esposizione del Signor Rinaldo Corso, nuovamente mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli. Alla illustriss. ed eccellentiss. Signora Donna Issabella [sic] Gonzaga, marchesana di Pescara. Con privilegii (Venice, 1558) [ed. Sessa]. Rime 1559 Rime della S. Vittoria Colonna, marchesana illust. di Pescara, con l’aggiunta delle rime spirituali di nuovo ricorrette per M. Ludovico Dolce (Venice, 1559) [ed. Giolito]. Rime 1560 Rime della S. Vittoria Colonna, marchesana illust. di Pescara, con l’aggiunta delle rime spirituali di nuovo ricorrette per M. Ludovico Dolce (Venice, 1560) [ed. Giolito]. Rime 1586 Rime spirituali della S. Vittoria Colonna, marchesana illustrissima di Pescara (Verona, 1586) [ed. Discepoli]. Rime 1692 Rime di M. Vittoria Colonna D’Avalo [sic] marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo date in luce da Antonio Bulifon, e dedicate all’eccellentiss. Signora D. Maddalena Miroballo duchessa di Campomele. Con licenza de’ superiori (Naples, 1692) [ed. Bulifon]. Rime 1693 Rime spirituali di M. Vittoria Colonna D’Avalos marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo date in luce da Antonio Bulifon, e dedicate all’eccellentiss. Signora D. Laurenza Lacerda, duchessa di Tagliacozzo, principessa di Palliano, gran contestabilessa del Regno di Napoli etc. Con licenza de’ superiori (Naples, 1693) [ed. Bulifon]. Rime 1760 Rime di Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, corrette ed illustrate colla vita della medesima scritta da Giambatista Rota, Accademico Eccitato. Con licenza de’superiori (Bergamo, 1760) [ed. Lancellotti]. Rime 1840 Le rime di Vittoria Colonna corrette su i testi a penna e pubblicate con la vita della medesima dal cavaliere Pietro Ercole Visconti. Si aggiungono le poesie ommesse [sic] nelle precedenti edizioni e le inedite (Rome, 1840).

Bibliographical Abbreviations

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Rime 1860 Rime e Lettere di Vittoria Colonna, marchesana di Pescara, ed. G. Enrico Saltini (Florence, 1860). Rime-0 1692* Vittoria Colonna, Rime Spirituali (Naples, before 1692) [ed. Bulifon] non extant. Rime-1 1539 Rime della divina Vettoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo ristampate, aggiuntovi le sue stanze, e con diligenza corrette (n.p., 1539) [ed. Zoppino]. Rime-1 1542 Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna de Pescara inclita marchesana, novamente agiontovi XXIIII sonetti spirituali, e le sue stanze, ed uno Trionfo de la croce di Cristo non più stampato, con la sua tavola (Venice, 1542) [ed. Guadagnino]. Rime-1 1546 Le rime spirituali della illustrissima Signora Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, non più stampate da pochissime infuori, le quali altrove corrotte, e qui corrette si leggono. Con grazia e privilegio (Venice, 1546) [ed. Valgrisi]. Rime-1 1548 Le rime spirituali della illustrissima Signora Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, alle quali di nuovo sono stati aggiunti, oltre quelli non pur dell’altrui stampe, ma anco della nostra medesima, più di trenta o trentatre sonetti, non mai più altrove stampati; un capitolo; ed in non pochi luoghi ricorrette, e più chiaramente distinte. Con gratia, e privilegio (Venice, 1548) [ed. Valgrisi]. Rime-2 1539 Rime della divina Vettoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, con le sue stanze aggiunte e di nuovo con diligenza stampate e ricorrette (Venice, 1539) [ed. Salvioni]. Rime-2 1542* Dichiarazione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della divina Vittoria Collonna [sic] marchesa di Pescara da Rinaldo Corso alla molto Illust. Mad. Veronica Gambara da Correggio ed alle donne gentili dedicata, nella quale i sonetti spiritali [sic] da lei fino adesso composti ed un Trionfo di Croce si contiene. Con la tavola sua (n.p., 1542). Rime-3 1539 Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna de Pescara inclita marchesana, nuovavamente [sic] aggiuntovi XVI sonetti spirituali, e le sue stanze. Con massima diligentia revisti, né in luogo alcuno per l’adrieto stampati (Florence, 1539) [ed. Zoppino].

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bibliographical abbreviations

Rvf Francesco Petrarca, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (edition cited: Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata, 2nd ed. [Milan, 2004]). V2 (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime—Michelangelo’s Codex) Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 11539, Rome. V3* (Manuscript of Colonna’s rime) Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Chigi L IV. 79, Rome.

About the Editors and Contributors Abigail Brundin is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture in the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of St. Catharine’s College. She has published on women writers in the first age of print, on literature and religious reform, including censorship and the first Indexes of Prohibited Books, and on poetry in and around convents. She is the editor and translator of Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo (Chicago University Press, 2005), and the author of Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Ashgate, 2008). Stephen Bowd is Reader in European History (1500–1800) at the University of Edinburgh, where he also obtained his doctorate. He has published widely on Italian religious history during the sixteenth century, with particular focus on Venice and the Veneto. His book Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy was published by Brill in 2002, and his most recent monograph is Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Harvard University Press, 2010). Emidio Campi is Professor Emeritus of Church History and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Swiss Reformation History of the University of Zurich. He has written widely on Peter Martyr Vermigli, the Zurich Reformation, and the wider dissemination of the reformed tradition. His numerous publications include Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna (Claudiana, 1994), Zwingli und Maria (Theologischer Verlag, 1997), Consensus Tigurinus (Theologischer Verlag, 2009), and Shifting Patterns of Reformed Tradition (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Eleonora Carinci earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2009, with a dissertation titled “Lives of the Virgin Mary by Women Writers in Post-Tridentine Italy.” Recent projects include a number of published journal articles and chapters in edited collections on women as cultural and literary protagonists in early modern Italy, as well as a forthcoming edited volume of letters of the apothecary Camilla Erculiani for the “Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series (Toronto University Press).

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about the editors and contributors

Adriana Chemello teaches Italian literature in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Padua. In recent years she has worked on the epistolary genre, as well as on biography and popular, pedagogical literature. Her most recent publications include an anastatic reproduction of the 1726 edition of Luisa Bergalli, Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo (Eidos, 2006); the anthology Saffo tra poesia e leggenda. Fortuna di un personaggio nei secoli XVIII–XIX (Il Poligrafo, 2012); and a chapter on Vittoria Colonna in Liriche del Cinquecento, ed. Monica Farnetti and Laura Fortini (Iacobelli, 2015). Virginia Cox is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. She is the author of The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and A Short History of the Italian Renaissance (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Tatiana Crivelli is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Zurich, where from 2004 to 2014 she also directed the Centre for Renaissance Studies. She has published books on Giacomo Leopardi and on the novel in eighteenth-century Italy; women’s writing has a particular relevance among her research interests. Her most recent books are La donzelletta che nulla temea. Percorsi alternativi nella letteratura italiana tra Sette e Ottocento (Iacobellieditore, 2014) and Pellegra Bongiovanni, Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura alle Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca in vita della medesima (Antenore, 2014). Maria Forcellino is currently affiliated with the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut in Rome. Her research has focused on antique revival in the eighteenth century and its influence on the figurative arts, and more recently on the works of Michelangelo, from the Tomb of Giulio II to the works produced for Vittoria Colonna in the 1540s. Recent publications include: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali” (Viella, 2009); and, with Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Michelangelo il marmo e la mente. La tomba di Giulio II e le sue statue (Jaca, 2014).

About The Editors And Contributors

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Gaudenz Freuler is Titularprofessor of Art History at the University of Zurich. He specializes in medieval and renaissance Italian painting, book illuminations relating to thirteenth-century to fifteenth-century Italy and iconographic theory. He is a consultant for numerous national and international institutions. His books include, with A. Labriola and C. De Benedictis, La miniatura senese 1270–1420 (Skira, 2002). A complete list of his publications is available at http://www. khist.uzh.ch/kol/titularprofessuren-privatdozierende/Freuler.html. Anne Piéjus is a musicologist and Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris. She specializes in seventeenth-century French music and theater and in early modern Italian spiritual music. Her most recent book, Musique et dévotion à Rome à la fin de la Renaissance. Les laudes de l’Oratoire (Brepols, 2013) is about lauda singing, spiritual revival, and political issues in early modern Rome. She is currently writing a new book on the relationship between spiritual rewritings of madrigals and censorship after the Council of Trent. Diana Robin is Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of New Mexico, and Scholarin-Residence at Newberry Library. Her books include Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago University Press, 2007); Filelfo in Milan (Princeton University Press, 1991); Francesco Filelfo, Odes (Harvard University Press, 2009); Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (Chicago University Press, 1997); Cassandra Fedele, Letters and Orations (Chicago University Press, 2000). Helena Sanson is Reader in Italian Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Clare College. She is the author of Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento: un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguistico (Accademia della Crusca, 2007) and Women, Language and Grammar in Italy, 1500–1900 (Oxford University Press, 2011). Maria Serena Sapegno teaches medieval Italian Literature (Boccaccio and Petrarca), renaissance culture (political thought, historiography, utopian treatises, women poets), and nineteenth-century literature at La Sapienza University of Rome, where she also teaches Women’s and Gender Studies. Her most recent publications are Il senso e le forme. Storia e Antologia della letteratura Italiana (La Nuova Italia, 2011) and L’Italia dei poeti (Aracne, 2013).

Part 1 Vittoria Colonna: Life and Letters

⸪

Introduction Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno

Who was Vittoria Colonna?

Vittoria Colonna lived during a period of profound and traumatic historical change, one that effectively reshaped Italian and European identities at the level of religion, culture, and politics. Although the Italian Peninsula retained its status as a beacon of cultural exemplarity on the European stage, its dominance began to recede over the course of the sixteenth century, beset as it was by wars and foreign invasions and plunged into further crisis by the destabilizing impact of the northern Reformation, a crisis felt at every level of society. Colonna was born into the highest echelons of the Italian and European elite.1 Her father, Fabrizio, was a military leader of such great repute that Machiavelli chose him as protagonist of his dialogue, Dell’arte della Guerra (1521).2 Her mother was the refined and authoritative Agnese da Montefeltro, daughter of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino and Battista Sforza. Vittoria was their firstborn child, and was betrothed at the age of just seven to Ferdinando (Ferrante) Francesco d’Avalos, to seal the new alliance between the Colonna and the Aragonese representatives in Naples; the marriage took place in 1509. Like her mother before her, from a young age Vittoria Colonna moved with ease in aristocratic circles, and was given an administrative role in relation to her family’s vast territories as well as maintaining diplomatic relations with the Holy See, with other Italian courts, and even with the Holy Roman Emperor. Her move south to the court presided over by her husband’s aunt, Costanza d’Avalos, on the island of Ischia, brought the young bride into contact with a highly fertile cultural context: among others she met the poets Jacopo Sannazaro, Cariteo, Galeazzo di Tarsia, and Girolamo Britonio.3 The first 1  Ascanio Condivi, Vita di M. Buonarroti (Rome, 1533); Paolo Giovio, Vita del Marchese di Pescara (Florence, 1551); Luca Contile, Lettere (Venice, 1564), 19–20; Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, “La Vita di Vittoria Colonna,” in Ritratti scritti da I. T. Albrizzi, (Pisa, 1826); Carteggio; Amy A. Bernardy, La vita e l’opera di Vittoria Colonna (Florence, 1927). 2  Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra (Florence, 1521). 3  Suzanne Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna châtelaine d’Ischia (Florence and Paris, 1968); Tobia R. Toscano, “La formazione ‘napoletana’ di Vittoria Colonna e un nuovo manoscritto delle sue Rime,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale

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evidence of her own poetic activity arose from her separation from her husband as a result of his military career, in the form of a poetic Epistola composed in 1512 after the rout of Ravenna, during which both her husband and her father were captured.4 During the 1520s Colonna’s husband was frequently absent from home, engaged in the many military campaigns of the Italian Wars, and simultaneously her circle of literary acquaintances grew to include Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, and Jacopo Sadoleto, whom she met in Rome. But the real change in her fortunes coincided with the dramatic events of 1525, when at the battle of Pavia Ferrante d’Avalos led the Imperial and Spanish troops to a decisive victory over the French, but sustained serious injuries that led to his death later that same year. From the time of her widowhood, although she never neglected the duties and obligations that came with her position in society, Colonna led a life of retirement, lodging frequently in various convents in Rome, Naples, and Viterbo in preference to her family seat. Her poetic activity grew, the resulting works circulating within a carefully defined private context, and during the 1530s she also began to frequent groups in which faith was being discussed in an evangelical vein. Colonna’s desire for religious reform led her to side openly with the Capuchin order when they demanded the right to practice a radical form of Franciscanism.5 She was also in contact with Bernardino Ochino and many other protagonists of the reform movement in Italy—figures such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, Pietro Vermigli, Marcantonio Flaminio, Cardinal Reginald Pole—as well as with some of the gentlewomen who were deeply engaged with the movement such as Giulia Gonzaga, Caterina Cibo, Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara, and Marguerite de Navarre. In 1538, a volume of Colonna’s Rime was published in Parma, the first print edition of a collection of poetry by a woman writer, and immediately became a literary talking point and best seller.6 Numerous other editions of her poetry followed. The core of her poetic activity, infused from the start with a profound spirituality, grew increasingly in the direction of a meditation on religious LIII (1996): 79–106; Gigliola Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri, (Florence, 2005), 97–105. 4  Published as an appendix to Fabrizio Luna, Vocabulario (Naples, 1536). 5  C arteggio, passim; Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna. Un dialogo artistico teologico ispirato da Bernardino Ochino (Turin, 1994); Giovanni Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino”, Italique, IV (2001): 61–101; Gigliola Fragnito, “Gli ‘spirituali’ e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino”, Rivista storica italiana, 84 (1972): 777–813. 6  R ime 1538.

Introduction

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themes, directly connected to the religious debates taking place on a wider platform at that time. During the 1540s, Colonna spent some time in Viterbo, where she participated in the discussion of religion among the members of Reginald Pole’s so-called Ecclesia Viterbiensis.7 Throughout this period Colonna continued to compose literary works, and participated in a limited scribal dissemination of her rich poetic production, either directly preparing or allowing for the preparation of at least two manuscript collections of her work to be sent to the recipients Marguerite de Navarre and Michelangelo Buonarroti, with both of whom she had close friendships. Meanwhile printed editions of her sonnets continued to appear, including in 1546, shortly before her death, a collection of Rime spirituali published in Venice, which sealed her fame as the most successful poet of her age, the model of a new kind of spiritual lyric. Colonna’s example opened the way for the many women writers—first in Italy and later in France and England— who recognized her excellence as a poet as well as her careful exploration of questions of female subjectivity in all her work.

The Colonna Companion Project

This volume presents a complete picture of Vittoria Colonna’s context and production: both in her role as a literary practitioner of the first order, admired by her peers for her elegant emulation of the Petrarchan style, who also pushed the boundaries of the Petrarchan form in new and path-breaking directions; and as a historical protagonist who was closely engaged with some of the primary religious and cultural debates of her age. One outcome of recent decades of renewed attention to female cultural protagonism in the Italian renaissance is a newly enlivened appreciation of Colonna’s status as the genre-defining secular woman writer of her era. Her literary model helped to establish a decorous and wholly assimilated voice for women writers within the Italian literary panorama, one that was taken up by successive generations as a springboard for their own cultural engagement.8 At the same time, Colonna’s involvement

7  Massimo Firpo, “Valdesianesimo ed evangelismo: alle origini dell’Ecclesia Viterbiensis (1541),” in Libri, idee e sentimenti religiosi nel Cinquecento italiano, ed. Rolando Bussi, Istituto di studi rinascimentali (Ferrara, 1987), 53–71. 8  On Colonna’s literary model and its subsequent imitation and redefinition by later generations of women writers, see Virginia Cox’, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008) and The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore, 2011).

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with the religious debates of the Reformation era colored her literary endeavors in fascinating and ultimately highly influential ways. This volume engages with the many facets of Colonna’s work, as well as interrogating the manner of its reception and interpretation over time, both in her era and in succeeding centuries. Key strengths of the present Companion are its interdisciplinarity and its international flavor, drawing in scholars from different cultural contexts who work in the fields of literary criticism, religious history, history of art, gender studies, musicology, and history of the book. It will, we hope, amply fulfil the remit of providing a useful and comprehensive handbook to meet the needs of students and scholars at earlier and advanced levels. However, this book aims to do more than this, by drawing into a single volume for the first time scholarship from across disciplines in which Vittoria Colonna’s influence has been felt, including the visual arts and music. One necessary outcome of such an endeavor is a range of scholarly opinions, and thus we aspire to produce a volume that successfully harnesses differences of approach and interpretation as a key strength, an indication of the rich terrain of Colonna studies and the significant work that is currently being carried out in different countries and languages. Rather than offering a volume that is “finished,” in the sense that it ties the writer and her work to a fixed and stable set of meanings and interpretations, we have tried instead to open Colonna’s fascinating history to new questions and new approaches.

Themes and Structure

Our investigation begins with a reappraisal of the author’s status as a public figure. Vittoria Colonna lived her whole life at the center of a complex web of social and familial obligations. She maintained relations with the members both of her own extended family and her husband’s, with the protagonists of courtly society in Naples and on Ischia, with the emperor and the pope, with the most important intellectuals of her day, the groups of reformers associated with Reginald Pole, the sister of the king of France, and the most highprofile aristocratic ladies of the various Italian courts and, famously, with Michelangelo Buonarroti. A network of epistolary relationships, fabricated and maintained through the constant exchange of letters and poems, allowed Colonna to exert a strong and sustained influence on the world around her, seeking out interlocutors and the support of sympathetic peers. The opening chapter by Adriana Chemello unpicks and analyzes Colonna’s rich web of social connections.

Introduction

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It was not only the historical Vittoria Colonna who was placed at the center of a closely woven web of social and cultural relations, however: a similar dialogue with a wider context also lies at the root of her poetic work, and this too, in our view, cannot be adequately traced without taking account of the strength and vitality of such interactions. For this reason, part 2, dedicated to Colonna’s Rime, rereads her body of work in conversation with various crucial environments and triggers, in order to uncover, by means of a range of complementary approaches, a previously unsuspected dynamism that radically alters the fixed perspective on her poetry offered by the critical edition of 1982 and opens up new ways of reading.9 Through an analysis of the manuscript tradition of Colonna’s poetry, enriched since the publication of the 1982 edition by new archival discoveries, Abigail Brundin highlights for the first time the importance of a kind of “tacit” publication by the author, as well as the role played by orality in the transmission and diffusion of poetic texts. Beginning with a survey of the extant manuscript evidence, and taking account of previous philological analyses, she reconsiders the question of the author’s direct involvement in the preparation of gift manuscripts for specific recipients, as well as arguing for other, more nuanced forms of involvement in scribal publication. Tatiana Crivelli’s investigation of the tradition of Colonna’s Rime in print similarly demonstrates how, in an age of transition into a new medium, with the emergence of new models for printed poetry books, the image of Colonna as an aristocratic poet enclosed within a wholly rarified cultural context is contradicted by the evidence. Crivelli’s contribution traces in detail the extraordinary editorial success of Colonna’s Rime and identifies a previously unsuspected level of popular consumption of her works. Read in this new light with the focus on reception, Colonna’s Rime can be seen interacting with the literary culture of the age and being appropriated by that culture in a variety of ways. The corpus of poems is dismembered, amplified, altered both sequentially and linguistically in the various printed editions, necessitating careful historical reconstruction before any interpretation can begin. The question of the macrotext is at the heart of Maria Serena Sapegno’s chapter, which demonstrates how—despite fluctuations in the ordering of individual poems and the constant intrusion of non-authorial additions—it is possible to trace in Colonna’s Rime a forceful and coherent sense of continuity. The poet’s themes and figures, treating both the more “amorous” and the clearly “spiritual” subject matter, emerge as key to her act of literary refashioning, 9  Bullock: Rime.

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Brundin, Crivelli, and Sapegno

which became a point of reference not only for subsequent generations of women poets, but also for the wider poetic development of the European renaissance. Finally, in this part, Helena Sanson considers the language used by Colonna in both her literary works and her correspondence. Sanson argues that Colonna’s Petrarchan language should not be read as a formulaic response driven by poetic norms, but instead can be recognized as a wholly original enterprise born out of close, mindful, and continuous contact with the texts and protagonists of the Questione della Lingua debates in Italy in the sixteenth century. Turning to the relationship between Colonna and the arts, Gaudenz Freuler considers Colonna in portrait, surveying the extant works that have previously been associated with her and reassessing the evidence for these attributions. At the core of Freuler’s article is an analysis of the “grammar” of Colonna portraits, which argues suggestively for the manner in which different images were controlled and shaped by the preoccupations of patron, artist, sitter, or a wider public, so that we should not expect two portraits of Colonna to look the same. While the portraits tell us little about what Vittoria Colonna looked like, they reveal a great deal about the reception of her image by her contemporaries, and its close association with ideals of female beauty and intellectual excellence. Remaining with the visual arts, Maria Forcellino turns to the famous friendship between Colonna and Michelangelo Buonarroti, paying close attention to the works produced by Michelangelo for Colonna and others in the circle of the spirituali. Based on recently uncovered archival sources and close analysis of the pictorial evidence, Forcellino makes the case for reopening the question of Michelangelo’s production of painted images for the group of Italian reformers, arguing for the reattribution of certain works in oil from Marcello Venusti to Michelangelo himself. The subject of Anne Piéjus’s chapter is the phenomenally rich history of musical settings of Colonna’s Rime over the course of the sixteenth century. Popular texts for the composition of spiritual madrigals in the second half of the century, the musical settings were characterized by the same formal uniformity that defined the poetry. Piéjus highlights the links between some of the composers and Colonna’s extended circle, as well as the role played by various Academies in disseminating poetic texts to be set to music, indicating plausible routes via which manuscripts of Colonna’s poetry might have made their way into the hands of composers. Her study confirms once again the broad and deep infiltration of Italian culture by Colonna’s work in her own century, via printed editions of musical settings and their widespread performance. Turning in Part 4 to the very important religious context for all of Vittoria Colonna’s literary production, Stephen Bowd considers where the group later

Introduction

9

known as the spirituali came from and what defined their shared views on religious reform. The particular Christological bent of the reformed position adopted by this group is traced in the letters exchanged between Colonna and Gasparo Contarini, as well as the unavoidable tensions that arose between personal faith and institutional demands. Ultimately, Bowd defines Colonna’s friendship with Contarini, and more broadly the responses of most members of this circle, as “prudential” insofar as conformity with institutional structures ultimately confined the passionate, interiorized faith that was practiced by the Italian reformers. Emidio Campi moves the discussion from the broader picture painted by Bowd to a more focused consideration of aspects of Colonna’s own reform thought, through an analysis of a different friendship, that between Colonna and the Capuchin preacher Bernardino Ochino. Basing his approach on three key themes of reformed discussions in the period, those of Scripture, and of the figures of Christ and Mary, Campi argues for the crucial influence of Ochino’s sermons on Colonna’s religious thought, and points out the various ways in which her position on these issues, but particularly her understanding of Mariology, demonstrates a flexible and notably “modern” reworking of traditional views. Closing Part 4, Eleonora Carinci assesses the contribution made to Colonna’s literary reputation by her prose writings, long neglected by scholarship. While focusing on the important manner in which these works were informed and defined by the evangelical context in which they were composed, Carinci’s essay also performs the vital task of re-connecting them to the literary tradition of Marian writings. Carinci’s conclusions, like Campi’s, demonstrate the importance of Mary for Colonna’s religious and literary self-presentation. In order to understand the reception and longevity of Vittoria Colonna’s poetic production, we need to expand our analysis in order to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the editorial marketplace precisely in the years surrounding her death, including the rapid rise of both a new kind of reader and a new print genre, namely the poetic anthology. Anthologies gave voice for the first time to many women poets whose work was published in conversation with contributions by male poets. These volumes went through print runs of thousands and, together with the books dedicated to the work of single authors, they helped to consolidate the place of poetry, particularly spiritual poetry, in the literary marketplace. This fascinating development is the subject of Diana Robin’s chapter. Finally, Virginia Cox illustrates how the concept of literary imitation, a commonplace of renaissance culture, was in reality self-consciously and artfully present in the elaboration of the “model” of Vittoria Colonna. This can be seen in the choice of female role models proposed in her letters, from Saint Catherine of Alexandria

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to Mary Magdalene, in her choice of role models from among her own contemporaries, including Marguerite de Navarre, and in the repeated references to the heroines of Classical mythology and to the Virgin Mary. Colonna’s artful act of “self-modeling” is beautifully mirrored in the modeling of her image on a number of commemorative medals from the period. The chapters collected in this volume, working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, collaborate in enriching our picture of Vittoria Colonna “in the round,” drawing out historical, critical, artistic, musical, and philological perspectives which add a great deal to our understanding of such a major figure. At the same time, they point toward new avenues for future enquiry. By focusing on the state of current research into the historical person that was Vittoria Colonna and on her role in the society of her day, her importance as a key player in literary and political circles has been highlighted; at the same time, the analysis of art, literature and religious questions in relation to her work allows us to appreciate the groundbreaking nature of her contribution to renaissance culture. In publishing this volume, after two years of intense and constructive collaboration, it is not our intention to close the door on a job well done, but rather to open new doors and stimulate new research activity across different disciplines. As a final point, we are hopeful that the advances made in the literary and philological analysis of Colonna’s oeuvre—in relation to scribal dissemination, print publication, thematic and linguistic analysis—will reinvigorate Colonna studies within and beyond the Academy. Having argued for the need for a new edition of the Rime, based on an up-to-date appraisal of her work, and having indicated some possible approaches to this undertaking, we hope that not too much more time will pass before Vittoria Colonna’s poetry is once again read and celebrated by the broad public it deserves.

Chapter 1

Vittoria Colonna’s Epistolary Works Adriana Chemello Historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently cited Ariosto’s eulogy to Vittoria Colonna, who possessed the “sweetest style ever heard” (“dolce stil di che il meglior non odo”),1 to highlight the qualities of her poetry and reconfirm her central position in the literary landscape of the Cinquecento. They also performed the important service of bringing to the attention of scholars the membra disiecta, or scattered fragments, of her many epistolary exchanges with princes and princesses, popes and cardinals, as well as literary figures and poets, which had been accumulating dust in public and private archives. It is no coincidence that the Ottocento was the century in which Colonna’s literary fortune underwent a strong revival. The efforts of “foreigners busily studying her and writing her life story”2 were coupled with the innovations of the publishing market that printed two editions of her Rime alongside two biographical profiles in the span of twenty years. In the Discorso preliminare to his edition of Colonna’s Rime (1840), Pietro Ercole Visconti underscores that such an “illustrious lady” was “elevated to the Heavens by the highest intellects of her most learned age, [and] boasted a supreme excellence.”3 In the detailed biographical account accompanying the Discorso he reiterates that “esteem for our dear Colonna had such deep roots in everyone’s hearts, and that her friends were true and not superficial.”4 Visconti was the first to understand the value of Colonna’s letters, published throughout the Cinquecento, and to use them for documentary purposes. He followed the method of openly “investigating and organizing [. . .] the epistolary correspondences, which contain the

1  A riosto, Orlando Furioso, XXXVIII, 16, 6. 2  “[A]ffaccendarsi degli stranieri a studiarne e scriverne la vita”: Rime 1860, VI. 3  “[I]llustre donna,” “levata a cielo dai più alti ingegni della dottissima età sua, [ed] ebbe vanto di una somma eccellenza”: Rime 1840, XXII. 4  “[Q]uanto profonde radici avesse negli animi di ciascuno [scil.: dei letterati del suo tempo] l’estimazione verso la Colonnese nostra, e che gli amici erano suoi e non della ventura”: Ivi, CXXVII.

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most intimate and hidden history of things and men.”5 This emphasis was soon taken up by Enrico Saltini, who published his edition of Colonna’s Rime twenty years later in the vein suggested by Visconti, furnishing it with a dense appendix that contained twenty-two of her letters. Although many of these letters had been printed in the sixteenth century, Saltini also added a few previously unpublished ones.6 The work of Saltini seeks to recover a figure who was “always worthy of being upheld as an example, and particularly so for Italian ladies.”7 In fact, concluding her biographical profile, he explicitly designates the potential female audience of the work, revealing the circle of virtue that the reading of her “life” should encourage: A woman of such exemplary and esteemed beauty, of such exquisite intellect, endowed with elegance and eloquence, and, moreover, author of such beautiful verses, that she seemed worthy of being recalled by Italian women, to whom we intend to address this small volume in particular. [. . .] herein they will learn of an uncommon example of faithfulness in marriage, of holy love for the homeland, of sincere trust in God, and finally, how to refashion themselves using the Italian language. It deserves repeating, since it can never be overstated, that language is the first mark in which we see the national identity of a people visibly sculpted.8 5  “[I]nvestigare e ordinare [. . .] nelle epistolari corrispondenze, nelle quali è la più intima e riposta istoria delle cose e degli uomini”: Ivi, CXXXVI. 6  In Rime 1860, the editor states: “La stampa di queste rime fu condotta con lievissime varianti, che reputammo necessarie, sulla edizione, fuor di commercio, fatta a Roma nel 1840 per cura del Cav. Pietro Ercole Visconti ed a spese del Principe Alessandro Torlonia, quando egli impalmò donna Teresa Colonna. E vogliamo qui ringraziare pubblicamente la cortesia di questo Signore, il quale, inviandocene una copia, consentì che su quella ponessimo in luce il presente volumetto. Le lettere poi furono raccolte da noi, e ne dicemmo la provenienza nelle note.” 7  “[M]eritevole in ogni tempo d’esser proposta in esempio, e singolarmente alle donne italiane,” Ivi, vii. 8  “Una donna di tanta esemplare e ammirata bellezza, di così squisito ingegno, eleganza e facondia fornita, e per sopra più autrice di versi tanto stupendi, ci parve degna d’essere ricordata alle donne italiane, a cui più particolarmente intendiamo indirizzato questo volumetto. [. . .] v’apprenderanno esempio non comune di fede coniugale, il santo amor della patria, la sincera fiducia in Dio, e in fine a rifarsi nella favella italiana. Lo ripetiamo, perché mai non par detto abbastanza, la lingua è il primo segno ove appare manifestamente scolpita la nazionalità di un popolo”: Ivi, xlv–xlvi.

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Meanwhile, in his capacity as Commissario delle Antichità (Commissioner of Antiquities), Pietro Ercole Visconti took it upon himself to inaugurate a bust of Vittoria Colonna at the solemn assembly held at the Accademia d’Aracadia in Rome on 12 May 1845. He arranged for the publication of an anthology of poetry to celebrate the most illustrious of renaissance female poets and included, among the eulogies of thirty-three poets, a number of female voices (Rosa Taddei, Teresa Gnoli, Luisa Amalia Paladini, Elena Montecchia, and Enrica Orfei). In their verses, the female poets overcome the canonical dimension of the eulogium by encouraging “Italian maidens” to “break the vile chain / that hinders the virtue of your sex,” and to prove their “feminine worth.”9 Vittoria Colonna’s brilliant mind and literary prowess, recognized by her contemporaries and attested in eulogies, dedications, epistolary sonnets and praise poems, have been the subject of careful analysis in the work of Concetta Ranieri and Tobia Toscano.10 An illustrious woman by dint of noble birth, Colonna acquired the title of Marchesa di Pescara through her marriage to Francesco D’Avalos. She was celebrated by poets and literary figures as the “mirror and light of virtue”11 and was considered to illustrate claritas through her “generous and noble blood” and “her virtue and valor.”12 In his Italian translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, the Libro di M Gio. Boccaccio delle Donne Illustri, published in 1545, Betussi concluded the supplement dedicated to contemporary “illustrious women” with the name of Colonna, who had recently moved from Viterbo to Rome: I can now justly conclude the number of illustrious women with reference to this lady, who should be considered an equal to all those worthy ancient and modern women who have left us a worthy memory of 9  “[I]taliche donzelle,” “spezzar la vil catena / che la virtù del vostro sesso inceppa,” “valor femineo,” Per la inaugurazione del busto di Vittoria Colonna (Rome, 1845); on this text see also Tatiana Crivelli, La donzelletta che nulla temea (Rome, 2014), 92–93. 10  See Concetta Ranieri, “Vittoria Colonna: dediche, libri e manoscritti,” Critica Letteraria, 47 (1985): 249–70; Mirella Scala, “Encomi e dediche nelle prime relazioni culturali di Vittoria Colonna,” Periodico della Società Storica Comense, liv (1990): 97–112; Tobia R. Toscano, “La formazione ‘napoletana’ di Vittoria Colonna e un nuovo manoscritto delle sue Rime,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale, liii (1996): 79–106. 11  “[S]pecchio, e lume di virtù”: G. Betussi, “Di Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara. Cap. L,” in Libro di M. Giouanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri. Tradotto di latino in volgare per M. Giuseppe Betussi, con vna giunta fatta dal medesimo, d’altre donne famose. E vn’altra nuoua giunta fatta per M. Francesco Serdonati. d’altre donne illustri. Antiche e moderne. Con due tauole vna de nomi, e l’altra delle cose più (Florence, 1596), 475. 12  “[G]eneroso e nobilissimo sangue,” “virtù e valor suo”: Ivi, 473.

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themselves [. . .] It is right that she embraces each and every virtue and merit of all the others, being most nobly, richly and happily endowed with them above mortal custom.13 The “virtues” and “merits” with which she was endowed “most nobly [. . .] above mortal custom” are then enumerated: In the current times, we have not witnessed a spirit endowed with greater nobility, nor seen a member of the female sex advance more then she has in the study of the letters, or, above all, poetry: we can rightly say that with the flight of the quills of her intellect she has elevated herself above stars, and with the rays of her virtue she has glorified our age.14 Betussi associates the “quills of her intellect” with the “rays of her virtue” to celebrate Colonna’s “true Victory [Vittoria] over names and affections.”15 Because she illuminated an entire era, she was likened to “the most beautiful light of the world.”16 As a female poet, she was a symbol of the female Parnasus, an exemplum maximum, and a magistra in her poetic craft. She was also praised for the eternal nature of her verses that reverberate with the memory of her dead husband through time.17 Colonna not only illuminated literary society but also the minds of those who shared in her earthly pilgrimage. As a symbol

13  “Ragionevolmente in costei posso ora conchiudere il numero delle donne illustri, la quale si come al par di quante degne antiche e moderne, che abbiano di sé lasciato degna memoria a noi, si può agguagliare, [. . .] così giusto è, ch’ella abbracci tutte le particolari virtù e meriti dell’altre, essendone dignissima, e sopra l’uso mortale stata ricca e felice”: Libro di M. Giouanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri, 472. 14  “Imperocché a’ giorni nostri non s’è veduto spirito dotato di maggior nobiltà d’animo, né che ne gli studi delle lettere, e sopra tutto della Poesia, abbia avanzato il donnesco sesso più di lei: la quale si può dire, che col volo delle proprie penne dell’intelletto suo si sia alzata sovra le stelle, e co’ raggi della virtù sua abbia illustrato questa nostra età”: Libro di M. Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri, 473. 15  “[V]era Vettoria di nomi e d’affetti”: Ivi, 474. 16  “[I]l più bel lume di questo mondo [. . .] ci sarà tolto dagli occhi”: from Fracastoro’s letter to Gualteruzzi in which he anxiously asked him for advice concerning the Marchesa’s health, in Della Nuova Scielta di Lettere di Diversi Nobilissimi Huomini, et Eccell.mi Ingegni, Scritte in diverse Materie, Fatta da tutti i Libri sin’hora stampati . . . (Venice, 1582), 291. 17  “[M]orto marito”: Libro di M. Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri, 474.

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of her legacy, Girolamo Ruscelli dedicated his annotated edition of her Rime, published in Venice by the Sessa brothers in 1558, to the new Marchesa di Pescara, Isabella Gonzaga.18 In addition to such eulogistic works, two kinds of letter serve to illustrate and to document Colonna’s “most intimate and hidden history of things.”19 The first of these is the numerous private letters that preserve Colonna’s “epistolary secret.” The second is the letters addressed to a collective audience via the publication of a libro di lettere, a new genre that was developed by the printing presses in the fourth decade of the Cinquecento.20 If eulogies and praise texts point primarily to the exoteric dimension of Colonna’s character, which was illuminated by her “high and refined verse,”21 then this other genre of writing offers a more obscure version of the Marchesa di Pescara. In her correspondence, especially the letters that for a long time had the status of private papers, she emerges as a quasi-esoteric figure. This suggestion was first made by Visconti, who encouraged the investigation of her unedited personal documents and correspondence while he edited her Rime, which he “corrected directly with pen and paper.”22 It was precisely in the same period, at the end of the nineteenth century, that Colonna’s Carteggio was published by Ferrero and Müller (1889), who put together the most complete collection of her correspondence to date.23 Even in the most recent critical studies of her literary production, scarce attention has been paid to Colonna’s correspondence. Her importance as an epistolary writer, however, in the roles of both recipient and sender, has been highlighted by anastatic facsimiles and modern critical editions of important sixteenth-century letters written by Pietro Bembo to Bernardo Tasso, and by Annibal Caro to Baldassarre Castiglione, Giovanni Guidiccioni and Michelangelo Buonarroti. These letters have helped to map the dense web of relations that existed inside and extended outside the epicenters of culture, religion, and politics. Colonna’s complex chiaroscuro character is revealed by knitting together her letters with the many other letters in which she is the object of discussion, praise, and admiration, by virtue of the authority of her poetry and of her judgment. 18   R ime 1558. 19  “[L]a più intima e riposta istoria delle cose”: Rime 1840, CXXXVI. 20   Le “carte messaggiere” Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare: per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento, ed. by A. Quondam (Rome, 1981), 277–326. 21  “[V]erso alto e purgato”: Pietro Bembo, Rime, ed. by C. Dionisotti (Milan, 1989), CXXV, 609. 22  “[C]orrette su i testi a penna”: Rime 1840, cxxxvi. 23   C arteggio.

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By reassembling the different pieces of Colonna’s epistolary correspondence, I demonstrate her continued engagement with several key themes, despite the shift from the narrative register to the exhortative register. In Colonna’s scriver lettere we can identify at least three different modes of writing and textual circulation that correspond to different periods in her life. First, the epistle in terza rima addressed to her husband at war and printed in 1536. Second, the “spiritual letters” published in a single volume in 1544–45 and reissued in the course of that century. Third, three further types of letter: those documenting the exchange of sonnets with poets and writers of the time; those addressing the question of the “true living faith” that was debated in the evangelical circles frequented by Colonna (including Costanza D’Avalos, Bernardino Ochino, Giulia Gonzaga, Contarini, Bembo, Cardinal Pole); and those written to princes and popes regarding family affairs and ecclesiastical donations.

The Poetic Epistola

Colonna employed the epistle form early in her poetic development, skillfully adapting it to her expressive needs. Her first known work in this form is the Pìstola in terza rima, “Excelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo”. Preserved with the title Pìstola de la I(llustrissima) S(ignora) M(archesa) di P(escara) ne la rotta di Ravenna, it can be accurately dated. It was written during the imprisonment of the Marquis of Pescara, who was captured after the military retreat from Ravenna (1512).24 Colonna adapts the form of the epistle, or the capitolo in verse, by setting it in the context of waiting based on the model of Ovid’s Heroides. She thematizes the concern for a beloved who is far away, the anxiety of a long wait and the lament for his absence. Excelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo per te narrar fra quante dubbie voglie, fra quanti aspri martir dogliosa io vivo. Non sperava da te tormento e doglie, ché se ’l favor del Ciel t’era propizio perdute non sarian l’opime spoglie. (ll. 1–6)25 24  For the text of the Pistola see Bullock, Rime, A2: 1. 25  “My august lord, I write this to tell you among how many doubts and fears I am miserably living, among how many harsh scourges. I was not expecting such torment and pain from you; for if the heavens had been favorable, the rich spoils would not have been lost”: Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2013), 79.

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The epistle was published as an appendix to Fabrizio Luna’s Vocabulario (1536), which is the only witness of the original form of the poem. The Pìstola has all the characteristics of a “private” letter that escaped Colonna’s scrutiny by fortuitously falling into the hands of typographers, perhaps after being given to a trusted person with free access to her papers. The work is considered “an experiment in strongly ‘dated’ poetry” in terms of both its meter and style.26 However, its interest lies—in my opinion—in the choice of the form of epistolary narrative and its narration in the firstperson, in which the sender undertakes a subjective retelling of narrated events. She stages her personal feelings in a form of love letter,27 inscribed within the mythological paradigm of the Heroides. The text allows the reader to enter Colonna’s study and to observe the books open on her desk, as though she had intentionally wanted to display them to us. The Pìstola is thus an important document for understanding Colonna’s literary formation: the layering of her borrowings, calques, choices, stylistic and semantic echoes in direct and indirect citations as well as in the use and re-use of literary models. The poem is a small puzzle, a voracious accumulation of texts from Petrarch to Dante, Ovid to Boccaccio. It is a miscellaneous assortment of different formal and semantic suggestions that gains its power from its innovative structure. In this work, the female narrator has a fictional literary voice but also a real historical voice. The text moves from the “simulacrum of writing”28 by women encoded in the work of Ovid (Penelope, Laodamia, Briseis, Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, Medea, etc.) to history; from myth to the foundation of a new paradigm, to a text centered on a historical truth (the battle of Ravenna) and Colonna’s relationships with her husband and father. Colonna was the first woman to write a true epistula Heroidis.29 The literary topos of the woman intent on writing, committed to penning a letter to her beloved within the epistelle, originated in Ovid’s Heroides and then passed through into medieval and humanist Latin literature, where it was adapted according to different textual demands. A comparison might be made with the character of Fiammetta, the protagonist of Boccaccio’s work of the same name. From the beginning of the prologue, Fiammetta explicitly and 26  “[U]n esperimento di poesia fortemente ‘datato’ ”: Carlo Vecce, “Vittoria Colonna: il codice epistolare della poesia femminile,” Critica letteraria, 78 (1993): 3–34, here 12. 27  “[E]pistola d’amore”: Vecce, 32. 28  “[S]imulacro della scrittura”: Patrizia Violi, “L’intimità dell’assenza. Forme della scrittura epistolare,” in Carteggi. Le figure dell’epistolare, numero monografico di Carte Semiotiche, 0 (1984): 90–91. 29  Vecce, 33.

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unexpectedly speaks in the first person to the “noble ladies” to whom the work is addressed: You alone, [. . .] I pray be my readers; and as you read, you will find neither Greek myths embellished with many lies, nor Trojan battles befouled with much blood, but stories of love stirred by innumerable desires; in them, there will appear before your eyes the wretched tears, the impetuous sights, the doleful voices—and the stormy thoughts.30 From the start, Colonna’s Pìstola respects the distinctive features of epistolary writing: it addresses an absent and distant recipient, separated in space; a recipient who is also named (“Excelso mio signor, questo ti scrivo”). The practice of writing is referred to, and, soon after, so is the chance event that led the sender to thematize distance and narrate her present condition as an abandoned woman: Ma or in questo periglioso assalto, in questa pugna orrenda e dispietata che m’ha fatto la mente e ’l cor di smalto la vostra gran virtù s’è dimostrata d’un Ettor, d’un Achille . . . (ll. 25–30)31 The separation in space allows Colonna to develop the trope of the differences between men and women, their diverse aims and behaviour: note, for example, the alternation in the pronouns “noi” / “voi” in the following verses: Non noce a voi seguir le dubbie imprese, m’a noi, dogliose, afflitte, ch’aspettando semo da dubbio e da timore offese; voi, spinti dal furor, non ripensando 30  “Voi sole, [. . .] priego che leggiate; voi, leggendo, non troverete favole greche ornate di molte bugie, né troiane battaglie sozze per molto sangue, ma amorose, stimolate da molti disiri, nelle quali davanti agli occhi vostri appariranno le misere lagrime, gl’impetuosi sospiri, le dolenti voci e li tempestosi pensieri”: Giovanni Boccaccio, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta; see also: Adriana Chemello, “Il codice epistolare femminile. Lettere, ‘libri di lettere’, e letterate nel Cinquecento,” in Per lettera. La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia secoli XV–XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 1999), 3–42. 31  “Still, in this perilous assault, this fierce and horrendous battle that has turned my mind and heart to stone, you showed yourself to have the greatness of a Hector, an Achilles”: Cox, Lyric Poetry, 80.

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ad altro ch’ad onor, contr’il periglio solete con gran furia andar gridando. Noi timide nel cor, meste nel ciglio semo per voi; e la sorella il fratre, la sposa il sposo vuol, la madre il figlio. (ll. 40–48)32 The separation between male and female, between intus and extra, also plays on the theme of the oikos: women act as a mirror in which men can contemplate their exploits with satisfaction. The speech on the distance of the faraway husband engaged in dangerous exploits is then followed by another on the ideology of honor, which seems to overpower any other bond. A semantics of pain unifies the text, which is marked by the following lexical choices: “doglia,” or pain (with the variants, doglie / dogliosa / dogliose); “dolore,” or suffering (dolent / dolor / duolo); and “pianto,” or affliction (piangeano / piangendo / pianti). Colonna’s lament bifurcates according to two distinct familial paradigms: the father and the husband. Her pain as an abandoned woman does not inhibit her intellect, rather her logically coherent and precise argument reaches a crescendo when she offers a woman’s perspective on war and honor. The epistle has a canonical tripartite structure: an exordium (ll. 1–24), a narratio (ll. 25–105), and an envoy (ll. 106–12). The battle (“periglioso assalto”) at the center of the narrative is seen through a dual male and female perspective. The condition of the “pained, abandoned” woman (“dolente, abbandonata”), strengthened by the mythological paradigm of the relicta, allows Colonna to expand the antithesis war v. peace to demonstrate how female reasoning clashes with that of men. Pursuing their military exploits (honor and fame), men do not worry about the “dolore” of their abandoned women. The news of the defeat in battle, which brings the story back to reality, is relegated to the short space of just one terzina (ll. 88–90): “Ed ecco il nuncio rio con mesta voce / dandoci chiaro tutto il mal successo, / che la memoria il petto ognor mi coce.”33 The text then resumes the epistolary form in which the sender addresses her husband through a play on her name:

32  “You men are not harmed by attempting your bold enterprises, but what of us women, suffering, afflicted, torn apart by fear and doubt as we wait for you? You, fueled by fury, thinking of nothing but honor, delight to race furiously into the face of danger, while we wait, fearful at heart, sad-eyed on your account; the sister longs for her brother, the bride her husband, the mother her son”: Ivi, 80. 33  “And now there arrived the cruel messenger to recount the whole calamity to us in somber tones. Even the mere memory of it burns me through!”: Ivi, 81.

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Se vittoria volevi io t’era a presso, ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei, e cerca ognun seguir chi fugge d’esso. Nocque a Pompeo, come saper tu dei, lasciar Cornelia, ed a Catone ancora nocque lasciando Marzia in pianti rei. Seguir si deve il sposo dentro e fora, e s’egli pate affanno ella patisca, e lieto lieta, e se vi more mora; a quel che arrisca l’un l’altro s’arrisca; equali in vita equali siano in morte, e ciò che avien a lui a lei sortisca. Felice Mitridate e tua consorte, che faceste equalmente di fortuna i fausti giorni e le disgrazie torte! Tu vivi lieto, e non hai doglia alcuna, ché, pensando di fama il novo acquisto, non curi farmi del tuo amor digiuna; ma io, con volto disdegnoso e tristo, serbo il tuo letto abbandonato e solo, tenendo con la speme il dolor misto, e col vostro gioir tempr’il mio duolo. (ll. 91–112)34 As proof of her reasoning, the poet names several illustrious women of the ancient world, from Cornelia to Ipsicratea, women cited in Dante (Inf. IV, 128) and in Petrarch’s Trionfo d’Amore. Colonna adopts the perspective of a woman waiting on a rock (Ischia) for the return of her warrior, and uses a host of ancient heroines to remark on the negative effects of their separation. Adding force to 34  “If you wanted Victory [Vittoria], I could have been at your side; but you, in leaving me, also left her, and now all seek to follow her as she flees. It harmed Pompey, as you must know, to leave his wife Cornelia; and Cato too regretted leaving his wife Marcia weeping. A wife should follow her husband at home and abroad; if he suffers hardship, let her suffer too; if he is fortunate, let her share in his happiness; if he dies, let her die alongside him. What one spouse risks, the other should risk; they are equal in life; let them be equal in death; what he undergoes, let her too undergo. O happy Mithridates and his wife, who equally shared in all Fortune brought, both the days of victory and the distress that followed! But you are blithe and have no care; thinking only of how to increase your fame; you do not care that you are leaving me hungering for your love. But I remain, miserable and angry, waiting in your lonely abandoned bed, mingling my sorrow with some faint hope; only the thought of your happiness softens my grief”: Ivi, 81.

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this perspective, she appeals to the formula vel in talamo vel in tumulo, taken from Roman family law, which states that a wife should be united with her husband in life and in death. The rule is illustrated by Ipsicratea who disguised herself in habitum virilem, in men’s clothing, in order to follow her husband. In the envoy, the sender makes an impassioned plea to the recipient that recalls the previous opposition between “onore” and “dolore.” In the guise of a “new” Penelope, she makes an unexpected generalization. She shifts her audience from the second person singular “tu” to the second person plural “voi,” from the Marquis to all men. The desire for fame and honor is thus a source of joy (“vostro gioir”) for men, while all that remains for women is heartache (“duol”). Colonna takes inspiration from the ancient Penelope (previously mentioned in the exordium), who laments her empty bed (“I would not have lain there, cold in an empty bed”) and implores her consort, not for a responsive letter, but for his return home (“Don’t reply to me however: come yourself!”).35 Colonna hopes that her epistle will fulfil a similar pragmatic function, inciting her husband to change his behavior and to take care of his beloved by returning home to temper her pain.

Letters to Women

The rise of the new genre of the letterbook in the 1540s brought about an anthropological change in epistolary writing that inevitably had an impact on the circulation of printed books.36 The appendices to Le “carte messaggiere,” 35  “Non ego deserto acuisse frigido lecto,” “Nil mihi rescribas attinet: ipse veni!”: Ovid, Lettere di eroine, ed. and trans. Gianpiero Rosati (Milan, 1989), 66. 36  Especially in recent decades, literary historians have researched the changes in the sixteenth century that transformed the private letter into a publishable text, which could be reproduced in dozens of copies. In a letter to Lodovico Dolce, Pietro Aretino, the first to create vernacular “books of letters,” remarks on these changes: “Sì che riponetele [le lettere] in luogo che si possin mostrare di tempo in tempo, come gemme de la gloria loro e come corde del merito del istromento del vostro ingegno”: Pietro Aretino, Tutte le opere. Lettere. Il primo e il secondo libro, ed. F. Flora (Milan, 1960), 372 (the letter to Dolce is dated 17 December 1537). As demonstrated by Aretino’s lexical choices, within the “new genre” the letter acquires an important economic value and is compared to a gem. The letters are not reissued to protect confidentiality, but to be shown at the appropriate moment. Like gems, these letters are precious objects in which it is possible to invest, to capitalize resources, and which might then be exhibited, thereby increasing their value. The reproducibility guaranteed by the printing press transforms the “place of letters” (limited to an exchange between sender and recipient) into something different.

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a volume edited by Amedeo Quondam, serve to quantify the phenomenon.37 Between 1538 and 1627, 160 titles were published in two different types of editions: single-authored volumes (circa 130 volumes) and collections of letters by various authors (27 volumes). Counting reprints and reeditions (with “aggiunte” and updates), it is possible to collate a library of some 540 volumes of letters.38 The history of the letterbook was, therefore, closely intertwined with the history of sixteenth-century publishing. However, it is also evident that the editorial production of letterbooks was intertwined with issues related to genre norms, models and their imitation, and the circulation of ideas—not least on the need for religious reform.39 In his dedication to the Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini (1542), in which Colonna’s letters were first published, Paolo Manuzio, the likely author, states: I had the idea of gathering and printing some letters by prudent men, eloquently written in our common Italian language. [. . .] I am persuaded that the authors of these letters will not mind that I reveal the flowers of their intellect for the common benefit of all, because in this way they will spur on the work of those who are in the know: and those who are not in the know will have reason to be grateful to them, since from their example they will learn the art of writing well.40 The shift from the epistola to the liber involves a marked difference. First, the single and identified recipient is substituted with a collective recipient, the readers of the letter book. The décalage from manuscript to print also allows the author to intervene in the texts with corrections, additions, omissions, and censorship, changing the character of the original letter. These authorial actions cause the book of letters to become a true work of literature. 37   Le “carte messaggiere” Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare: per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento, ed. A. Quondam (Rome, 1981), 277–326. 38  Of these, 85 percent are single-authored books and the remaining 15 percent are anthologies (raccolte) by various authors. Although the reprints follow a discontinuous rhythm, some authors have a constant market presence over a long period of time (see the graph on page 33 of Quondam’s volume, which shows the market presence of different authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). 39  Quondam states: “Il ‘libro di lettere’ nel Cinquecento non costituisce qualcosa di episodico, di marginale, rispetto alla più ampia pratica di scrittura di lettere, rispetto all’insieme complessivo dei circuiti epistolari: assume una funzione modellizzante generale, fonda la stessa praticabilità dello scrivere lettere. La sua presenza risulta egemone non soltanto in termini quantitativi, ma soprattutto formali”: Amedeo Quondam, “Dal ‘formulario’ al ‘formulario,’ ” in Le “carte messaggiere,” 19. 40  “Mi sono immaginato di raccogliere e fare stampare alcune lettere d’huomini prudenti, scritte con eloquentia in questa lingua comune Italiana. [. . .] Però mi persuado che gli

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The selected letters of these “prudent” literary figures are “the flowers of their intellect” and become the mirror (or exemplum) of eloquentia and of the art of “writing well.” Their function as literary models for a collective recipient is thus clearly expressed. Although there is no significant female presence in these imposing collections of letters (the three books of Letteri volgari, published by Manuzio from 1542, incorporate 400 letters), the name of the Marchesa di Pescara occurs frequently. Quickly surveying the list of senders in the first volume, one finds only three female names: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, Veronica Gambara and Marguerite de Navarre. The work includes six letters written by these women (four by Vittoria Colonna and one by each of the other two women).41 In the second book, the female contribution is even poorer, in the form of a single letter by Veronica Gambara.42 Likewise, the third book includes only one letter by Chiara Matraini.43 The female recipients of letters, however, are more numerous. Vittoria Colonna’s name appears eight times (five times in the first book and three in the second) as the recipient of letters sent by Giovan Matteo Giberti (1), Pier Paolo Vergerio (3), Marguerite de Navarre (1), Baldassarre Castiglione (2), and Luigi Alamanni (1). The women who do appear were all powerful and educated protagonists on the sixteenth-century literary scene.

auttori di queste lettere non havranno a male ch’io dimostri al mondo i fiori dell’ingegno loro con utilità comune, perché così porgeranno ardire all’industria di quei che sanno: e quei che non sanno, loro haveranno obligo, potendo da questi essempi ritrarre la vera forma del ben scrivere”: Delle lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini et eccellentissimi ingegni scritte in diverse materie, Libro Primo (Venice, 1542) (emphasis added). 41  Ibid. Colonna’s four letters are respectively addressed to: the Prince of Orange, Lodovico Dolce, Serafina Contarini, and the queen of Navarre. Marguerite de Navarre’s letter is addressed to Colonna, and Veronica Gambara’s is for Gabriele Cesano. 42   Lettere volgari di diversi eccellentissimi huomini, in diverse materie. Libro secondo (Venice, 1545). Veronica Gambara’s letter is addressed to Giovanni Michiel. 43   Delle lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini et eccellentissimi ingegni scritte in diverse materie, Nuovamente mandate in luce . . . (Venice, 1567). Chiara Matraini’s letter is addressed to Annibal Tosco. In the two volumes of the Lettere facete, respectively edited by Atanagi and Turchi, we find no letters written by a female hand. Women are present only as recipients of letters: in the first book there is a letter from Muzio to the Duchess of Urbino; in the second there are two letters: one from Paolo Giovio to Vittoria Colonna and another from Rinaldo Corso to Claudia Rangone. See: Delle lettere facete et piacevoli di diversi grandi huomini et chiari ingegni, scritte sopra diverse materie, raccolte per M. Dionigi Atanagi, libro primo (Venice, 1561); Delle lettere facete et piacevoli, raccolte per M. Francesco Turchi (Venice, 1575).

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Indeed, all of them had seen their names printed on the frontispiece of at least one book by 1555.44 Among the seven female senders of letters collected in the Novo libro di lettere scritte da i più rari auttori e professori della lingua volgare italiana (edited by Gherardo in 1544 and 1545) are the names of Ippolita Borromeo in Anguissola (1 letter), Vittoria Colonna (6 letters), Violante Gambara in Valente (1 letter), Virginia Negri (1 letter), Renata of France (1 letter), Isabella Sforza (1 letter), and Bona Maria Soarda Sangiorgio (1 letter). I will return to this book later in the chapter. The collection titled Tredici uomini illustri, edited by Girolamo Ruscelli for Ziletti in 1556, claims in the title to bring together, “the flower of many more beautiful letters than have been seen to date.”45 The book contains only two female names among the thirty-six selected authors: Vittoria Colonna (3 letters) and Marguerite de Navarre (with 1 letter to Colonna). The collection, which was subsequently reissued by Comin da Trino da Monferrato in 1564, highlights the female presence by including these four letters in a separate chapter, Book XIV. It is as though the editor wanted to introduce the thirteen “illustrious men” to highly distinguished women such as Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre. In the collection of letters edited by Lodovico Dolce, published by Giolito in both 1554 and 1559, which serves as a parallel to Ruscelli’s publication, two of Colonna’s letters are included: the famous missive to the Prince of Orange along with a letter addressed to the collection’s editor.46

44  After the first edition of 1538 from Parma, Colonna’s Rime were reprinted numerous times. For a full account of her publication history, see the contribution to this volume by Tatiana Crivelli. Veronica Gambara’s work was included in the Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani, nuovamente raccolte e mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli, tra le quali sono le rime della Signora Veronica Gambara et di M. Pietro Barignano (Venice, 1554). Chiara Matraini’s work saw a discreet edition: Prose e rime di M. Chiara Matraini gentildonna lucchese (Lucca, 1555). 45   Lettere di diversi autori eccellenti. Libro primo. Nel quale sono i tredici autori illustri e il fiore di quante altre belle lettere si sono vedute fin qui . . . (Venice, 1556). The letters in this volume by Colonna are the same as those in the collection by Manuzio, addressed to the Prince of Orange, the queen of Navarre, and Serafina Contarini. The queen of Navarre’s letter is addressed to Colonna (as in the edition by Manuzio). 46   Lettere di diversi eccellentiss. huomini, raccolte da diversi libri tra le quali se ne leggono molte, non più stampate. Con gli argomenti per ciascuna delle materie, di che elle trattano, e nel fine una Tavola delle cose più notabili, a commodo de gli studiosi (Venice, 1559) (citations are from the second edition).

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If “the century of print began with Catherine of Siena’s letters,”47 then we might say that the season of the letterbook began with Vittoria Colonna’s Litere. As with Catherine of Siena’s letters, Colonna’s libretto is an indication of and a warning about “religious and moral reform addressed to Italy and its Church.”48 The complex title of the work announces its underlying thematic structure: Litere della divina Vetoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara a la Duchessa de Amalfi sopra la vita contemplativa di santa Caterina e sopra de la activa di santa Madalena (1544).49 This series of “spiritual letters” were printed during Colonna’s lifetime, unlike most of her scattered letters, published much later. There is a further important feature of the three letters included in the Litere: they are all addressed exclusively to the Duchess of Amalfi, Costanza D’Avalos, named on the title page. In addition to its doctrinal and didactic orientation, the work is thus also addressed to a single recipient, with whom the author shares a common set of customs, life practices, and ideas. Although they were separated in space and time, their mutual interests are revealed page after page. Both women participate in a common practice of introspection and spiritual reflection, and share a scriptural and linguistic ability, a so-called household language (“lessico famigliare”): “that cherished pleasure that lovingly binds us in one desire.”50 Colonna’s Litere were published in 1544, and were reprinted the following year in the second edition of Gherardo’s anthology, the Novo libro di lettere scritte da i più rari auttori e professori della lingua volgare italiana. They represent the first published collection of “spiritual letters,” serving as models and didactic instruments in demonstrating the “path to perfection.” The rich figurative language of these letters, replete with Platonic and Scriptural allusions,

47  “Il secolo della stampa si apre con le lettere di Santa Caterina da Siena”: Adriano Prosperi, “Lettere spirituali,” in Donne e fede. Santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Rome and Bari, 1994), 227–51, here 228. 48  “[D]i riforma religiosa e morale indirizzato alla Chiesa italiana e all’Italia”: Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence, 1968), 4–5. 49   Litere della divina Vetoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara a la Duchessa de Amalfi sopra la vita contemplativa di santa Caterina e sopra de la activa di santa Madalena (Venice, 1544). On these letters, see the excellent reading by Maria Luisa Doglio, Lettera e donna. Scrittura epistolare al femminile tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Rome, 1993), 17–31. 50  “[P]er quella cara dilettione che caldamente ci lega in un desio”: cited in Novo libro di lettere scritte da i più rari auttori e professori della lingua volgare italiana, facsimile of the Gherardo edition, 1544 and 1545, ed. Giacomo Moro (Bologna, 1987), 277. All citations of Colonna’s Litere are from this source.

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draws us to the heart of the spiritual debates in which Colonna participated over decades, albeit with discretion. During the years of her cloistered retreat at Viterbo, Colonna’s ties with the outside world became at once looser and ever more refined. Reading and meditating on scriptural texts, she focused her mind on inner reflection and distanced herself from the praise and eulogies of a mundane world. The three letters addressed to Costanza D’Avalos are evidence of her growing spirituality. In the first letter, Colonna inscribes her speech with a prandial dimension, employing the metaphor of the “household supper” (“domestica cena”). She urges her “spiritual sister” (“sorella d’anima”) to take up the lectio divina, the only sort of reading that guarantees spiritual nourishment: “because I know the Lord will make his mercy clear to you, just as he makes his high invisible light visible to the blessed.”51 Suggesting how best “to prepare the thirsty soul” (“preparer la sitiente anima”) to be welcomed at his “generous table” (“larga mensa”), Colonna stresses the vertical relationship with the divine, identifying the “highlights” (“punti luce”) of her scriptural readings: But because I know that by distancing yourself, you will be so lucid in that divine light, so enflamed in the beautiful fire, and so perfect in the pinnacle of perfection, that you will wait only to nourish yourself, it seems to me that when your spirit slows and you feel the weight of the world calling you back, you must stop with my most respected father Paul, or with my great light Augustine, or with my fervent servant Magdalene. They will explain what I have asked of you. Above all, I beg you to try to see how our exceptional patrone and Queen, Mary, embodies the wondrous mystery of the highest Word in her person. See how she melts with divine fire on seeing her flesh made into a living sun, how she lives blessed in the restful and safe peace of Heaven, and how much she delights in seeing rays born from her living light, rays that make Paradise beautiful.52 51  “[P]erché so che mercé del Signor nostro sarà chiaro alla tua mente, come l’alta invisibil luce si fa visibile a suoi eletti”: Ivi, 277. 52  “Ma perché so che nel tuo alienarti starai si lucida in quel divin lume, si accesa nel bellissimo fuoco, et si perfetta ne l’alta somma perfettione, che attenderai sol a cibarti, mi par che a l’allentar dello spirito quando già senti che la gravezza terrena vuol richiamarti, ti fermi col mio osservandissimo padre Paolo, o col mio gran lume Agostino, overo con la ferventissima serva mia Maddalena, et da essi t’informa di quel, che t’ho supplicato, et sopra tutto ti prego ti sforzi veder come la singularissima patrona, et Regina nostra Maria il mirabil mistero de l’altissimo Verbo incarnato in lei, et come si liquefa di divino ardore di veder la sua istessa carne fatta un vivo sole, et come vive beata nella riposata e sicura pace del cielo, e quanto gode di vedere, che dal suo vivo lume nascono i raggi, che fanno bello il Paradiso,” Novo libro di lettere, 1545 (Moro facsimile edition), letter cxxxi, 278.

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This letter is a dialogue with the soul: the sender appears to read and interpret the thoughts, desires, and most secretly guarded aspirations of her silent interlocutor. In the second letter, centered on the figure of Mary, Colonna explicitly provides the key to interpreting her writings, thus giving the letter a hermeneutic value. She starts with an observation on the function of the epistle, which serves to bring “much consolation” (“consolatione assai”), in this particular instance, if the recipient participates in its commonly shared plane of meaning (“but I speak of that which is sweetly represented to me in the customs of our church”).53 Then, she describes the introspective method: “I see my dearest thoughts with the inner eye,”54 implying that the inner eye is the vehicle and the essential tool for silent meditation. Colonna dedicates the third letter to Catherine of Alexandria and Christ’s “beloved Apostle,” “our advocate and most loyal escort, Mary Magdalene.”55 The meditation is activated by the inner eye (“l’occhio interno”) with propositions that seem to spiral down one on top of the other. The “inner eye” sees, and the mind considers as it penetrates into the depths of the soul, following in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene, who was accepted among the elect by Christ because of “her intrepid spirit, her most learned and warm reasoning, her sincere and unfailing faith.”56 The sender focuses particular attention on Mary Magdalene: I think that she, his beloved disciple, deserved to see him in his immortal glory before all others: as clear proof of how much her ardor, perseverance, trust and love pleased Him, and to show her that she was his apostle, he commanded her to be the first to bear the awaited news and the wondrous mystery of his resurrection.57

53  “[M]a dico quel che soavemente ne l’usata nostra chiesa mi rappresenti”: Ivi, letter CXXXII, 279. 54  “[I]l mio più caro pensiero, vedeva con l’occhio interno”: Ivi, 279. 55  “Apostola diletta,” “nostra advocata, et fedelissima scorta Maddalena”: Ivi, letter CXXXIII, 286, 284. 56  [L]’intrepido animo, la dottissima, e calda disputazione, la sincera, e costante fede”: Ivi, letter CXXXIII, 285. 57  “Considero che quella amata discepola meritò prima de tutti vederlo glorioso et immortale: dando chiaro testimonio il Signor grato quanto al suo ardore, la sua perseveranza et il suo fido et accetto amore gli fosse piacciuto, et per certificarla che era sua apostola le comandò che fosse la prima annunciatrice de la aspettata novella, et del mirabil mistero della sua resurrettione,” Novo libro di lettere, 1545 (Moro facsimile edition), letter cxxxiii, 285.

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For the privilege of being the first witness to the Resurrection of Christ, Colonna honors Mary Magdalene with the title of apostle. However, she also refers to her as a “woman who converted the moment she ardently loved Him” (dilexit Multum).58 The penitent Mary Magdalene becomes a figure “to be mirrored by and a model for every penitent,”59 in accordance with the Gospel of Luke, in which Christ affirms: “many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved very much” (Lk 7:46–49). This statement reinforces the salvific nature of sola fide. Colonna rekindles her fondness for this particular version of the figure of Mary Magdalene in her spiritual sonnets, in which the repentant woman is “armed only with ardent living hope” (“armata sol di viva ardente speme”) and associated with evangelical echoes from Luke and John (Lk 7:44–50; Jn 12:1–11).60 As early as March 1531, while at Ischia, Colonna requested “a painting [. . .] of a figure of St Magdalene,”61 and received a painting by Titian a few months later. Thanks to the mediation of her cousin Alfonso d’Avalos, a similar commission was requested from Michelangelo Buonarroti. Monica Bianco has examined the connection between the sonnets dedicated to Mary Magdalene and some of the iconographic representations of her.62 The 1545 edition of Gherardo’s Novo libro di lettere, which contains the three spiritual letters addressed to Costanza D’Avalos, includes two more letters by Colonna addressed to an unnamed recipient, who has been persuasively identified as Bernardino Ochino.63 The thematic contiguity of these letters with those addressed to Costanza is clear, as well as the similarities in their linguistic register and style. They constitute a small ‘appendix’, a related reflection on the sermons of the friar. In the esordium of the first letter addressed to her “most respected Reverend Father,” Colonna declares that she attempts to write “some simple meditations” (“qualche meditation semplice”). Immediately afterward, she names the object of her reflection: “the Gospel of the adulteress”

58  “[C]onvertita donna da l’hora che ardentemente lo amò”: Ivi, 285. 59  “[P]er specchio e norma d’ogni penitente”: Giovanni Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino,” Italique, iv (2001): 61–101, here 79. 60   B ullock, Rime, S1: 155, 5; see also S1: 121. For more information, see the anthology of texts by Colonna, edited by Adriana Chemello, in Liriche del Cinquecento, ed. Monica Farnetti and Laura Fortini (Rome, 2014). 61  “[U]na pittura [. . .] d’una figura di S.ta Maddalena”: Barbara Agosti, “Vittoria Colonna e il culto della Maddalena (tra Tiziano e Michelangelo),” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 71–81. 62  Monica Bianco, “Per la datazione di un sonetto di Vittoria Colonna (e di un probabile ritratto della poetessa ad opera di Sebastiano del Piombo),” Italique, XI (2008): 93–107. 63  Giacomo Moro, “Introduzione,” Novo libro di lettere, 1545 (Moro facsimile edition).

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(“lo Evangelio della adultera”).64 Reading the holy pages (“sacre carte”), Colonna was profoundly moved by the figure of the adulterous woman and her salvific encounter with Christ. This fascination was renewed by listening to the sermons of Bernardino Ochino and their intimacy (“intrinsichezza”) led her to commit her personal reflections on his learned concepts to paper. Colonna was particularly touched by the “singular grace” received by this woman who, according to John (8:1–11), had the privilege of “being judged by the most just and true judge in his sweet advent, and in his mild conversation with us.”65 The encounter with Christ takes place with her full dignity and freedom. The woman is alone before Christ, after her accusers have distanced themselves following the words of the teacher who invites “he who is without sin” to raise the first stone. According to Augustine’s masterful commentary, “there were the two left, misery and mercy.”66 From the episode in John, Colonna recalls above all the “great goodness, compassion and mercy” of he who “came for sinners, as a doctor for the sick, to minister and to bring peace, light, grace—all enflamed by charity.”67 Christ, distinguishing between sin and sinner, teaches a lesson to the woman’s detractors by inviting them to look inside themselves before casting stones of judgment. In stressing Christ’s mercy, Colonna underlines the “burning love and living faith” of a woman who was “truly converted, enlightened, perfect, and surrendered herself entirely to Christ.”68 Colonna strived to make this total abandonment to love and to the living faith a rule in her own life.

Epistolary Networks

The third strand of Colonna’s epistolary writing is more typically poetic and literary, with the practice of writing poetry at its center. Colonna’s public letters, collected in the above-mentioned anthologies, existed alongside her private letters, which she exchanged with literary figures such as Pietro Bembo, 64   Novo libro di lettere, letter CXXXIV, 287. 65  “[E]sser giudicata dal giustissimo vero giudice nel suo advento dolce, e nella sua benigna conversazione fra noi”: Ivi, letter CXXXIV, 287. 66  “[R]elicti sunt duo, misera et misericordia”: Augustine, Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium, 33, 5. 67  “[G]ran bontà clemetia, et misericordia,” “veniva per li peccatori, per medico delli infermi, per ministrare, per dar la pace, la luce, la gratia, tutto infuocato di carità”: Novo libro di lettere, 1545 (Moro facsimile edition), letter cxxxiv, 287. 68  “[A]cceso amore e viva fede,” “veramente convertita, illuminata, e perfetta si lassò tutta in Cristo”: Ivi, 290.

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Carlo Galteruzzi, Pietro Aretino, Bernardo Tasso, Giovanni Guidiccioni, Luca Contile, and many others. Only a handful of these letters were printed in the sixteenth century, and these represent the tip of an iceberg. Despite their fragmentary and incomplete nature, the surviving correspondences, available today in modern editions, perfectly map the web of relationships that Colonna maintained with powerful men and women and with Church authorities. This gallery of figures had Colonna at its center, a woman who knew how to maintain an open dialogue with the cultural, religious and political protagonists of her time, despite renouncing the mundane world. As Concetta Ranieri has observed, skimming through Colonna’s surviving letters we find a striking absence of “lettere familiari,” that is domestic or familiar correspondence, which might have shed light on her intimate feelings and desires. Colonna’s emergence on the literary scene was sanctioned by her exchange of letters with Bembo, which was made possible by the mediation of Paolo Giovio, who passed on her poetry to him in the autumn of 1529. The correspondence with Bembo was configured as an intellectual partnership marked by the exchange of sonnets, enthusiastic comments, and critical judgments on each other’s poetry: Among the many beautiful poems that I have seen, I think I have not seen a poem more beautiful than this one by Her Ladyship, and I consider it to be very good indeed. It is serious, it is fine, it is intelligent; in sum, it is excellently planned, prepared and executed. I will devise to reply to her if I can, but I greatly fear I will be unable to do so.69 Bembo wrote these lines to Giovio from Padua on 7 April 1530, and followed them, a few weeks later, with a response sonnet (Cingi le costei tempie de l’amato) for Colonna and the confession that: “if before I warmly desired to meet her and to see her, now I am consumed by a burning desire to do so.”70 The correspondence between Colonna and Bembo was always mediated by 69  “A me pare non aver veduto alcuna rima di S.S. più bella di questa, tra molte bellissime che vedute ho, e tengomene buono grandemente. È grave, è gentile, è ingeniosa, et è in somma eccellentemente e pensata e disposta e dettata. M’ingegnerò di risponderle, se io potrò, ché assai temo di non potere”: Letter from Bembo to Paolo Giovio, in Bembo: Lettere n. 1077, 125; cited in Dionisotti: Appunti, 281–82; and Concetta Ranieri, “Ancora sul carteggio tra Pietro Bembo e Vittoria Colonna,” Giornale italiano di filologia, n.s., xiv (1983): 133–51. 70  “[S]e io prima era caldo dal desiderio di conoscerla e vederla, ora io ardo tutto in questa voglia”: Letter from Bembo to Mons. (Paolo) Giovio, dated 29th May 1530, in Bembo: Lettere, n. 1094, 140.

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Paolo Giovio, the “faithful transmitter of missives and rhymes.”71 This is also evident in a letter from Colonna to Giovio (Ischia, 24 June 1530) in which she expands on a perceptive and subtle analysis of Bembo’s sonnet. Here, she reveals a profound competence in the art of poetry and the composition of verse, as well as a lucid self-assurance in passing critical judgment on an eminent literary figure of her time. The friendship between Bembo and Colonna was not only mediated by Giovio but also by Carlo Gualteruzzi, who interceded and forwarded their continuing sonnet exchange and intensifying literary correspondence. In another letter, dated 25 July 1532, Bembo thanks Colonna for the “elegant sonnet written to me” and adds, “also precious to me were the other two beautiful sonnets [. . .] in one of these it seems to me that you far surpass and overcome your sex: while, in the other, you exceed yourself.”72 In the same year, Bembo entrusted Gualteruzzi with the task of obtaining a portrait from Colonna and, when he received it, he thanked her for the “rare and precious gift” (“raro e caro dono”): “which I will treasure all the more, as it does not seem like a painted figure, much as the real figure that it depicts is an excellence more precious than your sex imagines.”73 Even in the absence of a great number of their replies, when we combine and reassemble Bembo and Colonna’s correspondence chronologically, we are able to recapture an important literary friendship. We also catch a glimpse through these letters of contact and intersections with princes, clergymen, and ambassadors. Other correspondence, encounters, direct, and indirect exchanges also emanate from these figures. In a letter to the Marquis of Vasto, dated 10 September 1533, Bembo asks to be remembered to Colonna and defines her as “the honor of her sex and of our century.”74 In the same year, he invited her to visit Venice to “see something as new as Venice is in truth, a place wholly

71  “[F]edele trasmettitor di missive e rime”: Carlo Vecce, “Paolo Giovio e Vittoria Colonna,” Periodico della Società Storica Comense, liv (1990): 67–93, here 86. 72  “[S]onetto leggiadro scrittomi,” “cari eziandio mi furono gli altri due bellissimi sonetti [. . .] nell’uno dei quali a me pare che voi di gran lunga superiate et vinciate il vostro sesso: nell’altro d’alquanto voi stessa,” letter from Bembo to Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara, in Bembo: Lettere, n. 1399, 365–66. 73  “Il quale io serberò per cosa tanto maggior di quello, che non pare che possa essere una figura dipinta, quanto la vera, che ella rassembra, è eccellenza di più prezzo che non cape il vostro sesso”: Letter from Bembo to the Marchesa di Pescara, dated 2 July 1533, in ibid., n. 1501, 447–48. 74  “[O]nore e del suo sesso e del nostro secolo”: ibid., Letter n. 1517, 460.

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unusual compared to other cities that one might visit.”75 Toward the second half of the 1530s, the correspondence with the Venetian writer changed register, becoming less formal. The exchange of praise, gifts, and critical judgements on poetry was supplemented by the desire for a more intimate relationship (“to see and to hear you” [“veder e udir voi”]). Writing from the monastery of San Silvestro in Capite, in a letter dated December 1538, Colonna confesses to Bembo her dedication to “peaceful and gentle conversation with books and with thoughts.”76 In this same period, their correspondence documents Bembo’s explicit request to Colonna to convince “your father, friar Bernardino of Siena” to go and preach in the lagoon the following Lent.77 We also have a detailed report of the deep emotions provoked by the friar’s sermons: I confess that I have never heard anyone preach more usefully or more devoutly than him. Nor am I surprised if you love him as much as you do. He thinks very differently and in a more Christian manner than all others who have taken to the pulpit in my time, and he does so with more dynamic charity and love, and with better and more humble actions. [. . .] Thank you for loaning him to us.78 This is a confession made with an open heart, a clear expression of gratitude for the “dear and welcome gift” (“dono [. . .] caro e grato”) of being able to listen to the friar’s inspired words. However, it also marks a change in the nature of the relationship between Bembo and Colonna. Their common bond is no longer limited to the art of versification, but now extends to their shared religious sentiment. The friar is no longer “loaned” for Lent, but has become “our

75  “[V]edendo cosa così nuova come nel vero Vinegia è, e così fuori dell’uso delle altre Città che si veggono”: ibid., Letter n. 1526, 467. 76  “[P]acifica e dolce conversazione co’ i libri e co’ i pensieri”: Ranieri, “Ancora sul carteggio tra Pietro Bembo e Vittoria Colonna,” 145. 77  “[V]ostro padre, frate Bernardino da Siena”: Letter from Bembo to the Marchesa di Pescara, dated 6th April 1538, in Bembo: Lettere, n. 1925, 108. 78  “[C]onfesso non havere mai udito predicar più utilmente né più santamente di lui. Né mi maraviglio se V.S. l’ama tanto quanto ella fa. Ragiona molto diversamente e più Cristianamente di tutti gli altri che in pergamo sian saliti a’ miei giorni, e con più viva charità e amore, e migliori e più giovevoli cose. [. . .] grazie a V.S. che ce l’avete prestato”: Letter from Bembo to the Marchesa di Pescara, dated 23 February 1539, in Bembo: Lettere, n. 2015, 178. See also the letters of 15 March 1539 (n. 2024, 185) and of 4 April 1539 (n. 2039, 197).

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friar Bernardino, because my will is partnered with yours from now on.”79 On receiving the title of cardinal, Bembo did not hesitate to express in writing his gratitude for the decisive support given to him by the “wise and holy and courteous and most loving soul”80 and generously offered to commission a valuable edited volume of Colonna’s Rime to correct the 1538 edition. The Quinternus Litterarum Marchionissae Pescariae, discovered at the end of the last century in the Vatican Archives and later published, transports the reader to Colonna’s period of residence in Viterbo and the era of Cardinal Reginald Pole’s central role in the so-called Church of Viterbo (Ecclesia Viterbiensis).81 Aside from the “troubles or war” (“affanni o guerra”) of the time, during these years Colonna devoted herself to an in-depth exploration of the doctrinal issues related to evangelism. These included the doctrine of justification by faith alone and its liberating meaning, the notion of free will, the value of works, the inner peace of God’s forgiveness, and the “sweet predestination” that calls Christians to become “citizens of Heaven.”82 Colonna’s spirituality was an inner calling to feel and to think, to listen to God, an elitist spirituality shared with highly cultured men and women, who asked questions, sought answers to their inner restlessness, interrogated texts and allowed themselves to be influenced by the figurative language of St Paul and St Augustine (as we have seen in the letter to Costanza). Colonna made no mystery of her concern for the whole “health of the soul” when she wrote to Giulia Gonzaga from her Viterbo retreat, where she could “attend to serving God more calmly than she did in Rome.”83 Her spirituality was aimed at strengthening the “inner eye,” so that she could achieve an inner virtue (“bene interiore”), thereby mirroring the “eternal goodness of the divine will.”84 The letters of this period addressed to 79  “[I]l nostro frate Bernardino, ché mio il voglio da ora innanzi chiamare alla parte con V.S.”: Bembo, Lettere, n. 2039, 197. 80  “[S]aggia e santa e cortese e amorevolissima anima”: Bembo: Lettere, n. 2040, 198. 81  Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Città del Vaticano, 1989), and in particular Concetta Ranieri, “Storia e analisi dei testi,” 63–88; Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000); Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008). 82  “[D]olcissima predestinazione,” “cittadino del cielo”: Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘Spirituali,’ ” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, xxiv (1988): 211–61, here 218–19. 83  “[A]ttendere a servire Dio più quietamente che non faceva a Roma”: Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘Spirituali,’ ” 213. 84  “[D]ivina voluntà che è sempre bona”: Pagano, Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, 99.

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Cardinal Pole and Giovanni Morone allow us to appreciate only the surface of the spiritual fervor that circulated within this circle, the Ecclesia Viterbiensis. There remain only hints, allusions, oblique assertions of shared formulae (“the true vine,” “the joy of the final destination,” the “true joy,” “our only Easter,” the “vital and life-giving air,” etc.).85 The Christian affection that united the correspondents in a sort of interiorized kinship bond (“parentado interiore”)— a communion of souls that propagated without words—is assiduously evoked. As explicitly stated in the first letter to Costanza, letters between these friends always bring the greatest consolation. They energize and enliven the “kindred spirit” destined to reach perfection in Christ: “because I see in Him an order of spirit that only the spirit feels, and he always elevates me so high up towards that abundance of light that he does not let me dwell too much on my own wretchedness.”86 No longer conveying paper messages (“carte messaggiere”), these letters are hard to decipher and lacking in significant documentary or biographical information. However, they hold a symbolic value, they act as a seňal and act to “resuscitate consolation” in the receiver.87 The acts and documents of the Inquisition trial of Pietro Carnesecchi provided information for historians about the make-up of the group at Viterbo, and, in particular, the depth of the relationship between Colonna and Cardinal Pole, “in whom she believed like an oracle.”88 Carnesecchi’s statements leave no doubt about the “spiritual conversations” between the two: [Pole] often conversed with that Lady in Rome and in Viterbo, and always, I think, about Godly matters, because they both delighted more in this subject than in any other [. . .] The details of their conversations were not known by me, nor by anyone else, because they spoke together without intermediaries or witnesses, and although Flaminio, Priuli and I would accompany Her most illustrious Ladyship to the monastery, we would not intervene in their discussions, but, were we to join in, we would do so in church or thereabouts.89 85  “[V]era vite,” “gaudio del porto,” “vero gaudio,” “sola nostra pascua,” “vitale et vivifico aere”: Ivi, 98–99 passim. 86  “[P]erché vedo in lui un ordine di spirito che solo lo spirito lo sente, et sempre mi tira tanto in su a quell’amplitudine di luce che non mi lassa troppo fermare nella miseria propria”: Pagano, Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, 153; letter from Vittoria Colonna to Reginald Pole. 87  “[R]esuscitare la consolatione”: Ivi, 139; letter from Vittoria Colonna to Giovanni Morone. 88  “[A]l quale ella credeva come a un oracolo”: Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘Spirituali,’ ” 223 (Processo Carnesecchi, 283). 89  “[Pole] haveva spesso ragionamenti con quella Signora et in Roma et in Viterbo, et sempre, credo, delle cose di Dio, perché l’uno et l’altro se delettava più di questo che di niuno

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After visiting Colonna in Rome, Luca Contile wrote a letter to a friend in which he uses a figurative image to express the value of this esoteric figure among the followers of evangelism. Impressed by her “pleasantly modest” manner of speaking, he confesses to his friend that he moderated his youthful presumption, being taken with admiration for this true master of wisdom (“I learnt from her all that I needed”).90 She knew how to make herself maieuta, or mistress of the Socratic method, toward the young disciple (“I see how a Christian mind [. . .] knows how to make others walk along the road of health”).91 In the letter, Colonna assumes the role of a new Diotima and is likened to the biblical figure of the Queen of Sheba (Kings 10:1–12) for her ability to combine modesty with deep doctrinal conversation, “infused” not only by her reading, but by the “true and invisible light.” The letter also refers to a form of “guarantee” given by Colonna regarding a work by Luca Contile, I Dialoghi spirituali, printed in Venice in 1543. This work represents a series of speeches around the central themes that were discussed in Italian evangelical circles and in particular in the Ecclesia Viterbiensis. The speeches are given in a convivial setting (the “banquets” or “feasts” bring us back to the prandial metaphor of the first letter to Costanza D’Avalos). The Dialoghi do not contain Colonna’s spiritual conversations with Cardinal Pole, since those conversations were never committed to paper by her. Conclusion Taking the canonical Heroides of Ovid as her model, in the epistola Excelso mio signor Vittoria Colonna unconsciously achieved an important and innovative step by generating a new protagonist, one who would attain full relevance with the coming of modernity. Colonna’s verse epistle thus assumes a generative function: it gives birth to the character of modernity, moving from Ovidian myth, with its dormant simulacrum of female writing, to the present-day story. The hypotext carries a further meaning by incarnating a real historical figure,

altro subietto [. . .] I particulari di lor ragionamenti non poteva intendere né io né altri, perché parlavano insieme senza arbitri et senza testimonii, ché, si ben il Flaminio, il Priuli et io accompagnavamo Sua Signoria illustrissima al monasterio, non intervenivamo però alli loro colloqui, ma se intertenivamo da noi in chiesa o lì intorno”: Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘Spirituali,’ ” 222. 90  “[I]mparavo da lei quel che mi bisognava”: Luca Contile, Lettere (Pavia, 1564), 23v. 91  “[V]eggo quanto una cristiana mente [. . .] sappia far caminar altrui per la strada della salute”: Contile, Lettere, 23v–24v.

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that of the female poet of Marino.92 With this verse epistle Colonna simultaneously legitimized her writing and began the process of constructing her own identity. The letters dating from the Viterbo period bring to light the private dimension of Colonna’s written correspondence, which is marked by moderation and balance. They uncover, in filigree, her profile as a master of learning and morality, an expertise honed by her silent reading and her internalization of the “sacre carte.” They also reveal Colonna as a model of wisdom and sobriety in the years in which the res publica christiana was ripped apart by controversy and conflict that would only increase over time. Colonna’s spirituality found a solid anchor in the “true living faith” that inhabits the conscience of the believer and that is nourished by Christ’s love, not by adherence to a strict code of doctrinal truths or to Church hierarchy.

92  This is the process of “triangulation” [triangolazione] of which Guido Paduano speaks: “io credo che la relazione di un testo col suo ipotesto sia sempre in qualche modo una triangolazione che ha nella realtà il suo punto di riferimento, in quanto il suggerimento dell’ipotesto si presenta come proposta di una nuova relazione con essa, di un senso che il classico può assumere parlando a una diversa società”: Guido Paduano, Edipo. Storia di un mito (Rome, 2012), 10–11.

Part 2 The Poetry

⸪

Chapter 2

Vittoria Colonna in Manuscript Abigail Brundin Consider her Tuscan poems, which are in circulation despite her bashful resistance and absolute unwillingness that this should be so.1

⸪ Vittoria Colonna’s notorious “shyness” when it came to the circulation of her poetic works is a well-established commonplace, one that was mentioned frequently by her friends and contemporaries and has endured into recent scholarship. Her role as faithful wife, who wrote only to extol the heroic qualities of her absent beloved, is inscribed into her early poems, as well as the works by others that praised her.2 Equally, the image of the pious widow, retreating from the world into a convent after her husband’s death and dedicating herself to the composition of private spiritual poetry, was promoted from the earliest published editions of her work. In the first printed edition of 1538, the publisher Pirogallo justified his decision to ignore the author’s clear wishes: “I have 1  Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 533. On the portrait of Colonna presented in this work, see Gouwens, “Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women,” Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015): 33–97; see also Diana Robin, “The Breasts of Vittoria Colonna,” California Italian Studies, 3 (2012): 1–15. 2  Colonna’s sonnet Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia, generally placed at the beginning of sixteenth-century collections of her verse, amply demonstrates this stance of wifely modesty; see Bullock: Rime, 3 (sonnet A1:1). Ariosto included Colonna in the third edition (1532) of the Orlando furioso as the finest example of poetic style in a woman writer, and also a paragon of wifely devotion; see Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Cesare Segre, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1976), 37: 16. For a discussion of the passage in Ariosto, see Virginia Cox, “Women Writers and the Canon in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Vittoria Colonna,” in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, ed. Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 14–31; Albert Russell Ascoli, “Body Politics in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,” in Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Craig A. Berry and Heather Richardson Hayton (Tempe, 2005), 49–85.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_004

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dared to print them, even though it goes against the desires of such a high-born Lady; considering it to be a lesser error to displease one single woman (albeit rare and noble) than the many who desire it.”3 A stance of “bashful resistance” is appropriate for an aristocratic woman who made clear at all times the personal and private qualities of her writing, produced not for monetary but for spiritual profit. Yet it is one that demands some reinterrogation, most pressingly in relation to the circulation of Colonna’s poetic works in manuscript during the sixteenth century. While the print history of Colonna’s Rime suggests strongly that the author herself played little part in the provision and selection of texts for publication, as Tatiana Crivelli’s contribution in this volume makes clear, evidence for the manuscript tradition is more ambiguous. In this chapter, after surveying the extant manuscript evidence (concentrating exclusively on Colonna’s poetic works), I seek to probe the extent of the relationship between the author and the many manuscript collections of her Rime that circulated during her lifetime. Here, I evaluate how far the author herself collaborated in the process of dissemination, as well as analyze other patterns of manuscript circulation and their genesis and likely audiences. Who was putting Colonna’s works “out there,” if not the author herself, and how were they obtaining material? An additional factor to take into consideration is the role played by oral dissemination, in the face of evidence that Colonna herself memorized and recited poetry at social gatherings. Alan Bullock’s 1982 edition of the Rime offers a full appraisal of the manuscript tradition as it was understood in 1982, and subsequent additions have been made to the manuscript evidence since he completed his work. However, Bullock tends to link manuscript collections to printed editions, seeing them as in some way preliminary or preparatory, and while he surmises that Colonna probably dictated her poems to secretaries and scribes, he does not consider a looser, primarily oral tradition in the search for manuscript provenances.4 It is important to keep in mind the role played by memory in the collating of manuscripts of Colonna’s work, the subsequent noting of poems after brief sight of a written

3  “[H]o preso ardire di mette[r]gli in istampa, anchora che contradicessi al voler d’una si gran Signora; stimando meno errore dispiacere a una sola Donna (benche rara e grande) che a tanti huomini desiderosi di ciò”: cited in Bullock: Rime, 225. Veronica Gambara, the other high-born woman poet of the era, was equally reluctant to see her poetry in print: see Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge and New York, 2009), 17. 4  See Bullock: Rime, 225–26.

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source that was not available for copying, or the witnessing of an oral performance, either recitation or perhaps musical performance.5 Before beginning to survey the manuscript evidence for Colonna’s poems, it is important to face head on the question of the relationship between manuscript and print in the sixteenth century. The necessary separation—in the interests of clarity and ease of use—of the material in this volume into discrete chapters dedicated to Colonna’s work in manuscript and in print, perhaps unhelpfully perpetuates the view that the two modes of dissemination operated separately in the renaissance, or that manuscripts were largely preparatory and aimed toward eventual print publication, a view that has been effectively challenged by recent scholarship.6 In fact—and Vittoria Colonna’s oeuvre is a particularly interesting example of this—the two forms of publication continued to co-exist well into the “age of print,” and scribal publication remained significant for lyric poets in particular. While Petrarchism was a notable phenomenon of print culture in the sixteenth century, both singleauthored collections as well as the highly popular lyric anthologies, poets continued to publish scribally to select and delimited groups of readers (including within the growing number of Academies), to exchange poetry in manuscript for comment and response, and to prepare manuscript collections as gifts for friends and patrons.7 The “sociability” of manuscript dissemination, including the opportunities it offered for feedback and interaction within circles of practitioners with a keen understanding of the genre, as well as its removal from the tarnish of the marketplace, made it a popular form of publication particularly within higher social circles.

5  On the latter, see Anne Piéjus’s contribution to this volume, which includes important considerations of the manner in which musicians gained access to Colonna’s poetry via routes other than printed editions. More generally on the importance of developing the memory, and the particular attractions of oral performance, see Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 226– 34; as well as the various essays in Oral Culture in Early Modern Italy: Performance, Language, Religion, ed. Stefano Dall’Aglio et al. Special Issue of the Italianist 34 (2014). 6  See most crucially Brian Richardson: Manuscript Culture, and his, “Print or Pen? Modes of Written Publication in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Italian Studies 59 (2004): 39–64; “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo’s Rime, 1529–35,” Modern Language Review 95 (2000): 684–95. 7  See Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 3–4, 95–114; Abigail Brundin, “Composition ‘a due’: Lyric Poetry and Scribal Practice in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israels and Louis Waldman, 2 vols. (Florence, 2013), 496–504. On poetic anthologies and Colonna’s place within them, see Diana Robin’s contribution to this volume.

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Clearly, then, scribal dissemination cannot be considered as necessarily secondary to print publication, especially for an author in Colonna’s social position. A further factor to consider is the amount of manuscript circulation that was not authorially controlled, but rather the result of copying, remembering, jotting down, sometimes indeed misremembering or misattributing verses that had been encountered in some less-than-stable form and were subsequently incorporated into manuscript miscellanies of various kinds. This form of dissemination depended to a large degree on the culture of sharing, which operated around manuscripts, as well as printed books, in the period.8 A number of manuscripts containing poems by or attributed to Vittoria Colonna bear the clear hallmarks of this secondary form of scribal publication, particularly in the misattribution of works actually by another poet (most commonly Veronica Gambara) or in verse variations that suggest a nonauthorial source.9 It must, too, have been this kind of secondary manuscript dissemination, passing material into ever-wider circles of readers, that led to the collation of sonnets from various manuscript sources that provided the text for the first printing of Colonna’s poetry in Parma in 1538, as Tatiana Crivelli has argued.10 While this kind of evidence probably cannot shed any light on the author’s own attitude to scribal publication, it does reveal a story of dissemination that was often driven by people close to the author who had access to her work directly or via third parties, and an interest in sharing it with other readers, perhaps because it represented a novelty or material that was difficult to obtain by other means. These “secondary” publishers of Colonna’s work, often close to her, were, like Pirogallo cited above, happy to override the author’s potential objections, if such existed, in the interests of entering her verses into communities and networks of readers that they deemed to be important. Such sharing could also lead to abuses, of course, as in the case of Nicolò Franco, who was accused of passing on to publishers poems by Colonna that were not his to share, in the interests of personal profit.11 8  Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 20–36. 9  On the problems of misattribution of Colonna’s sonnets, see Alan Bullock, “Veronica o Vittoria? Problemi di attribuzione per alcuni sonetti del Cinquecento,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 6 (1973): 115–31; id., “Vittoria Colonna e i lirici minori del Cinquecento: quattro secoli di attribuzioni contraddittorie,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 157 (1980): 383–402. Richardson mentions the case of the deliberate misattribution of poetry by Anton Francesco Grazzini to Vittoria Colonna in Florence on Easter Monday 1538: Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 37–38. Bullock’s edition contains full appendices of verse variations across the many manuscripts he examined. 10  See the contribution by the same to the current volume. 11  See again Crivelli’s discussion in the current volume, as well as Franco Pignatti, “Niccolò Franco (anti)petrarchista,” in Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e

Vittoria Colonna in Manuscript



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The Manuscript Tradition

The extant manuscript evidence for Colonna’s Rime attests to the wide dissemination of her poetry in that medium and the considerable interest it attracted over the span of the sixteenth century.12 It is not my intention here to enter into the contested space that still surrounds the precise dating and chronological organization of these manuscripts; scholars have disagreed, often strongly, on the correct way to interpret the data, and Alan Bullock’s 1982 edition, which set out to establish an urtext for both rime amorose and rime spirituali, while it remains the only more-or-less complete edition, has attracted criticism from other scholars on a number of grounds.13 After having read with interest the various opinions of these skillful philologists and codicologists, the evidence remains ambiguous, and however much one might wish to establish a clear chronology and narrative for the manuscripts identified to date, such clarity continues to elude us. Each new discovery adds interesting depths to the picture, but it is perhaps more fruitful in this context to consider the evidence “in the round,” and to ask what the overall spread and weight of manuscript evidence can tell us about the dissemination of Colonna’s poetry, its reception and its readership in the scribal medium. The earliest known manuscript trace of Colonna’s poetry is a single sonnet clearly written while her husband was still alive, thus dating to before 1525. The sonnet is contained in a Sienese manuscript now in Naples, and identified by Tobia Toscano in 1988.14 Although it is evident that Colonna was composing letteraria tra Riforma e Controriforma, ed. Antonio Corsaro, Harald Hendrix, and Paolo Procaccioli, Proceedings of the international seminar, Urbino-Sassocorvaro, 9–11 November 2006 (Manziana, 2007), 131–95, here 141–44. 12  Bullock includes a full list of manuscripts identified to 1982 in Bullock: Rime, 237–57. To these should be added the examples presented by Tobia Toscano in Vittoria Colonna, Sonetti in morte di Francesco d’Avalos, marchese di Pescara: edizione del ms. XIII.G.43 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, ed. Tobia R. Toscano (Milan, 1998); and most recently Fabio Carboni, “La prima raccolta lirica datata di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 76 (2002): 681–707. 13  See the review of Bullock’s edition by Danilo Romei, “Le Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Paragone-Letteratura 34, 404 (1983): 81–84; Bullock’s reply to the same, “Sulle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Paragone-Letteratura 35, 412 (1984): 96–101; and Romei’s response to his response, in the same volume, 101–4. Toscano has also entered the debate more recently, dismissing many of Bullock’s claims in the light of his own Neapolitan findings; see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 22–51. Carboni suggests simply that Bullock’s edition may be in need of “ulteriori semplici precisazioni” (“La prima raccolta,” 682). See Crivelli’s chapter in this volume for an up-to-date discussion of the state of play vis-à-vis printed editions of the Rime. 14  The manuscript is MS V.E.52 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples; see Tobia Toscano, Letterati corti accademie: La letteratura a Napoli nella prima metà del 500 (Naples, 2000),

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poetry from as early as 1512, when she addressed a poetic Epistola to her husband and father, imprisoned after the Battle of Ravenna by the French, no early manuscripts exist for this time period.15 The poem in the Sienese source, O dolce un tempo, or lagrimosa oscura, copied into a manuscript dating from the late eighteenth century, treats the same theme as the 1512 Epistola, but Toscano points out its greater linguistic and poetic dexterity, suggesting that it is the product of a more mature poet, not yet widowed but further advanced in her practice of Petrarchism. He also makes clear the links that existed at the time between Siena and Naples (Alfonso D’Avalos became a member of the Accademia degli Intronati in Siena, along with a number of other Neapolitans, in 1525, the year it was founded), demonstrating a route via which Colonna’s work could have traveled north from Naples via a close family member.16 Another manuscript trace of Colonna’s poetry from this early period has been identified in the form of a madrigal in a manuscript now in Madrid, although the attribution is more doubtful as Colonna rarely composed madrigals. The poem, Ogni loco attrista, ove non veggio, is marked by what seems to be a new and sudden loss, so that Toscano suggests it may have been written shortly after the death of D’Avalos—in the Spanish manuscript it is given the title Madrigale in morte del marquesse da Pescara, facto per la signora Victoria della Colona, sua consorte.17 Tobia Toscano has also contributed to a much better understanding of Colonna’s manuscript reception in Naples in the early period of her poetic career through his identification and publication in 1998 of another collection of Colonna’s poems, not recognized as such before this date. MS.XIII.G.43 from the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples helps to fill the lacuna that previously existed between 1512 (the historical date of Colonna’s earliest known poem, although not its publication date) and 1535 (the poet’s first appearance 17–19; and Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 12–13. Colonna’s husband, Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos, died in 1525 after the Battle of Pavia; see Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2009), 23–24, and the biographies cited there. 15  The Epistola was first printed in Fabrizio Luna, Vocabolario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi (Naples, 1536). Colonna’s first appearance in print dated to a year earlier, when a sonnet of hers, “Ahi, quanto fu al mio Sol contrario il fato,” was published in Pietro Bembo, Rime (Venice, 1535), alongside Bembo’s response per le rime. Bullock mentions seven early verses composed by Colonna before 1525 that have never been traced in manuscript or print: Bullock: Rime, 223. 16  Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 12–13. 17  The source is MS n. 617 in the Biblioteca Real di Madrid; see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 13–14.

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in print), a period during which other literary figures attested to her growing reputation, indicating that poetry was clearly being written and disseminated.18 The manuscript presents itself as a collection assembled by someone with an interest in local writers, as the majority of works are by Neapolitan poets or others from the region. Sixty-two sonnets by Colonna are included, two of them incomplete.19 Two of the poems were not included in Bullock’s edition and were unknown in print before 1998. The collection also includes Bembo’s response per le rime to Colonna of 1530, which acts as a useful dating point for the work; Toscano posits a likely compilation date of c. 1531.20 Included along with Bembo’s poem is a misidentified poem by Berni, wrongly designated as Bembo’s. Such a basic mistake (the copyist also mixes up Colonna’s and Bembo’s actual correspondence poems, placing the answer before the initial poem) underlines the potential complexities of all forms of dissemination in this period: even manuscript sources that are seemingly close to Colonna herself, geographically and perhaps socially, are not foolproof and easily stray into error. Toscano makes the case for the Neapolitan manuscript as, if not a directly authorial publication, at least a coherent and stable collection that demonstrates internal integrity and thematic consistency: closing with Bembo’s sonnet(s) is a way of placing the seal of approval on this poetic journey.21 The collection, which Toscano describes as a “breviary” in memory of Francesco D’Avalos opens with Colonna’s famous poem Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia; nothing distracts the poet’s attention from the focus of her mourning.22 He sees this as the closest the manuscript tradition can come to a definitive collection of Colonna’s early poems, given what he presumes to be her tendency to rewrite or destroy them in later life when her writing turned wholly to matters of religion. 18  On Colonna’s early years in Naples and on Ischia, following her marriage in 1509, see Suzanne Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna châtelaine d’Ischia (Florence, 1968), which provides details of the many works in Italian and Spanish that refer to Colonna and to her reputation for extreme wifely devotion. Toscano believes that Colonna destroyed her early verses, written while her husband was alive, in order to avoid disseminating them: Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 9. 19  Toscano provides a detailed description of the manuscript in his introduction to Colonna, Sonetti in morte: the following commentary closely follows his edition. 20  Toscano dates the manuscript as sometime between early 1530 and the end of 1531: Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 19–22. 21  Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 49–50. 22  Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 51: “questo piccolo ‘breviario’ in memoria di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos.”

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The existence of the Neapolitan manuscript suggests that a concerted effort was made in that city to collect and record Colonna’s poetry as it circulated around its discreet scribal networks, but the poetry was also already moving more widely beyond Naples. In the same period, for example, a substantial collection of poems in memory of D’Avalos had made its way to Bologna, possibly carried there by Paolo Giovio who was attending the imperial coronation of Charles V in that city. Pietro Bembo mentions having read the work in a letter to Colonna of January 1530.23 In addition, the next datable manuscript collection— in fact the only one that bears a precise and unambiguous date—also appears outside the Neapolitan context, this time in Rome. MS Vaticano Chigi L.IV.79, identified in 2002 by Fabio Carboni, contains 109 poems and is dated 18 October 1536 in the hand of a certain “Alexander,” who provides no further information about himself and has not been identified.24 The most compelling hypothesis as to the identity of Alexander is that he is Alessandro Vercelli, to whom the first edition of Colonna’s Rime printed in Parma in 1538 was dedicated. Vercelli could have been collating the poet’s works in preparation for an upcoming printing endeavor, but this hypothesis sadly falls by the wayside on the grounds that the contents and ordering of Vaticano Chigi L.IV.79 bear little or no relation to the 1538 printed edition. Rather, as Carboni illustrates, the Vatican manuscript contains a different selection of rime amorose in a different order, together with a handful of rime spirituali and a not insignificant number of epistolary sonnets addressed to the Emperor Charles V, the Marchese del Vasto, Ascanio Colonna, Giovanna d’Aragona (Colonna’s sister-in-law), and other unidentified recipients. Other sonnets are labeled “in resposta,” although to whom is not specified. The overall tone of the manuscript is of a collection that is engaged, outward looking and entirely in line with the norms of occasional Petrarchism, working within established networks of poetic contacts.25 In total, if we take account of all the manuscripts listed by Bullock in his 1982 edition, as well as the Neapolitan collection identified by Toscano in 1998 and the Chigi manuscript identified by Carboni in 2002, fourteen manuscript 23  The manuscript that circulated in Bologna at this date has not been identified. Bembo’s letter, dated 20 January 1530, is in Carteggio, 61. 24  Carboni, “La prima raccolta,” 682–86, advances a number of intriguing hypotheses relating to the possible identity of the scribe “Alexander,” but dismisses each one on the basis of handwriting comparison and for other convincing reasons. 25  Carboni provides a full list of manuscript contents in “La prima raccolta,” 687–90, including the poems by other authors that are appended at the end of the collection, some in the same hand.

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collections of Colonna’s sonnets have been identified dating to the sixteenth century, in libraries and archives up and down the Italian peninsula, the smallest containing 32 poems (Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 50 [F.VI.52]), and the largest 148 components (Biblioteca Angelica, 2051).26 Around nine of these collections can be tentatively dated to before 1547, that is compiled and circulated during the poet’s lifetime. Already this evidence acts as a compelling corrective to the picture of a “private” poet. While many of the manuscript collections, with notable exceptions which will be discussed below, contain a selection of early poems or rime amorose that replicates more or less the contents of the first printed edition of the Rime of 1538, some of them also contain a brief sample of rime spirituali and epistolary sonnets, including material that did not find its way into print in the period. Vaticano Chigi L.IV.79 in particular alerts us to the existence of assemblages of verse that are in no way connected or preparatory to print editions. “Alexander,” in compiling his manuscript, is alert to the poet’s relationships, and includes a poem addressed to her by Paolo Giovio, as well as one addressed to Sannazaro by the Marchese del Vasto, thus ably inserting his collection into the scribal world that the poet herself inhabited.27

26  In (provisional) chronological order, the manuscripts are as follows: Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, XIII.G.43 (ca. 1531); Rome, Vaticano Chigi L.IV.79 (1536); Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, 226 (before 1538); Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Y.124 sup. (ca. 1540); Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashburnam 1153 (ca. 1540); Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 11539 (ca. 1540); Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 828 (1250) (post 1540); Florence, Biblioteca Nazional Centrale, II.IX.30 (ca. 1541); Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 50 (F.IV.52) (ca. 1545); Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana e dell’Accademia dei Lincei, 263 (45.D.9) (1550); Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, It.IX.300 (6649) (after 1550); Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 5172 (after 1550); Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, 2051 (after 1553); Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 897 (D.VI.38) (ca. 1560). I am largely following Carboni’s proposed chronology, in turn following Bullock: Carboni, however, for unexplained reasons, dates manuscript Vaticano Latino 11539, the gift for Michelangelo, as “after 1546,” which does not correspond to the evidence identifying this manuscript as a gift sent from Viterbo while Colonna was resident there. See the discussion later in this article. To date no thorough survey has been carried out of manuscripts in libraries outside Italy containing Colonna’s work. Bullock mentions a collection in Munich, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS.626 (Ital.251), dated 1589 and containing thirty-eight of Colonna’s poems: Bullock: Rime, 258. 27  For a discussion of the disassociation between Colonna’s poetic production and the printed editions of her work in the sixteenth century, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 30–35.

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We can add to the fourteen discrete collections of her verses a further thirty manuscripts containing a much smaller number of poems by Colonna, intermingled with works by other poets (and sometimes misidentified).28 These partial testimonies to manuscript circulation each contain between one and twenty poems, some of them closely following the contents of extant printed editions. This in itself is an interesting reflection of the continued interaction between manuscript and print circulation for this kind of lyric material in the period: while ownership of a printed poetry book would have been within the means of many more people by the mid-sixteenth century, still there were individuals who chose to copy out poems in manuscript, perhaps after hearing a recitation of verses, or thanks to the loan of a printed copy for a short period.29 The copying out of poems already in print is only part of the story. A significant number of poems that appear in the manuscript collections and partial testimonies of the sixteenth century were not printed for the first time until the nineteenth century or even later, so that their circulation in the period was clearly being scribally controlled, at one remove from editors and printers.30 This is of course unequivocally the case for the contents of Vaticano Chigi L.IV.79, whose date confirms it.

28  The details are in Bullock: Rime, 237–58: I have included the manuscripts that date to the sixteenth century and are dismissed by Bullock as of “scarsa importanza” because they reproduce the contents of printed editions. One of the manuscripts included in the total, containing twenty of Colonna’s poems and cited by Domenico Tordi, is now missing; see Alan Bullock, “Domenico Tordi and Vittoria Colonna: Forty Years On,” Italica, LV (1978): 20–35, here 23–25. I have also included Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS V.E.52 and Biblioteca Real di Madrid, MS n. 617 in this total, both identified by Toscano. Bullock’s list of “Testimonianze parziali” includes Biblioteca Casanatense, 50 (F.IV.52), which I, following Carboni, have reclassified as a discrete manuscript collection as it contains thirty-two of Colonna’s poems. 29  See M. D. Reeve, “Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” in J. B. Trapp, ed., Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing (London, 1983), 12–20. On the affordability of books in the period, see Cristina Dondi and Neil Harris, “Oil and Green Ginger. The Zornale of the Venetian Bookseller Francesco de Madiis, 1484–1488,” in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues of Manuscript and Print (Leiden, 2013), 341–406; Martin Lowry, Book Prices in Renaissance Venice: The Stockbook of Bernardo Giunti (Los Angeles, 1991); Joseph A. Dane and Alexandra Gillespie, “The Myth of the Cheap Quarto,” in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge, 2009), 25–45. 30  A careful study of the appendices to all sixteenth century manuscripts cited in the Bullock edition produces a total of fifty-five poems that remained unpublished until the nineteenth century or after.

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Who was responsible for the scribal dissemination of Colonna’s poetry during her lifetime? The manuscript evidence echoes the impression given by the printed editions to some extent, that is of a process of dissemination that was bitty and partial because generally conducted at one remove from new work that Colonna was producing in Rome and Viterbo in the 1540s. It seems that, while a selection of rime amorose circulated freely in a number of locations and formats, Colonna’s mature, spiritual Petrarchism did not move very far from the poet herself and a close group of associates during her lifetime. This impression is in opposition to Toscano’s assertion that Colonna destroyed or rewrote her earlier production later in life in order to prevent it from circulating. Rather, the evidence suggests that it was her later, more focused spiritual production that was tightly controlled and prevented from reaching a wider readership, perhaps because of its reformed religious bent. Only in the gift manuscript prepared for Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vaticano Latino 11539, which included a manuscript of forty sonnets sent from Viterbo, now lost but presumably representing a selection of work written when Colonna was closest to her religious mentor Reginald Pole, do we have evidence of the poet knowingly disseminating her mature poetic production to a trusted friend.31 Her earlier work, by contrast, was allowed to circulate widely, and seemingly managed by individuals who were closely linked to Colonna personally, including Paolo Giovio and Pietro Bembo, the former providing the latter with manuscript copies of poems in his possession, and Alfonso D’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, through his family connections.32 Illuminating epistolary evidence shows us the mechanism for this kind of “mediated” scribal publication of Colonna’s sonnets. Writing to the Duke of Mantua, Federico II Gonzaga, in December 1531, Paolo Giovio describes a recent stay on the island of Ischia, where Colonna was also in residence. She wishes to join Giovio in congratulating the duke on his recent marriage, and has asked him to send on some recently composed poems: “some of the freshest 31  On the influence of Pole and his circle on Colonna’s poetic production, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna. 32  Giovio’s role in sending poems to Bembo is discussed later in the chapter. Tobia Toscano also advances the interesting thesis that Veronica Gambara and the court at Correggio acted as a “centro di diffusione e studio” of Colonna’s poetry, see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 47–49. On the role played by Veronica Gambara in promoting the “other” secular female poet of the age, see Abigail Brundin, “ ‘Presto fia ’l mio potere in farvi onore’: Renaissance Women Poets and the Importance of Praise,” in Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. Jill Kraye and A. L. Lepschy with assistance from Nicola Jones, Special Supplement of The Italianist 2, no. 2 (2007): 133–49.

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sonnets.”33 The Duke responds very positively, in January of the following year, complimenting the sonnets and asking Giovio to send on any more when he might obtain copies.34 Although Colonna herself does not participate in this correspondence, it is clear that she has made the poems available to both Giovio and Gonzaga, and indeed not only sanctioned but directly initiated their dissemination in this case. Giovio acts with her approval and collaboration. Meanwhile the gesture of sending sonnets is a suitable one in the context of an aristocratic marriage, for which presumably poems on appropriately amorous themes have been assembled, if not indeed composed directly for the occasion. The “freshness” of the works is stressed, as it forms an important part of their value as a gift from the poet. Tobia Toscano has advanced the theory that it was Alfonso D’Avalos who took primary responsibility for disseminating Colonna’s work to a wider circle of readers. He was her husband’s cousin, an orphan who was brought up on Ischia by Costanza D’Avalos and remained very close to his surrogate family.35 Well connected in literary circles beyond Naples, Alfonso D’Avalos was well placed to bring Colonna’s verses to the right kinds of new readers, including via his contacts with academies in other cities.36 It is interesting to consider his motivation for wishing to promote Colonna’s work: exemplary learned women were widely viewed as an asset to cities and communities, extolled by local humanists and brought out to make speeches and recite in classical languages when visiting dignitaries passed through, as a means of demonstrating

33  “Essendo questi giorni passati ne la beata isola d’Ischia, intesi el successo de le famosissime et felisissime nozze, et volendo io congratularmi con V. E. la sig.a marchesa de Pescara me ne ha dato occasione con imponermi che indirizzassi questa sua alligata a quella . . . con alcuni sonetti de più freschi . . . Essa S.ra è tanto devote del nome di V. E. che più non desidera di buona fortuna et felicità al proprio Marchese Del Vasto”: cited in Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista storica mantovana 1 (1885): 1–52, here 20, note 1. I am grateful to Veronica Copello for drawing this important correspondence to my attention. 34   “Li sonetti della S.ra Marchesa che V. S. me ha mandato per essere bellissimi mi sono piaciuti molto, e ne la ringrazio, pregandola che quando l’ha copia di belle compositioni, massime di quelle della S.ra Marchesa nelle quali veramente non manca cosa alcuna de dottrina e perfettione, le me ne voglia far parte”: 2 January 1532, cited in ibid. 35  On Alfonso D’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, see the entry by Gaspare De Caro in DBI 4 (1962): 612–16. 36  See Toscano, Letterati corti accademie, 109; id., “Due ‘allievi’ di Vittoria Colonna: Luigi Tansillo e Alfonso D’Avalos,” Critica letteraria 16 (1988): 739–73.

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the general exemplarity of a location.37 The same motivation might easily be identified within a high profile family, especially during a time of political upheaval when its fortunes were in jeopardy.38 Colonna’s literary status was a way of reinforcing the cultural and intellectual credentials of both the Colonna and the D’Avalos clans. Her poetry of mourning performed two important political functions: it set up her defunct husband as a paragon of military and Christian virtue, and it established her own credentials as a model of chastity and wifely devotion, strong and eloquent, but nonetheless contained within the appropriate marital confines.39 Plus, of course, the poetry was of very high quality, as Bembo and other Petrarchists quickly acknowledged. It seems no accident that it was at the imperial coronation, in a politically charged context, that Colonna’s rime seemingly made their earliest appearance on the national stage. There is further, albeit meager, evidence for Colonna’s own participation in the sharing of her later poems with a wider readership. In a letter from Verona written in 1540, Francesco Della Torre, secretary to Cardinal Giberti, wrote to ask Carlo Gualteruzzi if he could lend him a manuscript of sonnets by Colonna: I have learned from a letter from Mr Lattantio [Tolomei] of a collection of many beautiful sonnets; I have a great wish to see them, if I can without being tiresome. I wanted to let you know of my desire, the decision will be in your hands, but I know how much I can trust in the kindness of that lady, and in your friendly offices.40 37  See on the phenomenon of the “learned lady,” Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), 32–34. On the exemplary women of the Neapolitan court, as discussed in Paolo Giovio’s Ischian dialogue, see Gouwens, “Female Virtue.” On the role of literary women in the Sienese context, see Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Notre Dame, IN, 2012). 38  On the political travails of the Colonna family during the sixteenth century, see Domenico Tordi, “Vittoria Colonna in Orvieto durante la guerra del sale,” Bolletino della Società Umbra di Storia Patria I (1895): 473–533; Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007). 39  Colonna’s chastity and devotion to her husband’s memory is given prominence in Giovio’s Ischian dialogue, in which she is described as being at all times guarded when out in public by two elderly virgins, “like two huge and wild mastiffs keeping watch at her feet”: Gouwens, “Female Virtue,” 78. 40  “Ho inteso per lettere di M. Lattantio d’un parto di molti bellissimi sonetti, ho gran desiderio d’averli, se si può senza importunità. Ho voluto che sappiate il mio desiderio, il resto sarà ad arbitrio vostro, ma so ben quanto debbo confidare nella benignità di quella signora, et nell’officio vostro amorevole”: Lettere di XIII huomini illustri . . . (Venice, 1556),

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Della Torre is hopeful that when Gualteruzzi asks permission from the poet she will respond favorably to the request. In fact it took over a year before a manuscript was sent from Rome, and scholars remain divided over the precise contents of this manuscript, but given the personal connections between Della Torre and Colonna’s circle it is likely to have contained more recent works, perhaps including those that were not yet in printed circulation.41 Colonna was a close friend to Della Torre’s employer, Cardinal Giberti, and thus the link takes us into the religious circles within which Michelangelo’s manuscript was born.42 Michelangelo claimed to have loaned his manuscript widely in the early years after he received it, presumably with the author’s tacit approval.43 Members of the group of spirituali, connected by their love for Cardinal Pole, frequently shared gifts and property, and Della Torre promised only to copy the manuscript and then return it, and to prevent his copy from circulating further, “since I would not wish such rare compositions to get into other hands than mine in these lands.”44 The implication is that the verses should be read by an initiated reader, or might in some way compromise the poet. Perhaps the manuscript Della Torre received in Verona in 1541 and Michelangelo’s gift manuscript are one and the same.45

Authorial Scribal Publication: Gift Manuscripts

Vittoria Colonna’s personal relationship to manuscript publication is particularly interesting, and particularly difficult to root out. There are very few 156–57. See Alan Bullock, “A Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of 100 Poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence,” Italian Studies 21 (1966): 42–56. 41  On the debates concerning the identification of the manuscript lent to Della Torre, see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 23–25, citing Bullock (who thought this manuscript was the collection of rime amorose in MS.II.IX.30 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence), and Dionisotti (who believed that the manuscript would more likely have been similar or identical to Michelangelo’s gift manuscript, Vat. Lat. 11539). 42  On Cardinal Giberti, see Adriano Prosperi, Tra evangelismo e controriforma: G. M. Giberti (1495–1543) (Rome, 1969). 43  Michelangelo makes this claim in a letter to his nephew of 1551, cited in Domenico Tordi, Il codice delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, appartenuto a Margherita d’Angoulême, Regina di Navarra (Pistoia, 1900), 11. See also the discussion in the next section of this chapter. 44  “Si che non vorrei che si rare compositioni fossero in altre mani, che nelle mie in questi paesi”: the letter is from 1541, cited in Bullock, “A Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript.” 45  Dionisotti comes to this conclusion in his study: Dionisotti: Appunti, 280.

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instances of manuscripts for which a more-or-less direct line can be traced between the poet and the eventual recipient of the work, but a couple of persuasive examples do exist, as well as other instances in which the poet disseminated individual poems in her own correspondence, either offering or inviting a response per le rime from a fellow poet. The significant number of poems by Colonna that can securely be identified as “correspondence poems” also points to her active involvement in networks of Petrarchists who shared their work, even though the precise contexts for these exchanges may now be lost.46 This suggestive body of evidence for the poet’s active participation in scribal publication allows for an important recasting of the prevailing view of her total rejection of publicity of any kind for her poetic works. There are two persuasive instances of manuscript collections of Colonna’s poetry that were presented to recipients as gifts from the poet and demonstrate the author’s personal involvement to a greater or lesser extent. In each case the contents of the manuscript have been tailored to meet the particular interests of the reader, indicating a thoughtful process of collation that suggests deep knowledge of the work and its eventual reception, as well as access to a range of material on which to draw. Although in one case the gift cannot be directly tied to Colonna through related correspondence, in both these examples the circumstantial evidence for authorial input is persuasive. The first gift manuscript from Colonna, and the only instance identified to date of a collection of the rime that was prepared under the poet’s direct supervision, is Vaticano Latino 11539, sent to Michelangelo Buonarroti around 1540.47 This unadorned work, containing 103 sonnets on spiritual matters, is now held in the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican: only seventeen of the sonnets it contains had been printed by 1540, so its contents depart considerably 46  Bullock includes all the verses that he had identified as correspondence poems in the section of his edition entitled “Rime epistolari” (203–19), placing thirty-two poems in that category, most with identified addressees, ranging from family members (her brother Ascanio Colonna and sister-in-law Giovanna d’Aragona) to fellow poets, rulers, and religious figures. Other poems, not included in this section of Bullock’s edition, can be added to the list, including poems addressed to Reginald Pole and Pietro Bembo which are placed elsewhere in the volume. The total number of correspondence poems is therefore difficult to establish. 47  Both Colonna’s gift manuscripts have been extensively discussed in the secondary literature: see as a starting point, Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 67–131. See also Antonio Corsaro, “Manuscript Collections of Spiritual Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Aldershot, 2009), 33–56; Claudio Scarpati, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna nel codice Vaticano donato a Michelangelo,” Aevum 78 (2004): 693–717.

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from the selection of Colonna’s verses that were circulating to a wider public by this date.48 Michelangelo indicated the value of this manuscript to him personally in a letter of 1551 to his nephew Lionardo, in which he expressed his disinclination to loan the collection to a third party (Gianfrancesco Fattucci): he also tantalizingly mentions a further manuscript of forty sonnets, sent to him from Viterbo while Colonna was resident there, but now lost. Significantly, Michelangelo’s letter makes clear that the gift came directly from Colonna, not via a third party. About a month ago Mr Gianfrancesco asked me if I had anything by the Marchesa of Pescara. I have a little book made of parchment that she gave me about ten years ago, in which are one hundred and three sonnets, not counting the ones that she sent to me from Viterbo on paper, of which there are forty, which I had bound into the same little book, and at the time I lent it to numerous people so that all the poems are by now in print.49 Michelangelo was not being wholly truthful in claiming that all the poems in his manuscript were already in print by 1551: in fact nine of the verses had not been printed by that date, and we do not know what the additional manuscript of forty verses from Viterbo contained. His unwillingness to loan the work more likely stems from its personal value to him as a gift from a close friend, although he claims to have lent it out willingly at an earlier time.50

48  The manuscript was first identified in 1938, see Enrico Carusi, “Un codice sconosciuto delle Rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna, appartenuto forse a Michelangelo Buonarroti,” in Atti del IV Congresso Nazionale di Studi Romani 4 (Rome, 1938), 231–41. The modern bilingual edition is Brundin 2005. 49  “Messer Gianfranco mi richiese circa un mese fa di qualche cosa di quelle della Marchesa di Pescara, se io n’avevo. Io ò un libretto in carta pecora che la mi donò circa dieci anni sono, nel quale è cento tre sonetti, senza quegli che mi mandò poi da Viterbo in carta bambagina, che son quaranta; i quali feci legare nel medesimo libretto e in quel tempo li prestai a molte persone, in modo che per tutto ci sono in istampa”: cited in Tordi, Il codice delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna, 11. 50  On Michelangelo’s role in disseminating the manuscript soon after he received it, see Carlo Vecce, “Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo: Note di comment a testi e variant di Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 44 (1992): 101–25. A printed copy of Girolamo Ruscelli’s edition of Colonna’s Rime (Venice, 1558), containing the commentary on the sonnets by Rinaldo Corso, now in the British Library (catalogued as c.28.a.10) contains Michelangelo’s signature, suggesting that he also owned copies of

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Michelangelo’s gift manuscript from Colonna is notable both for its contents and for its presentation. As far as the latter is concerned, the manuscript is wholly unadorned, with no illumination and no title page, merely a notation— “Sonetti spirituali della Sig.ra Vittoria”—at the front: the binding is simple, the handwriting seemingly that of one of Colonna’s own calligraphers.51 The sonnets are set out one per page in a clear italic hand, and numbered chronologically. Nothing about this gift is luxurious, the layout and presentation seem designed to draw attention only to the contents of the verses themselves. All 103 poems treat the mystery of faith, concentrated in the poet’s intense relationship with Christ, whose body becomes the vessel upon which she inscribes her poetry using the instruments of the Passion.52 While the recipient of this manuscript had a close personal bond with the writer, Codice Vaticano Latino 11539 also contains correspondence poems, including two verses addressed to individuals from the broader circle of writers and reformers in which Colonna and Michelangelo both circulated.53 These are Pietro Bembo, urged to turn his poetic muse to matters of faith in Diletta un’acqua viva a pie’ d’un monte, and Cardinal Reginald Pole, who is addressed as Colonna’s spiritual mentor, she as his “second mother,” in Figlio e signor, se la tua prima e vera.54 Both these correspondence poems are included in the manuscript’s closing sequence, helping to ground the collection in the Roman society that was familiar to Michelangelo, and thus reinforce the link between the reader and the writer, through a shared religious and poetic context. Seemingly Colonna wished to ensure that the recipient of her gift was reminded at all times of the mindset in which he should read his poetic manuscript, that is with a constant awareness of the spiritual discussions around faith and doctrine that occupied Colonna and her friends in Rome and Viterbo in the late 1530s and early 1540s. the printed editions: the signature of “Michelagniolo Schultore” appears on 392. See also Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 190–91. 51  On the identification of the calligraphy, see Vecce, “Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo,” 104. 52  See in particular the second quatrain of the opening sonnet: “I santi chiodi omai sian le mie penne, / E puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue, / Vergata carta il sacro corpo exangue, / Sì ch’io scriva ad altrui quel ch’ei sostenne” (“Let the holy nails from now on be my quills, / and the precious blood my pure ink, / my lined paper the sacred lifeless body, / so that I may write down for others all that he suffered”): Brundin 2005, 56–57. For a full analysis of the poems in this manuscript, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 79–100. 53  On Colonna’s religious context more broadly, see the contributions to this volume by Stephen Bowd and Emidio Campi, as well as Brundin, Vittoria Colonna. 54  The poems are numbered 98 (to Bembo) and 99 (to Pole).

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One final detail about Michelangelo’s gift manuscript is worthy of mention. In the opening poem, Poi che `l mio casto amor gran tempo tenne, the poet expresses her wish to “write down for others all that he [Christ] suffered.”55 In printed versions of this sonnet, the line reads “So that I may write down for myself ” (“per me”), and the change here seems very significant. In this scribal context, in which Colonna is knowingly and willingly disseminating her verse to a reader whom she trusts, and beyond him potentially to other readers, she acknowledges the act of publication in the poem. Her desire to be heard, in this case in order to share an evangelical message of spiritual union with Christ, clearly outweighs any qualms about the propriety of publication. Whether the change to the published versions stemmed for a manuscript variant that the author generated, or was rather the work of editors or copyists who sought to reinforce the poet’s public image of modesty, remains an open question. It is clear that the manuscript for Michelangelo arose out of a close friendship and a mutual exchange of gifts, which included gifts from Michelangelo to Colonna of drawings and possibly paintings.56 The second of Colonna’s gift manuscripts was prepared for another friend, but one who was less closely engaged with Colonna’s immediate circle, the French queen Marguerite de Navarre, sister to King François I. The gift for Marguerite de Navarre was prepared seemingly in the same period as Michelangelo’s collection, that is around 1540/41. The manuscript that was dispatched to France has been identified by some scholars as Ashburnam 1153, now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.57 This collection contains a wholly different selection of verses to Michelangelo’s gift, a mixture of rime amorose and rime spirituali together with some poems by other authors, a fact that has been used as evidence to discredit the status of Ashburnam 1153 as an authorially approved gift: scholars have argued that Colonna would not have allowed such a seemingly random selection of poems to be offered in her name to such an important friend.58 Yet attention to the interests and views of the intended recipient do seem to 55  “Sì ch’io scriva ad altrui quel ch’ei sostenne”: Brundin 2005, 56 (Sonnet 1, line 8). 56  On the gifts of art from Michelangelo to Colonna, and new arguments for the attribution of painted works after Michelangelo’s drawings, see the contribution to this volume by Maria Forcellino (and related bibliography). 57  For this identification see Tordi, Il codice delle Rime. Alan Bullock agreed with Tordi’s hypothesis: Bullock: Rime, 360–67. 58  For the principal arguments against Tordi’s identification of Ashburnam 1153 as a gift from the author to Marguerite de Navarre, see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 25; Dionisotti: Appunti, 257–86, here 284–85.

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be reflected in the selection of poems included in the Florentine manuscript, in a manner that makes a persuasive case for Colonna’s involvement at least in some capacity. In addition, Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre were in regular correspondence in the same span of years, writing letters that reflected their shared interest in religion and reform: would it seem strange if a gift manuscript of poems by Colonna should be offered to her friend and correspondent in a manner which wholly excluded the author from the exchange?59 As with Michelangelo’s manuscript, the gift manuscript for Marguerite de Navarre is plain and simply bound: the title page is decorated sparingly, with Marguerite’s coat of arms showing the fleur de lis, colored in blue, red, green, and gold. The sonnets are written one per page in an elegant, clear hand, with the first letter of every poem picked out in gold. The letter accompanying the gift reinforces the deliberate rejection of rich decoration: this is “a small volume, bare of any external adornments, which is entirely in keeping with the role and status of the aforementioned lady, who is herself turned toward adornments of the soul and scorns those of the body as vile and fleeting.”60 The story of this manuscript’s journey from Italy to France is not straightforward, and doubt remains over Colonna’s precise involvement in its preparation. The correspondence relating to the manuscript’s dispatch has been attributed to Carlo Gualteruzzi, who is thought by some to have worked as Colonna’s literary agent: some critics have assumed that Gualteruzzi acted on his own initiative, obtaining access to Colonna’s work due to his close relations with her.61 An alternative hypothesis is that Pietro Bembo took the initiative for sending the gift, perhaps collaborating with Gualteruzzi to organize it.62 A third possibility is that the gift originated in Ferrara, rather than Rome, as it was received in France by the Ferrarese ambassador to the French court,

59  On the correspondence between Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre, see Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: the Correspondence of Marguerite d’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna, 1540–1545 (Princeton, 2000). 60  “[U]n piccolo volumetto, nudo d’ogni esteriore ornamento, si come appunto conviene allo stato e professione della prefata S.ra, la quale volta agli ornamenti dell’anima quelli del corpo sprezza come cose vili e caduche”: cited in Tordi, Il codice, 19. 61  See for this viewpoint Angela Dillon Bussi, “Vittoria Colonna: Rime (Sonetti),” in Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, ed. Silvia Ferino Pagden (Vienna, 1997), 202–4. Carlo Dionisotti disagreed with the notion that Gualteruzzi was ever Colonna’s secretary, although he acknowledged their closeness and his access to her literary works: Dionisotti: Appunti, 280. 62  This is the view of Tobia Toscano in Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 24–25.

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Alberto Sacrati.63 It is certainly the case that whoever sent the manuscript speaks in the accompanying letter of a personal undertaking, referring to the poet herself as being involved only to the extent of having allowed copies to be made of poems that she read aloud: It has recently come to our attention in Rome that Your Highness desires a copy of the spiritual sonnets of the illustrious Marchioness of Pescara, and to that end you have sent word to us that you wish that they should be found and dispatched to you as soon as possible. I find I have kept them all, having copied them out one by one as she dictated them, which was easy enough for me to do in view of my long-standing devotion to Her Excellency, and I have decided that it would be unchristian to withhold from sending the same to you.64 It is possible that the poet’s distance from this gift was a necessary act of decorum.65 Nonetheless, Colonna’s proximity to the sender is clear: he has spent long periods in her company copying out her sonnets as she dictated them; he sends them now to her correspondent in his role as a member of the poet’s inner circle. Another letter, this time in Bembo’s hand, mentions both the speed with which Colonna composed “one hundred most beautiful sonnets [. . .], all of them religious and holy, dictated from her most wondrous imagination in such a short space of time that it would seem unbelievable to any who did not know it to be true”—as well as Bembo’s role in revising them (“per meglio rivedergli”), and Colonna’s continued stance of resistance to sharing them, even with Marguerite—“for the Lady Marchioness will be pained at him for having acted thus [in sending the manuscript].”66 63  This is the view put forward by Dionisotti, citing a letter from Alberto Sacrati to the Duke of Ferrara that mentions the manuscript and its confiscation by Anne de Montmorency, Grand Constable to the French court: Dionisotti: Appunti, 284–85. 64  “Essendosi in Roma nuovamente inteso V. M. desiderar di haver copia delle rime spirituali della Ill.ma S.ra Marchesa di Pescara, et sopra ciò haver commesso et scritto qua che sieno cercate et mandatele con buona diligenza, io, il quale mi trovo haverle di mano in mano e mentre ella dettate le ha, copiate et conservate tutte, il che a me è stato assai agevole fare, per l’antica servitù, che io con S. Ex.a tengo, ho giudicato non potere senza nota di christiana impietà cessare di mandargliele”: cited in Tordi, Il codice, 18. Toscano mentions a variant in another transcription of the letter, which changes “dettate” to “donate”: see Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 24–25. 65  On the economies and decorum of gift-giving in the renaissance, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000). 66  “[C]ento molto belli sonetti [. . .] tutti religiosi e santi, dettati dal suo leggiadrissimo ingegno in così breve spazio che non si crederebbe di leggieri da chi veramente nol sapesse

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The manuscript’s contents add to the impression of a gift coming, if not directly from Colonna, then from those who knew her very well and understood the nature of her relationship with the French queen. The sonnets are arranged in a manner that puts significant emphasis on Marian themes, opening with a poem addressed to the Virgin Mary, Vergine pura, che dai raggi ardenti, and continuing with a sequence of previously unpublished sonnets that affirm this emphasis on Mary and motherhood. Given that poems on a Marian theme make up a relatively small proportion of Colonna’s overall output, to find them grouped in this way at the start of the manuscript gives them a particular prominence that links to themes explored in the correspondence between Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre, in particular the need for women to have female role models in exploring matters of faith, as well as the importance of strong, “maternal” spiritual relationships in which the nurturing mother figure can learn from her spiritual “son.”67 The letter that accompanied Marguerite de Navarre’s manuscript also affords us a brief but tantalizing glimpse of Colonna’s working practice, and indicates an oral source for the poems that is directly authorial, but in a context (transcribing from dictation), which might also help to explain some of the variations in spellings and verse forms that this manuscript contains.68 As an author Colonna could afford to pay scribes and secretaries to take fair copies of her work, a practice that was common in the period.69 Her own hand was not good, presumably because she had not been offered the humanistic education that men of her generation might have had.70 Her dictation of her verses to a third party, and subsequent agreement that this individual keep his copies of her poems (and ultimately make them available elsewhere), constitutes a tacit form of scribal publication, stemming from an oral source but with [. . .] che la S.ra Marchesa di Lui si dolga che così adoprato abbia”: cited in Dionisotti: Appunti, 284–85; see also Toscano’s discussion of this case in Colonna, Sonetti in morte, 25. 67  For a more developed close reading of the contents of the manuscript, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 107–31; Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61–81. 68  For a full account of spelling and verse variations, see the numerous appendices in Bullock: Rime. 69  Richardson gives the example of Federico Borromeo dictating to scribes and secretaries in Manuscript Culture, 90. 70  The work that offers information about the library on the island of Ischia where Colonna may have spent her early years, and thus received some education, is Pierluigi Leone De Castris, “Kultur und Mäzenatentum am Hof fer D’Avalos in Ischia,” in Vittoria Colonna, Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 67–76. Carteggio contains a facsimile of one of Colonna’s autograph letters. On her use of language and engagement with the linguistic arguments of her day, see the contribution to this volume by Helena Sanson.

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an acknowledged manuscript afterlife, the poet’s participation at one remove seemingly wholly in tune with her public position of modesty and “shyness.”71 Her oral “performance” of her poems in this context is also interesting, underlining the importance of vocal delivery for this kind of poetry. Scipione Ammirato tells us, in the dedication to Berardino Rota’s Egloghe piscatorie of 1560, that in the early 1530s Colonna was in the habit of memorizing poetry on hearing it performed, and reperforming it herself at every opportunity: “It has been twenty-seven years already since he [Rota] composed them, and he had as his audience Vittoria Colonna [. . .] who liked these eclogues so much [. . .] that she memorized a large number of them, and recited them and praised them as the fruit of a great and illustrious poet.”72 There is also fascinating evidence of a performance of Colonna’s poems at a social gathering in Ferrara during the carnival of 1538, as a letter from a Ferrarese courtier to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga makes clear: Yesterday evening his Lordship the Duke and I had great pleasure in dining with the most illustrious lady mother of your Reverence [Isabella d’Este], and the aforementioned Marchioness [of Pescara] dined with us too. After dinner five of the aforementioned Marchioness’s sonnets were read, which were so beautiful that I do not believe an angel from heaven could make them more perfect.73 71  Harold Love, in his study of scribal publication in seventeenth-century England, terms this a “weak” form of publication: the text is no longer in private possession, its circulation is acknowledged but no longer controlled by the author, and affecting an attitude of indifference or even resistance meets the demands of decorum. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 35–46. 72  “Già sono xxvii anni ch’egli vi pose mano, et hebbene per ascoltatrice Vittoria Colonna [. . .]; a cui piacquero cotanto queste egloghe, [. . .] che n’havea gran parte a memoria, et recitavale, et celebravale come frutto di sommo poeta et illustre”: Berardino Rota, Egloghe piscatorie, ed. Stefano Bianchi (Rome, 2005), 75 (dedication by Scipione Ammirato). I am grateful to Brian Richardson for pointing out this reference to me. 73  “Hiersera fumo in grandissima consolatione la excellentia del signor Duca et io, con l’Illustrissima signora madre di V. S. Reverendissima con la quale cenamo, et medesimamente cenò la Signora Marchesa predetta. Dopo cena si lessono cinque sonetti della sopradetta Signora Marchesa, tanto belli, ch’io non credo che uno angelo del paradiso li potessi far più perfecti”: Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 1907, fol. 454r, cited in Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, Una gentildonna irrequieta: Giulia Gonzaga fra reti familiari e relazioni eterodosse (Rome, 2012), 142–43. I am once again grateful to Brian Richardson for alerting me to this source, and for making available to me his own unpublished work on it. See also Brian Richardson, “ ‘Recitato e cantato’: The Oral Diffusion of Lyric Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth

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While the precise wording of the source does not make it clear who read the poems (“si lessono,” “[the poems] were read”), the general context is one of after-dinner entertainment involving music and recitation. Perhaps it was the poet herself who gave the performance of her verses, as a suitable contribution by an illustrious guest to an elite, after-dinner gathering. It is also possible that someone else present at the dinner read aloud the five poems by Colonna in her presence, from a written source that was already in the household or that the poet herself had provided, or perhaps having already committed them to memory. The picture of Colonna that emerges from these tantalizing glimpses is that of a poet who operated most naturally in an oral context, dictating, memorizing, and reciting poetry, employing trained scribes to take copies after her oral delivery, and asking literary agents or secretaries or even friends to manage the afterlife of the resultant manuscripts. In such a context, it is no surprise if we cannot find clear and unequivocal links between the poet and the manuscript sources, and are forced, instead to build up a picture through circumstantial evidence. It would seem to be wholly appropriate that an aristocratic female poet should operate in this way, at one remove from the messy necessities of quill and ink, and I would not see this as reason to discount her tacit approval of the kinds of scribal publication that have been outlined above. The final piece of evidence to reinforce this point is the quantity of correspondence poetry that Colonna wrote, a sign of her active participation in the important networks producing occasional poetry in response to public events.

Authorial Scribal Publication: Correspondence Poetry

A contemporary source, Paolo Giovio in his dialogue set on the island of Ischia in 1527, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, refers to Colonna’s “almost innumerable letters: what authority, what manly decorum, and what charm these display, written as they are to the loftiest and most learned men and to the greatest kings, and concerning the most weighty and honorable matters.”74 Giovio’s comment is interesting, as it alerts us both to an extensive correspondence, but also to public knowledge of this as well as access to the letters by a wider network of readers. What has survived of this correspondence is disappointingly limited, with the result that, although many of Colonna’s poems are Century to the Present: Essays in Honour of Richard Andrews, ed. Brian Richardson et al. (Leeds, 2004), 67–82. 74  Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, 533.

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clearly epistolary in nature and were probably included in her correspondence, the original contexts for these individual acts of scribal publication are now lost.75 However, it seems likely that, if the letters were widely read and known of, so too would have been any poems included in Colonna’s letters, leading to copies, and re-copies, and ultimately to the various manuscript traces now scattered throughout Italian libraries and archives. Bullock’s identification of rime epistolari based on named interlocutors included in the poems allows for the reconstruction of at least a partial rollcall of addressees, which helps to flesh out the lyric networks into which Colonna sent her verses on the understanding that doing so would lead to copying and further acts of manuscript dissemination unless strictly forbidden by her (and likely even then).76 The list of correspondents includes family members: her brother Ascanio Colonna, her sister-in-law Giovanna D’Aragona, and Alfonso D’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, whom she figured as her “adopted son.” She also composed poems to commemorate the deaths of family members, including her brother Federico and cousin Pompeo Colonna. Another group of correspondents is made up of fellow poets and writers: Paolo Giovio, 75  Colonna’s surviving letters are collected in Carteggio. Further letters have subsequently been published in a number of places. In chronological order, see Giuseppe Contin, Alcune lettere del card. Pietro Bembo tratte le più dall’archivio storico dei Gonzaga in Mantova, per le nozze Bembo-dionisi, Prosperini (Padua, 1875); Annali di Gabriel Giolito da Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato Stampatore in Venezia scritti ed illustrati da Salvatore Bongi (Rome, 1890), vol. I, 372–77; Abd-El-Kader Salza, Lettere inedite di Vittoria Colonna e Benedetto Varchi (Florence, 1898); Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Tre Lettere Inedite di Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara (Rome, 1901); Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, Nuove lettere inedited di Vittoria Colonna (Rome, 1901); idem, Vittoria Colonna fautrice della riforma cattolica secondo alcune sue lettere inedited (Rome, 1901); Benedetto Nicolini, “Una lettera inedita di Vittoria Colonna,” Ricerche di Storia Religiosa (January–April 1955): 133–36; Concetta Ranieri, “Censimento dei codici e delle stampe dell’epistolario di Vittoria Colonna,” Atti e Memorie dell’Arcadia, Series III, VII (1977), 1, 123–63; VII (1979), 3, 259–69; VII (1980–81), 4, 263–80; VIII (1981–82), 1, 251–64; idem, “Lettere inedite di Vittoria Colonna,” Giornale italiano di filologia, VII (1979): 138–49; Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: Questione religiosa e nicodemismo, Istituto Storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea (Roma 1979), 464–66; Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City, 1989). I am grateful to Veronica Copello for providing me with many of these references. On the practice of publishing poems via correspondence, often addressed to fellow poets and with a desire for feedback or poetic response, see Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 99–114. 76  Richardson provides a number of examples of authors attempting to prevent the copying and dissemination of their work after sending it, not always wholly successfully: Manuscript Culture, 20–26.

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Veronica Gambara, Pietro Bembo, and Francesco Maria Molza, along with a poem addressed to an upcoming voice of the next generation of Neapolitan writers, Laura Terracina,77 and another commemorating the death of Jacopo Sannazaro. A further group consists of men of the Church: a poem is addressed to Reginald Pole; another mourns the death of Gasparo Contarini. A final group consists of poems addressed to the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, written with a clearly political motive. It is significant to note that a number of these poems, defined by Bullock as epistolary, are in fact written to commemorate the recent death of the addressee. While this clearly means they cannot have been sent to the same, they form part of the important genre of occasional poetry, having been written as a contribution to a public act of mourning in which Petrarchism played a vital role. Poems written to mark the deaths of friends, family members, fellow poets, cannot be deemed to be private acts of mourning, although they may present themselves thematically as such. Rather, networks of lyric poets regularly produced poetry responding to current affairs and political developments, and these often circulated in manuscript, as well as being displayed in public places (at the funerals of the deceased, for example) and sometimes subsequently printed.78 The importance for any poet of participating in such occasional lyric networks is clear: participation was a means of cementing literary and social ties within a local community, as well as forging them across geographical distances.79 Colonna’s contribution to the genre indicates once again that she was a willing participant in scribal literary networks and used her poetry for social and political ends, as was entirely the norm in the period. Her poetry addressed to the pope and to Charles V is a reminder of her status and the access she had to the most highly placed members of the European elite. There is one correspondence for which some of the original epistolary evidence does still exist, which is particularly significant for what it can tell us about Colonna’s poetic aspirations and the kinds of literary networks she 77  Colonna’s poem addressed to Laura Terracina is included in Rime seconde della signora Laura Terracina di Napoli, e di diversi a lei (Florence, 1549), 92. I am grateful to Amelia Papworth for providing this information. Virginia Cox cites Vittoria Colonna di Toledo as author of this work: Cox, Women’s Writing, 314, n. 179. 78  See Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 114–26, for a number of examples of this practice from different Italian cities. 79  The importance of occasional Petrarchism as a means of cementing literary status for women poets has been explored in a number of recent studies; see on the courtesan Tullia D’Aragona who used occasional verse in self-defense, Julia L. Hairston, ed. and trans., The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others (Toronto, 2014).

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sought to join. This is the correspondence she carried on with Pietro Bembo, not directly at first but via the mediation of Carlo Gualteruzzi, Paolo Giovio, and Vittore Soranzo, establishing a relationship with Bembo that was to endure until her death. Like her fellow female poet, Veronica Gambara, Colonna clearly recognized Bembo’s importance, both as the primary arbiter of poetic taste and quality, but also as the best potential literary “consort,” via whose careful mediation numerous other contacts might be established.80 Her desire to share her poetry with him represents a clear act of scribal publication, once again of the most discreet and aristocratic sort, but doubtless with the awareness that her sonnets would thus be entering a wider network of potential readers. The first extant letter between Colonna and Bembo is from the latter, dated January 20 1530: in it, Bembo refers to “my long-standing devotion to you,” suggesting some kind of prior acquaintance at least via third parties.81 Bembo mentions having seen in recent days a collection of Colonna’s poems in memory of D’Avalos: writing from Bologna, his letter makes it clear that a manuscript is in circulation in that city by this date, containing a number of sonnets (“molti sonetti vostri”) and is being widely praised. It has been suggested that Paolo Giovio was responsible for taking Colonna’s sonnets to Bologna, where many high profile individuals had gathered for the coronation of Charles V, and giving them to Bembo.82 In his letter, Bembo stresses how impressed he is by the poems and how pleased he is to have the opportunity to read them: 80  Veronica Gambara sent a poem mourning the death of his mistress to Bembo in 1536, asking him to correct it for her: Bembo’s courteous reply refused to correct the sonnet, on the grounds that it did not need it. On this exchange, see Giorgio Dilemmi, “ ‘Ne videatur strepere anser inter olores’: le relazioni della Gambara con il Bembo,” in Veronica Gambara e la poesia del suo tempo nell’Italia settentrionale, ed. Cesare Bozzetti et al. (Florence, 1989), 23–35; and Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 3–4. Gambara had addressed a sonnet to Bembo some years earlier, in around 1530, to which Bembo replied in verse form and sent his reply to other readers via Vettor Soranzo, but it is not clear that the poems were ever actually sent to their addressees at this time: see Richardson, “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication,” 685. On Bembo, see Carlo Dionisotti, Scritti sul Bembo, ed. Claudio Vela (Turin, 2002); as well as the detailed entry by the same, “Bembo, Pietro,” Dbi, 8 (1966): 133–51. 81  “[P]er l’antica devotion mia verso voi”: Carteggio, 61 [Bembo to Colonna, 20 Jan. 1530]. See also Bembo: Lettere, 99–100. A later letter, addressed to Paolo Giovio in May 1530, makes it clear that Colonna and Bembo have never met face to face: see ibid., 140. 82  Carlo Vecce, “Paolo Giovio e Vittoria Colonna,” Periodico della Società Storica Comense 54 (1990): 67–93.

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he does not allude to resistance from Colonna to this act of dissemination, nor express the opinion that she was unaware of the event. Rather, he writes as if to congratulate her on her successful act of scribal publication in Bologna. In a short space of time from this first encouraging letter from Bembo, the relationship between the two writers has progressed to a more direct exchange of sonnets. The instigator is clearly Colonna, who takes upon herself a further act of scribal publication. Writing to Carlo Gualteruzzi in March 1530, Bembo laments the fact that he has not yet received a sonnet that Gualteruzzi tells him Colonna has sent directly.83 By 7 April it has arrived, sent on not by Colonna herself but via Paolo Giovio, and Bembo swiftly expresses his great admiration: the poem is “serious, and lovely, and clever, and in sum excellently conceived and arranged and composed.”84 Bembo recognizes the duty to respond, but feels unequal to the task and asks Giovio to mediate in his stead in thanking the author. Significantly, two days later on 9 April, Bembo writes to Vittore Soranzo and thanks him for sending the same sonnet.85 The arrival of Colonna’s sonnet in two different letters in a short space of time allows us an interesting glimpse of the manner in which this kind of epistolary scribal publication functioned. Colonna has clearly asked that Bembo be sent the sonnet: more than one acquaintance has obliged, resulting in a duplication. Both Giovio and Soranzo possess copies of the poem in question, either direct from the author (certainly in Giovio’s case) or via some other source. In other words, the sonnets are circulating close to the author but not necessarily under her direct management. By the end of May 1530, Bembo has, after some difficulty, managed to compose a response per le rime to Colonna’s sonnet.86 In June he is able to read— he does not clarify where or how—a further sonnet by Colonna, addressed to Charles V, which he deems with pleasure to be inferior to the one addressed to him.87 By September, in an exchange conducted via Giovio, the pair are making declarations of love in the requisite Petrarchan mode and expressing a desire to meet in person (although Bembo blames his advanced years for the inability to journey to Naples to accomplish this).88 An exchange of portraits is 83   Bembo: Lettere: Vol. III, 117. 84  “È grave, è gentile, è ingeniosa, ed è, in somma, eccellentemente e pensata e disposta e dettata”: ibid., 125. 85  Ibid., 126. 86  Ibid., 140, 142. 87  Ibid., 147. 88  Ibid., 178–80.

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even mooted.89 Despite the quasi-flirtatiousness of these Petrarchan gestures, underlying all the correspondence is serious mutual esteem: Bembo is deeply impressed by Colonna’s abilities as a literary critic and her clear understanding of the lyric genre in all its finest nuances. She seems to me to possess a sounder and more secure judgment, and to conduct a more detailed and attentive analysis of my verses, than I have seen produced in recent times by some of the most educated and greatest masters of this art, nor would they be capable of such.90 It is interesting to note that, as his letters make clear, Bembo’s receipt of Colonna’s sonnets included the poetic exchange between Colonna and Veronica Gambara, which was sent to him by Marcello Palone in 1532.91 He was involved in promoting the literary careers of both women, helping to establish a space within Petrarchan discourse for female voices that was to bear multiple fruits later in the century.92 Although the number of sonnets exchanged remains small (by July 1530 Bembo has read three poems sent to him at various points via other parties, as well as two received directly from Colonna),93 what the correspondence with Pietro Bembo tells us about Colonna is that her “shyness” regarding publication did not extend to the kinds of scribal networks that were the bread and butter of any serious Petrarchist in the mid-century. It goes without saying that she was astute in her choice of correspondents, selectively participating in lyric exchanges with the poetic “A-list” of her age, and not always playing 89  Ibid., 365–66. On the exchange of portraits, see Barbara Agosti, “Vittoria Colonna e il culto della Maddalena (tra Tiziano e Michelangelo),” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 71–81, here 79. 90  “Ella mi pare vie più sodo e più fondato giudicio avere, e più particolare e minuto discorso far sopra le mie rime, di quello che io veggo a questi dì avere e saper fare gran parte de’ più scienziati e maggior maestri di queste medesime cose”: Bembo: Lettere: Vol. III, 179. See also Richardson, “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication,” 688–89. 91   Bembo: Lettere: Vol. III, 352–53. 92  On Bembo’s role in promoting women poets, see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 53–64. On the poetic exchange between Colonna and Gambara, see Brundin, “ ‘Presto fia ’l mio potere in farvi onore.’ ” Writing in praise of a sonnet by Caterina da Piovene in January 1534, Bembo exclaims that Vittoria Colonna must be in Naples and Vicenza simultaneously: “Dissi Marchesa di Pescara perciò che è quella che ha ora il primo grido.” See Bembo: Lettere: Vol. III, 479. 93  Bembo’s letter to Colonna of 25 July 1532, the first extant direct correspondence between them, summarizes all the poems received by that point: Bembo: Lettere: Vol. III, 365–66.

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by the rules: Colonna’s Carteggio bears witness to the occasions when she did not respond to a poetic overture with a response per le rime, as might have been hoped.94 One might even argue that, within the necessary confines of her class and sex, Colonna published as much as she could get away with: in many ways her activities mirror those of Bembo in her careful use of scribal networks, but she seems to have refrained from the final act, collaboration with a printer. When Bembo attempted to take responsibility for this on her behalf, by preparing a printed edition that would correct the mistakes and misattributions already circulating in print, Colonna delayed until the project was abandoned.95 It would take another generation before women writers of her class became truly comfortable with print publication.96 Conclusion The traces are faint and sometimes more suggestive than conclusive, yet there does seem to be sufficient evidence of Colonna’s involvement in scribal publication to correct the long-standing image of “shyness” that has clung to her over the centuries. As a Petrarchist, Colonna was adept at participating in the lyric networks that were the lifeblood of the genre and aware of the desirability of sharing her verses with other practitioners. As a woman, educated we know not to what degree, and an aristocrat, she left the management of her manuscripts to others, both friends and those in her pay. Although her mature poetry was deeply spiritual and interiorized, it nonetheless derived its potency from the act of being read by others, as the manuscript gift for Michelangelo Buonarroti makes clear. All of these factors add up to a picture of concerted engagement with an audience, far from a “private” muse. Bembo tells us that when the first pirated edition of her Rime was published in 1538, Colonna responded “sweetly,” blaming herself for having dallied too much with the 94  An apologetic letter to Ludovico Dolce of 1536 acknowledges receipt of two “divini sonetti” followed by a further two, and excuses the lack of poetic response, which is down to her “ignorantia e poca virtù”: Carteggio, 124–26 [15 December 1536]. 95  See Richardson, “Print or Pen?,” 42–43. A letter from Bembo to Gualteruzzi of December 1538 expresses pleasure that Colonna has decided to hand on a copy of her Rime for editing and printing by Bembo, suggesting that she was persuaded of the benefit of the project: two days later, she has seemingly changed her mind. See Bembo: Lettere: Vol. IV (1537–46), 158–59. 96  On the subsequent tradition of women writers in print, see Cox’s, Women’s Writing in Italy, and her The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore, 2011).

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things of this world.97 Yet in her sonnet addressed to Bembo, included in the closing sequence of the gift manuscript for Michelangelo, she urges him to turn his own hand to writing spiritually engaged poetry as a Christian duty.98 The suggestion is that despite her anxiety about the efficacy of her work, Colonna continued to write, and publish in manuscript in the loosest sense, throughout her lifetime.99 As far as the rest of the manuscript tradition is concerned, it points towards an audience for the Rime that recognized the partiality of the pirated editions in print and sought better and more up-to-date manuscript evidence from sources close to the poet. This audience was well informed, and included numerous poetic practitioners as well as those involved with reformed circles who knew of the connection between Colonna’s poetry and that religious context. The absence of an autograph work or any clearly established urtext is frustrating but probably a reflection of the poet’s position at one remove from the actual copying and dissemination of her work, reliant on scribes, secretaries, and intermediaries. Finally, while tacitly and occasionally actively allowing her work out into scribal networks, it is also undeniably the case that Colonna in her own life sought seclusion and peace, far from the clamorous demands of the material world.100 Bembo’s numerous letters concerning his own publishing endeavors give us a sense of the onerous attention to detail and messy interactions that such an enterprise demanded if it was to be done properly.101 While writing poetry remained an important spiritual duty, Colonna aspired above all to “live happily in prayer and contemplation,” far from such material concerns.102

97  See Bembo: Lettere: Vol. IV, 158. 98  The sonnet in question is Diletta una acqua viva a pie’ d’un monte. The closing tercet reads: “Bembo mio chiaro, or ch’è venuto il giorno / Ch’avete solo a Dio rivolto il core, / Dhe! rivolgete ancor la musa al vero.” 99  Anxiety concerning the efficacy of her spiritual poetry is clearly expressed in the closing sonnet of the Vatican manuscript for Michelangelo, “Temo che ’l laccio, ov’io molt’anni presi” (number 103). 100  A letter to Colonna from Pope Clement VII dated 5 May 1526 gives her permission to retreat to a house in Naples, left to her by her husband, and live there in a form of nonmonastic seclusion together with a group of chaste women: see Carteggio, 38–39. I am grateful to Ramie Targoff for drawing my attention to this letter. 101  See Richardson, “From Scribal Publication to Print Publication,” as well as the collective evidence contained in the four volumes of Bembo’s letters edited by Ernesto Travi. 102  “[V]ive[re] lieta nelle orazioni e contemplazioni sue”: Bembo: Lettere: Vol. IV, 356 (Bembo describing Colonna to Contarini, June 1541).

Chapter 3

The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime Tatiana Crivelli

I: 1535–1539. In an Appendix: The First Published Traces of Vittoria Colonna’s Poetry, 1535–1536

Vittoria Colonna’s collected Rime appeared in print for the first time in 1538 and the importance of the princeps has tended to obscure earlier evidence for subsequent scholars: in fact, there exist some printed traces of the author’s poems before 1538, which remain partial but nonetheless significant. The first sonnet ever published, Ahi quanto fu al mio Sol contrario il fato (A1:71), was printed by Nicolini da Sabbio in Venice in 1535. It is to be found in an appendix to the second edition of Pietro Bembo’s Rime, of which Bembo himself sent a copy to Colonna on 11 April of that year.1 The apparent marginalization in an appendix should not deceive us: a direct reference to Colonna’s composition is found in the corpus of Bembo’s work, in which Cingi le costei tempie de l’amato by Bembo is the response to Colonna’s poem, composed between 3 December 1525 and 17 March 1530.2 The fact that this constitutes an important recognition of her work is confirmed, not only by the words of praise that Bembo reserves for Colonna’s poetry,3 but also by his response to her in verse. In his anthology, Bembo dedicates two further sonnets to Colonna.4 In the quatrains of Cingi le costei tempie de l’amato, he asks Phoebus (Febo, v. 8) for a laurel crown for her and in the tercets, as if ­wishing to underline the importance of the ­occasion, 1  The text is reproduced in a limited selection that includes an epistolary sonnet by Veronica Gambara (A l’ardente desio ch’ognior m’accende), in Delle Rime di M. Pietro Bembo, Stampate in Vinegia by Giovann’ Antonio de Nicolini da Sabbio, second impression, appendix, c. 42v. The letter recording the sending of the sonnet is no. 1674 in Bembo: Lettere, 581. 2  The post quem date is that of the death of Ferrante D’Avalos, lamented in these verses; the ante quem date coincides with the date when the sonnet to Bembo was sent. See Bembo: Lettere, no. 1077. The reply from Bembo may be dated to May of the same year (see ibid., no. 1094, and the note referring to sonnet 125 in Bembo: Prose e rime, 609). 3  See Bembo: Lettere, in particular no. 1077: “è grave, è gentile, è ingegnosa”; and no. 1078: the sonnet is “bello e ingegnoso e grave, più che da donna non pare sia richiesto: ha superato la mia aspettazione assai.” 4  B embo: Prose e rime, nos. 126 and 127, 610–11.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_005

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foregrounds (at the beginning of the verse with an enjambment between vv. 12–13) the verb stampare, thereby expressing the idea that Colonna’s verses “leave a clear imprint on the memory” by using a verb that also evokes the “imprinting” of the printed book: “e lei ben nata, che sì chiaro segno / stampa del marital suo casto affetto.” This first instance of a poem by Vittoria Colonna in print deserves a metapoetic analysis, both in terms of its content and context. The poetic dialogue opens with Colonna’s complaint that Bembo had failed to dedicate any verses to the memory of her late husband Ferrante d’Avalos (the metaphorical Sole in the incipit), while in his response Bembo explicitly praises the artistic value of Colonna’s poetry. Conversely, Colonna’s composition is published by the celebrated author of the Prose della volgar lingua, who had already gained recognition as the leading authority on the Petrarchan tradition. The result is that this first publication represents artistic recognition of the highest order.5 Two years after Bembo’s publication, a short sequence of poems by Colonna appeared in a volume intended to celebrate the use of the lingua tosca, by following the example of the finest poets: the Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi non meno oscuri che necessari. This peculiar work,6 printed “in Napoli per Giovanni Sultzbach Alemanno apresso alla Gran Corte de la Vicaria adi 27. di Ottobre 1536” and edited by Fabricio Luna,7 provides an explanation in alphabetical order of a number of lexical choices used by “Furioso, Boccaccio, Petrarca and Dante” with an emblematic poem at the end of each section dedicated to a letter of the alphabet.8 Once again in an appendix, and once again included in an anthology immediately after Veronica Gambara, under the title Pistola de la I.S.M. di P. ne la rotta di Ravenna (cc. Cg1r–Cg2v), we

5  This point is underlined, in her commentary on the text, by Virginia Cox in Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2013), 269: “Although not the first surviving sonnet exchange between a female and a male poet, this exchange between Colonna and Bembo is of exceptional historical importance.” 6  This is a fine quarto copy, with a red and black title page, published “Con priviliegio e Breve p(er) dieci anni chiudendo la strada a ciaschuno che non lo possa ne imprimere ne vendere senza lice(n)cia del p(ro)pio Autore riservando q(ue)lli à suo co(m)modo” (in ibid.). 7  On Luna, see Fiammetta Cirilli, “Luna, Fabricio,” in Dbi 66 (2007): 549–51. For information on the publisher, Giovanni Sultzbach, see Pietro Manzi, Annali di Giovanni Sultzbach (Napoli, 1529–1544—Capua, 1547) (Florence, 1970). 8  Gambara’s poems reproduced at cc. Ff3r–Cg1r “al E. S. Don Scipione Vintimiglia” are the same ones that numerous editions attributed to Colonna (from Quando miro la terra etc., to Dietro à l’orme di voi donque venendo).

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find a text that to this day can be considered the only certain evidence9 of a poetic composition by Vittoria Colonna before the death of her husband: Eccelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo (A2:1).10 Further on, at c. Cg2r, we read: “De la medesima S. Son.”: Qua(n)do io dal caro scoglio guardo i(n)torno (A2:13) and “De la medesima S. Al Giovio”: Di q(ue)lla chiara tua servata fronde (E:1). There is no precise information about how Luna came to be in possession of Colonna’s compositions. However, based on the view that he had direct contact with the circle of Ischian artists associated with the D’Avalos family,11 it is clear that the primary justification for this publication was Colonna’s great renown, which in this period was already firmly established. In support of this claim we can cite the fact that two years earlier, in a letter dated 23 January 1534, Pietro Bembo, who, while praising the work of another author, had referred to Colonna as a paragon of virtue, explained to his correspondent: “I mentioned the Marchioness of Pescara because nowadays she is the best known.”12 In any case, Luna was fully aware of his actions in relation to Bembo and the canon of Tuscan authors: in exploring the connections with Southern Italian literature, not without a trace of irony, the Neapolitan author, who dedicated his work to the Vintimiglia family from Sicily, provided in his Vocabolario, in the words of Dionisotti, a “most rich and lively document.”13 As has been noted by other scholars, the alternative canon of modern authors proposed by Luna, one that 9  Tobia R. Toscano, “Schede sul noviziato poetico napoletano di Vittoria Colonna,” in Letterati corti accademie. La letteratura a Napoli nella prima metà del Cinquecento (Naples: 2000), 13–24, retrieved from the manuscript tradition two other texts whose attribution to Colonna’s youthful phase appears dubious and indeed there is reason to think they may have been repudiated by the author. In Rime 1840, note 2, xxxiii–xxxiv, the editor, referring to the biography written in the sixteenth century by Filotimo or Filonico Alicarnasseo, Vita di Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara (published in Carteggio, 487–518) mentioned, among the texts written during Ferrante’s lifetime but no longer extant, four other sonnets by Vittoria Colonna (Padre del ciel, che nostra mente guidi; Vanne lieto mio sol, vanne sicuro; La viva selce, che percossa rende; Cara è la vita, e dopo lei mi pare), and the “capitolo” Poiché il fato, signor, ti discompagna. 10  Compared to the text edited by Bullock: Rime, 53–55, this edition presents a number of variations. The most significant is at v. 79, where Bullock replaced the Latinate form cohortò (encouraged, exhorted) with confortò (comforted). 11  Erika Milburn, “La biblioteca di Fabrizio Luna: nell’officina di un lessicografo del Cinquecento,” Letteratura italiana antica. Rivista annuale di testi e studi 8 (2007): 425–57 here 444. 12   B embo: Lettere, no. 1545. The words of praise are for Caterina da Piovene: “Dissi Marchesa di Pescara perciò che è quella che ha ora il primo grido.” 13  Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti sulle rime di Sannazzaro,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 140 (1963): 161–211: note 1 at 203: “documento ricchissimo e vivacissimo.”

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included Vittoria Colonna, took account of the list of participants in discussions at the court of Urbino recounted in Castiglione’s Cortegiano (I, V)—in the publication of which Colonna played a controversial role14—and added to it the names given in the Marescalco (V, III, 5 et seq.) by Pietro Aretino.15 The result of this operation is an unusual selection of modern poetry in the vernacular, “an example of Neapolitan resistance to Bembo’s model.”16 In this context, the most famous woman poet brought with her both the recognition granted by Bembo and a close association with Southern Italian culture of the highest order. The fact that her poems were published at the end of the volume did not prevent the editor from treating them with the utmost regard: the ideal reader of this volume was intended to be Colonna herself, the “nuova Pallade” of Ischia, as stated in a light-hearted letter closing the volume (a c. Ee3v). Luna’s publication makes evident that before long the name of Vittoria Colonna was to be moved from an appendix to the title page of a published work. The publication of the princeps in Parma in 1538 represented a significant innovation in the European literary panorama: the rise of an autonomous publishing tradition for the work of a woman poet. 1538: “Insult and injury” of the Princeps On 8 November 1538, writing to Carlo Gualteruzzi, his “dearest partner and brother” (“carissimo Compare e fratello”), Pietro Bembo informed him of the “insult and injury caused to the Marchesa di Pescara by whom I know not, by printing her Rime with manifold errors on shabby paper and in a woeful manner.”17 In referring to the existence of the first discrete published selection of the poetry of Vittoria Colonna, Bembo, who gives no sign of actually handling the edition in question, goes on to say that the author had written to him “not only not complaining, but claiming that she deserved it since her 14  With regard to the “clamorosa [. . .] vicenda del manoscritto (del Cortegiano) inviato a Vittoria Colonna, resa di pubblico dominio da Castiglione tramite la dedica a Miguel da Silva nella princeps del 1528,” see Amedeo Quondam, “Il manoscritto a Vittoria Colonna,” in “Questo povero Cortegiano.” Castiglione, il libro, la storia (Rome, 2000), citation on 67. 15  See for example Pasquale Sabbatino, “La grammatica della letteratura volgare a Napoli nel Cinquecento,” in L’idioma volgare. Il dibattito sulla lingua letteraria nel Rinascimento (Rome, 1995), 13–74, here 59–61. 16  Cirilli, “Luna, Fabricio,” 551: “esempio di una resistenza napoletana al modello bembiano.” On this point, see Toscano, Letterati corti accademie, 85–120, quote at 117. In the text by Luna, reference should be made, at the end of the Appendice, to the amusing epigram by Felice Antonio Mangione, a Neapolitan, about the Tuscan language. 17   B embo: Lettere, no. 1967: “ingiuria e villania fatta alla S.ra Marchesa di Pescara da non so cui, che impresse le sue Rime e incorrettissime, e di pessima forma e carta.”

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a­ ttention was turned to worldly matters.”18 The precious letter from Colonna, probably sent to him from Lucca—where, as shown by her correspondence,19 she was staying almost uninterruptedly at least from 9 April to 3 October of that year—has not survived, just as Bembo does not appear to have received any response to the request submitted by him to Colonna to send him “an edited copy of the Rime, so that I could have them nicely printed here in a proper manner.”20 The plan to revise and reprint the princeps was dear to Bembo’s heart, to the point that he would have been willing to set aside the idea of making amends for “the error of that sad” first editor only if Gualteruzzi wanted for himself the “honor of printing these verses there”21 (that is in Rome, where his friend was living and where Vittoria Colonna was about to sojourn). Bembo’s insistence, the outcome of which will be discussed when commenting on the reprints of 1539, should be taken into account in evaluating his extremely negative response to the princeps. Although the edition printed in Parma in 1538 may undoubtedly be considered inadequate in terms of the selection of texts,22 and while not a luxury edition in terms of print quality it does not differ greatly from many others in circulation at the time, and the text it contains “is not on the whole more inaccurate than the various manuscripts” of the Rime of the period that are known to us.23 The impression it made on E. Marion Cox,24 who described the copy housed in the British Library as “printed in good italic type on paper of satisfactory quality,” appears to be confirmed after an extensive examination of various copies.25 18  Ibid.: “non solo non dolendosene, ma mostrando d’averlo meritato con curar le vane cose.” 19   C arteggio, nos. 94–97, 159–66. 20   B embo: Lettere, no. 1967: “una copia di dette sue Rime corretta, perciò che io le farei stampar qui bene, e in bella maniera.” 21  Ibid.: “l’error di quel tristo”; “loda di farle imprimere costì.” 22  The publication, in octavo in 11 folios with four cc., marked from A to L, without any printer’s mark, is identified by Bullock: Rime: 258. 23  Tobia R. Toscano, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime amorose di Vittoria Colonna,” in Letterati corti accademie, 76–77: “non è nel suo complesso molto più scorretto di quanto non lo siano i vari manoscritti.” 24  E. Marion Cox, “The Earliest Editions of the Rime of Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara,” The Library. A Quarterly Review of Bibliography, ser. 4, vol. 2 (1922): 266–68. 25  The following volumes were examined: three copies of the princeps from the Fondo Tordi in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence (marked respectively Tordi 626, 721 and 723), as well as the copy in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, catalog number PQ4620.A17 1538. Fondo Tordi no. 626 is the copy examined by Bullock (it includes the handwritten corrections by Stromboli that he describes); no. 721 is bound together with an edition not recorded in Edit16 of the vernacular poems of Agostino

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The d­ amning judgment by Bembo, which was harsher than that of Colonna herself, was at least in part intended to promote his new venture: to produce a more elegant edition, above all entrusted to the care of a more prestigious patron. It should be borne in mind that Bembo’s interest in putting himself forward as the publisher of Colonna’s poetry—an interest that had led him to be the first to publish her sonnet as an appendix to his own Rime—can be placed within the timeframe of the complex process by which he was appointed cardinal. He was named cardinal-elect on 20 December 1538 and proclaimed cardinal on 19 March 1539, and Vittoria Colonna is known to have played a key role in this development. The most decisive card that Bembo could play in the delicate phase prior to his election was certainly his prestige and authority as an author. In fact, he had no qualms about playing it with a view to achieving this important objective, as he clearly demonstrated as early as 1536 in his dedication to Paul III of the Ciceronian “brevi” that he had composed for Leo X. Bembo’s interest in Vittoria Colonna’s poetry—which Dionisotti outlines in a masterly manner although considering it to be an act that “finally casts light on a Bembo inclined to give rather than to take, to give that which the poet Colonna might expect from a past master of the art”—does not seem too far removed from the relationship of “ancient devotion and service” born “not from literature, but from ecclesiastical interests” and carried forward at a distance as a “lasting relationship of artistic solidarity and human kindness,” without doubt, but in the long run complicated by the interference of “gratitude and calculation.”26 Moreover, the idea that someone as eminent as Bembo might wish to publish Colonna’s poetry in order to enhance his own reputation, although it might appear to be irreverent, was confirmed a short time later, in 1540, when the cardinal, without first obtaining the consent of the author”27 and once again in collaboration with Gualteruzzi, went ahead Beazzano, including cc. 49: A La Serenissima Imperatrice, Agostino Beatiano. Di Venetia à li .X. di settembre del M.D.XXXVIII; no. 723 includes a title page and on c. L2r a mark, not identified, consisting of an arm holding up a sword with two stars on the sides. If this is a printer’s mark added at a later date then it is comparable to those used in later years by the Salvioni family (see Edit16: U397 and T17), without a motto, with the arm extended in the opposite direction, and with the sword not in the upright position but leaning over to the left. 26   D ionisotti: Appunti, 274, 260, and 266: “finalmente ci rappresenta il Bembo incline a dare piuttosto che a ricevere, a dare quel che la Colonna poetessa poteva attendersi da un vecchio maestro dell’arte”; “antica devozione e servitù”; “non dalla letteratura, ma dai benefici ecclesiastici”; “rapporto durevole di solidarietà artistica e di simpatia umana”; “gratitudine e calcolo.” 27   B embo: Lettere, no. 2204 A: “la qual cosa non avendo S. Sig. ria ottener dallei potuto.”

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and, according to Dionisotti, produced the precious manuscript in homage to the queen of Navarre.28 In that phase, as he admits in correspondence with the dedicatee, he will not pay heed to the fact that “in order to please Her, the Lady Marchioness may be disappointed that he acted in such a way, while she should instead be pleased that the fruits of her devoted soul, entirely turned to God, may be delivered to Her Majesty, who is so grateful to God.”29 Not even the possible self-interested motives of the future cardinal, however, appear to justify the pejorative tone in which the first edition is described. The impression is that the criticism is aimed not so much at the book itself, as at the unknown person responsible for the initiative and the circles in which this “sad person” moved. Just as Bembo was left in the dark, unfortunately we too know nothing for certain about those responsible for the 1538 edition, as the colophon, c. L3r, simply bears the note “Printed in Parma with Grace and Privilege, 1538.” There are some possible traces, however, that could help explain certain aspects of the affair, at the same time opening up new perspectives on the circles in which Colonna’s poetry was received. We know that the 1538 edition appeared in a rather peripheral location in relation to the main publishing centers, so that in library catalogs it is simple to attribute it to Antonio Viotti, undoubtedly the most important printer and publisher in Parma in the first half of the sixteenth century,30 whose business flourished from 1530, when he acquired the printing press of Francesco Ugoleto.31 It is important to note, however, that in his books Antonio Viotti was in the habit of providing details of the place of printing accompanied by his printer’s mark, consisting of his own initials surmounted 28   D ionisotti: Appunti, 277–86. 29   B embo: Lettere, no. 2204 A: “per piacerle, che la S.ra Marchesa di Lui si dolga che così adoprato abbia, quando tuttavia deve allei essere in grado che i frutti della sua al servizio di Dio volta e dedicata anima a V. M. tà, che a Dio tanto grata è, pervengano.” 30  Edit16 makes reference to a total of 16 publishers active in Parma in the first half of the sixteenth century; of the eighty-four editions printed in Parma recorded here, no fewer than thirty-five were produced by the Viotti printing press. These figures, known to be merely indicative, highlight the leading role played by this printer-publisher, who also served a number of other publishers on the list. 31  Fernanda Ascarelli and Marco Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (Florence, 1989), 79. Among the references in that work, see Giovanni Drei, “I Viotti stampatori e librai parmigiani nei secoli XVI e XVII,” Parma Grafica, num. unico (1925): 9–35 and Carlo Antinori, La tipografia parmense ai tempi del Correggio (1489–1534) (Parma, 1990). A useful resource is the Dizionario Biografico dei Parmigiani by Roberto Lasagni, that may be consulted on the website of the Istituzione Biblioteche del Comune di Parma, http://www.parmaelasuastoria.it.

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by a cross,32 and that both are missing from the edition of Colonna’s Rime. Not even the search for documents relating to printing rights based on the “privilegio” placed on the title page of the edition has borne fruit.33 A closer examination of the editions published by Viotti during the 1530s and the early 1540s, when the business was taken over by his nephew Seth, shows that his repertoire consisted largely of “gride,” Latin texts on religious topics (in this case Viotti sometimes uses the fleur-de-lys, the heraldic symbol of the Farnese family, by way of homage to the power of Paul III over the City of Parma) and, to a much smaller extent, contemporary literature in the vernacular. It is possible to identify three editions published on an autonomous basis in the period that is of interest to us here: Il libro del cortegiano del conte Baldesar Castiglione, released in August 1530, in which Viotti includes his own name both in the colophon and in the printer’s mark; I tre libri della Humanità di Christo (1536) by Pietro Aretino, a reprint with the following wording in the colophon: “As testimony to the goodness and courtesy of the divine Aretino, Antonio Viotti ordered the present volume to be printed. In Parma by Antonio Viotto in the month of April 1536”;34 finally, the Rime by Vittoria Colonna, which appears to be a special case, not only because of the absence of a printer’s mark, but also due to the fact that, compared to the other two volumes, this one is much less elaborate in terms of the quality of the printing.35 Taking all these facts together suggests that, even if 32  Edit16: U623 and U739. See also Giuseppina Zappella, Le marche dei tipografi e degli editori italiani del Cinquecento: repertorio di figure, simboli e soggetti e dei relativi motti (Milan, 1986), 2 vols., no. CXXIXr, vol. 2, 220. 33  For this information I am grateful to the Archivio di Stato di Parma and to Roberto Lasagni who, in preparing the continuation of his L’arte tipografica in Parma. 1: Da Portilia agli Ugoleto (1471–1528) (Parma, 2013), systematically consulted, though without managing to retrieve any material, the available archives, in particular the Notai Camerali and the Memoriali. The privilegio was granted under precise conditions: “a Venezia, ad esempio, il privilegio non veniva concesso se la tiratura del libro era inferiore alle 400 copie” (Angela Nuovo, “Catalogazione e ricerca storico-bibliografica: una reciproca influenza,” in La descrizione del libro antico secondo la nuova ISBD, ed. Maria Enrica Vadalà. Seminario di studio, Trento, Biblioteca comunale, 14 May 2007, vol. 1, 119–31, here 129). As counterfeiting a privilegio could have borne heavy consequences for a printer, I am inclined to consider Viotti’s statement to be true. I would like to thank Angela Nuovo for her precious feedback on this and other issues. 34  “Per testimonio della bontà et della cortesia del divino Aretino Antonio Viotto ha fatto imprimer el presente volume. In Parma per esso Antonio Viotto del mese di Aprile. M. D. XXXVI.” 35  By way of example a comparison may be made with the reprint in 1532 by Castiglione— the edition of 1530 contained only the title and the printer’s mark—to which Viotti added in the title page a fine frame with botanical decorations, birds, and drop capitals.

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the volume was produced at his printing press, this was probably not an initiative undertaken directly by Viotti.36 Like almost all his contemporaries, based on standard practice at the time, Viotti was in business both as a printer for external clients and as a publisher on his own account. However, the lack of information does not enable us to identify the patron with certainty. From the dedicatory letter printed at c. A2r–v we are informed that the print version was derived not from Colonna’s autograph, but from copies collated by various editors and that “variations in the penmanship of those who copied them out” (diversità de le penne de chi prima gli scrisse) is believed to be the cause of any errors. We also learn that “Philippo Pirogallo”—who signs the dedication, states that he has collated the texts and is responsible for the printing—has been asked to prepare the volume by the dedicatee, the “most learned” (dottissimo) “Messer Alessandro Vercelli.” Pirogallo makes clear that the publication is explicitly intended to circulate the poems (“since you together with other young persons have requested this of me”) and to serve as a model (“to benefit the minds of those living in our age . . .; so that having such a great model to study, they may better achieve perfection”).37 Both the sender and the recipient of this dedicatory epistle are, as Dionisotti astutely observed, “unknown to us the first, and albeit learned, also the second.”38 At least with regard to the former, however, scholars have managed to acquire some information, identifying Filippo Pirogallo as a member of the Accademia dei Trasformati in Milan in the late 1540s.39 Research by Simone Albonico40 has shown that he was active between 1533 and 1555 (the year of his death) and was probably,

36  On the basis of the commonly used font, an italic Colonia 100, it does not seem possible to make a definitive deduction (see Alberto Tinto, Il corsivo nella tipografia del Cinquecento. Dai caratteri italiani ai modelli germanici e francesi [Milano, 1972]). On this point, see also note 148. 37  Ibid.: “per havermegli voi, insieme con alcuni altri gioveni richiesti”; “più per giovare a gli intelletti, che ne l’età nostra si trovano [. . .]; Perciò che essi havendo un si gran mezzo di studiare, potranno meglio pervenire a l’estremo de la perfettio[n]e.” 38   D ionisotti: Appunti, 275: “Ignoti l’uno e, benché dottissimo, l’altro.” 39  His name, in the variant form “Pirogalli,” is recorded with those of others in a chapter dedicated to Andrea Giussano, in 1545, in the volume by Bartolomeo Corte, Notizie istoriche intorno a’ medici scrittori milanesi, e a’ principali ritrovamenti fatti in medicina dagl’Italiani. Presentate all’illustrissimo Sig. Conte D. Carlo Pertusati, Regio questore del Magistrato Ordinario dello Stato di Milano da Bartolomeo Corte, Filos. e Medico Milanese (Milan, 1718), 83. The name is mentioned again in later repertories. 40  Simone Albonico, Il ruginoso stile. Poeti e poesia in volgare a Milano nella prima metà del Cinquecento (Milan, 1990), 288.

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according to Carboni,41 an ancestor of the Milanese gold merchant of the same name whose portrait was painted by Filippo Abbiate in 1677.42 Known works by Pirogallo consist of eight Petrarchan sonnets, included in the selection published under the title Sonetti de gli Academici Trasformati di Milano by Antonio Borgi in Milan in 1548, on the occasion of the visit of Philip II of Spain.43 As regards the dedicatee, however, not even careful research by Fabio Carboni, who sought to establish that this was the same Alexander who was responsible for the Chigi Codex L IV 79 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana—a line of inquiry that proved fruitless due to the lack of any correspondence between the Codex and the volume published in Parma—has enabled us to trace a profile.44 It has been argued45 that the initiative for the publication was taken in Milan in the period of Charles V, and hence in a cultural setting with close links to the D’Avalos family. In fact, until 1546, Alfonso d’Avalos was the governor of Milan:46 he moved there with his wife, Maria d’Aragona, thus recreating in the north an elite cultural circle, frequented by Paolo Giovio, who for a long time acted as mediator in the correspondence between Vittoria Colonna and Pietro Bembo. The Accademia dei Trasformati, set up in 1546, seems to have been established with the support of the Marquis of Vasto.47 Nevertheless, we might be justified in asking why an edition that was not derived “dal proprio originale” and, all the more so, an edition that attributes to Vittoria Colonna texts written by other authors, would have been produced in a context that was so close to Colonna herself and printed in a city of minor importance, without a printer’s mark and 41  Fabio Carboni, “La prima raccolta lirica datata di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum. Rassegna di scienze storiche, linguistiche e filologiche 76 (2002): 681–707, here 683. 42  The portrait of Filippo Pirogallo is housed in the Pinacoteca dell’Ospedale Maggiore in Milan: see the note by Mauro Pavesi, with a reproduction of the painting, www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/opere-arte/schede/3n120-00085/. 43  Michele Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna, 1926–30), ad vocem, and above all Albonico, Il ruginoso stile, 181–234. 44  Carboni, “La prima raccolta lirica datata,” 682–83, notes: “Non sono molti i Vercelli e nessuno nel XVI secolo ha nome Alessandro. Si incontrano soltanto: Battista, tanagliato in diverse parti di Roma, impiccato e squartato presso Sant’Angelo, per ordine di Leone X nel 1517 [. . .] e Giovan Giorgio, cavaliere di Malta e ambasciatore dell’Ordine a Roma nel 1572.” 45  Ibid., 684. 46  With regard to the government of Alfonso D’Avalos in Milan, see the studies by Chabot, in particular Federico Chabot, Storia di Milano nell’epoca di Carlo V (Turin, 1961). 47   Lettera dell’Abbate D. Giovanni Andres al Sig. Comendatore Fra Gaetano Valenti Gonzaga Cavaliere dell’inclita religione di Malta sopra una pretesa cagione del corrompimento del gusto italiano nel secolo XVII (Cremona, 1776), 18. See also the Storia di Milano del Conte Pietro Verri da’ suoi più remoti principii fino al 1525 e continuata fino alla presente età da Stefano Ticozzi, vol. 5 (Milan, 1836), 117.

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without the most authoritative critics being able to identify with any degree of certainty who was responsible for it. By the same token there seems to be little justification for the hypothesis outlined by Toscano, who linked the princeps to the 1558 edition and supposed a common derivation from the circles of the court of Correggio, with the mediation of Veronica Gambara.48 The publication may instead be explained with reference to an agent who was associated with quite a different cultural setting that therefore requires a discussion of the dissemination of the printed works of Vittoria Colonna to which critics have so far paid scant attention: so-called “popular” or “cheap” literature.49 Although it may appear strange, given that we are in the habit of interpreting literary history through the testimony of cultural elites of the era and counting Vittoria Colonna in the highest ranks of historical and literary circles, initiatives such as the publication of the princeps bear witness to a diversified distribution and readership, which includes not only the select circulation of copies of the manuscript intended for the humanistic circles of the sodales—still very much in evidence at the time of the publication50—but also other kinds of distribution and readers.51 We know, for example, of the cheap reprintings of Ariosto’s works, but attention has not been paid to the fact that the same fellow countryman who was responsible for the first unauthorized edition of his verses, printed in 1537 with the title Forze d’amore,52 was in direct contact with the printer in Parma to whom Colonna’s princeps has been attributed, and used the 48  Toscano, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle Rime amorose,” 76–80. 49  I use the first term in the nonreductive sense suggested by Paul Grendler, “Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993): 451–84, mostly to indicate works in the vernacular and in small format accessible to large sections of the public. For the second one, see now Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City. Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester 2014), esp. pp. 19–28. 50  Quondam, “Questo povero Cortegiano,” 55, speaks of literary criticism between peers “che connotano da sempre la sodalitas degli umanisti, anche di questa generazione che ha subito l’impatto con il libro tipografico e continua a rivendicare il suo diritto a gestazioni testuali lunghissime, a scambi di libri manoscritti per letture in anteprima, a raccolta di pareri e di censure.” 51  In this connection it seems pertinent to refer to Chartier’s exhortation not to imagine that “popular” publications are only for an uncultivated readership. See Roger Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, ed. Steven Laurence Kaplan and Walter De Gruyter (Berlin, 1984), 229–53. 52   Forze d’amore opera nova nella quale si contiene sei capitoli di messer Ludovico Ariosto, sopra diversi sogetti non più venuti in luce intitulata le forze d’amore. Con altri capitoli, sonetti, strambotti, madrigali, barzelette d’altri auttori sopra varii e diversi propositi. Ad instanza di Hyppolito Ferrarese, 1537, [24] cc.

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same printing presses. Among the various individuals who used Viotti’s printing press there was at least one of those characters “midway between market traders of odds and ends, booksellers and even occasional publishers,”53 who were known as “cerretani” (peddlers): Ippolito da Ferrara. A full account of this interesting character is now available in the work of Giancarlo Petrella.54 We are thus in a position to provide a reliable picture of the reception of Colonna’s printed works, including elements that are certainly unorthodox but of undoubted interest, and to observe that this improviser, who was a soap and bookseller, wandering minstrel and storyteller, who published his own work and that of others,55 not only dedicated the Opera santissima et utile a qualunque fidel christiano by Pietro da Lucca “To Her Excellency the Marchioness of Pescara,”56 displaying the dedication on the title page, but also, it would seem, published a selection of Colonna’s work, though no copy has survived. 53  Giancarlo Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese.’ Un cantimbanco editore ­nell’Italia del Cinquecento,” Paratesto 8 (2011): 23–79, here 23: “a metà strada fra commercianti ambulanti di cianfrusaglie, librai e persino editori d’occasione.” 54  See Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese’ ” and the abbreviated English translation of the same work: Giancarlo Petrella, “Ippolito Ferrarese, a Travelling ‘Cerretano’ and Publisher in 16th-Century Italy,” in Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the History of Printing and the Book Trade in Small European and Spanish Cities, ed. Benito Rial Costas (Leiden, 2012), 201–26. Reference should also be made to Fiammetta Cirilli, “Ippolito Ferrarese,” in Dbi, vol. 62, ad vocem, and the bibliography contained therein. The first critic to take an interest in Ippolito was Vittorio Rossi, “Un cantastorie ferrarese del secolo XVI. Appunti,” Rassegna emiliana di storia, letteratura ed arte, 2 (1890): fasc. 8–9, 435–46. 55  Rosa Salzberg “La lira, la penna e la stampa: cantastorie ed editoria popolare nella Venezia del Cinquecento” (Milan, 2011), note 44, 7. This is the Italian translation, revised and updated by the author, of “The Lyre, the Pen and the Press: Performers and Cheap Print in Early Cinquecento Venice,” in The Books of Venice. Il libro veneziano, ed. Lisa Pon and Craig Kallendorf (Venice, 2008), 251–76. By the same author see now Ephemeral City, pp. 84–86. In 1538 Ippolito seems to have been publishing in at least three different cities: Venice, Bologna, and Brescia. For a catalog of the editions that are known to us, more extensive than the one supplied by Edit16, see Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese,’ ” 65–75. 56  “All’Illustre S. Vittoria digniss. Marchesa di Pescara.” The work—which Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese,’ ” 49–50, demonstrates to have been erroneously attributed to the Minor Friar Cherubino da Spoleto—is entitled: Opera santissima et utile a qualunque fidel cristiano de trenta Documenti di frate Cherubino da Spoliti eremita. Donata p[er] il detto a Ippolito detto Ferrarese: e stampata novamente ad instanza sua, in Bressa (Brescia) per Damiano Turlino, 1538. According to Edit16 there is a single copy in the Biblioteca universitaria in Padua. In previous editions the work was dedicated to the noblewoman from Lucca, Caterina Carminiati (Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese,’ ” 50).

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Figure 3.1 Title page with dedication to V. Colonna and erroneous ­attribution to Cherubino da Spoleto, of Pietro da Lucca, Opera santissima, Brescia, Turlino for Ippolito da Ferrara, 1538 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria).

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Brief reference to both of these works was made by Salvatore Bongi, in his precious Annali of Giolito. With regard to the dedication to Vittoria Colonna, Bongi observed: “Certainly it is truly remarkable that a devout work, dedicated to the most highly respected lady there was at that time living in Italy, should be sold on market stalls in the square alongside the Puttana Errante (The Wandering Whore) by Veniero, which, in exactly the same year, 1538, the charlatan market trader had also had printed on his own account”; but instead of being one of the “signs of the great confusion of customs and opinion that reigned in Italy at the time,”57 it would rather appear to be evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit of Ippolito da Ferrara, who attracted readers by printing the famous name on the cover of his little book.58 Moreover, this is not the only time that the name or the work of Vittoria Colonna appeared in volumes produced by market traders, as pointed out by Rosa Salzberg. Another example is the edition commissioned in Venice by the songster-storyteller Baldassarre Faentino which made a false claim to include work by the famous author; a further case is the choice of letters published by Alessandro Viani in Venice in 1544 for the itinerant pamphlet publisher Antonio “il Cremaschino”: Litere della divina Vetoria Colona ala duchessa de Amalfi sopra la vita contemplativa di Santa Caterina e sopra de la attiva di Santa Madalena non più vista in luce.59 With reference to Colonna’s poems, Bongi highlights twice in his study the existence of “a partial printing of a certain number of verses to be sold on a market stall by a peddler, which we managed to see, though we are not able to recall the title or the date”: later

57  “Certo è cosa singolarissima che una divota scrittura, dedicata alla più rispettata signora che allora fosse in Italia, si vendesse in banco per le piazze accanto alla Puttana Errante del Veniero, che, precisamente in quello stesso anno 1538, il girovago cerretano aveva egualmente fatto stampare per conto proprio”; and also: “indizii della grandissima confusione dei costumi e delle opinioni che allora correvano in Italia.” Both of these quotations are taken from: Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato, stampatore in Venezia (Mansfield Centre, CT, 2000), 2 vols., Limited ed. facsimile of the original, 1st. ed. Rome, 1890–1895, 192a. 58  Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese,’ ” 53, does not rule out the possibility that Ippolito may have met Vittoria Colonna in Ferrara, in 1537–38. 59  Rosa Salzberg, “From Printshop to Piazza: The Dissemination of Cheap Print in 16th Century Venice” (PhD diss., Queen Mary College, The University of London, 2008), http://qmro.qmul .ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1904, 149 and notes 564 and 565. With regard to the Opera nova Salzberg refers to an edition printed probably in 1547, but notes that Bullock: Rime, 281, mentions a previous edition in 1537, once in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, though its whereabouts are now unknown.

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he refers to this publication as being the work of Ippolito da Ferrara.60 Bongi’s testimony, together with what we know of the peddlers’ customs and their patrons,61 and the fact that publications by Ippolito da Ferrara are known to range in length from four to sixteen pages, all lend support to the idea that this must have been a publication with a limited selection of verses. We also know that Ippolito da Ferrara worked with Viotti, both directly and indirectly, in 1540: directly, by commissioning the printing of Lume di marte occorente al arte militare amplissimo con bellissimi exempli,62 and indirectly when he entrusted to Francesco da Prato, a publisher in business in Parma who is believed (see Edit16) to have made use of the printing press of Antonio Viotti, a booklet with two chapters63 by an author with close connections to Vittoria Colonna, Francesco Maria Molza, to whom sonnets A1:88, E:17 and E:18 are dedicated. This, in short, is the evidence that points to the existence of popular channels for the distribution of printed copies of the Rime, running parallel to but for obvious reasons not easily connected to Colonna and the elite circles in which she moved, and also distinct from the publishing initiatives consisting of anthologies, such as the one by Giolito.64 If it were the case that the publication by Pirogallo for Vercelli could be linked to the popular circulation of the book—which uses the name of Vittoria Colonna for promotional p ­ urposes— then the particular motivation adopted in the preface to the princeps would make more sense. Pirogallo seeks to justify the publication, which he claims to be his own initiative, on the basis of the demand for copies of Colonna’s sonnets: Since it is not possible, let us say at one and the same time, to satisfy everybody, in order to avoid the fatigue of writing them out, and the ­disdain of those who refuse to grant access to them, I was bold enough to 60  Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, 376a and note 2, 30b: “una parziale stampa d’alcune di esse fatta per vendersi in banco ad uso di un ciarlatano, da noi veduta, ma di cui non ci è riuscito di ricordare né titolo né data”; “Delle stampe d’Ippolito Ferrarese vedemmo pure un opuscolo contenente poesie di Vittoria Colonna; ma non ne ricordiamo il titolo.” 61  See Salzberg, Ephemeral City, pp. 24–28. 62  Parma, A. Viotto, Hyppolito detto el ferrarese, 1540 (as it appears in Edit16), which survives in only one copy, now in the British Library. 63   Capitulo in lode del Verno: et uno altro capitulo in lode de la torta de M. Francesco Molza opera dignissima e non più vista al presente stampata ad istanza de Hyppolito deto Ferrarese. Stampata in Parma, per Francesco da Prato, 1540, [16] cc. in 8. 64  On this point see Diana Robin, Publishing Women. Salons, the Presses, and the CounterReformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007) and Robin’s contribution in this volume.

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print them, even though this may be in conflict with the wishes of such a great Lady; considering it less of an error to cause displeasure to just one Lady (although one of rare distinction, and great) than to the many men who desire it.65 The same commercial logic comes to the fore in the rather brief title page to the book: Rime de la divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara. Novamente sta[m]pate con privilegio, in which the emphasis is placed on the quality of the writer, who is said to be “divine,” on the innovative nature of the edition, and on the publisher’s legal rights (“privilegio”).66 In addition to this overview of the widespread but unorthodox circulation of the work of Vittoria Colonna, mention should also be made of one individual who almost by definition represents the trait d’union between the literary world and the unscrupulous operators in the publishing trade: Nicolò Franco. The “flagello dei flagelli” was the only intellectual in the period to be openly accused of trading on the good name of Vittoria Colonna. In a well known letter to Pietro Aretino, written between June 1536 and the end of 1539,67 Lodovico Dolce—who himself in 1552 published a posthumous edition of Colonna’s work—denigrated Franco. Dolce accused Aretino’s new protégé 65  “non essendo possibile, si può dire in una istessa ora, di sodisfare a tutti, per fuggire la fatica de lo scrivergli, e lo sdegno di qualunque gli brama a no[n] concedergline, ho preso ardire di mettegli [sic] in istampa, ancora che contradicessi al voler d’una sì gran Signora; stimando meno errore dispiacere a una sola Donna (benché rara, e grande) che a tanti uomini desiderosi di ciò.” The quotations are taken from the dedicatory letter to the princeps, a c. A2r. 66  In the absence of any evidence in support of the idea that the publication is a second edition, this “novamente” should be interpreted as a form of marketing highlighting the novelty of the book, in line with the terms adopted for example by Ippolito da Ferrara in the titles already cited, in which there is frequent use of the expression “Opera nova.” 67  In the letter—cited in Paolo Procaccioli, ed., Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino, vol. 9, vol. 1 of 2 (Rome, 2003), nos. 361, 340–43—Dolce makes explicit reference (line 7), to the stay in Venice of Franco “già tre giorni venuto in questa Città e divenuto familiare di vostra Signoria.” According to the interpretation given to this passage, either literally or as an ironical expression to refer to the parvenu, the letter may be dated to between June 1536, when Franco arrived in Venice, and the end of 1539, the date of the definitive and clamorous rupture in relations between Franco and Aretino, marked by the stabbing of Franco on the orders of Aretino, after which Franco left Venice for good. The first interpretation is supported by Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere. Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome, 1988), 294; and the second by Franco Pignatti, “Niccolò Franco (anti)petrarchista”, in Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria tra Riforma e Controriforma, ed.

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of having “­neither a knowledge of Latin, nor style” (line 46) and of being so ignorant that, in order to stop him from making a fool of himself, his mentor should make sure that his latest work, the Pellegrino (which was in fact never published), never saw the light of day (line 76). Its publication would result in an abysmal reputation everywhere because—in Dolce’s poisonous words—“I am certain that the Charlatans will know him in Venice as they have done in Naples and Rome for his other nonsensical works” (lines 74–76).68 In concluding his masterpiece of invective, Dolce highlights the difference between himself and the person who dared to criticize him by underlining that: When I had my work printed I did not resort to giving the printers, in order that they might print it, the works of another excellent Poet, as may be seen in his case; for when he wants to print his crude works in Latin and the vernacular, he resorts to selling to others that which is not his to sell, that is the sonnets by Pescara. In a few days she will make sure he gets the comeuppance he deserves, that is to be beaten like a donkey, if the matter does not escalate further.69 (lines 93–100; emphasis added) In Dolce’s letter, often cited for other reasons, this passage tends to be interpreted as an indication of the fact that Franco, whose dealings as a plagiarist are now well documented,70 had tried to pass off some of Colonna’s poems as

Antonio Corsaro, Harald Hendrix, and Paolo Procaccioli, Atti del seminario internazionale di studi, Urbino-Sassocorvaro, 9–11 November 2006 (Manziana, 2007), 141. 68  “io m’affido che i Ceretani tosto lo conosceranno in Vinegia come l’hanno conosciuto in Napoli e in Roma in altre sciocchezze.” 69  “Né quando ho voluto farle imprimere m’è stato di mestiero di dar agli impressori, accioché le stampino, l’opera d’alcuno eccellente Poeta, come si vede avenire di lui; che per voler fare istampar le sue goffarie così latine come volgari, gli convien vendere ad altri quello che non è suo, cioè i Sonetti della Pescara. La quale fra pochi giorni gli farà aver il guiderdone che gli si conviene, cioè una soma di bastonate d’Asino degne di lui, se ’l giuoco non passerà a peggio.” 70  This is the case of the short poem on octavos, Il tempio di Amore, published by Franco on his arrival in Venice by Francesco Marcolini, which turned out to be plagiarized from the work of the Neapolitan Iacopo Campanile (see Carlo Simiani, “Un plagio di Nicolò Franco,” Rassegna critica della letteratura italiana 5 (1900): 19–26, and more recently Alessandro Capata, “Nicolò Franco e il plagio del Tempio d’Amore,” Studi (e testi) italiani. Semestrale del Dipartimento di Italianistica e Spettacolo dell’Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” no. 1: Furto e plagio nella letteratura del Classicismo, ed. Roberto Gigliucci (1998): 219–32).

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his own.71 In fact the accusation by Dolce, though no less denigratory, seems to be based on commercial motives: in order to persuade the publishers to print his own work, Franco appears to have “sold” them the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna. Even taking account of the tone of caricature adopted by Dolce, his testimony enables us to hypothesize not only that Franco “was in some way involved either in Naples, or in Venice by way of correspondents, in the manuscript circulation of Colonna’s sonnets”72 but also that he played a role in the unauthorized printing of her work. It is therefore significant that a manuscript has survived, which contains an exchange of invective between Franco and the same Fabricio Luna who, as said, in 1536 printed for the first time a number of compositions by Colonna and who was also directly connected to Colonna’s artistic circle on Ischia.73 Moreover, it is well known that Franco intended to gain access to the intellectual elite of his day by any means necessary: we have evidence of this not only in his letters, the publication of which resulted in a falling out with Pietro Aretino, but also in the dedications to his work, which reveal his interest in people associated with the D’Avalos family, from whom he hoped to gain recognition and benefit.74 The fact that the leading figures of the day attracted the attention of those seeking to advance their own interests and that their reputation could be exploited in unauthorized publications has been demonstrated in the case of various male authors, among them Ariosto. Colonna herself was publicly reprimanded in the famous preface to the Cortegiano in 1528 for exposing Castiglione’s work to the risk of unauthorized publication;75 Pietro Bembo tried rather unsuccessfully to control the unauthorized distribution of his 71  See Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, 21A, and Pignatti, “N. Franco (anti)petrarchista,” 143–44. 72  According to Pignatti, “N. Franco (anti)petrarchista,” 143–44: “fosse in qualche misura partecipe, a Napoli o da Venezia tramite corrispondenti, della circolazione manoscritta delle rime della Colonna.” 73  In ms. V.E. 53 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, in a poetic exchange, Franco defines as “rozzi e incerti” the verses by Luna published in 1534 in Naples by Mattia Cancer, with the title Sylvae, elegiae et epigrammata (no copy is preserved). See Antonio Altamura, “Fabrizio Luna e due invettive inedite di Niccolò Franco,” Samnium 23 (1950): ff. 2–3, 100–105. In his Vocabolario Luna refers to the episode in a light-hearted manner (c. A3v). 74  The Dialogo dove si ragiona delle bellezze (1542) sings the praises of Alfonso d’Avalos and his bride Maria d’Aragona, and through them of Charles V. Further praise, indicating that he was seeking to establish a connection, is to be found in the epistolary exchanges: Nicolò Franco, Epistolario (1540–1548). Ms Vat. Lat. 5642, ed. Domenica Falardo (Stony Brook, NY, 2007). 75  See note 14 above.

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work by using his printing “privilegi”;76 Aretino, both cynical and unscrupulously modern, boasted instead of the exploitation of his image as a mark of his celebrity: For my part I have no doubt that my name will endure, since I am well known even in the brothels. You will hear my name shouted out by the peddlers; you will find my name on the works of those who would otherwise not be able to sell them; you will find my name in lead, copper, silver and gold. For this reason I am well pleased, not in spite of all this, but due to the legends that women poets compose in order to speak ill of me.77 The possibility that the same fate should befall the poems of a noblewoman whose morals and style were deemed to be exemplary is more difficult to accommodate. Is it too outlandish to place Vittoria Colonna’s princeps in “the intricate web of printing and publishing that has still not been fully explored” in Renaissance Italy, in which there were “dozens of booksellers, small businessmen, simple publishers or occasional printers who, at various levels, played a role that was by no means marginal in book production and distribution”?78 Considering the circumstantial evidence surveyed above and bearing in mind that, as shown by recent studies in book publishing, the distribution of books for popular consumption was by no means the exclusive prerogative of market traders since, in the first half of the sixteenth century, this kind of publication was “already so widespread as to constitute the backbone of the book supply in a city shop,”79 the hypothesis does not appear far-fetched. This form of distribution of the work would clearly explain the irritation of Bembo on the one hand, 76  Angela Nuovo, Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata (Milan, 2008), 197–99. 77  “Io per me non dubito che mi si spenga il nome così tosto, poi che anco in chiasso ho un poco di fama. Eccomi esclamato da le voci de i ceretani; eccomi intitolato sopra l’istorie di chi con altra via non le venderebbe; eccomi in piombo, in rame, in argento, e in oro. Onde mi rallegro forte, non pur di questo, ma sin de le leggende che le poetesse mi compongono in male.” Letter to Marcolini in January 1545, in Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. Procaccioli, vol. 3, 138. 78  The two quotations are taken from Petrella, “ ‘Ad instantia d’Hippolito Ferrarese,’ ” 23, who speaks of an “intricato sottobosco tipografico-imprenditoriale, ancora troppo poco indagato” and of “decine di librai, piccoli imprenditori, semplici editori o tipografi occasionali, che, a diverso livello, giocarono un ruolo nient’affatto marginale nella produzione e circolazione del libro.” 79  Nuovo, Il commercio librario, 139–40: “già talmente diffuso da poter costituire il nerbo della proposta libraria di una bottega cittadina.”

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and Colonna’s more aloof reaction on the other. Unlike Aretino, Colonna would have neither any reason to wish for any such publication, nor to especially fear such an uncontrollable means of dissemination of her work, signaling as it did her great popularity. What this might tell us about the author’s involvement in the editing of her work for publication is a matter to which we will return later. To conclude this lengthy analysis of the possible cultural setting of the princeps, we need to focus briefly on the book’s contents. The collected poems include 143 sonnets and 2 canzoni, all previously unpublished, setting aside the three sonnets printed by Bembo and Luna (A1:71, A2:13, E:1). Nine of these poems, however, were falsely attributed to Colonna (see Table 1 in the Appendix). These include three sonnets by Molza (Alma cortese, Anime belle and L’altezza) also present in the Medici Codex L, discovered and described by Domenico Tordi80 and attributed by him to Gualteruzzi, which, on the basis of an intriguing but now invalidated hypothesis by Bullock, would lend support to the claim that for the princeps “Pirogallo may have obtained at least some of his material from Gualteruzzi, either directly or through an unspecified number of intermediaries.”81 In fact, the issue is much more complicated82 and it should be noted that the practice of false attribution, as distinct from that of the plagiarism that was widespread throughout the sixteenth century, concerns a multitude of authors83 and, for this reason, simply confirms 80  Domenico Tordi, Il codice delle rime di Vittoria Colonna marchesa di Pescara appartenuto a Margherita d’Angoulême Regina di Navarra. Scoperto ed illustrato da Domenico Tordi (Pistoia, 1900). 81  Alan Bullock, “Vittoria Colonna and Francesco Maria Molza: Conflict in Communication,” Italian Studies 32 (1977): 41–51, here 49. 82  Not only has the role attributed to Gualteruzzi of “personal secretary” to Colonna been reconsidered (and according to Dionisotti: Appunti, 280, it appears “affatto improba­ bile che a lui solo faccia capo una tradizione manoscritta delle rime stesse”; see also Ornella Moroni, Carlo Gualteruzzi (1500–1577) e i corrispondenti (Vatican City, 1984), 39, note 24, but the connection in terms of the contents of the princeps and L appears to be shaky, since this manuscript consists almost entirely of spiritual poems. Finally, the connection hypothesized by Bullock presents problems of dating that are almost impossible to overcome (Codex L is dated to 1540). With regard to the debatable identification of L with the codex sent by Colonna to Regina Margherita, see the study by Abigail Brundin, who does not agree with the increasingly widespread view that “Se invio di rime alla regina Margherita da parte del Bembo (per interposto Gualteruzzi) vi sia stato non bisogna certo pensare al ms. L, ma sempre a rime esclusivamente spirituali” (Na, 25), thus reopening the debate. 83  Some of these cases were clearly identified by Bullock himself: Alan Bullock, “Vittoria Colonna e i lirici minori del Cinquecento: quattro secoli di attribuzioni contraddittorie,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 157 (1980): 383–402.

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the hypothesis of a widespread and uncontrollable distribution of Colonna’s poems. The texts that are falsely attributed to Colonna do not enable us to ascertain the provenance of the material in the princeps including the numerous unpublished poems—no less than 133—which were first printed in the 1538 edition. This question was not resolved even by the recent discovery of two more manuscripts predating the princeps: a Neapolitan codex dated circa 1531 and a Vatican codex dated October 1536, examined respectively by Tobia Toscano and Fabio Carboni.84 Considering the fact that not even the only other manuscript known to us today that predates the princeps, codex 226 in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma—containing only 59 texts, two of them incomplete—can be identified as the source for the print version, we must instead reflect on another aspect of the question, that is the importance of this collection for the purposes of reconstructing the history of the Rime. The texts that are included in the 1538 edition taken together form a single corpus that is unique in terms of genre, resulting in the immediate and widespread dissemination of Colonna’s work as well as exerting a profound influence on the subsequent presentation of her poetic corpus. For this reason, from here on, we focus on the relationship between later editions and the first edition, because the history of reprintings and reformulations of the princeps determines the form in which contemporary readers became familiar with Colonna’s Rime. In the princeps the majority of the texts, 107 to be precise, fall into the category labeled by Bullock as rime amorose (A), almost a quarter of which in his critical edition he inexplicably places in the subsection A2 disperse (“missing”: though missing perhaps only from the manuscript from which he was working for his critical edition); a further 11 poems are defined by Bullock as Epistolari (E), but were in fact mixed, in various positions from nos. 12 to 127, with other texts, indicating that they were not deemed to belong to a category of their own; finally, 15 poems were classified by Bullock as spirituali (S), and their presence in a collection predominantly made up of love poems contradicts the idea that developed over time, namely that the works of Colonna can be divided neatly into rime amorose and spirituali. First Sparks: The 1539 Editions The impact of the princeps was convincingly compared by Dionisotti, in a now-famous locution, to a “spark falling on straw.”85 The edition that had so 84  See Na*; in 2002 Carboni discovered and described, in “La prima raccolta lirica datata,” Vatican Chigi Codex L IV 79. 85  “scintilla caduta nella paglia”: Carlo Dionisotti, “Letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio di Trento,” in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), 227–54, here 238.

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­disconcerted Bembo was followed immediately by others: as early as 1539 other “sad individuals” (tristi) made Colonna’s poems available “di nuovo ristampate” and “con diligenza corrette” (reprinted again and carefully corrected). To the best of our knowledge four editions appeared in the year after the princeps, three of them—catalogued by Bullock as Rime 1539, Rime-1 1539 and Rime-2 1539—identical in content, though not in format. In this group of three editions, which included the dedicatory letter and all the texts in the princeps, some of the printing errors of the 1538 edition were eliminated, while certain linguistic variations were introduced. With regard to the spurious texts, however, the 1539 editions take a step in the opposite direction: not only do all the false attributions in the princeps reappear in the same places but the novelty that these reprints claim on the title page is also spurious. The so-called unpublished poems, beginning with Quando miro la terra ornata e bella, are in fact the same ones that Luna had printed in his Vocabolario alongside the verses by Vittoria Colonna, though quite properly attributing them to Veronica Gambara, now definitively recognized by critical scholarship as the author. With this apochryphal appendix, the three 1539 editions, confirming a clear tendency to place side-by-side and at times to confuse the work of the two women poets, gave rise to one of the most enduring false attributions in the history of the Rime.86 None of these 1539 editions provides explicit information about the place of printing or the publisher responsible for them: the first of the three, in the order assigned by Bullock (an order that in the absence of more precise data can obviously not be deemed to be chronological) has an anonymous title page, similar in all respects to that of the princeps, and does not present any printer’s mark or name, not even in the colophon.87 This new edition, revised and extended, does in fact correct some of the printing errors, but, above all, shows signs of an attempt to make corrections at the linguistic level, the most significant of which is clearly the replacement in the title page, of “Vittoria” with the form “Vettoria,” which from then on was to appear in all the reprints until the edition with commentary by Rinaldo Corso in 1542.88 86  The false attribution, recorded in a sixteenth-century manuscript (Casanatense D. VI.38, now 897) but corrected by Ruscelli as early as 1553, appears in at least thirty-seven collected editions, at least until 1839. The history of the attribution is examined by Alan Bullock, “Veronica o Vittoria? Problemi di attribuzione per alcuni sonetti del Cinquecento,” Studi e problemi di Critica Testuale 6 (1973): 115–31, here 116–17. 87  The following copies were examined: Chicago, Newberry Library: Case 3A 569; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Misc. 333.13 (now in digital form on Google) and Tordi 624. 88  In the preface by Pirogallo, for example, the following meaningful changes are to be found, not only correcting printing errors (the line in the princeps is given in parentheses): racolti (3) to raccolti; gioueni (6) to giouani; mettegli (13) to mettergli; dinino (19)

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By contrast, the title page of Rime-1 1539 is surrounded by an interesting (woodcut) frame,89 depicting battle scenes in the upper margin, a port city in flames in the lower margin—intended to be Carthage, as shown by the letters CAR—and a warrior on each side that Bullock interprets, I believe correctly, as portrayals of Publius Scipio Africanus and Hannibal, the ruler of Carthage, but whose significance in relation to the contents of the book is not immediately clear, except perhaps as a vague allusion to the military valor of Ferrante d’Avalos. On the basis of this frame, Marion Cox put forward the hypothesis of a possible attribution of the work to the Florentine publishing house of the Giunta heirs,90 without, however, providing any supporting evidence. More recent research by Lorenzo Baldacchini on the printer Zoppino91 has shown that the same xylographic frame was used two years earlier for Tre primi canti di battaglia del divino Pietro Aretino. Nuovamente stampati, et istoriati, printed in Venice by Niccolò d’Aristotile, also known as Zoppino, in September 1537 (a work that in octaves five to nine was dedicated by the author to “Reale Alfonso” D’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto). In the absence of evidence to the contrary and despite the frequent sharing of materials between the printers of the era,92 to diuino; ponno (19) to pono; da la (25) to dalla; sicutade (27) to sicurtà; la qual (30) to laquale; Percio, che (33) to percioche; obligati (36) to obbrigati; da poi (41) to dopoi; A la (41) to Alla. In addition, there is a substitution, in v. 2 of the second sonnet Per cagion d’un profondo alto pensiero, of the Latinate form “obietto” with “oggetto” and in v. 5 of “Lo Spirto” with “Il spirto.” 89   The following copies were examined: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Magliabechiano 3.6.202 and Tordi 719. In addition to the description by Bullock, this edition, based on the copy in the British Library, is described by E.M. Cox, “The Earliest Editions of the Rime.” 90  E.M. Cox, “The Earliest Editions of the Rime.” 91  Lorenzo Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria in volgare. Niccolò Zoppino, da Ferrara a Venezia: annali (1503–1544) (Manziana, 2011). 92  As noted by Luca Degl’Innocenti, “Testo e immagini nei continuatori dell’Ariosto: il caso uno e trino della Marfisa di Pietro Aretino illustrata coi legni del furioso Zoppino,” Schifanoia 34–35 (2008) [2010]: 193–203, here 194, “Il riciclaggio del costoso materiale silografico allo scopo di ammortizzare l’investimento sostenuto per la produzione o l’acquisto dei legni è un costume arcinoto della tipografia antica ed interessa fin da subito la categoria dei libri cavallereschi.” This valuable contribution, confirming with new evidence the importance of the role of Zoppino in the distribution of books of chivalry, traces the path of the woodcuts used to illustrate editions of Furioso produced by Zoppino, but unfortunately does not provide any information about the frame in the title page that is of interest to us. Note 2 states that: “Per inciso, dopo il 1536 non ci risulta più alcuna attestazione del set ariostesco originario.” Whereas this is the case with the internal illustrations in the text, the situation is different with regard to the title pages: those of Morgante and Furioso appear to be different from those of Marfisa from which the frame in Colonna’s

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the hypothesis that the work may be attributed to Zoppino93 appears to be plausible. This is corroborated by the correspondence between the characters in the title page, by the analogous use of the adjective “divino” and also by the tendency of the publisher to print materials almost in the form of a book series ante litteram by means of certain typographical features, above all the use of the woodcut frame.94 The decorative elements, incongruous in an edition of the rime amorose of Vittoria Colonna but clearly well suited to celebrating the Marfisa battles of Aretino, find their raison d’être in the reuse of materials by the same printer. Compared to the princeps, this edition shares most of the corrections and variants to be found in Rime 1539, but not all of them.95 Finally, the third edition of this group (Rime-2 1539),96 presents a plain title page and is the only one which, in some at least of the surviving copies, bears a printer’s mark on the last page: the toro passante (running bull), which in this variant together with the initials M and S surmounted by a cross characterizes the printed editions of the publisher and bookseller Marco Salvioni. Active in Venice between 1539 and 1548, Marco senior, “il libraro” (the bookseller), probably died in 1573,97 but at least in 1560, was residing in Ancona,

Rime is derived. With regard to the reuse and exchange of the woodcut frames, see the emblematic case illustrated by Neil Harris, “Nicolò Garanta editore a Venezia 1525–1530,” La Bibliofilia 97 (1995): Disp. II, 99–148, here 121–23. 93  Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria in volgare, nos. 395, 310. 94  Luigi Severi, “Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri.” Niccolò Zoppino tra libro volgare, letteratura cortigiana e questione della lingua (Manziana, 2009), 336–340. 95  With regard to the exemplary cases indicated above, the form “ponno” (19) in the princeps remains unchanged here, and the form “oggetto” from Rime 1539 is also present here, but with the addition of an “i” (“oggietto”). This prevents us from cataloguing it as simply a B variation of this edition, as would appear to be the case in Edit16 (though the notation is ambiguous). 96  The following copies were examined: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Rinasc. C 329 and Tordi 715; Chicago, Newberry Library: Case PQ4620.R56 1539 no.1 (without the cover bearing the printer’s mark). In addition to the description by Bullock, this edition, based on the copy in the British Library, is described by E.M. Cox, “The Earliest Editions of the Rime.” 97  The hypothetical date of death, 14 May 1573, is recorded and discussed by Filippo M. Giochi and Alessandro Mordenti, Annali della tipografia in Ancona 1512–1799 (Rome, 1980), note 30, lii, which provides a particularly useful account of the Salvioni family on liii–lviii. See also Rosa Marisa Borraccini, La mobilità dei mestieri del libro nello stato pontificio, in Marco Santoro and Samanta Segatori, eds., Mobilità dei mestieri del libro tra Quattrocento e Seicento, Convegno internazionale, Rome, 14–16 March 2012 (Pisa and Rome, 2013), 299– 318, here 312.

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Figure 3.2 Title page of Tre primi canti di battaglia del divino Pietro Aretino, Venice, Zoppino, 1537. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

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Figure 3.3 Title page of Vittoria Colonna, Rime [Venice, Zoppino,] 1539. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

a city where his family was to set up an important printing business. During the years in which Colonna’s Rime appeared, he made use of various printers (Curzio Troiano di Navò and Venturino Ruffinelli, but also Bernardino Vitali and Agostino Bindoni, whose presses adopted a printer’s mark almost identical to that of Rime-2 1539.98 If the identification by Edit16 is correct, however, Giovanni Marco Salvioni mainly collaborated with the Venetian printing press

98  In addition to the mark reproduced here, with the addition of a tree to the left, the printer’s mark with a running bull is to be found also in the variant form with three ears of corn on the back of the animal; see Edit16: CNCM 2434 / U963.

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of Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio, two of whose editions bear the same mark as that which appears on the edition of Colonna (see Figure 3.4).99 The data available to us relating to this group of 1539 editions provide confirmation of the favorable reception of the princeps, which gave rise to immediate imitations, and also allow us to hypothesize about the rapid circulation

Figure 3.4 Marco Salvioni’s mark in Rime-2 1539 (by Niccolini da Sabbio?) (Edit16: CNCM 2433). By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

99  See also Inter omnes. Contributo allo studio delle marche dei tipografi e degli editori italiani del XVI secolo (Rome, 2006), fig. 569, 285.

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of at least three successive editions, immediately reproduced with minimal variations and presumably always in the area of Venice. In light of this success one can explain the appearance, again in 1539, of an edition consisting of new material not included in the previous group of texts, one that finally includes not only the name of the author, but also that of the publisher. This edition is Rime-3 1539, published in Florence “in the month of July,” with the wording at the end of the book “Stampati [sic] ad instantia de Nicolo d’Aristotile, detto il Zoppino, da Ferrara” (c. F7v) (Printed by order of Nicolo d’Aristotile, also known as Zoppino, of Ferrara). If our hypothesis is well founded, then this would be, after Rime-1 1539, a second edition by the same publisher, active between 1503 and 1544, who relied on the services, among the various printers with whom he seems to have worked, of Nicolini da Sabbio, who may have printed Rime 2–1539 for Salvioni. Compared to the other editions of the same year—that we assume to be prior to this one—Rime-3 1539 includes some new unpublished works and in addition, in keeping with common practice of the period,100 a note boasting about the correctness of the materials presented, all of them “con massima diligentia revisti” (revised with the utmost diligence). An examination of these two aspects confirms that, although not to the extent stated on the title page, the second Zoppino edition maintains its promises. It presents a number of spiritual sonnets never “in luogo alcuno per l’adrieto stampati” (elsewhere previously printed), even if of the sixteen unpublished works specified in the title, in actual fact six correspond to texts already published starting with the princeps, which are simply reprinted here, representing the first significant intervention on a macrotextual level in relation to the collection.101 Leaving the order of the texts unaltered, Zoppino assigns paramount importance to the new group of poems, since the new texts not only appear at the beginning of the book but the title also states that they belong to a specific genre: the “spiritual” poems. With regard to linguistic corrections, the editorial process adopted by Zoppino is based on Giovanni Francesco Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua, a less inflexib­le 100  Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna, 1991; reprinted Ferrara, 2009). 101  The following ten compositions were previously unpublished (here I indicate the position in the collection published by Zoppino and, in parentheses, the corresponding r­ eference in Bullock): 2 (S2:22), 3 (S1:55), 4 (S1:54), 5 (S1:83), 6 (S1:124), 7 (S1:10), 10 (S2:11), 11 (S1:8), 12 (S1:92), 14 (S1:18). These compositions are also included and indicated as innovations compared to the princeps in ms. A in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (mark Y 124 sup., dated to around 1540). The following poems were placed in a different order, but they were not previously unpublished: 1 (S1:5), 8 (S1:7), 9 (S1:93), 13 (S1:51), 15 (S1:111) e 16 (S1:100).

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­ roponent than Bembo of the fourteenth-century Florentine model. In the p editions for which he was responsible, Zoppino reaches an interesting compromise between the precepts of linguistic formalism on the one hand and an open and dynamic concept of literature, in line with the tastes of the wider public, on the other, laying down “within certain limits the graphic, phonetic and morphological elements, without detracting from the lexical, stylistic and rhetorical variety of the result.”102 This compromise had been the distinguishing characteristic of his publishing since 1525.103 The placing of the rime spirituali as an incipit that deviates from the sequence of the conversio, or transition from worldly to spiritual love in the Petrarchan mode, and the corrections carried out on the texts thus converge to provide a version of the Rime that does not fully conform to the cultural and lexical canon established by Bembo in the period. This should not come as a surprise, considering what we now know about this editor. “Nicolò, who?,” asks Neil Harris, as if in jest: Who? might well ask those used to thinking of Italian Renaissance printing in terms of Aldus, and yet more Aldus. Just imagine a publisher/printer as opposite as possible, who never published in Greek, very little in Latin, and whose vernacular output experimented with every variety of literary Italian circulating before Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua imposed the suffocating dominion of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Imagine a publisher who on only four occasions employed folio format . . ., who chose octavo for some ninety per cent of his publications, but at the other end of the scale only ventured three times into aristocratic duodecimo. . . . Imagine a publisher who concentrated on short, often ­attractively illustrated books, avidly read at the time, which therefore survive in only a few copies, very often only one. Imagine all these things and you have Niccolò Zoppino, enormously successful, with a gigantic catalogue, which . . . remains in part uncharted.104 Niccolò di Aristotile de’ Rossi, also known as Zoppino (the cripple), this antiAldo of Renaissance publishing, a citizen of the same city in the same period as the Ippolito whose work was discussed extensively in relation to the princeps, 102  Severi, Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri, 27–28: “entro certi limiti l’aspetto grafico, fonetico e morfologico, senza nulla togliere alla varietà lessicale, stilistica e retorica del suo risultato.” 103  Ibid., 16–17. 104  Neil Harris, “Alle origini dell’editoria volgare. Niccolò Zoppino da Ferrara a Venezia. Annali (1503–1544). By Lorenzo Baldacchini,” The Library 14 (2013): 213–17.

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adopted an approach to publishing that was “a kind of rival to that of the courtly theoreticians, and more in general to the literary movement not in alliance with Bembo.”105 He cultivated direct links with the world of the charlatans, to the point that he himself was considered to be one.106 In short, he brings us back to that milieu in which literature was disseminated among the people with editions designed for large-scale distribution that we have indicated as the soil in which the edition of 1538 was rooted. In the course of his long-running partnership with the ballad singer Vincenzo di Polo (between 1513 and 1524 the two of them “published no fewer than 140 editions”)107 Zoppino plied his trade in various Italian cities.108 Not only in Venice, but also in Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Pesaro, and Rome he carried on his publishing business. In Ravenna and Faenza we know that he owned bookshops, though we do not have any evidence of trading in Parma, where the princeps was published, but there seems no reason to rule out such a possibility a priori. Zoppino was also “one of the first proponents of the Reformation, but without overexposing himself, as in the following decades he managed to continue to enjoy the support of the ecclesiastical authorities, from whom he had no difficulty ­obtaining

105  Severi, Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri, 15: “una sorta di controfaccia editoriale della riflessione dei teorici cortigiani, e più in generale del fronte letterario non allineato a Bembo.” 106  This is shown in the well-documented, long-lasting, and fruitful collaboration with Vincenzo di Polo (Ascarelli-Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia, 351–52), who stated in his will that he was a bookseller (bibliopola) and songster (cantor circumforaneus). See Giuseppe Rossini, “Ulteriori notizie sulla cartiera, i librai e le prime stampe fiorentine,” Studi romagnoli 7 (1956): 283–92, here 287 and more recently Lorenzo Baldacchini, “Cantastorie-editori nell’Italia del Cinquecento” in Mobilità dei mestieri del libro, 219–30 as well as Massimo Rospocher, “In Vituperium Status Veneti: The Case of Niccolò Zoppino”, The Italianist 34 (2014): 349–61. There is evidence of his own promotion of his reputation as a songster, about which there was debate in the nineteenth century which has still not been definitively concluded, regarding whether this might be the same person as “quel Zoppino che quando canta in banca tutto il mondo corre a udirlo,” cited in the first day of the Dialogo between Nanna and Pippa by Aretino, whose work Zoppino was the first to publish. This matter is dealt with in the introduction to Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria volgare, 1–6. Recently the question of whether this is actually the Zoppino mentioned in the work of Aretino has been reconsidered with new evidence by Luca degl’Innocenti, Il caso uno e trino, 197, note 1. 107  Baldacchini, “Cantastorie-editori nell’Italia del Cinquecento,” 227. The editions are listed by Baldacchini, Alle origini dell’editoria volgare, 1–161, 438. 108  According to Norton, Italian Printers 1501–1520, 164, the numerous places of printing indicated in his editions show that he was a “wandering bookseller.”

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publishing rights and licenses.”109 It was this intrinsic relation between “literary breaking-and-entering” and “religious breaking-and-entering”110 that laid the ground for his publishing business and, as a result, it was not by chance that he established himself as one of the leading publishers, both in terms of the timeliness of his publications and the number of reprints, in the distribution of the poems of Vittoria Colonna. Before concluding this chapter dedicated to the first impact of the princeps, we need to consider a matter previously set aside and to examine, with a commentary on the developments in the exchange of letters between Bembo and Gualteruzzi, the outcome of their intention to produce a new edition of the Rime in a proper form that would be worthy of the nobility of the author. In a second letter to his friend, Bembo expressed his satisfaction that Vittoria Colonna had agreed to make available to Gualteruzzi “a copy of her poems to be printed there [in Rome]. They were not to be concealed and neglected, but to be gilded and embellished in order for them to be circulated.”111 This was the permission Bembo was aiming for in order to produce the envisaged edition, to be drawn up under the supervision of the author herself. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this edition was ever produced nor—due to the close alignment between the macrotext of the princeps and the 1539 editions, and in particular due to the constant presence of misattributed poems, the number of which tended to increase over time rather than diminishing—is it possible to establish a correspondence between this project and the editions of the Rime that were to appear in print the following year. However, on the basis of the recent critical edition of Bembo’s letters, there is a need to correct the current interpretation of this negotiation, according to which Colonna went back on her word, after three or four days, as regards the “half-promise made to Gualteruzzi and indirectly to Bembo.”112 The misunderstanding derives from a variant reading of the manuscripts. The letter of 11 December 1538 addressed to Gualteruzzi113 by Bembo was as follows (italics added to highlight the critical passage in manuscript Vat. Barb. Lat. 5693): “I have received the cherished l­ etter 109  Ibid., 16–17: “uno dei primi protagonisti della Riforma, ma lo è senza esporsi troppo, riuscendo a mantenere nei decenni successivi la fiducia delle autorità ecclesiastiche, dalle quali non avrà difficoltà ad ottenere privilegi e licenze.” 110  Severi, Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri, 84: “effrazione retorica ed effrazione religiosa.” 111   B embo: Lettere, no. 1989, 158: “l’essempio delle sue rime da imprimerlo costì. Non erano da esser nascoste e tralasciate, anzi da esser dorate e ingemmate e lasciate così uscire a dimostrarsi.” 112   D ionisotti: Appunti, 276: “mezza promessa fatta al Gualteruzzi e indirettamente al Bembo.” 113   B embo: Lettere, no. 1991, 159.

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from the Marchioness of Pesc[ara]. But I cannot accept that on any account Her Excellency should fail to provide me with a copy of the Rime for the purpose of printing them there [in Rome]. And I beg you in any case to ensure they will be printed, properly and in a gracious manner.”114 Dionisotti, however, in his transcription wrote “darvi l’essempio” (to give you a copy) thus interpreting the passage as a refusal to provide Gualteruzzi with the copy that had just been promised to him. The original, by contrast, is a reference to Bembo (“darmi d’essempio”) (provide me with a copy) and, as a result, unless we assume the author to be of an extremely capricious disposition, we can hypothesize that Colonna, though intending to entrust the manuscript to Gualteruzzi for the purposes of producing an edition under her supervision, continued, in keeping with her position stated in the previous letter, not to wish to give in to Bembo’s request (as mentioned above, she had not sent a reply to his letter, to the point that he was afraid that his “letter had not been delivered into her hands”).115 In this case, what Bembo “could not agree to under any circumstances” (“non può consentire in alcun modo”) is the fact that Colonna should refuse to give him a manuscript that she seemed willing to entrust to others. Furthermore, if as early as 1538 Colonna appeared to be seriously intending to produce a printed edition of her work, then there is a need to reconsider the claim—based on indirect testimony not always of a disinterested kind and, as I argued at some length in a previous study,116 distorted by the powerful presupposition that a writer who is a woman should necessarily comply with the principles of modesty—according to which Vittoria Colonna was fiercely opposed to the circulation of a printed edition of her work. We should therefore suppose not only that certain editions, especially those prepared “by men extremely close and devoted to her” should not see the light of day “if her refusal were peremptory”117 but also that Colonna had a much greater awareness of the extent to which her work was distributed in print that we are given to believe. Interesting enough, there is earlier evidence of an attempt to print her sonnets, which Colonna opposed, in a letter from Benedetto Varchi to Francesco Maria Molza 114  “Ho avuta carissima la lettera della Marchesa Ill. de Pesc[ara]. Ma non consento che per conto alcuno S.S. manche di darmi d’essempio delle sue Rime da fare imprimere costì. E voi priego che in ogni modo le facciate venir corrette e belle in luce” (ivi). 115  Ibid., no. 1967, 140–42, here 141: “che la lettera non le sia venuta alle mani.” 116  Tatiana Crivelli, “ ‘Mentre al principio il fin non corrisponde.’ Note sul Canzoniere di Vittoria Colonna,” in Marco Praloran, 1955–2011. Studi offerti dai colleghi delle università svizzere, collected by Simone Albonico, ed. Silvia Calligaro and Alessia Di Dio (Pisa, 2013), 129–50. 117   D ionisotti: Appunti, 276: “da uomini vicinissimi e devoti a lei”; and “se il rifiuto di lei fosse stato perentorio.”

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of November 1537:118 only a few months later, her resistance was broken by the princeps, ­demonstrating the impossibility of controlling the spread of print. We can only speculate about the reasons for which, in the end, the revised edition of the Rime was not published by the author. The most plausible hypothesis is the one outlined by Dionisotti,119 that Colonna, who was now intending to compose poetry that was essentially of a spiritual nature, was no longer interested in managing the distribution of a collection which represented an earlier phase of her literary work, rather than her present or future interests. In this way, however, Colonna deliberately leaves the floor open to the popular distribution of her collected works and, in weighing up the success of the publishing initiatives of Zoppino and Bembo’s ambitions, she finally acts to the disappointment of the latter.

II: 1540–1547 and Posthumous Editions

“A Changed Style”: The Editions Published between 1540 and 1543, the Commentary by Rinaldo Corso (1542, 1543, 1558), and the Valgrisi Edition (1546) of the Rime spirituali The Editions Published between 1540 and 1543 In Part 1 we have seen that the addition of material displayed in the title page of Rime-3 1539, giving pride of place to the “sonetti spirituali,” highlights for the first time this specific element in Colonna’s poetry, aligning it with a new way of arranging the poems. As already noted, this was a clever move by the publisher, which should, however, be placed in the context of ­growing a­ ttention to topics relating to the intense religious debate taking place in Italy in the period. In Colonna’s case, the process of selection seen here was to lead ultimately to the production of an autonomous collection of works by the author that were more explicitly associated with religious topics. In the space of a few years this resulted in the editions by Rinaldo Corso in 1542–1543 and Vincenzo Valgrisi in

118  “I sonetti della signora marchesa, la quale io visitai a questi giorni passati e molto mi dimandò di vostra signoria, si stampariano a questi giorni, ma il Tasso [Bernardo] gli lo scrisse e ella, collo scrivere a non so chi di qua, fece sì che si lascierranno stare, come per ventura si farebbe delle vostre stanze” (Benedetto Varchi, Lettere 1535–1565, ed. Vanni Bramanti (Rome, 2008), 61). I thank Veronica Copello for this precious information. 119  Ibid., 277.

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1546, both consisting exclusively of texts on religious topics.120 Colonna’s influence in creating a model for the genre of spiritual poetry, far from diminishing in the second half of the sixteenth century, seems to have survived the suspicions surrounding the author due to her close relations with Reformation thinkers, to the extent that, according to Virginia Cox, “here, unusually, rather than a genre of writing established by male authors in which women belatedly sought to negotiate themselves a place, we have one in which a woman, Vittoria Colonna, was widely acknowledged to have had a founding role.”121 As testified by Gabriele Fiamma in the 1570 dedication of his Rime spirituali to Marcantonio Colonna, “it is well known that the eminent Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, was the first to write poetry on spiritual matters in a dignified manner.”122 If we give credence to the testimony of Carlo Gualteruzzi, then we can date the period of Colonna’s so-called “spiritual conversion” and the first phase of religious poetry to the spring of 1536: “the Lady Marchioness of Pescara has dedicated her life to God, and does not write about any other matter, as you may seen from the enclosed sonnet, which I am sending you to show you the change in style.”123 Any such “change in style” was not a brusque change in direction, however, but only the intensification of predispositions and attitudes that were already present both in Colonna’s poetry and in her personal life experience. As has been rightly noted by Amedeo Quondam, in fact, even the structure of a book of Petrarchan poems requires, albeit in the absence of a separate section or a specific heading, the presence of: 120  On the question of why Colonna served as a model for this literary genre, see the detailed analysis by Veronica Copello, “ ‘Con quel picciol mio Sol, ch’ancor mi luce.’ Il petrarchismo spirituale di Vittoria Colonna,” in Quaderni ginevrini d’Italianistica (2014): 93–127. 121  Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 56. On the new style of Colonna’s spiritual poems see: Giovanni Ferroni, “Bernardo Tasso, Ficino, l’evangelismo. Riflessioni e materiali attorno alla ‘Canzone all’anima’ (1535–1560)”, in Rinascimento meridionale: Napoli e il viceré Pedro de Toledo (1532–1553),  Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Naples, 22–25 October 2014), ed. Encarnación Sánchez Garcia (Naples 2016), pp. 253–319; Veronica Copello, “La tradizione laudistica in Vittoria Colonna”, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 28 (2015), pp. 261–308. 122   Rime spirituali del R.D. Gabriel Fiamma, Canonico Regolare Lateranense esposte da lui medesimo, in Vinegia, presso a Francesco de’ Franceschi Senese, 1570: “è noto a ciascuno, che l’Illustr. Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, è stata la prima, c’ha cominciato a scrivere con dignità in Rime le cose spirituali.” 123  The letter from Gualteruzzi to Cosimo Gheri is dated 12 June 1536. See Ornella Moroni, Carlo Gualteruzzi (1500–1577) e i corrispondenti (Vatican City, 1984), 65: “la signora Marchesa di Pescara ha rivolto il suo stato a Dio, et non scrive d’altra materia, sì come per l’inchiuso sonetto potrà vedere, il quale le mando per mostra di questo suo cangiato stile.”

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a group of poetic texts that are in fact “spiritual”: due to the fact that they are capable of dealing with not only the canonical themes of love and human relations, but also the no less canonical themes of religious introspection, a conscientious examination of one’s errors and sins, of the desire for conversion, with the related prayers to God, Christ, the Virgin, the Saints, and so on. Even though these topics appear only rarely in the body of a book of poetry (canzoniere?), as a self-standing section, with a specific heading.124 If we accept that from 1536 Colonna increasingly dedicated herself to writing spiritual verse, at the same time we should also note that the circulation of her poems diversified more slowly; and, in this case, the comments that apply to the circulation of the printed editions also apply to the distribution of her manuscripts.125 The Zoppino edition of 1539 (Rime-3 1539), with its focus on a spiritual theme, marks an important turning point in the tradition of the Rime. The astute publisher immediately diversified the supply of books in this direction, with a new edition entrusted to the Venetian printer Comin da Trino: Rime 1540. Rime 1540 included, in addition to the materials mentioned above (including the poems by Gambara), an even larger number of spiritual sonnets than the previous edition and, for the first time, the short poem in terza rima (with a 124  Amedeo Quondam, “Note sulla tradizione della poesia spirituale e religiosa (parte prima),” in Paradigmi e tradizioni (Rome, 2005), 127–211, here 172: “un gruppo di testi di rime che sono di fatto anche “spirituali”: perché sanno trattare, oltre ai canonici temi d’amore o di relazione, anche gli altrettanto canonici temi di introspezione religiosa, di esame di coscienza dei propri errori o peccati, di ansia di conversione, con relativa preghiera a Dio, Cristo, Vergine, santi, eccetera. Ancorché questi temi di rado risultino profilati, nel corpo del libro di rime (canzoniere?), come sezione autonoma, con specifica intestazione.” 125  With regard to the Vatican Chigi L IV 79 described by Carboni and compiled in October of the year of Colonna’s “conversion,” of the 109 compositions only 8 are spiritual works; the princeps in 1538 includes 18 out of 145; codex A of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Y 124 sup., c. 1540) contains, in addition to those of the princeps, the 10 spiritual sonnets already published by Zoppino (see below); the one housed in Bologna (Biblioteca Universitaria, 828 [1250], post 1540) includes only one additional composition compared to princeps; the one in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale II IX 30, from c. 1541, does not include any further items, from this point of view, compared to the princeps, and a similar pattern may be seen for all the manuscripts of any importance that have been handed down to us and that can be dated prior to 1542–43, with the exception of the Vatican Codex V, dedicated to Michelangelo, the compilation of which may be dated to the early 1540s and which, as in the case of the editions from the same period published by Corso and Valgrisi, is dedicated exclusively to the spiritual poems, as stated in the title.

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three-line rhyming scheme) Trionfo della croce di Cristo (S2:36),126 highlighted on the title page as the most important innovative element: Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna de’ Pescara inclita Marchesana, novamente aggiuntovi XXIIII. sonetti spirituali, e le sue stanze ed uno trionfo de la croce di Cristo non più stampato con la sua tavola.127 A closer examination of the text of the “table” highlighted on the title page, which is placed at the end of the volume (cc. G5v–G6r), reveals that this is a subject index of a specific selection of spiritual sonnets: not the unpublished ones, but those printed on pages 7 to 13, all of which are present in Rime-3 1539. An analysis of the structure of the macrotext reveals the publisher’s working method: having decided to allocate more space to the spiritual component of Colonna’s work, he returned to the previous edition to extrapolate a number of other texts and, along the lines of Rime-3 1539, placed them at the beginning of the volume, grouped with the spiritual sonnets that had already been identified as such as well as with other unpublished materials. It is the hitherto unpublished works that are placed at the beginning of the volume: the tercets of the Trionfo are preceded by an engraving of the Crucifixion. Eleven hitherto unpublished sonnets follow,128 and subsequently twenty-four spiritual sonnets that, although already printed in Rime-3 1539, are presented rather incongruously on the title page as if they were the only new additions. As noted, these works are placed in a prominent position in the table at the end of the volume: this probably indicates two different stages of printing, and the need for an addition, while already in press, detailing the works that really were unpublished. An innovation can be noted in relation to the reuse of material, which concerns the dispositio, or textual arrangement. Of the group of twenty-four texts reprinted from Rime-3 1539, only the first sixteen were placed at the beginning of the volume, in an identical sequence, in the previous edition, 126  Rosa Casapullo, “Per una lettura del Trionfo di Cristo di Vittoria Colonna,” in Storia della lingua e storia, ed. Gabriella Alfieri, Atti del II Convegno ASLI, Catania, 26–28 October 1999 (Florence, 2003), 337–55. 127  The following copies were examined: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Tordi 724.1 and Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, PQ4620.A17 1540. A copy in the British Library is described by E. Marion Cox, “The Earliest Editions of the Rime of Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara,” in The Library. A Quarterly Review of Bibliography, ser. 4, vol. 2 (1922): 266–68. The Florentine copy is bound with a collection of poetry without a title page (A1 missing) and without a colophon (A8 missing), containing poems attributed to Petrarch and taken from “un anticho libro,” including the correspondence in verse with Giacopo de Garatori da Imola and with Ser Diotisalvi di Pietro da Siena. 128  See cc. 2v–7r: 2 (S1:6), 3 (S2:5), 4 (S1:52), 5 (S1:13), 6 (S1:50), 7 (S1:53), 8 (S1:132), 9 (S1:84), 10 (S1:98), 11 (S1:57), 12 (S1:12).

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whereas the other eight were picked out from another part of the text, where they occupied, in the same sequence, positions 146 to 153.129 A result of the reordering of poems is that certain poems that were previously considered to be rime amorose move into the spiritual section (see Table 2 in the Appendix) and—confirming the publisher’s tendency to highlight a literary genre that was increasingly in vogue—clearly demonstrate the fine line between compositions based on introspection (Bullock’s rime amorose) and those of religious inspiration. After concluding the section of spiritual poems—once again, as in the case of the 1539 edition, clearly signposted with the wording: “Finisse gli Sonetti Spirituali” (Here end the Spiritual Sonnets) (c. B5r)—Rime 1540 then reproduces the same textual sequence as Rime-3 1539, with the exception of the series of eight sonnets which, as noted above, is moved forward. The emphasis on the spiritual component of Colonna’s poetry is for the first time in this edition supported by iconographic materials. A devotional image in an oval on the title page portrays a woman in a nun’s habit, kneeling before a crucifix, with her right hand placed on a book and her left hand on her heart. This image is clearly intended to strengthen the spiritual vocation of the volume, rather than constituting an attempt to portray the likeness of the author, a supposition reinforced by the fact that the same image is reused for at least one other work that has nothing to do with Colonna, containing songs of praise to the Madonna.130 A second engraving with a simple design, which ­follows on the verso of the same page, portrays Christ on the cross and, at the foot of the cross, Mary and St John. According to Severi, in this edition, a radical contrast is to be seen between the popular aspect and poetic dignity: whereas the inclusion of the rather coarse woodcuts is intended to convey the impression of a humble vocation, sending a message to women readers who were particularly attracted by devotional images, 129  The reference is to S1:1 (with the incipit, Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne, changed from the Valgrisi edition in 1546 into: Poi che ’l mio casto amor gran tempo tenne. The two versions were later often published as if they were two different sonnets), S1:2, S2:1, E:17, A2:28, S1:114, S1:95, S1:115. 130  Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College Library. Department of Printing and Graphic Arts. Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts. Part II: Italian 16th Century Books (Cambridge, 1974), nos. 132, 188, identifies it as an illustration of c. B8v of Confitemini della Madonna con le letanie (Venice: Francesco del Leno, 1560), and describes it as a “nun at prayer.” See Victor Masséna Essling, Les livres à figures vénitiens de la fin du XVe siècle et du commençement du XVIe (Mansfield, CT, 1995), pt. 2. vol. 2, no. 2350, undated Sessa edition; Max Sander and Carlo Enrico Rava, Le livre à figures italien depuis 1467 jusqu’à 1530. Essai de sa bibliographie et de son histoire (Milan, 1941–69), 6 vols., 2, 732.

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the reorganization of the texts with new additions, and the placing of the Triumph of the Cross at the beginning, suggest rather a level of editorial zeal aimed at palates that are not so coarse, nor reliant on little religious books for mass consumption, and in this case won over also by the quality of the literary language of the author, for which the celebrated name of Colonna serves as a guarantee.131 Judging by the history of the publication, traceable via the surviving copies of this 1540 edition that suggest a sizeable print run, it must have been a considerable success. Bullock (261–62) cites two editions by Zoppino, Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542 (see figures 3.7 and 3.8),132 which on examination turns out to be a reprint, with a new date, of the edition of 1540 (see figures 3.5 and 3.6).133 Rime 1540 was further used as a model for the edition printed in Venice in 1544 by “Bartolomeo detto l’Imperadore e Francesco Vinetiano,” a printing press active between 1543 and 1556, of which Edit16 lists sixty-eight titles, some produced in collaboration with the so-called Guadagnino (Giovanni Andrea Valvassori).134 131  Luigi Severi, “Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri.” Niccolò Zoppino tra libro volgare, letteratura cortigiana e questione della lingua (Manziana, 2009), 343: “si radicalizza il contrasto tra aspetto popolare e dignità poetica: se le rozze silografie aggiunte [. . .] devono accentuare l’impressione di una mira umile, ammiccando soprattutto al pubblico femminile, particolarmente attratto da opere devozionali, la riorganizzazione dei testi e le nuove aggiunte, con la collocazione iniziale del Triompho della croce, valgono invece a suggerire un’idea di zelo editoriale buono per palati anche meno grossi, non disavvezzi alle operine religiose di ampio consumo, e in questo caso conquistati anche dalla qualità della lingua letteraria d’autore, a garanzia della cui altezza bastava il celebrato nome della Colonna.” 132  The wording on the title page is simply Soneti, the woman is younger, the crucifix is more detailed, and the date on the title page, 1540, does not match the one on the colophon, 1542. The copy examined was the one in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence: Tordi 725, found to be identical in content to Rime 1540. 133  The date on the title page bears a correction with the addition of two characters to the printed Roman numeral MDXXXX (thus accounting for the discrepancy between the two ways of writing the date: on the title page MDXXXXII, and in the colophon, MDXLII). As a result it is impossible to be certain, as argued by Monica Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘Canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna,” Italique I (1998): 35–45, that both editions were printed in 1542. The copy of Rime 1542 examined was the one in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence: Palat. E. 6. 6. 61. 134  The copy examined was the one in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence: Tordi 674.1, which reproduces Rime 1540 with only minor textual variations in the titles and in certain graphical features (for example, in many cases the accents on the preposition a have been eliminated).

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Figure 3.5 Title page of Rime 1540. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

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Figure 3.6 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime 1540. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

The two-part model proposed by Zoppino, and the emphasis on the spiritual theme introduced by the images, are features that are immediately emulated: in 1542, another Venetian edition sees the light of day, this time on the initiative of Giovanni Andrea Valvassori, also known as Guadagnino (the money-spinner),135 and his brother Florio. Rime-1 1542 (to borrow Bullock’s notation system) once again presents the same contents, this time 135  The nickname “Guadagnino” is found for the first time in the Vita del glorioso apostolo Joanni printed by Zoppino on 4 March 1522 and bearing his monogram (Antonio D’Atri, La vita del glorioso apostolo et evangelista Ioanni composta dal venerabile patre frate Antonio de Adri de l’ordine de frati minori della obseruantia (Venice: Nicolò Zoppino e Vincentio compagno, 1522).

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Figure 3.7 Title page of Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

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Figure 3.8 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime-1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

accompanied by new, more elaborate illustrations, which reflect the skill of the artist responsible for the artwork in the new edition.136 The same title as is used for the Zoppino editions is surrounded here by a woodcut frame, at the base of which is the printer’s mark consisting of the initials Z (Zuane, regional variant of Giovanni), A and V, within a heart surmounted by a double cross.137 136  The copies examined are the two in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence: Guicc. 21. 4.5 and Tordi 709. 137  Edit16: CNCM 1360 / U313.

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Figure 3.9 Title page on f. 55r of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

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Figure 3.10 Engraving on f. 1v of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.11 Printer’s mark on f. 55r of Rime-1 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

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At the end of the volume the printer’s mark appears again, this time in a variant form flanked by a castle with three towers inside a coat of arms.138 The engraving of Christ on the cross is replaced by a more elaborate image of his Descent from the Cross. The same frame is used by the Valvassori family on several occasions: not only in the reprint of the same edition produced by Giovanni Andrea in 1546 (Rime 1546) but also in at least six other volumes, both Latin and vernacular, produced between 1538 and 1555, including an edition of Arcadia by Sannazzaro. Active in Venice from the 1530s, Valvassori—whose work has not yet been fully explored—not only printed about 80 volumes,139 including no less than five illustrated by Ariosto,140 but also distinguished himself as an engraver.141 138  Edit16: CNCM477 / Z219. 139  Edit16 states that he used above all the printing presses of Giovanni Griffio the elder and Giacomo Piccaglia. His heirs took over the firm and continued to do business “al segno dell’ippogrifo” until 1584. See also Ester Pastorello, Bibliografia storico-analitica dell’arte della stampa in Venezia (Venice, 1933), 220; Enid T. Falaschi, “Valvassori’s 1553 illustrations of Orlando Furioso: The development of multi-narrative technique in Venice and its links with cartography,” La Bibliofilia 77, no. 3 (1975): 228–51; Fernanda Ascarelli and Marco Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (Florence, 1989), 363; the entry by Gianvittorio Dillon in the Dizionario enciclopedico dei pittori e degli incisori italiani, 11 vols. (Milan, 1983), vol. 11, 264–65. 140  See proceedings of the final conference for the PRIN 06 project, L’Orlando Furioso e la sua fortuna figurativa at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, held on 21–22 May 2009: Lina Bolzoni, Serena Pezzini, and Giovanna Rizzarelli, eds., Tra mille carte vive ancora: ricezione del Furioso tra immagini e parole (Lucca, 2010). 141  We are in the presence of a “personaggio piuttosto eclettico: capostipite del ramo veneziano di una prolifica e longeva famiglia di origine lombarda, risulta attivo dapprima come incisor figurarum—come si definisce in una prima versione del suo testamento— poi come editore di carte geografiche, libraio, stampatore e tipografo, attività, quest’ultima, che esercitò dal 1530 circa (dal 1537 in associazione con i fratelli) e fino al 1572” (Ilaria Andreoli, “Dürer sotto torchio. Le quattro serie xilografiche e i loro riflessi nella produzione editoriale veneziana del Cinquecento,” Venezia Cinquecento 19 [2009]: 5–135, here 81). His name is listed in the corporation of Venetian painters (Elena Favaro, L’arte dei pittori in Venezia e i suoi statuti [Florence, 1975], 143), but his paintings have not survived. With regard to the production of woodcuts for which he is better known, there is a problem that still has not been fully resolved arising from the fact that there are two other artists of the same name. See the entry “Vavassore, Zoan Andrea” by Luigi Servolini and Tammaro De Marinis in the Enciclopedia Treccani, vol. XXXIV (1937): 1055–56; Victor Masséna Prince d’Essling and Charles Ephrussi, “Zuan Andrea et ses omonymes,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1891): I, 401–45 and II, 225–44; Lamberto Donati, Del mito di Zoan Andrea e di altri miti grandi e piccoli (Florence, 1959); Andreoli, “Dürer sotto il torchio,” note 94, 128.

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Rime 1–1542, the reprint by Guadagnino dated 18 January 1542, is therefore the fourth identical volume in two years, clearly demonstrating the far-sightedness and understanding of popular taste of Niccolo Zoppino, who with his edition laid the ground for the recognition of the corpus of spiritual verses as a distinct body of work, highlighted in both layout and illustrations, and thus paved the way for a separate edition of Colonna’s rime spirituali, which was shortly to appear on the market. The Commentary by Rinaldo Corso, 1542, 1543, and 1558 The first edition dedicated exclusively to Colonna’s spiritual poetry is a publication of considerable interest: it is not only the first in this literary genre, but also, and above all, the first sixteenth-century collection of poems to be published along with a critical commentary. Critical analysis had never been applied to the printed work of a living author before this date, particularly a woman poet:142 commentaries on the poetry of Berardino Rota and Luca Contile were not published until 1560, a commentary on Giovanni Della Casa appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century and a commentary on Bembo did not see the light until 1729.143 The original textual analysis of Colonna’s poems was carried out by a young scholar, Rinaldo Corso, who, unlike the characters encountered so far, frequented the milieu close to the poet: the court (Correggio), and the Academy associated with it,144 of Veronica Gambara. Based on the dedication, almost certainly drafted with a view to

142  I am aware of commentaries with an analysis of individual texts such as the one that may have inspired Corso, by Alessandro Piccolomini on a sonnet by Laudamia Forteguerri, published in Bologna in 1541; in this connection see Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), 106–8. 143  Giacomo Moro, “Le commentaire de Rinaldo Corso sur les Rime de Vittoria Colonna: une encyclopédie pour les ‘très nobles Dames,’ ” in Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire, France / Italie (XIVe–XIVe siècles), ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani and Michel Plaisance (Paris: 1990), 195–202, here 196. The author makes reference to Dionisotti: Appunti, 282. 144  See Michele Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, vol. II (Bologna, 1927), 94–96. On page 96 Maylender distinguishes the Accademia di Correggio “da quei convegni effimeri di parassiti che infestavano le Corti degli altri Principi. L’Accademia di Veronica Gambara era composta di filosofi, teologhi e medici, i quali ne’ loro rami di sapere esponevano, in determinate ore ed alla presenza della Principessa, i frutti dei loro studi, venendo poi ampliate le dissertazioni accademiche da Veronica stessa.” As further evidence of Corso’s connection with this circle, a Prince of the Accademia di Correggio was Giambattista Lombardi, professor at the University of Ferrara, whose niece was married to Corso.

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presenting and discussing it at a meeting of the Academy,145 the p ­ ublication may be dated to the summer of 1541. At that time Corso (1525–1581?), who appears to have had links with circles expounding Reformation theology,146 was only sixteen years old but already an active protagonist in the intellectual life of Correggio.147 The favorable response to his commentary was seemingly a factor in his decision to print the work immediately, dedicating it Alla molto Illust. Mad. Veronica Gambara da Correggio et alle donne gentili (To the Illustrious Lady Veronica Gambara of Correggio and to noble ladies), with the title Dichiaratione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della diuina Vittoria Collonna [sic] marchesa di Pescara. The “second part,” but the first to be published, which was, according to Corso, sent out without its “sister” (“senza la sorella in luce,” c. A1r), is dedicated to “sonetti spiritali da lei [Colonna] fino adesso composti, ed un Trionfo di croce” (spiritual sonnets composed thus far by her, and a Triumph of the Cross). The volume contains thirty-six texts in all, the same number as in the previous editions, hence, as we will demonstrate later on, not the same ones. Corso’s edition of the spiritual poems—a recent discovery, with which critical scholarship is only now coming to terms148—was 145  Moro, “Le commentaire de Rinaldo Corso,” 197. The practice of writing commentaries on contemporary authors was also found in other academies. According to Giorgio Masi, “Politica, arte e religione nella poesia dell’Etrusco (Alfonso de’ Pazzi),” in Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria tra riforma e controriforma, 301–58, here 330, Colonna’s poetry was commented on at the Accademia degli Umidi, or Fiorentina, founded in 1540. With regard to sixteenth-century commentaries on texts, see the essay by Franco Tomasi, “Strategie paratestuali nel commento alla lirica del XVI secolo (1540– 1560),” in Le soglie testuali: apparenze e funzioni del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento— Textual Thresholds: appearances and functions of paratext in the 16th century, ed. Philiep Bossier and Rolien Scheffer (Manziana, 2010), 21–60. 146  He was the author of the dedicatory epistle, dated 3 February 1545, written for the Italian edition but misattributed to another author, of the Vorrede auf die Epistel S. Pauli an die Römer by Luther: Prefatione del reverendiss. cardinal di santa Chiesa. M. Federigo Fregoso nella pistola di san Paolo a’ Romani (Venice, 1545), discussed by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Le traduzioni italiane di Lutero nella prima metà del Cinquecento (Florence, 1977), 85. 147  This was to be followed by his appointment to the post of Giudice e priore del Collegio dei notai, but he continued to take an interest in literature and the arts, as shown by the fact that he is said to have founded, after the death of Veronica Gambara, the Accademia dei Filogariti (see Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, II 426). In his later years, after a marriage that ended in tragedy, he dedicated his life to the Church, pursuing a brilliant career at the end of which he was appointed bishop of Strongoli in Calabria, probably in 1581; see Giovanna Romei, “Corso (Macone), Rinaldo,” in Dbi XXIX (1983): 687–90. 148  See Sarah Christopher Faggioli, “A 16th-Century Reader and Critic of Vittoria Colonna: Rinaldo Corso’s 1543 Commentary on Her Spiritual Rime” (PhD diss, University of Chicago,

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printed for the first time in 1542. Of this edition only one copy has survived. Now housed at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples, unfortunately the last leaf is missing, along with the colophon.149 Much better known, and better preserved, is the edition rearranged and printed in Bologna the following year by Giovanni Battista Faelli.150 Without attempting a comparison of the two editions (an interesting task, that has been extensively dealt with in the work of Christopher Faggioli),151 it is worth noting, along with Giacomo Moro, that in this volume Corso provides a detailed analysis of Colonna’s work. In line with the tradition of commentary on the great authors of vernacular poetry, he adopts an encyclopedic approach intended to explain “the totality of the concepts contributing to the definition of literary civilization and the culture to which the poems under discussion belong.”152 The commentator summarizes the contents of each poetic text and clarifies the essential data concerning their production (the occasion on which the text was composed, the intended readers, and so on) and then goes on to illustrate the contents in 2014) and, by the same author, the article: “Di un’edizione del 1542 della Dichiaratione di Rinaldo Corso alle rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 634 (2014): 200–21. 149  In keeping with the nomenclature used by Bullock and adopted here, we shall label this edition, unknown to the editor of the modern critical edition, Rime-2 1542. Christopher Faggioli attributes this edition to the press of Bartolomeo Bonardo and Marc’Antonio da Carpi, who were active in Bologna in those years, mainly on the basis of an analysis of the font. This is a less than convincing argument, since the font under examination, an italic Colonia 100, was actually widely used: it is to be found, for example, in the edition of the princeps published in Parma (see note 36 above). 150  Edit16 lists nine copies in Italy and Christopher Faggioli refers to two others in the United Kingdom (at the British Library and the University of Manchester). Reference is made to this edition both by Bullock, and later specialist studies, e.g. Bianco: “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘Canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna.” See also: Monica Bianco, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Studi di filologia italiana 56 (1998): 271–95. 151  See ch. 3, 10–11, where the structural differences are identified as follows: number of pages (152 vs. 118, due to the different font); elimination of a note to the reader; repositioning of the prelude and the dedication; inclusion of two sonnets by Colonna (instead of 35 there are now 37); further development of the poetic exchanges between Corso and M. Rizzo Merli da Correggio. 152  Moro, “Le commentaire de Rinaldo Corso,” 198, which draws parallels between this structure and that of Il Petrarca colla spositione di Misser Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, stampato in Venegia per Ioan. Antonio di Nicolini ed i fratelli da Sabbio, 1533: “tout l’ensemble de notions qui concourent à la définition de la civilisation littéraire et de la culture auxquelles appartiennent les poètes commentés.”

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detail while providing a paraphrase and numerous digressions with elaborate comments on the lexis and the syntax, highlighting the mastery of grammar of the future author of Fondamenti del parlar toscano.153 The impressive attention to linguistic detail and encyclopedic knowledge displayed by the commentator do not appear to have been fully appreciated in the history of the reception of the Rime.154 However, these characteristics enable Corso’s commentary to have a profound impact on tendencies that were already evident in Colonna’s work, drawing them together and allowing them to take shape. In particular, the Esposizione detects and emphasizes three features: the propensity, clearly expressed from the first Zoppino edition, to give greater visibility and autonomy to the corpus of spiritual poems; the importance of Colonna’s poetry for the formation of a “modern” linguistic canon of vernacular poetry, as seen since the inclusion of Colonna’s texts in the Vocabolario published by Luna; and the role of Colonna’s poetry in providing a model for a new readership and for other emerging female authors. In all three cases Corso’s work presents a significant advance: in the first case, it establishes the possibility for the effective autonomy of a corpus of spiritual poetry, including an autonomous printed edition;155 in the second, it offers a careful analysis of the language and style of Colonna’s work, providing examples to act as models;156 in the third case it explicitly places Colonna’s poetry in a literary milieu directly concerned with the production and appreciation of poetry, in which cultivated women play a leading role: from the dedication to Veronica Gambara, to the “donne gen153  In this domain it is the most significant work by Corso. After the first unauthorized edition, dated 1549, many others were published, until the definitive version of 1564 (Rome, Blado). On the importance of this work in defining the grammar of vernacular Italian, see Ciro Trabalza, Storia della grammatica italiana (1908; repr. Bologna 1963), 125–27. 154  As mentioned by a sceptical reviewer of Colonna’s poetry in the 19th century, some considered it appropriate that a poet who was “poco più che mediocre” should have “Rinaldo Corso per lungo e noiosissimo commentatore” (Giuseppe Bustelli, “La vita e la fama di Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista bolognese di scienze, lettere, arti e scuole I (1867): 349–59, 471–90, here 483). 155  Chiara Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 73 (1999): 669–96, in connection with the Petrarchan “specularità tematica delle rime della ‘Prima’ e della ‘Seconda Parte’ ” observes (note 28, 678): “Della tradizionale bipartizione del Canzoniere petrarchesco la raccolta allestita dal Corso [. . .] mantiene anche la proporzione quantitativa: le rime della ‘Prima Parte’ occupano infatti il 75% della totalità della raccolta, come le liriche ‘in vita’ di Laura coprono il 73% delle rime sparse del Petrarca.” 156  In connection with the role of Vittoria Colonna as a linguistic model, see the contribution to this volume by Helena Sanson and related bibliography.

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tili,” identified on the title page as readers, who provide the justification for the commentary. The most ­significant development, however, is Corso’s direct intervention in the composition of the macrotext, as he clearly states that he has altered the sequence of texts available at the time and published the spiritual poems in a volume dedicated entirely to the genre. In the dedication to Gambara, dated 15 February 1542, Corso explains (c. A4r and v) that he has postponed the publication of the rime amorose because that part of the commentary was likely to be “a great deal more difficult and obscure than this part.”157 The postponement did not result, as far as we know, in a separate publication of the first part, giving rise to serious doubts about whether it ever existed.158 Nevertheless, in 1558, sixteen years after Faelli’s edition and eleven years after Colonna’s death, Corso’s commentary was published in its entirety in Venice by Girolamo Ruscelli (Rime 1558). This edition, which survives in a significant number of copies159 and is divided into two distinct parts, seems to have been prepared from an original manuscript containing the commentary on the complete work. As noted by Ruscelli (cc. *iiijv and *vr, unnumbered): Just a few days ago the Illustrious Count Giovan Battista Brembato presented me with a gift of the poems of Her Illustrious Excellency Signora Vittoria Colonna, God rest her soul, Marchioness of Pescara, with a commentary by His Excellency Signor Rinaldo Corso of Correggio, and the same Count told me that he had received this copy after beseeching the Illustrious Signora Veronica Gambara, since by chance the said Signor Rinaldo had presented it to her for her contemplation, and had given her a handwritten copy.160 157  “di gran lunga più, che questa, difficile, et oscura” (ibid.). 158  The most interesting argument appears to be the one—following from Riccardo Finzi, Un Correggese del Rinascimento: Rinaldo Corso (1525–1582) (Modena, 1959)—put forward by Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle rime di Vittoria Colonna,” note 21, 675, based on the statements made in the sonnet Mentre che voi sotto ’l gelato Arturo, addressed by Corso to Girolamo Berbena in 1546, in which the author expresses his regret that he is unable to conclude the work. 159  According to research by Christopher Faggioli, at least sixty-five copies are still in existence. I consulted, and classified as identical, four copies housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence (Tordi 740, Nencini 1.5.4.39, Nencini 1.8.3.46, Rin. C. 327) and the copy housed at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago (PQ4620 1558 Rare Bk). 160  “mi fu questi giorni a dietro dall’Illustre S. Conte Giovan Battista Brembato fatto dono delle rime dell’Illustrissima ed Eccellentissima Sig. Vittoria Colonna, di santa

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In order to appreciate the importance of Girolamo Ruscelli (1518–1566)—“one of the most powerful cultural figures and publishing managers, for whom the title of ‘poligrafo’ that is ritually assigned him is in no way adequate”161—we refer to a major conference recently held in Viterbo, which cast light on his oeuvre from numerous perspectives.162 Ruscelli, who arrived in Venice in 1549, where he appears to have been close to the circle of Aretino, “in addition to his professional activity as a reader-publisher was engaged as a literary adviser to important public figures from outside Venice, starting with the Duke of Ferrara”;163 above all, he seems to have been particularly adept at interpreting the demands of the public and the publishing trade of the era. In producing editions of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Ariosto, he played a fundamental role in developing new linguistic practices by producing editions in the vernacular, which were undoubtedly important but at the same time attracted fierce criticism.164 His opponents included Lodovico Dolce who, with characteristic verve, defined him “in order, as an alchemist, pedant, mendacious translator, charlatan” and finally “ruffiano” (bootlicker).165

memoria, Marchesana di Pescara, con l’esposizione dello Eccellen. Sig. Rinaldo Corso da Correggio, del quale libro il detto Conte mi dice che egli con molti prieghi ebbe copia dalla Illustrissima Signora Veronica Gambara, avendolo per aventura il detto Signor Rinaldo così esposto à contemplazione di lei, ed a lei donatolo scritto a penna” (ibid.). 161  Amedeo Quondam, Petrarchismo mediato: per una critica della forma ‘antologia’ (Rome, 1974), 221: “una delle più forti personalità di organizzatore culturale e di manager editoriale, cui certamente non competono in alcun modo quelle descrizioni di ‘poligrafo’ ritualmente assegnategli dai repertori.” 162  Paolo Marini and Paolo Procaccioli (eds.), Girolamo Ruscelli dall’accademia alla corte alla tipografia. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Viterbo, 6–8 October 2011 (Manziana, 2012). With regard to earlier bibliography, see: Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere. Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome, 1988), 33–34; and Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna, 1991, reprinted Ferrara, 2009), 241–97. 163  Paolo Procaccioli, “ ‘Costui chi e’ si sia’. Appunti per la biografia, il profilo professionale, la fortuna di Girolamo Ruscelli,” in Girolamo Ruscelli dall’accademia alla corte alla tipografia, 13–75, here 32: “oltre all’attività professionale del correttore-editore svolgeva quella di consulente librario per importanti personalità non veneziane, a cominciare dal duca di Ferrara.” 164  See Chiara Gizzi, “Girolamo Ruscelli editore del Decameron: polemiche editoriali e linguistiche,” Studi sul Boccaccio XXXI (2003): 327–48. 165  Procaccioli, “ ‘Costui chi e’ si sia,’ ” 34–35 and 44–45. The quotation is from 45: “nell’ordine, alchimista, pedante, traduttore mendace, ciarlatano.”

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We might also note the certain but thus far not well documented proximity of Ruscelli to the religious circles sympathetic to the Reformation.166 In addition, Ruscelli, it has been claimed: also championed a form of editing that tended to meet the new readers’ desire for refinement, by producing erudite editions of the classics enriched with ever more extensive paratexts and critical commentaries (especially with a linguistic focus). All the critical embellishments that so pleased the common reader, even if the educated, proud of their selfreliance as readers, turned up their noses.167 Ruscelli was in the habit of proposing so many changes in the texts he edited that, following Procaccioli, we could say that he claimed for himself the status of co-author. Corso’s commentary fully meets the criteria of innovation and the principles of high-level dissemination that attracted Ruscelli’s attention. Moreover we know that there were strong bonds between the two men, who were almost the same age,168 even though, as we are told in the preface ‘To the Reader’, the proofs of the Ruscelli edition were never seen by Corso.169 On closer examination and from a linguistic point of view, Ruscelli’s edition is significantly different from the two previous editions of Corso’s commentary, which, as Monica Bianco has shown, refer to Rime 1540 (or else to the 166  The conclusion currently agreed on by critics is that “il letterato viterbese non era estraneo ad ambienti eterodossi, anche se sono rimaste ben poche tracce di queste frequentazioni” (Lodovica Braida, Libri di lettere: le raccolte epistolari del Cinquecento tra inquietudini religiose e buon volgare [Rome, 2009], 155). On the importance of Corso’s commentary in Reformation circles, see Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the spiritual poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), in particular ch. 6: “Colonna’s Readers: The Reception of Reformed Petrarchism.” 167  Procaccioli, “ ‘Costui chi e’ si sia,’ ” 39–40: “[Ruscelli] fu anche un campione di quell’editoria che tendeva a rispondere alle esigenze di affinamento del nuovo lettore proponendo edizioni di classici arricchite di corredi sempre più folti e di sussidi critici (specie in direzione linguistica e erudita). Tutti quegli ammennicoli esegetici che tanto piacevano all’acquirente comune, anche se i dotti, fieri della loro autonomia di lettori, arricciavano il naso.” 168  See the letter by Sebastiano Erizzo cited in Franco Tomasi, “ ‘Distinguere i ‘dotti da ­gl’indotti’: Ruscelli e le antologie di rime,” in Girolamo Ruscelli dall’accademia alla corte alla tipografia, 571–604, quote from 598. 169  Bianco, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” 283–84, argues that this is a cautious statement aimed at protecting Corso from possible accusations of unorthodoxy, as he was already suspected by the Inquisition for his preface to the Lutheran letter cited above and for having praised Bernardino Ochino.

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editions derived from it) “not only in their lections, but in two cases even in the printing errors.”170 An examination of the variants between the 1543 edition of Corso’s commentary (the spiritual poems) and the second part of the complete edition of 1558 shows a major overhaul of the text—carried out through the expunging of certain elements (such as the name of Bernardino Ochino), substitutions (often with the addition of numerous citations of sources), corrections and additions (“representing by far the greatest number of changes”) that took the form of “explanations, clarifications, etymologies”—as well as the elimination, which we can confidently attribute to Ruscelli himself, of certain Latinate spelling conventions.171 Similar findings emerge from a linguistic study of the texts included in Corso’s commentary on the rime amorose. As Tobia Toscano has demonstrated, the texts are derived directly from the princeps, as “there are many significant places in which the 1558 edition agrees with the 1538 edition in terms of errors and particular lections,”172 but at the same time they are the fruit, as shown by a number of the lezioni,173 of a linguistic reworking, by whom remains uncertain. Whereas in terms of linguistic usage the reference manuscript appears to have been subject to a series of corrections over the years, by Corso ­himself, by Ruscelli and also by other readers mentioned in the preface of the 1558 edition—what appears to be unaltered is the textual order adopted by the commentator. Apart from the addition of two sonnets absent from the first

170  Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘Canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna,” 38: “non solo nelle lezioni, ma in due casi financo nei refusi.” 171  Bianco, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” 290: “rappresentano di gran lunga la maggioranza degli interventi”; and “precisazioni, chiarimenti, etimologie.” 172  “molti e significativi sono i luoghi in cui l’edizione 1558 e l’edizione 1538 concordano in errori e lezioni particolari”; the quotation and the list of the loci are in Tobia R. Toscano, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle rime amorose di Vittoria Colonna. In margine a una sconosciuta raccolta napoletana di sonetti in morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos,” in Letterati corti accademie. La letteratura a Napoli nella prima metà del Cinquecento (Naples, 2000), 25–84, here 78–80. Instead of extrapolating from this concordance the idea that the princeps derived from a manuscript associated with the court of Veronica Gambara (ibid., 76–77), I am inclined to believe, for the reasons discussed in the first part of this study, that it was more likely that Corso’s edition derived from the printed edition. The integration of the previously unpublished sonnet, Di novo il Cielo de l’antica gloria (E:13), dedicated to Veronica Gambara, may be explained by the acquisition, while work was in progress, of an original copy of this single text. 173  Toscano, “Appunti sulla tradizione delle rime amorose di Vittoria Colonna,” 80.

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edition,174 the same sequence of spiritual poems appears in both the 1542 and 1543 editions, and then reappears in the integral, 1558 edition. Rinaldo Corso was the first editor who, faced with the need to decide on the order of his commentary, explicitly raised the question of the book’s thematic cohesion. Since he was working within a tradition that, as we have seen, made no claim to reflect the intentions of the author, he prepared his edition taking liberties with the original and adjusting it according to a plan that, Bianco argues, is based on the 1525 edition produced by Vellutello. The latter had reworked the macrotext of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, “creating a new sequence of texts inspired both by the ‘internal’ diachrony and by Petrarch’s biography.”175 Whereas in previous editions Colonna’s poems were predominantly organized according to the usual subdivision by metrical form (sonnets, canzoni and stanzas, with the addition in 1540 of the capitolo ternario Trionfo della Croce), Corso’s commentary, while maintaining the metrical division within the two sections, reorganizes the material to emphasize the thematic links that are of greatest interest to the volume’s editor. From the first edition, he makes plain his intentions in this regard (Rime-2 1542, c. Br and v): For some readers it may have seemed better to place the Triompho before the Sonnets [. . .]. However, in our opinion, as it is best for the Triompho to be placed at the end of all the Poems, we have (appropriately, as we believe) placed it at the end: although [. . .] each composition in itself would not exist without being dependent on the others [. . .]. However, it is a greater source of satisfaction for the reader, as they are collected together, to find them placed in order, and continually explained. This is what we [. . .] have done at least with regard to the Sonnets. But just as we have completed the first part with the two Canzoni, due to the fact that they are different from the Sonnets in their manner of expression, so also

174  This is a reference, as explained by Corso himself in a note to the reader, to Pende l’alto Signor nel duro legno and to Quasi gemma del Ciel l’alto Signore (later included at nos. 22 and 27, cc. G1v e H1v–H2r, in the 1543 edition), expunged “per non averne potuto la vera lettion sapere” (Dichiarazione 1542, c. A1v). 175  Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna,” 37: “instaurando una nuova progressione dei componimenti ispirata insieme alla diacronia ‘interna’ e ai dati della biografia petrarchesca.” In addition to the clear division into two parts, the model adopted by Vellutello also sets aside—and there is an astonishing analogy between this procedure and the one adopted in the modern critical edition of Colonna’s Rime by Bullock—a handful of epistolary compositions, considered to be off-topic and moved to the end of the volume.

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due to their different manner of expression, we have placed the Tercets after the Sonnets.176 The 1558 integral edition with commentary contains in the first part 106 love sonnets, 12 epistolary verses and two canzoni, followed in the second part by thirty-seven spiritual sonnets and a “capitolo ternario.” The Ruscelli edition thus includes and comments on (with a few exceptions; see Table 3 in the Appendix),177 almost all the texts in print by that date and in so doing places them in “thematically linked groups,” while underlining in the commentary the connections “not only among the various groups but also between the individual texts” via a series of cross-references, which are aimed at constructing a coherent macrotextual discourse.178 This order is maintained in reprints of the Esposizione, in which, from 1543 on, the editor includes two texts (S1:6 and S2:11) previously omitted “due to the fact that we were not aware of their true lection” (Rime-2 1542*, c. A1v). These observations concerning the ordering of texts in the corpus of spiritual poems also apply to the comparison between the princeps and the section dedicated to love poetry in Rime 1558: in this case, the macrotextual order which, apart from minor additions and repositionings, continues practically unaltered from the first edition to 1541 (when Corso composed his Esposizione) and also appears largely unaltered in the edition published before Ruscelli’s 176  “Sarebbe ad alcuni forse miglior ordine parso, anteponendo il Triompho a gli Sonetti [. . .]. Nondimeno, parendo a noi, che meglio quel Triompho tutte le sue Rime chiuda, l’abbiam (quanto al parer nostro convenevolmente) posto nel fine: lasciando stare, che [. . .] ciascuna composizione per sé non istea senza avere da altra dipendenza [. . .]. È tuttavia quasi maggior sodisfacimento di chi legge, poi che raccolte sono, trovarle per ordine poste, e continouatamente dichiarate. Il che noi [. . .] abbiamo alquanto nei Sonetti osservato. Ma sì come la prima parte abbiamo chiusa con le due Canz. per esser dai Son. differente maniera di dire, così in questa per essere differente la maniera de Terzetti dall’ordine de Sonetti, quelli abbiam posto innanzi” (ibid.). 177  The table illustrates the reordering carried out by Corso to compose the section of spiritual sonnets in Rime-2 1542, his first publication, and shows that, apart from nos. 8, 21, 28, and 34, present in Rime 1540 but not placed by Zoppino among the spiritual poems, these are the same texts that were placed in the section of ‘spiritual’ poems by Zoppino, but in a new order. 178  See Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna,” 40–42, the source of the citations, which at 40 states: “Sempre attento alla coerenza del discorso, il Corso cerca, per quanto possibile, di appianare eventuali incongruenze col ricorso a formule di occupatio quali ad esempio: ‘non è Vittoria nostra, come ad alcuni forse parrebbe, contraria a quel che abbiamo noi detto nel precedente sonetto (E 1558, p. 403).’ ”

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Rime 1552, is completed reworked. With hardly any exceptions,179 none of the poetic sequences printed hitherto is maintained intact: what is more, the individual texts are arranged according to a highly original sequence that serves the macrotextual purposes of the author of the commentary, whose textual analysis, according to Gorni, mainly provides the “consistency of the canzoniere”180 to Colonna’s work. The effects of the macrotextual structure on textual interpretation are discussed in depth in the contribution to this volume by Maria Serena Sapegno,181 but from the point of view of the publishing history as well as in connection with the possible production of a new critical edition of the Rime, two aspects of this textual reorganization should be given due consideration. First, from a historical perspective the macrotext produced by Corso is a one-off in the history of the printing and publishing of Colonna’s oeuvre. Although this underlines the objective importance of this edition, at the same time it also testifies to its deficiencies as a model. Second, the young commentator’s sensitivity enabled him to recognize and formalize aspects of Colonna’s poetry that were already evident in its prior reception, casting light on these aspects and rendering them more durable. From 1542 on it would become standard practice to publish self-standing volumes of Colonna’s spiritual poetry or to divide comprehensive editions into two sections based on theme, to present Colonna’s poetry as a recognized linguistic model and finally to praise Colonna’s role as a foundational figure and as a model for women writers.

179  This is a reference to the following three groups of compositions in the princeps: nos. 38 (A1:88), 39 (Alta fiamma amorosa; et ben nate alme), and 40 (E:18), which in Rime 1558 are at nos. 114, 116, and 117; nos. 64 (E:26) and 65 (E:25), in Rime 1558 at nos. 107 and 108; nos. 87 (A1:51), 88 (A1:68), and 89 (A1:70), in Rime 1558 nos. 102, 101, and 103. The same applies to one sequence of spiritual verses and two canzoni: nos. 132 (S1:1), 133 (S1:2), and 134 (S2:1) are to be found in Rime 1558 at nos. 122, 123, and 124); nos. 144 (Spirto gentil, che sei nel terzo giro) and 145 (A1:89) are to be found in Rime 1558 at nos. 118 and 119. 180  Guglielmo Gorni, “Le forme primarie del testo poetico,” in The Letteratura italiana, dir. da Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. III: Le forme del testo, tomo I: The Teoria e poesia (Turin, 1984), 439–518, here 514. 181  A different, but highly stimulating gendered reading of the amorous poems in relation to the Petrarchan canzoniere is to be found in Shannon McHugh, “Rethinking Vittoria Colonna: Gender and Desire in the Rime Amorose,” The Italianist 33 (2013): 345–60, who at 346 argues: “She (Colonna) presents a male body that is concrete yet adaptable and a female body that experiences desire. In so doing she rejects traditional gender dichotomies, redeveloping the unstable male-female spectrum she already finds present in Petrarch into an idealized and novel union of feminine and masculine virility.”

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The Valgrisi Edition (1546) of the Spiritual Poetry The tendency to read Colonna’s spiritual poetry as a discrete corpus, which Corso understood so well, found its best expression in the production of the edition published in Venice in 1546 by Vincenzo Valgrisi (Rime-1 1546) immediately reused in three other sixteenth-century editions.182 On pages 2v and 3r the publisher presents Colonna’s spiritual poetry as an exalted model to be emulated in both themes and style, and underlines the exceptional nature of the work and its author: a female, who deals with spiritual matters in such elegant, noble and divine poetry, and who is by no means inferior to other poets neither in intelligence nor eloquence. Moreover, being so superior in the quality of the topics and in the choice of her subjects, just as heavenly things are superior to earthly ones, it may be said without hyperbole that her poetry compared to the rest shines no less brightly than the moon among the minor stars.183 In contrast to previous editions, the majority of the material published by Valgrisi was unedited: only 35 sonnets had previously been published, whereas no fewer than 145 poems were completely new to print publication. Valgrisi’s source is not known to us, yet there is no doubt about the similarity of his e­ dition to the manuscript dedicated by Colonna to Michelangelo (V2), where the 182  With the 1548 edition, Valgrisi produced an identical reprint (at the Venetian printing press of Comin da Trino, who collaborated with many local publishers) and an expanded edition with thirty-three compositions (Rime 1548 and Rime-1 1548), as well as a reprint in 1550, at cc. 49r–104v, of the anthology of spiritual poems published in Venice by Giovanni de’ Franceschi (Rime 1550). On these points, see Bullock: Rime, 264–65. Edit16 lists the surviving copies of each one of these titles. For this study reference was made to Rime-1 1546: University of Chicago and Regenstein Library: HQ1420.W64 Reel 23 n. 144 and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Palat. 12.3.4.32 e Tordi 1142; Rime 1548 (Comin da Trino): Chicago, Newberry Library: Case Y 712.C7182 and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Tordi 739; Rime-1–1548: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Tordi 1147; Rime 1550: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Palat. 12.2.1.39. In addition to the description by Bullock, in relation to Rime-1 1548 it should be noted that the reprinted text contains a number of variations and a minimal alteration to the order of poems, with the inversion of the two sonnets on page 67. 183  “una femina, la quale tratta le cose spirituali con una poesia tanto leggiadra, nobile, e divina, che non essendo ella inferiore a gli altri poeti né d’ingegno, né di eloquenza, ed essendo tanto superiore nella qualità della materia, e del soggetto, quanto sono più alte le cose celesti delle terrene, si può dir senza iperbole, che la sua poesia fra queste altre non altrimente risplende, che si faccia la luna fra le minori stelle” (ibid.).

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author was directly involved in the production, as has been demonstrated.184 In fact, the Valgrisi edition, while making available a much larger number of texts, includes 93 of the 103 sonnets contained in the Vatican manuscript and shares a number of its characteristics “due to the presence of the opening and closing markers represented by the sonnets Poi che ’l mio casto amor gran tempo tenne (n. 1, S1:1)185 and Temo che ’l laccio ov’io molt’anni presi (n. 103, S1:179).”186 This replication led Bullock to hypothesize that both works descend from the same manuscript source, affirming that “this book, appearing one year before the death of the author, should be considered the printed version of Colonna’s personal manuscript” and as a result contains “the definitive version of the majority of her spiritual poems.”187 Although this hypothesis is plausible, there is uncertainty around the effective date of composition of the manuscripts and their genealogy, particularly since the discovery of the Vatican Chigi Codex L IV 79 and the Neapolitan Codex XIII G. 43, which stresses the need for “a more careful analysis of all the available material, in order to enable us to collate the manuscripts, or groups of compositions, or individual poems, within a new stemma.”188 Moreover, the circumstances of the actual printing, which in Bullock’s view imply that the author expressed her intentions even regarding additions to the posthumous edition, rely on a series of hypotheses which, though plausible, are not verifiable. For the edition published in 1546 by Donato Rullo—a wealthy merchant originally from Lecce, a great friend of Ascanio Colonna and at the time “the agent of the Colonna family in Venice”189—the editor “presumably” had access to Colonna’s papers, while the sonnets added to Rime 1548 “appear” to have been copied separately, from papers discovered

184  Reference should be made to the discussion of the case in Brundin 2005, 33–35. 185  The sonnet used as a prelude was already included in the princeps, albeit with a variation in the incipit: Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne. 186  Claudio Scarpati, “Le Rime Spirituali di Vittoria Colonna nel codice vaticano donato a Michelangelo,” Aevum. Rassegna di scienze storiche, linguistiche e filologiche 78 (2004): 693–717, here 694, who speaks of a “presenza di indicatori di apertura e di congedo rappresentati dai sonetti.” 187  See Bullock: Rime, 406; and ibid., 359 and 385: “questo libro, apparso un anno prima della morte dell’autrice, deve considerarsi la riproduzione a stampa del manoscritto personale della Colonna,” and “la versione definitiva della maggior parte delle sue rime spirituali.” 188  Fabio Carboni, “La prima raccolta lirica datata di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum. Rassegna di scienze storiche, linguistiche e filologiche 76 (2002): 681–707, here 682: “disamina più accurata di tutto il materiale reperito, tale che permetta di collocare i codici, o i gruppi di componimenti, o le singole rime, all’interno di un nuovo stemma.” 189  Bullock: Rime, 225: “agente di casa Colonna a Venezia.”

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after the death of the author, “in all probability” kept separate from the main corpus by Colonna herself, due to their thematic content.190 Rullo’s close links to the circle of Reformation thinkers led by Reginald Pole are an established fact: in 1554 Rullo is said to have accompanied the cardinal back to England, but upon his return to Italy, he was deemed to be “hereticus et complex”191 and was condemned to die in the prisons of the Inquisition in 1566.192 Alternatively, that this edition of spiritual poems can be attributed to Rullo is an assumption based on a passage from a letter sent to Colonna’s brother, Ascanio, on 13 November 1546: “I understand His Excellency to be displeased with me, because I handed them over to be printed, or because I did not prohibit it.”193 Unlike the case of the princeps, considering the quantity of previously unpublished works contained in this edition as well as its significant overlap with the manuscript dedicated to Michelangelo, scholars have tended to underplay the author’s resistance and to agree that the publication by Valgrisi, “although without the express certainty of the author’s approval, seems to imply the her tacit consent.”194 In any case, there is no doubt about the fact that the 1548 edition was published in close association with the Reformation thinkers dear to Colonna: linked to this circle we find not only Rullo but also the publisher Vincenzo Valgrisi,195 whose bottega or 190  Bullock, “Vittoria Colonna and Francesco Maria Molza.” 191  Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, critical edition vol. 2/1 (Rome, 1984), 369, 371. 192  An extensive biographical note is provided by Massimo Firpo, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, critical edition, vol. 1 (Rome, 1981), 273–75. In addition to the bibliography therein, see Carlo De Frede, “Un pugliese familiare del cardinale Pole: Donato Rullo,” Rivista di letteratura e di storia ecclesiastica: organo dell’Istituto superiore di teologia 1–2 (1980): 3–28. 193  In Bullock: Rime, 225: “intendo essere S. Eccen.tia mutinata contra di me, perché io le ebbi date a stampare, o perché io non abbi proibito.” 194  Adriana Chemello, “Vittoria Colonna”, in Liriche del Cinquecento: Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Franco, Veronica Gambara, Chiara Matraini, Isabella Morra, Gaspara Stampa, Laura Terracini, ed. Monica Farnetti and Laura Fortini (Rome, 2014), 61–128, here 76: “senza essere espressione certa di volontà autoriale, sembra sottendere un seppur tacito consenso della poetessa.” 195  With reference to this printer, publisher and bookseller of French origin, who was active in Rome, Venice, and Prague, see the biographical note by Nuovo, Il commercio librario 179, note 60, which corrects the widespread but erroneous belief that the sign with the “head of Erasmus” outside his workshop portrayed Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Tiziana Pesenti, “Stampatori e letterati nell’industria editoriale a Venezia e in terraferma,” in Storia della cultura veneta (Vicenza, 1983), 4/I, 93–129. An extensive study of Valgrisi, which reproduces documents relating to his publishing business, is the recent doctoral thesis of Ilaria Andreoli, Ex officina erasmiana: Vincenzo Valgrisi e l’illustrazione del libro

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workshop, particularly in that period, was the meeting place for discussions on evangelical topics and for those who in 1559 were tried, like Rullo, for alleged heretical activities. The strongly Christocentric stance196 of this collection, inspired, according to Russell,197 by Bernardino Ochino and Valdesian evangelism, make the edition a milestone in the publishing history of Colonna’s spiritual poetry. However, not even this edition would become the reference text for later reprintings, at least as far as the macrotextual order of the work was concerned. On the contrary, as had happened with Corso’s commentary, the previously unpublished texts in the Valgrisi edition were immediately republished before the end of the sixteenth century, in another collection of poems, edited by Lodovico Dolce for Giolito (Rime 1552). The new edition once again modified the textual order, ignoring a sequence which, according to Bullock: Rime, 385, constitutes “an organic corpus clearly ordered according to a well defined criterion.”198 Valgrisi “Reloaded” by Dolce The work of Lodovico Dolce, who produced the first posthumous edition of Colonna’s poetry that was not a reprint or an anthology, has already been recog­nized as an important volume in our discussion of the princeps (Dolce’s polemic with Nicolò Franco) and the Corso edition of 1558 (Dolce’s polemic with Ruscelli). The editor of Rime 1552 was a central figure in the cultural and editorial world of sixteenth-century Venice, long neglected in literary history but today much better recognized: “After all, Dolce was a man who had produced more than a hundred volumes bearing his name, whether as author, editor, translator, or critic—a writer who had gained, in his own century, universal renown, standing out as an exemplar of the ideal poligrafo, in the best sense of the word—a well-rounded man in the field of the humane letters.”199 Certain aspects of his publishing business are also well known, particularly the working conditions, with editions often produced in great haste and not always free tra Venezia e Lione alla metà del ’500. Tesi in cotutela fra l’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia e l’Université Lumière Lyon 2, 17 March 2006, http://theses.univlyon2.fr/documents/ lyon2/2006/andreoli_i. 196  Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the spiritual poetics of the Italian Reformation, 34. 197  Rinaldina Russell, “L’ultima meditazione di Vittoria Colonna e l’Ecclesia Viterbiensis,” La parola del testo. Semestrale di filologia e letteratura italiana e comparata dal medioevo al rinascimento 4 (2000): 151–66. 198  Ibid.: “un corpo organico chiaramente ordinato secondo un criterio ben definito.” 199  Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, 1997), 3. For the numerical data concerning Dolce’s productivity, see Di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere, 58–68.

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of printing errors. Nevertheless, thank to his numerous contacts in intellectual circles200 and to his intense collaboration with the publisher Giolito— during which, from 1542 until his death in 1568, he was responsible for 184 of the approximately 700 volumes produced by the publisher201—Dolce played a fundamental role in the dissemination of literary works in the vernacular: in the sixteenth century his bestseller, an edition of the Orlando Furioso, was reprinted at least 66 times.202 Also in the case of Colonna’s poetry, the edition produced by Dolce was innovative in nature. As he made clear in the opening pages, this new edition was based on a manuscript of “somma perfezione” (no further details are provided) that happened to come into the editor’s possession. Furthermore, the texts were deemed worthy of the addressee, the “Magnifico M. Giorgio Gradinico,”203 not only “being, as they are, completely expurgated” but also “appearing, as they do, perfectly correct due to my diligent work.”204 Dolce’s edition was thus presented as a collection of all the texts that were known at the time from previous editions, although linguistically revised and organized into new sequences, the compositional logic of which still requires attention, but which was to reappear, including the errors, in reprints produced by Giolito in 1559 and 1560.205 Whereas in the first part, dedicated to the love poems, the 200  On contacts between Dolce and Giolito, the pro-Spanish Neapolitan aristocracy, and in particular the entourage of the Colonna family and Laura Terracina, see Gianluca Genovese, “Ariosto a Napoli. Vicende della ricezione del Furioso negli anni Trenta e Quaranta del Cinquecento,” in “Tra mille carte vive ancora.” Ricezione del Furioso tra immagini e parole, ed. Lina Bolzoni (Lucca, 2010), 339–55, here 347–48. 201  Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, 13. 202  Ibid., 12. 203  Ibid., 3. This cultivated Venetian aristocrat was appointed Podestà of Portogruaro on 29 May 1552. The author of poetry and patron of literary and artistic works, it was to him that Dolce dedicated the edition of the Cortegiano edited by Giolito in 1569. See Anna Siekiera, “Gradenigo, Giorgio,” in Dbi, 58 (2002): 304–306. 204  Ibid., 2: “essere, come sono, purgatissimi”; “uscire, come escono, per industria mia correttissimi.” 205  An examination was carried out of Rime 1552 using the copies in Tordi 590 and Banco 17.8.46 in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. Rime 1559 and Rime 1560, claiming to be revised editions of Rime 1552, were actually, except for minor linguistic variations, similar in all respects to this edition, often reproducing printing errors. The copy of Rime 1559 catalogued as Palatino 2.5.3.23 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence does not correct, for example, the presence of duplicates (S1:88 is found on pages 52 and 81, with a mistake in the first incipit; S1:121 is found on pages 66 and 87; S1:115 is found on pages 67 and 92). Rime 1559 corrects a mistake in the page numbering, but introduces some others; a number of copies of the reprint contain an error in the incipit

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overall plan is derived from the tradition inaugurated by the princeps, for the section of spiritual poems the previously unpublished works of the Valgrisi edition were reprinted in a completely new order. The end result is a collection that undoubtedly deserves renewed attention in pondering a modern critical edition, in relation to the reputation of the printer, the editor’s claims regarding his source, as well as his clear ability to capture the cultural spirit of the age. On the basis of the macrotextual order, it can also be argued that it was this edition—and not, as implied by Bullock: Rime, 269, the one produced by Valgrisi—that served as model in the late sixteenth century in the preparation of Rime 1586, published in Verona by Girolamo Discepoli.206 In concluding this discussion of the tradition of Colonna’s spiritual poems, we should also mention that the texts of the Valgrisi edition and their order of presentation, both directly inspired a number of later editions that appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Rime 1760, 1846, 1851). The sequence of Colonna’s spiritual poems was further modified in the first critical (“Pescrra,” 5). The unreliability of the dates is also typical of the working practice of a printing press dealing with a large volume of business. The following cases were found (unless otherwise specified, the catalog numbers are those of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence): a) title page 1559 and colophon 1559 (Palat. 2.5.3.23, Nencini 2.4.5.32 and Guicc. 23.2.28, bound with an edition of Tullia d’Aragona of the same period); b) title page 1559 and colophon 1560 (Chicago, Newberry Library: Case Y712.C72); c) title page 1560 and colophon 1559 (Rin. C. 337); d) title page 1560 and colophon 1560 (Tordi 583.3 and Palat. 2.5.3.24). On the market for these editions by the Giolito family, see Angela Nuovo—Christian Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nell’Italia del XVI secolo (Geneva, 2005). 206   R ime 1586, of which the following copies were examined: Chicago, Newberry Library: Case 3A.879; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: Tordi 707 and Guicciardini 2.42.58. The latter, although following the page numbering, contains (quaderni D–G, 49–112) no less than seventy-eight texts attributable to the friar from Treviso, Giuseppe Policreti (d. 1623), an author whose importance for the work of Marino has been highlighted by Francesco Guardiani, “Dieci pezzi sacri del Marino: per un’edizione della Lira II,” in Feconde venner le carte. Studi in onore di Ottavio Besomi, ed. Tatiana Crivelli, vol. 1 (Bellinzona, 1997), 348–70, here 357, and who was also a correspondent to Lucrezia Marinella (Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse. Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore, 2011), note 84, 280). With regard to Policreti see also the biographical note by Pacifico M. Branchesi and Davide Maria Montagna, Bibliografia dell’Ordine dei Servi, 2: Edizioni del secolo XVI (1501–1600). Studi e scrittori nell’Osservanza dei Servi (Bologna, 1972), 176–96 and 283. On Policreti’s Rime spirituali, for which no modern edition is available, reference should be made to the useful online diplomatic edition (1587), http://hdl.handle.net/1807/9450. On the printer, active in Verona, Viterbo, and Rome, in addition to the bibliography in Edit16, see Attilio Carosi, Girolamo Pietro e Agostino Discepoli: 1603–1631 (Viterbo, 1993). His printer’s mark (Edit16: V538 / Z148) portrays, in a frame with the motto “Natura iubente et arte exequente,” an eagle grasping a bird in its claws.

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edition of 1840—the textual order of which was reproduced with only minor variations until 1917 (appearing as Rime 1858, 1860, and 1882)—and readopted by Bullock, with reference to the extended Valgrisi edition, in the critical edition of 1982.207 The overall picture outlined here demonstrates that, while we undoubtedly need to refer to the Valgrisi edition, as it made available compositions that were previously unpublished, the question of the macrotextual order still needs to be settled. This is particularly true for the spiritual poems, considering that a comparison between the order of Michelangelo’s manuscript (V2) and that of the Valgrisi edition (which contains, as noted above, almost all the same texts and was published in the same span of years) reveals a radical reorganization of poetic sequences, comparable to that seen in the posthumous edition produced by Giolito. Other Editions and Posthumous Developments Beginning in the 1540s, poetry on spiritual themes was increasingly perceived and disseminated as a genre in its own right and Colonna’s poetry, testimony to “a primacy that was immediately consolidated,”208 represents an emblematic case of the establishment of a new paradigm, reflecting changes in the religious climate. 1542 was the year of Ochino’s flight from Italy and of the definitive crisis of Reformation thinking within the Roman Church. From then on, in the titles of collections of poetry, the adjective “spiritual,” though no less frequent, underwent a change in meaning, tending more and more to coincide with “religious,” “thus, in various cases, taking on, both in terms of prospects and awareness, the connotation ‘catholic’: that is, of tridentine inspiration.”209 From the first discrete edition of spiritual poetry—the one containing Rinaldo Corso’s commentary of 1542—until 1586, the sixteenth-century tradition of editions of the Rime is characterized by an even division between poetry that is exclusively spiritual on the one hand and comprehensive ­editions of Colonna’s poetry with an internal division into two parts (six editions or reprints of each of the two models) on the other.210 207  Bullock expunges only one sonnet (Agno puro . . .), which he attributes to Molza. For a comment on the language and stylistic modes of the spiritual poems, see: Copello, “Con quel picciol mio sol, ch’ancor mi luce.” 208  Quondam, “Note sulla tradizione della poesia spirituale e religiosa (parte prima),” 171 (“un primato subito consolidato”). 209  Ibid., 140: “pertanto, in diversi casi, assume le proporzioni, progettuali e consapevoli, di connotazione ‘cattolica’: cioè di bandiera tridentina.” In this connection see the fundamental BPR: Saggio di bibliografia della poesia religiosa (1471–1600), published at the end of the essay cited above, 213–82. 210  This calculation does not include Rime 1580, containing fourteen spiritual sonnets set to music by Pietro Vinci.

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The only publisher who produced an edition in the seventeenth century, 106 years after the last sixteenth-century edition—Antonio Bulifon, a French expatriate in business in Naples, to whom we owe the publication of an entire series of verses by women authors211—did so without modifying this approach. He produced both an edition of the poems internally divided into two parts (Rime 1692), and a separate edition containing only the spiritual poems (Rime 1693).212 Thus, a century and a half after Colonna’s death (as noted in a sixteenth-century handwritten note by an unknown author on the title page of the Rime spirituali produced by Valgrisi, “Morì la Marchesa alli 24. di Febr: di giovedì, M.D.XLVIJ”213) publishers continued to produce both earlier versions of her work. As for her reputation, the author was no longer immediately familiar to the public by the end of the seventeenth century, but she had in the meantime taken on a certain historical status, as shown by the inclusion, in Rime 1692 and Rime 1693, of an authorial biography. Both Rime 1692 (cc. a4r–a8v, unnumbered) and Rime 1693 (cc. a7r–11v, unnumbered) contain for the first time a profile, written by the editor, a “Vita di M. Vittoria Colonna D’Avalo Marchesana di Pescara.” This was derived (“cavata”) from 211  In addition to those by Colonna, Bulifon was to publish, between 1692 and 1694, the poems of Laura Terracina, Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara, Isabella Morra, Maria Selvaggia Borghini, Tullia d’Aragona, Laura Battiferri, and Isabella Andreini, as well as an anthology of fifty illustrious women poets. For an exhaustive study of this interesting printer, see the entry by Gaspare De Caro, “Bulifon, Antonio,” in Dbi 15 (1972): 57–61, and an article by Suzanne Magnanini, “Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: The Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile’s Fairy Tales in 17th-Century France,” Marvels & Tales 21 (2007): 78–92, in particular 79–83. 212   R ime 1692 is available online on Google Books: copy from the University of Michigan, with a number of leaves missing. Two copies of Rime 1693 were examined at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence: Nencini F.2.I.7 and FIN 3.7.165 (the latter lacking the booklet containing the life of Colonna). On the basis of the title of both copies (Rime spirituali  [. . .] di nuovo date in luce [. . .]) and the publisher’s claims both in the dedicatory letter (c. a3v, not numbered: “avendo di nuovo dato alla luce le Rime Spirituali della Signora Vittoria Colonna”) and in the address to the reader (c. a5v, not numbered: “In questa terza edizione vi sono gionti trentatrè Sonetti, i quali la prima fiata non si dedero alla luce”), there should also be an earlier edition containing only the spiritual poems, that has not survived. Rime 1693 follows the extended Valgrisi edition (Rime-1 1548), that probably corresponds to the text supplied to him “dall’eruditissimo Signor Vincenzo Vidman Regio Consigliero” (c. a5v not numbered). 213  “The Marchioness died on 24 February, a Thursday, 1547.” Recorded in the copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze: Palatino 12.3.4.32. In fact, as noted in Ascanio Colonna’s correspondence, the death occurred at dawn on 25 February; see Fabrizio Colonna, Sulla tomba di Vittoria Colonna (Rome, 1887), 12–13.

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the Cronicamerone by Antonio Bulifon—a substantial account of historical events written by the editor, and previously published only in part214—which provided a rich collection of testimony in praise of Colonna, thus constituting an important stage in the history of the author’s reception.215 The celebration of Colonna’s life and work was accompanied by another publishing first, in the form of the portrait of the author. In it, Colonna is portrayed as a young woman, not without sensuality, but depicted in the guise of a wise virgin keeping vigil for her husband with a burning lamp, as in the parable of Matthew 25:1–13 (see Figure 3.12). The portrait, signed by the Neapolitan artist Francesco de Grado (active in Naples between 1690 and 1693), reproduces another engraving, by the Bohemian artist and engraver Wencelaus Hollar (1607–77) on the basis of a painting by Sebastiano del Piombo that may be dated to around 1512, in the sixteenth century erroneously believed to be a portrait of Vittoria Colonna (see Figures 3.13 and 3.14).216 With the intention of saving Colonna’s oeuvre from falling into obscurity— since her publications were by then available only in “extremely rare copies” and hence, as might be said of numerous other women writers, “close to being lost in the shadows of oblivion”217—Bulifon recovered and relaunched the poet’s public image, already crystallized in the second half of the sixteenth century. He also reiterated her role as a model for other women writers by means of a dedication to two women (Maddalena Miroballo Duchess of Campomele in 1692 and Laurenza Lacerda Duchess of Tagliacozzo in some copies of 1692 and in 1693), while insisting in his paratexts on the union between the poet of conjugal love and the poet of sacred verse. An analogous organizational principle, that is a collection of poetry preceded by a historical contextualization of the life and work of the author along with her portrait, is to be found in the rare editions that appeared in later centuries. The model pertains in both Rime 1760 (Bergamo, Lancellotti),218 which contains an engraving of the medals with portraits of Colonna and her husband, ­preceded by the famous Vita by Giambattista Rota and by testimonies in praise of the author by third parties; and Rime 1840, the first critical 214  The part concerning the historical events up to 1690, printed that year in Naples, is available on Google Books, taken from a copy housed in Turin. 215  See, in this volume, the contributions by Virginia Cox and Adriana Chemello. 216  I thank Gaudenz Freuler for this identification. 217   R ime 1693, c. a5v, not numbered: “Antonio Bulifon al Legitore,” who speaks of “rarissime copie,” “vicine a perdersi fra l’ombre dell’obblivione.” 218  The copy examined was the one in the University of Chicago: PQ 4620 A17 1760 c. 1 Rare.

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Figure 3.12

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Francesco de Grado, portrait of Vittoria Colonna as a wise virgin keeping vigil for her husband with burning lamp (Matthew 25, 1–13) and dedication by the editor in Rime 1692, c. 1v, not numbered (National Library of Naples, Online Digital Collection).

The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna ’ s Rime

Figure 3.13

131

Wencelaus Hollar, Ritratto de S. Vittoria Colonna fatto de Sebastiano del Piombo Discipolo Congionto col Titiano dal Gran Giorg[i]one (University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection).

132

Figure 3.14

Crivelli

Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Young Woman as a Wise Virgin, ca. 1510. Oil on hardboard transferred from panel, Washington National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1952.2.9.

edition of the work which—while it is based on the two Roman manuscripts discovered by the editor, Pietro Ercole Visconti219—presents and amplifies an analogous set of biographical, historical and iconographic apparatus (and the 219  The manuscripts are Cas1 and Cor. On the rather dubious use of these sources by Visconti and on the unreliability of the two manuscripts for the purposes of textual reconstruction, an extensive discussion is provided by Alan Bullock, “L’edizione critica del 1840 e la

The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna ’ s Rime

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same applies to its adaptation in Rime 1860 edited by G. Enrico Saltini for the publisher Barbera of Florence).220 After that, until Bullock’s critical edition appeared in 1982, the publication of Colonna’s poems took the form of more or less extensive anthological editions, translations and reprints. Conclusions The critical edition published by Alan Bullock in 1982, the first to offer a systematic treatment of all the material known at the time and to include a wellgrounded philological commentary, is clearly of considerable merit. Just as undeniable, however, following the discovery of new manuscripts and in the light of a revised philological approach, is that Bullock’s reconstruction may be said to be artificial in a number of ways. As this historical overview of printed editions has shown, Bullock’s edition corresponds to an idealized form of canzoniere petrarchesco in sixteenth-century guise (with a three-part division into amorous, spiritual, and epistolary following Vellutello, in a kind of “redemptive” sequence), but does not find its counterpart in any of the historical forms to be found in the publishing tradition of Colonna’s poetry. It is to be hoped that before long someone will undertake to produce a new critical edition with full commentary of this important poetic work. By the same token, whoever does so will need to think anew about the overall macrostructure of the book. From the present study, two possible pathways are discernible, that a future edition might follow. The first option would be a total reworking of the critical edition of 1982 according to the method indicated by Lachmann, in particular with a view to verifying and integrating all extant manuscripts, and carrying out a more extensive and systematic collation, with the support of new technologies, of all the documents in the current recensio. This would be a major endeavor, the outcome of which would presumably modify, though probably not in a profound way, the reading of a number of individual texts. A new critical edition constructed on the basis of these principles would at most result in the choice of a different base text for the three sections of Bullock’s edition, ­leaving unresolved the bigger challenge of the macrotext, which would have to be dealt with on the basis of individual critical choice, just as was the case for Colonna’s first editor.

sua attuale inadeguatezza,” in appendix to Bullock: Rime, 407–18. Bullock takes this as his starting point to outline a completely revised interpretation of the texts of the Rime. 220  On Colonna’s letters published during the nineteenth century, see the contribution to this volume by Adriana Chemello.

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The second option, one that seems more practical and at the same time more responsive to the requirements of current researchers, is to propose the publication of one of the preserved sixteenth-century editions, chosen from among those that have been most influential within the tradition. In this case it would be necessary to set aside the idea of a canzoniere corresponding to the intentions of the author: but we have already demonstrated that, unlike the manuscript tradition, the printed texts of Colonna’s poems were widely circulated in their own right, and it now seems safe to argue that, while perhaps not promoted by Colonna, this kind of dissemination was tolerated by her. If one was to follow this path, at least three editions should be considered: the much vituperated princeps, which, in spite of the fierce criticism of commentators, was characterized by widespread circulation and, at least with regard to the corpus of rime amorose, had a profound impact on the macrotextual sequence over time; Rinaldo Corso’s commentary in the integral version of 1558, which, though it had limited impact on the publishing tradition, is a particularly interesting document that reveals much about the history of the work’s reception; finally, Dolce’s posthumous edition, never previously studied in depth, which from 1552, shortly after the author’s death, not only presented the entire corpus of known poems according to a new linguistic and macrotextual model but was also placed at the centre of a much more wide-ranging operation of promotion of the work of women poets in the well received series of anthologies printed by Giolito.221 After choosing which printed edition to reproduce, a commentary on the work would be invaluable in order to explain to contemporary readers a series of texts that are by no means easy to interpret. This may sound like a very complex operation, and it surely is; but the value of such an edition is easy to explain. It will suffice to refer to the words used by the very same Zoppino who did so much to advance Colonna’s reputation in sixteenth-century Italy. In presenting to the “candido lettore” (candid reader) one of his books, in which he published for his favorite (female) readership, not a collection of poems, but a wonderful series of embroidery patterns, he stated: And why then if certain men, some by means of letters, some by taking up arms, some by skill and diligence in endeavors worthy of commemoration, 221  There is less interest in reprinting Valgrisi’s edition since not only was that important book of “spiritual” poetry adopted by Bullock as the basis for this section of his book, but we also have a modern edition of the manuscript dedicated to Michelangelo, which demonstrates partial but specific affinities to this edition. Together with the princeps and Corso’s commentary, the Valgrisi edition is the only one to have been printed with a “privilegio”.

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have become famous and immortal in this world, why should not women by their virtue acquire fame and an eternal name among miserable mortals? Thus when a thing is in itself deserving of praise, and worthy of commendation, for this reason it should come to light for the utility of all, and for the knowledge of all.222

Appendix Table 1

Compositions erroneously attributed to V. Colonna in Rime 1538

Carta

No.

Incipit

Author

C4v E4v F3r H2v I2v I3r I3r I3v K2v–K4v

39 71 81 112 128 129 130 131 144

Alta fiamma amorosa; et ben nate alme, Miser, che debbo altro, che pianger sempre, S’io potessi sfrondar da l’empia, e folta Di vaga Primavera i piu bei fiori Anime belle, che vivendo essempio L’altezza del obietto onde a me lice Alma cortese, che con dolci accenti Sì come augelli semplicetti, e puri Spirto gentil, che sei nel terzo giro (canzone)

Francesco Maria Molza unidentified Pompeo Colonna (?) Unidentified Francesco Maria Molza Francesco Maria Molza Francesco Maria Molza Francesco Maria Molza Ludovico Ariosto

This table provides an overview of the compositions erroneously attributed to Vittoria Colonna in the princeps, indicating the carta on which the text is found, the numbering in the collection (not included in the print version), the incipit and the original author.223

222  Text T220, cit., cc. A2r and v in appendix to: Severi, Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri, 394 (emphasis added): “Imperoché, se delli uomini alcuni in lettere, alcuni in armi, alcuni nella sollerzia e diligenza di cose degne di memoria sonosi fatti famosi ed immortali al mondo, perché non debbano ancora le donne per le lor virtù acquistar fama e un nome eterno fra’ miseri mortali? Perciò che quanto una cosa per se stessa è lodevole, e di ogni commendationi dignissima, tanto più a commune utilità di tutti debbe venire in luce, et alla cognizione di tutti.” 223  In addition to IUPI: Incipitario unificato della poesia italiana, ed. Marco Santagata et al. (Modena, 1988–96), 4 vols., reference was made to the following works by Alan Bullock:

136 Table 2

Crivelli Macrotext of the Zoppino editions

This table provides an overview of the macrotext and the transition from the second Zoppino edition of 1539 (Rime-3 1539) to the 1540 edition by the same publisher. Previously unpublished texts are in boldface, and previously published texts placed in a new position are italicized. The incipits are given in the form proposed by Bullock. After Bullock’s catalog number, the numerical position in the modern critical edition is given. Rime-3 1539

Rime 1540

1 (S1:5=146) 2 (S2:22=342) 3 (S1:55=196) 4 (S1:54=195) 5 (S1:83=224) 6 (S1:124=265) 7 (S1:10=151) 8 (S1:7=148) 9 (S1:93=234) 10 (S2:11=331) 11 (S1:08=149) 12 (S1:92=233) 13 (S1:51=192)

1 (S2:36=356) Poi che ’l mio sol, d’eterni raggi cinto 2 (S1:6 =147) Pende l’alto Signor sul duro legno 3 (S2:5=325) Chiari raggi d’amor, scintille accese 4 (S1:52=193) Debile e inferma a la salute vera 5 (S1:13=154) Duo lumi porge a l’uomo il vero Sole 6 (S1:50=191) Quando, mercé del Ciel, quasi presente 7 (S1:53=194) Vorrei che ’l vero Sol, cui sempre invoco 8 (S1:132 =273) D’altro che di diamante o duro smalto 9 (S1:84=225) Tra gelo e nebbia corro a Dio sovente 10 (S1:98=239) Di breve povertà larga ricchezza 11 (S1:57=198) S’io piena con Zacheo d’intenso affetto 12 (S1:12 =153) Padre eterno del Ciel, se, Tua mercede 13 (S1:5=146) Con la croce a gran passi ir vorrei dietro 14 (S2:22=342) Rinasca in Te il mio cor quest’almo giorno 15 (S1:55=196) Con che saggio consiglio e sottil cura 16 (S1:54=195) Quel pietoso miracol grande, ond’io 17 (S1:83=224) Se quanto è inferma e da sé vil con sano 18 (S1:124=265) Dietro al divino tuo gran Capitano 19 (S1:10=151) Spiego vèr Voi, Signor, indarno l’ale 20 (S1:7=148) Da Dio mandata, angelica mia scorta, 21 (S1:93=234) Di vero Lume abisso immenso e puro, 22 (S2:11=331) Quasi gemma del Ciel, l’alto Signore 23 (S1:08=149) Tempo è pur ch’io, con la precinta vesta 24 (S1:92=233) Del mondo e del nimico folle e vano 25 (S1:51=192) Se ne die’ lampa il Ciel chiara e lucente

“Vittoria Colonna e i lirici minori del Cinquecento: quattro secoli di attribuzioni contraddittorie,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 157 (1980): 383–402; “Vittoria Colonna and Francesco Maria Molza: Conflict in Communication,” Italian Studies 32 (1977): 41–51; “Veronica o Vittoria? Problemi di attribuzione per alcuni sonetti del Cinquecento,” Studi e problemi di Critica Testuale 6 (1973): 115–31.

The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna ’ s Rime

Rime-3 1539

Rime 1540

14 (S1:18=159) 15 (S1:111=252) 16 (S1:100=241) [132] [133] [134] [135] [136] [151] [152] [153]

26 (S1:18=159) Cibo, del cui meraviglioso effetto 27 (S1:111=252) Padre Noè, del cui buon seme piacque 28 (S1:100=241) Vergine pura, che dai raggi ardenti 29 (S1:1=142) Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne 30 (S1:2=143) L’alto Signor dal cui sauer con gionte 31 (S2:1=321) I nove cori e non le nove altere 32 (E:17=375) Molza, ch’al Ciel quest’altra tua Beatrice 33 (A2:28=117) Tralucer dentro al mortal vel consparte 34 (S1:114=255) L’antiche offerte al primo tempio il pondo 35 (S1:95=236) Padre nostro e del Ciel, con quanto amore 36 (S1:115=256) L’aura vital di Cristo in mezzo il petto

Table 3

137

Macrotexts published by Zoppino and Corso

This table shows the rearrangement by Corso in collating the selection of spiritual poems in Rime-2 1542, his first publication, and demonstrates that, apart from nos. 8, 21, 28, and 34, included in Rime 1540, but not placed by Zoppino among the poems on spiritual themes, they are the same texts that appeared in the “spiritual” section in Zoppino’s edition, but in a new order. The incipits are shown as in Bullock; in italics the titles that are omitted, in bold those placed by Corso among the spiritual poems. Rime 1540 (also: Rime-1 1540, Rime 1542 and Rime-1 1542)

(Corso) Rime 1542

02 (S1:6=147) Pende l’alto Signor sul duro legno

“per non haverne potuto la vera lettion sapere, quasi a forza habbiam tralasciato” (A1v, p. 2) “per non haverne potuto la vera lettion sapere, quasi a forza habbiam tralasciato” (A1v, p. 2) tacitly expunged from the corpus of spiritual poetry tacitly expunged from the corpus of spiritual poetry 01

22 (S2:11=331) Quasi gemma del Ciel, l’alto Signore 32 (E:17=375) Molza, ch’al Ciel quest’altra tua Beatrice 33 (A2:28=117) Tralucer dentro al mortal vel consparte 13 (S1:5=146) Con la croce a gran passi ir vorrei dietro

138 Table 3

Crivelli Macrotexts published by Zoppino and Corso (cont.)

Rime 1540 (also: Rime-1 1540, Rime 1542 and Rime-1 1542)

(Corso) Rime 1542

23 (S1:08=149) Tempo è pur ch’io, con la precinta vesta, 29 (S1:1=142) Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne 30 (S1:2=143) L’alto Signor dal cui sauer con gionte 31 (S2:1=321) I nove cori e non le nove altere 04 (S1:52=193) Debile e inferma a la salute vera 19 (S1:10=151) Spiego vèr Voi, Signor, indarno l’ale

02

09 (S1:84=225) Tra gelo e nebbia corro a Dio sovente 11 (S1:57=198) S’io piena con Zacheo d’intenso affetto 07 (S1:53=194) Vorrei che ’l vero Sol, cui sempre invoco, 12 (S1:12 =153) Padre eterno del Ciel, se, Tua mercede, 24 (S1:92=233) Del mondo e del nimico folle e vano 14 (S2:22=342) Rinasca in Te il mio cor quest’almo giorno 28 (S1:100=241) Vergine pura, che dai raggi ardenti 16 (S1:54=195) Quel pietoso miracol grande, ond’io 34 (S1:114=255) L’antiche offerte al primo tempio il pondo 36 (S1:115=256) L’aura vital di Cristo in mezzo il petto

03 04 05 06 07 08 (S1: 88, no. 132 in Rime 1540) Signor, che ’n quella inaccessibil luce 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna ’ s Rime

Rime 1540 (also: Rime-1 1540, Rime 1542 and Rime-1 1542)

(Corso) Rime 1542

17 (S1:83=224) Se quanto è inferma e da sé vil con sano 03 (S2:5=325) Chiari raggi d’amor, scintille accese

19

26 (S1:18=159) Cibo, del cui meraviglioso effetto 25 (S1:51=192) Se ne die’ lampa il Ciel chiara e lucente 35 (S1:95=236) Padre nostro e del Ciel, con quanto amore 05 (S1:13=154) Duo lumi porge a l’uomo il vero Sole: 15 (S1:55=196) Con che saggio consiglio e sottil cura 27 (S1:111=252) Padre Noè, del cui buon seme piacque

21 (S1:93=234) Di vero Lume abisso immenso e puro, 20 (S1:7=148) Da Dio mandata, angelica mia scorta, 08 (S1:132 =273) D’altro che di diamante o duro smalto 10 (S1:98=239) Di breve povertà larga ricchezza, 18 (S1:124=265) Dietro al divino tuo gran Capitano

06 (S1:50=191) Quando, mercé del Ciel, quasi presente 01 (S2:36=356) Poi che ’l mio sol, d’eterni raggi cinto,

139

20 21 (S1: 24, no. 127 in Rime 1540) Gli angeli eletti al gran bene infinito 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 (S1: 99, no. 134 in Rime 1540) Le nostre colpe han mosso il Tuo furore 29 30 31 32 33 34 (S1: 121, no. 158 in Rime 1540) Donna accesa animosa, e da l’errante 35 36

Chapter 4

The Rime: A Textual Conundrum? Maria Serena Sapegno

The Textual Problem and the Author’s Wishes

Extraordinary though it may seem, becoming acquainted with the poetry of Vittoria Colonna, the most famous Italian woman poet of the Renaissance, is no easy task. The reason for such a paradox lies in a simple detail: we cannot yet count on an established and definitive text that might enable us to form a precise idea of her poetic production as a whole, which, as far as we know, consists of at least 390 texts. It is impossible to purchase a complete print edition even in specialized bookstores; libraries only possess eighteenth-century editions alongside Alan Bullock’s critical edition, published in 1982,1 but not reprinted since, in part due to the criticism it faced upon publication and to the repeated calls for a new edition.2 The root cause of such an unusual situation—which makes it very hard to approach a corpus that is as complex as it is difficult to interpret—seems, paradoxically, to lie in the material history of Vittoria Colonna’s texts, their extraordinary success and their broad dissemination both in manuscript and print. Some of Colonna’s poems have recently been made available in print,3 with an English translation and commentary. It is no accident that these constitute the only part of Colonna’s poetic production which raises no doubts as to the author’s intentions: a manuscript, that is of 103 sonnets that Vittoria Colonna had copied and collected expressly as a gift to be sent to Michelangelo, around 1540, as part of an intense exchange of letters and gifts between the two. The manuscript, which only came to light in the last century when Enrico Carusi

1  B ullock: Rime. All quotations refer to this edition unless otherwise stated. 2  N A*; Fabio Carboni, “La prima raccolta lirica datata di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 76 (2002): 681–707, here 682; Tatiana Crivelli, “Mentre al principio il fin non corrisponde. Note sul canzoniere di Vittoria Colonna,” in Marco Praloran 1955–2011. Studi offerti dai colleghi delle università svizzere, ed. Silvia Calligaro and Alessia Di Dio (Pisa, 2013), 117–36. 3  B rundin 2005.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_006

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discovered it in Rome in 1938,4 did not therefore play an active role in the history of Colonna’s production and reputation.

Print and Manuscript Circulation

The material history of Colonna’s poetry can be understood and brought into focus only within the context of a cultural shift that was to prove epochal in many ways, starting with the printing revolution which profoundly and irreversibly altered the relationship between author and reader, well beyond the expectations and even the awareness of the individual parties. The same deep change affected manuscript circulation as well, in terms of both its implications and mechanisms. We also know that Colonna herself attempted to exercise control over her own poetic production, by limiting its circulation in manuscript form to a select group of interlocutors. Despite all her caution, however, she was not able to predict what was later a surprise to a great number of people, that is, that the development of a new editorial market for printed texts would soon reach such a level of maturity as to be able to welcome an extraordinary novelty: the publication of a book entirely devoted to the poetry of a single woman poet. The volume of Rime della Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara was published in Parma in 1538, and Pirogallo, the editor, explicitly declared in his preface to the text that he had proceeded to print the book to “satisfy the desire of many,” though this meant going against the wishes of “so great a Lady.” Beyond speculation about Colonna’s interest in the printing of her own compositions,5 the Pirogallo edition marked the beginning of a new story, which consolidated and amplified the resonance of the public persona of the Marchioness of Pescara, descendant of such illustrious families as the Colonna and the Montefeltro and related by marriage to the d’Avalos, prominent in the Neapolitan court which counted itself among the ranks of Habsburg supporters. But she herself was already endowed with an authority that was all her own and very new, conferred on her by her poetry, as Ariosto had testified as

4  Enrico Carusi, “Un codice sconosciuto delle Rime Spirituali di Vittoria Colonna, appartenuto forse a Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Atti del IV Congresso Nazionale di Studi Romani 4 (1938): 231–41. 5  D ionisotti: Appunti, 115–40; Tatiana Crivelli, “Mentre al principio il fin non corrisponde”; see also Brundin’s and Crivelli’s contributions to this volume.

142

Sapegno

early as 1532.6 The 1538 edition, and the successive ones of 1539 and 1540 (six editions in total) were an unprecedented success. If Colonna’s poetic activity by then dated back fifteen years and had been recognized for about a decade within the restricted literary circles of the Italian peninsula, the print editions set the circulation of her work on a new and independent course, with important consequences for the literary landscape of Italy and Europe. It was in fact by means of the print editions that within the space of a few years the image of the poet began to evolve relatively independently from her poetic activity, which continued without interruption on another plane and with no voluntary connection on her part to the print and publishing market. However, it was precisely the publishing market that consecrated Colonna as the most authoritative poetic voice of the moment and also marked a turning point in the organization of her rime. Soon a commentated edition was devoted to her poetry, an event that at the time was a first for a living author. As early as the Zoppino edition of 1539 the printer had explicitly declared in the title that he had “added 16 spiritual sonnets and her stanze” (agiuntovi XVI Sonetti Spirituali e le sue stanze). Again in 1540, the publisher indicated that for the first time the internal order of the printing7 had been changed along with an arrangement according to genres (sonnets, canzoni, stanze), in order to give greater visibility to the new spiritual poems which moved into first position (nuovamente aggiuntovi XXIIII sonetti Spirituali e le sue stanze e uno triompho della Croce di Cristo non più stampato). It has been thought, seemingly with good reason,8 that this change and the gradual division between the Rime of the first edition—all classified summarily as “amorose,” and those following—defined as “spirituali,” was a response to the demands of the publishing market, according to the contemporary fashion which perceived the spiritual intonation of Colonna’s sonnets as being more novel and perhaps better suited to the times. Within the space of a few years everything seems to have changed: in 1541–42 the young Rinaldo Corso, active in the court of the poet Veronica Gambara and interested in contemporary doctrinal and theological debates, devoted himself to preparing a commentated edition of Colonna’s Rime. The edition was to be clearly divided into two parts with independent numbering, with one part focusing on “earthly love” 6  See in the 1532 print edition of Orlando furioso (canto XXXVII) the famous octaves (15–23) dedicated to the celebration of Vittoria Colonna, the greatest of what was by then quite a large number of women poets. 7  Monica Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il Canzoniere di Vittoria Colonna,” Italique: poésie italienne de la Renaissance 1 (1998): 37–45. 8  Ibid.

The Rime: A Textual Conundrum ?

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and the other on “heavenly love.”9 The idea is clearly Petrarchan, or better it falls within the contemporary interpretative trends and practice of a number of poets of the period, male and female.10 But while the work was conceived as one unified whole, Corso ultimately chose to publish only the second part (in 154211 and then again in 154312) consisting of thirty-eight spiritual poems, and to defer to a more propitious time the more demanding work on the first part. It was once again a printed edition—authoritative by dint of having been prepared within a milieu that was close to the Colonna family—that brought the publishing endeavor full circle. In 1546 Vincenzo Valgrisi printed the Rime spirituali della illustrissima signora Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara. Non più stampate da pochissime infuori, le quali altrove corrotte, et qui corrette si leggono (“The spiritual poems of the illustrious Marchioness of Pescara Vittoria Colonna. No longer printed except very few, which elsewhere are found corrupted, and here are read in their correct form”). The message is clear: this is an entirely new and different edition, which is also homogenous in inspiration. In the years following Colonna’s death in 1547 her poems continued to be popular,13 and the two-part conception of her work was consolidated in print, thanks above all to the influential Venetian editions prepared by the Giolito family, who published all the poems, maintaining the division into two separate parts.14

9  For this edition, see also Crivelli’s chapter in this volume. 10  Chiara Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 73 (1999): 669–96. 11   Dichiaratione fatta sopra la Seconda Parte delle Rime della Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara da Rinaldo Corso, 1542, n. p. 12  R ime 1543. 13  Between 1541 and 1560 another thirteen print editions appeared, five of which contained both the “amorous” and “spiritual” poems and four only the “spiritual” ones. There was nothing further until 1586, when the spiritual poems alone were printed in Verona by Girolamo Discepoli. Then followed two editions in the 1600s, and in the nineteenth century editions by Pietro Ercole Visconti (Rome, 1840) and the Rime 18603. 14  The other Venetian edition in 1558 by the Sessa brothers moves in the same direction, but with completely different and very complex implications. This edition was introduced and edited by Girolamo Ruscelli, who finally printed the complete version of Rinaldo Corso’s original plan.

144

Sapegno

A Rich and Complex Corpus

Vittoria Colonna’s complete poetic production testifies to intense literary activity over a period of more than twenty years. The breaking up of this extremely rich corpus occurred over time and has continued to the present day. The division according to poetic genres and themes, or selection of the so-called epistolary compositions for inclusion in a separate section, can of course be explained precisely by the complexity and wealth of the corpus itself, which would be difficult to deal with without seeking an interpretative strategy, or without imposing some order on it so as to guide the reading experience. But we must be clear that these are techniques and as such they are arbitrary. If twenty years are a long period of time for development and change, we know that when around 1540 Colonna decided to put together a gift for Michelangelo, the manuscript was composed according to an organic plan in which poems appear that were printed among the so-called rime amorose, which had already been printed in the princeps edition. In addition, the so-called epistolary poems cannot be separated from the rest since they are an excellent representation of the way in which the poet on the one hand pursued an individual and highly personal line of poetic enquiry, fueled by intimate reflection and reading, and on the other hand moved constantly within a circle of select individuals cultivated over the years, the necessary interlocutors of a greater endeavor, which consisted of a passion for truth. When we work through the corpus of her poems seeking interpretative threads and paths, therefore, we must always remember that we lack knowledge of a clear and explicit authorial intent defining their order, with the exception of the manuscript donated to Michelangelo; but, paradoxically, we must also keep in mind that we are dealing with a systematic mind, as is demonstrated precisely by the circumstances of that text. The reading of such a broad and rich corpus immediately poses a series of questions: Why did Colonna’s poetry assume such an influential position, so that she became a role model for many later women poets?15 How, despite its complexity, did her work succeed in making the leap from a restricted and select audience to a much broader public, which was certainly less well equipped with the interpretative tools to understand it? Answers can be sought in the characteristics that define Colonna’s poetic voice as markedly original: the authoritativeness that her lyric “I” is capable of assuming, the 15  Giovanna Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford, 2000), 478–97.

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extraordinary balance maintained between the expression of suffering, which never becomes complaint, and the pursuit of lofty expression, of a passion that is present but subdued, mediated in rhyme, interwoven with images. The very dimensions of Colonna’s poetic pursuit, which is at the same time the pursuit of form and of meaning, of truth, endows the poems with an inner heat, allows for the sublimation of loss, fills emptiness and overcomes desperation. This pursuit of knowledge—of oneself first of all—fully engages with the tradition, but seeks its own words and images to see itself and to say itself. Perhaps it was precisely those unanswered (unanswerable?) questions, despite being so refined, that were able to speak to a less sophisticated audience, along with the force and the power of Colonna’s voice, while many modern readers have in contrast heard above all the extraneous quality of a voice that appears to them to be too composed and formalized, and an imagery that is too controlled and idealized.

Genesis and Structure

When we speak of a genuine poetic vocation for Vittoria Colonna we immediately think of her contact with poets such as Sannazaro in the lively Neapolitan court context. One testimony of her precociousness is undoubtedly the famous epistola composed in 1512, “Excelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo,”16 addressed to her husband Ferrante, a prisoner after the battle of Ravenna, along with her father Fabrizio. Without a doubt, however, her profound need to write was set in motion definitively by the sudden death of Ferrante after being wounded in the battle of Pavia (1525). The so-called amorous poems are more properly those of a widow,17 and find their intrinsic raison d’être in the grieving process, as declared explicitly in the sonnet which was to occupy the prime position in all the printed and manuscript collections of this period: Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia. This is an important text, with a pronounced meta-poetic character, introduced by a clear declaration of authorial intent, only partially attenuated by multiple instances of excusatio and topical declarations of modesty.18 It is also the poem in which the determination and force of the poetic impulse are immediately made clear, together with the marked spiritual dimension of 16  Carlo Vecce, “Vittoria Colonna: il codice epistolare della poesia femminile,” in Les femmes écrivains en Italie au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance (Aix-en-Provence, 1994), 213–32. 17  As was suggested many years ago by Dionisotti: Appunti, 137. 18  For a more detailed analysis, see Maria Serena Sapegno, “La costruzione di un Io lirico al femminile nella poesia di Vittoria Colonna,” Versants 46 (2003): 15–48.

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Colonna’s discourse and, finally, an aspiration to measure up to the highest auctoritates, with both Petrarch and Dante called as witnesses from the very first moment:19 Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia ch’al cor mandar le luci al mondo sole, e non per giunger lume al mio bel Sole, al chiaro spirto e a l’onorata spoglia. Giusta cagion a lamentar m’invoglia; ch’io scemi la sua gloria assai mi dole; per altra tromba e più sagge parole convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia. La pura fe’, l’ardor, l’intensa pena mi scusi appo ciascun; ché ’l grave pianto è tal che tempo né ragion l’affrena. Amaro lacrimar, non dolce canto, foschi sospiri e non voce serena, di stil no ma di duol mi danno vanto.20 It was thus in the guise of a grieving widow that Colonna first appeared on the poetic scene, and as such she began to redefine a highly formalized poetic code, which had hitherto only allowed for the presence of a voiceless woman, placed in the position of Other, of mirror, of muse.21 Her widowed state granted her a certain degree of freedom, offering the opportunity for self-definition and experimentation. 19  “pur di sfogare il doloroso core” (only to give vent to my sorrowing heart) (Rvf, 293, v. 10) “Ora, s’i’ voglio sfogar lo dolore” (Dante, Vita Nova, XXXI: Li occhi dolenti, v. 4). 20  “I write solely to salve the suffering that those bright eyes, peerless in this world, caused my heart, and not to add luster to my lovely Sun, to his radiant spirit and honored remains. A just cause leads me to lament, and it sorely pains me that I may detract from his glory; his great name deserves to be rescued from death by a loftier voice and wiser words. May my pure faith, my ardor, my intense grief excuse me, for my mourning is such that neither reason nor time can restrain it. Bitter weeping, not sweet song; dark sighs, not a serene voice: my verse boasts not of style but of woe” (Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance [Baltimore, 2013], 134). 21  Virginia Cox analyzes the proemial sonnet, comparing it with Rvf, and finds that, through a refined series of inter-textual references, Colonna demonstrates great awareness of her own specific position as a woman poet (Virginia Cox, “Attraverso lo specchio: le petrarchiste del Cinquecento e l’eredità di Laura,” in Petrarca. Canoni, esemplarità, ed. Valeria Finucci [Rome, 2006], 117–49).

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From its first beginnings, Colonna’s poetry encompassed a spiritual and religious component, the tendency or rather the necessity for intellectual and even metaphysical reflection. We know that the poet participated passionately in debates on the reform of the Church, followed questions of doctrine, knew many prominent religious figures of the time and was directly involved in issues involving the Church, such as the debate over the status of the Capuchin order.22 Her poetry embraces and reflects the passions, doubts and fundamental questions of her age, which are filtered through the most authoritative poetic code then available to her—that of Petrarchism. But if in the RVF the death of Laura and the revolutionary interpretation given by Petrarch to the paradigm of conversion and itinerarium in Deo represent a true watershed, Colonna’s poetry was not well suited to such a paradigm, for many reasons. There is unfortunately no certain proof of the very plausible hypothesis that the macro-text constitutes a unified path. Over the years, it of course remains open to the poet’s shifts in subjective experience and changes course as she delves more deeply into questions and problems that are constantly evolving. While different interpretations are possible, Colonna’s lifelong literary pursuit, as well as the variety of its structural outcomes, bear witness to the substantial unity of her search for the truth. It is a pursuit that is intrinsically predisposed to constant reworking, destined never to reach structural definitiveness, but which has left clear traces in the Rime. The history of Colonna’s poetic reception tends to a clear sub-division of the corpus into two parts, which for some reflect only a shift in emphasis and for others a more marked evolution, and this is without doubt due to the power which the two-part model seems to have assumed for some readers as an interpretative key. While Colonna continued to write poetry and seek her own methods of organizing and transmitting it within an exquisitely personal creative context, the emerging printing industry began dictating new rules for the lyric genre, including inventing for it a new audience. It is certainly instructive that Pietro Bembo, an important figure for Colonna and the unquestioned poetic authority of his century, acted in those same years in a different way to her, arranging as many as three different print editions of his own poetry, the last of which was published posthumously and went precisely in the direction of a renewed division into two parts within a unified work. At the same time, it seems that the end of a cycle had been reached, as new anthologies started to appear, those ‘collections by diverse authors’ which completely changed the 22  Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli Spirituali,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 24 (1988): 211–61; Gigliola Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 97–141.

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public perception of lyric poetry: from a strongly individualized and solitary activity to the possibility of dialogue and exchange of ideas in a community which was prevalently courtly. Despite the complexity of the situation, the clear presence in Colonna’s poetic corpus of a line of meta-poetic and interpretative reflection, the information we have regarding the arrangement of substantial handwritten collections as gifts for privileged interlocutors, as well as the certainties presented by the manuscript for Michelangelo, all lead us to some further conclusions. The gift for Michelangelo (henceforth, V2), most certainly arranged by Vittoria,23 seems to confirm an important custom in the print tradition, at least in the positioning of the opening sonnet, which is also in the same location in the Valgrisi edition of the Rime spirituali: Poi che ’l mio casto amor gran tempo tenne l’alma di fama accesa, ed ella un angue in sen nudrio, per cui dolente or langue volta al Signor, onde il rimedio venne, i santi chiodi omai sieno mie penne, e puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue, vergata carta il sacro corpo exangue, sì ch’io scriva per me quel ch’Ei sostenne. Chiamar qui non convien Parnaso o Delo, ch’ad altra acqua s’aspira, ad altro monte si poggia, u’ piede uman per sé non sale; quel Sol ch’alluma gli elementi e ‘l Cielo prego, ch’aprendo il Suo lucido fonte mi porga umor a la gran sete equale.24

23  Carlo Vecce, “Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo: Note di commento a testi e varianti di Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 44 (1992): 101–25; Brundin 2005, 1–55. 24  “Since my chaste love for many years / kept my soul aflame with the desire for fame, and it nourished / a serpent in my breast so that now my heart languishes / in pain turned toward God, who alone can help me, / let the holy nails from now on be my quills, / and the precious blood my pure ink, / my lined paper the sacred lifeless body, / so that I may write down for others all that he suffered. / It is not right here to invoke Parnassus or Delos, / for I aspire to cross other waters, to ascend / other mountains that human feet cannot climb unaided. / I pray to the sun, which lights up the earth and / the heavens, that letting forth its shining spring / he pours down on me a draught equal to my great thirst”: Brundin 2005, 56–7.

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We have here what is clearly a fundamental text, of great meta-poetic significance, a key to understanding the way in which Colonna was re-reading and interpreting her own poetic development in 1540. This is confirmed by the fact that the sonnet, included in the first 1538 printed edition, had a different beginning that was modified in V2: Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne. Thus revised, rather than referring to a generic past that had been more involved in human affairs, the first line represents a strong link and at the same time a watershed between the first and second phase of her poetic activity: Colonna looks back to her poetry of mourning (“mio casto amor”), which had long occupied her, with a Petrarchan diffidence for the guilty motive which she perceives in it, the desire for fame,25 but is now ready for an entirely holy course, through the gift of divine help (“onde il remedio venne”). Based in the powerful images of the crucifixion, which run through many of her compositions,26 the new poetry is born precisely here: the nails, blood, and body of Christ constitute the writing materials that will serve to disseminate faith.27 Moreover, the tercets manifest a clear shift in Colonna’s relationship with the poetic tradition: the measure is no longer taken from the classical tradition (Parnassus and Delos) but from references to Dante’s Purgatorio (referred to by Petrarch as well). A penitential journey is undertaken here, itself impossible without the gift of faith (“per sé non sale”), and it ends with a prayer for salvation. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this text in reconstructing the poet’s journey: the repeated theme of the gift of faith, together with the idea of an apostolate to be carried out, place the “I” within the problematic historical present. This is a new and different “I,” but one that is at the same time positioned along a line of continuity with the past: on the one hand the lyric poetry of mourning which has provided the very foundations for the construction of a subjective I; on the other hand, the great classical tradition within the 25  In this proemial part, the repetition of the Petrarchan proemial metaphor, which also turns to a past “di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva il core,” is transformed into the nourishing of a poisonous serpent at the breast. 26  “The writing metaphor, already present in Jeremiah, is found also in a sermon by Bernardino Ochino, where—as the prophet had applied it to God—it is however referred to the Crucifix: ‘[Christ] up on the cross, writing always in spirit, used the heart of the people as paper, blood, sweat and tears as ink, and as a pen nails, the spear and the cross.’ Through the mediation of Ochino a parallel was being created between Vittoria and Christ.” Monica Bianco, “ ‘Porgo la carta bianca a’ vostri sacri inchiostri’: Michelangelo, Vittoria e la poesia,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 150. 27  Brundin notes the decisive variant in the manuscript compared to the printed version, in which in line 8 “io scriva ad altrui,” is replaced by “io scriva per me,” profoundly changing the meaning of the whole: Brundin 2005, 141.

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symbolic horizon of which the poet could not avoid placing herself. But there is also a new recourse to a language of the body with which the entire text is interwoven and which is to be one of the hallmarks of the new poetry, in this sense owing more to Dante than Petrarch. The last sonnet of manuscript V2 is also placed in the same position as in the Valgrisi edition, and has the same importance: Temo che ’l laccio, ond’io molt’anni presi tenni gli spirti, ordisca or la mia rima sol per usanza, e non per quella prima cagion d’averli in Dio volti ed accesi. Temo che sian lacciuoli intorno tesi da colui ch’opra mal con sorda lima, e mi faccia parer da falsa stima utili i giorni forse indarno spesi. Di giovar poca ma di nocer molta ragion vi scorgo, ond’io prego ’l mio foco ch’entro in silenzio il petto abbracci ed arda. Interrotto dal duol, dal pianger fioco, esser de’ il canto vèr Colui ch’ascolta dal Ciel, e al cor non a lo stil risguarda.28 The text wishes to be at once a critical evaluation of the past and a leavetaking, and as such it explicitly takes up a number of threads of the first Vatican sonnet, with which it shares a meta-poetic dimension. The lyric I turns once again to the long time spent in poetic activity, proposing the same image of poetry as containment of an inflamed spirit; inflamed firstly by the pursuit of fame and then, as in the weave of a fabric, by God; and just as the poetic I at first posited an illegitimate ambition for fame, she now fears mere habit, 28  “I am afraid that the knot, with which for many years / I have kept my soul bound up, now orders my verses / only through long habit, and not for the primary reason / that they are turned toward God and inflamed by him. / I am afraid that they are knots tied tightly / by one who works badly with a dull file, / so that, fired with false esteem, I believe / that my days are useful when in fact I waste them. / I perceive little reason why they should be of use, / but much evidence that they do harm, so I pray that / this internal fire may embrace and scald my heart in silence. / The song I sing to God, who listens from above, should be interrupted by pain and hoarse cries, / for he values my heart and not my style”: Brundin 2005, 138–39.

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the desire to do others good collapsing into an illusion, or even into harm. It is the poetic voice itself that is thus called into question; silence is preferred as long as it too burns, like the poem, within the inner being. But if poetry no longer constitutes the prime tool to give form to grief and space to the lyric I and its pursuit of the truth of faith, the circle closes upon itself in a grief that is now unutterable, received into heaven for what it is, and poetry ceases, going back to the first beginning, to that “di stil no ma di duol mi danno vanto,”29 with which the discourse had begun. A continuous journey unquestionably exists, then, watched over and held together by a vigilant and determined “I,” which feels the need to give its own interpretation of the process; but it is arguable whether it is to be interpreted as a journey of ascent, as an Itinerarium Victoriae in Deo.

Rinaldo Corso’s Commentary

Precisely this interpretation is offered in Rinaldo Corso’s commentary. When finally in 1558 Ruscelli succeeded in printing the complete text,30 in the volume Tutte le rime della illustrissima et eccellentissima signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana di Pescara, con l’expositione del signor Rinaldo Corso, nuovamente mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli, he added to the 38 spiritual poems already printed in the Dichiaratione, with revised commentary, a first part consisting of 120 amorous poems grouped together in an entirely arbitrary arrangement, according to a thematic scheme.31 The aim of this process was the construction of a canzoniere, which preserved from the editio princeps of 1538 (its main source) both the position of the proemial sonnet as well as that of the final canzone (implicit and explicit), but then radically changed the internal order of the other poems in an attempt to identify conceptual sequences or clusters 29  A1: 1, v. 14: “my verse boasts not of style but of woe.” 30  Monica Bianco reconstructs the complicated vicissitudes of the commentary, probably given in manuscript form as a gift to Veronica Gambara by Rinaldo Corso once he completed it (but in 1546 it had not yet been completed and in 1550 Gambara died). Corso no longer made any effort to have it printed and he seemed to try to keep his distance from the publication made by Ruscelli. Bianco, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso,” 271–95. 31  The numerical disproportion between the poems of the first and second part was not a problem also because, as suggested by Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” 678, the disproportion could have reflected the proportions existing in Rvf between the poems in life and poems in death.

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of compositions linked by affinities in the attitude of the poet, or else by theme. The reading that is thus encouraged is a continuous one, in which the commentary makes explicit “the logical passage from one thematic sequence to the next,”32 according to an actual narrative thread. The result is at once interesting and surprising. It is interesting because the search for thematic or topical threads is one of the possible approaches that can be practiced today, if not by general readers then certainly by scholars. It is surprising and also disconcerting, however, because the resulting macro-text is halfway between a narrative poem and a rhetorical exercise. Such an arrangement produces outcomes that are contrived even in light of its own logic: in fact if the whole “canzoniere” presents the existential journey of Colonna’s soul toward heaven,33 what is defined as its final sonnet (Penso per addolcire i giorni amari) is followed, not only by sonnets of penitence, but also by epistolary compositions and finally canzoni, signaling a return to an arrangement by poetic genres. Despite these drawbacks, Corso’s commentary offers a powerful reading and an organic interpretation: it clearly identifies and highlights the uninterrupted thread of spiritual meditation, grounded in Platonism, which, watched over at all times by vigilant reason, overcomes earthly conflicts and destructive temptations and transforms the object of love into a witness and guide for a spiritual journey of ascent, which is naturally strengthened and crowned in the second part. The second part, which (paradoxically?) reprints only the thirtyeight sonnets that had already appeared in 1542–43, features a commentary that has been much revised, presumably in keeping with the changing times,34 eliminating in the meantime the explicit references to Bernardino Ochino,35 but also adding citations from Biblical and literary sources along with a variety of other information, thus producing a perceptible shift in the direction of erudition, a less slippery area than doctrinal considerations in this period.

32  Ibid., 683. 33  According to Monica Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il Canzoniere di Vittoria Colonna,” Italique: poésie italienne de la Renaissance 1 (1998): 37–45, this existential journey is modeled on Vellutello’s Petrarch of 1525. 34  Precisely in those years Paul IV Carafa had launched an “anti-heretical” offensive that brusquely closed the lively debate on doctrinal issues that had characterized the first part of the century and saw Vittoria Colonna personally involved. 35  Bianco, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso,” 281–87.

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Themes and Figures

While a “thematic” reading of Colonna’s text is without doubt legitimate,36 nevertheless the structure of V2—although it only contains poems relating to religious and spiritual reflection—demonstrates that the organizational rationale of Vittoria Colonna’s poetic discourse is very far from a succession of thematically linked sonnets. The conceptual texture behind the entire macro-text is complex, resisting any attempt at linear organization, and is run through by vectors that mirror each other and are redefined semantically in reciprocal “citations.” The themes allude to one another and are repeated and varied in different locations, while Biblical, Petrarchan, or Dantesque figures and topoi undergo semantic shifts in a play of intertextuality. In keeping with the proemial declaration of Poi che il mio casto amor, for example, classically derived figures disappear while figures from the Gospel or the lives of the saints abound. But there are also many key figures which, having already appeared early in the work, take on a different meaning as reflection on spiritual and religious themes is intensified. In establishing the lyric subject, the themes that are interwoven are those of the relationship between suffering and writing: a central concern is the capacity of reason to dominate the senses by developing inner life and thought as the only possible route to poetry, calling into question the very perception of the real through the senses (vero/falso). These are themes that never fade; they are rather transformed. The definition of the object of love is connected with the marital/amorous relationship (nodo, legame) and the body (absent/present), in a corporeal dimension that continues in the spiritual poetry, but in an entirely new vein. Naturally the central and probably most significant theme is precisely that of poetic writing, and the ways in which, through it, the subject defines and articulates itself. We have already noted this singular meta-poetic attention in the proemial sonnet, as well as the intensity with which the subject is introduced and affirms its need for itself (“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia”),

36  Rinaldina Russell’s analysis (“The Mind’s Pursuit of Divine: A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,” Forum Italicum 26, 1 [1992]: 14–27) is also thematic and focuses a great deal on the presence of a Neo-Platonic conception of ascension. The pioneering study by Mila Mazzetti, “La poesia come vocazione morale: Vittoria Colonna,” La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana LXXVII (1973): 58–99, was the first to call attention to the theme.

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according to a Petrarchan conception,37 but also the legitimate ethics of its own poetry (“giusta cagion a lamentar mi invoglia”). Yet an apologetic insistence, self-negation, repeated antinomy (e non, e non), and above all the conclusion (“di stil no ma di duol mi danno vanto”) concur from the very opening in signaling an excess of apology and contradiction that goes well beyond the topical declaration of the author’s modesty, to suggest a particular need for legitimization and at the same time a strong self-awareness. If pain therefore seems to be not only the preferential topic of discourse, but also the trait that in defining the subject provides an ethical motivation for poetic expression, then pain must be expressed and cultivated and remembered, through the poetry which will be the memory of it (“sol la memoria nel dolor s’aviva”).38 For these reasons, as already announced in the proemial sonnet, poetic expression is often defined as weeping (pianto), sighing (sospiri), shedding tears (lacrimar), but also as rime and stile. The idea of poetry as the instrument of memory returns repeatedly, along with the topical question of whether emotions and feelings can be expressed in words (“mostra ardente memoria d’ora in ora. / Tal potess’io ritrarle in queste carte / qual l’ho impresse nel cor”).39 The fact that the question is rhetorical and does not injure the poet’s self-awareness in her writing process seems to be shown by her calling as witnesses the most important auctoritates, such as Virgil (Le belle opre d’Enea superbe e sole):40 her reference to what Petrarch had already done in Rvf, 186 (Se Virgilio et Homero avessin visto) seems explicit. In the case of the sonnet Rami d’un arbor santo (Bullock: Rime: A2: 17) there is in addition an interesting twist, with an explicit reference to Dante and Petrarch through a device—already present in the proemial sonnet—that strengthens the idea of authorship on the basis of the excellence of the object that is praised.41 Colonna in fact defines herself as auctor (“per far eterna qui memoria / di lui”)42 through a complex game of changing roles, an exchange 37  R vf, 293, 10: “pur di sfogare il doloroso core.” For an in-depth analysis of the theme see Sapegno, “La costruzione di un Io lirico al femminile nella poesia di Vittoria Colonna,” 15–18. 38  A1: 3, v. 8: “Only memory revives in pain.” 39  A2: 19, vv. 8–10: “My ardent memory from hour to hour reveals them. / Such could I portray them in these pages / as I have them imprinted on my heart.” 40  A1: 24, v. 1: “The beautiful works of Aeneas, proud and unique.” In the sonnet she imagines what Virgil would have done if he had had the opportunity to sing of an object as glorious as her “Sun.” 41  A1: 1, vv. 3–4: “e non per giunger lume al mio bel Sole, / al chiaro spirto e all’onorata spoglia” [“and not to add radiance to my beautiful Sun,/ his clear spirit and honoured remains”]. 42  A2: 17, vv. 10–11: “To make eternal memory of him here.”

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in which her own gender identity is at once affirmed and denied: “Ben fora a par di lor suo stil felice / s’io per lui degna scorta a l’alte spere / fossi, a Parnaso e l’altre glorie vere, / com’agl’amanti Laura e Beatrice.”43 In the game played between the singer-poet and the figure who is both guide and mirror, the poet manages to occupy both positions, modestly claiming glory only for the second. The “memoria di lui,” is, however, also necessarily connected to her own reputation as auctor: Non ch’io pensi dar luce al chiaro Sole in cui mi specchio, né ch’un marmo breve non chiuda il corpo mio col nome inseme;44 ch’excelsa immortal lode, extremo onore, per l’altezza de l’opra aspetto e spero.45 If the early phase of Vittoria Colonna’s poetic activity is devoted mainly to the construction of her authorial identity and of a feminine subjectivity—one that did not yet exist in the tradition—it is not surprising that a great part of this production is dedicated to meta-poetic reflection and the definition of the lyric I as well as the object of the poetry itself. As her foundational work seems complete, and her attention shifts increasingly toward spiritual reflection, the poet seems to feel this need for self-assertion less and less, and the space it is given is consequently reduced. As we have seen, the act of writing returns to a central position in Colonna’s discourse in the first sonnet of V2: its significance and its instruments are redefined by focusing on the Revelation, thus overcoming the mourning process. With less frequency than in the poems of mourning, the poet reflects on her new poetic style and again almost justifies herself, but in a different way— no longer to legitimize her own voice but to foresee likely objections to the treatment of sensitive themes.

43  A2: 17, vv. 4–8: “His wondrous style would be equal to theirs / if I were a worthy escort to the high spheres / to Parnassus and the other true glories, / as to the lovers Laura and Beatrice.” 44  A1: 75, vv. 9–11. “Not so that I may think to add light to the clear Sun / in which I reflect myself, nor so that a brief monument / might enclose my body and my name.” 45  A1: 87, vv. 3–4: “Lofty, immortal praise, high honor, / for the greatness of the work I expect and hope for.”

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Parrà forse ad alcun che non ben sano Sia il mio parlar di quelle eterne cose Tanto a l’occhio mortal lontane, ascose, che son sovra l’ingegno e corso umano. . . . Lui, che sol il può far, prego che mandi Virtù che scioglia e spezzi i duri nodi A la mia lingua, onde Li renda onore.46 If the author chooses to challenge her own abilities at a level that she recognizes as extremely difficult and even bold on her part, it is because she can do so; she feels that it is her duty and asks God to assist her in her new endeavor: no longer to give expression to her grief but to honor Him. Thus, just before the concluding sonnet, there appears in V2 another sonnet with an entirely meta-poetic content:47 S’in man prender non soglio unqua la lima del buon giudicio, e, ricercando intorno con occhio disdegnoso, io non adorno né tergo la mia rozza incolta rima, nasce perché non è mia cura prima procacciar di ciò lode, o fuggir scorno, né che, dopo il mio lieto al Ciel ritorno, viva ella al mondo in più onorata stima; ma dal foco divin, che ’l mio intelletto, sua mercé, infiamma, convien ch’escan fore mal mio grado talor queste faville; e s’alcuna di lor un gentil core avien che scaldi mille volte e mille ringraziar debbo il mio felice errore.48 46  S1: 3; V2: 59, vv. 1–4; 12–14. “Perhaps it will appear to some that my talking / of those invisible things is not entirely healthy, / things that are so distant and hidden from mortal eyes, / far above the minds and life of men. . . . He who guides our thoughts I pray may send / me virtue to untie and break the hard knots / that bind my tongue so that I may honor him”: Brundin 2005, 102–3. 47  In the Valgrisi edition (and thus in S1: 4) it occupies position no. 4, immediately after the just cited Parrà forse ad alcun, ideally continuing its reflection. 48  V2: 102: “If I often fail to take up the file / of good sense and, looking around me / with scornful eyes, refuse to embellish / or erase my rough, uncultivated verses, / this is because my primary concern is not / to garner praise for it, or avoid contempt, / or that after my

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The poet asserts that she is not seeking stylistic refinement (once again with an excess of deprecatio for poetry that she defines as “rough and uncultivated”), pointing to her indifference to current or future fame. Nevertheless she acknowledges that, despite herself, the divine passion that sustains her is sometimes translated into moments of authentic poetry, capable of transmitting faith. The entire sonnet deploys the language of Petrarchism and more generally of the lyric code: particularly noteworthy is the use of the rhyme gentil core / felice errore, which defines with precision an entire poetic and personal process of development. The way that this code is adapted to the new pursuit is remarkable, but there are other places as well in which Colonna’s affirmation of her own writing as a choice strongly motivated by sacred intent is reinterpreted using the code of the lyric tradition, thus confirming a strategic choice: tal io, qualor il caldo raggio e vivo del divin Sole onde nudrisco il core più de l’usato lucido lampeggia, movo la penna, mossa da l’amore interno, e senza ch’io stessa m’aveggia di quel ch’io dico le Sue lodi scrivo.49 Here the familiar image of the Sun—which in the poems of mourning always represented the light of her beloved, but now refers unequivocally to divine light—shapes the Petrarchan image of the nourished heart in a new way, and is then broadened again to allude to Dante and, though it is less likely, her religious sources. In other places too the “poesia della lode” is the key that connects the lyric I to tradition on the one hand and to the crucial theme of faith on the other: “Mossa da simil fede io scrivo, e spero / che se le lode vostre, al mondo sole, / qual posso canto, e come il ver le vole, / non se ne sdegni il vostro animo altero.”50 joyful return to heaven, / my poems will live on in the world more highly honoured, / but the divine fire, which through its mercy / inflames my mind, sometimes gives out / these sparks of its own accord, / and if one such spark should once warm some gentle heart, then a thousand times / a thousand thanks I owe to that happy mistake”: Brundin 2005, 137–38. 49  S1: 46, vv. 12–14: “so too I, when the warm, vivid ray of the divine Sun that nurtures my heart shines more dazzlingly than usual, move my pen, moved by the love inside me, and without being aware of what I am saying, write in his praise” (Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance, 78). 50  S1: 139, vv. 5–7: “Moved by similar faith I write, and hope / that if your praises, alone in the world, / I write as I can, and wish them to be true, / your noble spirit will not disdain them.”

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The rhyming word that recurs most frequently in the widowhood poems is Sole, which is also the most frequent word in Petrarch’s Rvf.51 While at times it effectively indicates the star,52 it is predominant—and of more interest to us here—as the preferred appellative of the deceased husband, often accompanied by the possessive adjective (mio Sole). Much more than the star and at times in open contrast to it (for the star with its light banishes night and with it “l’inganno del sonno,” the deceit of sleep),53 the poet’s Sun represents a constant force that is not subject to the elements—in comparison, the star is “discolored, gloomy, afflicted and black” (“discolorato, mesto, afflitto e nero”).54 Her Sun is indif­ferent to death or, conversely, now in his turn illuminated by the divine sun and capable of infusing her with beatitude. At other times a sense of absence and dejection prevails: “Da l’or che ’l mio bel Sol fu in terra spento / o è confuso l’ordin di natura / o ’l duolo ai sensi miei nasconde il vero”;55 or the Sun produces “nel fido petto un’altra primavera”56 and the lyric I even dreams “di Fetonte l’ardir, d’Icar le piume / [. . .] da condurmi vicino a quella parte / ove soggiorna il mio fulgente lume.”57 The semantic field of light, fire and ardor, also much present in RVF, is associated with images of the Sun and antinomially related to images of darkness, cold, obscurity, which on the whole are however less common. The whole semantic area, which in Corso’s commentary unequivocally points to the Platonic ascendancy of Colonna’s poetry, is transported without decisive changes into the phase of the more clearly spiritual writings and constitutes a strong element of continuity in her poetic language. Colonna herself once again provides a key to the interpretation of the development of her poetry: e ch’Ei volle sgombrar pria la mia mente con quel picciol mio sol, ch’ancor mi luce,

51  In Petrarch the relationship between Laura and the sun passes through the complex SoleApollo-lauro-Laura mediation; in Vittoria Colonna there is a direct Sun-Ferrante passage. 52  And in a certain number of cases it is the feminine adjective in the plural or at times the third person indicative of the verb “solere.” 53  A1: 68, v. 6. 54  A1: 21, v. 11. 55  A1: 32, vv. 12–14: “From the time when my beautiful Sun was extinguished on earth / either the natural order is confused / or pain masks the truth from my senses.” 56  A1: 33, v. 1: “In the faithful breast a new spring.” 57  A1: 36, vv. 9–12: “the bravery of Phaethon, the wings of Icarus / [ . . .] to bring me close to that place / where my brilliant Sun resides.”

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per entrarv’Egli poi, suprema Luce, e farla del Suo foco eterno ardente.58 Here, it is made unambiguously clear that the experience of intellectual concentration and poetic production linked to the relationship with the beloved is understood as being providential and of foundational importance to the experience of divine love—and to the supreme and definitive dimension of that experience—as it is to the new poetics. The echoes of neo-Platonic reflection are certainly evident, but it is difficult to go beyond the level of suggestion and to speak of “sources.” In the case of these last verses we can simply observe that they express an important concept, which is to be found in the speech that Castiglione assigns to Bembo in the fourth book of the Courtier: “egli vorrà servirsi di questo amore come d’un grado per ascendere ad un altro molto più sublime.”59

The Object and the Marriage Relationship

The lyric I in the vernacular literary tradition, which is naturally constructed in the representation of the delicate I/you dynamic, in Colonna’s case is found to have particular features: it is an “I” declined in feminine opposition to a masculine “you,” deprived by death of a body, which the “I” has legitimately known. The poetry is developed within these discursive boundaries, represented through an intricate web of figures. The lyric I insistently defines itself through the object and within the dimension of interiority: Per cagion d’un profondo alto pensero scorgo il mio vago obietto ognor presente; sculto il porto nel cor, vivo in la mente tal che l’occhio il vedea quasi men vero . . . Quel colpo che troncò lo stame degno ch’attorcea insieme l’una e l’altra vita 58  S1: 146, vv. 5–8: “He wished to clear my mind first of shadows / with that small sun of mine, which still shines for me, / to enter then Himself, the supreme Light, / and make it eternally burn for His fire.” 59  “He will use this love as a step to ascend to another, much more sublime, kind of love.” Baldassarre Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, lib. IV, c. lxvii, ed. Maier (Turin, 1981).

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in lui l’oprar e in me gli effetti estinse; fu al desir primo e fia l’ultimo segno la bella luce al sommo Ciel gradita che sovra i sensi mia ragion sospinse.60 In this sonnet, which appears among the opening poems in all the printed editions, a number of images are present which recur in various forms and places: the object of love, according to the tradition, is engraved into the heart but it creates a mental image so lifelike as to challenge the truth of the image perceived by the eye (the rhyme pensero/vero recurs numerous times). This strong, Petrarchan image,61 which returns various times in the form of an “imagin viva,”62 problematizes the relationship between reason and the senses, truth and dreaming,63 as do the antithetical pairs vero/falso, interno/esterno, but also alto/basso, caldo/freddo, eterno/mortale, primo/ultimo.64 Death has shattered two lives in one blow and the result is that the lyric I is endowed with reason detached from the senses and yet always in accord with Love: “Ragion l’afferma e Amor me ’l mostra aperto.”65 The construction of the lyric I is organized into two partially autonomous discourses: one deals with the construction of a suitable Object, endowed with recognizable value, while the other deals with the representation of a tie strong enough to justify the creation of an authoritative voice. The figure of Ferrante, who is never named, from the start assumes an idealized shape, described as possessing valor and glory, celebrated for his extraordinary military capacity 60  A1: 2, vv. 2–4; vv. 9–14: “By reason of a deep and high thought / I perceive my beautiful object always present; / I carry it sculpted in my heart, alive in my mind / such that to my eye it would almost seem less real [. . .] That blow which broke the worthy stem /that bound together our two lives / extinguished in him all deeds, in me all effects. / It was to desire the first and will be the last sign / that beautiful light beloved of Heaven / which drove my reason over my senses.” 61  R vf 157, vv. 1–4: “Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno / mandò sì al cor l’imagine sua viva / che ingegno o stil non sia mai che ‘l descriva / ma sempre a lui con la memoria torno.”(That always cruel and honored day so sent to my heart its lively image that no wit or style can ever describe it; but often I return to it with memory.) See also “l’imagin vera” in 126, 60 (Chiare fresche e dolci acque). 62  A1: 4, vv. 5–6: “Finché l’imagin viva a l’occhio riede / la bella tua memoria” (“So that the living image reveals to the eye / your lovely memory”); or again A1: 20, vv. 3–4: “dimostra il sonno poi l’imagin viva / con altro inganno più simile al vero” (“sleep then shows the living image / with other deceits more similar to the truth”). 63  Roberto Fedi, “L’imagin vera: Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo, e un’idea di canzoniere,” Modern Language Notes 107 (1992): 46–73. 64  True/false, internal/external, high/low, hot/cold, eternal/mortal, first/last. 65  A1: 4, v. 12: “Reason affirms it and Love shows me openly.”

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(“la forte tua vittrice mano”)66 but measured in terms of eternal life (“ch’uman premio non paga opre divine”).67 Salisti al mondo i più pregiati gradi; or godi in Ciel d’altri trionfi veri, d’altre frondi le tempie ornate e cinte.68 The condition of the You is thus connoted by an uninterrupted continuity of enjoyment, in a way that mirrors the suffering of the I; it is also characterized by a permanence guaranteed by its frequent appearance in dreams and in general by its function as a guiding presence. This persistently public and somewhat muscular aspect of the beloved, in contrast to the intimate dimension of the I, yields at times to the author’s need to endow him with more human features, “facean de l’opre udite intera fede / l’ardito volto e ’l parlar saggio e adorno”;69 and again: Se ben a tante gloriose e chiare Doti di quell’invitto animo altero Volgo la mente ognor, fermo il pensero, Non fur l’altre di fuor men belle e rare. Pur perché quelle son, queste n’appare Che sian più grate; il nostro casto e vero Parrebbe forse amor falso e leggiero Se non fosser l’interne al cor più care.70 The image of the relationship that is gradually constructed is first of all a condition of happiness and love (casto e vero); in particular, the unique nature of the love relationship for the I is asserted with the repetition of the first and last syntagm in every possible variation: 66  A1: 5, v. 2: “Your strong, victorious hand.” 67  A1: 5, v. 14: “Human rewards do not pay for divine works.” 68  A1: 6, vv. 12–14: “You ascended in this world to the highest honors; now in heaven you enjoy different, true triumphs, your temples adorned and crowned by different wreaths” (Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance, 135). 69  A1: 61, vv. 7–8: “They made of his renowned deeds ample proof / his bold aspect and wise and elegant speech.” 70  A1: 62, vv. 1–8: “If to so many glorious and noble / qualities of that high unconquered soul / I always turn my mind, with steady thoughts, / the others from without were no less wondrous and rare. / Precisely because they are, these then seem / more dear; our chaste and true / love might seem false and superficial / if the inner qualities were not dearer to the heart.”

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da l’antica passion nacque sol una fede al mio petto, che non men sincero del primo giorno sarà l’ultim’anno.71 This absolute uniqueness72 is emphasized as proceeding from a divine plan and is thus inexplicable when the soul of the subject has been banished from the “divin recetto:” La scorta, il lume, il giorno l’è interdetto Ond’or camina in cieco error smarrita. Se la natura e ’l Ciel con pari voglia Ne legò insieme, ahi! Qual invido ardire O qual ingiusta forza ne disciolse? Se ’l viver suo nudrì mia frale spoglia, per lui nacqui, ero sua, per sé mi tolse, in la sua morte ancor devea morire.73 The loss of the totalizing function of the figure of the beloved pushes the I to the threshold of rebellion, which is after all not surprising given the “infernal” condition—revealed by the Dantean echo—in which it finds itself; at the same time the declaration of belonging so explicitly connoted as feminine, in contrast to the inverted image of nourishment, offers a glimpse of other less codified aspects of the relationship. The beloved’s guiding role nevertheless seems to suit the idealization of the relationship, which is functional to the construction of the I. It returns in other texts with slightly different nuances but with considerable continuity. Seco vissi felice; ei mi scoverse I dubbi passi ed or dal Ciel m’insegna Il sentier dritto coi vestigi chiari. Ei mi mostrò il principio, e ’l fin m’offerse 71  A1: 58, vv. 12–14: “From the ancient passion is born just one / faith in my breast, which will be no less sincere / in the last year as on the first day.” 72  According to the traditional Roman image of the univira, endowed with virtue and reinterpreted time and time again. 73  A1: 22, vv. 7–14: “His companion, the light, the day are forbidden it [to my soul] / so it wanders lost in blind error. / If Nature and Heaven with equal desire / bound them together, alas! What jealous passion / or unjust force rent them? / If his life nourished my frail being, / I was born for him, I was his, he possessed me, / when he died I should have died too.”

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Della vera salute; ei farà degna L’alma, che là su goda e qua giù impari.74 The guiding function exercised by the object of love is reasserted more forcefully in a sonnet in which the presence of Dante is particularly significant: Dal breve sogno e dal fragil pensero soccorso attende la mia debil vita; quando interrotti son riman smarrita sì, ch’io peno in ridurla al camin vero, vero non già per me, ch’altro sentero mi suol mostrar la mia luce infinita, e dirmi: “Meco in Ciel sarai gradita se raffrena il dolor lo spirto altero. Martiri, aversità, disdegni e morte non diviser le voglie insieme accese ch’Amor, Fede e Ragion legar sì forte.” Rispondo: “L’alte tue parole intese e serbate da me son fide scorte per vincer qui del mondo empie contese.”75 The poem opens with a Petrarchan syntagm (breve sogno), which however refers to an indispensable oneiric dimension, because it is the only moment in which the beloved is “present” and it is more effective—fallacious though it is—than thought in maintaining contact. The lyric I loses itself when such supports are lacking and finds it difficult to establish a relationship with reality, which in effect appears less ‘true’ than the road of truth indicated by her guide. In addition to the evident repetition of the vita/smarrita rhyme, Dante is present in many rhyming series, in particular

74  A1: 63, vv. 9–14: “With him I lived happily; he guided / my doubtful steps and now from Heaven he teaches me / the straight way with clear tracks. / He showed me the beginning, and offered me the end / of true salvation; he will make the soul / worthy, so that up there it is joyful and down here it learns.” 75  A1: 14: “From a brief dream and frail thought / my weak life awaits help; / when they are interrupted it is lost / so that I struggle to bring it back to the true path, / true not for me, for my infinite light / ever shows me another path, / and says to me: ‘You will be welcome in Heaven with me / if your noble spirit checks its pain. / Martyrdom, adversity, scorn and death / did not break the desires lit together / which Love, Faith and Reason so strongly bound.’ / I reply: ‘Your noble words understood / and employed by me are faithful escorts / to overcome on earth cruel disputes.’ ”

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pensero/vero,76 but also in the tercets ( forte/morte/scorte)77. The advice of the beloved is important because it indicates that suffering must be experienced and coped with through the filter of poetry as well as faith, which is possible only through the intervention of reason, according to the direct indication se raffrena il dolor lo spirto altero.78 Conversely, it consolidates the idealized image of a relationship that has been capable of overcoming all hardship by uniting Love, Faith and Reason, according to a line that is more Dantean than Petrarchan. The response of the I reasserts the guiding role of the beloved with words recalling those of Virgil to Dante79, but here the relationship between guide and guided is again inverted, as we have already seen in Rami di un arbor santo. Reason/Senses The idea of reason as a brake—one that is at times ineffective—first appeared in the proemial sonnet Scrivo sol as a reference to Dante80 from whom the rhyme (raffrena/pena) is also taken. Reason is also seen as what dominates the senses (che sovra i sensi mia ragion sospinse)81 and a positive force of inner clarity that acts in harmony with Love: Ragion l’afferma e Amor me ’l mostra aperto Che ’l tuo vivo splendor riluce interno Nel petto, ov’ogni error prima disciolse.82 Although there are times when trust fails (“Niun soccorso a me vien da mia ragione / ella contra d’Amor si trova imbelle”)83 and even moments of desperation (“ma, non trovando alfin ragion che giove / a l’alma nel suo duol sempre

76   Commedia: Par. XXVIII, v. 2 and XXIX, v. 83. 77   Commedia: Inf. I, v. 5; Pur. XXVII, v. 17. 78  A1: 14, vv. 7–8: “the high spirit lessens pain.” 79   Commedia: Inf. II, v. 43: s’i’ ho ben la parola tua intesa. 80  The syntagm appears in Dante Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, where the rhyme doglia / voglia also appears. In Petrarch (Rvf 240, v. 3) it is found only once with a different meaning. 81  A1: 2, v. 14: “which suspended my reason over my senses.” 82  A1: 4, vv. 12–14: “Reason confirms it and Love shows me openly / that your living splendour shines inside / my breast, where it first melted all sin.” 83  A2: 51, vv. 9–10: “No help comes from my reason; / she finds herself feeble with Love.”

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proterva, / prego che ’l pianto mio finisca morte”),84 generally the poet’s faith in her own rightful reason prevails (“È sì giusto il pensier che mi tormenta / che m’è grato il morir per tal cagione; / fa li sensi subietti a la ragione”).85 The path of reason is connected to a slow and continuous mourning process, as explained in Quanto s’interna al cor più d’anno in anno (“la mia piaga amorosa men m’offende”86). Such a process, governed by reason, releases the lyric I from the slavery of pain and the urgings of the senses, producing a progressive interiorization that leads to sublimation (symbolized by the image of flight). Una viva ragion prima raffrena Il duol, poi lega i sensi ed ella sciolta Con l’alto mio pensier volano insieme.87

Interiority and Thought

The adjective interna appears in the opening line of the proemial sonnet as a defining characteristic of doglia (“suffering”), which increasingly stands out as the poet’s dominant condition: an internal dimension in which the only reality is “thought” itself—a complex but crucial concept that runs through Colonna’s entire production, but particularly the mourning poems. “Pensero” (one of the most frequent rhyme words) is often rhymed with “vero” and articulated within the terms of the alto/basso antinomy. We are here within the sphere of an intense spirituality in which a religious component is present from the start—although it is not yet dominant. The adjective interno, for example, is frequently rhymed with eterno and is used to construct a new antinomial pair, dentro/fuori, also placed within the series of binary oppositions: Dal vivo fonte del mio pianto eterno Con maggior vena largo rivo insorge 84  A1: 51, vv. 12–14: “But in the end finding no reason that is useful / to my soul, always stubborn in its pain, / I pray that death may end my weeping.” 85  A2: 41, vv. 1–3: “The thought that torments me is so just / that dying for this reason is a pleasure; / it subjects the senses to reason.” 86  A1: 52, v. 2–2: “As it becomes more and more embedded in my heart, / my loving wound offends me less.” 87  A1: 52, vv. 9–11: “Lively reason first checks / the pain, then binds the senses, and thus freed / with my noble thought fly together.”

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Quando lieta stagion d’intorno scorge L’alma, che dentro ha un lacrimoso verno; quanto più luminoso il ciel discerno, ricca la terra, e adorno il mondo porge le sue vaghezze, il cor miser s’accorge che ’l bel di fuor raddoppia il duolo interno.88 In the dentro/fuori opposition, which features in the entire text, a contrast develops between external reality and an interiority, which is untouched by it and has its own special truth, as we have seen in the case of dreams, thoughts, mental images.89 Interiorization taken to an extreme can also lead to the temptation of silence, as in the lovely sonnet Spinse il dolor la voce (“Pain provoked my song”) which ends with the poet’s desolate decision to cease writing poems of mourning (pianto), in order to preserve the flame of love within a more discreet internal dimension: Tempo è ch’ardendo dentro ascoso il foco mai sempre sé di fuor rasciughi ’l pianto, e sol d’intorno al cor rinasca e mora.90 The sphere of interiority, which is crucial to Colonna’s articulation of poetic subjectivity, shifts semantically in her move toward religious meditation and is almost always expressed in terms of “interno ardore” or, more traditionally, as the seat of the heart. Forse il Signor, finché di molle cera mi vegga il petto, onde ’l sigillo eterno

88  A1: 13, vv. 1–8: “From the living source of my eternal weeping / with a greater vein arises a wide stream / when my soul perceives a happy season all around / and inside knows only tearful winter; / the more light-filled the sky, / rich the earth, and the more the adorned earth / shows off its beauties, so the miserable heart realizes / that this external beauty redoubles its internal pain.” 89  The influence of reformed thought in this complex figuration of inner life is clear. Ossola identifies a precise link with Valdés and defines Vittoria Colonna as “the most sensitive and faithful interpreter of spirituality cultivated in the circle of Viterbo”: Carlo Ossola, ed., Lo Evangelio di San Matteo (Rome, 1985), 82. 90  A1: 74, vv. 12–14: “It is time that my fire burning hidden always within / my weeping dries itself without, / and only around my heart is born and dies.”

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m’imprima dentro nel più vivo interno del cor la fede Sua fondata e vera91 Different considerations apply to the concept of “thought” (pensero or pensiero), which Colonna employs in an original way, in contrast with Petrarch. It has a very high frequency: it is rhymed as many as thirty-two times and appears about seventy times in the entire corpus. It rhymes almost invariably with vero and this immediately alludes to the philosophical—when not religious— sphere. It is frequently qualified by an adjective, which is often the possessive mio, indicating the intimate process of coming to terms with grief, as well as the beloved’s invisible “presence” as grief is interiorized: “thought” becomes an active agent. As we have already seen, adjectives are often used to qualify the value of thought: alto, basso, falso, fido, bello, dolce, casto, ardente, fragile. Pensero generally represents the subjective sphere of meditation, but also points to the dimensions of memory and imagination, in which truth is not subject to the constrictions of reality: “Parmi che i lunghi miei gravosi danni / li ricompensi un dolce alto pensero.”92 It can also include the creative capacity of poetry: Quando già stanco il mio dolce pensero del suo felice corso giunge a riva dimostra il sonno poi l’imagin viva con altro inganno più simil al vero. Quel fa ch’io segni bianco il giorno nero, questo d’oscurità le notti priva, e se già l’aprir gli occhi mi nudriva il chiuderli ora è cagion ch’io non pero. E se col tempo il gran martir s’avanza, sempre più salda in la memoria siede col sonno e col pensier l’alta sembianza.93 91  S1: 49, vv. 5–8: “Perhaps the Lord, seeing my breast / is made of soft wax, so that the eternal seal / imprints within the living depths / of my heart His grounded, true faith.” 92  A1: 27, vv. 5–6: “It seems to me that my long, oppressive suffering / is repaid by a sweet, noble thought.” 93  A1: 20, vv. 1–11: “When already weary my sweet thought / reaches the banks of his happy course / sleep shows me the true image / with a deception closer to the truth. / That makes me call the black day white, / this deprives the nights of darkness, / and if opening my eyes nourished me before / then now closing them is the reason I don’t perish. / If with time the great martyrdom advances / the more securely in my memory resides / the noble image in sleep and contemplation.”

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The poet’s narration of an experience between dream and vision radically questions the relationship between truth and deception of the senses, between life and death, as well as the challenge that memory—and poetry—pose to death: the preservation of the image conveyed by the poem is founded precisely on dream and meditation. The very idea of truth—complicated by an inner experience of dramatic opposition between absence and presence—encourages the lyric I to shift toward a “mystic” mode of perception: Quanto toglie un desir rende un pensiero di dolce frutto a l’alta mia fatica; l’un mi consuma il cor, l’altro il nudrica; questo fa il viver grave e quel leggiero. Scorge falso il pensier quanto per vero dimostra il mondo, onde la pena antica con novo freno allevia, e mi fa amica del ben ch’ei gode; io pe’ suoi prieghi il spero. L’altro coi sproni ardenti s’appresenta, vago de l’alme luci e del gioire che nudrian l’alma mentr’ei visse in terra. Quel fa la gloria viva e questo spenta; l’un guarda a la cagion, l’altro al martire; m’alfin l’alto pensier vince la guerra.94 In the “war” waged by the I against the “ardent” grasp of regret, which consumes vital energy, makes life weary and risks undermining the noble suffering of the grieving process, “thought” (pensiero), being “lofty” (alto), disproves the established beliefs of the world (mondo) and represents an authentic way of relating to the beloved’s privileged condition (“del ben ch’ei gode”), which the poet hopes to attain through his mediation (“pe’ suoi prieghi il spero”). There is only one way to win such a war: by struggling against “desir,” which in bringing back the memory of pleasure consumes the poet with “ardent spurs.”

94  A1: 38: “As much as desire robs me, so much my thought gives back / sweet fruit to my lofty suffering; / the one consumes my heart, the other nourishes it; / one makes my life painful and the other easy. / My thought perceives as false all that the world / presents as true, so that a new restraint / lessens my ancient pain, and makes me friends / with the good that he enjoys; through his merits I hope for it. / The other presents itself with ardent spurs, / desirous of the beautiful lights and by the pleasure / which nourished my soul when he lived on earth. / One makes his glory living, the other dead; one looks to the cause, the other to martyrdom; but ultimately my lofty thought wins the war.”

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Desire The posthumous dimension of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry casts the problem of desire and the hope of satisfying it—both crucial aspects of the love theme in the poetic tradition—in a completely new light, which is particularly significant given the sensitive nature of the theme for a woman. Nevertheless, the Petrarchan code is still so powerful in this case that the poet’s discourse cannot stray very far from Petrarch’s own achievement: while death alone is not enough to put an end to desire, or to poetry, it is a prerequisite for abandoning hope and beginning a process of change. Such a process, far from negating the desiring subject entirely, is what leads the poet to a final appeal to the Virgin, “prendi in grado i cangiati desiri,”95 which brings the transformation to completion. Colonna recognizes in herself the power of Petrarch’s figure of conflict, and the process of change is also described in Petrarchan terms, from loss of hope to transformation: S’io verde prato scorgo trema l’alma priva di speme, e se fior vaghi miro si rinverde il desir del mio bel frutto che morte svelse.96 ’l mio tormento interno sperar non fa minor, né toglie oblio, ma col tempo il duol cresce, arde il desio.97 Such a dimension is contradictory to a degree, because desire entails not only pain but also a certain amount of pleasure, even when unsatisfied. At the same time, letting go of grief is no easy task and poetry itself seems futile: e ’n questo e ’n quel pensier piangendo godo tra poche dolci e assai lacrime amare.98

95  R vf, 366, v. 130 (“accept my changed desires”). 96  A1: 11, vv. 9–12: “If I see a green meadow my soul trembles / deprived of hope, and if I gaze upon a lovely flower / the desire for my beautiful fruit is renewed, / which death stole.” 97  A1: 89, vv. 22–24: “But my inner torment is not mitigated by hope or canceled by oblivion: time passes, and my pain grows, my desire burns” (Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance, 48). 98  A1: 61, vv. 13–14: “and weeping between one and the other thought, I enjoy / a few sweet and many bitter tears.”

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Amor, s’a’ nostri bei desiri il varco n’è chiuso, onde correan a la beata luce, chiudi in la mente a lor l’intrata, che ’l cor com’è del ben sia del duol scarco. . . . Il pianto e ’l languir nostro a che ne giova? A che la breve speme e i van desiri, s’al suo riscuoter l’alma il fin non trova? Non vo’ lasciar i miei dolci martiri, né che dal primo nodo il cor si mova, ma ch’in mezzo le fiamme almen respiri.99 The existence of the I, its very foundation, is insistently linked with desire (prima/primo/primo/primi), and it is desire that survives well beyond hope, until the end: Amor, se morta è la mia prima speme nel primo foco ancor pur vivo ed ardo; il desir, ch’ebbi pria col primo sguardo nei dì miei primi, avrò ne l’ore extreme.100 A need for change, however, arises from within the mourning poems: di speranza or priva, quei costumi devrian mutarsi in più sicuri e rari desiri101 Unsatisfied with her achievement, the poet develops a new perspective that departs from the Petrarchan framework, despite its continued presence in the 99  A1: 46, vv. 1–4, 9–14: “Love, if the way to our desires is / closed, whence they ran to the blessed / light, shut my mind to their entry, / so that my heart may be free from pain as it is from joy [. . .]. What good is our weeping and languishing? / What good the brief hope and vain desires, / if the soul on rousing cannot find the end? / I will not leave my sweet martyrdoms / nor loose my heart from its first knot, / in the midst of the flames at least to breathe.” 100  A1: 48, vv. 1–4: “Love, if my first hope is dead/ I still live and burn within the first fire; / the desire, which I had first with the first glance / in my first days, I will keep in the final hours.” 101  A1: 66, vv. 12–14: “now deprived of hope, those customs / must change into surer and rarer / desires.”

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spiritual poems (“erga e rinforzi il purgato desire”;102 “avendo al cor gli altri desiri spenti”;103 “con desii purgati e casti”).104 A different path now seems to open up: A che sempre chiamar la sorda morte e far pietoso il Ciel col pianger mio se vincer meco istessa il gran desio sarà in por fine al duol per vie più corte? . . . riman sol a provar se vive meco tanta ragion ch’io volga quest’insano desir fuor di speranza a miglior opre.105 Victory over desire cannot be achieved with one’s own death, nor with divine assistance: the poet’s original answer is thus to appeal to reason in an attempt to escape folly (“insano desir”) and turn the impulse of desire into “miglior opre”—better (good?) deeds—an expression which can only be interpreted within the context of Christian terminology, or as an allusion to a new form of poetry.

Corpus/Body 1: Prison, Knot, Veil

The posthumous dimension of Colonna’s poetry, however, could not remove the fact that she had a body; and in the lyric tradition, the body of a woman was not placed as a subject, but only as the object of poetry, for which it constituted a problem. The Petrarchan solution, following Dante, consisted in representing the object of love as endowed with great moral virtue, but its physical sensuality had to be completely depleted and sublimated postmortem, in order to allow the subject relative freedom from his own (sensuality). Colonna finds herself—the first woman—working with a code which did not allow for

102  S1: 6, v. 11: “raises and reinforces the pure desire.” 103  S1: 8, v. 6: “having quashed all other desires within my heart” (Brundin 2005, 65). 104  S1: 98, v. 7: “all desires chastened and purged” (Brundin 2005, 69). 105  A1: 64, vv. 1–4; vv. 12–14: “Why always call to deaf death / and move the Heavens to pity with my weeping / if overcoming on my own the great desire / will end my suffering by a quicker route? . . . It remains only to test if I possess / sufficient reason to turn this insane / desire from hopelessness to some better work.”

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female subjectivity: the body of her beloved is virtually absent from the text106 while her own is repeatedly defined as an encumbrance, a burden contrasted with a continual aspiration to “flight,”—which she expresses by borrowing the figure of Icarus from Dante.107 This relationship with the body, however, is described by means of a paradigm that is subject to significant variation. As we have seen, absolute control of reason over the senses may be understood as punitive but also as a more balanced process of sublimation. If the sphere of desire is a great source of hardship, loss and memory at first inspire the poet to depict the entire dimension of the body as a veritable cause for doom, an unbearable burden to be cast off, even to the point of desiring death. Or come avien che questa fragil salma, di mortal gonna per mio danno ordita, la tiri in terra, essendo in Ciel unita con la sua luce gloriosa ed alma? S’ivi s’appaga, si nudrisce e vive, e l’abitare in questo carcer sempre le saria grave, anzi pur viva morte.108 The body as a prison does not appear in Rvf until canzone 264, I’vo pensando e nel pensier m’assale, which opens the section devoted to the death of Laura; in Colonna’s work, the figure appears in the poems in which her desire for her own death begins to manifest itself more clearly. A new emphasis on the body as an unassailable fact emerges: it is a fact which must be dealt with and which will open up new avenues of meditation. The poet’s reflection on the dual nature of humanity, which begins in sonnet A1: 29 with a declaration of wonder at the greatness of creation, is immediately overturned in a dramatic revelation of powerlessness and dismay, culminating in an assertion that falls just short of blasphemy: 106  Although there are abstract references to his “beauty” or his “scars,” and although in sonnet A2: 20, Colonna alludes to the loved one’s “graces” (“ogni grazia”) and to the fact that “hence desire is born,” these are only partial exceptions as they are linked to the higher senses of “sight and hearing” (“dal veder e da l’udir”), following Plato. Colonna is careful to make it clear that the “other simple senses” or “any base thought” are not involved. 107  Dante, Inf. XVII, v. 109; A1: 56; A2: 18. 108  A1: 54, vv. 5–11: “How can it be that this frail body, / tangled in human garb to my detriment, / pulls it to earth, when it is united in Heaven / with its glorious and noble light? If there it is gratified, nurtured and fed, / and living in this prison would always / be torture, or more, a living death.”

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Cara union, con che mirabil modo per nostra pace t’ha ordinata il Cielo, che lo spirto divino e ’l mortal velo leghi un soave ed amoroso nodo! Io la bell’opra e ’l grande auttor ne lodo, ma, d’altra speme mossa e d’altro zelo, separarla vorrei prima che ’l pelo cangiassi, poiché d’essa io qui non godo. L’alma rinchiusa in questo carcer rio come nimico l’odia, onde smarrita né vive qua né vola ov’io desio. Vera gloria saria vedermi unita col lume che die’ luce al corso mio, poi sol nel viver suo conobbi vita.109 The marvelous union between body and spirit is defined as a nodo (knot), following Petrarch,110 who is also at the origin of the phrase mortal velo;111 Rvf, 264 is the most explicit subtext of the sonnet: Né posso il giorno che la vita serra, antiveder per lo corporeo velo, ma variarsi il pelo veggio e dentro cangiarsi ogni desire.112 Colonna’s text shows only the admiration that is due to humanity—the crowning glory of Creation—and for the measure of divinity in which it shares, but it also seems to express an unchristian feeling of hate, as well as a new rebellion 109  A1: 29: “Dear union, with what admirable design / for our peace did the Heavens order you, / so that the divine spirit and human veil / are joined in one sweet and loving knot! / I praise the beautiful deed and its great author, / but, moved by another hope and another zeal, / I wish to rend it before the hair / changes, since here I cannot enjoy it. / My soul enclosed in this wicked prison / hates it as an enemy, for lost / it neither lives here nor flies where I desire. / It would be a true glory to see myself united / with the source that shed light on my path, / since in his life alone I found life.” 110  R vf, 283 “del più leggiadro e più bel nodo hai sciolto” (Morte); 305 “anima bella da quel nodo sciolta”; 361 “dal suo bel nodo sciolta.” 111  R vf, 70 “mortal velo.” 112  R vf, 264, vv. 113–16: “nor will this bodily veil allow / foreknowledge of life’s closing day / but I see my hair turning grey / and all my passions changing in my heart” (Robert M. Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems [Cambridge, MA, 1979], 432).

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against the bodily condition which, once more with a Dantean rhyme (vita/ smarrita), she seems to define as infernal, before closing with a subjective definition of what life is. The frequency of the term nodo in the macro-text is also due to its other meaning, which points to an interpersonal amorous bond and semantically redefines the entire field, as, for example, in: Amor, tu sai che già mai torsi il piede dal carcer tuo soave, né disciolsi dal dolce giogo il collo, né ti tolsi quanto dal primo dì l’alma ti diede; . . . il nodo è stretto ancor com’io l’avolsi; . . . Fa’ omai da te che ’l nodo si rallente, ch’a me di libertà già mai non calse; anzi, di ricovrarla or mi par tardo.113 The amorous prison is pleasant and its yoke is sweet: the constraint of the knot is still felt, but it is the result of a choice that the poet will not disavow, since it is not freedom that she seeks. A contradiction lies in the persisting ambivalence of the corporeal dimension: the body is—as always—what represents the limits of the spirit; it will be possible to develop a new appreciation of the body only if a deeper understanding of the dual nature of human beings is achieved—starting from the radically new way in which human nature manifests itself in Jesus Christ.

Corpus/Body 2: Bond, Dominion

The amorous bond is represented as the only reality whose value is entirely independent of earthly events. Founded as it is both on reason and love, it is not connected to the body in particular: such an amorous tie is all the more profound and cannot be severed, for not only has it overcome the ordeal of death, but above all it has disciplined the mortal body. The tie/knot—a figure 113  A1: 45, vv. 1–4, v. 6, vv. 12–14: “Love, you know that I have never wandered / from your lovely prison, nor freed / my neck from your sweet yoke, nor taken back / anything that my soul gave you at the start; . . . The knot is as tight as when I first tied it; . . . Now you loosen the knot, / for liberty has never mattered to me; / on the contrary, it seems too late to recover it now.”

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to which the poet returns with devoted and obsessive insistence, listing all of its related terms, starting with nodo, which is also used in the closing formula of the poem below—has become its own reward, conquering the corporeal barrier (and discarding it precisely because it is transitory), in order to enter the sphere of interiority, and become eternal in the afterworld. Chi può troncar quel laccio che m’avinse? Se Ragion porse il stame Amor l’avolse; né Sdegno il rallentò, né Morte il sciolse; la Fede l’annodò, Tempo lo strinse. Il cor legò, poi l’alma, e intorno cinse; chi più conobbe il ben più se ne tolse; l’indissolubil nodo in premio volse per esser vinta da chi gli altri vinse. Convenne al ricco bel legame eterno spreggiar questa mortal caduca spoglia per annodarmi in più mirabil modo; onde tanto obligò lo spirto interno ch’al cangiar vita fermerò la voglia; soave in terra, in Ciel felice nodo.114 Despite her contradictory relationship with her own body, the poet has chosen a clear path in order to attempt its representation: she offers a figure of achieved reconcilement, which is satisfying on the aesthetic but above all the ethical plane, and very different to the image chosen by Petrarch, for reasons that are likely connected to their different gender identity. Questo nodo gentil che l’alma stringe, poi che l’alta cagion fatt’è immortale, discaccia dal mio cor tutto quel male che gli amanti a furor spesso constringe.

114  A1: 10: “Who can cut the bond that tied me? / If Reason held the lace, Love wound it; / Scorn did not slow it, nor Death unbind it; / Faith knotted it, Time tightened it. / It bound my heart, then my soul, and girded them; / he who was happiest took more of it; / the indissoluble knot was a prize / to be won by he who won all others. / It befits the rich, wondrous, eternal bond / to spurn this weak, mortal body / so as to knot myself in a more admirable way; / he so obligated the inner spirit / that I will fix my will on changing lives; / sweet on earth, in Heaven happy knot.”

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Tante imagini false or non dipinge Amor ne la mia mente, né m’assale timor, né l’aureo o l’impiombato strale tra freno e sproni or mi ritiene, or spinge. Con salda fede in quell’immobil stato me l’appresenta un fiso e bel pensero sovra le stelle, la fortuna e ’l fato. Né men sdegnoso un giorno o più altero l’altro, ma sempre stabile e beato, quest’amor d’ora è ’l fermo, il buono e ’l vero.115 With her beloved’s death and his reduction to spirit, the love relationship (“nodo gentil”) has undergone a profound transformation, in which all sources of disquiet (“furor”) are absent, since the love relationship has shifted to the spirit only, abandoning the body (“l’alma stringe”). When the sensual power of Love is neutralized, anxiety and conflict disappear, with the result that a condition of ataraxy is achieved—a total absence of movement in which the contemplation of truth prevails, signaled once again by the pensero/vero rhyme in the all-important closing lines. The entire sonnet is pervaded by a blissful immobility which has subdued every impetus of passion (“salda,” “immobil stato”; “un fiso e bel pensero”; “sempre stabile e beato”; “il fermo, il buono e il vero”), securing what appears to be a true victory over the body and its fragility, an experience close to the condition of the Blessed in Paradise.116 This seems to be the ending point of the mourning process begun by the poet in the proemial sonnet. The body is conceived of as an element of utter weakness and vulnerability; one must become free of it in order to achieve the ideal condition of bliss. Such an experience is linked of course to mystical thought, but also appears not independent from the sheer condition of being a woman—that is, of being reduced and confined to the body by our culture. One important piece, however, is missing to complete this picture, and this is 115  A1: 31: “This gentle knot that binds my soul, / now that my noble lord is made immortal, / unleash from my heart all the harm / which often pushes lovers to madness. / Love does not paint in my mind / so many false images, nor does fear / assail me, nor does the gold or leaden arrow / curbing or urging me, pull me back or push me on. / With firm faith in that immobile state / it offers me a fixed and beautiful thought / above the stars, fortune and fate. / Nor one day less disdainful or another / more lofty, but always stable and blessed / from now on this love is firm, good and true.” 116  “Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa, / mirava fissa, immobile e attenta, / e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa.” Commedia, Par., XXXIII, 97–99.

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the redefinition of the meaning of poetry that such a picture entails, as shown in sonnet A1: 30:117 Quando Morte fra noi disciolse il nodo che primo avinse il Ciel, Natura e Amore, tolse agli occhi l’obietto e ’l cibo al core; l’alme ristrinse in più congiunto modo. Quest’è ’l legame bel ch’io prezzo e lodo, dal qual sol nasce eterna gloria e onore; non può il frutto marcir, né langue il fiore del bel giardino ov’io piangendo godo. Sterili i corpi fur, l’alme feconde; il suo valor qui col mio nome unito mi fan pur madre di sua chiara prole, la qual vive immortal, ed io ne l’onde del pianto son, perch’ei nel Ciel salito, vinse il duol la vittoria ed egli il sole.118 The rhyming series nodo/modo/lodo/godo links the poem in a single train of thought to some of the other sonnets analysed above (Cara union, con che mirabil modo, A1: 29; Chi può troncar quel laccio che m’avinse, A1: 10); it also refers to a similar reflection in Petrarch.119 However, while Colonna diverges from Petrarch by presenting the idealized image of an extreme “subduing of the flesh,” in this sonnet the difference is revealed precisely in that body which bursts into the discourse despite her wishes. The poet first illustrates how the mortal blow which severed the tie between her and her beloved— a tie endowed with divine meaning, as well as corporeal and sentimental com117  See Maria Serena Sapegno, “ ‘Sterili i corpi fur, l’alme feconde’ (Vittoria Colonna Rime A1: 30),” in “L’una et l’altra chiave”: Figure e momenti del Petrarchismo femminile europeo, ed. Tatiana Crivelli et al. (Rome, 2005), 31–44. 118  A1: 30: “When death dissolved the knot between us / first tied by Heaven, Nature and Love, / it took from my eyes the object, from my heart the nourishment; / tied our souls in a tighter bond. / This is the wondrous bond that I prize and praise, / from which alone come eternal glory and honor; / fruit cannot rot, nor flowers wither / in the lovely garden which I, weeping, enjoy. / Our bodies were sterile, our souls fertile; / his valor united here with my name / make me mother to his noble offspring, / which lives immortal, and I am carried by waves / of weeping, for he is risen to Heaven, / pain vanquished victory [Vittoria], he vanquished the sun.” 119  R vf, 175: nodo / modo / odo / godo; 268 nodo / modo; 330 modo / nodo; 359 nodo / modo / godo.

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ponents—has admittedly produced a serious loss on the last two planes (body and feelings), but has also reinforced the bond between their two souls on the spiritual/divine plane. She then reasserts what we have seen in A1: 31, that is the ideal nature of the bond, which she claims with great force. This bond will secure for them both the eternal dimension of fame, precisely because it is not subject to the deterioration of living things—as are the flowers and fruits in a natural garden, unlike the spiritual one in which she is permitted to “godere nel pianto” (in the writing of poetry). This dimension of “fecundity” is what produces poetry, and it entails the image of poetic production as offspring, an image derived from Plato,120 which is also to be found in Ovid’s Tristia, Colonna’s probable source.121 If this is the likely source the effect is astonishing, for it points to an entirely original development: the question is absent in Petrarch, who has only one occurrence of the term fecondo (and that with a meaning that is paradoxically reversed since it refers to the “verginità feconda” of the Virgin in Rvf, 366). Colonna takes a real experience, her painful sterility, and reverses it by bringing it into contact with her chosen poetic figure, thus producing a short circuit between a metaphor of spiritual maternity and the reality of her female body. This ambivalent victory over the body gives rise to a peculiar form of “ ‘maternity,” which defines her as “fertile,” but in spirit, “against” the body; she has produced an immortal poetic progeny, not subject to death, unlike natural offspring. The poet is thus a Mother, though not in a self-sufficient way, as in Ovid’s image of Zeus the father/mother of Minerva. She is mother to a generation resulting from the union of her beloved’s valour and her own name, the name of a woman who has overcome her grief (“vinse il duol la vittoria”) by writing poetry (“ne l’onde del pianto”). As a result, eternal glory is achieved through poetry by a woman who has achieved full control over the weakness of her body.

120  “a lofty classical tradition, [. . .] which, starting from the words pronounced by Diotima in the Symposium—according to whom ‘there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies’—put a hierarchy of nobility into place which made it so that ‘anyone would prefer to produce such offspring rather than children in the flesh, in their wish to imitate Homer, Hesiod and the other great poets’ (cfr. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur un lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern: 1948, VII, 2)” in M. S. Sapegno “Sterili i copri fur,” 38. 121  “Palladis exemplo de me sine matre creata / carmina sunt; stirps haec progeniesque mea est”: Ovid, Tristia, III, 14, vv. 13–14.

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Dual Nature, Virgin and Mother

At the same time, one of the keys to the power of Colonna’s new spiritual poetry, made possible—as she herself tells us—by her earlier poetic experience, lies precisely in the restitution of meaning and value to the body. The proemial sonnet in V2 (and in the Valgrisi edition) explicitly connects the poet’s early experience with the new one, as well as the ‘chaste’ quality of the amorous relationship with her appropriation of new, entirely corporeal writing instruments: the body and blood of Christ. While a great deal of her poetic reflection is dedicated to the problematic co-existence of two natures in human beings—the human and the divine, body and soul—placing more value on the divine part at the expense of the other, in an incessant yearning for elevation, an urge to cast off the heavy mortal veil, here the situation appears reversed. The dual nature is still at the core of this new thought,122 but it is seen from a radically different point of view, that of Christ, who takes on the mortal veil, of which his divine essence certainly has no need, in order to redeem it and thus give it new meaning; all this is made possible thanks to a maternity that is also extraordinary—that of the Virgin. Christ’s selfless choice appears to finally elevate the poet’s humble humanity: Quel pietoso miracol grande, ond’io sento, la sua mercé, due parti estreme, il divino e l’uman, sì giunte inseme ch’è Dio vero uomo e l’uomo è vero Dio, erge tant’alto il mio basso desio e scalda in guisa la mia fredda speme che ‘l cor libero e franco più non geme sotto l’incarco periglioso e rio. Con la piagata man dolce e soave giogo m’ha posto al collo, e lieve peso sembiar mi face col Suo lume chiaro; a l’alme umili con secreta chiave apre il tesoro Suo, del qual è avaro ad ogni cor d’altere voglie acceso.123 122  Emidio Campi, “ ‘Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa’: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino,” in Dall’Accademia neoplatonica fiorentina alla riforma. Celebrazioni del 5. centenario della morte di Lorenzo il Magnifico: Convegno di studio, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, 30 ottobre 1992 (Florence, 1996), 67–135. 123  S1: 54; V2: 3: “The wondrous and holy miracle by which, / through his mercy, I perceive two opposed beings, / one divine and one human, so fused into one / that God becomes a true

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Thanks to the profound and miraculous unity between the two natures of Christ even the weight of the body seems to grow lighter, desire takes a new, upward direction, hope takes on new life. The entire lyric code is conveyed into this new context,124 to the point where even Petrarch’s “sweet yoke” finds its place on the neck of the poetic I, but with a dramatic shift: the yoke is placed there by the wounded hand of Christ, a tangible sign of the crucifixion. Such radical change is made possible through mysterious ways (“con secreta chia­ve”) only for those who have the humility to accept (“la sua mercé”) the precious gift of Christ’s treasure. The pivotal role in this evolution of the very idea of the human seems to be played by the Virgin, to whom a great number of Colonna’s compositions as well as a short prose piece (Il Pianto della marchesa) are dedicated.125 Most of these sonnets appear in the first printed edition (Rime 1546) of the Spiritual poems in an almost perfect sequence—100-101-103-104-105-106-107-108-109-110—and several of these are also grouped together in the arrangement given to the Vat. Lat. 11539 manuscript prepared for Michelangelo (V2). The poet’s appeal to the Virgin,126 inspired initially by the well-known apostrophe in Dante’s Paradiso—as is the Petrarchan canzone that concludes the RVF—deals precisely with the question of dual nature and the multiplicity of relationships established over time between the Virgin and Christ:

man and man a true God, / causes my lowly desire to soar so high / and in the same way so inflames my chilly hope / that my free and candid heart no longer trembles / beneath the evil, worthless burden of the world. / With his sweet, gentle, wounded hand / he has placed a yoke around my neck, and in his beautiful / clear light I see it is an easy weight to bear; / to all humble souls with his secret key / he opens up his treasure, jealously guarded / from any heart inspired by proud ambition”: Brundin 2005, 59. 124  As already noted, there is a strong continuity of themes and sentiment among many of the figures used in the first part of Colonna’s poetic production and the second. In sonnets S1: 50–53, for example—a survey might be extended to include other sequences— the religious poetry is strongly influenced by the lexis of the lyric code, as a preliminary analysis of the rhyming series shows: ardente / mente, pensero / vero, martiri / sospiri / desiri, vera / cera / spera, ardire / desire, lume / piume, amore / Signore, foco / loco, impresa / accesa. The semantic fields of light, fire and heat, and those related to wings and flight, are also cases in point. 125  Rinaldina Russell, “Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets on the Virgin Mary,” in Maria Vergine nella Letteratura italiana, ed. Florinda M. Iannace (Stony Brook, NY, 2000), 125–37; Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61–81; see also Eleonora Carinci’s chapter in this volume. 126  The only one on this theme, already present in Rime 1538.

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Vergine pura, che dai raggi ardenti del vero Sol ti godi eterno giorno, il cui bel lume in questo vil soggiorno tenne i begli occhi tuoi paghi e contenti, uomo Il vedesti e Dio quando i lucenti Suoi spirti fer l’albergo umile adorno di chiari lumi e timidi d’intorno i tuoi ministri al grand’ufficio intenti. Immortal Dio nascosto in mortal velo L’adorasti Signor, Figlio Il nudristi, L’amasti Sposo, e L’onorasti Padre; prega Lui dunque che i miei giorni tristi ritorni in lieti, e tu, Donna del Cielo, vogli in questo desio mostrarti Madre.127 The quatrains are dominated by the figure of the divine light which illumi­ nates the Virgin’s “vil” (humble) passage on earth, giving her happiness (“godi; paghi e contenti”) and ennobling the modest shelter in which the birth of Christ (“grand’ufficio”) took place. The dual nature is emphasized by an aequivocatio (immortal/in mortal), while the multiple reciprocal relations between Christ and the Virgin, in an allusion to Dante’s Vergine e Madre, figlia del tuo figlio which further broadens the spectrum, reinforce the extraordinary substance of their relationship. In the final tercet, the Virgin intercedes with Christ so that he may allow the poet to share in their bliss, thus exhibiting her motherly qualities. The term “Mother,” significantly placed at the end of the poem, alludes to the opening invocation (Virgin) and closes the text within the context of a mystery of faith. In 101 Stella del nostro mar, chiara e secura, the Virgin’s merit in having elevated human nature is emphasized,128 and the extraordinary quality of her achievement is highlighted in a sort of vision: 127  S1: 100; V2: 95. “Pure Virgin, you who in the burning rays / of the true sun bask in eternal day, / whose beautiful light, during your toilsome earthly life / kept your lovely eyes serene and contented; / you beheld him, both man and God, when his / bright spirits adorned his humble dwelling / with a great light, and your ministers timidly / gathered round intent on their great office. / Immortal God hidden in mortal veil, / you worshiped him as Lord, nurtured him as son, / loved him as husband, and honored him as father; / therefore pray to him now that my sad days / may be transformed to joy, and may you, lady of heaven, / act as a mother to me in this my desire”: Brundin 2005, 131–33. 128  In “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Brundin observes that the growing importance of the Virgin in the work of Vittoria Colonna has been thought to indicate an increasing

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Veggio il Figliuol di Dio nudrirsi al seno d’una vergine madre, ed ora inseme risplender con la veste umana in Cielo.129 Besides a distinctive appreciation of human nature in itself, a new, wholly physical component is particularly evident in the poem, expressed through the privileged vantage point of maternity, or to be precise by means of the intercession of the mother of Christ. This shift in attitude is clearly confirmed in sonnet 103, which accentuates the carnal element in the mother/child relationship while pointing to the great difficulty human beings have in comprehending the mystery of incarnation: Donna, dal Ciel gradita a tanto onore che ‘l tuo latte il Figliuol di Dio nudriva, or com’Ei non t’ardeva e non t’apriva con la divina bocca il petto e ‘l core? Or non si sciolse l’alma? e dentro e fore la virtù, i sensi ed ogni parte viva col latte insieme a un punto non s’univa per gir tosto a nudrir l’alto Signore? Ma non convien con gli imperfetti umani termini misurar gli ordini vostri, troppo al nostro veder erti e lontani; Dio morì in terra, or ne’ superni chiostri l’uom mortal vive, ma debili e vani sono a saperne il modo i pensier nostri.130

interest on her part in the theology of Incarnation, according to which the strongest core of mystery is to be identified in the Incarnation itself rather than in the Crucifixion. 129  S1: 101, vv. 9–11; V2: 53. “I see the son of God nourish himself at the breast / of a virgin mother, and now I see / their mortal forms shine above us together in heaven”: Brundin 2005, 99. 130  Sonnet S1: 103 appears in V2: 51. “Lady, blessed by the heaven with such high honor, / whose breast nourished the son of God himself, / how is it that his divine mouth did not scorch / or rend your breast and your heart? / Did your soul not melt away, / and within and without your spirits and all / living parts not flow out in your milk / and speed to nurture your holy Lord? / Yet we must not measure in our imperfect human / terms your task, which lies far beyond / and above our base understanding; / God died upon this earth, now in the heavenly cloisters / the mortal man lives on, yet our thoughts / are too weak and frail to understand these things”: Brundin 2005, 97.

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The powerful image of the divine child at the breast—nourished with human milk—and the poet’s amazement at the thought that his mouth did not have devastating effects on the maternal bosom, are rendered with strongly sensual accents; striking too is the passion with which the poem represents the Virgin’s maternal impulse in putting her entire being, her virtue and her senses, into the milk that must nourish the special infant. But Colonna, the “mother of poems” (“madre di carmi”) who imagined and gave expression to the emotions of such a bodily relationship hesitates at this point and takes a step backward, accepting the limits of humanity in understanding a God who not only becomes man but then conveys his own human body to Heaven (“ne’ superni chiostri l’uom mortal vive”). The lyric code once again lends itself to representing the Virgin, her special and at the same time human relationship with Christ, celebrating her position as eternal moon (“eterna luna”)131 with regard to the true Sun; as well as the role taken on by that extraordinary mother’s milk, a special ‘dew’ that can protect human sinners (“che sopra il mondo errante il latte puro / che qui ’l nudrì, quasi rugiada affrena / de la giusta ira sua l’effetto ardente.”) from the fire of divine wrath. Of course the heart-rending image of the Pietà, reworked so many times by Colonna’s beloved friend Michelangelo, represents the other side of the idyllic image of the Virgo lactans: Quando vedeste, Madre, a poco a poco al Figliuol vostro il vivo almo splendore fuggir dagli occhi, e ‘n sua vece l’amore sfavillar d’ogn’intorno ardente foco, credo che i vostri spirti andar nel loco dei Suoi per riportarne al vostro core quei che v’eran più cari, ma brevi ore furon concesse al doloroso gioco ché la morte li chiuse; onde s’aperse la strada a noi del Ciel, prima serrata mille e più lustri da la colpa antica. Lo scudo de la fede in voi sofferse il mortal colpo, onde ogni alma ben nata nel favor vostro sua speme nudrica132. 131  See Eterna luna, alor che fra ’l Sol vero, S1: 110: 12–14; V2: 100: “and moving over the world your pure milk, / which nurtured him on earth, like a dew dampens / the burning fire of his righteous anger”: Brundin 2005, 137. 132  S1: 107; V2: 43. “Holy Mother, when you saw the living / light gradually draining from the eyes of your / sweet crucified son and in its place a great fire / of love leap up on every side,

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The lyric I turns once again to the Mother, focusing this time on the moments in which she sees the light of life dying out in the eyes of her Son. The lyric code offers images from the interplay of looks and glances on which the love dynamic is traditionally founded: the rhyming words in the quatrains all mark this continuity, which is then broken in the incipit of the tercet (“ché la morte li chiuse”), taking the reader to a different level. The closing of Christ’s eyes opens up a new road to salvation which had been obstructed by original sin, and no one but the Virgin, capable of absolute faith, can restore hope to those who turn to her. Significantly, the Virgin’s triumph over original sin is attributed to an act of faith (presumably the faith with which she accepted the annunciation) and not to her having been born without sin. Also dedicated to the image of suffering and the immense symbolic power of the Pietà is another sonnet which is of lesser doctrinal depth and is in general more attentive to the human dynamics of the mother, represented sympathetically as being torn between the reality of her embrace with her dead son and the knowledge of his triumph, between her unbearable grief and the joy of his resurrection. The final tercet reveals a different kind of participation: ma, perché vera madre Il partorio, certo è che infino a la Sua sepoltura sempre ebbe il cor d’ogni conforto privo.133 If in the preceding sonnet the I limits herself to expressing her opinion on what Mary’s emotional state in the tragic situation of her son’s death must be (“credo che,” v. 5), in these closing lines she possesses an absolute certainty which arises from the one convincing and unquestionable fact that this mother has in effect given birth like any other—nothing at all can comfort her as she awaits her son’s burial. Colonna’s reflection on the maternal as a way to reevaluate and represent corporeality is connected to the many other images related to food and nourishment that run through the entire corpus. On the other hand, Colonna / I believe that your spirit went to the place / of his spirit and tried to recover what was dearest in him / within your own heart, but only a few brief / hours were granted you for this painful task, / as death closed his eyes and opened wide / for us the path to heaven, which had been barred / by original sin for many thousands of years. / The shield of faith in you withstood / the mortal blow, and every elected soul / nurtures its hope in your favour”: Brundin 2005, 91. 133  S1: 108, vv. 12–14: “but because she gave birth to him as a true mother, / it is certain that until His burial / her heart was deprived of every comfort.”

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reverses the role of the mother, representing her as being the one in need of care, when choosing to represent her own relationship with the English cardinal Reginald Pole—the central figure in Italian Evangelism and in the so-called Ecclesia Viterbensis. The lyric I is presented before him—significantly, the cardinal’s mother was at the time imprisoned in England for political-religious reasons—in a maternal, but fragile guise, pleading for help in Figlio e signor, se la tua prima e vera: A me, che sembro andar scarca e leggiera, e ’n poca terra ho il cor chiuso e sepolto, convien ch’abbi talor l’occhio rivolto che la novella tua madre non pera.134 Such a request for attention reveals that the apparent freedom of the woman who is speaking conceals her inconsolable grief, while her “cor sepolto” sheds definitive light on the relationship, which is immediately presented as that of a mother entreating her son.135 In another sonnet, Da Dio mandata angelica mia scorta,136 again in dialogue with Pole, the relationship of care (“poich’hai di me la cura”) is assimilated to the task of a guardian angel who must guide and sustain her so that she may be ready for the moment in which Christ will appear (“del venir del mio Sol”), in an allusion to the parable of the wise virgins.137

The Cross

Undoubtedly, it is the body of Christ on the cross that is the true ‘new Sun’ in Colonna’s poetry, the centre of inspiration which shapes her poetic language, as she herself wished to make clear with the first sonnet of V2; in the following sonnet, included in the first edition of 1538, she goes so far as to declare that she wishes to personally bear the cross: Con la croce a gran passi ir vorrei dietro (S1: 5). 134  S1: 41; V2: 99. “To me, who seem to move about unburdened and free / and to keep my heart confined and buried in a small plot, / I pray you turn your eyes from time to time / so that your second mother does not perish”: Brundin 2005, 135. 135  But note also that as “second mother” Vittoria Colonna is placing herself within an illustrious biblical genealogy (Eve is the first mother, as observed by Brundin 2005, 169). 136  S1: 7, also present in V2: 7. 137  Matthew, 25; see also Tempo è pur ch’io con la precinta veste, S1: 8; V2: 12, included in the poems published in 1539, in which the parable of the virgins is taken up in its entirety.

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The Cross as the central mystery of faith is also the subject of a capitolo in terza rima (S2: 36)—the only one in a production that is almost entirely modulated on the extraordinary versatility of the sonnet: the composition is modelled on the Petrarchan triumph and dedicated to a vision of the triumph of the Cross. What becomes more evident in the poetry devoted by Colonna to the Cross is her profound engagement with Italian Evangelism, which had long been seeking to open up a dialogue with the reformed milieus, an attempt that ultimately proved impossible and was explicitly forbidden with the Carafa papacy. Her closeness to that movement and in particular her interest in the short treatise Beneficio di Cristo, with its poetical/mystical language, emerges above all in the passages in which the relationship with Christ is viewed in its simplest and most intimate aspects, taking the form—as in the treatise—of brief meditations in which the faithful follower may find comfort and peace. In Pende l’alto Signor sul duro legno, the blood of Christ is once again an expressive instrument, in this case not ink, but color: Con divine parole il bel dissegno fece Ei del viver vero, e poi colore gli die’ col sangue, e che de l’opra amore fosse cagion ne dà Se stesso in pegno. . . . vengano a mille in me calde quadrella da l’aspre piaghe, ond’io con vero effetto prenda vita immortal dal Suo morire.138 This reflection on the death of Christ begins with the poet’s simple observation of a body on the cross which represents the fulfilment of a verbal promise, the realization of a plan: like an artist, God brings his work—a labor and a message of love—to completion, adding colour to the design, but the colour in this case is blood. The subject gazing at that work, the beneficiary of that love, is once again the I with its lyric code: as the emotional centre of Colonna’s poetry is shifted from the eyes of her beloved to the crucified body, the arrows of love

138  S1: 6, vv. 5–8; 12–14: “With divine words He made a beautiful design / of the true life, and then gave it / colour with his blood, and so that love might be the reason / for the work, He gave Himself in exchange. . . . Let a thousand hot arrows come to me / from His bitter wounds, so that with true effect / I derive immortal life from His death.” For the quadrella see Petrarch, Rvf, 206, v. 9.

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are substituted with those darting forth from Christ’s wounds.139 The body of Christ speaks louder than words. The wounded Christ, and in particular the open wound in his side,140 returns with great frequency even in poems which are not entirely dedicated to the cross: Or che del lato aperto le sante acque non sempre tanto lavan quanto ponno le macchie nostre, insin nel vivo impresse;141 Chiari raggi d’amor, scintille accese di pietà viva escon dal sacro lato . . . Porge l’aperta piaga alta e sicura letizia.142 I secreti Suoi nel lato aperto le mostra e la piagata man le porge.143 Col lato aperto su dal santo legno ne chiama sempre, pieno il petto e ’l volto d’infinita pietà, d’immenso amore.144 Rays of love and mercy issue forth from the Cross, a true summons of Christ to all men, as he engages in a direct and intimate relationship with the faithful, typical of the new sensibility of the reformers. The figure of the Cross, at the centre of so many sermons and devotional and propagandistic pamphlets 139  See. Una Roman d’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 90–129. 140  See John 19: 34. and Augustine (Brundin 2005, 144). 141  S2: 32, vv. 9–11; V2: 8. “The holy water flowing from his open wound / does not always entirely wash away / our sins, which are imprinted on our living flesh”: Brundin 2005, 63. 142  S2: 5, vv. 1–2; 9–10: “Clear rays of love, lit sparks / of living pity flow from the holy side . . . The open wound confers high and sure / delight.” 143  S1: 66, vv. 12–13: “His secrets he reveals / in his open side and with his wounded hand he offers them.” A kind of mystical ecstasy is described in the sonnet where the mind ascends to speak to God who, unconcerned with merit (“non risguarda il merto”), looks only at love. 144  S1: 83; V2: 6, vv. 12–14. “wounded in one side, he calls eternally / down from the holy cross, his breast and his face / charged with infinite pity and unending love”: Brundin 2005, 61.

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of the period, is presented at times as a doctrinal and intellectual fact which prompts reflection: Le braccia aprendo in croce, e l’alme e pure piaghe, largo, Signor, apristi il Cielo, il Limbo, i sassi, i monumenti, e ‘l velo del tempio antico, e l’ombre, e le figure. Le menti umane infin alora oscure illuminasti, e dileguando il gielo le riempisti d’un ardente zelo ch’aperse poi le sacre Tue scritture.145 Such an emphasis on the new light—which does not merely illuminate minds, but also enables new, passionate readings of the sacred scriptures—clarifies that Colonna’s spiritual reflection is explicitly carried out on two levels. On the one hand she meditates on liturgical figures and on the traces of a more “popular” religious sentiment, but on the other she shows great familiarity with a more sophisticated level of the debate, and is greatly interested in fundamental questions146 of doctrinal and scriptural interpretation. Her reflection on the suffering of Jesus on the Cross, which we have seen from the Virgin’s point of view,147 leads in some places to a clear indication of reformed sensibility, which urges the faithful to celebrate the joy deriving from sacrifice: Quando io sento da pura amica voce che mi risona spesso in mezzo al core dirmi: “Risguarda, ingrata! ecco il Signore cui le tue colpe han posto in su la croce!,” alzo gli occhi al bel segno, e grave atroce pena m’assale sì che dal timore 145  S1: 94, vv. 1–8; V2: 68. “Opening wide your arms upon the cross and your blessed / and pure wounds, o Lord, you opened the heavens / and limbo, rent the rocks, monuments, and the veil / that cloaked our eyes, the shadows and figures. / All human minds, until then immersed in darkness, / you enlightened, and melting the ice / you filled them with a burning fervor, / revealing the meaning of your sacred texts”: Brundin 2005, 111. 146  See Carlo Ossola, Introduzione. But Abigail Brundin (Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation [Aldershot, 2008], 65) also identifies in this sonnet a particularly effective example of Vittoria’s capacity to express the Evangelists’ positions. 147  There is no lack of sonnets of meditation on Christ’s suffering, almost stations of the Cross, such as S1: 47: Quando la croce al Signor mio coverse, in which Christ’s fall under the weight of the cross on the way to Calvary is contemplated.

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vinta cade la speme, ma in brevi ore giova tanto la fe’ ch’ei più non noce, la qual col pensier vero al cor risponde che convien gloriarsi in quella ardente opra d’alta pietà ch’al Ciel ne spinge, e che il peccato umilia, non confonde, se ‘l peccator il cor, l’alma e la mente ne la bontà di Dio chiude e ristringe.148 Guilt and fear would defeat hope and lead to feelings of dismay (“cor”) if it were not for faith. Such a faith, along with “pensier vero” (true thought)—a certainty that is also rational—leads the faithful to rejoice in the glory of that “opra” that propels sinners toward heaven if only they place their trust in divine goodness with their whole heart, soul and mind. This divine work (“opra”), which again is represented as an artistic object to be gazed upon (“Risguarda; alzo gli occhi”), seems also to allude to the poet’s meditation on the drawing that Michelangelo had sent her. Quando in se stesso il pensier nostro riede e poi sopra di sé s’erge la mente, sì che d’altra virtù fatta possente vivo ne l’aspra croce il Signor vede, sale a cotanto ardir che non pur crede esser Suo caro membro, anzi alor sente le spine, i chiodi, il fele e quella ardente Sua fiamma in parte sol per viva fede.149

148  S2: 34; V2: 55. “When I hear the clear loving voice, / which often sounds out in the depth of my heart, / telling me, “Look, ungrateful one, here is the Lord / who was placed upon the cross for your sins!” / to this wondrous sign I raise my eyes, and a deep awful / pity overwhelms me so that, undone by fear, / my hope collapses vanquished, yet in a few short hours / my faith is so renewed that it can no longer be damaged. / Thus, with a pure mind my faith replies to my heart / that one must rejoice in this loving deed / of great mercy, which carries us to heaven, / and that sin humbles us, but does not lead us astray, / as long as the sinner encloses and confines / within the bounty of God his heart, soul and mind”: Brundin 2005, 99–101. 149  S1: 41, vv. 1–8: “When our thoughts return within / and the mind pushes beyond itself, / so that made powerful by other virtue / it sees the Lord alive on the bitter cross, / it climbs to such ardour that it no longer believes / those are His dear limbs, but feels / the thorns, the nails, the bile and His burning / flame through living faith alone.”

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These verses are a “testimony to the truth of the words written by Vittoria to her friend soon after having seen the work.”150 As in Michelangelo’s drawing, so in her own imagination, Vittoria “sees” the “living” Christ on the Cross and feels his suffering in her own body. In her poetry, she wavers between a mediated and intellectualized conception of faith and the conviction that a complete surrender on the human being’s part—emotions and feelings included— is required in order to open oneself fully to Christ. This condition of emotional abandonment is clearly indicated when the poet addresses the triumphant Christ directly, asking him about his terrible experience on the cross: Dimmi, Lume del mondo e chiaro onore del Cielo, or che ’n Te stesso il Tuo ben godi, qual virtù Ti sostenne, o pur quai nodi T’avinser nudo in croce cotant’ore? Io sol Ti scorgo afflitto, e dentro e fore offeso, e grave pender da tre chiodi. Risponde: “Io legato era in mille modi dal mio sempre vèr voi sì dolce amore, lo qual al morir mio fu schermo degno con l’alta ubidienza, ma l’ingrato spirto d’altrui più che ’l mio mal m’offese, ond’io non prendo il cor pentito a sdegno, già caldo e molle, ma il freddo indurato ch’a tanto foco mio mai non s’accese.”151 150  Vittoria Romani, “ ‘Non se po vedere più ben fatta, più viva et più finita imagine,’ ” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 154, refers to one of Colonna’s letters to Michelangelo, in which she comments on his drawing of the Crucifix; in the same collection, Monica Bianco (“ ‘Avend’io desiderato di far più per quella che per uomo che io conoscessi mai al mondo’: Fonti ed esiti poetici dei disegni michelangioleschi per Vittoria,” 156–61) duly attempts to identify the “sources” of some of Colonna’s poetic compositions in the drawings. 151  S1: 89; V2: 88. “Tell me, light of the world and radiant glory / of the sky, now that you enjoy your bounty within yourself, / what virtue sustained you and what knots / bound your nude body to the cross for so many hours? / I only see you wounded, offended from / within and without, hanging in pain from three nails, / He replies, “I was bound so tightly / by my eternal sweet love for you / which, with divine obedience, was a worthy shield / at the moment of my death, but the ungrateful / spirit of others hurt me more than the pain I bore. / For I do not scorn the repentant heart, / which is warm and soft, but rather the cold, hard one / that all my fire could not inflame:” Brundin 2005, 127.

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Christ replies, from his place in heaven, and explains that what protected him from suffering was his great love for humanity and his obedience to God. He then stresses, however, how unbearable the ingratitude of humanity was and in particular of those whose ‘cold, hard heart’ made it impossible for him to touch and save them with his love. Here the Petrarchan code once again lends itself to expressing new content of great contemporary relevance.

Faith, Gift, Salvation

The entire semantic field of the Crucifixion touches upon and in part overlaps that of faith, and in particular of faith as divine gift, the only source from which salvation can descend. This was a point of heated discussion within the official Church, but the wider public had also become impassioned and divided over the attempt to secure the highest possible form of mediation. This was a search in which many of Vittoria Colonna’s and Michelangelo’s mentors and followers participated, in the years leading up to the Diet of Ratisbon and the following schism, the end of the Council of Trent and the birth of the Inquisition. In the entire collection of spiritual poems, “fede” is the most frequent rhyming word (twenty-eight occurrences) after “amore” (forty-two), and “core” (thirty-nine), and in sonnet 78, Colonna gives a very clear representation of the entire issue: Questo vèr noi maraviglioso effetto di morir Dio su l’aspra croce excede ogni umano pensier, onde no ‘l vede con tutto il valor suo nostro intelletto; ma se del bel misterio in mortal petto entra quel vivo raggio, che procede da sopra natural divina fede, immantenente il tutto avrà concetto. Quei ch’avrà sol in Lui le luci fisse, non quei ch’intese meglio, o che più lesse volumi in terra, in Ciel sarà beato; in carte questa legge non si scrisse, ma con la stampa Sua nel cor purgato col foco de l’amor Gesù l’impresse.152 152  S1: 78; the sonnet is also in V2: 78. “God’s incredible gesture toward us / of dying upon the cruel cross exceeds the scope / of any human virtue, so that our earthbound / intellect cannot comprehend its worth. / Some great or tiny ray of this beautiful mystery / enters

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The quatrains focus on the mystery of the Cross, with references to the philosophical terms of the debate on the absolute impossibility of the human mind to comprehend the death of God. A necessity thus arises for the “mortal” being to be struck by a “vivo raggio” which does not depend on the subject’s will but “proceeds from a divine and superhuman faith”: only then the “conception” will be immediate. Clearly, this is a crucial passage, in which the poet seeks to render a doctrinal argument in poetic form. The following tercets almost deny the extremely abstract and philosophical nature of the argument: the proven limitations of the human intellect entail that we must not put our trust in it for salvation, which cannot be reached through mere intellectual effort. It is rather faith, the effort of concentrating on Christ, which ensures salvation, something that is branded in the heart and certainly not printed in books. Colonna’s great indebtedness to Ochino’s sermons is very evident here; he had more than once condemned rote Aristotelianism and called for humility in reading the Scriptures.153 What we have here, then, is the doctrine of sola fide, accompanied by a strong assertion of anti-intellectualism, one of the terms of the debate and a theme that recurs in another sonnet: Doi modi abbiam da veder l’alte e care grazie del Ciel: l’uno è guardando spesso le sacre carte ov’è quel Lume expresso ch’a l’occhio vivo sì lucente appare; l’altro è alzando del cor le luci chiare al libro de la croce, ov’Egli stesso si mostra a noi sì vivo e sì da presso che l’alma allor non può per l’occhio errare.154

into our mortal breast and confers / a divine and superhuman faith, / a pure and perfect gift from God alone. / Thus he who can fix his eyes upon God, / not he who better understood or who read more / books on earth, will be blessed in heaven. / This law was not written upon paper, / but rather it was imprinted by Jesus with his seal / and with the fire of his love upon the purified heart:” Brundin 2005, 119. 153  See Campi, “Non vi si pensa,” 67–135. 154  S1: 165, vv. 1–8: “We have two ways of seeing the noble, dear / graces of Heaven: one by consulting often / the sacred sheets where that Light is expressed / which seems to the living eye so bright; / the other is by lifting the clear lights of the heart / to the book of the cross, where He / shows himself to us so alive and close / that the soul cannot be led astray by the eye.”

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The intent gaze of the mind, which in its struggle to see (“guardando spesso”) finally perceives the divine light of the sacred Scriptures, is accompanied by the gaze of the heart, which is able to immediately read the “book of the cross,” for the vividness and closeness of the Cross is such that the soul cannot err. Naturally intrinsic to the concept of salvation through faith are those of gift and of grace,155 terms that recur in many of the poems and point to a larger debate,156 employed as they are to examine the essence of humanity, which lies in its capacity to accept a gift, to owe a debt, and be capable of gratitude because God “gave us his love”: onde dai larghi doni umile e grato l’uom fosse, e dal ricever suo sicuro, sì che di fede viva e d’amor arda.157 Despite the fact that Colonna’s production has been consistently perceived by its readers as divided into two separate parts, a close analysis reveals that it is characterized by a unified thrust. Such unity is constructed by means of an uninterrupted metapoetic reflection, which produces a circular path leading from the proemial poem to what appears to be the last of the sonnets, but also points to the comprehensiveness of Colonna’s enquiry: the same conceptual threads and figures run through the macrotext and hold it all together. Also giving unity to the poems is the very form through which the lyric I constructs itself: an individual poetic voice that is established with a reflection on its object but then goes on to focus increasingly on the inner dimension. Such a powerful affirmation of interiority, however, is accompanied by the poet’s marked interest in engaging in dialogue, particularly with the members of a community for whom the poems were written, but who were also themselves present in the poems as important interlocutors. In the final part of Colonna’s poetic production, the gallery of discourse participants is broadened to include Mary Magdalene, the Virgin, Thomas, Francis, Benedict, the Archangels and other witnesses in the search for truth. 155  The rich and complex theme of the gift, its absolute gratuitousness, was partly inspired by the problem of the sale of indulgences, which was one of the main grounds of the reformers’ polemical intent. The theme, however, posed deeper problems, which also touched on the relationship among the intellectuals of the time and their mutual capacity to give and accept gifts, such as the poems themselves. 156  These themes are treated in many of Colonna’s poems. 157  S2: 12, vv. 9–11; V2: 39. “so that man should be humbled and grateful for / the generous gifts, yet so sure of receiving them / that he burns with living faith and love:” Brundin 2005, 87.

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Conclusion Even if we wished to know nothing of her biography, the variety of approaches used by Colonna to deal with the burning issues of her day, as well as the interlocutors who appear more or less explicitly in her poetry (from Charles V to Bembo, Michelangelo to Molza, Giovio to Sannazaro, Pole to Contarini), cannot but point to an extremely important figure and a unique personality. Destiny having placed her—an Italian but also a European woman—within the ruling class of her day, Colonna did not limit herself to occupying her public role with courage and determination, but she resolutely chose a complex path of personal discovery, which exposed her to the scrutiny of a public that was by no means benevolent toward a woman entering the public sphere. Her poetic and spiritual enquiry was directed with decision to the very core of the issues that impassioned the intellectuals of her time, but also harshly divided them into opposing fronts. Far from keeping to the margins of the more dangerous debates, she dissected them thoroughly and took very clear and independent positions. The exceptional success of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry was due in part to the material circumstances in which she found herself: the spread of Petrarchism and the rise of the printing press provided a favourable context for her poetry, a novel sphere in which a new reading public was being produced. Although her poetry was fully established within the Petrarchan tradition, Colonna reinterpreted that code and succeeded in impressing upon it a very personal mark. Although she did not put together a well-structured “canzoniere,” she was most mindful of meta-poetic considerations and systemic problems. Her poetic language is explicitly indebted to Petrarch, but it is equally significant that, starting with the ‘primo proemio’, Dantean quotations and rhyme series are found in strategic positions. The presence of Dante, and specifically of the Commedia, appears necessary given the religious and theological quality of her poetic discourse. This spiritual bent, developed so fully as to depart from the Petrarchan model, even while building upon its lyric code, was to be one of the reasons that enabled Colonna to become in her turn a poetic model. The spiritual poetry of the second half of the century was greatly indebted to Vittoria, and women in particular found legitimization and inspiration in her work.158 Without doubt the women who followed her grasped an implicit but lucid implication in the subtext of her entire production: Colonna had searched for female models, but she had also fashioned herself into an exemplary female subject. 158  See Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model.”

Chapter 5

Vittoria Colonna and Language Helena Sanson Vittoria Colonna’s life spans a crucial period in the history of the Italian language: by the time she was born, in 1490 or 1492, the printing press was progressively spreading across the peninsula and so was the need for a more homogeneous literary language. In her childhood, the Aldine editions of Petrarch (1501) and Dante (1502) were edited by Pietro Bembo, an important moment of linguistic reflection and close study of Trecento Tuscan that contributed to its establishment as the accepted literary vernacular in the course of the century. When Colonna married, in 1509, Bembo was already working on his Prose della volgar lingua and a few years later, in 1516, Fortunio published his Regole, the first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular. The year her husband died, in 1525, the Prose came out in print. In 1538, when her Rime were printed against her will in Parma, Francesco Marcolini published in Venice the second edition of the Prose for an intended readership that was no longer made up only of scholars. The year of her death, 1547, also marks the death of Bembo. Against the background of her life and the rich literary and linguistic production of her time, this chapter aims to analyze the relationship between Vittoria Colonna—the woman and the poet—and language, taking into account the complex linguistic situation of the peninsula at the time and the lively debates of the Questione della lingua.

The Linguistic Context

During Colonna’s life, Italy was characterized by political and linguistic fragmentation, a situation that was to remain unchanged until the second half of the nineteenth century and unification in 1861. Various vernaculars, all originally derived from Latin, were in use in everyday life across the peninsula. With the unstoppable spread of the printing press from the 1460s, writers, as well as publishers, felt an increasing need for a standardized, literary language. Lively debates developed at the beginning of the sixteenth century among men of letters and theorists on the nature and definition of this literary language: which one of the many vernaculars in use across the peninsula should become the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_007

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language of culture able to compete with Latin? The controversy, known as the Questione della lingua,1 saw a number of conflicting positions, of which ultimately the one supported by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo prevailed. In his dialogue Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo put forth fourteenth-century Tuscan, as used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio (particularly Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose) as the language to be used in literature. This archaizing position therefore supported a language from two centuries earlier, which differed from contemporary Tuscan, due to the normal linguistic changes that occur over time. Bembo’s “vernacular humanism” de facto successfully applied the theories of imitation of the best Latin classics—Virgil and Cicero—to the vernacular classics, providing a clear and prestigious model for printers and authors alike, backed up by an unsurpassed, rich literary heritage. This position came to be widely accepted, but its success was ultimately the reason for that gap, which was to become a specific feature of the Italian literary and linguistic tradition for a long time, between the spoken language, on the one hand, and the written one, on the other. The former was a local vernacular, learned naturally since childhood. The latter was an artificial language that needed to be studied and learned from books, and for centuries remained beyond the reach of the majority of the (widely illiterate) population. Italian was for a long time the preserve of a restricted circle of scholars and, more broadly, of learned people. Of course, in the sixteenth century Trecento Tuscan was nobody’s mother tongue, not even for Tuscans. It is not surprising then that another current developed, especially in the mid-century, promoted by scholars such as Giovan Battista Gelli, Pierfrancesco Giambullari, and Benedetto Varchi, who claimed that contemporary Florentine, or a more generically defined Tuscan, should be adopted as the literary language. Already earlier in the century an energetic defense had been voiced by Tuscan men of letters (such as Lodovico Martelli, Angelo Firenzuola, and Claudio Tolomei) against proposals by non-Tuscan

1  There is a considerable literature on the Questione. For a starting point in English, see Bruno Migliorini and Thomas Gwynfor Griffith, The Italian Language (London and Boston, 1984). In Italian, see Maurizio Vitale, La questione della lingua (Palermo, 1984) and Claudio Marazzini, “Le teorie,” in Storia della lingua italiana, ed. Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone, 3 vols. (Turin, 1993–94), vol. 1, 231–329. On the sixteenth century in particular, see Claudio Marazzini, Il secondo Cinquecento e il Seicento (Bologna, 1993) and Paolo Trovato, Il primo Cinquecento (Bologna, 1994), both part of the series “Storia della lingua italiana,” ed. Francesco Bruni. For a more recent contribution, see Caterina Mongiat Farina, Questione di lingua: l’ideologia del dibattito sull’italiano nel Cinquecento (Ravenna, 2014).

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theorists to reform the orthographic system of Florentine.2 Other writers, more pragmatically, supported an eclectic solution based on that koinè, that common language, which had naturally developed and was in use at the smaller and bigger courts of Italy, where nobles, diplomats, dignitaries, men of letters, and artists from the four corners of the peninsula met, and their own native, local vernaculars came into close contact.3 This position was also upheld by Baldassar Castiglione in his Libro del cortegiano of 1528, in which prescriptions on the qualities and virtues of the perfect courtier did not omit to deal with the thorny question of language. More difficult to define, precisely because of its eclecticism, and less prone to imitation and standardization for its lack of prestigious literary models, this courtly language nonetheless had a real “spoken” existence, but also a written one, as can be seen, for instance, in the epistolary exchanges extant from the period. Its foundation was still Tuscan, but it was not purposely restricted to Tuscan only, and instead thrived with the contributions of the different vernaculars: it was a viable means of communication, in the absence of a national, spoken language. However, it was changing and unstable by its very nature and in this it failed to respond to the strong need, felt by writers and publishers alike, for a clear linguistic model to refer to, something that Trecento Tuscan, with its unsurpassed literary heritage and political neutrality, could more easily provide. Although the vernacular gained ground in a number of fields, Latin was far from being replaced as the language of prestige and culture and throughout the sixteenth century, across the peninsula, more books were published in Latin than in Italian. It was also the official language of the Church, at the highest levels, as well as of the liturgy for believers (although preaching was taking place in the vernacular).4 It dominated university teaching, as well as all “high” subjects such as philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics.5 Latin was, with few exceptions (i.e., the “scuole d’abbaco,” schools for the sons 2  On this polemic, see Trattati sull’ortografia del volgare 1524–1526, ed. Brian Richardson (Exeter, 1984). 3  On the “lingua cortegiana,” see Riccardo Drusi, La lingua cortigiana romana: note su un aspetto della questione cinquecentesca della lingua (Venice, 1995); Claudio Giovanardi, La teoria cortigiana e il dibattito linguistico nel primo Cinquecento (Rome, 1998); Riccardo Tesi, Storia dell’italiano: la formazione della lingua comune dalle origini al Rinascimento (Rome, 2001); Nadia Salamone Cannata, Gli appunti linguistici di Angelo Colocci: nel manoscritto Vat. lat. 4817 (Florence, 2012). 4  See Rita Librandi, “L’italiano nella comunicazione della Chiesa e nella diffusione della cultura religiosa,” in Storia della lingua italiana, 335–81. 5  But mathematical works of a practical nature were in the vernacular, such as Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità (Venice, 1494).

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of merchants or artisans), the language of instruction in the traditional school curriculum, because children would learn to read and write in Latin. The Tuscan-based literary language and the other vernaculars, in contrast, had a more limited role. The grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino, from Vicenza, commented on this point in his Dubbii grammaticali of 1529: “these days almost no one is taught Italian, but everyone is taught Latin and learns Italian on his own.”6 There were exercises in translation from the vernacular, and, later in the sixteenth century, Dante and Petrarch, translations of Latin works, vernacular religious texts, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and other “libri de batagia,” infiltrated more traditional material, despite some teachers’ complaints.7 Spanish was the foreign tongue that had the strongest influence in sixteenth-century Italy, especially in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily under the Aragonese, and also owing to the presence of Spanish soldiers across the peninsula during a very turbulent period in Italian military history. Spanish supremacy was recognized with the Peace of Cambrai in 1529 and the Congress of Bologna in 1529–30, and later confirmed and strengthened with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, when a good part of Italy found itself directly under Spanish rule. French too was a well-known foreign tongue (although it had nowhere near the prestige it would acquire in the eighteenth century), and its influence was particularly felt in Piedmont, in the Kingdom of Savoy, for geographical and political reasons. Not surprisingly, Castiglione mentioned both French and Spanish as necessary for the intellectual formation of the perfect courtier in Book II of the Cortegiano: The same is true of knowing many languages: I praise this highly in the courtier, especially Spanish and French, because both nations have much commerce with Italy and these two languages are more similar to ours than some of the others; and those two princes, who are most powerful in war and splendid in peace, always have their courts full of noble knights who spread across the world; and we too must be able to converse with them.8 6  “hoggidì quasi a niuno se insegna italiano, ma a tutti se insegna latino, e poi lo italiano se impara da sé”: Gian Giorgio Trissino, Dubbii grammaticali (Vicenza, 1529), fol. 3r. Quotations from sixteenth-century primary sources have been preserved as in the original with only minor interventions to facilitate reading and comprehension. 7  Attilio Bartoli Langeli and Mario Infelise, “Il libro manoscritto e a stampa,” in L’italiano nelle regioni: lingua nazionale e identità regionali, ed. Francesco Bruni (Turin, 1992), 941–77, here 956, 964–65. 8  “Il medesimo intervien del saper diverse lingue; il che io laudo molto nel cortegiano, e massimamente la spagnola e la franzese, perché il commerzio dell’una e dell’altra nazion è molto

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In sixteenth-century Italy, a spectrum of linguistic varieties was potentially available to speakers, at varying degrees, depending on a number of diatopic, diachronic, diamesic, and diaphasic factors, that is, factors related to space and geography, to social class, to the spoken and/or written medium, and to the registers and the different contexts in which these varieties were employed. Men and women who were born, or lived, in the peninsula might, or might not, be able to use a number of these linguistic varieties: they ranged from the local, native vernacular to the elusive “lingua cortigiana,” from the literary vernacular and Latin to foreign idioms. This was, of course, also the case for Vittoria Colonna.9

Language in Vittoria Colonna’s Life

As a woman of the aristocracy, Colonna would have had, in principle, easier access to a wider range of linguistic varieties compared to, for instance, a woman of the lower classes. She was born in Marino, at the time a fief of the Colonna family in the Colli Albani, not far from Rome. Medieval “romanesco,” the language of Rome, was originally a southern vernacular, with linguistic features quite different from contemporary ones, but the vernacular in use in Rome and the surrounding area had already undergone a process of Tuscanization, as far as its written form was concerned, in the fifteenth century. There was also a strong presence of Tuscans at all levels of the cosmopolitan Papal court (as well as Tuscan popes), which influenced the local vernacular that was in use. From the medium and high level of society, Tuscan influence progressively spread to lower strata too, leading, over the course of the sixteenth century, and especially after the Sack of Rome in 1527, to a “smeridionalizzazione del romanesco parlato,” that is, a loss of specific southern features of the spoken “romanesco.”10 frequente in Italia e con noi sono queste due piú conformi che alcuna dell’altre; e que’ dui príncipi, per esser potentissimi nella guerra e splendidissimi nella pace, sempre hanno la corte piena di nobili cavalieri, che per tutto ’l mondo si spargono; e a noi pur bisogna conversar con loro”: Baldassarre Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Nicola Longo (Milan, 2003), lib. 1, c. 37, 175–76. 9  On women’s access to sixteenth-century linguistic varieties, with particular attention to the spoken medium, see Helena Sanson, “ ‘Femina proterva, rude, indocta . . . , chi t’ha insegnato a parlar in questo modo?’ Women’s ‘Voices’ and Linguistic Varieties in Written Texts (Italy, 16th–17th Centuries),” The Italianist 34 (2014): 400–17. 10  The Sack of Rome caused a dramatic acceleration of this process, considering the city’s population was dramatically reduced by the mutinous imperial troops. Only 30,000 people survived, but between 1527 and 1551 Rome grew to reach over 80,000 inhabitants, of which

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In the first part of the sixteenth century, the “lingua cortigiana” of the Papal court acquired prestige: nobles, men of letters, and artists from all parts of Italy gathered there and were in need of a supraregional common means of communication. This common language was defined by Mario Equicola, in his Libro de natura de amore (1525), as “Roman courtierly language, full of all the best words from across Italy, since in that court there are worthy men from every region.”11 The need for a shared language concerned not only the court of Rome, but every other court that would, on a minor scale, reproduce the same encounter of aristocratic and literary figures of different mother tongues. The use of language in the courtly environment was no minor question, but one to which Castiglione devoted a long passage in the first Book of his Libro del Cortegiano, not to mention the clear statement made in the opening dedicatory letter as to his own position within the Questione debates. “Grazia” (grace), “bon giudicio” (good judgment), and “sprezzatura” (studied carelessness) being the key words to define the perfect courtier, “affettazione” (affectation) ought to have no room in linguistic exchange: Our courtier will be considered excellent and will have grace in all things, above all in speaking, if he will avoid affectation; into which error many lapse [. . .] and all this arises from too great a desire to demonstrate one’s learning; and in this way men devote study and diligence to acquiring a most odious vice. Certainly for myself it would cost no small effort, if in our conversations I wished to use those ancient Tuscan words that have already been rejected from Tuscan usage of today; and what is more I believe everyone would laugh at me.12 50,000 were from other parts of Italy, mostly from the center-north. This strong injection of speakers of different dialectal varieties caused ‘romanesco’ to lose its distinctive southern traits in favour of a more Tuscanized variety. See Pietro Trifone, Rinascimento dal basso: il nuovo spazio del volgare tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Rome, 2006), 61–94. For a linguistic history of Rome, see Pietro Trifone, Storia linguistica di Roma (Rome, 2008). See also his earlier “Roma e il Lazio,” in L’italiano nelle regioni: lingua nazionale e identità, ed. Francesco Bruni (Turin, 1992), 540–93. 11  “la cortesiana romana, la quale de tucti boni vocabuli de Italia è piena, per essere in quella corte de ciascheuna regione preclarissimi homini”: Mario Equicola, La redazione manoscritta del Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola, ed. Laura Ricci (Rome, 1999), 213. 12  “Sarà adunque il nostro cortegiano stimato eccellente ed in ogni cosa averà grazia, massimamente nel parlare, se fuggirà l’affettazione; nel qual errore incorrono molti . . . e tutto questo procede da troppo desiderio di mostrar di saper assai; ed in tal modo l’omo mette studio e diligenzia in acquistar un vicio odiosissimo. E certo a me sarebbe non piccola fatica, se in questi nostri ragionamenti io volessi usar quelle parole antiche toscane, che

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Elitism and archaism were however deeply ingrained in Bembo’s Trecento Tuscan as a model language. This explains why in sixteenth-century Italy (as well as in the centuries that followed) the use of Tuscan in conversation outside Tuscany by non-Tuscans was deemed artificial and carried with it a stigma of affectation, a social faux pas to be avoided at all costs. Very few Tuscan and non-Tuscan theorists and writers therefore felt inclined to consider favorably non-Tuscans who spoke Tuscan or, more loosely, who Tuscanized.13 If the perfect courtier and the perfect “donna di palazzo” had to shun affectation in their use of language in Castiglione’s Urbino, this was also the case in the small court on the island of Ischia, near Naples, where Vittoria Colonna took up residence after marrying Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos in December 1509. There she found herself part of a lively literary milieu, frequented among others by Iacopo Sannazaro and Benedetto Gareth (il Cariteo), and presided over by her aunt-by-marriage Costanza d’Avalos del Balzo (1460–1541), herself a highly learned woman.14 Colonna also had access to the court library, which Costanza d’Avalos carefully enriched over the years. These events in her life were not without linguistic implications, as her marriage to an aristocratic member of a Spanish family, as well as sojourning often at Ischia, meant being exposed to another set of linguistic varieties. In Naples (and in nearby Ischia), the influence of literary Tuscan was of less consequence for those who, despite being literate, had no real literary interests. Similarly, it was less important in those writings in which the aim was not so much to achieve elegance in style, but to bear witness to historical and local events, as well as in those literary genres that were less popular in the courtly environment.15 The local dialect prevailed in these cases. As for the spoken già sono dalla consuetudine dei Toscani d’oggidí rifiutate; e con tutto questo credo che ognun di me rideria”: Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, lib. 1, c. 29, 64–65. 13  See Brian Richardson, “Gli italiani e il toscano parlato nel Cinquecento,” Lingua nostra 48 (1987): 97–107. 14  On this literary circle, see Pierluigi Leone de Castris, “Kultur und Mäzenatentum am Hof der d’Avalos in Ischia,” in Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Agostino Attanasio (Vienna, 1997), 67–76; Concetta Ranieri, “Vittoria Colonna e il cenacolo ischitano,” in La donna nel Rinascimento meridionale. Atti del convegno internazionale: Roma, 11–13 novembre 2009, ed. Marco Santoro (Pisa: 2010), 49–65. See also T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of SixteenthCentury Italy (Princeton, 1995), 86–105. 15  Nicola De Blasi, Storia linguistica di Napoli (Rome, 2012), 60. On the linguistic situation of Naples and Campania through the centuries, see Patricia Bianchi, Nicola De Blasi and Rita Librandi, “La Campania,” in L’italiano nelle regioni: lingua nazionale e identità, ed. Francesco Bruni (Turin, 1992), 629–84; Patricia Bianchi, Nicola De Blasi, and Rita Librandi,

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language, in Naples, as was also the case in the rest of the peninsula, there were a number of diastratic varieties of different prestige in use, with Trecento Tuscan being the highest, but also one that entailed an immediate sense of display of affectation.16 Benedetto di Falco explained, in his Dichiaratione de’ molti luoghi dubbiosi d’Ariosto, e d’alquanti del Petrarca. Escusation fatta in favor di Dante, of around 1539, that those who wanted to “parlar regolatamente” (“speak regularly”) had to forfeit local traits in their speech and rather follow the rules of the literary language, without though being “obligato esser Tosco,” that is, without having to use Trecento Tuscan as such.17 “Parlar regolatamente” meant using a form of “lingua cortigiana” that distanced itself from the local vernacular. In 1589, in his Ritratto o modello delle grandezze, delitie e meraviglie della nobilissima città di Napoli, Giovan Battista Del Tufo went as far as saying that the “favellar gentil napoletano” (“Neapolitan polite speech”) was in fact equal to Tuscan and that it even went far beyond Milanese speech. Local pride aside, Del Tufo’s reference is here to a “lingua cortigiana” that simultaneously shied away from local forms and from the affectation of openly Tuscanizing one’s speech: “The speech that suits gentlemen / . . . can bear comparison to any other, / except that they try to stretch it too much / by Tuscanizing / in a way that hardly suits even Boccaccio or Bembo.”18 In Naples, the “lingua cortigiana” was “an essentially common language, alert to the rules of Italian and different from dialect,”19 similar in essence, nature and aim to the “lingua cortigiana romana,” but also flexible to reflect the contribution of the local tongue. From 1503 on, the south of Italy, which had been annexed to the kingdom of Ferdinand the Catholic, was under Spanish rule and governed by a number of Spanish viceroys. Spanish influence became more evident not only in social customs and manners, but also linguistically. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many Spanish words entered the Neapolitan dialect, following the Iberisms that had already come into the language during the earlier

Storia della lingua a Napoli e in Campania: I’ te vurria parlà (Napoli, 1993); Nicola De Blasi, “Notizie sulla variazione diastratica a Napoli tra il ’500 e il 2000,” Bollettino linguistico campano 1 (2002): 89–129; Nicola De Blasi, Profilo linguistico della Campania (Rome, 2006). 16  Bianchi, De Blasi, and Librandi, “La Campania,” 647–50. 17  Cited in De Blasi, Storia, 77. 18  Ibid.: “l raggionar che a’ cavalier conviensi / [. . .] può stare al paragon d’ogni parlare, / fuori di che poi la vuol troppo stirare / col suo toscanizzare / [. . .] che non stan ben quasi al Boccaccio e al Bembo.” 19  “lingua tendenzialmente comune, attenta alle regole dell’italiano e diversa dal dialetto”: De Blasi, Storia, 75. On the role of Bembo’s linguistic model in Naples, see Pasquale Sabbatino, Il modello bembiano a Napoli nel Cinquecento (Naples, 1986).

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Aragonese rule.20 The family of Colonna’s husband was of Spanish descent and knew Spanish. Paolo Giovio recalls, for instance, in his biography of Francesco Ferrante that, as a child, “when it was time to study literature he preferred tales and romances in the vernacular, and above all in Spanish.”21 Colonna, by marriage, and because of her life in Ischia, found herself therefore in a Spanishinfluenced environment.22 The language Vittoria Colonna used in her verse, as we shall see later, was literary Tuscan, in accordance with the guidelines set forth by Bembo in his Prose and followed in his own Rime (1530). But which linguistic variety did Colonna use in her everyday life, at least with people of more elevated ranks in speaking, and with her many correspondents and interlocutors from different parts of the peninsula (and abroad) in writing? If Colonna’s autograph letters are anything to go by (always keeping in mind the variations in register and forms due to the written means),23 the language she used in everyday life seems to confirm that, in the sixteenth century, “many of those who tried to write in Tuscan or Italian in reality wrote in a sort of ‘lingua cortigiana’.”24 In a short note by Colonna herself to Costanza d’Avalos, written on 21 December 1525 from the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, we come across linguistic features

20  See Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza (Bari, 1917), 149–71. 21  “Quando era tempo da studiare le lettere si dilettava più tosto d’istorie e di romanzi scritti in volgare, e massimamente in lingua spagnola”: Paolo Giovio, Le vite del gran Capitano e del Marchese di Pescara volgarizzate da Ludovico Domenichi, ed. Costantino Panigada (Bari, 1931), 207. The sixteenth-century edition is Paolo Giovio, La vita di Ferrando Davalo marchese di Pescara scritta per mons. Paolo Giovio, vescovo di Ferrara et tradotta per m. Lodovico Domenichi (Florence, 1551), which, as the subtitle indicates, is a vernacular translation by Domenichi of d’Avalos’s life from the original Latin Pauli Iovii Novocomensis epi­ scopi Nucerini Illustrium virorum vitae (Florence, 1549). 22  A short (autograph) letter written in Spanish by Colonna to Ignacio de Loyola is transcribed in Monumenta Ignatiana, ex autographis vel ex antiquioribus exemplis collecta. Series prima, 12 vols (Madrid, 1903–1911), XII, 362–63. In English translation in Hugo Rahner Jr., Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women (Freiburg, 1959), 131. 23  It might be worth remembering that Colonna had secretaries writing letters for her, which means that some linguistic forms that we find in her correspondence might be more the reflection of her secretaries’ choices than her own. It is safer therefore to base one’s consideration on the correspondence written in her own hand. 24  “molti di coloro che si sforzavano di scrivere in toscano o in italiano scrivevano in realtà in una sorta di lingua cortigiana”: Trifone, Storia linguistica di Roma, 48.

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that are indeed typical, in spelling and grammar, of a “lingua cortigiana,” more specifically “romana,” considering Colonna’s own origins:25 Ill.ma S. mia. Quella felice anima, la quale nel suo testamento è, che quanto se trova in la casa che sia d’altri se restituisca; et io per questa lettera fazio fede alla S. V. che me scripse de sua mano restituisse el Colle alli frati de San Benedetto, et da quella hora in cqua io ho facto fare la intrata al dicto loco aspectando che ’l papa lo determinasse; mo che dicto S.r mio resolutamente lo dice et Sua S.ria non ce vole mettere de conscientia, et questi frati se contentano benedirli tucte le intrate percepute dalla casa, prego V. S. ce lo fazia restituire.26 [My most illustrious Lady. That blessed soul (Colonna’s husband) wrote in his will that whatever in his house belongs to others should be returned; I in this letter confirm to your ladyship, as you wrote to me in your own hand that I should return the hill (Colle) to the friars of Saint Benedict, and since that time I have been providing for the friars while waiting for papal approval; since my Lord states this unequivocally and your Ladyship does not wish to offend us, and those friars are happy to bless all that they have received, I pray you will allow us to give it back.] And similarly, in this excerpt from a letter to Federico II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, on 8 May 1523: Ad miser Mario Equicolo scripsi circa li Quattro milia ducati che per M. Theodoro V. S. Ill.ma deve al Marchese mio S., et non ho resposta: non so se per vergogna de tanta dilactione, credo ad causa de non osar epso recordarlo ad V. S. e per mal recapito de la lettera. . . . Tenendo la voluntà tene al Marchese mio nè la lettera nè la opera li dolerà.27

25  For some examples of ‘lingua cortegiana romana’ in historical manuscript sources, see the “Appendice documentaria,” in Drusi, La lingua cortigiana romana, 195–226, with preceding linguistic commentary, 143–94. 26  C arteggio, 35–36. Carlo Dionisotti remarked, with reference to a letter written by Colonna to the Pope in that same year: “Se altre testimonianze non avessimo, questa sola ci consentirebbe di misurare l’enorme, a prima vista incolmabile distanza linguistica, che in quell’anno 1525 ancora separava la Colonna dall’autore delle Prose della volgar lingua.” See Dionisotti: Appunti, 261. 27  C arteggio, 1.

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[I wrote to Messer Mario Equicolo about the four thousand ducats which, via Messer Theodoro, Your Excellency owes to the Marquis my husband, but have had no reply: I don’t know if due to shame at such neglect, I believe caused by his not daring to mention it to you, or through failed delivery of the letter. . . . Keeping your word, you show your good will toward my husband, and neither the letter nor the act will hurt you.] We might note the presence of Latinisms in spelling (scripse, scripsi, facto, dicto, aspectando, tucte, dilactione, epso), as well as in lexicon (loco, voluntà, respondere). The preposition “a” is employed in its etymological form “ad” before consonants (ad causa). Compared to features present in Tuscan at the time, we find here a lack of diphtongization in stressed vowels (vole, tene); the use of analytical forms such as “in la” for “nella”; the use of reflexive and impersonal “se” (se trova, se contentano), instead of “si”; in protonic position, the open sound “e” prevails over “i” (de tanta, de non, ce vole), and similarly in proclitical forms such as “me” for “mi” (me scripse). Another relevant morphological characteristic is “li” used, invariably, as the plural masculine article and in “preposizioni articolate” (“alli”). The past participle form “percepute” for “percepite,” despite not being in itself geographically connotated, is often present nonetheless in fifteen-century writings from central Italy. Typical of southern dialects is the adverbial form “mo” for “adesso.” Colonna’s language in her letters comes across as uncertain, if compared with her more refined and assured literary compositions; but not even Bembo himself made used of Trecento Tuscan in his more personal writings, as, again, his autograph letters reveal. The discrepancy in style and language in Colonna’s case represents a “macroscopic case in her exemplarity,” because even her letters to more illustrious correspondents operate linguistically at “a vast distance from her poetic writings. For Colonna it is a case of two linguistic registers belonging to separate rhetorical spheres, whose possible continuity is irrelevant and in any case not even expected.”28 This incongruity between 28  “caso [. . .] macroscopico nella sua esemplarità [. . .] una distanza straniante dalle pagine in versi. Si tratta per la Colonna di due livelli di linguaggio appartenenti a momenti retoricamente [. . .] separati, la cui possibile continuità è irrilevante e comunque non prevista”: Giovanna Rabitti, “Le lettere di Chiara Matraini tra pubblico e privato,” in Per lettera: la scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia: secoli XV–XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 1999), 209–34, here 226. Colonna is one of the few women authors to be included in sixteenth-century “libri di lettere.” Women’s limited presence in terms of names and numbers in these collection of letters testifies to “un’assenza che connota non tanto una scarsa pratica epistolare tra le donne, quanto piuttosto la assoluta irrilevanza dal punto di vista della modellizzazione:” Adriana Chemello, “Il codice epistolare femminile. Lettere,

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the language used in literary composition and that of more personal writings is a recurrent issue in the Questione debates. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) touched precisely on this while writing to Lord Holland on the question of the authenticity of some manuscripts of Petrarch. Italian and foreign critics did not sufficiently take into consideration the fact that the language used by the great writers in the Italian tradition was not a “common and natural one,” but rather, and this was still the case in his own time, “only a literary, and artificial language.”29 He explained that neither Dante nor Boccaccio who were “more Florentine than Petrarch,” ever wrote verse or prose works as they actually spoke in conversation, and that they used “the common idiomatical and loose language of their countrimen in familiar letters.” Similarly, Foscolo continued, the letters of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and even of Machiavelli, “although written in a more refined age, are full of grammatical and orthographical blunders; those of Ariosto are still worse, and those of Vittoria Colonna the most accomplished of Italian ladies and celebrated for the elegance of her poetry are letters which seem to have been written by a farmer’s wife.”30 Last but not least, Latin was present in Colonna’s life. The study of the classical language was usually not considered appropriate for women,31 but there were exceptions, of course, especially at the upper level of society. Despite information about Colonna’s education in her early years being scarce, we know that her social class had granted her the privilege of a high level of education, ‘Libri di lettere’ e letterate nel Cinquecento,” in Per lettera. La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia secoli XV–XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 1999), 4–42, here 37-38. In the case of Colonna, for instance, four letters by her are included in the over 400 of the three volumes of the Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini et eccellentissimi ingegni scritte in diverse materie, on which the first volume was published in 1542. In Lodovico Dolce’s Lettere di diversi eccellentissimi huomini, raccolte da diversi libri tra lequali se ne leggono molte, non più stampate (Venice, 1554, 1559), there are only two letters by women, one being Colonna. In Girolamo Ruscelli’s Lettere di diversi autori eccellenti. Libro primo. Nel quale sono i tredici autori illustri, et il fiore di quante altre belle lettere si sono vedute fin qui (Venice, 1556), which, as the title page indicates, aims to collect “il fiore di quante altre belle lettere si sono vedute fin qui,” Colonna and Marguerite of Navarre are the only women among the thirty-six authors selected. On Colonna’s letters in print, see also note 44 below. 29  Ugo Foscolo, “Epistolario. Volume nono (1822–1824),” in Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, XXII, ed. Mario Scotti (Florence: 1994), 434 (Letter dated 13 September 1824). 30  Ibid. 31  On the ideas about women and Latin in sixteenth-century Italy, see Helena Sanson, Women, Language and Grammar in Italy, 1500–1900 (Oxford, 2011), 31–45.

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perhaps unusual for sixteenth-century female poets but appropriate for her elevated position. She studied Latin (but we have no evidence of Greek) at least to the point of being able to use it in her reply poem to the Ferrarese poet Daniele Fini.32 On Ischia, Costanza d’Avalos was herself fluent in Latin (as well as a poet of some merit in the vernacular).33 We find words or quotations in Latin embedded in the vernacular of Colonna’s letters to friends and writers, a practice that was not unusual at the time.34 Colonna used mostly set phrases or biblical quotations. This can be seen at the time when she was close to the Reformist movement in the peninsula, and was writing, for example, to Michelangelo,35 Bernardo Ochino,36 or Cardinal Giovanni Morone.37 Similarly, in 1536, in one of her letters to Gasparo Contarini, one of the great cardinals of the Roman Church, we find: I thought, reverend father, that the things proven through deeds for ten years need not be proved every day in words, for as Our Lord says: Ipsa opera quae ego facio, testimonium perhibent de me.38 As for receiving friars, which is that from which, in my view, orta est haec tempestas, that is wanting to close this door more than God wishes.39 32  Silvio Pasquazi, Poeti estensi del Rinascimento: con due appendici (Florence, 1966), liii (for the text of the Latin poem “Certe ego nec mundum vici nec vincere possum,” see 159). The text of a short Latin oration by Colonna can be found in Le rime di Vittoria Colonna corrette su i testi a penna e pubblicate con la vita della medesima, ed. Pietro Ercole Visconti (Rome, 1840), cxlv. 33  Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 87–88. 34  On Latin words and sentences being used both in speaking and writing as a display of refinement, see Sanson’s Women, Language, and Grammar, 37–39; and “Femina proterva, rude, indocta,” 408–13. 35  Letter dated 1539–40, Carteggio, 209: “Et ho visto che Omnia possibilia sunt credenti.” 36  See letter dated 1535–1542, Carteggio, 241–45: “amplius noli peccare [. . .] incipientes a senioribus [. . .] o felix culpa, quae tantum ac talem meruit habere redemptorem [. . .] mulier, ubi sunt qui te accusabant? [. . .] nemo, domine.” 37  Letters dated 30 November 1542, Carteggio, 253–55, and 20 May 1545, Carteggio, 305–7. 38  “Pensava, Rev.mo Signore che le cose dece anni per opere provate non bisognasse provarle ogni giorno con parole, chè come il Signor Nostro dice: Ipsa opera quae ego facio, testimonium perhibent de me”: Carteggio, 111. The quotation is from John 5:36. 39  “In quanto al recever di frati, che è quello, unde, al mio giudicio, orta est haec tempestas, ciò è voler chiudere più che Dio non vole questa porta”: Carteggio, 116. Colonna also received letters written in Latin, for instance, from Pope Clement VII (letters dated 14 October 1525, Carteggio, 32–33; 2 December 1525, Carteggio, 33–34; 5 May 1526, Carteggio, 38–39) and Pope Paul III (letters dated 20 December 1536, Carteggio,

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She also used snippets of Latin in letters that do not specifically deal with religious matters, as well as in others that were sent, for instance, to female interlocutors, such as the Duchess of Urbino Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere (who in 1509 had married the Duke of Urbino Francesco Maria della Rovere),40 or the duchess of Amalfi, Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini: Beloved sister, I wish to speak with you of two glorious women: of our advocate and most faithful handmaid Magdalene, and of her whose death is celebrated today, along with her happy life, Catherine. And even though our great King said to his disciples: Qui voluerit inter vos maior fieri, sit vester minister, et qui voluerit inter vos primus esse, erit vester servus,41 from which any comparison is a great error, nonetheless, because I am going to speak of the glory of heaven, of which that incarnate truth said: In domo patris mei mansiones multae sunt,42 trusting in my humble and loving obedience to their own, ancient and reborn, I will dare to distinguish a little the grades and graces which our great and true husband and Lord granted them. . . . I see the most fervent Magdalene listening at the feet of the Lord, Dilexit multum,43 and Catherine, in jail. Agnosce filia creatorem tuum.44 126–27; 13 March 1537, Carteggio, 131–32; the extant letters from Colonna to him are in Italian; letter dated 1542–47, Carteggio, 316) and from Reginald Pole (letter dated mid1541, Carteggio, 231–35; but we also have letters by Pole in Italian, letter dated 4 October 1546, Carteggio, 309–12). The Emperor Charles V wrote to her in Latin (letter dated 26 March 1525, Carteggio, 27–28; letter dated 9 November 1526, Carteggio, 44–46), as well as in Spanish (letters dated 30 December 1538, 17 March 1541, 26 March 1541, Colonna, Carteggio, 167–68 and 227–29) and a few words in Spanish, in fact a short remark made by Charles V, can be found in a letter to Ascanio Colonna (dated 7 or 8 March 1541, Carteggio, 222). Her extant correspondence with Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre, is in Italian (see, for examples, letter dated 15 February 1540, Carteggio, 185–88; letter dated 1540, Carteggio, 202–206; and end of 1544 or beginning of 1545, Carteggio, 289–92). On their epistolary exchange, see Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: The Correspondence of Marguerite d’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna, 1540–1545 (Princeton: 2000), in particular Appendix D, 125–31. 40  Letter dated 27 June 1536, Carteggio, 110. 41  Matthew 20:26–27. 42  John, 14:2. 43  Luke 7:47. 44  “Di due gloriose donne, sorella amantissima, vorrei ragionar teco della nostra advocata, et fedelissima scorta Maddalena, et di quella che hoggi si celebra la morte, et anzi felice vita, Catherina, et benché il sommo Re nostro dicesse a’ suoi discepoli: Qui voluerit inter vos maior fieri, sit vester minister, et qui voluerit inter vos primus esse, erit vester servus;

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Historical and personal events in her life led Colonna to enter into the realm of the literary vernacular with her verse. From 1512 on, when he joined the imperial league to fight against the French, Francesco Ferrante was often absent from home. In the battle of Pavia, in that same year, he distinguished himself as one of the most active, loyal and brilliant captains of Charles V. Taken prisoner, he was sent to France. During the months of detention and the long years of campaigning that followed, Vittoria and her husband corresponded in passionate terms both in prose and verse. The year 1512 marks Vittoria Colonna’s first extant lyrical composition, an Epistola (Eccelso mio Signor, questa te scrivo), in the form of a capitolo, written for Francesco Ferrante, and which then first appeared in print, together with two of her sonnets (perhaps provided by Paolo Giovio), only later in the 1536 Vocabulario by the Neapolitan Fabrizio Luna.45 The language used by Colonna in the Epistola is, here too, not yet the more mature Trecento Tuscan of her later Rime, and is rather an eclectic, donde ogni comparatione è massimo errore, pur perchè io vo considerando la gloria del cielo, della quale questa incarnata verità parlando disse: In domo patris mei mansiones multae sunt, confidando ne l’humil, et amorosa mia verso loro antica, et rinata servitù, ardirò distinguere un poco i gradi et le gratie, che ’l grande et vero sposo et Signor nostro ha loro concesse. . . . Vedo la ferventissima Maddalena udir a piedi del Signore, Dilexit multum, et Catherina, nella carcere. Agnosce filia creatorem tuum”: Nuovo libro di lettere de i più rari auttori della lingua volgare italiana, di nuovo, et con nuova additione ristampato (Venice, 1545), fol. 37v., where we find another two letters for Costanza. See also Colonna, Carteggio, 299–300, letter dated “before 1545.” Considering the letter was included in a selection of the best authors of the “lingua volgare italiana,” it is highly likely its language was revised before publication. The letters for Costanza were first published in Litere della divina Vetoria Colona ala duchessa de Amalfi sopra la vita contemplativa di Santa Caterina e sopra de la attiva di Santa Madalena non più vista in luce (Venice, 1544). It is not known if Colonna intended print publication for them, but the way they are written suggests a certain literary self-consciousness, as if designed to be read and be useful as spiritual tracts. See on this, Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 146–54. The Latin quotations add no doubt to the more formal and literary register of the letter. The last quotation is from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, caput clxviii, “De Sancta Katherina.” See Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggione, 2 vols. (Tavarnuzze, 1998). 45  Fabrizio Luna, Vocabulario di cinque mila vocabuli toschi (Naples, 1536), fols. Gg1r.–Gg2r. (“Pistola de la I. S. M. di P. ne la rotta di Ravenna”). The sonnets are at fol. GG2r.–Gg2v. In his address “Al libbro,” Fabrizio Luna invites his “pargoletto libbro” to present itself “innanzi la nova Pallade Colonna, e la magnanima Costanza in Ischia” (fol. Ee3v.). The text of the Epistola is available to modern readers in Bullock: Rime, 53–56. Colonna’s earlier writings are indeed attested indirectly or remain untraced, as she seems to have either destroyed her earlier work, or perhaps suppressed its circulation. Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), 65.

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hybrid form closer to the “lingua cortigiana.”46 It was from this moment on that she started to slowly establish her name in Neapolitan literary circles. By 1515, an edition of Dante’s Commedia had been dedicated to her,47 and a few years later, in 1519, Girolamo Britonio placed his Opera volgare [. . .] intitolata Gelosia del sole “beneath the valued shade of your great name” (“sotto la pregiata ombra del vostro sì chiaro nome”48), thus helping to diffuse her reputation as both muse and poet.49 In those same years the first printed grammar of the vernacular went into print. The Regole della volgar lingua, composed by Giovan Francesco Fortunio, originally from Pordenone, was printed in Ancona in 1516 by Bernardin Vercellese (Bernardino Guerralda). The grammar, a quarto in italic font, was crucial in establishing Italian grammatical production as one based on the authority of the great Trecento authors, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as in setting the foundation for a literary language based on an archaic model of the past. This was then reinforced, as we saw earlier, by Bembo’s three books of Prose of 1525. Colonna, at least in the first stage of her literary production, ventured into the field of love poetry—which had, until then, been mostly the privilege of male poets. Through her verse, she expressed her longing and love for Francesco Ferrante. Ferrante died prematurely in November 1525, in Milan, of the wounds he had suffered a few months earlier. Her husband’s death “was for Vittoria the end of life and [. . .] the beginning of literature.”50 In her case specifically, “literature” meant poetic composition in the Petrarchan style. By choosing the Petrarchan genre, women writers could gain access to the literary world in a way that seemed acceptable and respectful of their decorum. The state of widowhood, as a state of freedom from marriage and domestic duties, meant for women the possibility of acquiring independence, as well as time and space to devote themselves to other activities such as writing.51 46  On the Epistola, see Carlo Vecce, “Vittoria Colonna: il codice epistolare della poesia femminile,” Critica letteraria, 78 (1993): 3–34. 47  Dante Alighieri, Dante col sito, et forma dell’Inferno tratta dalla istessa descrittione del poeta (Venice, 1515). 48  Girolamo Britonio, Opera volgare . . . intitolata Gelosia del sole (Naples, 1519), fol. A3r. 49  See on this Johann J. Wyss, Vittoria Colonna: Leben / Wirken / Werke. Eine Monographie (Frauenfeld, 1916), 15–22. 50  “fut pour Vittoria la fin de la vie, et [. . .] le commencement de la littérature”: Suzanne Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna châtelaine d’Ischia (Paris, 1968), 42. 51  On the link between freedom from marriage and the possibility for women to devote their efforts to literary production, see Virginia Cox, “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 513–81.

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Despite being independently wealthy at the relatively young age of thirty-five, Colonna withdrew from society back into her original family circle, refusing several suitors, and chose to lead a pious existence suitable to her state. Yet, she also managed to entertain, as her correspondence indicates, an extensive network of connections with some of the most famous figures of her age, writers, theologians, philosophers, dignitaries, and rulers.

Language Issues in Vittoria Colonna’s Writings

We do not have any extant, explicit writing by Colonna on the main issues of the Questione della lingua, but we can nonetheless safely assume that she was aware of and up-to-date with the main questions at stake in the debates.52 A number of writers and scholars who published on the topic of language and the new vernacular literature were among her correspondents. She also received critical feedback from some of the foremost literary figures of the time and offered her own to them. Her relations with Bembo and Castiglione are a case in point. Bembo, more than any other figure of the time was, it is important to note, influential in popularizing in sixteenth-century Italy “a stance of intellectual engagement with women,” by making it “an imitable, and widely imitated formula.”53 This is particularly the case in the links he established and nurtured with Veronica Gambara and, indeed, Vittoria Colonna, both of whom became the main poetic models for women writers for decades to come.54 The model of vernacular culture shaped and codified by Bembo required a female creative presence for its ideal completion, and one that was not reducible to a single exceptional figure was evidently much stronger than one that was.55 Colonna might have, 52  Women did not produce metalinguistic texts in sixteenth-century Italy, but we nonetheless find some female characters in literary dialogues of the time being invested with a learned knowledge of current linguistic issues. See on this Helena Sanson, “ ‘Orsù, non più signora, . . . tornate a segno’: Women, Language Games and Debates in Cinquecento Italy,” Modern Language Review 105 (2010): 103–21. 53  Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 61. On Bembo’s literary relations with women, see also Ernesto Travi, “Le donne e il volgare,” in idem, Lingua e vita nel primo Cinquecento (Milan, 1984), 76–92; Gordon Braden, “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38 (1996): 115–39. 54  Veronica Gambara (1485–1550) too was widowed at an early age, her husband Giberto having died in 1518. On the role of Gambara and Colonna as literary models and icons in sixteenth-century Italy, see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 64–79. 55  Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 68.

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as some scholars suggest, first met Bembo in 1520, together with Castiglione, when she was in Rome for an audience with Pope Leo X.56 Although no actual evidence has come to down to us, such a meeting would indicate that Colonna had started to enlarge her literary network beyond the context of Naples, within which she had already gained considerable appreciation.57 The letters between Bembo and Colonna are testimony to their mutual esteem.58 In a letter to her dated 20 January 1530, Bembo compared her husband’s military achievements with her literary ones: The aforementioned Messer Fl. [Flaminio Tomarozzo] will be able to tell you how much I have praised our age, since I have recently seen your many sonnets written for the death of your husband the Marquis; this century has had him among its men, equal to the most praiseworthy and noble of the ancients in virtue, and it has you, who are more excellent in this art than it even seems possible that nature would concede to your sex.59 On 31 March Bembo wrote to Carlo Gualteruzzi that he was expecting to receive a sonnet by Colonna, and confirmed receipt of it on 7 April to Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), bishop of Nocera, who acted initially as intermediary between the two poets.60 Bembo had words of fond admiration for it: It seems to me that I have never read a poem of hers that is more beautiful than this one, among the many beautiful poems I have read, and I am truly delighted with it. It is serious, noble, ingenious, and in general most

56  Giorgio Patrizi, “Colonna, Vittoria,” DBI 27 (1982): 448–57. 57  See on this point Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste, 201–77. 58  On the relation between Bembo and Colonna, see Dionisotti: Appunti; Giovanna Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna, Bembo and Firenze: un caso di ricezione e qualche postilla,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 44 (1992): 127–55. 59  “Il detto M. Fl. vi potrà dire, quanto io mi sia rallegrato col nostro secolo, havendo veduto a questi giorni qui molti sonetti vostri fatti per la morte del sig.or Marchese vostro marito; il qual secolo sì come tra gli huomini ha lui havuto nelle arme eguale alla virtù de gli antichi più lodati et più chiari, così ha voi, che tra le donne in questa arte sete assai più eccellente che non pare possibile, che al vostro sesso si conceda dalla natura”: Bembo, Letter to Vittoria Colonna dated 20 January 1530. Bembo: Lettere, III (1529–1536), 99–100. 60  On Giovio’s role as intermediary between the two poets, see Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 154–55.

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excellently devised and set down and elaborated. [. . .] Please be so good in the meantime as to thank her for it on my behalf.61 From this moment on the two poets started an exchange of letters and verse. On 29 May Bembo sent to Colonna, via Giovio, a sonnet, “a poor thing, I hardly dare call it a gift, but recognition of your great and noble courtesy,” in reply to the one she had sent two months earlier: he apologized for his tardiness, explaining that “to such a great and serious and fulsome and meaningful poem one could not reasonably respond in a shorter period of time.”62 On 24 June 1530, writing to Paolo Giovio from Ischia, it was Colonna’s turn to comment on Bembo’s sonnet, praising him above any other vernacular poet, including Petrarch himself: Reverend Sir. I will not hide from you the fact that I lack adequate means to praise the divine sonnet by my own Pietro Bembo, and having pondered whether I could rise to such heights, I judge that silence is the best and truest response to it. Really it seems to me that, in seeking to imitate the most praiseworthy writer in our language, he has exceeded him in style, and excusing my lowly judgment, I say that I have never read a sonnet by another poet, either living or dead, which can be compared to this. Her remarks amount in fact to a sort of short review, in which she displays elegant skills as literary critic. By focusing both on meter and style, she demonstrates her competence and subtlety in understanding the potentialities of the vernacular language: I will not mention the very select vocabulary, new sentences that bend subtly without ever breaking: but my wonder is primarily at seeing how, 61  “A me pare non aver veduto alcuna rima di S. S. più bella di questa, tra molte bellissime che vedute ho, e tengomene buono grandemente. È grave, è gentile, è ingeniosa, ed è, in somma, eccellentemente e pensata e disposta e dettata. . . . In questo mezzo tempo sarete contento voi ringraziarne lei a nome mio”: Bembo, Letter to Paolo Giovio dated 7 April 1530, in Bembo: Lettere, III, 125. 62  “questo povero, non dico dono, ma riconoscimento della sua molta e chiara cortesia’; ‘a così grande e grave e piena e sentenziosa rima non si dovea ragionevolmente poter rispondere in men lungo e spazioso tempo”: Bembo, Letter to Paolo Giovio dated 29 May 1530, in Lettere, III, 140. The sonnet sent by Bembo to Colonna is Cingi le costei tempie dell’amato. It was composed in reply to her Ahi, quanto fu al mio Sol contrario il fato, as we read in Colonna, Tutte le rime, 389. See, more in detail, Colonna, Rime, 38 and 502–3. For Bembo’s sonnet, see Bembo: Prose e rime, 609.

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by constantly raising the verse, he ends the clause so far from where he began, with no effort at all. In fact, the endings seem to flow so naturally from his seamless prose, that their beautiful, smooth harmonies can be heard in the soul before they chime in the ears. The more one reads and ponders them, the more admiration they elicit, or even envy, if my own intellect did not feel itself to be so unequal to that bright light, which it so craves, as something the perfection of which it could never emulate. Thus I have resolved that I am completely in love with him. . . . Others may have beautiful words in great number, but large, bright pearls are useless if one does not know how to string them together, as he does, so that one pearl sets off the next.63 Colonna was, we understand, not only impressed by Bembo’s specific lexical choices, but also by his ability to structure and organize his “vocaboli elettissimi” into finished sentences that came across as new and original: the verse was not hindered by breaks or interruptions of any kind, given that every word seemed to have been assigned its rightful place. The musicality of the verse flowed effortlessly from beginning to end, “senza sforzo alcuno,” because Bembo’s choice of rhymes too appeared to be inherently natural to his beautifully constructed sentences. The music of his poetry, the “bella et suave armonia” he had created, reached the soul of those who read or listened to it even before it reached their ears, allowing them to anticipate, as if these words had been made their own and thus came from within, what the actual verse 63  “Reverendo Signore. A Voi non asconderò io che me manca ogni modo per lodar el divin sonetto del mio M. Pietro Bembo [. . .] et veramente mi par che cercando egli imitar el più lodato autor de la nostra lingua nel scrivere, lo ha superato ne lo stile, et escusandomi prima col mio iuditio, dico che io non leggo sonetto di niun altro, tanto de presenti como de passati, che a lui possa aguagliarsi”; “Non dirò de’ vocaboli elettissimi, sententie nove et sottile senza spezzarse: ma solo la mia maraveglia consiste in veder che alzando sempre el verso va a finir la clausola così lontana senza sforzo alcuno, anzi par che le desinentie vengano si necessarie a la ben ordinata sua prosa, che la bella et suave armonia loro prima si senta nel anima che nel orecchia, et quanto più si rileggono et più spesso si considerano, maggior admiration porgono, anzi direi invidia, se non che ’l mio intelletto si sente più improportionato a quel lume che non lo appetisce como cosa, de la di cui perfetion non è capace, sì che io me risolvo, che son totalmente inamorata de lui. [. . .] habian pur gli altri belle parole e copiose, chè poco giova haver candide e grosse perle senza saperle infilar, di modo che l’una favorisca l’altra como fa lui”: Carteggio, 62–63. “Questo passo meriterebbe di figurare in una ancora intentata e molto desiderabile antologia della critica letteraria di quell’età: tutt’altra cosa e molto più rara, in ispecie per testi volgari, che non la trattatistica”: Dionisotti: Appunti, 265.

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was still to bring. This effect, she pointed out, was by no means diminished by further readings, on the contrary: one’s admiration could only grow, leading Colonna humbly and dutifully to acknowledge the superiority of Bembo’s poetic skills over her own. His fame, it was clear, would remain untarnished by the passing of time, because other poets might have been skillful in selecting their words, but lacked his gift in weaving them together. During the late 1520s and early 1530s, while Colonna was in Ischia, her poetry started to enjoy wider circulation across the peninsula, far beyond Naples.64 Her verse was still in manuscript form, none of her poems having yet been published in print: nonetheless she successfully managed to establish herself as an acclaimed poet. Crucial in this sense was the Congress of Bologna in 1529–30, which marked the reconciliation between the pope and the empire and led to the crowning by the pope of the Emperor Charles V in February of 1530. At this time, Bembo was in the city and Paolo Giovio brought him from Rome a copy of some of Colonna’s sonnets composed for her dead husband. The Congress had brought together the most important political and cultural figures in the peninsula, turning the city into a sort of “fulcrum of literary exchange” in which Colonna’s verse circulated “with Bembo’s enthusiastic stamp of approval,” no doubt “a vital step in her conversion to a kind of national icon.”65 Even though within obvious limits, it would be possible to say that Colonna established herself as a sort of female alter ego of the Venetian humanist on the literary stage of Cinquecento Italy.66 Colonna was considered as a “guida” by contemporary male writers as well. We know, for instance, that Giovanni Guidiccioni and Annibal Caro asked for her views and corrections of their verse,67 and that Castiglione sent a manuscript copy of his Libro del cortegiano for her to read, a gesture that was not simply a pure act of courtesy, but a sign of the great esteem Colonna enjoyed, 64  See Tobia R. Toscano, “Due ‘allievi’ di Vittoria Colonna: Luigi Tansillo e Alfonso d’Avalos,” in idem, Letterati corti accademie (Naples, 2000), 85–120. 65  Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 66. 66  As mentioned earlier, Gambara too was a female model in the literary production of the time. Rinaldo Corso, a protégé at the court of Gambara in Correggio (and the author of a commentary on Colonna’s work, to which I shall return), pointed out the consonances between his patron and Bembo when he wrote in his biography of Gambara that: “Né è meraviglia, che . . . ella, che col Bembo s’allevò, e da lui prese i primi nutrimenti della sacra poesia, tal guida delle donne sia stat[a] quale esso fu de gli huomini.” See Rinaldo Corso, Vita di Giberto terzo di Correggio detto il Difensore (Ancona, 1566), fol. E4r. Also: “Allegrisi il nostro secolo d’havere havuto il Bembo insieme e questa donna . . . per dare alla posterità lume et invitare a seguire i lor vestiti” (fols. E4r–v.). 67  Patrizi, “Colonna, Vittoria,” 453.

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thanks to her social and political position and her literary fame. The episode of the “theft of the Cortegiano” (“furto del Cortegiano”) which the dedicatory letter of the dialogue to Miguel Da Silva, Portuguese ambassador at the papal court, records for posterity, is also at the same time evidence of Colonna’s familiarity with the Questione. In his “Dedicatoria” Castiglione explains how, after the death of the duke of Urbino, Guidubaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508), he had been in the service of Francesco Maria della Rovere, and had started to compose his Cortegiano, encouraged by the memory of the great time past and of the “eccellenti persone” who adorned Guidubaldo’s court. But the process of composing the dialogue took much longer than expected, oppressed as Castiglione had been for years “by such constant labors” (“in così continui travagli”).68 By the time he arrived in Spain (he had set out from Rome at the beginning of October 1524 to go first to Mantua and then to Madrid, as papal ambassador), he had been informed that Colonna, to whom he had himself sent a manuscript copy of his work years earlier, had arranged, to his regret and despite what she had originally promised, for a good part of it to be copied. “I learned that part of the book was in Naples in many hands,” and fearing the dialogue would find its way into the press without his consent, he decided “to revise the book the small amount that time would allow, with the intention of publishing it; judging it a lesser evil to allow it to be read only marginally corrected by my hand than ruined by the hands of others.”69 As we saw earlier, manuscript circulation of works of literature was still common in the sixteenth century, despite the unstoppable spread of the printing press. Castiglione had sent copies of his dialogue to a circle of reputed figures in order to have their feedback and comments on his literary effort. By means of his friend Ludovico Canossa, he had sent a copy to Jacopo Sadoleto and to Pietro Bembo in September 1518, at the time both secretaries of Pope Leo X: “I have written my Dialogue of the Courtier [. . .] and although I don’t like it, I have been forced by the insistence of friends [. . .] to let it out. [. . .] I pray you take a look at it”—he wrote to Sadoleto from Mantua on 20 September 1518— “and let me know your opinion on whether to keep it hidden or publish it.”70 In his correspondence to Bembo the following day, on 21 September, he explained 68  Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, “Dedicatoria,” 3. 69  “Seppi che quella parte del libro si ritrovava in Napoli in mano di molti”; “ ‘di riveder súbito nel libro quel poco che mi comportava il tempo, con intenzione di publicarlo; estimando men male lasciarlo veder poco castigato per mia mano che molto lacerato per man d’altri”: Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, “Dedicatoria,” 4. 70  “[H]o scritto quel mio Dialogo del Cortegiano [. . .] et benché a me non piaccia, sono sforzato dalla importunità di qualche amico [. . .] a lasciarlo andare. [. . .] La priego a dargl­i

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how, being encouraged by countless people “a darlo fuori,” he was asking for the views of trusted friends as to the quality of his work. Because of the role his character was made to play in the dialogue itself, Bembo was “top of the list,” which is why, Castiglione continued, “I ask you to make the effort [. . .] to read it, all or part, and let me know what you think, so that, even if the book cannot be purged of many errors, at least they will not be infinite.”71 Not much attention had to be given at this stage to “la scrittura,” that is, to the language used, he told Bembo, as the “fatica” of revising it would subsequently be taken on by someone else.72 The authority of these literary figures acted as a validation for the Cortegiano: their readings, commentaries, and revisions contributed to making the dialogue, at this stage, a sort of collective labor, the product of a network of sodalitas that defined the contemporary res publica litteraria.73 Vittoria Colonna was among the literary authorities that Castiglione consulted with this aim in mind. And Colonna, in return, read the text in detail. It is worth remembering here that among the topics that are introduced into the fabric of the Cortegiano in the course of the four books (and evenings) of the courtiers’ refined discussions, we find, in Book I, a detailed and lively exchange among the elegant interlocutors that focuses on the Questione della lingua, on the type of vernacular to use both in writing and in speaking. The declared verisimilitude, which is at the basis of the dialogue as such, is in itself, if there was any need for it, a confirmation of the fact that the Questione was openly tackled, by men and women alike, in courtly conversations.74 For Castiglione, speaking and writing at court implied being able to combine the “ancient words” (“parole antiche”) of the Tuscan literary tradition and the “common use of today” (“consuetudine d’oggidì”), to find a compromise between Bembo’s archaic Trecento Tuscan on the one hand, and a language based on common una occhiata”; “et dirmi il parer suo intorno al tenerlo celato o publicarlo:” Baldassarre Castiglione, Lettere, Tomo primo (1497–Marzo 1521), ed. Guido Rocca (Milan, 1978), 383. 71  “prego V. S. che pigli fatica [. . .] di leggerlo, o tutto o parte, et avertirmi di quello che le parerà, acciò che, se ’l libro non può esser senza molti errori, sia almeno senza infiniti”: Castiglione, Lettere, 383–84. 72  Ibid. Castiglione, despite being a supporter of the “teoria cortigiana” in terms of language, and despite the long digression in Book I precisely on this point, had the language of the Cortegiano revised for the press by the Venetian patrician Giovan Francesco Valier, to give it the “certezza grammaticale” and the “patina di ‘toscanità’ ” that the author himself had not been able to achieve (Ghino Ghinassi, “L’ultimo revisore del Cortegiano,” Studi di filologia italiana 21 (1963): 217–64, here 247. 73  Amedeo Quondam, “Questo povero cortegiano”: Castiglione, il libro, la storia (Rome, 2000), 58. 74  See Sanson, “Orsù, non più signora, . . . tornate a segno.”

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usage on the other. This is why the Cortegiano is considered a well-known representative of the “teoria cortigiana” current in sixteenth-century debates on language. Language and language use, in speaking and writing, was a topic of conversation in Urbino, and no doubt also a topic of discussion at the court on Ischia. It certainly was a matter of importance for Colonna the aristocratic woman in her many stays in different courts around the peninsula, and even more so for Colonna the poet. It is not surprising, then, that Castiglione chose to send Colonna a copy of the Cortegiano to read: she was herself an aristocratic, courtly figure of the kind that could have very easily figured among the characters of his dialogue. And she was also a poet, one whose fame was steadily on the rise, and therefore needed to make specific choices about the language of her works, as did Castiglione himself (particularly as both were non-Tuscan in origin). On 20 September 1524, Colonna wrote to Castiglione. She was in Marino and Castiglione in Rome, busy with the preparations for his move to Spain. In her letter, she recalls her promise to safely send him back the copy of the Cortegiano she had with her: “Noble Sir, I had not forgotten my promise to you,” but she explains that the pleasure she has gained from it is the reason for the delay in returning it. She is, we learn, half way through reading the book for the second time and keen to get to the end, after which she assures Castiglione that she will promptly and safely return the manuscript: “I beg you to allow me to finish, and I promise then to return it [. . .] Nor do you need to send men for it, for I will send it cautiously and safely.”75 Her apologies are followed by elegant and acute observations concerning the subject matter of the dialogue, and its various subtopics, as well as its style: I will simply tell you the honest truth, confirming it with a sacrament that will amply demonstrate its efficacy to you, that is that I swear “on the life of the Marquis, my husband” that I have never seen, nor believe I will see again, another work in prose better or even equal to this one, nor worthy of second place to it. Apart from the wonderful new subject matter, the excellence of the style is such that, with a previously unknown smoothness it leads you to a beauteous and fruitful hill, climbing higher without ever being aware that you are no longer at ground level; and the way is so well tended and ornate that it is difficult to see whose effort has gone in 75  “Ex.te S.or Non haveva io perduta la memoria di observarli la promessa; son già al mezo della seconda volta ch’io la lego, prego la S. V. me la voglia lassar finire, ch’io le prometto remandarcelo. [. . .] Nè bisognerà mandare altri per esso, ch’io lo inviarò cautamente et sicuro”: Carteggio, 23–24.

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to its cultivation, nature’s or art’s. Let us leave to one side the wonderful witticisms, the deep insights, which glitter no less than gemstones set in only as much gold as is needed to set them off without stealing the tiniest part of their light; nor do I believe that other such gems can be found, nor any better craftsman who could improve their setting.76 In her comments on the Cortegiano manuscript, Colonna also touches explicitly on language issues, showing her support for the claims Castiglione made in his work that a vernacular other than Trecento Tuscan should be successfully and appropriately employed in literary compositions: And what can I say of the propriety of the language, which truly demonstrates with such clarity the potential for using a language other than Tuscan? It is by chance that this has come so late, for the fame of he who so strictly observed it has lived on till now, and what I noticed above all is that where you use other words, departing from the Tuscan, it seems you have done this more because these words work better than due to a desire to reject Tuscan usage.77 Colonna’s words are full of praise for Castiglione’s choice of language: I will not be silent about that part which aroused my greatest admiration, which is that it seems to me that someone who writes in Latin is different from other authors, in the same way that a craftsman who works with 76  “Semplicemente li dirò la pura verità, affirmandola con sacramento tale, che mostri la efficatia che devessi che li dico por vida del Marchès, my S.or, ch’io non ho visto mai, nè credo vedere altra opera in prosa meglio o simile, nè forse meritamente seconda a questa: perchè oltra el bellissimo soggetto et novo, la excellentia del stile è tale che con una suavità non mai sentita vi conduce in uno amenissimo et fruttifero colle, salendo sempre senza farve accorger mai di non esser pur nel piano dove entrasti; et è la via sì ben culta et ornata, che difficilmente può discernersi chi habbia più faticato in abbellirla, o la natura o l’arte. Lasciamo stare le meravigliose argutie, le profonde sententie, che ci rilucono non meno che gemme legate in sì poco oro che solo li serve per necessaria compagnia, senza togliere pur una minima parte de la lor luce; nè credo che altre possin trovarse tali, nè meno artefice migliorar l’incastro”: Carteggio, 24–25. 77  “Ma che dirò io de la proprietà de le parole, che veramente dimostrano questa chiareza di possere usare altro che ’l toscano? È stata ventura sia venuta sì tardi, perchè la fama di chi la ha sì strettamente observata sia fin qui vissa, et quel che più ho notato è che dove usa altra parola, sono così da lassar le toscane, che par più per seguir queste meglio che per fugir quelle, l’habbi fatto”: Carteggio, 25.

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gold differs from someone who works with copper: for however simple the object he makes, the excellence of his base material shines through so brightly that the object is rendered beautiful; but the object made from copper, however cunningly and skillfully it is worked, still in the comparison will come off worse; yet your new vernacular has its own rare majesty which cedes nothing to the finest Latin work.78 Those who choose to write in Latin, she explained by means of an effective simile, have an inherent advantage over those who choose to write in the vernacular. They are indeed like goldsmiths, as opposed to those who work with copper. Given the “excellentia de la materia”—gold is more precious—even the most banal, the most simple of crafts they produce is inevitably beautiful. Not so for works in copper, that is, in the vernacular: no matter the “grande ingegno e sottil modo” that supports them, they will—usually—only fall short in comparison with the gold of Latin. But, Colonna observed, Castiglione had clearly succeeded where other had failed: the “volgare” of the Cortegiano was “novo,” intrinsically cloaked in a rare “maestà” that made it equal to Latin. In short, Castiglione’s “novo volgare” was like gold. By the end of September 1527, Colonna’s copy of the manuscript had still not been returned to Castiglione. Writing on 21 September, from Burgos in Spain, Castiglione expressed his frustration that copies of the manuscript had been made and circulated: “my lord the Marquis of Vasto  [. . .] showed me a letter from Your Ladyship, in which you yourself confess to the theft of the Cortegiano. [. . .] It pained me a little, like a father who sees his son mistreated.”79 The Cortegiano was being read in Naples in an earlier version to the revised one Castiglione had in his own hands, and to the one that would ultimately reach the press: the text, seen in that form, “così incompositamente,” might have “aroused disdain in the opinion of many people” (“acquistato molta disgratia nella opinione delle persone”),80 not to mention that the novelty (“novità”) of the work was also at risk. He found himself forced to have his manuscript 78  “Non tacerò già quello che più admiratione mi ha causato, che è che a me pare che chi scrive latino habbi una differentia con li altri autori, simile ad uno artefice, che lavora di oro, a quelli che lavorano di rame: chè per semplice opera che faccia, la excellentia de la materia luce tanto che la dimostra bella; ma la opera di rame con grande ingegno et sottil modo non può farsi tale, che in la comparatione non perda molto; ed il novo vostro vulgare porta una maestà con seco sì rara, che non deve cedere a niuna opera latina” (ibid.). 79  “il mio signore Marchese del Vasto [. . .] mi mostrò una lettera di Vostra Signoria, dove essa medesima confessava il furto del Cortegiano. [. . .] Dolsemi un poco, come padre che vede il figliuolo mal trattato” (ibid.). 80  Ibid., 50.

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transcribed in as little time as possible, Castiglione added, and see it into print in Venice.81 Colonna, it must be noted, did not receive a presentation copy of the printed version.82 Other writers involved in the Questione debates were also among Colonna’s correspondents, such as Trissino, who in 1524 published a proposal for a spelling reform of Tuscan,83 and was the author of a dialogue on language, Il Castellano, and of a short grammar, the Grammatichetta (both published in 1529).84 She also entertained an epistolary exchange with the Sienese Claudio Tolomei, a supporter of the Tuscan viewpoint, as expressed in his dialogue Il Polito (1525)85 and in Il Cesano (published in 1555, but written thirty years earlier).86 From a letter sent to her from Rome, on 7 April 1531, we learn that Colonna had solicited Tolomei to let her see some of his work: having nothing finished at the moment to send her, he obliged nonetheless by enclosing a copy of the tragedy Tullia, the work of the late Lodovico Martelli, from Florence, who was

81  Ibid. In reality, as Quondam points out (“Questo povero Cortegiano,” 71), Castiglione had not sent to the presses a hurriedly prepared copy at the insistence of other people, but rather a manuscript on which he had worked strenuously and assiduously for many years, with the assistance of his literary circles of “advisers.” This unusual expression of resentment by Castiglione, which seems inappropriate with reference to a woman of Colonna’s standing, would then rather act as a “racconto liberatorio,” for his concerns that an earlier version of his Cortegiano would reach the press (ibid., 72–73). 82  Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge, 1995), 39. 83  Gian Giorgio Trissino, Epistola . . . de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (Venice, 1524). His spelling reform sparked lively reactions by Tuscan and Florentine theorists, on which see Richardson, Trattati. 84  Gian Giorgio Trissino, Dialogo . . . intitulato il Castellano, nel quale si tratta de la lingua italiana (Vicenza, 1529); idem, La grammatichetta (Venice, 1529). Trissino, similarly to Castiglione, upheld a literary language of a more eclectic nature that should reflect the contributions of other vernaculars in the peninsula, rather than limiting itself to Trecento Tuscan. This vernacular, he maintained, ought to be deemed “italiano,” rather than, as it was often termed, “toscano.” For modern editions of Trissino’s work, see Gian Giorgio Trissino, Scritti linguistici, ed. Alberto Castelvecchi (Rome, 1986). 85  Claudio Tolomei, De le lettere nuovamente aggiunte libro di Adriano Franci [pseud.] . . . Intitolato Il Polito (Rome, 1525). For a modern edition, see Claudio Tolomei, “Il Polito,” in Richardson, ed., Trattati, 77–130. 86  Claudio Tolomei, Il Cesano, dialogo [. . .] nel quale da più dotti huomini si disputa del nome, col quale si dee ragionevolmente chiamare la volgar lingua (Venice, 1555). For a modern edition, see Claudio Tolomei, Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana, ed. Ornella Castellani Pollidori (Florence, 1996).

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an admirer of Colonna’s, and who had prematurely died in 1527.87 Tolomei had composed the missing chorus of the tragedy, at the explicit request of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, in whose service he was at the papal court. But, and this is particularly interesting in confirming Colonna’s familiarity with the Questione and relevant texts on the topic, he also promised to send her soon some writings of his that dealt specifically with issues of language, namely, a defense of the vernacular, later to be published in Parma by Seth Viotti with the title Due orazioni in lingua Toscana: accusa contra Leon Secretario, di secreti rivelati. Difesa (1547): Most excellent Lady, I wished to send you some of my scribblings, not because I want them to be seen, or indeed think them worthy of such; but so as not to be discourteous, for I would be rude indeed if I did not seek to satisfy you, since you have asked me so sweetly. Searching among those small trifles that I have composed from time to time in order to avoid idleness, I have found nothing that is finished; nor did I feel I could send you something that was imperfect and unworthy of your attention. Nonetheless I will try shortly to send you a short work in defense of our language against those who condemn it, of which I lost the second book, which was nearly finished, in the Sack of Rome. I have never made the effort to rewrite it, waiting for fortune to do me the favor of allowing me to recover it.88 87  See Lodovico Martelli’s “Stanze di Lodovico Martelli a la Illustriss. Sig. la S. Vittoria Marchesa di Pescara in morte de lo Illustriss. Marchese suo Consorte,” in his own Rime volgari (Rome, 1533), fols. 96r.–116v. 88  “Desideravo mandarvi, Escellentissima Signora, qualcuna de le mie ciancie, non già per voglia ch’io habbi ch’elle sian vedute, o perchè io le stimi punto di ciò degne; ma per non esservi discortese, chè ben sarei rozzo, s’io non m’ingegnassi di sodisfarvi, poi che con tanta humanità me le domandate. Ma rivolgendomi tra quelle poche cosette, ch’io talora per fuggire ozio ho composte, non vi ho trovata opera finita; né m’è parso di potervi per ancor mandar cosa, se non imperfetta e indegna di venirvi dinanzi. Nondimeno io mi sforzarò infra non molto tempo mandarvi una operetta in difesa de la lingua nostra contra i biasimatori di lei, de la quale havendo perduto nel sacco di Roma il secondo libbro, che quasi era finito, non ho mai ripresa questa fatica di rifarlo, pur aspettando, che la fortuna mi volesse almeno usar questa cortesia di farmelo ritrovare”: Claudio Tolomei, Delle lettere [. . .] libri sette (Venice, 1547), fol. 37v. (and Carteggio, 67–68). But from a letter written by Tolomei to Colonna on 7 May 1533, we learn that she had also received from the Marchese del Guasto (Vasto) a manuscript copy of Tolomei’s oration on peace, the Oratione de la pace, addressed to Clement VII and later published in Rome in 1534 by Antonio Blado. Lamenting that it was “guasta molto, e male scritta,” Tolomei urged Colonna to get directly from the Marquis “l’originale scritto di mia mano” (Carteggio, 87).

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Women might not have directly participated in the codification of the vernacular in Cinquecento Italy, nor did they compose treatises or dialogues revolving around the Questione della lingua. Nonetheless, these topics permeated upperclass society, for men and women alike, because the issue of language use in everyday life was a matter of social distinction. In this respect, it was inevitably a matter of concern for Colonna too. Similarly, the social and linguistic implications of the Questione were not abstract polemics exclusively confined to male theorists and writers, but were a matter of fundamental importance for all writers who, irrespective of their sex, expressed their voice and talent in Cinquecento Italy.

Rinaldo Corso’s Dichiaratione to Colonna’s Poetry

Colonna’s poems, we saw earlier, had already been circulating widely in manuscript for some time within elite literary circles, even before her writings found their way into print. The first appearance of Colonna’s poetry in print dates back to 1535, when Bembo published the second edition of his Rime and included, among the selection of correspondence poems that are added as an appendix, his poetic exchanges with Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. In 1538 the first edition of Colonna’s Rime was published in Parma, without the author’s consent. The edition might have satisfied the reading public eager for her poetry, but this editorial operation was deemed by Bembo to be an offence, an “ingiuria e villania,” against Colonna, as he wrote in that same year to Gualteruzzi, because her Rime were “most incorrect, and badly set down on poor paper” (“incorrettissime, e di pessima forma e carta”).89 No doubt Bembo was also concerned about possible linguistic inaccuracies in Viotti’s edition.90 Almost as if to balance out the potential damage brought about by this unapproved edition of her Rime, just a few years later Colonna was honored with a stylistic and linguistic commentary on her verse. No other living poet—either male or female—had had this kind of accolade ever before, not even Bembo. The concern here seems to be not only the legibility of the manuscript, but also the language used, clearly an issue of importance for a (Tuscan) theorist of language writing to a renowned poet of the vernacular. 89  Letter 1967, dated 8 November 1538, in Bembo: Lettere, IV (1537–1546), 140–42, here 141. 90  The editorial vicissitudes of Colonna’s Rime are indeed complex and still unsolved. For a detailed reconstruction, see the chapter in this volume by Tatiana Crivelli on “The Print Tradition of the Rime by Vittoria Colonna.”

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The author of the commentary was Rinaldo Corso (Verona? 1525-Strongoli 1580/1582), active at the court of Correggio where Veronica Gambara entertained and welcomed artists, scientists, and other intellectuals. At the time of the composition of his work, in the summer of 1541, Corso was only sixteen. His Dichiaratione sopra la seconda parte delle Rime di Vittoria Collonna Marchesana di Pescara was first published in 1542.91 Another edition of this commentary on Colonna’s “sonetti spirituali” was republished the following year in Bologna by Giambattista Faelli, with a number of variants.92 Reading the “proemio alle amorose donne” in the 1543 edition, we understand that a Dichiaratione sopra la prima parte delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna, also by Corso and focusing on her “sonetti amorosi,” had also been prepared and was presumably intended for publication: I would happily have refrained [. . .], since with your blessing my first voyage led me to a safe port, from setting out a second time, because I don’t consider myself very learned in spiritual matters, and because my mind is less capable of grasping those concepts than it was (with your help) of the others. [. . .] I would also have left off since such topics cannot be described without style and order. [. . .] Nonetheless [. . .] I did not wish [. . .] to deny you any part of my work.93 91  Rinaldo Corso, Dichiaratione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della di­vina Vittoria Collonna [sic] marchesa di Pescara. Da Rinaldo Corso alla molto illust. mad. Veronica Gambara da Correggio. Et alle donne gentili dedicata. Nella quale i sonetti spirituali da lei fino adesso composti, et un Trionfo di croce si contiene. Con la tavola sua (n. pl., n. pub., 1542). On this edition, preserved in only one copy at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples, see Sarah Christopher Faggioli, “A Sixteenth-Century Reader and Critic of Vittoria Colonna: Rinaldo Corso’s 1543 Commentary on Her Spiritual Rime” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), which also discusses the variants between the two editions (ch. 3). See also eadem “Di un’edizione del 1542 della Dichiaratione di Rinaldo Corso alle rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” GSLI, 191, 131, fasc. 634 (2014), forthcoming. 92  R ime 1543. 93  “Harei volentieri lasciato [. . .], poscia che col vostro favore del primo pelago era ad assai buon porto uscito, di entrare nel secondo, sì perché io non mi veggio nelle cose divine molto bene instrutto, sì perchè il mio intelletto non è così di questi concetti capevole come di quegli altri (la vostra mercede) è stato. [. . .] Harelo anchor fatto, perciò che e’ pare, che così fatti soggetti non si possano se non con stile, e piano descrivere.[. . .] Nondimeno [. . .] non ho voluto [. . .] in alcuna parte l’opera mia negarvi”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fol. A2v. In the closing pages, in the dedication to Veronica Gambara dated 25 February 1542, Corso informs us that he had decided to give to the presses the “seconda parte delle Rime [. . .] da me la state passata isposte, et a voi dedicate,” adding also that having “riten[uto]

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The Dichiaratione sopra la prima parte never made it to press on its own. Instead, in 1558, the Prima and Seconda parte appeared in a single edition, in Venice, comprising a total of 158 texts, with the title Tutte le rime della Illustriss. et Eccellentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana di Pescara. Con l’espositione del Signor Rinaldo Corso. It was edited by Girolamo Ruscelli and dedicated to Isabella Gonzaga.94 Ruscelli, originally from Viterbo, but active in Venice since 1549, was a successful example of a “poligrafo,” that new figure of “author-editor” who, especially in the second half of the century, devoted his energy and commitment almost entirely to vernacular literature and language, across a range of different literary genres, in collaboration with some of the main Venetian printers.95 Ruscelli’s was a life-long, ambitious, and wide-ranging project that aimed at making vernacular language and literature more generally available among the literate members of the social classes, and, we can add, to the two sexes alike.96 In the dedicatory letter, we read that Ruscelli (who does not mention the printed text of 1543) had received a copy of Colonna’s poems with Corso’s “espositione” from Count Giovan Battista Brembati. Brembati, in turn, had had “il libro” from Veronica Gambara, for whom the work had been composed:

appresso di me la prima parte di gran lunga più, che questa, difficile et oscura, farò con questa saggio [. . .] et più sicura aprirò la strada a far, che la prima si veggie” (fol. O7v). 94  R ime 1558. On Corso’s commentary, see Giovanni Moro, “Le commentaire de Rinaldo Corso sur les Rime de Vittoria Colonna: une encyclopédie pour les ‘très nobles dames,’ ” in Les Commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Actes du Colloque international sur le Commentaire (Paris, mai 1988), ed. Gisèle MathieuCastellani and Michel Plaisance (Paris, 1990), 195–202; Monica Bianco, “Le due redazioni del Commento di Rinaldo Corso alle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Studi di filologia italiana: bollettino annuale dell’Accademia della Crusca, 56 (1998): 271–95; eadem, “Rinaldo Corso e il ‘canzoniere’ di Vittoria Colonna,” Italique 1 (1998): 35–45; Chiara Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 73 (1999): 669–96. 95  On Ruscelli’s role in the publishing business, see Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto: la stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna, 1991), 241– 68 and Paolo Marini and Paolo Procaccioli, eds., Girolamo Ruscelli: Dall’Accademia alla corte alla tipografia. Itinerari e scenari per un letterato del Cinquecento. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Viterbo, 6–8 ottobre 2011), 2 vols, (Rome, 2011). 96  See on this his address “A i lettori’ in his Rimario, Del modo di comporre in versi nella lingua italiana, trattato. . . . Nel quale va compreso un pieno & ordinatissimo Rimario (Venice, 1559), fols. a8r.–c3r. In 1554, Ruscelli had also edited Gambara’s Rime. See Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani, nuovamente raccolte, et mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli tra le quali sono le rime della signora Veronica Gambara, & di m. Pietro Barignano, ridotte alla vera sincerità loro (Venice, 1554).

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In the past few days I have had a gift from the illustrious count Giovan Battista Brembato of the poems of the most illustrious and excellent lady Vittoria Colonna of sacred memory, Marchioness of Pescara, with a commentary by the excellent Rinaldo Corso from Correggio, and the count tells me he had a copy of that book after repeated requests from the illustrious lady Veronica Gambara, as Rinaldo had by chance explained them for her and given them to her written out in pen.97 Having read it all, Ruscelli then decided to see the entirety of Corso’s manuscript into print: in Tutte le rime (Rime 1558), the first part comprises 120 “amorosi” poems (118 sonnets and two “canzoni,” pp. 1–392) and the second is a revised version of the text of the Dichiaratione of 1543 with the thirty-eight “spirituali” poems (thirty-seven sonnets followed by the “Trionfo della croce,” pp. 393–501).98 Colonna’s poems “explained” (“esposti”) by Corso, as Ruscelli himself tells us, allowed him to “continually fulfill my intention to be of benefit to lovers of good literature and end up by raising our language to the heights.”99 The title page of the 1543 edition informs us that the work is dedicated to Veronica Gambara, as well as to “gentlewomen” (“donne gentili”), a broader public of female readers. This attention to a female readership is reiterated throughout the commentary, as indicated by the various apostrophes in the text (e.g., “carissime donne,” “gentilissime donne”). In the closing pages,100 Corso explicitly refers to the “most noble women, whose consolation I sought in undertaking this for now brief work.”101 Not that his work excluded the 97  “mi fu questi giorni a dietro dall’Illustre Signor Conte Giovan Battista Brembato fatto dono delle rime dell’Illustrissima et Eccellentissima Signora Vittoria Colonna di santa memoria, Marchesana di Pescara, con l’espositione dello Eccellente Signor Rinaldo Corso da Correggio, del qual libro il detto Conte mi dice che egli con molti prieghi hebbe copia dalla Illustrissima Signora Veronica Gambara havendolo per aventura il detto Signor Rinaldo così esposto a contemplatione di lei et donatolo scritto a penna”: Rime 1558, fol. *4v. 98  For a comparison between the 1543 and 1558 editions, see Bianco, “Le due redazioni,” in particular 284–95 for the corrections, expunctions and additions Corso introduced in his observations on style and language. 99  “continuatamente servar l’intention mia di far beneficio a gli amatori delle belle lettere et finir di condurre in colmo la nostra lingua”: Rime 1558, fol. *5r. 100  Ruscelli informs the readers that Corso had not personally corrected this version, as he was in Naples at the time it was given to the presses (Rime 1558, fol. **4r.). 101  “Nobilissime donne, a consolatione delle quali io mi sono messo a questa per ora brieve fatica”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fol. O3r. We learn from a couple of references in the 1558 edition that Corso was not new to this kind of literary enterprise, having already composed

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possibility of male readers, of course. However, it seems only appropriate that Corso wrote an “espositione” of the verse by one of the best-known female poets of the time, dedicating it to another well-known female poet and for the benefit of other women eager to learn more about Trecento Tuscan and who might, possibly, even have had literary aspirations. On one level, Corso focused on Colonna’s subject matter and stylistic choices, interpreting her poems within a rich network of references to the broader cultural, literary, and religious contexts. By so doing, he paid homage both to Colonna the aristocratic figure and to Colonna the literary figure: he established and validated her role and status as a renowned poet who drew her verse from prestigious antecedents, while ultimately also creating for herself a place in that same tradition. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante da Maiano, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Bembo, together with the Latin Virgil, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, as well as the Greek Homer, Euripides, are only some of the authors Corso refers to, across the 1558 edition, thus inscribing Colonna’s verse within a prestigious literary background (and simultaneously displaying also his own erudition).102 Significantly, Corso also cites Gambara’s verse as a model for emulation. This was no doubt a necessary homage to his patron and dedicatee, but, in pairing the two great female poets of the time, he also followed a trend that Bembo himself promoted. In his “espositione” of sonnet Il cieco honor del mondo un tempo tenne, line 2 “L’alma di fama vaga, e quasi un angue,” we find a lengthy and detailed discussion of the word vaga, and its cognate terms:

a commentary (now lost to us) on Petrarch’s Rime. See, for instance, his comments on Colonna’s Sonnet 77: “Et io mi sono ingegnato d’aprirla [l’oscurità del sonetto] nelle mie annotationi sopra quel poeta” (Rime 1558, 217) and at Sonnet 92: “Veggansi le mie annotationi in quel poeta” (Rime 1558, 268). Similarly, a reference to Corso’s commentary on Petrarch can be found in the letter to the readers of the 1554 edition of the Canzoniere edited by Ruscelli where we read: “Et in alcuni luoghi si vede pure che ancor l’ordine del Vellutello potesse migliorarsi, come bene avvertisce M. Rinaldo Corso in una compendiosa et utilissima esposition sua” (Francesco Petrarca, Il Petrarca, nuovamente con la perfetta ortografia della lingua volgare, corretto da Girolamo Ruscelli. Con alcune annotationi, & un pieno vocabolario del medesimo, sopra tutte le voci, che nel libro si contengono, bisognose di dichiaratione, d’avvertimento, & di regola (Venice, 1554). The reference is to the well-known Espositione of Petrarch’s Rime by Francesco Vellutello, which had several editions in the course of the century. 102  It is worth noting here that Corso quotes from classical authors in the original Latin and Greek, two languages which were not, especially the latter, necessarily part of the knowledge available to the ‘nobilissime donne’ he was addressing. See note 31 above.

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By vago (beautiful), we mean that thing which causes pleasure in looking at it, as Petrarch demonstrated when he said: Quel vago, dolce, caro, honesto, sguardo. [. . .]103 Similarly you can say invaghire, as the same Petrarch said, Gli occhi invaghiro allhor sì che loro guai. From this comes invaghito, which you yourself, most gentle Gambara, use in your poem when you say: Tal che di sé invaghita la natura Gode in mirar la sua bella fattura.104 But Corso’s commentary also provides more technical know-how on poetic composition, as well as lexical and grammatical observations. This meant that the female readers he addressed, the “amorose donne,” could familiarize themselves with the grammar of the literary vernacular as used by Vittoria Colonna herself. Commenting, for example, on Colonna’s sonnet Gli angeli eletti a quel bene infinito, Corso offers his readers specific linguistic observations and explanations, implicitly praising Colonna for the accuracy of her grammatical choices in accordance with Trecento Tuscan: They write badly and against Tuscan usage, those who, before nouns, cause a collision with the particle GLI, be it an article or else used in place of an article, by removing the first “I.” I’ll give an example: gli angeli. Gl’han dato. This is openly demonstrated by the Tuscan language, and the more correct texts confirm it. It is true that when this particle is followed by a noun that starts with the letter “I,” sometimes the first “I” can be removed, as in gl’infiniti, gl’immacolati.105 103  See Rvf, 125, v. 1. 104  “Vaga, dichiam quella cosa, che la vista alletta a risguardarla, come il Petrarca mostrò dicendo: Quel vago, dolce, caro, honesto, sguardo. [. . .] Quindi similmente si fa invaghire, che disse il medesimo Petrarca, Gli occhi invaghiro allhor sì che loro guai. Onde viene invaghito, che voi Gambara gentilissima nelle stanze vostre diceste: Tal che di sé invaghita la natura / Gode in mirar la sua bella fattura”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fols. B2v.–B3v. See Veronica Gambara, Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Florence, 1995), 119 (Stanze, “Quando miro la terra, ornata e bella,” ll. 15–16). In the 1558 edition, pp. 388–90, we also find two sonnets by Veronica Gambara (“Oh, de la nostra etade unica gloria” and “Mentre da’ vaghi e giovenil pensieri”) included alongside others by Bembo or Francesco Molza. 105  “Male et contra la favella thoscana scrivono quelli, che innanzi alle vocali fanno collisione di questa particola GLI, o sia articolo, o posto in vece d’articolo, levandone la prima I. Do l’essempio: gli angeli. Gl’han dato. Il che ne dimostra aperto la favella thoscana et ce lo danno a vedere, leggendo i più corretti testi. È vero che seguendo incontanente quella

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Analyzing the lexical and morphological choices in line 124 A i santi piei colei, che simil nome of the “Triompho della Croce,” with particular attention being given to piede and its variants in the singular and plural forms, Corso writes: The other form, ai santi piei, instead of piedi, in the plural and in the singular too, piè, instead of piede, or piedi, and so Petrarch in the latter: Men solitarie l’orme Foran de’ miei piè lassi.106 And commenting on line 131, “Non volse il piè fedel, nè strinse il pianto,” we read: Volse comes directly from the verb volgo, and it means to turn (voltarsi). Nonetheless, as volgo and voglio are so close, as well as other similar words, it often happens that they are conjugated in both ways: the same as with Tolgo, Toglio, Volgo, Voglio, often found instead of Volle in both poetry and in prose (but more rarely). Volgo can also mean publish, and in the past tense it becomes volgai. In this case the first ‘o’ is more closed. [. . .] Vulgo is how the Tuscans say it, and divulgo. And vulgo can also sometimes be a noun, and Petrarch uses both words in his canzone “Quel antico mio dolce empio signor”: c’hor saria forse un roco mormorator di corti, un huom del vulgo I l’exalto, e divulgo etc. Hence volgare and divulgato, well-known terms.107

particella una voce, che dalla I habbia cominciamento alcuna volta, la prima I se ne può levare, come gl’infiniti, gl’immacolati”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fol. G1v. 106  “L’altra, che ai santi piei, in vece di piedi, sì come nell’altro numero et in questo ancora piè, in vece di piede, o piedi, onde il Petrarca del secondo: Men solitarie l’orme / foran de’ miei piè lassi”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fol. O1r; see Rvf, 125, vv. 7–8. 107  “Volse, dirittamente dal verbo volgo deriva, e significa voltarsi. Nondimeno per la vicinanza, che hanno volgo, et voglio, e l’altre voci simili, sì che sovente l’una, e l’altra voce ricevono: come Tolgo, Toglio, Volgo, Voglio, in vece di Volle molte volte, e nel verso, e nella prosa (ma più di rado) si legge. Volgo anchora significa publicare et fa nel tempo passato volgai. Ma allhor più chiusa si proferisce la prima O. [. . .] Vulgo similmente dicono i Thoscani, et divulgo. Et è quel vulgo alcuna volta nome, come il Petrarca dell’uno, e dell’altro disse nella canzone Quel antico mio dolce empio signor:

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Corso’s observations therefore range from glosses on lexical choices to more detailed remarks on morphological and stylistic usage. But they also include comments on punctuation, figures of speech, and the etymology of words, as well as remarks in line with the established tradition of advising readers on the differences between the language and vocabulary of prose and poetry (as, for instance, in Bembo’s own Prose). In Tutte le rime, for example, with reference to sonnet V, Tralucer dentro al mortal vel cosparte, and more specifically to line 13, “sia almeno il cor che omai sdegna il beato,” we read that: “Omai can be written ormai, oramai, or oggimai. But the last two forms are more common to prosewriters than to poets.”108 With his commentary, Corso contributed to making Colonna’s verse accessible to a wider public, well beyond those privileged readers who had benefited from the manuscript circulation of her poetry. In this respect, it fits well into the general trend of democratization of literary, and grammatical, production that took place from the 1530s on, owing to the spread of the printing press, the establishment and recognition of the literary vernacular, and the progressive dissolution of the court system. The new type of readership that began to emerge at this point in history extended to include wider, less learned social circles that were often in need of help and guidance in navigating the structure and the information contained in the book they had in their hands. This is why editors and publishers started printing works in which they provided their readers with a range of resources, such as “dichiarazioni,” “commenti,” indexes and summaries, marginal notes, “tavole” or, from the 1540s on, allegories or glosses that suggested, for instance, a moral or spiritual interpretation of the content. All such paratexts made these works more easily accessible to those who had not had the benefit of a more refined education. Similarly, in the same period, grammar production opened up to extend to readers who did not know Latin, and therefore also to the female sex (often taken to be the representatives of the illiterati), less familiar with the grammar of the Latin language on which grammarians of the vernacular still based their works. In this respect, some grammarians, for example, explicitly indicated women, and the less learned more broadly, as potential readers of c’hor saria forse un roco mormorator di corti, un huom del vulgo I l’exalto, e divulgo etc. Quindi volgare et divulgato voci per sé note”: Corso, Dichiaratione, fol. O2r; see Petrarch, Rvf, 360, vv. 116–18. 108  “Omai si dice ormai, oramai et oggimai. Ma le due ultime voci sono più convenienti a’ prosatori, che a’ poeti”: Colonna, Tutte le rime, 22.

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their works.109 Corso was a case in point. His Fondamenti del parlar toscano,110 a normative grammar of Tuscan composed in 1547 and published in 1549, is explicitly dedicated to a woman, Lucrezia Lombardi, whom he married in that same year (and whose name, for the sake of modesty, is concealed in the text under the pseudonym of Hiparcha). Corso’s Fondamenti, in terms of its structure, content, and layout presents a number of elements that testify to this democratization of grammar, by means also of adapting to the needs and skills of its potential readership, that is, a woman in particular, and women more broadly.111 With this in mind, it is clear that the composition of his Dichiarazione on Colonna’s work, considering the attention Corso gives in it to specific points of grammar, must have acted as an important preliminary stage of reflection for the elaboration, just a few years later, of his Fondamenti. His grammar was indeed meant to help Lucrezia “penetrate to the true meaning of the writing of others” (“penetrare al vero sentimento dell’altrui scriture”), and allow her to more easily read the “works of those whom I have studied in order to open the way to you.”112 Undoubtedly the “leggiadre donne” who were eager to better understand the literary vernacular would make good use of such works. Corso did not use in his Fondamenti any verse from Colonna’s poems to exemplify specific grammatical points (quoting, rather, from Petrarch, Boccaccio, or Dante, when needed).113 Colonna was an exemplary literary model, one certainly worth studying and exposing for the benefit of a broader readership, but Corso, like other grammarians of his time—and inevitably so, given what

109  See Sanson, Women, Language, and Grammar, 90–107. 110  Rinaldo Corso, Fondamenti del parlar thoscano (Venice, 1549). It had later editions in 1550 (Venice), in 1562—as part of Francesco Sansovino’s collection Le osservationi della lingua volgare di diversi huomini illustri—and in 1564 (Rome). In 1572, it was one of the texts chosen by Giovanni Aquilano da S. Demetrio (Giovanni da L’Aquila) for his Regole della lingua toscana con brevità, chiarezza, & ordine raccolte, e scielte (Venice, 1572) and in the seventeenth century it was included in the collection Degli autori del ben parlare edited by Giuseppe degli Aromatari (Venice, 1643). 111  See Helena Sanson, “Women and Vernacular Grammars in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Iparcha and Rinaldo Corso’s ‘Fondamenti del parlar Toscano’ ” (1549), Letteratura italiana antica 6 (2005): 391–431. 112  “scritti  [. . .] di coloro, a’ quali io, per aprirvi la strada, mi sono affaticato”: Corso, Fondamenti, fol. 98v. 113  The Fondamenti stands out, compared to other grammars, also because Corso creates his own examples, some very personal, rather than drawing on the writings of the great vernacular fourteenth-century authors. See on this Sanson, “Women and Vernacular Grammars.”

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we saw earlier with regards to Italy’s linguistic situation—went straight to the fourteenth-century Tuscan authors to find their grammatical models. Conclusion During the first decades of the sixteenth century, Colonna successfully established herself as a literary model to look up to, a gendered alter ego, as we saw earlier, of Bembo himself. Respect and mutual admiration defined their personal and literary relations. Fate brought their lives and literary parabola to an end within weeks of each other: Bembo died in January 1547, Colonna less than a month later. Colonna’s Rime, after the princeps of 1538, went through a further four editions within the next two years, and then a further eight before her death. Bembo’s own Rime, first published in 1530, went through numerous further editions until the end of the century. Interest in Colonna’s verse declined progressively after the Cinquecento, but attracted attention again in the eighteenth century and, with renewed strength and variety, even more in the second half of the nineteenth, both in Italy and abroad.114 Bembo and the “subtlety” (“esilità”) of his lyrical Petrarchism might have been the object of criticism over time, but these reservations nonetheless continued to be “subordinate to the praise and recognition of the fundamental role he played in establishing a new language and literature that were properly Italian.”115 Colonna’s own literary and linguistic destiny diverged in this sense, because her achievements ended up at times being overshadowed by her biography, that of the devoted widow of a much-loved spouse, a model of feminine decorum, above all. When toward the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the educationalist Giulia MolinoColombini, together with Giovanni Lanza, included two of Colonna’s sonnets in their anthology Esempi di prosa e di poesia—a collection of texts chosen for the benefit of female pupils in schools on the basis of “healthy morals and [. . .] good reading” (“sana morale e [. . .] buone lettere”)116—she did not fail to observe that Colonna “was famous for her poetry, and even more for her

114  See Crivelli’s chapter in this volume. 115  “subordinate all’ossequio e al riconoscimento della parte fondamentale che egli aveva avuto nell’instaurazione di una nuova lingua e letteratura propriamente italiana”: Carlo Dionisotti, “Bembo, Pietro,” Dbi 8 (1966): 133–51. 116  Giulia Molino-Colombini and Giovanni Lanza, eds., Esempi di prosa e di poesia: scelti ed annotati ad uso delle scuole superiori femminili (Turin, 1880), 5.

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faithfulness to her husband.”117 Colonna, both the woman and the poet, was an exemplary figure that women could aspire to imitate, but literary and intellectual pursuits have not always been actively encouraged in the female sex in the Italian tradition. If knowledge by women of Italian—the literary language—which by the time of Unification was also the “national” language, had acquired crucial importance in contemporary political rhetoric, women writers’ actual use of that same language was, simultaneously, an easy target for male critics.118 If women writers’ contribution to the history of Italian literature has been increasingly the object of a number of scholarly works since the 1970s, the role women writers, and women more broadly, played over the centuries in the history of the Italian language and its codification, and in the Questione della lingua debates, is still awaiting further study. 117  “ebbe fama dalla poesia, e più dalla fedeltà serbata al marito” (ibid., 330, n. 4). 118  See respectively, Helena Sanson, “ ‘La madre educatrice’ in the Family and in Society in Post-Unification Italy: The Question of Language,” in Women and Gender in PostUnification Italy: Between Private and Public Spheres, ed. Katharine Mitchell and Helena Sanson (Bern and Oxford, 2013), 39–63; and eadem. “Women Writers and the ‘Questione della Lingua’ in Ottocento Italy: The Cases of Caterina Percoto, La Marchesa Colombi, and Matilde Serao,” Modern Language Review 105 (2010): 1074–98.

Part 3 Vittoria Colonna and the Arts

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Chapter 6

Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence Gaudenz Freuler Few famous women of the Renaissance have attracted the interest and admiration of artists and intellectuals of their time to the same degree as the noblewoman Vittoria Colonna. She was celebrated by her contemporaries as a muse of the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, and through this association was ranked among the most famous muses of Italian poetry, comparable to Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice. For generations this fame was to stir up the wildest romantic fantasies about Vittoria Colonna, which ultimately served to obfuscate her true historical position. Her fame during her lifetime was certainly amplified by her liaison intellectuelle with Michelangelo, and perhaps her link with him was one of the reasons for the great interest in her imagery, particularly the attention to the question of how she was to be depicted. A number of paintings by the most prominent artists of her time, including Michelangelo himself as well as Sebastiano del Piombo and others were—with more or less good reason and sometimes in a romanticising vein—associated with her and were even perceived to be genuine portraits of her. By now, many of these works, most prominently Michelangelo’s own drawings (see Figure 6.7), have been rightfully downgraded to the limbo of Apocrypha. In our—admittedly hazardous and in a certain sense futile—attempt to evince from these images a clue to Vittoria Colonna’s physical appearance, we have to tackle the question of how far these depictions were “true to life,” how much was merely an idealization of her physical appearance in order to celebrate her fame as poet and intellectual as well as esteemed representative of a noble family. Alone her noble status would have called for an idealized representation, generously smoothing any physical deficiencies. But, as we will see in the course of this chapter, the idealization of Vittoria Colonna in her portraits had particular issues which were closely tied to her biography and to the perception of her by her contemporaries. This remark alone might imply that all the portraits associated with her do little or no justice to her physical appearance, but instead aim to highlight various aspects of her life. At the same time it will be demonstrated that the different portraits that I feel have good reason to be regarded as depictions of Colonna are contradictory with respect to her physical appearance and are instead clearly tied to their

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intrinsic iconological intentions. This opens a fascinating footnote to our broader understanding of Renaissance portraiture. Given the absence of archival documents regarding the paintings generally associated with her, our assessment of Vittoria Colonna’s portraits has to rely either on inscriptions that define the portrait as the effigy of Vittoria Colonna, or on the search for other circumstantial evidence in the paintings that can be related to Colonna in some way. The latter is true for two portraits painted by Sebastiano del Piombo (see Figures 6.10 and 6.11), which in the past have been generally accepted as portraits of Vittoria Colonna. From these observations it becomes clear that the catalog of portraits associated with her and discussed here is sparse and we will limit ourselves to those works either defined as representing Colonna through inscriptions or those which, thanks to circumstantial evidence, have traditionally been associated with her. Within the group of portraits produced to honor and commemorate Vittoria Colonna, there are two categories to be distinguished, one concerning the portraits which are closely tied to her private life (Figures 6.1, 6.10, 6.11), the other including the paintings that honor her by placing her official, public image in a gallery of “famous men and women” (Figures 6.12, 6.14), hence in the company of other celebrities of the time. It is evident that different intentions inherent in these portraits must have required distinctive and appropriate artistic solutions. These differences in her portraiture also had an impact on the desirability of a “true to life” image, as opposed to an image with a distinct form of allusive idealization. Recent criticism, particularly the 2008 study by Guisi Baldissone,1 has contributed greatly to a more accurate and less speculative assessment of the nature of Vittoria Colonna’s portraits, as well as to the task of differentiating chaff from wheat within the great number of female portraits of the period which were associated with her, often in an unduly speculative manner.2 In this chapter I examine the portraits which with good reason might be associated with her, but also some other works which past critics have speculatively linked to her. The category of paintings formerly identified as portraits of 1  Giusi Baldissone, Benedetta Beatrice. Nomi femminili e destini letterari (Milan, 2008), 100–103. The most recent studies with a sagacious and well-balanced approach towards the identification of portraits of Vittoria Colonna are cited in the course of this chapter. 2  Nunzio Albanelli, Stella in turbato cielo. Vittoria Colonna e il suo tempo (Ischia, 2004), is a highly speculative study that generously associates a large number of portraits by the most celebrated artists with Vittoria Colonna. In my opinion a great number of these so-called portraits, especially those which putatively represent her in a wider context, such as the lady in profile next to Christ and the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, Caliope in Raphael’s Parnassus from the Papal stanze or the noble woman next to Charles V in Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre, have no evidence to claim such an association.

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Vittoria Colonna, but rejected as such by later critics, however, seems to be of some interest for an assessment of the manner in which Colonna was seen by her contemporaries and by posterity. This is true for Michelangelo’s splendid drawing labelled “la Marchesa di Pescara” in the British Museum (Figures 6.7 and 6.8), and its derivations on paper and panel (Figure 6.9). Michelangelo’s beautifully drawn idealized profile all’antica of a young women, which by the nineteenth century was romantically associated with Colonna, will offer us some insight into the cultural and literary background for the aesthetics of her representation, in a similar manner to Colonna’s earliest known portrait on the main panel of the Ischia altarpiece (Figures 6.1, 6.2). Unlike other women of the Italian nobility, Vittoria Colonna was not primarily celebrated for her physical beauty or her social eminence, rather her fame was as a highly cultured literary figure, and most prominently as a poet in the genre of Petrarchism. It hardly comes as a surprise that in one of the earliest portraits that can unproblematically claim an identification with Vittoria Colonna (Altarpiece with the Madonna del soccorso, Ischia Ponte, Church of Sant’Antonio da Padova, Figure 6.1), Colonna appears as a graceful young lady, rendered according to an aesthetic ideal that had been defined and established by Petrarch in his Canzoniere. The great esteem that met Colonna’s poetry from an early stage in her life aroused the imagination of many of her contemporaries, who portrayed her in their own works with words of praise and enthusiasm. One constant in these literary apotheoses of Vittoria Colonna was her celebration as a great Muse, with fervent verses of passionate admiration for her spiritual bellezza. Such descriptions were common in the literary context of the Avalos court on Ischia, were Colonna grew up under the protection of her aunt Costanza d’Avalos, herself the dedicatee of courtly works by a number of humanistic poets and praised with flattering attributes such as “Heliconian godess” (“l’eliconia dea”), “Livia in name and Camilla in spirit” (“Livia di fama e d’ animo Camilla”), and “new Sybil on earth, siren of the sea” (“nuova Sybilla in terra, in mar sirena”).3 Nevertheless such poetic glorifications add little or nothing to our ability to define the “real nature” of these women. Even the highly Petrarchan literary portrayal of Vittoria Colonna on the occasion of her wedding to Fernando Francesco d’Avalos at the end of 1509, does not reveal a great deal about her looks: “a very graceful girl, her face framed by a wavy, blonde head of hair,

3  Giosuè Capasso, Farsa Napoletana: “Il monte delle Nove Vedove,” manuscript ms. Ital. 265 of the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, ed. Francesco Torraca (Livorno, 1884), 286.

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a majestic and serene carriage and a beautiful face of clear loveliness.”4 Britonio da Sancignano and Galeazzo di Tarsia’s generous description of her physical appearance as a young radiant lady with blonde undulating tresses is clearly humanistic praise of idealized beauty and renders the idea of poetically (and politically correct) idealized portraits of the female, which became a humanist standard in the courtly praise of female beauty—both in words and in paint. Such enthusiasm for Colonna’s beauty is contrasted by other less generous (and probably more honest and realistic) descriptions of her looks. Filonico alias Costantino Castriota, her biographer and contemporary, describes her as not being of particular beauty, juxtaposing her physical appearance to her spiritual and intellectual beauty: “she worked to grow the virtues of her soul since, not being possessed of great beauty, she was trained in literature and learning, to endow her with a beauty that would never fade.”5

The Ischia Altarpiece Portrait

If we now turn to the pictorial evidence for Vittoria Colonna, we will begin our investigation from her earliest known portrait on the main panel of the altarpiece of Ischia (Figure 6.1). This altarpiece with four saints on each side, presently in the sacristy of the Franciscan Church in Ischia, was undoubtedly one of the most impressive painted projects on panel of the earlier sixteenth century on the island of Ischia and originally stood in the convent of the Poor Claires, situated below the castle of the Avalos in Ischia. The inclusion of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of the Avalos, among the eight lateral saints—most of them Franciscans or dear to this order—is a clear hint at who had commissioned this altarpiece; it is most likely to have been Costanza d’Avalos, whom we see on the main panel on the left worshipping the Madonna del latte, who appears on a throne of clouds accompanied by a circle of putti and music making

4  “fanciulla di grande grazia, il volto incorniciato da una chioma e crespa e bionda, il portamento maestoso e sereno e il bel viso di chiaro splendore”: Britonio da Sancignano, Galeazzo di Tarsia, cited in Baldissone, Benedetta Beatrice, 100–103. 5  “[A]ttese da acrescer le doti dell’animo suo già chè per non essere di gran beltà posseditrice l’ ammaestrava alla letteratura et conoscimento, a provedersi di beltà immarcescibile:” Filotimo o Filonico Alicarnasseo, Vita di Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara, ms., later published in: Carteggio, 487–518, here 492.

Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence

Figure 6.1 Anonymous Neapolitan painter, Madonna del Soccorso, Ischia Ponte, Church of S. Antonio da Padova. Photo credit: John Palcewski.

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angels.6 Opposite Costanza, and at the same time leaving open a space that leads our eyes to the poor souls purging their sins, our attention is drawn to a truly graceful young lady with blonde hair and clad in a rich, multicolored garment. Her attention is directed neither to the book she holds in her hands nor to the Virgin and her Son, but to the lady clad in a black widow’s costume, identified as Costanza d’Avalos, Vittoria Colonna’s aunt and protector. Once established that the widow in black is the alleged commissioner of the altarpiece, Costanza d’Avalos, there is hardly any doubt that the elegant young lady is to be identified with Vittoria Colonna, Costanza’s protégé, and new radiant star of the prestigious literary circle of her court. The painting is by an anonymous local painter with a slightly archaizing style, whose art stands in the tradition of the early works by Andrea Sabatini (such as his Madonna del Soccorso painted in 1511 on the central panel of the polyptych in the parish of San Valentino Torio [SA]).7 As has been recognized by Pier Leone De Castris,8 its style also reveals some affinities with the North Italian painter and illuminator, also active in Naples, Protasio Crivelli, which suggests a date around 1510, a time when Colonna would have been in her earliest twenties and recently married to Ferdinand Francesco D’Avalos. Even in the context of a sacred image, the appearance of Vittoria Colonna as a member of the patron’s family reveals no apparently individualized features, and her idealized depiction as a graceful muse of Petrarchan descent clashes with the stern look of Costanza d’Avalos opposite her, in her dark widow’s weeds. The intent of this picture seems clear, as far as Vittoria Colonna is concerned: even in the context of a religious painting intended to arouse guilt and penance, she is hailed as the epitome of feminine grace and beauty, and her figure is the most eye-catching of the image. As such she seems strangely and ultimately arrogantly placed in competition with the actual protagonist of the

6  This highly important altarpiece has been variously discussed by Pierluigi Leone De Castris, I tesori dei d’Avalos. Committenza e collezionismo di una grande famiglia napoletana (Naples, 1994); idem, “Kultur und Mäzenatentum am Hof der d’Avalos in Ischia,” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Vienna, 1997), 135–36; idem, “I d’Avalos, clima culturale e committenza artistica alla corte di Ischia,” La Rassegna d’Ischia 19 (1998): 17–26 (with an exhaustive discussion of past criticism) and more recently by Fabio Speranza in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 46. For a thorough assessment of the milieu at the Avalos court on Ischia, see Suzanne Thérault, Un Cénacle humaniste de la renaissance autor de Vittoria Colonna Châtelaine d’Ischia (Florence, 1968). 7  Francesco Abbate, Storia dell’arte nell’Italia meridionale, vol. 3 (Rome, 2001), 56–57. 8  De Castris, “Kultur und Mäzenatentum am Hof der d’Avalos in Ischia,” 135–36.

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Figure 6.2 Anonymous Neapolitan painter, Madonna del Soccorso (detail of Vittoria Colonna), Ischia Ponte, Church of S. Antonio da Padova. Photo credit: John Palcewski.

painting, the Madonna del Soccorso, to whom the central panel is dedicated and who is rendered in her simple traditional blue mantle while she comforts the purging souls. The beautiful young bride of Francesco D’Avalos is assigned a particular place in the painting, at the same time as it refers to her special status as a celebrated woman and new muse at the Avalos court on Ischia and particularly to her intellectual and social status, praised in the literary circles there. The reverence accorded to Vittoria Colonna as a young muse is not rendered by means of a naturalistic portrayal, which would have revealed her individual features, such as was developed under the influence of Flemish painting by painters like Antonello da Messina and Leonardo da Vinci. She appears rather as a parola figurata, a portrayal of humanistic poetic praise of Petrarchan descent and therefore as a blonde, richly clad beauty of sublimated idealization. Thus this image is strangely comparable to a poetic female portrait

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Figure 6.3 Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of Simona Vespucci?, Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Inv. 936. © Städel Museum—U. Edelmann—ARTOTHEK.

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supposedly of Simonetta Vespucci, superbly painted a good three decades earlier by Sandro Botticelli (Frankfurt, Städel Museum Inv. 936, Figure 6.3). In the case of Botticelli’ s portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, the artist disguised the sitter as a nymph and had her appear in rigid profile on a neutral, dark background, creating an allusion to antique standards by making the sitter appear like an oversized antique gem. In the Ischia painting, a sacred image of the Madonna del Soccorso, the distinct allusion to classical aesthetics is plausibly avoided. Nevertheless both portraits clearly aimed at an idealized poetic aesthetic. Both sitters portray a slightly dreamy feminine grace and their eyes betray an inner glow as if absorbed in thought. Moreover, both appear as elegantly dressed blonde beauties with golden locks and sophisticated jewels and pearls smartly interwoven into hair, which otherwise falls in loose, stylish curls. Undoubtedly both protagonists lack distinct physiognomic articulation and should be considered as idealized representations of a classical paradigm of beauty based on the aesthetics established by humanist and proto-humanist poets, starting with Petrarch. Indeed, both portraits seem to match an aesthetic of female idealization as expressed by Petrarch in his Canzoniere, where he admires Laura thus: Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi che ’n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea, e ’l vago lume oltra misura ardea di quei begli occhi ch’or ne son sì scarsi; e ’l viso di pietosi color farsi, non so se vero o falso, mi parea: i’ che l’esca amorosa al petto avea, qual meraviglia se di subito arsi? Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale ma d’angelica forma, e le parole sonavan altro che pur voce umana; uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole fu quel ch’i’ vidi, e se non fosse or tale, piaga per allentar d’arco non sana.9 9  Rvf, 90. “She’d let her golden hair flow free in the breeze / that whirled it into thousands of sweet knots, / and lovely light would burn beyond all measure / in those fair eyes whose light is dimmer now./ Her face would turn the color pity wears, / a pity true or false I did not know, / and I with all love’s tinder in my breast- / it’s no surprise I quickly caught on fire. / The way she walked was not the way of mortals / but of angelic forms, and when she spoke / more than an earthly voice it was that sang: / a godly spirit and a living sun / was what I saw, and

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Following these early literary models, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries poets in humanistic circles, in Naples, Florence, and elsewhere, composed verses that were presented during mythological plays and in some cases even performed at the courts in mythological costume.10 There is a strong case that not only did Botticelli bear such ideas in mind when he portrayed Simonetta Vespucci in the guise of a nymph, but so too did the unknown Neapolitan painter of the Madonna del Soccorso, when he was given the task to include Vittoria Colonna among the patrons in his altarpiece. To have her appear here in such a “disguise” does justice to the metaphorical attributes given to her in the lines composed in her honor by Fuscano, when in the poem “Sovra la Bellezza di Napoli” he describes her as a radiant light among women: Si dir si può che sia nel secol nostro un sommo lume tra le donne belle, simil’ a l’occhio del celeste chiostro, tanto del giorno come de le stelle.11 Similar imagery, drenched in metaphorical expressions, also emerges in verses composed a few years after the presumed date of the Ischia altarpiece by Capanio in his Tempio d’Amore (ca. 1520), where Vittoria Colonna is included in an allegorical architecture of love as a column second only to the Vice-Queen of Naples: Apresso a lei l’altiera e Gran Colonna, Sopra la qual s’appoggia il mondo, il cielo. Questa portava essendo in trezza e in gonna, De Cinthia il scudo e di Cupid o il telo. Nel petto di sì lieta e bella donna Se può veder un altro Apollo in Delo, E sotto il nome chiaro d’alma Vittoria D’amor sol il trionfo honore e gloria.12

if she is not now, / my wound still bleeds, although the bow’s unbent”: Francesco Petrarch, The Canzoniere, or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996), 145. 10  For such plays at the Medici court, see Andreas Schumacher, ed., Botticelli. Bildnis, Mythos, Andacht (Frankfurt, 2009–10), 152–55. 11  Cristiana Anna Addesso, Le Stanze del Fuscano sovra la bellezza di Napoli. Edizione critica (Naples, 2005), 380 and pt. 2, 52: “It can be said that in our age there is / a great light among beautiful women, / similar to the eye to the celestial cloister, / like the day or the stars.” 12  “Next to her the noble and great Colonna, on which rest the world and the sky. She wore the plaits and robe of Cynthia and carried her shield and Cupid’s arrow. On the breast

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Given the sophisticated tradition of the literary apotheosis of noble women expressed in the erudite words of poets at the Italian courts, it is hardly surprising that painters felt obliged to render these cultured metaphors of beauty and inner morals and virtues with a pictorial language that best met these needs; that is, an aesthetic based on classical, pictorial language. In Botticelli’s painting of Simonetta Vespucci the sitter reveals none of her authentic features, but appears idealized as a goddess or muse. In her sophisticated disguise as a Venus or nymph Simonetta could easily have acted in one of Botticelli’s paintings of mythological subjects. Neither do we recognize any distinct features for Vittoria Colonna on the Ischia altarpiece, where she appears idealized as an ethereal being from another world, which seems far from the horrors of purgatorial suffering that unfold before her eyes. Hence nothing is revealed about Colonna’s physical nature. The golden locks of her magnificent and elaborated hairdo are as far from being reliable indicators of her physical appearance as the stylized, rounded shape of her lovely face. These graceful idealizations, based on aesthetic canons drawn from classic antiquity, are related to her literary glorification as a muse or a classical nymph.

Idealizing Portraiture

It is the same humanistic flair arising from courtly literary circles that emerges from a medallion in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which bears the bust of Vittoria Colonna (Figure 6.4). This medal was produced as a pendant to another medal of Colonna’s husband Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos (Figure 6.5). On the medal Vittoria is characterized in a pseudo-antique style as a goddess of classic antiquity. She appears with a sophisticated hair style all’antica and in a tunic that reveals her left breast. Despite the fact that there has been some debate about whether these medals were made during the lifetime of the couple or after their deaths, in my opinion and in agreement with Marcella Marongiu,13 there is no sound evidence to argue against the production of the works during the lifetime of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos and his spouse. On

of this joyous and lovely woman can be seen another Apollo in Delos and beneath the noble name of great Vittoria, for whom love is the only triumph, honor and glory” (cited in Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 110). 13  Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 137. For a discussion of the two positions in the debate on the chronological assessment of these medals and a proposal that postulates a date in the lifetime of Colonna and her husband, see the entry by Marcella Marongiu in Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 48.

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the contrary, it would seem odd and could even have appeared unacceptable to the public to have Colonna represented after her husband’s death in the guise of a nymph or Venus, dressed in a transparent tunic that unveils one of her breasts, the more so if we remember how grief-stricken she was after her husband’s death. This sorrow transformed the young widow gradually into an introverted intellectual concerned with spiritual matters. Such circumstances indicate that the medals of the noble couple were produced in the period of Colonna’s marriage. Appearing there as a goddess from antiquity, maybe even intended as a second Venus, her image is juxtaposed with that of her husband, who in glorification of his great achievements as a shrewd condottiere appears armed with a precious helmet and armor much in the guise of Mars. This juxtaposition again is intended as a pictorial metaphor exploiting images used in the classical language of the cultivated literary circles of the Italian courts, in order to glorify Vittoria’s inner spiritual beauty and her husband’s accomplishments as a successful warrior. Such metaphors were the same ones being used and performed in Renaissance courts on the occasion of the courtly plays with tableaux vivants, where the protagonists at court appeared disguised as antique Gods. The reference to the antique world, which has inspired the two medals, is additionally enhanced in the case of the medal for Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos, which is unmistakably modeled on an antique roman coin bearing the

Figure 6.4 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Figure 6.5 Italian, Medal of Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, sixteenth-century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

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portrait of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus (Figure 6.6). Whether this choice was purely aesthetic or whether it might have been a deliberate wish of the patron is not known. An allusion to Probus may have been instigated by an erudite member of the court and could have seemed appropriate to Francesco Ferrante’s biography. Probus was known as an astute strategist against the threat from the populations north of the Rhine, and could have appeared to d’Avalos to be highly appropriate to allude to his own military enterprises against the French threat to Italy. The fact that on other coins he appears as sol invictus was also fitting, as after his death Vittoria Colonna referred to him frequently as “mio sol” in her poetry of mourning. The representation of Vittoria Colonna and her husband as heroes of classical antiquity and in accordance with erudite literary metaphors which circulated at the Avalos court and elsewhere in Italy, might help us toward a better understanding of the association of Vittoria Colonna with some of Michelangelo’s drawings or Michelangelesque paintings putatively related to her. The most famous and most celebrated of Michelangelo’s drawings associated with Vittoria Colonna is undoubtedly the splendid idealized profile all’antica of a young women in the British Museum which by the nineteenth century was romantically labeled “la Marchesa di Pescara” alias Vittoria Colonna (Figure 6.7).14 The optimistic labeling of this celebrated drawing was perhaps not alone due to the romantic and idealizing view of Michelangelo as a genius and his friend Vittoria Colonna as his artistic muse, but might have a longer and specifically visual tradition.

Figure 6.6 Coin with portrait of Emperor Aurelius Probus. © Livius.org.

14  For a recent discussion of this celebrated drawing, see Martin Sonnabend, Michelangelo: Zeichnungen und Zuschreibungen (Frankfurt, 2009), 63–76.

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Figure 6.7 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ideal Head of a Woman in Profile (“la Marchesa di Pescara”), London, British Museum 1895,0915.493. © Trustees of the British Museum.

The idealized female head, as it was subtly conceived in Michelangelo’s drawing, its composed classical features and lavish and fanciful hairstyle and headdress, grew out of the aesthetic culture of late Quattrocento Florence, a culture that celebrated idealized female beauty by means of an elaborate and elegant artificiality all’antica, as had been modeled a good half century earlier by Botticelli in his presumed portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, discussed above. Michelangelo’s drawing, probably one of the teste divine mentioned

Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence

Figure 6.8 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Zenobia, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, 598 E.

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Figure 6.9 Francesco Bacchiacca, Sibyl after Michelangelo’s drawing of Zenobia, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Inv.-Nr. GG 2682. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

by Giorgio Vasari,15 belongs to those highly refined drawings which were produced to be presented as gifts to a circle of friends.16 Drawings of this kind were also produced by Michelangelo for Colonna.17 Interestingly this drawing of an idealized female bust is paralleled by another in the Uffizi of a similar aesthetic and comparable typology, the so-called Zenobia (Figure 6.8). This drawing, as well as the painted version after the drawing by Bacchiacca in the 15  Giorgi Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence, 1966–87), 121. For the “teste divine” mentioned by Vasari, see Andreas Schumacher, Michelangelos “Teste Divine.” Idealbildnisse als Exempla der Zeichenkunst (Münster, 2007), 63–77. 16  See Michelangelos “Teste Divine”; and Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin LXXIX (1997): 647–68. 17  On Michelangelo’s drawings, see the contribution to this volume by Maria Forcellino.

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Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Figure 6.9), were yet again associated with Vittoria Colonna, hence thought to be portraits of her. If today we wonder why such an erotic lady with unveiled or—in the case of Bacchiacca’s painted version—barely covered breasts could have induced posterity to identify her with Vittoria Colonna, we should bear in mind that Colonna’s image on the medal dedicated to her (Figure 6.4) characterizes her in just this manner as a classical goddess and nymph all’antica and with bared breasts. The combination of her fame as a close and mutually inspiring friend of Michelangelo, the existence of her image on a medal all‘antica, and her literary celebration and fame as a goddess of classical antiquity might have induced her contemporaries, as well as posterity, to see in Michelangelo’s teste all’antica the portrait of his own muse, notwithstanding the fact that, in the years of their friendship, Colonna kept her distance from courtly frivolities and was much concerned with theological and spiritual issues. If up to this point we have learned about Vittoria Colonna’s artistic and literary reputation during her younger years as d’Avalos’s fiancée and later wife, and understood these early portraits as expressions and receptions of her fame as literary and idealized sublimations of her intellectual and spiritual beauty, rendered by way of metaphors drawn from classical antiquity, nothing so far has been revealed about her actual physical appearance. We should perhaps not expect, in the works discussed thus far, to find any elements and features relevant to Colonna’s physical appearance: this is more likely to be revealed in those paintings that appear less artful and seem to have originated in a more intimate context within the circle of her own family.

Family Portraits

Two paintings belonging to this category and variously associated with Colonna clearly stand out; Sebastiano del Piombo’s two superb portraits of a young dark-haired lady, identified as Vittoria Colonna, in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, Cambó collection (Inv. 64984, Figure 6.10),18 and in the collection 18  The identification of this portrait with Vittoria Colonna has been debated in the past and is challenged in this volume by Maria Forcellino. For an accurate assessment of this debate, see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Vittoria Colonna im Portrait,” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 109–25 and more recently, Novella Macola, “Sebastiano Luciani detto Sebastiano del Piombo. Ritratto di donna (Vittoria Colonna?)”, in Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 49–50. Forcellino (in this volume and in her review of the exhibition Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, Florence, Casa Buonarroti (24 May–September

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of the Earl of Harewood in Leeds (Figure 6.11). Sebastiano del Piombo’s fame as subtle portraitist was already established during his lifetime, and this particular painter’s task was entrusted to him by the most respected patrons of his era. If we believe Giorgio Vasari, Colonna and her husband also featured among these noble patrons.19 Little wonder that in the past some of Sebastiano del Piombo’s female portraits were associated with Vittoria Colonna, although some of those identifications were not sustained by any reliable evidence, as is the case of the beautiful, half-length figure of a young women with a golden oil lamp in her hand, identified as one of the New Testament “wise women” in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and in the past regarded as the young Colonna, an apocryphal identification perpetuated by the transformation of this painting into a print to adorn the frontispiece of some of the editions of her poetry.20 Among those pictures by Sebastiano del Piombo which, thanks to sound circumstantial evidence, can with good reason claim an identification with Colonna, at least two stand out as possessing the necessary elements to represent her. In the portrait in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya (Figure 6.10), the towering figure of a young dark-haired lady glances at the viewer with noble, feminine reserve, while she points with her left hand to a text in an open book lying with other volumes on a table covered by a precious, oriental carpet. A strange spirit of inner composure permeates the painting and its sitter, while the gestures of the two elegant, slightly oversized hands act as a visibile parlare. The identification of this astonishing aristocratic woman—who seems to scrutinize the beholder from a distance—with Vittoria Colonna, is owed primarily to 2005) in Incontri 22 [2007]: 104–7) fails to see physical similarities with the paintings which refer to Vittoria Colonna as poet and bear the inscription of her name; the portrait painted by Cristoforo dell’Altissimo (see Stefano Corsi in: Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 106, cat. n. 28) and another by an anonymous master ca. 1550–60 in the collection of the principi Colonna in Rome (Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli (eds.), Il Rinascimento a Roma. Nel segno di Michelangelo e Raffaello [Milan, 2011], 312). Based on the physiognomic discrepancies between these portraits assigned to Vittoria Colonna, Forcellino therefore challenges their identification with Colonna. 19  Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 133. 20   Various prints have been made after Sebastiano del Piombo’s putative image of Vittoria Colonna in disguise as one of the wise women, in reference to Matthew 25:1–13 (Washington, DC, National Gallery): see Albanelli, Stella in turbato cielo, 164–65. The earliest by Enea Vico from the middle of the sixteenth century has been lost, whereas another engraved in 1650 by Vencelaus Hollar was used for various later editions of Vittoria Colonna’s poems: see Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 126–29, 137.

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Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Barcelona, Cambó collection (Inv. 64984). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

the (now vanished) text of her open book, which in 1881, when the picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, was still legible and contained the beginning of one of Colonna’s sonnets: Ovunque giro gli occhi o fermo il core / in questa oscura luce.21 Although the text was published in print for the first 21   Bullock: Rime, 119, S1: 69.

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time in 1546, decades after the painting’s putative date, there is no good reason to believe that the poem could not have belonged to Colonna’s earlier compositions during her marriage to d’Avalos.22 In fact the pictorial style of this lush portrait is closely related to Sebastiano del Piombo’s works of the later years of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and clearly postdates his portrait of Francesca Ordeaschi in the Gemäldegalerien in Berlin (ca. 1512). However, both paintings reveal a similar Giorgionesque naturalism in the wonderfully atmospheric landscape depicted at dusk, visible through an aperture on the left in the otherwise dark room. Both paintings disclose the typical Venetian sense for bright colors, rich materials such as the wonderful red brocade of the sitter’s dress or the carefully rendered books “a la fiamminga” and—in the case of our picture—the brightly lit colors flickering in the dark, as can be seen for instance in the knotted green drape behind the sitter. Sebastiano must have learned such dramaturgical techniques from Giovanni Bellini, and they are perpetuated in his earlier career in order to turn later in the course of his Roman activity—and suggested by his friend Michelangelo—to more classical pictorial concepts and at the same time to a less epidermic modeling of his figures. The latter is, in my opinion, the biggest difference between the Berlin portrait, datable to the artist’s earliest Roman years (1511–27) around 1512, and the painting in question. Compared to the more communicative portrait in Berlin, which appears as an artistic hybrid between Raphael and Giorgione, the flesh tones here are rendered with a modeling of cooler, ebony-like colors and the sitter reveals a decidedly more monumental attitude. These are the characteristic artistic tendencies of Sebastiano’s later Roman activity toward 1520–25, as they are discernible in his Visitation in the Louvre (ca. 1518/19) and his Michelangelesque painting of the Flagellation of Christ in the Museo Civico di Viterbo which, for documentary reasons, is datable to 1524/25. This might also be approximately the date when Sebastiano painted—probably instigated by her husband d’Avalos—the portrait of Vittoria Colonna. These years also correspond well to Vittoria’s age, as she appears here as a young lady in her early thirties. These circumstances, then, suggest that Sebastiano’s portrait of Vittoria Colonna in the Cambó collection in Barcelona was painted during the years of her marriage, probably shortly before her husband’s death.23 This would explain her appearance here as an elegant, lushly dressed lady of noble 22  For a discussion of Colonna’s earlier efforts as poet, see Macola, Sebastiano Luciani detto Sebastiano del Piombo, 50. 23  My critical assessment of both panels, based on the analysis of Sebastiano del Piombo’s pictorial style, corresponds with Mauro Lucco’s conclusions. See Mauro Lucco, Sebastiano del Piombo, L’opera completa (Milan, 1980), 113, 119.

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distinction, surrounded by precious books, which hint at a rich library reserved only for the erudite nobility. The painting therefore could well be a candidate for the portrait mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in Sebastiano del Piombo’s biography: To tell the truth, the painting of portraits from life was his proper vocation, as may be seen from the portrait of Marc Antonio Colonna, which is so well executed that it seems to be alive, and also from those of Ferdinando, Marquis of Pescara, and of Signora Vittoria Colonna, which are very beautiful.24 Kia Vahland has acutely analyzed some significant features of this truly extraordinary portrait: one is the absence of attributes that respond to the possible patron of the work, either the fiancé or husband;25 the other is the clear reference to Colonna’s fame as a poet, expressed by the open book with the text of one of her sonnets to which she points with her left index finger. The gesture is self-referential, in that she points with one hand to her own text and at the same time, with a gesture of slightly ashamed humility, with her right hand to herself as the author, while bending her index finger as if she wanted to lose it coquettishly in her underdress. The subtle play of gestures—a typical feature of Cinquecento portraiture by Sebastiano del Piombo and other artists26— ensures that there is no sense of narcissism or auto-celebration in this picture, only a subtle reference to the celebrated talent of the sitter. This initiates a tradition of depictions of Renaissance female poets, which came to an impressive climax in Bronzino’s famous portrait of Laura Battiferri (1523–89). But the spirit of Sebastiano’s portrait is markedly different from the stern women in profile painted by Bronzino, both in the pictorial realization and in the statement made by the painting. While Vittoria Colonna appears with a text from her own poetic repertory, Laura Battiferri holds a book where we read passages from two sonnets (LXIV and CCXL) of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Unlike Colonna, 24  “e per vero dire, il ritrarre di natural era suo proprio, come si può vedere nel ritratto di Marc’ Antonio Colonna, tanto ben fatto che par vivo; et in quello ancora di Ferdinando marchese di Pescara, et in quello della signora Vettoria Colonna, che sono bellissimi”: Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1878), 573. 25  Kia Vahland, Lorbeeren für Laura. Sebastiano del Piombos lyrische Bildnisse schöner Frauen (Berlin, 2011), 150. 26  This is also the case for the subtle portrait of Vittoria Colonna’s friend Giulia Gonzaga in the Museo di Palazzo Ducale in Mantua painted by an anonymous sixteenth-century artist. For a discussion and interpretation of this portrait, see the entry by Macola in Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 109–11.

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who was depicted in order to be perceived as a poet, Laura Battiferri’s portrait, according to Victoria von Flemming’s subtle observations, is aimed at her celebration as a new Laura, and hence as an object of Petrarchan love, venerated poetically by Petrarch himself as well as by the viewers of her portrait.27 Such pictorial games were in vogue in Florence in the period, and had been visualized as early as Andrea del Sarto’s Young Lady with the Petrarchino (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi). Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Vittoria Colonna appears, then, as an idealized image of a noble lady with the remarkable fame of poet, which is alluded to by her open book. She is distant and withdrawn, and therefore does not offer herself as the object of subtle games of Petrarchan veneration: that privilege is proudly reserved for her husband, who might have commissioned the painting. A second slightly modified portrait of Vittoria Colonna, yet again painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, is housed in the collection of the Earl of Harewood in Leeds (Figure 6.11). It was certainly painted after the same preparatory drawing and therefore produced in approximately the same period as the first version, which however (also for stylistic reasons) must have been painted at least half a decade earlier.28 Nevertheless, there are a few remarkable and radical modifications with respect to the first version. These, combined with the general atmosphere of the painting, ultimately create a completely different statement. The alterations deserve some comment. Compared to the sober and at the same time serene feeling of the earlier version of the portrait, which by means of the gestures of the sitter and the text of the book she holds turns our attention to Colonna’s status as a celebrated poet of a high-ranking family—the latter indicated by her rich clothing and the equally rich carpet adorning her writing table, itself covered with finely bound manuscripts—the later portrait emanates a somewhat melancholy feeling. Vittoria appears there more or less in the same position as in the first portrait, probably indicating that the same cartoon has been used. However, this time there is no glimpse of a landscape from the room’s interior; only some flashes of light glancing up the green curtain might hint at an opening somewhere. The sitter’s garments are no longer of a rich colorful texture, but gloomy and dark, of a classical simplicity which blends very effectively with the painting’s general melancholy spirit. The eye-catching feature is undoubtedly the golden

27  Victoria von Flemming, “Laura Battiferri”, in Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 219. 28  For a summary of earlier discussions of this painting, particularly with regards to its chronological assessment, see Macola, Sebastiano Luciani detto Sebastiano del Piombo, 52.

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Figure 6.11

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Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Lady (Vittoria Colonna as Artemisia?), ca. 1526. Leeds, Harewood House, Earl of Harewood Collection. Photo: reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood Will Trust and the Trustees of the Harewood House Trust.

object in the sitter’s hand; a precious cup, which flares up out of the dark in a ghostly manner. Recently Novella Macola has offered a convincing and highly interesting elucidation of the Leeds portrait.29 Refuting previous interpretations which 29  Macola, Sebastiano Luciani detto Sebastiano del Piombo, 49–50.

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wanted to see Vittoria Colonna as a Saint Lucy holding her traditional attribute of a bowl with two eyes, or even more speculatively, as a second Sofonosiba, the daughter of Hasdrubal, who preferred to drink a cup of poison and die than suffer Roman imprisonment, Macola sees in this portrait an allusion to Artemisia, who after the death of her husband Mausolo, built a gigantic mausoleum and—as is recounted in various legends—drank her deceased husband’s ashes mixed with water from a precious cup. This act made Artemisia the mausoleum of her husband. The obvious allusion to the death of Colonna’s husband in December 1525, presents the noble Vittoria in her second portrait as a faithful widow and mourner of her recently deceased husband. The patron, Colonna herself, presents herself as a grief stricken widow, not in any unduly violent or emotional outbursts, but, in accordance with her noble ranking and her fame as poet, via a subtle poetic allusion to a legend from classic antiquity which circulated widely in the poetic circles of the sixteenth century (via the work of Pietro Bembo or Ariosto, for example). It hardly comes as a surprise, as has been pointed out by Macola, that only seven years after the death of Colonna’s husband, Ariosto described her in the thirty-seventh canto of his Orlando Furioso as a second Artemisia, and the same attribute is given to her some decades later by Giovan Pierio Valeriano.30 With this portrait, which refers to Vittoria as a second grieving Artemisia, the sitter revives the memory of her deceased husband. If Artemisia had built a mausoleum to immortalize her departed spouse, Colonna for her part had created for her husband a painted monument of poetry, to shield him from oblivion. Her mausoleum was to be the numerous verses in which she grieved at the loss of her consort. Through the reference to Colonna as a second Artemisia, yet again she is hailed as a poet, in this case one of mourning and memorialization. The fact that Sebastiano del Piombo used the same carton for his second version of Vittoria Colonna’s portrait—at least with regard to the upper portion of the sitter (head and shoulders)—is hardly surprising, given that in both paintings she appears as the celebrated poet but in two different stages of her life. As we have already pointed out, for reasons of pictorial execution and subject matter the first portrait was probably carried out shortly before the death of Vittoria’s husband, somewhere around 1524/25. In contrast to the opinion of past critics, it seems that the second version could not have been painted long after this date, because the artist reused the old drawing, easily visible in the area of the head, which shows the sitter with the same hairstyle and head dress and moreover with the peculiarity of the left ear slightly squeezed forward by the tightly bound white headdress. Vittoria appears in the second portrait to 30  Ibid., 50.

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be about the same age as in the first version, in her mid-thirties. Undoubtedly this is the fruit of the reuse of the same preparatory drawing and does not say anything about the real date of the painting, neither in favor of a limited time span of a few years for both works, nor against a later date, as has been suggested by past criticism, which argued that the portraits were produced a decade apart. The fact that Sebastiano del Piombo’s artistic career was far from linear and full of stylistic contradictions and surprises, probably the fruit of his Venetian roots and Roman experiences, means that stylistic analysis is of little help in the attempt to establish a confident chronology for the two paintings. Nevertheless, it would seem feasible that the second version could have been painted only a few years after the first version. As is suggested by the allusion to Artemisia, the second version could have been painted as the result of Colonna’s mourning for her recently deceased husband, hence not long after d’Avalos’s death, some time in 1526. The circumstances of the two portraits, which correspond with Colonna’s biography, provide strong evidence that the noble lady painted twice by Sebastiano del Piombo is indeed Vittoria Colonna, at the same time they refute the sometimes contradictory positions of past art historians.31 In this light we now can fully appreciate Sebastiano del Piombo’s great reputation as a subtle and sensitive portraitist, a quality that was celebrated during his lifetime by his contemporaries and subsequently hailed in Vasari’s Vite.

Issues of Verisimilitude

As has been argued by recent scholars, most prominently in the studies by Novella Macola and Kia Vahland, Sebastiano’s portraits of Vittoria Colonna are far from truthful renditions of her physiognomy. Unlike his portraits of male sitters, which tend to meticulously exploit the character, physiognomy, and social status of the sitter, his portraits of women are in accordance with Cinquecento traditions of the idealization of female beauty: in the case of 31  Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford, 1981), 117 and Mena Marqués, Sebastiano del Piombo y España (Madrid, 1995), 122–26, mainly on stylistic grounds, refute Vittoria Colonna’s identity as the sitter in both of Sebastiano del Piombo’s portraits discussed here. This view is shared in this volume by Maria Forcellino (see note 18), who fails to see in the portraits by Sebastiano dal Piombo a physical similarity to the sitter in the two Colonna portraits by Altissimo and an anonymous painter of the middle of the sixteenth century in the Colonna Gallery in Rome, which she considers as two reliable touchstones for lifelike depictions of Vittoria Colonna.

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Vittoria Colonna, this is coupled with her fame as a sophisticated poet and faithful consort. Even in Sebastiano del Piombos’s portraits, therefore, not much is revealed about Vittoria Colonna’s physiognomy. The idealization of her looks makes her a close relative of Giulia Gonzaga as she is depicted by Sebastiano del Piombo in various portraits, or even of his Saint Agatha in the National Gallery in London. Nevertheless, unlike in the two earliest portraits of Colonna in the Ischia altarpiece (see Figure 6.2) and the medal in Vienna (Figure 6.4), in Sebastiano del Piombo’s two depictions she no longer appears within a stylized painterly idiom, rooted in late Quattrocento formulae, as the epitome of Petrarchan female beauty, a young, blonde woman with a sophisticated and complex hairstyle all’antica. Instead she is represented as a watchful young lady, a dark-haired Mediterranean, somewhat withdrawn and at the same time sharp-witted. She is of no particular beauty, but of a noble and refined spirit. In the portrait painted by Bronzino’s pupil, Cristoforo dell’Altissimo, now in the Uffizi Galleries in Florence (Figure 6.12), Colonna does not appear to be especially beautiful, upholding Filonico’s statement, cited above, that she was not a great beauty (“di gran beltà posseditrice”).32 This painting seems to be a copy of an earlier portrait once in the collection of one of Colonna’s most fervent admirers, Paolo Giovio. As Stefano Corsi had discussed,33 the model of this portrait was an earlier depiction of Colonna, which was part of a series of paintings of famous figures from classical antiquity to the present day that hung in his Museaum Virum Illustrium. Next to portraits of Dante, Petrarch and other renowned poets and literary figures hung a painting of the Marchesa of Pescara, the celebrated female poet of his time. After Giovio’s death in 1552, Cosimo I de’ Medici had Cristoforo dell’Altissimo sent to Giovio’s Villa at Como to produce copies of all the portraits in the series. It seems that Colonna’s portrait was among the first to be copied by Altissimo and was mentioned specifically in Vasari’s Vite published in 1568.34 It is not known who originally painted Colonna for Paolo Giovio, but there are good reasons to believe that the unknown artist was induced by Giovio to paint her as faithfully as possible, especially if we consider that Giovio himself in 1527–28, while at the Avalos court on Ischia, had meticulously described Vittoria’s physiognomy. Giovio characterizes her in his unpublished Dialogus de viris ac foeminis aetate nostra florentibus (already known in literary circles in 1529) as a dark eyed lady, 32  Filonico Alicarnasseo, Vita di Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara, 492. 33  Stefano Corsi in Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 106. 34  For a summary of the painting’s history see Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 106–107.

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“clothed in shining ivory,” with arched brows and ebony hair with gold highlights—the latter a reflection of Petrarchan ideals of blonde hair—and a wide forehead and blushing milk-white cheeks, perfect small ears, a regal and delicate nose (fols. 31r–31v), a “fleshy” chin and a neck, suggesting “dignity but not severity.”35 Vittoria’s image in Giovio’s description is far removed from the idealized blonde beauty in her twenties, as she appears in the Ischia altarpiece from around 1510. Only Giovio’s reference to the splendour of her jewels and pearls—he states that nobody places gems and pearls more strikingly in her hair than Vittoria (fol. 32r)—matches her appearance in what is arguably the earliest known portrait of her (Figure 6.2). One striking physiognomic detail in Giovio’s description is the reference to a pronounced fleshy chin and a wide forehead, common features of the portraits discussed so far, even in the admittedly stylized face of the Ischia altarpiece. Despite all idealization inherent in a portrait which was to be included in the series of portraits of the Museaum Virum Illustrium (and notably, Feminarum), we might expect that a man such as Giovio, a friend of Colonna who had described her looks at length, would have been keen to have her depicted as faithfully as pictorial conventions of the time would allow. These circumstances might assign to Cristoforo dell’Altissimo’s admittedly modest portrait a significant place in our attempt to gain some idea of her physical appearance. She appears in Altissimo’s painting in her thirties and dressed as a widow, crowned as poet laureate with laurel leaves in her hair. A transparent black veil covers her shoulders, whereas the widow’s veil over her head covers her forehead while the punta reaches as far as the bridge of her nose, disturbing the proportions of her face. If we try to achieve a virtual picture of Vittoria Colonna’s appearance by lifting in our imagination the widow’s veil that covers her large, high forehead, we gain a picture that is not too distant from the admittedly idealized young woman painted by Sebastiano del Piombo. We might suppose that Colonna was a woman of Mediterranean looks, dark eyed and dark haired. Her appearance as it is reflected in Altissimo’s painting corresponds well with Giovio’s description of the poet, where he characterizes her as an authoritative poet in the Petrarchan tradition, as a chaste and deeply religious widow, and a 35  Giovio’s manuscript of the Dialogus de viris ac foeminis aetate nostra florentibus is in Como (Società Storica Comense, Fondo aliati, cass. 28). The first printed edition of Giovio’s text appeared in Paolo Giovio, Iovii opera, ed. Ernesto Travi and Mariagrazia Penco (Rome, 1984). The first English translation appeared in the bilingual edition of the work: Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA 2013).

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Cristoforo dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

powerful proponent of religious reform and exemplar of the new spirituality. Considering that Colonna emerges in Giovio’s writings as a poet following in Petrarch’s footsteps, it comes as no surprise to see Altissimo’s portrait of Vittoria Colonna as poet laureate in a direct line with the Cinquecento portraits of Petrarch himself, best exemplified by the painting of Petrarch by the late

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Figure 6.13

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Giovanni Battista Naldini, Portrait of Petrarch, Milan, private collection. Image courtesy of the Zeri Foundation.

sixteenth-century Florentine mannerist Giovanni Battista Naldini in a Milanese private collection (Figure 6.13), as well as by other similar works.36 This also 36  We should record also the sculpted bust created towards the middle of the sixteenth century by the workshop of Agostino Zoppo (Padua, Musei Civici) and probably based

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raises some doubts as to whether or to what extent this portrait actually does justice to Colonna’s looks. Much the same as Petrarch in his portrait by Naldini and others, she is given a rounded fleshy face which looks frontally toward the beholder and wears—just as her illustrious forefather does—a crown of laurel, the emblem reserved for celebrated poets. If, in the case of Altissimo’s Colonna portrait, our thesis of a deliberate assimilation of this portrait to those of Petrarch in the typology of Naldini’s picture and of a contemporary sculpture by Agostino Zoppo in the Musei Civici in Padua might be challenged, and the formal similarity put down to chance, there is another portrait of Vittoria Colonna on which the impact of the traditional conventions established for images of celebrated Italian poets of the past seems undeniable. In the portrait of Colonna in the Colonna collection in Rome,37 painted arguably after her death sometime between 1550 and 1560 by an anonymous artist (Figure 6.14), the sitter appears as an elderly, slightly emaciated, ascetic woman, who at first sight recalls images of mystics such as Saint Catherine of Siena and other pious women. This portrait, however, clearly reveals close ties to the pictorial tradition of the other great hero of Italian poetry, Dante Alighieri, as exemplified by paintings such as the Dante portrait by a late Florentine Mannerist in the Csartoryski Museum in Kraków, as well as two others by anonymous artists, dated ca. 1550, in the Museo Civico in Como and in the Yale University Gallery in New Haven (Figure 6.15). Much the same as Dante, Colonna appears in the Roman example crowned as a poet laureate in a three-quarter-profile, somewhat emaciated with a long, pronounced nose, piercing eyes, slim lips severely pressed together, and a generally stern and sharp expression which clearly renders and defines her as a spiritual sister of Dante, who, according to the Tuscan canon of Dante depictions beginning with Domenico di Michelino,38 is articulated with notably parallel features. The fact that the two portraits discussed here, where Vittoria is granted the attributes of a poet laureate, bear the inscription of her name, suggest that these depictions do not fall within the traditional category of portraiture, but on models similar to Naldini’s painting in Milan. For this sculpture see Matteo Ceriana and Luca Siracusano, Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento, ed. Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto, and Adolfo Tura (Venice, 2013), 151–52. The typology of Petrarch’s portrait which renders him as a middle-aged man with a fleshy, rounded face and full cheeks seems to have been developed in Florentine Renaissance art as early as the fourteenth century and perpetuated by Benozzo Gozzoli (Montefalco, San Francesco) and Andrea del Castagno (Florence, Uffizi). Another typology was developed in the Padua region by painters such as Altichiero, who, in line with courtly portraits, shows Petrarch’s fleshy face in profile. 37  Bernardini and Bussagli, Il Rinascimento a Roma, 231, 312, cat. 135. 38  Domenico di Michelino, Dante, Florence Cathedral.

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Figure 6.14

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Anonymous Italian artist, ca. 1550–60, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Rome, collection of the principi Colonna, Inv.361.

Figure 6.15

Anonymous Florentine artist, ca. 1575, Portrait of Dante, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, n. 1871.85. Source: Yale University Open Access Collections.

distinguish themselves as official representations, as we know from Altissimo’s painting, within the context of a series of uomini famosi including donne illustri, hence as official representations of Colonna within the context of the celebration of the most illustrious Italians, past and present. If we bear in mind that, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, Vittoria Colonna was ranked among the most illustrious Italian poets and intellectuals to be placed next to the great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, it is not surprising that in this official imagery her portrait assumed features similar to those of her equals on this new Parnassus of Italian poets. In the case of Dante’s portrait, the features traditionally given him beginning with Giotto are based on his death mask,39 allowing us a vague idea of his appearance, while in the case of other poets 39  Dante appears with his traditional features as early as the fresco painted by Giotto’s workshop in the chapel of the Podestà in the Bargello in Florence, and this image was further perpetuated through the centuries.

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such as Petrarch they were rendered from the artists’ imagination in order to assume later some kind of official, canonical character and serve as models for the “correct” depiction of a particular personality. In the case of Vittoria Colonna’s “official” imagery as poet, this process was just beginning in the midsixteenth century, and was intended to establish an official image of her, one that sought to lend her features that were similar to those of her most famous predecessors, hence to create visually a common breed of eminence within the canon of Italian poets. The features of Dante and Petrarch lent to Vittoria Colonna have become iconographical attributes used to define her eminence as a poet and her place within the poetic canon of great writers. Such considerations make it difficult to assign to this category of Colonna’s portraiture the quality of valid touchstones for her physical appearance. At the same time, this approach considerably weakens Maria Forcellino’s rejection, expressed in this volume, of the two portraits by Sebastiano del Piombo as images of Colonna on the grounds of insurmountable differences in her physical representation between Sebastiano’s paintings and those by Altissimo and in the Colonna Gallery in Rome. None of these paintings—for the reasons discussed above—were intended to do justice to her physical appearance, and this might have been a wise choice since there are enough indications in literature to negate her particular physical beauty. Rather, these works were produced, according to the specific function of each portrait, to be idealized representations. The same is true for the portrait on the frontispiece of the Venetian edition of her Rime of 1542 (Figure 6.16),40 where Colonna appears as a gaunt, bony mystic, not dissimilar to her portrait in the Colonna Gallery (Figure 6.14), where she was given Dante’s bony physiognomy. In this case, her fame as a deeply religious widow and a powerful proponent of religious reform and paradigm of the new spirituality dominated her representation. She was placed in a position of a mystic, comparable to the holy women of earlier centuries. Little wonder that in such images of her, produced to illustrate the frontispieces of her books, she appears in an attitude comparable to earlier and contemporary depictions of Catherine of Siena and other saints, hence as an ascetic penitent adoring a wooden crucifix (Figure 6.17). The medial power of images of Colonna as a saintly women kneeling before a crucifix, as she appears on the frontispiece of the Rime, must have been remarkable as a tool for the dissemination of a distorted image of the poet, allying her with saintly, quasi-mystical qualities. We might then be grateful for Sebastiano del Piombo’s two portraits of her, which even in their idealized representation offer us an alternative view of her personality and status as a 40  Pina Ragionieri in Bernardini and Bussagli, Il Rinascimento a Roma, 312–13, cat. 137.

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Figure 6.16

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Portrait of Vittoria Colonna. Frontispiece of Rime–1 1540 and Rime 1542. By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.17

Matteo di Giovanni, Saint Catherine of Siena receiving the stigmata, Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, Inv. M.I. 578. © Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon.

strong woman of noble background, as well as a talented poet admired and celebrated by her contemporaries. Conclusion There is a considerable distance between the juvenile portrait of Colonna as a young princess, as she appears in the Ischia altarpiece, and her depiction as

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pious, ascetic widow confined in a nun’s cell adoring the Crucifix, as depicted in editions of the Rime. The contrast is striking between the young noble beauty, celebrated in the Ischia panel through references to all the Renaissance conventions of idealization of juvenile female beauty rooted in poetic traditions deriving from Petrarch, and her representation as a pious mystic, as she is interpreted in the Dantesque portrait in the Colonna collection in Rome. All the apparently insurmountable differences in her imagery derive from the fact that each depiction of Colonna resulted from a distinctive set of intentions. These were articulated by means of attributive conventions which were understood and appreciated within courtly circles. In her first portrait as a young princess, her beauty was celebrated by means of the visualization of humanistic attributes of beauty founded on the aesthetic principles formulated within poetic circles. No less sophisticated were the two portraits which Sebastiano del Piombo might have painted for members of the close circle of Colonna’s family. The earlier portrait in the Cambó collection in Barcelona might have been commissioned by her husband himself or Colonna’s aunt, whereas the one in the collection of the Earl of Harewood in Leeds, where she appears as a mourning Artemisia, might have been a commemorative work, commissioned after her husband’s death by Vittoria herself. In both these paintings Colonna appears as an idealized noblewoman. Then again, we have the official portraits of Colonna in paintings such as those by Cristoforo dell’Altissimo (Florence, Uffizi Gallery) or by the unknown painter around 1550–1560 (Rome, Colonna Gallery) which were created in the context of a series of illustrious personalities, where by means of attributive physiognomic assimilation to the features of the most famous Italian poets, her eminence as a celebrated poet was praised and she was elevated to the ranks of Dante and Petrarch. Having examined various portraits of Colonna and singled out some distinct categories of representation—portraits created presumably within the close circle of her family, others invented to celebrate and honor her among the elite of Italian poetry—Vittoria Colonna’s appearance remains for us as mysterious as her personality. These various portraits are fragments of the multiple aspects of her persona, either propagated or perceived by her contemporaries, and the picture we have of her now will ultimately remain the one we create ourselves through our own imaginations, fed by the imagery of these portraits as well as by her poetry.

Chapter 7

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings Maria Forcellino The friendship between Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Vittoria Colonna was both intensely spiritual and artistic, and lasted from 1538 until Colonna’s death in 1547. The precise date and circumstances of the initial meeting between Colonna and Michelangelo are uncertain. It is sometimes claimed that the pair first met in 1533 or 1536, but the earliest surviving documentation that reliably attests to their acquaintance dates from 1538.1 Mentioned by contemporary biographers of Michelangelo (Vasari 1550, Condivi 1553, Vasari 1568), their friendship is also demonstrated by their surviving correspondence, and, directly or indirectly, by numerous other sources. In the context of this friendship, Colonna and Michelangelo exchanged gifts and poems, with Michelangelo creating some religious compositions especially for Colonna. Recognizable in the collections of the British Museum (Inv. 1895–9–15–504, Figure 7.1) and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Inv. I.2.0/16, Figure 7.2). These drawings—namely, a Crucifixion, a Pietà and a Christ with the Samaritan—have traditionally been considered by critics as “presentation drawings”: that is, drawings, which were bestowed as gifts, and which constitute completed works in their own right. Although its original no longer survives, Michelangelo’s Christ with the Samaritan has been preserved in the engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet (1507/15–1577) and in some drawn reproductions.2 1  For a critical overview of the beginnings of the relationship between Michelangelo and Colonna, in 1533, 1536, or 1538, see Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 3 (Milan and Naples, 1962), 2002–24; the argument for 1536 as the most likely date is outlined in Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, “Vittoria Colonna und Michelangelo in San Silvestro al Quirinale,” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, Exhibition catalog (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 25 February–25 May 1997), ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Vienna and Milan, 1997), 350. 2  Christ and the Samaritan, mentioned by Vasari in 1568 (Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, vol. 4, 2002–5 and 2022–24) has survived in the form of an engraving by Beatrizet (The Illustrated Bartsch, Italian Master of the Sixteenth Century, ed. S. Boorsch, vol. 29 [New York, 1982], 268 cat. 17 [247]), one of which is preserved in Rome, in the Istituto Nazionale della Grafica, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Inv. F.C. 69811 (Mario Rotili, Fortuna di Michelangelo

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Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings

Figure 7.1 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Crucifixion, London, British Museum, black chalk drawing, 371x270mm, inv. 1895–9–15–504r. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 7.2 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, black chalk drawing, 289x189mm, inv. 1.2.0/16. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

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Recent studies and the discovery of a previously unknown source have made it clear that, in those same years, the drawings were also reproduced as small paintings, which belonged to Colonna and her circle of friends; it is even possible that Michelangelo himself had a hand in executing some of these paintings. These works by Michelangelo were tracked down and reproduced, with the express intention, it would appear, of copying original works by this great artist. The divine Marchesa di Pescara wrote letters to Michelangelo, and wrote of him in her poetry; and he, in return, sent her a most beautiful drawing of the Pietà that she had requested. And so let it never be thought that any pen, whether destined for writing or for drawing, may produce finer results than Michelangelo’s own, nor any other pen or drawing instrument.3 Writing in 1550, Vasari judged Michelangelo’s relationship with Colonna to be worthy of inclusion among the most important facts of his life, portraying it as a great privilege for the artist. Vasari also celebrated Colonna in his own work, highlighting her fame as a poet and her place as the first of many emancipated women in her own century, in his Life of Properzia de Rossi: “they have earned great renown, not only for their study of letters, as in the case of S[ignora] Vittoria del Vasto and S[ignora] Veronica Gambara . . . most learned women, but also for all their other talents.”4 Yet the private side of the relationship nell’incisione, Exhibition catalog (Benevento, 1964), 68–69 cat. n. 42, Tav. 26) and another in Vienna (Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 443, cat. n. IV.45). There also exist three drawn reproductions of the work (one of which is held in Paris and now attributed to Giulio Clovio), as well as various painted versions (for an up-to-date list of the drawings and paintings, see Paul Joannides, Dessins Italiens du musée du Louvre: Michel’Angel, èlèves et copistes [Paris, 2003], 236–37, note 90). Active in Rome around the year 1540, Beatrizet made engravings of various works by Michelangelo, including the Pietà (1547); for more information on Beatrizet, see M. Grivel, in SAUR Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. 8 (Munich, 1994), 52–53. 3  “Ha meritato ancora Michele Agnolo che la divina Marchesa di Pescara gli scriva, et opere faccia di lui cantando, et egli a lei un bellissimo disegno d’una Pietà mandò da lei chiestoli. Onde non pensi mai penna, o per lettere scritte, o per disegno da altri meglio che da lui essere adoperat(a), et il simile qualsivoglia altro stile o disegnatoio”: Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, Firenze 1550, eds. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (Turin, 1986), 909. 4  “[H]anno acquistato grandissima fama, non solamente nello studio delle lettere, com’ ha fatto la S[ignora] Vittoria del Vasto, la S[ignora] Veronica Gambara [. . .] dottissime, ma eziandio

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between Colonna and Michelangelo, and its implications on a personal, religious, and spiritual level, is barely touched upon in Vasari’s first biography. As an artist, Vasari was interested primarily in the works of art that Michelangelo produced for Colonna. These included the Pietà, one of many gifts that Michelangelo generously bestowed upon his closest friends, and which had long since become known in the public sphere: it had already been reproduced in the engraving of 1546 by Giulio Bonasone (active between 1531 and 1574), and in that of 1547 by Beatrizet.5 Like some other drawings by Michelangelo, which owed their existence to special bonds of affection (for example, the drawings dedicated to Gherardo Perina or Tommaso dei Cavalieri), those given to Colonna soon emerged onto the public circuit, deserting their formerly private realm in favour of a wider circulation.6 It was Condivi, Michelangelo’s other biographer, who, three years later, shed further light on the friendship between Colonna and Michelangelo, dropping some hints about a more personal bond: In particular, he nurtured a great fondness for the Marchesa di Pescara, whose divine spirit kindled feelings of love in him, and who loved him deeply in return. Of her letters, filled with a pure and sweet love, he has kept many, such as she was accustomed to write them from her noble heart; and he too had written so many sonnets to her, all of them filled with the intelligence of sweet desire. Several times she left Viterbo and other places, where she had gone for leisure or to pass the summer, and came to Rome, moved solely by her intention of seeing Michelangelo. He in turn felt for her such love, that I recall him saying that his only regret was that, when he went to see her upon her deathbed, he planted a kiss not on her forehead or her face, but upon her hand. Her death marked

in tutte l’altre facultà”: Vasari, Le vite, 729. On Colonna as the model for the biography of Properzia de Rossi, see Marjorie Och, “Vittoria Colonna in Giorgio Vasari’s life of Properzia de Rossi,” in Wives, Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Katherine A. McIver (Farnham, 2012), 119–37. 5  For the engraving by Bonasone, see The Illustrated Bartsch, Italian Master of the Sixteenth Century, ed. S. Boorsch and J. Spike, vol. 28 (New York, 1985), 268, cat. n. 64 (127), and Stefania Massari, Giulio Bonasone, Exhibition catalog (Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Calcografia), vol. 1 (Rome, 1983), 70–71, cat. n. 77; for the engraving by Beatrizet, The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 29, 268, cat. n. 25 (251). 6  Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo in Print: Reproductions as Response in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot, 2010), 53–85.

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the beginning of an emotional wilderness, a time of senselessness in his life.7 Condivi’s account shows how, several years after Colonna’s death, Michelangelo continued to recall above all the emotional dimension of their friendship, thereby offering an expression of their more private feelings toward each other. The relationship is defined by Condivi as a profound meeting of minds, recalling Colonna’s own reference to “our stable friendship, our unshakeable affection bound by Christian faith.”8 Of the many letters which, according to Condivi, Michelangelo still possessed in 1553, only seven have survived the ravages of time: five written by Colonna, and two by Michelangelo himself.9 Although the dense and intricate language of some of these letters makes them models of eloquence, it also has the effect of rendering their meaning rather obscure. Virtually all the letters refer to Michelangelo’s artistic works with religious themes: a Christ, a Crucifix and a Samaritan (either for Colonna or for other friends, it is not always easy to tell which). The object of a protracted and meticulous critical analysis (by linguists, art historians and theologians alike), the letters are undoubtedly valuable as a key to unlocking the relationship between Michelangelo and Colonna, and to revealing the shared interests, both artistic and religious, that bound them in these years. The letters create an impression of frequent, often daily meetings, during which Colonna and Michelangelo would talk at length and in depth: a constant feature of their relationship, from the beginning to the end. 7  “In particulare amò grandemente la Marchesana di Pescara, del cui divino spirito era inamorato, essendo all’incontro da lei amato svi[s]ceratamente; della quale ancor tiene molte lettere, d’onesto e dolcissimo amore ripiene, e quali di tal petto uscir solevano, avendo egli altresì scritto a lei più e più sonetti, pieni d’ ingegno e dolce desiderio. Ella più volte si mosse da Viterbo e d’ altri luoghi, dove fusse andata per diporto e per passare la state, e a Roma se ne venne, non mossa da altra cagione se non di veder Michelangelo; e egli all’incontro tanto amor le portava, che mi ricorda di sentirlo dire che d’ altro non si doleva, se non che, quando l’ andò a vedere nel passar di questa vita, non così le basciò la fronte o la faccia, come basciò la mano. Per la costei morte più tempo se ne stette sbigotito e come insensato”: Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni, with essays by Michael Hirst and Caroline Elam (Florence, 1998), 60–61. 8  “[L]a nostra stabile amicizia et ligata in christiano nodo sicurissima affectione”: Carteggio CLVII, 268. 9  Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, posthumous edition by Giovanni Poggi, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, vol. 4 (Florence, 1979), CMLXVI, 101; CMLXVII, 102; CMLXVIII, 104; CMLXIX, 105; CMLXXXIII, 121; CMLXXXIV, 122; MXII, 169–70; ML, 224.

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In one of her earliest letters, Colonna asks Michelangelo to send her the Crucifix on which he is currently working, as she wishes to show it to the cardinal of Mantua’s entourage. She also requests that, if possible, Michelangelo should pay her a visit later the same day. The suggestion behind the invitation, that the two friends were in the habit of meeting regularly, finds confirmation in the Dialogues on Painting by the Portuguese theorist and miniature-painter Francisco de Holanda (1517–84).10 This custom of paying each other visits continued until the end. Evidence to this effect is found in a 1560 letter, addressed to Michelangelo by Bartolomeo Spatafora e Moncata, believed to have had heretical tendencies. Bartolomeo recalled the meetings between Colonna and Michelangelo, in the year 1546, at the convent of Sant’Anna dei Funari in Rome, where Colonna had been living since 1544: “and you must remember that in 1546, the last winter which was a spring to that blessed soul, I was in Rome, as a guest of His Excellency [. . .] and I often saw you visiting Sant’Anna so that you might converse with her.”11 That they continued to see each other regularly throughout the 1540s, while Michelangelo was occupied with painting the Cappella Paolina (1542–49), is also confirmed by various letters written by Colonna during that period: I am replying to your letter only now, if your letter could indeed be called a response to mine. It seems to me that, if we are to pursue our correspondence in accordance with my sense of obligation and your sense of courtesy, I shall be required to leave the chapel of Santa Caterina, and to absent myself from the gatherings with the sisters here, and you must abandon the chapel of Saint Paul.12

10   Maria Antonietta Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi di Francisco d’Olanda (Rome, 1939); Grazia Modroni, Francisco de Hollanda, I trattati d’arte (Livorno, 2003). 11  “[E]t vi dovete ricordare che del 1546 l’ult.o verno che fu primavera a quella santa anima, io era in Roma in casa di Sua Ecc. [. . .] et spesso si vedea venire a santa Anna a ragionare con lei.” Bartolomeo Spatafora e Moncata from Messina, to Michelangelo in Rome, on 15 March 1560, in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, Exhibition catalog (Florence, Casa Buonarroti 24 May–12 September 2005), 188 cat. n. 63. 12  “Non ho resposto prima alla lettera vostra, per esser stata si pò dire resposta della mia, pensando che se voi et io continuamo il scrivere secondo il mio obbligo et la vostra cortesia, bisognerà che io lasci qui la cappella de Santa Caterina senza trovarmi alle hore ordinate in compagnia di queste sorelle, et che voi lassate la cappella di San Paulo” (Carteggio, CLVII, 268); none of the letters in the correspondence bears a date, except this one, written “from the monastery in Viterbo, on 20 July” (“dal monasterio di Viterbo, a dì XX di luglio”), allowing us to conclude that it was written in the summer of 1542 or 43.

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Dating from the period when Colonna was living in Viterbo (September 1541–November 1543/spring 1544),13 and when Michelangelo was painting the Conversion of Saint Paul, the letter concludes by confirming the information offered by Condivi, regarding Colonna’s journeys “from Viterbo and other places [. . .] to Rome [. . .] to see Michelangelo.” In the same period, Michelangelo likewise left Rome several times in order to visit Colonna. This fact is attested by Colonna herself, in a letter from Viterbo in May or June 1543 to a mutual friend, Alvise Priuli, secretary to the English cardinal Reginald Pole: “Regarding Michelangelo, who is now arrived.”14 Colonna famously prepared a gift manuscript of sonnets for Michelangelo in this same period, which he treasured until his death.15 It is quite probable that Michelangelo was in possession of Colonna’s portrait. This work, now lost, seems to be alluded to in a handwritten annotation by Tiberio Calcagni, placed at the end of Condivi’s Vita: “And I have always wished to have this portrait in my home.”16 The fact that Calcagni, writing in the 1550s, referred to Michelangelo’s ownership of the portrait in the present tense, would imply that it still remained in Michelangelo’s house at this time. That said, the work is not listed among the items found in Michelangelo’s house after his death; and neither is it described in the letter that Daniele da Volterra sent to Vasari.17 Certainly, for Michelangelo to have possessed a copy of Colonna’s portrait would be entirely compatible with the habitual exchange 13  Most studies give the end of Colonna’s stay in Viterbo as Spring 1544 (Carteggio, CLXII, 273 [15 March 1542–44]); see also the entry on “Vittoria Colonna” in Dbi, ed. G. Patrizi, vol. 27 (1982): 448–57; S. Coen, “Zur Biographie Vittoria Colonna” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 21). However Concetta Ranieri, on the basis of mention of Colonna as being in Rome in a letter from Alvise Priuli to Ludovico Beccadelli, anticipates this date to November 1543 (Stefano Pagano, Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole [Vatican City, 1989], 96). This change of date has not been taken up in subsequent scholarship, and further clarification is needed. I thank Veronica Copello for bringing this issue to my attention. 14  “Circa Michelangelo che mo’ è giunto.” I quote from the precise transcription of the letter in the Quinternus litterarum Marchionissae Piscariae, in the archive of the Roman Sant’Uffizio, published in Pagano and Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, 150; the letter was previously cited in Carteggio, CLXIII, 276, although the latter part of the transcription was unclear. 15  On Colonna’s gift manuscript of sonnets for Michelangelo, see Abigail Brundin’s chapter in this volume. 16  “E questo suo ritratto lo ò sempre voluto in casa,” note 21 in Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, XXII and 60. 17  Aurelio Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, in 2 vol. (Florence, 1876), Inventario fatto a Roma, dopo la morte di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 148–54, note 40; Daniele da Volterra to

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of favors in courtly society of the time. Exchanges of portraits took place between Colonna and various other correspondents and friends, including Bembo.18 Her image is immortalized in the portrait by Cristoforo dell’Altissimo (datable to between 1552 and 1605) in Florence (Uffizi, Inv. Gallerie 1890, no. 204), and in another portrait, recently discovered in Palazzo Colonna, probably depicting her in the latter years of her life.19 Colonna’s image also features on a number of coins, dating from various periods of her lifetime, including an exquisite, Roman-style Viennese one portraying her and her husband in ancient Roman clothing, which almost certainly dates from the time of her residence in Naples. Reflected in the statements of Vasari and Condivi, the friendship between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna is also illustrated by a wealth of other sources, which allow for a glimpse of the most intimate aspects of their relationship. A case in point concerns the profound religious understanding they shared, which is barely acknowledged either by Condivi or by Vasari. The deep religious harmony that united Michelangelo and Colonna emerges powerfully from many sources, including their correspondence and their own poetic production. Moreover, this religious identification is certainly an indispensable point of reference for understanding the works that Michelangelo produced in the context of his affinity with Colonna and their mutual friends: senior representatives of the Church hierarchy, cardinals and men of letters, all of whom were embroiled in some capacity, during the decade in question, in the problem of Catholic religious reform.

Giorgio Vasari, 17 March 1564, in Giorgio Vasari, Der literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris, her. Karl Frey, vol. 2 (Munich, 1930), 53. 18  Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti su Bembo e Vittoria Colonna”, in Scritti sul Bembo (Turin, 2002), 125–26. 19  On the painted portraits and coin engravings of Vittoria Colonna, see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Vittoria Colonna im Portrait,” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 109–25; on the portrait by Cristoforo dell’Altissimo, Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 106 cat. n. 28; on the engraving of Colonna and her husband, see ibid., 48; it is doubtful, however (as proposed in ibid., 49–51 cat. n. 10) that the individual featured in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Ritratto di donna (now in Barcelona, in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Collezione Cambò, Inv. 64984), is in fact Colonna; this portrait in Barcelona scarcely resembles Vittoria as she was painted by Altissimo, or as she appears her other portrait by an unknown artist (Il Rinascimento a Roma. Nel segno di Michelangelo e Raffaello, Exhibition catalog [Rome, Palazzo Sciarra, 25 October 2011–18 March 2012], ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli, [Milan, 2011], 312 cat. n. 135); for an alternative interpretation, see Gaudenz Freuler’s chapter in this volume.

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Michelangelo and Colonna: From San Silvestro al Quirinale to Viterbo

The bond between Michelangelo and Colonna, including their religious identification, is described in the Dialogues by Francisco de Holanda. De Holanda lived in Italy between 1537 and 1541, and was probably in Rome between July 1538 and approximately 1540.20 Thanks to his long-standing friendships with the Portuguese ambassador Dom Pedro Mascarenhas, with Lattanzio Tolomei and Blosio Palladio, de Holanda soon found his way into Roman society, where he came into contact with Michelangelo.21 The Dialogues offer firm evidence for the genesis of the friendship between Colonna and Michelangelo. Their reliability in this respect has been established by historians, who have pinpointed the precise circumstances of the encounters mentioned: these took place in Rome, in the autumn of 1538 on three separate Sundays—20 October, 27 October, and 27 November, respectively.22 The Dialogues portray Michelangelo and Colonna in the gardens of San Silvestro al Quirinale. Colonna often came here, accompanied by Lattanzio Tolomei, to hear the sermons of the Dominican monk Ambrogio Catarino Politi (1484–1553) on the Epistles of Saint Paul, a text that occupied a central position in contemporary religious debates, and from which Luther had also derived his early ideas. At that time, Colonna was living in the nearby convent of Poor Clares of San Silvestro in Capite. In 1536, the Pope had issued two papal briefs, granting her permission to reside in female convents. During the daytime, she would receive her friends in the refreshing climate of the gardens at San Silvestro a Monte Cavallo, now called al Quirinale, close to her family home. Michelangelo, too, lived close by, in his workshop in Macello dei Corvi, which was also home to the blocks of marble and sculptures for the tomb of Julius II which had not yet been completed. The first encounter between Michelangelo and Colonna must have taken place some years earlier, when Michelangelo had completed his first work for the Marchesa di Pescara, albeit without knowing that she had been the one to commission it. Colonna was a fervent worshipper of Mary Magdalene, and in 1531, commissioned Titian to complete a painting featuring this figure; at almost exactly the same time, via her nephew, she had extended the same commis-

20  Modroni, Francisco de Hollanda, 7. 21  Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi, 51. 22  Deswarte-Rosa, Vittoria Colonna und Michelangelo, 353–54.

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sion to Michelangelo.23 The resulting painting, depicting the Noli me tangere, was actually completed by Michelangelo (still living in Florence at that time) in collaboration with Pontormo. As has been observed, Michelangelo’s treatment of his subject matter was highly original: departing from the traditional iconography, in which Mary Magdalene adopted a humble pose at Christ’s feet, he instead showed her standing up and facing him.24 In 1538, the year of his meetings with Colonna at San Silvestro al Quirinale, Michelangelo was in the process of painting the large fresco of the Last Judgement (1534–41), a project begun under Clement VII and subsequently taken over by Paul III Farnese (1534–49). Colonna, meanwhile, was already a well-established poet, and was heavily involved in questions relating to the reform of the Catholic Church, a matter that had been keenly debated by the most progressive members of the Church since the election of Paul III to the papacy.25 Gasparo Contarini, the reforming Cardinal, also lived close to San Silvestro al Quirinale, having become a guest of Colonna at Santi Apostoli in 1536. He met Reginald Pole in the presence of Colonna in those very days, between the third and fourth meetings in the Dialogues: “one day, I happened to be there myself, when the most reverend Contarini and Cardinal Pole were at San Silvestro, paying a visit to the Marchesa di Pescara.”26 In the years when Michelangelo made regular visits to Colonna at San Silvestro al Quirinale, her favored preacher and spiritual guide was the 23  Michael Hirst and Gudula Mayr, “Michelangelo, Pontormo und das Noli me tangere für Vittoria Colonna,” in Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 335–44; Barbara Agosti, “Vittoria Colonna e il culto della Maddalena (tra Tiziano e Michelangelo),” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 71–81. 24  Maria Rita Rafanelli, “Michelangelo’s ‘Noli me tangere’ for Vittoria Colonna, and the changing status of Women in Renaissance Italy,” in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, ed. Michelle A. Erhardt and Amy M. Morris (Leiden, 2012), 223–48. 25  Gigliola Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 125. 26  “mi sono ben trovato un giorno, che ’l Rmo Contareno et l’inglese [cardinal Pole] erano a San Silvestro a visitar la S.ra Marchesa di Pescara.” These are the words of Ottaviano Lotti, well known to Cardinal Gonzaga, who wrote to Gonzaga on 18 November 1538, giving him news of the events in Mantua; cited in Deswarte-Rosa, “Vittoria Colonna und Michelangelo in San Silvestro al Quirinale,” 371, n. 64. On the significance of this visit and the role played by Colonna in the Reformation debates of these years, see the contribution to this volume by Stephen Bowd. On Ottaviano Lotti, see Massimo Firpo, Il processo inquisitoriale del Cardinal Morone, vol. 1 (Rome, 1981), 322 note 161, and Adriano Prosperi, “Michelangelo e gli ‘spirituali’,” in Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo Buonarroti. Storia di una passione eretica, (Turin, 2002), xx.

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Capuchin monk Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564). Ochino, a figure to whom many of her friends and acquaintances turned for religious counsel,27 first became known to Colonna as an exponent of rigorously ascetic Capuchin reform, and later as a hard-line supporter of Valdés’s doctrine throughout the peninsula.28 In the spring of 1537, just as she was preparing to embark on a journey following Ochino’s preaching itinerary around the peninsula—from Ferrara, to Bologna, to Florence, Pisa, and Lucca—Colonna wrote to cardinal Ercole Gonzaga (1505–63) in Mantua, expressing concern about the criticism that the content of some of Ochino’s sermons was attracting;29 indeed, from 1536 on, the Napoletan Theatines had been growing increasingly suspicious of Ochino’s seemingly unorthodox views.30 Nonetheless, Ochino remained popular throughout Italy, and in 1537 his services were requested by the viceroy of Sicily (Ercole Gonzaga’s brother), and, in Florence, by Margherita d’Austria, wife of the late Alessandro de’ Medici.31 Colonna remained in touch with Ochino until July 1542, when he fled abroad for fear of being accused of apostasy.32 Having been summoned to Rome by the newly founded Roman Inquisition, headed by Cardinal Carafa, Ochino began to fear for his life, and went into voluntary exile in Geneva. From Florence, Ochino sent his protectress Colonna (who was then in Viterbo) a long letter, detailing the reasons for his departure: “Besides, what is left for me to do in Italy? Should I preach suspect teachings, mask the truth of Christ in jargon? [. . .] Word has reached me that Farnese says I am summoned because I am a heretic, full of scandalous teachings; [. . .] I am such as Your Ladyship knows me, and my doctrine is such as it has been heard directly from my own lips.”33 Finding herself in a potentially compromising situation, Colonna 27  Carlo Gualteruzzi to Vittoria Colonna, 4 June 1537, in Carteggio, LXXXIV, 140–43. 28  Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, XXIV (1988): 211–61, 212; on Ochino, see the entry by Miguel Gotor in Dbi, vol. 79 (2013). On the relationship between Ochino and Colonna, see in addition the contribution to this volume by Emidio Campi. 29  Vittoria Colonna to Ercole Gonzaga, 22 April 1537, in Carteggio, LXXXIII, 139; on Ercole Gonzaga, see the entry by Giampiero Brunelli in Dbi, vol. 57 (2002): 711–22; also Paul Murphy, “Between Spiritual and Intransigenti. Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Catholic Historical Review 88 (2002): 446–69. 30  Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” 127. 31  Carlo Gualteruzzi to Vittoria Colonna, 4 June 1537, cit. 32  On Ochino’s exile, see the essential work by Gigliola Fragnito, “Gli spirituali e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino,” Rivista Storica Italiana LXXXIV (1972): 777–811. 33   “Dapoi che farei più in Italia? Predicar sospetti et predicar Cristo mascarato in gergo? [. . .] Di poi ho inteso che Farnese dice che sono chiamato perché ho predicato

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decided to hand over this letter to the cardinal of the Sant’Uffizio, Marcello Cervini.34 In December of the same year, Ochino sent Colonna the first printed edition of his Geneva sermons. As soon as she received them, Colonna acted upon Pole’s advice, and handed the sermons over to Cardinal Cervini, adding a note of her own: “It grieves me that, the more he believes he is doing right, the more he is worthy of blame; and the more he seeks to save others from spiritual destruction, the more he jeopardizes their salvation, since he himself is now excluded from the ark of those who will be saved.”35 Colonna’s period of residence in Viterbo marked a turning point in her life and in her religious experience. During this period, her hitherto sporadic contact with the English cardinal Reginald Pole became more frequent. Already in June 1540, the bishop of Capodistria, Pier Paolo Vergerio, had sent Colonna a letter from France, describing her meetings in Rome with him and with other cardinals as a ‘school’: “then I shall not regret having left behind that unique school, with Your Excellency and the most reverend Cardinals Contarini, Pole, Bembo, Fregoso.”36 The influence of Pole would signal a decisive turning point in Colonna’s religious life, hitherto distinguished by strict fasting and penitence, which, as she herself recognized on many occasions, had rendered her health fragile: “I am most grateful to Your reverend Lordship for the health of my soul and my body, both of which have been endangered, one by superstition, the other for want of care.”37 It was Pole who taught Colonna about justification by faith and the “beneficio di Cristo.” By the summer of 1542, the emergence of the so-called Ecclesia Viterbiensis was already underway. In Pole’s house in Viterbo, where he had been appointed Legate of the Patrimony in August 1541, a gathering took place. Amongst those present was Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550), whom Pole had met while studying in Padua, and who heresia et cose scandalose; [. . .] Io son tale quale sa V. S., et la dottrina si può sapere da chi mi ha udito:” Bernardino Ochino to Vittoria Colonna, 22 August 1542, in Carteggio, CXLVI, 247–48. 34  Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 254. 35  “Mi duole assai che quanto più pensa scusarsi, più se accusa et quanto più crede salvar altri da naufragii più li expone al diluvio, essendo lui fuor dell’arca che salva et assicura.” Vittoria Colonna to Marcello Cervini, 4 December 1542, in Carteggio, CXLIX, 257. 36  “manco m’increscerà di haver lasciata la scuola della Eccellentia Vostra et de reverendissimi miei Cardinali Contareno, Polo, Bembo, Fregoso, che era tutt’uno”: Pierpaolo Vergerio to Vittoria Colonna, June 1540, in Carteggio, CXV, 193. 37  “io sono a Sua Signoria reverendissima della salute dell’anima e di quella del corpo obbligata, chè l’una per superstizione, l’altra per mal governo era in periculo”; Vittoria Colonna to Giulia Gonzaga, 8 December 1541, in Carteggio, CXLII, 239. See also Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 213.

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had recently returned from his Valdesian experience in Naples. Together, the participants began composing a new theological proposal, which would be expressed in the tract entitled Il Beneficio di Cristo.38 The group immediately aroused the suspicions of the newly established Sant’Ufficio in Rome: “There has been talk of Flaminio and the others, who are in Viterbo with the English cardinal.”39 The meetings between Pole and Colonna in Viterbo, which often took place without any third parties present, provided the scene for the “gradual definition of a new form of religion, intense and powerfully attractive, built upon the certainty of being chosen for a privileged existence and on the promise of eternal salvation offered by this; yet also a far cry from a simple leveling of reformed theology, and devoid of any desire to break away from ecclesiastical institutions and from official doctrine.”40 The chief characteristics of this form of religion included the “matrice alumbrada” of Valdés’s spiritualism, mirrored in the group’s use of terms such as “light,” “illuminated,” as well as their dialogue and their “spiritual confabulation.” Viterbo itself was to be the setting in which Flaminio would later produce a translation of Valdes’s texts from Spanish into Italian for Giulia Gonzaga, as was subsequently attested by Pietro Carnesecchi in one of his trials.41 In this context, the meetings between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo— first at San Silvestro al Quirinale, and later in Viterbo—make it amply clear that both of them took a keen interest in the topical religious questions. In the first of the Dialogues, Michelangelo is not present amongst those who gather to hear Frate Ambrogio’s sermons on the Epistles of Saint Paul, although he does accept an invitation from Colonna to join her friends and take part in their conversation. While his contributions tend to be limited to matters that relate closely to his artistic interests,42 it is nonetheless true that these artistic points were often highly relevant and overlapped with religious questions,

38  On Flaminio, see the entry by Alessandro Pastore in Dbi, vol. 48 (1997): 282–88. 39  “S’è detto qualche cosetta del Flaminio et gli altri che stanno a Viterbo col cardinale d’Inghilterra”: letter from Sernini to Ercole Gonzaga, September 1542, reproduced in Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 254. 40  “[S]i vennero via via precisando i contorni di una religiosità intensa e coinvolgente, fondata sulla certezza di vivere un’esperienza privilegiata e sulla garanzia di eterna salvezza che essa offriva, ma anche lontanissima da un banale appiattimento sulla teologia riformata ed esente da ogni volontà di rottura con l’istituzione ecclesiastica e con la dottrina ufficiale”: Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 222. 41  Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 228, note 72. 42  Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi, 49–75.

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including, for instance, the devotional role of sacred images.43 In the third Dialogo, Lattanzio Tolomei and Michelangelo are depicted by de Holanda, as they were in the cell of Frate Catarino.44 By 1538, Michelangelo was at the height of his artistic fame. To some extent, he had always been aware of religious problems: his experience, as a young man, of hearing Girolamo Savonarola preach in Florence made such an impression on him that the sound of Savonarola’s voice remained vivid in his mind forever. Even so, religious questions seemed until this point to have been little more than a background concern for him.45 He had composed a few religious sonnets in a satirical vein, dating back to the time of Julius II, as well as some poems inspired by his own reflections from the mid-1520s on.46 Only toward the end of the 1530s did Michelangelo appear to focus more intently on the question of faith located at the heart of the debates in which he himself participated, through his relationship with Vittoria Colonna and with her friends. In his treatment of religion, Michelangelo demonstrated such fully formed ideas as one would expect from a figure of his intellectual standing. His new circuit of relationships inspired in him a heightened consciousness of religion, which seems to be reflected in both his visual and poetic production, exercising a strong influence over his stylistic and iconographic choices. Some of Michelangelo’s poems, penned in the immediate aftermath of his intense relationship with Colonna, explicitly allude to his knowledge of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the object of several unmistakable references.47 Likewise, his artistic production from that decade was dominated almost exclusively by religious themes—as, indeed, were all the works he created as gifts for Colonna. These were also the years in which Michelangelo

43  See, amongst others, Hans Belting, L’arte e il suo pubblico (Bologna, 1986) and David Freedberg, Il potere delle immagini (Turin, 1993). 44  Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi, 119. 45  Michelangelo’s recollection of Savonarola’s preaching is mentioned by Condivi (Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 62) and, following Condivi’s example, by Vasari (“La vita di Michelangelo,” vol. 1, 121). On Michelangelo’s religious beliefs, most commonly attributed to his relationship with Colonna, see Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali” (Rome, 2009), 43–52, with bibliography. 46  I refer to the poems n. 32 from 1525 and n. 33 from 1524–28, in Michelangelo, Rime e lettere, ed. Paola Mastocola (Turin, 1992), 94–96. These works are also analyzed in Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna (Turin, 1994), 55. 47  Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 61; the sonnets are found in Michelangelo, Rime e lettere, n. 289, 286–87, and n. 290, 287, also analyzed in Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, 37–38.

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produced his Last Judgement (1536–41), the tomb of Julius II (1542–45), and the Cappella Paolina (1542–49).

A Drawing of the Crucifix for Vittoria Colonna and a Painting of the Crucifixion for Tommaso dei Cavalieri?

Of the works that Michelangelo made for Colonna, the Crucifix (now matched to a drawing held in the British Museum, Figure 7.1)48 may well have been the first. Whilst none of the works bears a date, close readings of relevant sources seem to indicate that the Crucifix is the earliest. This hypothesis is consistent with a stylistic analysis of the drawing, which is reminiscent of other works by Michelangelo from the 1530s. The drawing is distinguished by an emphasis on the sculptural form of Christ on the cross in the centre of the page, strongly recalling the classically beautiful appearance of Christ in the Last Judgement.49 As noted above, the drawing of the Crucifix is not mentioned in Vasari’s work of 1550. By contrast, Condivi’s work of 1553 provides plenty of evidence supporting the theory that this was a drawing created by Michelangelo for Colonna: Out of love for her, he made her a drawing of Jesus Christ upon the cross, portraying him not in death, as is the custom, but in the guise of a living man, who lifts up his gaze towards his father, as though he were saying “Heli heli”; thus the body does not slump abandoned in death, but is shown still alive, writhing in its bitter torment and pain.50

48  Charles Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo, vol. 3 (Novara, 1978), 66–67, 411 recto, 370 × 270 mm. 49  Stylistic considerations indicate that the Crucifix was probably drawn slightly earlier than the Pietà, between 1538 and 1541, as proposed by Romani (Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 155) and Antonio Forcellino (“Michelangelo as Painter: Technique and Formal Language,” in Marco Bussagli, Costanza Mora, and Lorenza M. G. D’Alessandro, eds., The Ragusa Pietà. History and Restoration, trans. Neal Putt [Rome, 2014], 113); the latter also mentions that the Cavalieri Crucifixion (derived from the Crucifix) was painted before the Ragusa Pietà. 50  “Fece anco per amor di lei un disegno d’un Giesù Christo in croce, non in sembianza di un morto, come comunemente s’usa, ma in atto di vivo, col volto levato al padre, e par che dica ‘Heli heli’; dove si vede quel corpo non come morto abandonato cascare, ma come vivo per l’acerbo supplizio risentirsi e contorcersi”: Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 61.

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Condivi’s testimony was subsequently picked up by Vasari, who, in the Lives of 1568, mentioned the Crucifix as one of the drawings given to Colonna.51 Further references to a Crucifix by Michelangelo appear in his own correspondence, in three letters, none of which is dated, but all of which were written sometime between 1538 and 1545. Chronologically, the first letter making reference to the Crucifix appears to be one to Michelangelo from Colonna, asking him to send her the work in question: “My most esteemed friend Michelangelo, I pray that you might send me some version of the Crucifix, even if it is not yet finished, for I should like to show it to the most reverend Cardinal of Mantua’s men; and if you are not occupied with work today, you might come to speak with me, if it should please you.”52 The situation described in Colonna’s letter is similar to that presented in the first of de Holanda’s Dialogues;53 here, Colonna requests the Crucifix because she wishes to show it to the Mantuan cardinal’s entourage; at the same time she invites Michelangelo to join her, “if he is not occupied with work today.” There is further evidence to suggest that the drawing of the Crucifix took place at roughly the same time as the writing of the Dialogues, a point that has not received sufficient emphasis in studies to date. Colonna writes in her letter that she wishes to show Michelangelo’s work “to the most reverend Cardinal of Mantua’s men.” The cardinal in question is Ercole Gonzaga, with whom Colonna was frequently in touch by letter.54 Colonna’s relationship with Gonzaga was certainly significant, since the pair were in close contact throughout their lives, but particularly in these years. They were united by their similar cultural backgrounds—both were of noble birth and moved in the courtly circles of Renaissance society—as well as by their religious ideas. 51  Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. I (Milan, 1962), 120–21. 52  “Cordialissimo mio signor Michelangelo, ve prego me mandiate un poco il Crucifixo, se ben non è fornito, perché il vorria mostrare a` gentilhomini del reverendissimo cardinal de Mantua, et se voi non seti oggi in lavoro, potresti venir a parlarmi con vostra comodità”: Carteggio, vol. 4, CMLXVI, 101. Critical problems concerning the order of the letters are discussed in Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 141 and note 58. 53  “Tu, va a casa di Michelangelo [. . .] domandagli se vuol perdere un po’ della giornata con noi, acciocchè noi la guadagniamo con lui.”: Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi, 54. 54  In the spring of 1537 (Vittoria Colonna to Ercole Gonzaga, 22 June 1537, in Carteggio, LXXXV, 143–45) the two met in Ferrara, where the cardinal had gone to pay her a visit (rough copy of a letter from Ercole Gonzaga to Vittoria Colonna, never sent, published in Carteggio, 145–46).

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From their correspondence, it is clear that Colonna and Gonzaga felt a deep identification. At exactly the time when the Dialogues were being written, in 1538, we learn that Colonna received a visit from Ottaviano Lotti, well known to the Mantuan cardinal, as noted in the letter cited above: “one day, I happened to be there myself, when the most reverend Contarini and Cardinal Pole were at San Silvestro, paying a visit to the Marchesa di Pescara.”55 Bearing in mind that Lotti visited Colonna at this time, and that she mentions this in her letter to Michelangelo, it seems highly plausible that Lotti was the one to whom Colonna intended to show the drawing. This being so, the date of Lotti’s visit to Colonna, 18 November 1538, might also provide an indication of the date for the drawing of the Crucifix, much more precise than the estimate of between 1538 and 1541 that has hitherto been proposed. A few months later, in February 1539, Lotti compiled for Gonzaga a list of the most eminent preachers in Rome, ranking them in order of merit, and placing Ochino in first place: a choice that cannot fail to remind us of the religious preferences of his friends in Rome, including Colonna.56 Lotti provided Gonzaga with regular updates on the activities of his friends and acquaintances in Rome. Now held in the British Museum, the drawing of the Crucifix reflects perfectly in its iconography Condivi’s famous description of “Jesus Christ upon the cross, portrayed not in death, as is the custom [. . .] but in the guise of a living man” (“Giesù Christo in croce, non in sembianza di un morto [. . .] ma in atto di vivo”). Condivi’s comment recalls the words of Matthew, 27:46: Eli, Eli, lamma sabactani? (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). Vasari’s account, by contrast, echoes the language used in Luke 23:46: “And Jesus crying out with a loud voice, said: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. And saying this, he gave up the ghost.” The divergence between these accounts is not insignificant. The black chalk drawing of the Crucifix is dominated by the figure of Christ on the cross, flanked by two half-length figures of Angels, only faintly outlined, below the horizontal beam of the cross. The angel on Christ’s right-hand side averts his gaze from the painful scene, reaching out with his index finger to touch Christ’s side, supposedly wounded although not visibly so in this image. Meanwhile, the angel on the other side clasps his face with both hands, contemplating the scene with an air of grief and desolation. Christ is portrayed in the final moments of his earthly life, captured in his extreme agony, alone and 55  “mi sono ben trovato un giorno, che ’l Rmo Contareno et l’inglese [cardinal Pole] erano a San Silvestro a visitar la S.ra Marchesa di Pescara.” 56  Letter to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, dated 24 February 1539, in Giovanni Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino” Italique, IV (2001): 61–101, 64 and note 10.

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prey to human desperation, one of the most dramatic moments in his passion. This image of Christ is remarkably lifelike. His body, seeming real and alive, is slightly forward-leaning and off-center, as though it were about to fall from the cross. We see Christ’s face slightly foreshortened, its sorrowful eyes gazing upward. The shapes of the drawing are traced with a single, clean line, somewhat thicker in certain places: along the left-hand side, at the foot of the cross, where the lines are slightly elongated above Adam’s skull; also in the drawing of the angels, who seem to be superimposed upon the lines of the sky, indicating that they were added later on, and were not conceived of as part of the original composition. In this period, Michelangelo was still drawing only in black chalk, his preferred medium after he abandoned his trademark red chalk in the mid-1530s, for architecture as well as drawing.57 The drawing demonstrates a studied knowledge of the human body, whose individual and variable forms are delicately rendered with a “fine mold” and “subtle chiaroscuro.”58 It should be noted that the drawing presents no trace of the physical torture to which Christ had been subjected prior to his Crucifixion: there is no crown of thorns on his head, no wounds on his side, no traces of blood that speak of his martyrdom. The only sign of blood is found on the wood of the cross, presumably flowing from Christ’s feet, which are nailed to it.59 The nail at Christ’s feet is also the only clearly drawn one of its kind in the entire picture, the sole indication of the many physical sufferings inflicted upon the body of Christ. Michelangelo does not seem concerned with offering a faithful representation of the holy story: the task of depicting Christ does not force him to relinquish the beauty of the human body. Neither is Christ painted with the brutal verisimilitude that he so despised, deeming it a limited art form, “Flemish painting” (“il dipingere di Fiandra”), the preserve of “women, especially the very old and the very young, and of monks, nuns, and the odd nobleman, oblivious to the musical sense of true harmony.”60 Rather, the drawing provides an image that the viewer must embellish, using his 57  Michael Hirst, Michelangelo. I disegni (Turin, 1993), 11. 58  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 3, 66. 59  Firpo makes the evocative suggestion that Christ’s redeeming blood seems to flow not from his body, but from the cross itself (Massimo Firpo, “Denis Calvaert e il ‘Cristo in Croce’ di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna,” Iconographica VI [2007]: 115–25, 118). 60  “[A]lle donne, principalmente a quelle molto vecchie, e a quelle molto giovani, e così pure ai frati, alle monache, e a qualche gentil uomo privo del senso musicale della vera armonia”: Bessone Aurelj, Dialoghi Michelangioleschi, 63; on this famous statement by Michelangelo, see the observations of Laura Camille Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/ Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 1175–219.

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imagination.61 In order to be made present, the suffering of Christ’s human body must be envisaged by the observer. A product of the Florentine neoplatonic school of art, Michelangelo had learned great respect for the heroic physical forms of ancient art, so much so that he made the male body the cornerstone of his art.62 Michelangelo’s drawing was very well received by Colonna. The Crucifixion was a central element of religion for her circle, who nurtured a deep interest in the role of Christ and theories of salvation. At the time when Michelangelo was working on the Crucifix, Colonna had adopted Ochino as her spiritual guide. Many of Ochino’s sermons from this period are, like the spiritual poetry of Colonna, focused on Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross.63 Like Juan de Valdés, Ochino maintained that Christ was “the greatest good, the greatest gift, the ultimate blessing bestowed by God.”64 The remission of sins, also known in Valdesian vocabulary as “forgiveness” or “pardon” (“perdono,” “indulto”), was understood as the gift that the crucified Christ offered the sinner. “If you tell me you are unworthy, for the countless sins and offences committed against your most clement Father [. . .] I tell you instead that you are worthy, through the goodness of your Lord, and not through your own actions. Think of a wealthy man who makes a will leaving a castle to his servant, however unworthy the latter may be; and yet, his generosity is such that he bequeaths it to him nonetheless.”65 As early as 1532, Colonna composed a poem about the Triompho della croce.66 Crucially, much of her spiritual poetry was dedicated to exalting the sacrifice of God’s son on the cross. The collection of poems she gave to Michelangelo in 1540 opened with a work dedicated to the Crucifix, the same poem that had marked the start of Colonna’s new phase of spiritual poetry: 61  On the significance of this artistic characteristic (including its theological importance), see Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform,” Renaissance Quarterly LIX (2006): 90–129. 62  James Hall, Michelangelo, and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York, 2005). 63  The centrality of the meditation on the cross in Ochino and Colonna is discussed in Bardazzi, Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino, 78 and note 81. 64  “[I]l maggior bene, il maggior dono, il supremo beneficio che Dio ci poteva fare”: Bernardino Ochino, Prediche veneziane, cited in Campi, Michelangelo, 27. 65  “Se tu mi rispondi che non sei degno, per li infiniti peccati e offese commesse contro a un tanto clementissimo Padre [. . .] ti dico che sei degno per la bontà del tuo Signore e non per le tuoi opere. Si come quando un signore nel suo ultimo testamento lassa un castello a un suo servitore, quantunque indegno; nondimeno per la sua liberalità ce ne lassa dappoi la morte e dona”: Ochino, Prediche lucchesi, in Campi, Michelangelo, 27. 66  See the entry by Antonio Corsaro in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, 132–33.

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i santi chiodi ormai sieno me penne, e puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue, vergate carte il sacro corpo exangue, sì ch’ io scriva per me quel ch’ Ei sostenne.67 Through close theological analysis of Ochino’s sermons and of Colonna and Michelangelo’s contemporary poetry, it has been possible to identify definite points of thematic convergence, which are also reflected in the iconographic innovations characterizing Michelangelo’s work for Colonna. Michelangelo’s “Cristo vivo” gives vent to his pain, embodying some of the central tenets of Valdesian and Ochinian theology: the two natures of Christ, the doctrine of salvation and the centrality of Christ.68 This sublime depiction of the body by Michelangelo seems intended to convey precisely the double nature of Christ, at once human and divine. Through his death, Christ redeemed humanity from its sins. Therefore the good Christian in search of salvation should look no further than the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Such theology would later come to define the group known as the Spirituali, and was expressed most clearly in the Beneficio di Cristo. Colonna’s expression of admiration upon receiving the Crucifix from Michelangelo has been miraculously preserved in a letter, and leaves little room for doubt about the esteem in which she held the work: Unique master, Michelangelo, most esteemed friend. I have received your letter and seen the Crucifix, which has surely crucified itself in my memory, more than any other image I did ever see; nor could there exist any image more finely made, more vivid, more perfect. Certainly, I would fail to describe its subtle and marvelous beauty, hence I am resolved that I wish it to be in no one else’s hands but mine; and so, if it be intended for someone else, pray tell me, and so be it. If it is your own, I would do all in my power to take it from you. [. . .] I have observed it closely, with the

67  “[L]et my pens now be his holy nails and my pure ink his precious blood; let my scriven paper be his bloodless sacred body, so that I may write for myself what he endured” (trans. Virginia Cox, in Eadem, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance [Baltimore, 2013], 192). On this sonnet, see Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” Italian Studies, LVII (2002): 61–74, especially 71; see also Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008). 68  Campi, Michelangelo, 58–59.

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aid of a lamp, a glass and a mirror, and never did I see any image more perfect. At your humble service, the Marchesa di Pescara.69 Given the historical context in which both Colonna and Michelangelo actively participated, it is impossible to suppose that the Crucifix represents a simple return to the iconographic traditions of the Middle Ages, as suggested by Vasari.70 The difficulties that Michelangelo’s contemporaries had in accepting his unusual depiction of Christ are confirmed by historical events: shortly afterwards, the practice of depicting the “Cristo vivo” was deemed unorthodox, and was prohibited by the Church. In 1556, the reactionary Pope Paul IV, who had been hostile toward Pole and the Spirituali since the 1530s, seemed to react against precisely this kind of image, issuing a decree that demanded that “the subjects of crucifixion must not be painted alive” (“i crucifissi non si dipingessero vivi”).71 Can this be interpreted as an attempt to put an end to a phase of doctrinal uncertainty, that had found such eloquent expression in Michelangelo’s work? Did it represent an effort to clamp down once and for all on the doctrine of the Spirituali, which Michelangelo had illustrated with such supreme artistry?72 It would appear so, judging by the events surrounding the circulation of the image.

69  “Unico maestro Michelangelo et mio singularissimo amico. Ho hauta la vostra et visto il crucifixo, il qual certamente ha crucifixe nella memoria mia quale altri picture viddi mai, nè se pò veder più ben fatta, più viva et più finita imagine et certo io non potrei mai explicar quanto sottilmente et mirabilmente è fatta, per il che ho risoluta de non volerlo di man d’altri, et però chiaritemi, se questo è d’altri, patientia. Se è vostro, io in ogni modo vel torrei. [. . .] Io l’ho ben visto al lume et col vetro et col specchio, et non viddi mai la più finita cosa. Son al comandamento vostro la Marchesa di Pescara”: Carteggio, CXXIII, 208; for an analysis of the problems raised by this letter, see Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 78–81. There is in fact a painting in the Galleria Barberini, showing a female figure who examines a painting reflected in a mirror by candlelight; this may be indicative of the same means of viewing art described by Colonna. 70  Campi, Michelangelo, 17; on the iconography of the “Cristo vivo” in the medieval tradition, see Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 77 and note 59. 71  Antonio Caracciolo, Vita et gesti di Giovan Pietro Carafa cioè di Paolo IIII pontefice massimo (Napoli, 1619), Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, ms 349, f. 392rv, cited in Firpo, “Ancora sul ‘Cristo in Croce’ di Michelangelo,” 10; the passage is also found in Antonio Forcellino, “Copie e modelli. La crocefissione di Michelangelo per Cavalieri e le repliche successive,” Bollettino ICR, 20–21 (2010): 150–51 and note 60. 72  Firpo, “Ancora sul ‘Cristo in Croce’ di Michelangelo,” 10.

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Michelangelo’s Crucifix, with its original design and its Cristo vivo, is reproduced in only one undated engraving, by Battista Franco.73 Given its limited circulation and low profile in critical studies, it is conceivable that the work may have disappeared as a result of censorship.74 A severe regulatory campaign, introduced shortly after the work’s completion, seemed to be directed particularly at those presses which had reproduced images of Michelangelo’s Christ. From then on, the work was adapted to conform more closely to the artistic traditions of the medieval period, in line with Vasari’s analysis. One of the first prints by Giulio Bonasone (undated, but produced sometime between the mid-1550s and the early 1570s), shows the “Cristo vivo”, with an additional scroll reading, “in manus tuas Domine,” on a cross that has been visibly elongated to make room for a spacious landscape; the meaning of the image has been visibly distorted with respect to the original version.75 Another later engraving by Bonasone, dated Rome 1585, is even more marked by efforts to normalize the image’s didactic message: there are two large additional scrolls, one on either side of the cross, with lengthy devotional verses by the French writer Marc’Antoine Muret, “genuine manifestos for a militant CounterReformation.”76 The context of the Counter-Reformation also helps to shed light on another print, published by Lafrery and Soye in 1568 and then again by Sylius in 1649. This work is based on the image of the “Cristo vivo” created by Michelangelo for Colonna. It shows two additional individuals at the foot of the cross, which bears the dead body of Christ, with an additional long caption.77 “The image explains the meaning of the scene, in Catechistic terms,

73   The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 32, Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century. School of Fontainebleau, ed. H. Zerner (New York, 1979), 169, note 13; on Battista Franco, see also Massimo Firpo and Fabrizio Biferali, Battista Franco “pittore viniziano” (Pisa, 2007). 74  Roman d’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood,” 95 and note 12. 75  Massari, Giulio Bonasone, 98–99, note 129; The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 28, ed. M. Cirillo Archer (Norwalk, CT, 1995), 246 cat. 43 (120); Kristina K. Hermann Fiore, “Disegni di Michelangelo in omaggio a Vittoria Colonna e tracce del poema di Dante,” in Michelangelo e Dante, Exhibition catalog (Torre de Passeri 30 September–30 November 1995), 105. 76  “[V]eri e propri manifesti di una Controriforma militante”: Firpo, “Denis Calvaert e il ‘Cristo in croce’ di Michelangelo,” 119; on the engraving, see also Rotili, Fortuna di Michelangelo nell’incisione, 60–61 cat. 26, Tav. 15. 77  This is the only caption mentioned by Charles Tolnay, Michelangelo: The Final Period (Princeton: 1960), 195–96, note 198, fig. 171; see also the observations in Rotili, Fortuna di Michelangelo nell’ incisione, 102 cat. 121, Tav. 46. On the history of this engraving, see also Alessia Alberti, in L’ultimo Michelangelo, Exhibition catalog (Milan, 24 March–19 June 2011), ed. Alessandro Rovetta (Milan, 2011), 176–77, N. 3.10.

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings

Figure 7.3 Philippe Soye, Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross, Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, engraving, 535 × 367 mm, inv. F.C. 68870, vol. 44 H 1. By kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo.

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and in obedience to the pedagogical canons of the post-Tridentine period.”78 (Figure 7.3) In recent years a further engraving has been discovered, in which Michel­ angelo’s Crucifix is incorporated into another scene, the Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross. This finding has given rise to a range of questions, both old and new. The most intriguing of these concerns the possibility (entertained by those who had already scrutinized the affirmations contained in Colonna’s letters), that the Crucifix discussed in the two letters she sent to Michelangelo was not in fact a drawing, or at least not only the drawing now held in London, but instead a painted scene.79 An engraving of this scene was discovered in 2010, although whether it may truly be deemed a “discovery” is debatable,80 since it had already been referenced in some studies (in spite of which it had, inexplicably, remained unexplored)81 (Figure 7.4). The engraving is anonymous, but is attributed to Nicolas Beatrizet, the same artist whose signature is found on engravings of other works by Michelangelo for Colonna—the Pietà (1546) and the Samaritan—as well as some of the contemporary works for Tommaso dei Cavalieri from the same years, such as the Fall of Phaeton (ca. 1545) and Children’s Bacchanal (ca. 1546).82 The discovery of the engraving indicates that the idea for this composition, too, may have been elaborated by Michelangelo. This finding makes it possible to establish Michelangelo’s agency in creating not only the known drawing of the Crucifix, but also the scene in which the Crucifix becomes the Crucifixion, with the addition of the Virgin Mary and Saint John. Until a few years ago, the latter scene was usually, with a few exceptions, attributed to one of Michelangelo’s pupils,

78  “L’immagine spiega catechisticamente il significato della scena secondo i canoni della pedagogia post tridentina”: Firpo, “Denis Calvaert e il ‘Cristo in croce’ di Michelangelo,” 118. 79  Redig de Campos, “Il Crocifisso di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna,” in Atti del Convegno di Studi Michelangioleschi (Florence, 14–17 June; Rome, 19–21 June 1964) (Rome 1966), 356–65; on the same point, see Maria Forcellino, in Il Rinascimento a Roma, 316–18, note 144. 80  Antonio Forcellino, “La Pietà di Ragusa,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2/1: 105–42 (113); Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, 70–78. 81  “Nella medesima collezione (F.C. 30614 vol. 34 H 10) si conserva la copia in controparte senza alcuna iscrizione e l’incisione anonima (F.C. 70795, vol. 44 H 22) che riteniamo ispirata alla versione michelangiolesca di Marcello Venusti della Galleria Doria”: Massari, Giulio Bonasone, 98, note 129; Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 421 cat. IV.32. On this engraving, see too Alessia Alberti, in L’ultimo Michelangelo, 174–175 N. 3.9. 82  Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, 54–69.

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings

Figure 7.4 Nicolas Beatrizet (?), Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross, Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, engraving, 420x270mm, inv. F.C. 70795, vol. 44 H 22. By kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo.

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the painter Marcello Venusti.83 Whereas Michelangelo’s work was widely printed and circulated during the 1500s, Venusti’s was not. The only pieces by Venusti of which engravings were made were those produced in collaboration with Michelangelo, for which the latter had provided the initial drawing, as in the case of the Lateran Annunciation.84 The theory that Michelangelo himself transformed the Crucifix for Colonna into a Crucifixion, with the added figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John at the foot of the cross, is supported by the two autograph drawings that were used to incorporate the two extra figures into the scene.85 Adopting a form that was dictated by the need to fit in around the preexisting scene of the Crucifix, they resemble two “cartonetti,” apparently conceived of as such by Michelangelo.86 The three drawings are extremely interesting, as they allow us to read the scene as a “work in progress.” Michelangelo seems to have taken the Crucifix as his starting point, and from there extended his research to other protagonists of this Biblical moment. Indeed, the addition of the two extra figures at the foot of the cross occupied the religious reflections of Michelangelo throughout the 1550s, and is documented by a series of later drawings on the same theme.87 The drawings in the Louvre, characterized by a more decisive style, were probably executed earlier; although there is a definite element of continuity, if only inasmuch as they prefigure themes that recur in other works by Michelangelo, whether from the same or a later period. Saint John, for example, leans forward slightly, his arms on his chest, adopting a pose that is replicated in a series of 83  Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 110–19; doubt about this attribution is expressed in Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, 76. On Venusti and Michelangelo, see Georg W. Kamp, Marcello Venusti Religiöse Kunst in Umfeld Michelangelos (New York, 1993); Simona Capelli, “Marcello Venusti: un valtellinese pittore a Roma,” Studi di Storia dell’Arte 12 (2001): 17–48; William E. Wallace, “Michelangelo and Marcello Venusti: A Case of Multiple Authorship,” in Reactions to the Master, ed. Francis Ames Lewis and Paul Joannides (Aldershot, 2003), 137–56. 84  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 3, 393r, 56–57; see the engraving reproduced in Barnes, Michelangelo in Print, 86. Another drawing, the Madonna of Silence (collection of the Duke of Portland, Corpus, vol. 3, 388r, 51–52), already highlighted by Tolnay as a work created by Michelangelo for Colonna, was reproduced as an engraving; see the image in ibid., 83. 85  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 3, 412r, 67–68; 413r, 68; Paul Joannides, Michel-Ange, élèves et copistes, 174–76, note 39 and 176–78, note 40. 86  Antonio Forcellino, “Copie e Modelli. La Crocefissione di Michelangelo per Cavalieri e le repliche successive,” in Antonio Forcellino, Maria Forcellino, Franca Persia, and Ombretta Cocco, “I dipinti della Crocefissione dai disegni di Michelangelo: copie e modelli attraverso la lettura riflettografica,” Bollettino I.C.R., 20–21 (2010): 144–54. 87  Hirst, Michelangelo. I disegni, 78–81; Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 82.

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later drawings: once by the Virgin Mary (Corpus, vol. 3, 417r) and again by the apostle (Corpus, vol. 3, 418r). This was also the pose in which Michelangelo depicted the enigmatic figure in the foreground of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter in the Cappella Paolina, which he worked on in the course of those same years. The Virgin Mary, meanwhile, bears a close resemblance to Lia on the tomb of Julius II. Similar conclusions have been suggested by a recent critical revision of sources, concerning a series of painted Crucifixions with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross. These paintings, which were clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s drawings, had traditionally been attributed to the painter Marcello Venusti, on the basis of stylistic considerations. Well into the 1550s, Michelangelo kept the drawings he had used (or, perhaps, that he had given to others to use) for the Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross. These drawings were mentioned by Cornelia Colonnelli, the widow of Francesco d’Amadori. In December 1557 Colonnelli wrote to Michelangelo, asking him for a reproduction of two paintings from “those same drawings” (“quelli medesimi desegni”) that she had had to give to the duke of Urbino.88 Colonnelli’s request was all the more significant, given that Michelangelo had been named “Tutores autem et pro tempore curatores” to her sons.89 Colonnelli was referring to two paintings that her children had inherited, as a gift from Michelangelo to Urbino. Research has revealed that one of the paintings was a Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John at the foot of the cross. The painting, which came directly from Michelangelo’s workshop, had gone via the Duke of Urbino’s collection, via the latter’s wife, Lucrezia d’Este, making its way into the Aldobrandini and then the Doria collection; indeed, the painting there today is probably still the same one.90 Written records suggest that this was the work of Michelangelo, although they do not necessarily suggest 88  Cornelia Colonnelli in Casteldurante to Michelangelo in Rome, 13 December 1557, in Carteggio, vol. 5 (1983), MCCLXV, 120–22. 89   Testamento dell’ Urbino in Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 137–40, here 139. The will contains no mention of the two paintings. 90  Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 103–19; the painting is also mentioned in Tolnay’s analysis of the drawing in London, as an offshoot of Michelangelo’s work: “In questa composizione [il Crocefisso per Vittoria Colonna] esistono, in basso a destra e a sinistra, ampi spazi vuoti, dando l’ impressione che essa non sia finita. E’ probabile che Michelangelo volesse completare la composizione con le figure della Madonna e di San Giovanni sotto la croce, come infatti si vede in una copia dipinta, attribuita a Marcello Venusti, nella Galleria Doria a Roma e nelle incisioni contemporanee. Uno schizzo rapido per la Vergine e due disegni preparatori, uno per la Vergine e uno per San Giovanni esistono al Louvre”: Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 3, 66. Curiously, Tolnay does

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it was an autograph work, let alone an original invention by Michelangelo. In 1598, in an attempt to recover the paintings given away by his wife, Francesco Maria II made reference to the “Paintings [. . .] of Raffaello and Michelangelo” (“Pitture [. . .] di Rafaello, et Michelag[no]lo”).91 The series of paintings through which Michelangelo’s Crucifix for Colonna morphed into a Crucifixion, unanimously judged by critics to be the most valuable of all, is illustrated by a painting belonging to a private collection in Oxford, now held by the Ashmolean Museum92 (Figure 7.5). According to the eight seals on the back, the painting belonged to the Cavalieri family until the late eighteenth century.93 Sold directly to the family in Rome as an original Michelangelo, the painting was exported to England by a well-known trader, archeologist, and collector. Its history can be traced across the next two centuries until, after a series of auctions, it reached the collection where it is currently held. Given our knowledge of the relationship between Michelangelo and Tommaso dei Cavalieri, there can be no doubt that it was Tommaso who purchased the painting. Tommaso had been a friend of Michelangelo since the early 1530s. He remained close to him for the rest of his life, and was even present at his deathbed.94 In addition, he was the dedicatee of some of Michelangelo’s

not mention the painting of the Cruxifixion (formerly owned by the Cavalieri family) in Oxford, despite the fact that it was already known to critics at the time. 91  Letter from Duke Francesco Maria II to Abbot Brunetti, 8 November 1598, reproduced in Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 245, document 5. 92  Phyllis Borland, “A Copy by Venusti after Michelangelo,” Burlington Magazine, CIII (1961): 433–34. More recent discussion by Maria Forcellino has led to the exhibiting of this work in Italy, in Milan (Alessandro Rovetta in L’ultimo Michelangelo, 160–61 n. 3.3), and in Rome (Maria Forcellino, in Il rinascimento a Roma, 316–18 cat. n. 144). 93  Forcellino, “Sulla Crocefissione appartenuta a Tommaso dei Cavalieri,” in Forcellino et al., “I dipinti della Crocefissione dai disegni di Michelangelo: copie e modelli attraverso la lettura riflettografica,” 132–44. 94  Present at Michelangelo’s death, Tommaso placed his seals on the chest of money that was delivered to Michelangelo’s nephew Leonardo (Inventario fatto a Roma, dopo la morte di Michelangelo Buonarroti, in Gotti, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 148–54, note 40). With the exception of Leonardo, Tommaso was the only person to whom Michelangelo left an original drawing: “A dì 7 d’ aprile 1564. Io Thomao di Cavalieri per la presente confesso haver ricevuto da monsignor reverendissimo Governatore di Roma [. . .] un cartone grande, dove stanno disegnati un Cristo et una Madonna già di mano di messer Michelangelo, quale io hebbi già in vita dal detto messer Michelangelo; et in fè del vero ho fatto la presente di mia propria mano. Io Thomao de’ Cavalieri manu propria”: Autograph letter, in ibid., 155–56.

Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings

Figure 7.5 Michelangelo Buonarroti (?), Crucifixion, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (on loan from Campion Hall, University of Oxford), oil on board, 51.4 × 33.6 cm.

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most famous presentation drawings on mythological themes.95 This, too, was a special friendship, which overlapped with the years in which Michelangelo was in touch with Colonna. In a letter which critics have identified as one of three pieces of correspondence pertaining to the Crucifix, Michelangelo rebukes Colonna for returning the Crucifix to him via Tommaso: “My Lady, it is strange, as I am in Rome, [. . .] [that] you decided to give the Crucifix to Signor Tommaso, using him as an intermediary between your Ladyship and myself, your servant.”96 The letter also reveals that Tommaso dei Cavalieri knew of the existence of the Crucifix; he may even have been the dedicatee of the piece. In her letter of praise for the Crucifix, Colonna seems uncertain about the identity of the individual for whom the work was intended: “and so tell me if this piece is meant for another [. . .] I am loath to return it” (“però ditemi se questa composizione è d’altri [. . .] io non sono per restituirla”). In the light of the observations regarding the series of paintings of the Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John, and given that there was a painting of the finest quality owned by Tommaso dei Cavalieri, the problem of the ambiguous correspondence between Michelangelo and Colonna resurfaces more acutely than ever. It seems increasingly likely that, in their exchange, Colonna and Michelangelo were referring to a painting as well as a drawing. The stylistic qualities of the painting set it apart from others depicting the same subject, both in the Doria collection and in Casa Buonarroti. Its outstanding beauty suggests something more than a faithful rendering of Michelangelo’s drawing, as has been observed recently.97 As for the underlying drawing, it has now been proven (using reflectography) that this is qualitatively different from those of the other two paintings in Rome and Florence; thus the disparity between these works and the Crucifixion in Oxford, already suggested by stylistic analysis, has been confirmed.98 95  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 2 (1976), 333r, 335r, 336r, 338r, 340r, 341r, 342r, 343r, 344r, 345r; Hirst, Michelangelo. I disegni, 149–60; on Tommaso dei Cavalieri and Michelangelo, see the essential study by Christoph L. Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso dei Cavalieri (Amsterdam, 1979). 96  “Signora Marchesa, e’ non par sendo io in Roma [. . .] che gli achadessi lasciare il Crocifisso a messer Tomao e farlo mezzano fra vostra Signoria e me, suo servo”: Carteggio, vol. 4, CMLXVII, 102. 97  “Indubbiamente la Crocefissione di Campion Hall si impone sulle altre versioni dipinte a noi note per l’ elevata tenuta pittorica e per la più attenta e calibrata fedeltà ai modelli di riferimento. [. . .] ciò non impedisce che la storia di questa Crocefissione sia nata in stretta prossimità con il maestro”: Rovetta in L’ultimo Michelangelo, 161. 98  Franca Persia and Ombretta Cocco, “Interpretation of reflectography,” in Forcellino et al., “I dipinti della Crocefissione dai disegni di Michelangelo: copie e modelli attraverso la lettura riflettografica,” 155–58.

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There are other aspects of the painting which are strikingly uncommon, and which pose unusual questions that cannot be answered through stylistic analysis alone. For instance, parts of the painted surface are not completed, leaving the underpainting exposed to the gaze of viewers, a fact that is difficult to explain in a context in which artists usually painted on commission. In two sections of the painting (along the Virgin’s left leg, and in the space between her cloak and the area beneath her knee), the painting appears incomplete, as an area of underpainting is left visible. The same is true of the space between the Virgin’s right-hand side and the inside of her forearm. As has been observed, these omissions demonstrate a certain indifference on the part of the artist, a “claim to freedom, inconceivable for any painter [other than Michelangelo].”99 It is to be hoped that experts will be able to investigate further the physical characteristics of this work, and that the findings of such investigations can be fruitfully compared with existing knowledge of Michelangelo’s technique as a painter. With this in mind, it seems that the time would finally be right for restoration, which provides the best opportunity for deepening our knowledge of a painting. The findings that have already emerged from the restoration of the Ragusa Pietà (based on the drawing of the Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, and which may even be an original by Michelangelo) would provide an interesting point of comparison.100 At present, critics are unanimous in believing that the Crucifixion in Oxford is either an original work by Michelangelo himself, or one that was executed under his close personal supervision.101

A Drawing of the Pietà for Vittoria Colonna and the Ragusa Pietà At the request of this lady, he made an image of Christ’s bare body, laid down from the cross. Like an abandoned dead body it would fall at the feet of his holy mother, were it not for the two little angels supporting it under the arms. But his mother, seated at the foot of the cross, her face

99  “[Una] rivendicazione di libertà inconcepibile per ogni altro pittore [che non fosse Michelangelo]”: Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo as Painter, 109. 100  Maria Forcellino, “Una Crocefissione e una Pietà di Michelangelo per gli ‘spirituali,’ ” Incontri 26 (2011): 16–26. 101  Regarding the Crucifixion in Urbino, Gronau hoped that critics would recognize the importance of such paintings, carried out under Michelangelo’s direct supervision: see George Gronau, Documenti Artistici Urbinati (Florence, 1935), 53; Christoph L. Frommel, “Vittoria Colonna und Michelangelos religiöse Krise von 1545/46,” in Synergies in visual culture: Bildkulturen im Dialog. Festschrift für Gerhard Wolf, ed. M. De Giorgi and N. Suthor, (Munich, 2013), 339–58; Rovetta, L’ultimo Michelangelo.

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tearful and grieving, opens her arms wide and raises both hands to the sky, speaking the words inscribed on the vertical beam of the cross: “One does not imagine how much blood it costs” (“Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa”). The cross resembles the one that the Bianchi carried in the procession, during the plague of 348, and which was placed in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.102 Condivi’s description of Michelangelo’s other composition for Colonna, the Pietà, clarifies that it was created on commission. The Pietà is also the subject of a contemporary work by Colonna, Meditatione del Venerdì Santo, or Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo, a cross between a letter and a treatise. Probably composed in response to one of Ochino’s sermons between 1539 and 1541 (Ochino had spoken of the Passion in his fourth Venetian sermon), this text underlines the important place that Colonna accorded the Passion of Christ in her own the religious reflection.103 It is likely that Michelangelo’s work served as a visual aid to this meditation, which represented “an encounter between a poet (Vittoria Colonna), an Evangelical preacher (Bernardino Ochino) and the most famous of artists, Michelangelo.”104 Colonna’s text may be a transcription of an oral meditation, recorded and fixed in written form by one of the members of the Spirituali.105 Michelangelo’s work for Colonna has now been identified as the drawing held in Boston106 (Figure 7.5). It depicts the Virgin in a seated position, aligned with the vertical beam of the cross. Resting in the space between her knees is the head of her dead son, following his deposition from the cross. The Virgin’s arms are opened wide with the palms of her hands facing upward, as if in prayer. Her face bears an expression of resigned submission, raised toward the sky. Inscribed on the cross is a verse by Dante: “One cannot imagine how much blood it costs” (“Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa”) (Paradise, XXIX, 91). The cross, which Condivi describes as being like that of the Bianchi, 102  Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 61. 103  See the contribution to this volume by Eleonora Carinci. The complex history behind the discovery of this text is traced in Adriano Prosperi, “Tra mistici e pittori: Vittoria Colonna,” in Eresie e devozioni (Rome, 2010), 187, note 35; Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 48–49 and notes 112 and 113, which also contains the text (117–22). 104  “[S]i doveva dare l’incontro di una poetessa (Vittoria Colonna) con un celebre predicatore evangelico (Bernardino Ochino) e col più celebre tra gli artisti, Michelangelo”: Prosperi, Tra mistici e pittori, 186. 105  Prosperi, Tra mistici e pittori, 188, note 37. 106  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 3, 426r, 76–78; drawing in black pencil on yellowed paper, 295 × 195 mm.

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is not fully visible in the drawing, its upper part being cut off. His arms spread apart, Christ is supported by two wingless angels, adopting a posture reminiscent of another work from the 1530s for Tommaso dei Cavalieri.107 Facing the viewer, and almost aligned with the figure of his mother, Christ shows his beautiful naked body, free of signs of the torture he has undergone, apart from the holes that the nails have left in his hands and feet and a wound, barely visible, in his right-hand side. His face, noticeably foreshortened, betrays his pain, as does his hair, matted with blood and sweat, virtually the sole indication of the suffering he has endured. Like the Christ of the Crucifixion, the Christ of the Pietà is distinguished by his physical beauty and power. At his feet, very faintly sketched, lies a crown of thorns. Christ is presented frontally, allowing the viewer to contemplate his entire body, which is supported by his mother and the two angels. The upward gaze of the Virgin is unusual for drawings of this kind, which tend instead to show her absorbed in the contemplation of her son’s dead body. This version of the Pietà is also characterized by significant iconographic innovations, differing noticeably, for example, from the version executed by the young Michelangelo for the French cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas. In the traditional Vesperbild, Christ is shown deposed from the cross, his head resting in the lap of his mother, who gazes down at him. In the drawing for Colonna Michelangelo breaks from this tradition, merging distinct themes, at least two of which are clearly recognizable: the Pietà con Angeli and the Imago Pietatis.108 Theological analysis of this drawing has revealed, once again, a distinct correspondence between Colonna’s attitude toward the Virgin Mary, and that of Ochino from 1537 to 1541. The innovative iconography of the piece, which highlights Christ as the center of attention, rather than Mary’s sorrow as she contemplates her dead son, can be linked to a particular tenet of Ochino and Valdesian theology. Ochino’s sermons from the period reveal a dramatic reinterpretation of the role of Mary: specifically, she is excluded from any participation in the salvation offered by Christ. Maria is no longer the Mediatrix, the Advocate, the Orator of Marian tradition; instead, she becomes an example of faith and humility, thereby still performing a vital role in relation to a form of religion that emphasized the role of Christ and the doctrine of salvation. This is the image of Mary presented in Ochino’s sermons.

107  Tolnay, Corpus, vol. 2, 338r, 106. 108  For iconographic analysis of the Pietà, see Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 64–69.

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And note the great humility of Mary, who instead of accepting the dignity and honor of being the mother of Christ, said: I am the servant, the lowly maiden. And in faith, we must believe, she spoke these words: My Lord, it pleases me to be your servant and the servant of your son, whom I shall nurture. And I shall be content to hold and cradle him in my arms, to endure every hardship and suffering necessary to raise and feed him, for the benefit of all elect souls. [. . .] And even now that he is laid down from the cross, I am content to hold him in my arms and to accompany him, together with the blessed disciples, to his tomb.109 The text of Colonna’s Pianto attests to her interest in the theme of the Pietà, which would lead her to request a work by Michelangelo on this same subject: “The day of Venus and the late hour move me to describe the pity wrought by the vision of Christ, lying dead in his mother’s arms.”110 The Pianto’s description of how the Virgin “consigned his near dead body to burial at that moment” (“immo far del suo corpo quasi morto una sepoltura in quella hora”), encourages us to reflect upon the position of Christ, cradled by his mother in Michelangelo’s drawing; as does the presence of the angels in both texts: “He did not call the Angels, for I know they were there, indeed I believe they sought to bear Christ’s weight, as a way of grieving their Lord.”111 Similarly, in Colonna’s text, as in Ochino’s sermons, the Virgin is presented as a model for imitation, by virtue of her “true faith”:

109  “Et nota la humiltà grande di Maria, ch’ella non si offerì accettar quella dignità e quello honore de esser madre di Dio, ma disse: io son l’ ancilla e la serva. E piamente è da credere che la dicessi: Signor mio, io son contenta d’ esser la serva tua e medesimamente del tuo figliuolo, al quale sarò nodrice. E son contenta di stringerlo e tenerlo nelle braccia mie, e patire ogni stento e fatica per allevarlo e per nodrirlo, a beneficio di tutti gli eletti. [. . .] E mi contento anchora, deposto della croce, haverlo nelle mie braccia e con quelli santi discepoli accompagnarlo per fino nel sepulchro”: Ochino, Predica seconda predicata in Vinegia . . . M.D. XXXIX, cited in Campi, 93. For a full discussion of the theology of Colonna’s Pianto, including some revision of Campi’s interpretation, see Carinci in this volume. 110  “El giorno del Venere et l’hora tarda me convitano a scriver del pietoso effetto di veder Christo morto in braccio a la Madre”: Vittoria Colonna, Meditatione del Venerdì Santo, cited in Campi, 117. 111  “[N]on chiamò gli Angeli perché so che ce trovorno, anzi credo che desideravano assumere el peso humano per pianger in quell’ atto el Signor loro”: Colonna, Meditatione del Venerdì Santo, in Campi, Michelangelo, 117 and 120.

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faith alone kept her alive, and she kept her faith alive to spread it throughout all the world, which was then stripped of it. Through her was born the ultimate Treasure that faith holds for the Christian, who has received it from the Virgin, without whom it would have been extinguished; now think, reverend and most pious Father, how much we are indebted to him.112 In truth, Michelangelo’s drawing of the Pietà is not so much a work reflecting Marian worship and contemporary Valdesian or Ochinian ideas about salvation (the similarities between them are now almost universally recognized), as a piece expressing a particular theological notion regarding the debate between creation and redemption. Support for this interpretation can be found in Colonna’s appreciation of the drawing, expressed in a letter that is widely believed to refer to this work: I have seen that nothing is impossible for he who believes. I had great faith in God, who gave you a supernatural gift to make this Christ, which is so wonderful that it surpassed all my expectations. Emboldened by your miracles, I wished for that which I now see so marvelously completed, every part of which reaches the height of perfection [summa perfectione]. Nothing more could be desired, neither could one have desired so much in the first place.113 The reference to the “height of perfection” (summa perfectione) conveys not only an aesthetic judgment, but also a theological evaluation, praising the perfect balance the drawing strikes through its combined focus on Christ, salvation and Mary.114 Regardless of whether or not it expresses a particular theological stance, Michelangelo’s Pietà for Colonna seems to have been avidly sought after by the Spirituali; sources suggest that the Pietà existed both as a drawing and in a painted version. Various sources point to the existence of a painted Pietà by Michelangelo owned by Cardinal Pole, who had apparently been given it by Colonna. Critics 112  “solo la fede la sostenne in vita et lei sostenne viva la fede per reinvestirne tutto il mondo che ne era al’hor spogliato, per tanto nascendo quanto Thesoro può aver il Christiano da la vera fede, et havendola ricevuta da la Vergine che se non per lei saria stata extinta, hor pensate, Reverendo et osservandissimo Patre, se devemo restarli obligati”: Colonna, Meditatione del Venerdì Santo, in Campi, Michelangelo, 117 and 122. 113  Vittoria Colonna to Michelangelo, in Carteggio, CCXXIV, 209. 114  Campi, Michelangelo, 75.

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have previously grappled with the use of the term “quadro” in a letter between Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and the bishop of Fano (the Dominican theologian Pietro Bertano, 1501–58), but struggled to draw the conclusion that that the object of exchange was, in fact, a painting rather than a drawing.115 The recent discovery of a new letter, which seems to refer to this exchange, and also contains the word ‘quadro’ (with all its concomitant complexities), does indeed suggest that the object in question was not a drawing, but a painting.116 Studies in the field of art history have probably not paid sufficient attention to the historical and cultural context that provides the background to one or two of Michelangelo’s original paintings. The meaning of the documents relating to the painting of the Pietà ceases to be obscure when one keeps in mind the particular context and the close acquaintances between the individuals in question. The correspondence between Gonzaga and Bertano needs to be properly contextualized in order for its significance to be fully appreciated. It occurred in the midst of the discussions at the Council of Trent, which Bertano and Pole had attended in 1546. On his way to Trent, where he would participate in the council with Pole between 4 February 1546 and 3 March 1547, Bertano had broken his journey at Mantua, in January 1546, to see Gonzaga, one of his supporters and protectors.117 From the month of February the two of them were in very close contact, as Bertano kept Gonzaga informed about the progress of the Council (in the same month, he sent him no less than three letters, dated 8, 13, and 16 February), thereby earning Gonzaga’s gratitude.118 This is the backdrop 115  The noun “quadro” is normally used to refer to a painting: see the analysis in Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 86–97; on Pietro Bertano, see the entry by Gerhard Rill in Dbi, vol. 9 (1967): 467–71. 116  This view is now shared by Hermann Fiore (L’ultimo Michelangelo, 188); Gianluca Masi (“Un dono di Michelangelo a Vittoria Colonna, la Pietà di Ragusa?,” in Mecenati, artisti e pubblico nel Rinascimento, Atti del XXI Convegno Internazionale (Pisa and Chianciano Terme, 20–23 July 2009), ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi [Florence, 2011], 169–97); Adriana Capriotti (“First Observations on a New Pietà with Angels,” in The Ragusa Pietà, Marco Bussagli, Costanza Mora, and Lorenza M. G. D’Alessandro, 116), Bussagli (“Anatomy and Symbolism in the Ragusa Pietà,” in ibid., 73); the theory that only the drawing exists continues to be upheld by Rovetta (“Diffusione e trasformazioni di modelli michelangioleschi attorno alla metà del Cinquecento,” in L’ultimo Michelangelo, 150). 117  Ercole Gonzaga to Reginald Pole, 21 January 1546, in BAV, Barb. Lat. 5793-LXII, c. 81 recto, in which he informs Pole, in Trento, of Bertano’s visit; thanks to Gonzaga, Bertano had been appointed Bishop of Fano (28 November 1537), when the post had been left empty following the death of the young Cosimo Gheri (Rill in Dbi). 118  Ercole Gonzaga to the Bishop of Fano, 18 February 1546, in BAV, Barb. Lat. 5793-LXII, c. 98 verso.

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against which the exchange of Michelangelo’s work was mentioned, in a letter from Bertano to Gonzaga, dated 12 May: Monsignor Pole has learned that you wish for a Christ made by Michelangelo, and has asked me not to make this desire known to others; for he has, in fact, a Christ made by that very artist, and would gladly send it to you. It is an image of the Pietà, although the entire body is visible. He says he would not feel deprived of it in the slightest, since he can procure another from the Marchesa di Pescara.119 Gonzaga made the following reply: Monsignore, or should I say my brother: if you were able to let me have that picture (“quadro”) of the image of Christ belonging to the very reverend Pole, for the sole purpose that I might have it copied by Messer Giulio here before returning it to you, I would be most obliged. Were you to honor me with such a favor, I tell you openly that you could not deliver it into any safer custody: the image of Christ will be in the hands of a faithful man who already carries him sculpted in his heart.120 There exists another letter discovered in 2005, in which Gonzaga again describes the object being exchanged as a “quadro.” In the interests of brevity, I have not transcribed the entire document in previous publications; here, however, the text is reproduced in full, in order to convey more vividly the

119  “Monsignor Polo ha per notizia, ch’ella desidera un Cristo di mane di Michelangelo, et amme imposto che io intenda segretamente la verità di cotal suo desiderio: perché, essendo in effetto, egli ne ha uno di mano propria del detto, che volentieri glielo manderebbe; ma è in forma di Pietà, pure se gli vede tutto il corpo. Dice che questo non sarebbe un privarsene, perciocché dalla marchesa di Pescara ne può avere un altro.” For the critical history of this letter, see M. Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 86 and 98. 120  “Mons.or mio come Fr.[te]llo: Quando mi possiate far haver quello Quadro d[e]lla imagini di Christo del Re.mo Polo per questo effetto solo ch’io lo possa far copiar da m. Giulio romano nro qui e rimandarglielo, mi sara cariss.o haverlo i quando mo la cortesia del car. li volessi passar questo segno, vi dico liberamente che no intendo ch’egli se ne privi in alcun modo no sapendo ovi meglio possa star [verso]: l’ imagini di christo che nelle mani di colui che lo porta per fede sculpito nel cuore”: Ercole Gonzaga to the Bishop of Fano, 21 May 1546, in BAV, Barb. Lat. 5793-LXII, c. 135 recto and verso; for the critical history of this letter, see ibid., 88 and note 105 with bibliography.

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historical context and the religious debate on original sin surrounding the reference to Michelangelo’s work: To the Bishop of Fano, in his own hand Monsignore, I have seen the Decree on original sin, which I find very good. I should, however, like to add a few words to heal the minds of those who, persuaded by the new doctrine of the Germans, believe that the fomes [tinder] is truly an o[riginal] sin, the outcome of the sin of our Father due to all those sins that we adults at present commit. The words are these: “Et hec sc.ta sinodus reprobat opinionem illorum qui affirmant Fomitem esse veri peccatum et dignum odio de nisi perpetuo condonetur.” Just as in the time of Pelagius, when the councils of Africa opposed his opinion, words were added to his decrees so as to stamp out all traces of heresy, thus is seems to me that this difference of the fomes between us and the Germans must be clarified with words, so open to doubt as to demonstrate that neither on this subject do we wish to adopt any position than that which has hitherto been adopted by the universal church. When Your Lordship sends me the painting belonging to the most reverend Pole, I shall prize it highly and have it copied immediately, before sending it back to Your most reverend Lordship to whom etc. Mantua, 11 June 1546.121 121  “Al vescovo di Fano di man pp. a Mons.or ho veduto il Decreto fatto del peccato originale che tutto mi piace, vero è ch vorrei aggiungervi alcune parole per sanar molti ingegni quali persuasi dalla dottrina nuova di Germani pensano certo che il Fomitem sia veramente peccato o  effetto del peccato del nostro Padre per ragion poi di tutti gli attuali che noi adulti commettiamo: le parole sono queste, Et hec sc.ta sinodus reprobat opinionem illorum qui affirmant Fomitem esse veri peccatum et dignum odio de nisi perpetuo condonetur” onde come al tempo di Pelagio quando nei concilii d’ Africa si confutò l’opinionem desso si posero nei Decreti parole che buttavano per terra tutte le parti della sua heresia, così a me pari poi che tra noi et Germani è questa differenza del Fomite si debba chiarire con parole sì aperte al dubbio che mostrino che neancho in questa parte vogliamo essere d’ altro parere di quello che fin hora ha tenuto la chiesa universale: Quando p V. S. mi mandera Il Quadro del R.mo Polo, l’ havero più caro per farlo subito copiare et rimandarlo a S[ua] S[ignoria] R.ma alla quale et. c. Di Mant.a lo 11 di Giugno del 1546”: Ercole Gonzaga to the Bishop of Fano (copia), 11 June 1546, in BAV, Barb. Lat. 5793-142 c. verso. I wish to thank Dr. Paolo Vian, director of Manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, for having helped to resolve a number of uncertainties regarding this transcription. On this document, see most recently Maria Forcellino, “The Pietà by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna: Sources, Documentation and Art-Historical Literature,” in The Ragusa Pietà, 89.

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This new reference to a painting reignited the debate, which would later emerge again, with renewed vigor, following the discovery (in 2010) of the Ragusa Pietà. (Figure 7.6) This painting presents a faithful iconographic replication of the Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, exactly as it is known to us from the drawing in Boston and the various engravings made of it. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Ragusa Pietà may, in fact, be an original work by Michelangelo.122 This initial hypothesis, advanced on the basis of stylistic criteria, can be better evaluated today, now that we know the results of the restoration and conservation of the painting, carried out under the supervision of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro.123 The facts that have emerged from the restoration process have enabled us to gain a deeper insight into the work. One of the chief findings is that the painting cannot possibly be a copy.124 Examinations using reflectography and discoveries relating to the painter’s technique provide evidence of a creative process vastly more complex than the underlying drawing, which does not suggest a pedantic imitation of Michelangelo’s original. This finding represents an important critical advance, bringing clarity to the scientific debate surrounding this work. Until recently, the considerable number of Pietà paintings, derived from Michelangelo’s drawing of the Pietà for Colonna, were almost all incorrectly attributed to Marcello Venusti: a case in point is the Pietà found in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, one of the finest.125 122  Antonio Forcellino, La Pietà perduta (Milan, 2010); Antonio Forcellino, in Il Rinascimento a Roma, 314–15 cat. n. 141. 123  “The recent rediscovery of the Ragusa Pietà and the Tommaso Cavalieri Crucifixion has led to involvement from the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro in a series of rigorous archival, historical and critical studies concerning these two works. As early as 2010 we decided to publish this research in the institute’s Bulletin. [. . .] Our desire was to avoid the superficial evaluations and discussions that can develop, or which can even be contrived, in dealing with potential attributions involving famous artists”: Gisella Capponi, Preface, in The Ragusa Pietà, 9. The restoration was carried out in the summer of 2011, by the conservator Lorenza M. G. D’Alessandro, under the scientific direction of the “Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro di Roma”: Marica Mercalli (art historian), Costanza Mora (conservator), Elisabetta Giani (physicist), and Kristina Hermann Fiore (art historian of the “Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma”). 124  Marica Mercalli and Costanza Mora, “Methodological Considerations in the Restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” in The Ragusa Pietà, 18. 125  For an up-to-date list of the paintings of Michelangelo’s Pietà, see Hermann Fiore in L’ultimo Michelangelo, 190–91; new observations are made in Masi, “Un dono di Michelangelo a Vittoria Colonna, la Pietà di Ragusa?,” 180, note 34. A few years ago my attention was drawn to a late sixteenth-century painting from Avellino, illustrating the

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Figure 7.6 Michelangelo Buonarroti (?), Ragusa Pietà, private collection (US), tempera on board, 64 × 46 cm.

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Also worthy of mention is a new Pietà con Angeli (in Rome, only very recently identified), whose iconography and stylistic qualities are so strikingly similar to the Ragusa Pietà that it would seem to be a copy.126 More interesting still are the findings regarding artistic technique and the study of the painted surface, both in terms of the materials used, and from the point of view of color application. The work in question is actually a tempera painting, and was therefore executed using a technique that was rather obsolete in the mid-sixteenth century, when it was losing ground to oil painting.127 The tempera technique would have been strongly characteristic of an artist who had trained in the late 1400s, and was, moreover, used in the only painting that can be attributed with absolute certainty to Michelangelo, the Tondo Doni.128 Significantly, another painting Michelangelo made in the 1530s for the Duke of Ferrara—the Leda and the swan which was later lost in France, as Vasari noted—was also executed using the tempera technique.129 Another intriguing quality of the painting is the presence of certain areas that have been left visibly “incomplete,” and which make it possible to observe what lies underneath the layers of paint. The artist appears not to have been concerned with completing the painted surface, instead allowing the base layer to remain visible as another potentially expressive element. This expedient strategy can be observed in several parts of the painting, behind the angel on the left, and, on the same side, between Christ’s arm and clothing.130 It is, popularity of this subject in the south; there is certainly scope for a project tracing the diffusion of the Pietà in painting, analogous to the study already carried out for sculpture. See Julien Pascal, “La Pietà Colonna de Michel Ange et sa diffusion sculptèe dans les paroisses languedociennes au XVIIe siècle,” in L’art au village. La production artistique des paroisses rurales (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Rennes, 2009), 153–66. 126  Adriana Capriotti, “First Observations on a New Pietà with Angels,” in The Ragusa Pietà, 115–21, illustration on 117. In her presentation of this new Pietà, the author appropriately refers to the copy made by Giulio Romano and Fermo Ghisoni for Ercole Gonzaga, of which evidence is offered by the correspondence between Gonzaga and Bertano. The restoration of this painting, too, would certainly yield new findings relevant to the ongoing critical debate. 127  D’Alessandro, “The Restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” in The Ragusa Pietà, 41–42. 128   Il Tondo Doni di Michelangelo e il suo restauro, ed. Silvia Meloni (Florence, 1985). 129  Maria Forcellino, “The Pietà by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna,” 92–93. 130  “The pink preparation is clearly visible in several areas where the artist has purposely left it in view, as well as at the base of the cracks in the more abraded areas of the painting”: D’Alessandro, “The Restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” 35. “Further, the cleaning procedures revealed areas of ‘unfinished’ work: a portion of red preparatory layer is still in view behind the left angel, and an area of red lake is seen between the arm and the tunic of the angel. [. . .] We are in full agreement with Antonio Forcellino’s statement that a copyist

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moreover, a feature that connects the Ragusa Pietà and the Crucifixion belonging to the Cavalieri family. Such remarkably similarities between the physical execution of different works are hardly likely to have arisen by chance, and should certainly serve as a stimulus to explore both paintings in greater depth. Back in the 1800s, Grimm established a connection between the Ragusa Pietà, Michelangelo, and Ludovico Beccadelli; the latter was secretary to Pole, who had been sent to Ragusa by Paul IV. Following its restoration, this painting has revealed itself to be a work of exceptional interest and extremely high quality. Freed from the clumsy overpainting added by previous restorations (concentrated in particular places, including the face of Christ and that of the Virgin,131 and which had previously hindered accurate stylistic and iconographic analysis), the Ragusa Pietà has finally emerged in all its expressive glory. The painting’s originality has been recovered, and with it the intensely dramatic nature of the scene it depicts: one sees shreds of dusky light subtly painted in the shadows, and a small moon. Such details create an affinity between this work and the frescoes in the Cappella Paolina, especially the Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1546–49), whose stylistic and formal parallels with the Ragusa Pietà are noted elsewhere.132 Although in some ways an interesting and thought-provoking point of contact, the face of the Virgin in the Ragusa Pietà—including her teeth, which are clearly visible—seems to recall a figure in the Last Judgement (probably painted around 1540), namely, the Donna con la cuffia who sits among the group of the bodily resurrected in the bottom lefthand corner of the painting.133 The interpretation of the Pietà embodied by the painting is much more dramatic than that proposed by the drawing in Boston, or in the engravings with which we are familiar. And it is truly fascinating to think that both the Ragusa Pietà, and the Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John of the Cavalieri family, might in fact both have been produced by the great Michelangelo, during such a crucial phase of spiritual turbulence.

would not leave such unfinished parts still in evidence”: Marica Mercalli, “Methodological Considerations in the Restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” 18. 131  “The depiction of Christ’s head, shown in shadow, evidently suffered greatly from the cleaning procedures. This apparently induced the restorer to hide the damage by repainting the entire area. . . . In attempting to re-execute the composition the restorer confused the original left eyebrow with the eyelid, thus lowering the brow and shifting the entire angle of the face into a more forward perspective”: D’Alessandro, “The restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” 46 and note 12. 132  Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo as Painter, 113. 133  Bussagli, “Anatomy and Symbolism in the Ragusa Pietà,” 75.

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Given the evidence we have gathered, it would be instructive to compare the various painted versions of the Pietà subject in terms of their technical execution, including the panel most recently discovered [. . .] [Pietà with Angels]. The examinations should ideally follow diagnostic criteria that would permit further analysis and clarification of the genesis, authorship and relationships between the different versions.134 This excellent proposal could perhaps also be extended to include a comparison between the fingerprints now identified in various parts of the work (both in the underpainting and in the painted layer itself), and those already in our possession, which are almost certainly those of Michelangelo.135 134  D’Alessandro, “The Restoration of the Ragusa Pietà,” 41. 135  Ibid., 45. While this article was in press, new evidence of relevance to the arguments presented here was published in: “D’après Michelangelo”: la fortuna dei disegni per gli amici nelle arti del cinquecento (Milan, Castello Sforzesco, 30 September 2015 to 10 January 2016), ed. Alessia Alberti, Alessandro Rovetta and Claudio Salsi (Venice, 2015). On these new findings, in particular in relation to the discovery of the Amadori Crucifixion, I will soon be publishing further work.

Chapter 8

Musical Settings of the Rime* Anne Piéjus The natural association between music and poetry in sixteenth-century Italy begs further exploration into the links enjoyed by various people—poets, composers, and performers—with the two art forms, whose methods of production and social aspects so often coincided. Vittoria Colonna’s poetry has inspired many musicians from wide social and geographical backgrounds, making her Rime one of the major sources of musical inspiration by spiritual Petrarchism. The poet herself does not seem to have had any musical training in particular. She made no mention, furthermore, of having written her poems with possible musical settings in mind. However, we do know that she was an exceptional dancer. In the third book of his Dialogus de Nostra Aetate viris and fœminis florentibus, written in Ischia where he frequented the Colonna family, the historian Paolo Giovio refers to Vittoria’s physical grace and extraordinary elegance, both reflected in dance, which she mastered perfectly. He mentions in particular a Hungarian dance that she performed alone at a ball, in front of an admiring audience, her rhythmic precision and the perfect design of her steps revealed by the movement of her dress on the floor.1 Noblewomen were certainly not expected to be composers. Women poets who accompanied their works with their own musical compositions were generally from more modest backgrounds, poets such as Gaspara Stampa (1523–54) who accompanied her poetry on the lute.2 This combined talent * My sincere thanks to Jane A. Bernstein, Philippe Canguilhem, and Massimiliano Rossi for their assiduous reading of this article. 1  See Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 513. My thanks to Veronica Copello for alerting me to this source. 2  Once in Venice, after their father died, Gaspara and her siblings Cassandra and Baldassare took lute and voice lessons under the tutelage of the excellent composer and singer Perissone Cambio (Maria Bellonci, “Introduzione,” in Gaspara Stampa, Rime [Milan, 1976], 5–25) who dedicated to her his Primo Libro di Madrigali a quatro Voci Di Perissone Cambio. Con Alcuni Di Cipriano Rore Novamente Composti Et Posti In Luce (Venice, 1547), claiming his admiration for Stampa’s exceptional gifts in music: “ma non mi potra già huomo del modo dire giamai ch’io habbia havuto poco giuditio nel dedicare queste mie note, quale elle siano, alla S. V. perche si sa bene homai, e non pure in questa felice città, ma quasi in ogni parte, niuna

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was particularly associated with courtesans. For women of the upper classes, an education in music focused rather on shaping one’s tastes and musical accomplishments— as seen in the musical talents of Isabella d’Este (1474– 1539), who by general consensus was said to sing, play the lute, and dance beautifully. Letters of hers exist in which she calls, with the authority of an expert, for a lute to accompany her voice.3 Vittoria Colonna left no such traces. In 1948, in the first article devoted to the music composed for poetry by Colonna and by Michelangelo, the musicologist Achille Lauri made reference to Colonna’s melomania. He based this on Michelangelo’s own well-documented love of music from the years they both shared in Rome—a period of time when the personal and artistic bonds between Colonna and Michelangelo were at their most intense. From this evidence alone, Lauri maintains that like Michelangelo, Colonna—whose Roman palazzo, according to him, rang out with concerts and Franciscan laude— demonstrated a marked taste for Palestrina’s counterpoint. He goes on to suggest that, again like Michelangelo, Colonna composed poems especially for musicians.4 None of these assertions are documented and so must be treated with caution. No music composed for Colonna’s poetry has emerged from Rome, even though the Roman manuscripts of her poems were important among musicians. She was not involved in setting her poems to music; all the editions and manuscripts of her work set to music appeared after her death, which sets her apart from Michelangelo who, in a letter to Sebastiano del Piombo, mentioned his satisfaction at seeing his verse elevated by Arcadelt’s music—a composer whose work was greatly admired.5 donna al mondo amar più la musica di quello che fate voi, ne altra più raramente possederla.” Gaspara’s voice and talent were also sung by Girolamo Parabosco (Lettere amorose, Lib. 1. 32). See Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston, 1982). 3  In a famous letter to Lorenzo da Pavia, her instrument maker, Isabella mentions an ebony lute that the singer Serafino Aquilano had seen in Lorenzo’s shop in Venice. She asks for one the same and begs that it should be strung a little higher than the viola he already made for her, so as to suit her voice. Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 2992, libro 8, c. 86. See also William F. Prizer, “Una ‘Virtù Molto Conveniente A Madonne’: Isabella D’Este as a Musician,” Journal of Musicology 17 (1999): 10–49. 4  Achille Lauri, “Poesia e musica nella Roma rinascimentale. Versi de Vittoria Colonna e di Michelangelo musicati,” Rivista musicale italiana L (1948): 124–34. See also William Prizer, “Una ‘Virtù Molto Conveniente A Madonne.’ ” 5  Lauri, “Poesia e musica nella Roma rinascimentale,” 132–33. Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “Music settings to poems by Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” in Art and Music in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honor of Franca Trinchieri Camiz (London, 2003), 377–88.

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We know of only two musical settings composed for Colonna’s poetry during her lifetime. The story of the musical settings is related to the popularity of Colonna’s publications. It traces how her Rime were circulated and received, from the start of 1540 until the end of the sixteenth century, at which point Colonna’s poems disappear from the musical landscape—contrary yet again to Michelangelo, whose musical posterity discreetly continued for another twenty years thanks to Francesca Caccini and Filippo Vitali.6 The last extant source demonstrating interest in Colonna’s Rime comes from a manuscript dating from November 1604, containing settings dating from an earlier period.7 It is an octavo volume containing a six-voice mass by Adrian Willaert (ff. 1–53), followed by previously unseen madrigals by Costanzo Porta (ff. 54–88), one of which is in two parts and composed for Colonna’s famous sonnet “Se ’l breve suon che sol questo aer frale.” While the mass is obviously much older, the madrigals are evidence of writing from later in Porta’s (1528–1601) career. After a three-century hiatus, Colonna’s poems also provided the pretext for some unusual compositions during the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These included two anonymous mélodies for voice and piano, published in Paris in 1850,8 and a mélodie, “Lume del ciel,” for two female voices and piano by the scholar, librettist, and composer Riccardo Boccardi, which appeared in 1916 with a dedication to Princess Teresa Colonna.9 Don Giovanni Pagella, a Salesian priest, organist, and choirmaster in Turin, and briefly student of Vincent d’Indy, also composed an unaccompanied

6  Aria “Chi desia di saper che cosa è amore,” and ottava “Io veggio i campi verdeggiar fecondi” by Francesca Caccini, Il primo libro delle musiche a una, e due voci (Florence, 1618). “Chi desia di saper che cosa è amore” also appears in Musiche di Filippo Vitali. A una due et tre voci. Per cantare nel Cimbalo, o in altri stromenti simili con l’alfabeto per la Chitarra in quelle più a proposito per tale stromento. Libro terzo (Rome, 1620). On Caccini, see Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago,‎2009). 7  Bologna, International museum of music, ms. U. 92. 8  Mélodies composées par Vittoria Colonna (Paris, 1850), on the paraphrastic translations of Colonna. 9  Teresa Caracciolo, duchess of San Teodoro, wife of Marcantonio Colonna, prince of Paliano and indirect descendant of the poet, after whom they named their daughter. The duchess most likely met the composer. The text, which in various places departs from that of Colonna, produces a two-part melody, in which the composer gladly superimposes the poetic opening lines on other verses. See Lucia Navarrini Dell’Atti, “Composizioni musicali su testi poetici di Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,” Incontri con Vittoria Colonna‬: atti delle giornate di studio, Arezzo, 26 January–2 March 2006, Franco Cristelli‬, Istituto di istruzione superiore Vittoria Colonna (Arezzo, 2007), 57–130.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

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melody for two sopranos and bass, on Colonna’s “Vergine pura che de’ raggi ardenti.”10 Among the musical settings dating from the sixteenth century, on which this chapter focuses, there is a significant evolution in Colonna’s popularity among composers. By the second half of the century, her poetry served as an important source for spiritual madrigals, which were gaining prominence at that time. Continuing the comparison with Michelangelo, it should be noted that his musical popularity stemmed essentially from numerous editions of the first book of madrigals for four voices by Arcadelt, who set two of the artist’s poems to music, and to a lesser extent from the fashion for Corteccia, who produced a madrigal based on a poem by Michelangelo.11 By contrast, more than fifty polyphonic madrigals for four, five, six, and even seven voices, based on texts by Colonna, emanated from Venice, Padua, Verona, Cremona, Lucca, Rome, Naples, Palermo, or even Prague, appearing in anthologies and singleauthored publications that included Colonna’s works together with those of other poets or contained settings devoted solely to her poetry. These pieces of music are at once prolific and difficult to identify, due to the number of poetic sources (printed and in manuscript), and due to the frequent mistakes in attributing works to Colonna. Bibliographies devoted to poetry set to music have perpetuated these errors, by omitting too many published madrigals,12 and conversely, by attributing to Colonna poems that had long since been attributed to other authors, or anonymous poems where the opening lines parody those of Colonna. The sources of these musical compositions are either editions in partbooks or manuscripts. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this study aims to contribute to the study of the popularity of Colonna’s Rime, by showing the

10  Giovanni Pagella, Vergine pura (Turin, 1938). Transcribed in Navarrini Dell’Atti, “Composizioni musicali su testi poetici di Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,” 121–24. 11  Arcadelt, “Deh dimm’Amor se l’alma di costei” and “Io dico che fra voi potenti dei” appear in various manuscript sources from the early 1530s and in Arcadelt’s first book of madrigals for four voices (Venice, 1539). “Se qui son chius’i begl’occhi e sepolti” appears in Corteccia’s second book of madrigals for four voices (Venice, 1547). 12   Bibliografia della musica italiana vocale profana pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700, ed. E. Vogel, A. Einstein, Fr. Lesure, and C. Sartori (Pomezia, 1977–) identifies 16 editions of music composed for Colonna’s verse; seven are erroneous, and the bibliography omits Palestrina’s madrigal, and the first book of spiritual madrigals by Philippe de Monte, which contains eight sonnets by Colonna. These inaccuracies were corrected in the RePIM (Repertorio della Poesia Italiana in Musica, 1500–1700, ed. Angelo Pompilio, http://repim.muspe.unibo .it). However, it is still incomplete and only takes editions into account.

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importance of the polyphonic madrigal in the distribution and circulation of her poetry. The Rime in Music Colonna’s oeuvre is characterized by the formal uniformity of the poetry, at the heart of which the sonnet occupies an almost exclusive position—reflected perfectly by the music composed for the poet’s verse. Extending the comparison with Michelangelo, this uniformity gives rise to a great difference. While we can count more than fifty musical madrigals for Colonna’s verse, and only five for those by Michelangelo, those five pieces include two madrigals set to music by Arcadelt,13 an epithalamium (set to music by Corteccia), as well as the aria and the ottava already cited. By contrast, the music composed for Colonna’s works reflects the overwhelming presence of the sonnet, a poetic genre that has long dominated the repertoire of polyphonic madrigals, alongside stanzas of canzone, madrigals in the poetic sense of the word, eclogues, ballate, and so on. Most of Colonna’s musical popularity stems from the repertoire of the madrigal, a generic term adopted by composers or publishers independently of the nature and form of the poems set to music. A rare fact to note is that Giovanthomaso Cimello, one of the first composers to have set Colonna’s verse to music, made a distinction between the poems he set to music (madriale et altre rime) and the musical compositions themselves, known as canti.14 The madrigal genre implies in principle the composition of music that is specific to the verse. At the end of the century, some of Colonna’s sonnets were however integrated into an entirely different tradition: that of the spiritual lauda. “Quando vedrò di questa mortal luce” and “Gli angeli eletti al gran ben infinito” were published in books of laude for the congregation of the Oratory in Rome, first as musical settings for three voices, then in poetic form.15 13  “Deh dimm’Amor se l’alma di costei” and “Io dico che fra voi potenti dei.” 14   Di Giovanthom. Cimello Libro primo de canti a quatro voci Sopra Madriali et altre Rime Con li Nomi delli loro authori volgari et con le Più necessarie osservanze instromentali, e più convenevoli avvertenze De toni accio si possono anchora Sonare, Et Cantare insieme (Venice, 1548). There is also a modern edition: Giovan Tomaso Cimello The Collected Secular Works, ed. James Haar and Donna Cardamone, Recent Research in the Music of the Renaissance 126 (Madison, WI, 2001). 15  The first sonnet was published in Il terzo libro delle laudi spirituali, stampate ad instantia delli Reverendi Padri della Congregatione dell’Oratorio. Con una Instrutione per promovere e conservare il peccatore Convertito (Rome, 1577; rpr. 1583): Il primo libro delle laudi

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Although Colonna’s poems remain exceptional in this endogenous repertoire, “Vergine pura che dai raggi ardenti” appears in one of the various collections of laude published by the Jesuits, Lodi devote per uso della Dottrina Cristiana (Genoa, G. Bartoli, 1589).16 The lauda almost systematically employs strophic music and lends itself easily to being re-used (several new poems were adapted to a given piece of music and vice versa). Setting them to music therefore raises unaired questions from the world of the madrigal: music composed for the first quatrain is used again for the second quatrain, as well as for the tercets. Depending on the work, tercets are extended by repeating a verse, or the music is shortened. The concept of musical expression that repeats itself across various verses is very different, and much more constraining, than that of the madrigal, where the concept of the whole, as well as the detailed writing, suggest a true interpretation of the poem. Another broad question common to all composers is that of the literary sources employed. Musicians could draw on poetry from books as much as from manuscripts, or from the music of their predecessors. Nonetheless, certain collections mixed poems printed beneath the music, which were sometimes difficult to piece together again (such as part-books with fragmented text, seen frequently in the polyphony of the madrigal), along with poems printed simply as poems. This was the case for the books of laude, which served as poetic sources as much as books of music for song. The books used were not limited to those containing only Colonna’s Rime, incidentally. Also worth noting are poetic anthologies, which were as much in circulation as single-authored books—in particular the Venetian anthologies of Rime Spirituali published in the 1550s “al segno della speranza,” which were the source of numerous first-generation spiritual madrigals.17 These three spirituali a tre voci, Stampata [sic] ad istanza delli Reverendi padri della Congregatione dello Oratorio (Rome, 1583, 1585); the second sonnet was published in the 1583 edition only. Both were reprinted in poetic form in the Libro delle laudi spirituali Dove in uno sono compresi i Tre Libri gia stampati. E ridutta la Musica à più brevità, e facilità: con l’accrescimento delle parole, e con l’aggiunta de molte Laudi nuove, che si canteranno nel modo che dentro si mostra. Stampata ad instanza delli Reverendi Padri della Congregatione dell’Oratorio (Rome, 1589). See Anne Piéjus, Musique et dévotion à Rome à la fin de la Renaissance. Les laudes de l’Oratoire, (Épitome musical) (Turnhout, 2013), 171–72. 16  Giancarlo Rostirolla, La lauda spirituale tra Cinque e Seicento. Poesie e canti devozionali nell’Italia della Controriforma. Studi di Giancarlo Rostirolla, Danilo Zardin e Oscar Mischiati. Volume offerto a Giancarlo Rostirolla nel suo sessantesimo compleanno (Rome, 2001), 398. 17  Some of these were published in Musica spirituale, libro primo. Di canzon e madrigali, a cinque voci. Composta da diversi . . . (Venice, 1563), compiled by Giovanni Del Bene, who

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books, especially the first (1550), contained a great number of Colonna’s poems taken from the 1546 Valgrisi edition. Most of the sonnets that were set to music can be found there. These texts are also very varied: looking at the entire range of music composed for Colonna’s poetry, we can see that the phenomenon of musical derivation and repetition, possibly resulting from some kind of homage, is extremely limited, unlike with the most famous Petrarchan sonnets. Musicians therefore appear to have drawn on poetic publications rather than the madrigals of their predecessors. Close scrutiny of the text written beneath the music for each voice can sometimes allow us to trace back the source and identify the means by which Colonna’s Rime circulated. In this way, textual variants reveal inconsistencies in the harmonies between the madrigals of Pietro Vinci and Philippe de Monte, who used six common sonnets, proving that each composer worked from different poetic sources. Almost all the sonnets set to music appear in the 1548 Valgrisi edition, which seems to have been the most thumbed poetic source for composers. However, the poems sometimes underwent major alterations, even as far as changing the meaning of the poem: Antonio Il Verso transformed “Di lagrime, e di foco” into “Di lagrime di pianto”—the oxymoronic association of tears and fire plateaus out into a banal repetition.18 Such phenomena, commonplace in lighter genres where composers rearranged strophic poetry or slotted in their own verse, were less usual in the more elevated genre of the polyphonic madrigal. Although we do not know whether a poet (or a copyist) has imitated Colonna or whether composers made modifications, we can count several madrigals composed for Colonna’s opening lines or which echo her sonnets. “Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse / ch’essendo spenta in me vive l’ardore” set to music by Il Verso19 can be attributed to Colonna; but “Di così nobil fiamma / Amor m’accese il core” by Felice Anerio20 is nothing more than a quotation of the famous sonnet, as is “Di così nobil fiamma amor m’accende / che nel più grave ardor gioisco e moro” by Giovanni Andrea Dragoni.21 was also the author of spiritual verse that appeared in anthologies. See Katherine Powers, “The Spiritual Madrigal in Counter-Reformation Italy: Definition, Use, and Style” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997), 219. 18  “Di lagrime di pianto,” in Di Antonio Il Verso della città di Piazza. Il Primo Libro de’ Madrigali a cinque voci. Novamente dato in luce (Palermo, 1590). 19   Di Antonio Il Verso siciliano della città di Piazza il Terzo Libro de’ Madrigali a cinque voci (Palermo, 1595). 20   Di Felice Anerio romano il Primo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci. Novamente composti, et dati in luce (Venice, 1587). 21   Di Giovan’Andrea Dragoni, Il Secondo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci, nuovamente posti in luce (Venice, 1575).

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Although the vast majority of musical settings made use of Colonna’s spiritual works, there were some that employed verses of a more secular nature. We know of at least one composition based on Colonna’s canzone: one stanza of “Mentre la nave mia, lunge dal Porto” set to music by Cimello was published in 1548.22 An anonymous madrigal, composed for the tercets (“O viver mio noioso o adversa sorte”) from the sonnet “Quando ’l gran lume,” was included in a small book of various madrigals for four voices published in 1554,23 along with works by Arcadelt, Bodeo, Cambio, Ferrabosco, Nasco, Willaert, Palestrina, and eighteen anonymous madrigals. The high register of the sonnet comes close to the lighter poetic genres—it should come as no surprise to find alongside sonnets by Petrarch, Bembo, Ariosto or Colonna, one of the famous madrigals on the theme of the kiss, “Baciami vita mia,” set to music by Ferrabosco. Corfini, a composer based in Lucca, also published a love sonnet of Colonna’s, “Quando più string’il cor la fiamma ardente,” in his second book of madrigals for five voices.24 This prolific composer of madrigals offers a good example of the variety of literary sources available to this generation. His first book for five voices (with two dialogues for seven voices at the end of the edition)25 contained many anonymous works of varied subject, matter and form, but also a sestina by Bembo, and sonnets by Petrarch, Della Casa, Francesco Maria Molza, and Colonna—who figured right at the heart of the Parnassus of spiritual Petrarchism. The so-called amorous compositions are among the first ones to have been set to music, while the more numerous spiritual poems provided sources for the spiritual Petrarchan madrigal that developed exponentially during the last three decades of the sixteenth century. At the century’s end only Antonio Il Verso (1560–1621) of Sicily still opted for two sonnets of a more secular nature. Even though he was a student of Pietro Vinci—the only composer to have devoted an entire collection of madrigals to Colonna’s spiritual sonnets—Il Verso selected texts that were rarely used by other musicians and were not 22   Di Giovanthom. Cimello Libro primo de canti a quatro voci Sopra Madriali et altre Rime Con li Nomi delli loro authori volgari et con le Più necessarie osservanze instromentali, e più convenevoli avvertenze De toni accio si possono anchora Sonare, Et Cantare insieme (Venice, 1548). 23   De diversi autori il quarto libro de madrigali a quatro voci a note bianche novamente dato in luce (Venice, 1554). 24   Di Iacopo Corfini organista del domo di Lucca il Secondo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci, novamente da lui composti, et per Antonio Gardano posti in luce. A cinque voci (Venice, 1568). 25   Di Giacopo Corfini organista del domo di Luca il Primo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci, con doi Dialoghi a sette. Novamente da lui composto et dato in luce (Venice, 1565).

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featured in the 1546 and 1548 editions of Colonna’s Rime. “Di lagrim’e di pianto nudrir l’alma,” a variant of “Di lagrime, e di foco nutrir l’alma,” a love sonnet he unusually arranged in three parts, distinguishing the two quatrains and the tercets, appeared in 1590 in his first book of madrigals for five voices.26 The third book of madrigals for five voices (1595) by this very prolific composer includes another love sonnet, the well-known “Di così nobil fiamma amor mi cinse,” this time arranged in the traditional style for sonnets, in two successive parts.27 Most of the musical compositions for Colonna’s poetry are found in singleauthored books. The anonymous madrigal published in 1554 is in effect an exception in several ways: it is secular and anonymous—a rare thing for compositions based on Colonna’s poetry; it is restricted to the tercets of a sonnet and finally it appears in an anthology (and not in a single-authored book). The only other madrigal on Colonna’s poetry appearing in an anthology is also restricted to the tercets of a sonnet—we cannot assume the reduction of the sonnet to a sestet is linked to the mode of production. “Soave fia ’l morir per viver sempre” (tercets of “Quando vedrò di questa mortal luce”), by Palestrina, was published in the famous anthology Musica di XIII autori illustri a cinque voci, dedicated by Gardano to the Duke of Bavaria, which gathered together, as its title suggests, the music of twelve of the greatest madrigal writers of the time.28 Also included are stanzas from canzone by Petrarch, sonnets by Bernardo Tasso, Orsato Giustiniani, Petrarch, and Luigi Tansillo, as well as several anonymous poems. The rare inclusion of Colonna’s sonnets in musical anthologies is worth noting. It can be explained by the late popularity of the poet among composers, in tandem with the growing appeal of the spiritual madrigal. At that time, anthologies of madrigals, which had been highly valued well into the 1570s, had been supplanted by single-authored books, which progressively dominated publications of madrigals, above all in Venice. Up until around 1580, madrigals composed for Colonna’s sonnets appeared mainly in books which mixed both secular and spiritual verse, as was the norm. Madrigals on spiritual texts were frequently included in books of madrigals, notably in Venice where the adjective “spiritual” first appeared in titles of music books by composers from Verona, and also in Rome, particularly 26   Di Antonio Il Verso della città di Piazza. Il Primo Libro de’ Madrigali a cinque voci. 27   Di Antonio Il Verso siciliano della città di Piazza il Terzo Libro de’ Madrigali a cinque voci. 28   Musica di XIII autori illustri a cinque voci, novamente per Angelo Gardano raccolta et data in luce. Nella quale si contengono i più belli madrigali ; che hoggidì si cantino (Venice, 1576). The volume includes works by Palestrina, Striggio, Padovano, Merulo, A. Gabrieli, Spontone, Porta, Donato, Lasso, Wert, Monte, and G. M. Nanino.

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from the printing presses of Valerio Dorico who from the 1560s categorized certain compositions in books of madrigals as “spiritual madrigals.”29 Apart from Bonzanino—a composer from Verona who was close to the group of “spirituali” known to Colonna—Perissone Cambio, Jacopo Corfini, and Marcantonio Ingegneri all associated Colonna’s spiritual sonnets with secular madrigals. Stefano Felis, who set to music the sonnet “Vergine pura che dai raggi ardenti” in his fifth book of madrigals for five voices (1583),30 and Costanzo Porta (“Quando senza spezzar né aprir la porta” in his fourth book of madrigals for five voices, published in 1586)31 both continued this association. At this time, it was usual to distinguish spiritual madrigals from their secular versions and forerunners. Within this context, Colonna’s musical popularity is perfectly representative of the evolution of the polyphonic madrigal. We should note here that musicians tended to favour among Colonna’s poems those that paraphrased liturgical texts or were inspired by them. Among the sonnets most frequently chosen was “Padre nostro e del ciel” (S1:95), evidently inspired by the Pater Noster, but also “Stella di nostro mar” (S1:101), a clear paraphrasing of the hymn Ave Maris Stella. The mix of genres, registers and sources of inspiration began to diminish only gradually, and from the 1570s, spiritual madrigals began to be published in their own right. Whether driven by moral or commercial pressures, this distinction corresponded to a new demand. It was only after the Council of Trent, amid the momentum of a redefinition of the ecclesiastical world, and in the uncertainty surrounding the monitoring of secular repertoires (a secondary preoccupation for the Church), that the spiritual madrigal became progressively defined by implicit comparison to the secular madrigal, establishing a previously unheard of distinction. While certain literary genres and poetic registers fall easily into one or another category, the line between these two genres was to remain finely drawn with several points of overlap. Colonna’s amorous poems are perfect examples of “serious” sonnets, with often mystical stresses and metaphors, much more akin to spiritual than to secular musical madrigals 29   Cesare Tudino della città d’Atri. Il Primo Libro delli soi Madrigali a cinque voci nuovamente da lui composto et dato in luce. Con sei Madrigali spirituali, et un Dialogo a sei voci (Rome, 1564) and Il Primo Libro de Madrigali, a tre voci, di Gio. Animuccia. Con alcuni Motetti et Madrigali spirituali, non più stampato (Rome, 1565). 30   Il Quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci di Stefano Felis maestro di capella del duomo di Bari, novamente composti, et dati in luce (Venice, 1583). 31   Di Costanzo Porta il Quarto Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci, novamente da Marsilio Cristoffori raccolti, et dati in luce. Al molto illustre et reverendiss. Monsig. Biagio Cangi dignissimo coppiere di Nostro Signore (Venice, 1586).

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about love or lighter subjects. Corfini set two of Colonna’s sonnets to music, one amorous, one spiritual. “Da Dio mandata angelica scorta” appeared in his first book of madrigals for five voices,32 three years before the love sonnet mentioned above. The parallel between the two illustrates the fragility of the line between secular and spiritual. The sonnet bemoaning the beloved’s absence, “Quando più string’il cor la fiamma ardente,” resorts to a metaphorical richness and an expressive intensity close to the Rime Spirituali. Despite this evident proximity, the spiritual madrigal gave rise to exclusively spiritual publications from the 1570s onwards. From that period, composers and printers favored monothematic and cyclical books, while this combined concept was rare in secular madrigals. It was the Vergini (madrigals composed on Petrarch’s “Vergine bella”) that paved the way. Frequently published alongside other compositions, these madrigals would eventually give their name to entire collections,33 then go on to establish a tradition of monothematic and cyclical music books containing all or some of the stanzas of Petrarch’s canzone. These cycles, which constitute a specific category of spiritual madrigal, attest to Petrarch’s uncontested reign over the nascent genre, in perfect continuum with the Petrarchism that dominated the secular (or indistinct) madrigal tradition of previous years. But the combined concept of the book of music devoted to one single poet would also become associated with Gambara’s Stanze set to music by Dorati (long considered to be by Colonna),34 Vinci’s Quattordici sonetti spirituali,35 or some years later, Lassus’s famous Lagrime di san Pietro on 32   Di Giacopo Corfini organista del domo di Luca il Primo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci . . . (Venice, 1565). 33   Le Vergine di Alessandro [Merlo] romano a quattro voci con la gionta di alcuni altri Madrigali novamente da lui composti coretti et da li suoi proprij essemplari stampati (Venice, 1554), those by Francesco Portinaro dedicated to Emperor Maximilian II (Le Vergini di Francesco Portinaro a sei voci con alcuni Madregali, a cinque, et a sei, et duoi Dialoghi a sette, da lui novamente composti, e con ogni diligentia corretti [Venice, 1568]), Le Vergine a tre voci di Gio. Matteo Asola Veronese novamente ristampate (first known edition: Venice, 1571), those by Philippe de Duc in 1574 (Le Vergini di Filippo Duc fiamengo, Libro Primo a sei voci con un Dialogo a otto nel fine. Novamente composte et date in luce. A sei voci [Venice, 1574]), then Palestrina’s first book of spiritual madrigals (Il Primo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci, di Gio. Petr’Aloysio Prenestino novamente composti et dati in luce [Venice, 1581]), which, although the title makes no mention of the spiritual tone, is entirely devoted to the first eight stanzas of “Vergine bella.” 34  Niccolò or Nicolao Dorati, Le Stanze della sig.ra Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara illustrissima. Composte da Nicolo Dorati capo della musica della illustriss. Sig. di Luca, a quattro voci. Nuovamente poste in luce (Venice, 1570). 35  Pietro Vinci, Quattordeci Sonetti spirituali della illustrissima divina Vittoria Colonna d’Avalos de Aquino marchesa di Pescara. Messi in canto da Pietro Vinci siciliano della città di

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the cycle by Tansillo36 and Palestrina’s second book of spiritual madrigals on the Priego alla beata Vergine,37 a poem that remained anonymous. Appearing in the 1580s, books by a single composer that brought together spiritual poems by different authors were much more abundant. They often reflected more complex personal projects and the poetic associations are worth analyzing. The blend of poems by different authors could be the work of the publisher (notably in the cases of anthologies), but often this was rather the work of the composer who would give the printer a ready-compiled volume. In every case, the juxtaposition is interesting to observe, and enables Colonna’s sonnets to be situated in the broader context of poetry set to music. These golden years for the spiritual madrigal were precisely those during which Colonna’s rime most interested musicians. From 1579 to 1589, there were more than thirty madrigals composed on her rime spirituali, which confirms her place as a major source of inspiration for the spiritual madrigal.

Music Books and the Art of the Dedication

As an aristocrat of the highest birth, a recognized poet, and an ambassador for Valdesian spirituality, the first question that springs to mind is what type of personal relations could certain musicians have formed with Colonna. Although her musical popularity was entirely posthumous, it is possible that several composers who were interested in her Rime could have met the poet in person. Working in Naples in the 1540s, Giovanthomaso Cimello (ca. 1510–after 1579) is especially known as a composer of villanelles, for which he would willingly write his own texts. Such dual abilities were not unusual in “light” genres; in a signed letter sent to Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto in 1579,38 Cimello introduces himself as much as a poet as a musician. However, he composed a number of madrigals, regularly published in the books of several of his contemporaries, signaling his recognition by the musical milieu in Naples, where he probably Nicosia maestro di cappella in S. Maria Maggiore di Bergomo a cinque voci (Venice, 1580). 36   Lagrime di S. Pietro, descritte dal Signor Luigi Tansillo e nuovamente poste in musica da Orlando Di Lasso, maestro di capella del serenissimo Signor duca di Baviera, et con un Mottetto nel fine a sette voci (Munich, 1595). 37    Delli Madrigali Spirituali a cinque voci di Gio. Pietro Luigi Prenestino, Maestro di Cappella di S. Pietro di Roma. Libro Secondo (Rome, 1594). 38   B AV, Cod. 6193, II, f. 501, edited by James Haar in “Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist,” Studi musicali, XXII (1993): 23–59; the transcription is on 50–52.

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held a permanent position,39 and among his many pupils. In 1548, Cimello’s four-voice book of madrigals was published by Gardano.40 This edition, as was characteristic of note nere anthologies41 printed by Gardano and Scotto in the 1530s, was conceived as a didactic work. As the title suggests, the composer published his pieces for instrumental performance and on that basis proceeded to make unusual arrangements for the period. He also includes a variety of metric examples, with the aim of defending notation in note nere in C.42 Colonna’s sole text, which holds a prime position at the front of the collection, is neither a madrigal nor a sonnet, but only the last four verses (the congedo) of the canzone “Mentre la nave mia, lunge dal Porto” (one of the two canzones by Colonna to appear in print since the publication of her Rime by Pirogallo in 1538). In it, the poet compares her suffering to that of the great heroines Penelope, Laodamia, Ariadne, Medea and Portia: Canzon, fra’ vivi qui fuor di speranza Và sola, e dì ch’avanza Mia pena ogn’altra, e la cagion può tanto, Che m’è nettar il foco, ambrosia il pianto.43 Compositions followed on poems by Petrarch44 and Bembo, on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, on Sannazaro’s Arcadia, mixed with two poems by Alfonso d’Avalos, who was Colonna’s nephew by marriage, as well as with Neapolitan poems and texts by the composer’s friends: Cimello’s book in effect was testament to his links to the Accademia dei Sereni in Naples.45 Several members of the Accademia provided texts, notably Vincenzo Belprato, who at that time was still a fervent Valdesian, connected to the circles in which Colonna moved.

39  Haar, “Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist,” 26. 40   Di Giovanthom. Cimello Libro primo de canti a quatro voci Sopra Madriali et altre Rime . . . (Venice, 1548). 41   Note nere (“black notes”) was a style of notation, common in mid sixteenth-century madrigals, which used shorter note values than usual (black-headed notes). 42  See also Alfred Einstein, The Italian madrigal (Princeton, 1949), 405. 43  “Song, among the living here, bereft of all hope, go wandering alone, and tell that my pain advances all others and that its cause is such that the fire is nectar to me and my weeping ambrosia to my lips”: Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2013), 144. 44  Madrigal n. 26 is a cento based on Petrarch’s texts. Haar, “Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist,” 40. 45  Haar, “Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist,” 35.

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By the time his book was published, Cimello was already linked to the entourage of Giovanna D’Aragona, sister-in-law (through her marriage to one of her brothers, Ascanio) and close friend of Colonna. His 1548 book of madrigals begins with dedicatory poems to Giovanna D’Aragona and two of her sons, Fabrizio and the youngest, Marcantonio, the rising star of the family, from whom Cimello possibly hoped for some favour. Cimello’s dedication could have been made to coincide with the marriage of Fabrizio Colonna to Ippolita, daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga.46 In a sonnet to Fabrizio in this book of madrigals, Cimello compares the commission he received to write it to that of the portraits ordered by Alexander the Great from Apelles. A quatrain in Latin follows, comparing Fabrizio to Caius Fabritius, then a long Latin poem in hexameter praising the mother and her two sons, mentioning their exile from Rome, with numerous references to the “colonna,” a commonplace in encomiastic poetry to the family. How the subjects of these dedications received Cimello’s work is not known, but the musician was subsequently to go to Rome, perhaps around the 1550s, in the service of Marcantonio Colonna. The direct link here therefore is not with Vittoria, but with her family. Much later in the century, after victory at Lepanto confirmed Marcantonio Colonna as a military genius and his nomination by Philip II to the throne of viceroy of Sicily, this illustrious nephew seems to have influenced composers in choosing Colonna’s texts. The character of the late poet and the quality of her poetry became pretexts to praise a powerful person. Cimello dedicated Colonna’s poems to her indirect descendants: to her sister-in-law and close friend, and to her nephews. In the next generation, Niccolò Dorati also dedicated his last book of musical madrigals to Marcantonio Colonna.47 This dedication, which is not original in focusing on a powerful political figure, could have a double meaning: while Dorati, a likely reformist sympathizer, may have had at heart the intention of honoring an (indirect) descendant of Vittoria Colonna, the dedication also contains a banal personal request—that of seeing his son Michele serve the great man, just as, Dorati adds, he would have liked to have done himself.48 Here is the conjunction between possible ideological convictions and a traditional request addressed to a powerful figure to whom the artist makes a gift of his music.

46  Keith A. Larson, The Unaccompanied Madrigal in Naples from 1536 to 1654 (Cambridge, 1985), 187. 47   Madrigali di Nicolo Dorati capo della musica dell’illustriss. Signoria di Lucha, novamente composti et dati in luce. Libro Primo a sei voci (Venice, 1579). 48  Dedicatory letter, Madrigali di Nicolo Dorati . . . Libro Primo a sei voci.

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The protection that certain musicians could have expected from the powerful viceroy of Sicily might in effect have directed them towards the poetry of the “divine” Vittoria, independent of any religious conviction. In 1580, Pietro Vinci of Sicily, the choirmaster for twelve years at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, composed and published in Venice with the heirs of Girolamo Scotto, a book of madrigals entirely composed for Colonna’s Rime Spirituali—the Quattordeci sonetti spirituali della illustrissima et eccellentissima divina Vittoria Colonna messi in canto a cinque voci. The publication was very likely to have been calculated to attract the attention of Marcantonio, whom Vinci hoped would champion his personal career, at a point when he wished to return to his birthplace. The composer dedicated his collection to “Vittoria Colonna.” While no other details are given, the Vittoria in question was the daughter of Marcantonio, granddaughter of Giovanna D’Aragona and great-niece of the poet whose name she shared. The dedication astutely omits the titles of the noble lady, playing therefore on the ambiguity between two of the “Vittorie” in the Colonna family.49 This layering effect is confirmed by the text of the dedication. In a very meaningful way, the dedicatee is depicted as a “new phoenix” rising from the ashes of the “divine” Vittoria and enabling her name to live on: These sonnets, most illustrious Lady, by which I have desired to honor my music, are the saintly compositions of that most excellent Lady Vittoria Colonna Marchesa of Pescara, of glorious and eternal memory, which have remained as faithful testaments to the world of her piety and religion, as much as of the lofty heights of her admirable mind, and to act as worthy ministers and companions of her wondrous, immortal fame, since that star remained on earth when her most noble sun was extinguished. To whom would it be more fitting to present them than your most illustrious Ladyship, since like a new phoenix you have returned to renew the dear and glorious name and the great works of such a singular woman, and to bring back to the world that glory that she had taken into heaven, so that I can more easily cause you to recognize what is rightfully yours, than offer you anything of my own.50 49  These being the poet, her niece the daughter of Ascanio Colonna and Giovanna D’Aragona (and wife of Garcia Álvarez de Toledo), and her great-niece, daughter of Marcantonio, wife of Ludovico III Enriquez de Cabrera, Count of Modica, and Duchess of Medinaceli. 50  “Questi sonetti Signora Illustrissima, de quali hò voluto honorare la mia musica sono santissimi parti del Eccellentissima Signora Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara di gloriosa et eterna memoria, rimasti per fidelissimi testimoni al mondo non men della pietà, e religione sua, che dell’altezza, e felicità del suo mirabile ingegno, et appresso

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Venetian Milieus

The first musical pieces that were known to be composed for Colonna’s Rime came from Venetian circles, where reformist ideas notably from Padua were circulating, and where several poetic anthologies that included Colonna’s poetry were printed. The first known publication of Colonna’s verse set to music is the work of Perissone (or Pierreson) Cambio (ca. 1520–ca. 1562), a composer originally from the southern Netherlands, probably Hainaut, who made his career in Venice, where he was a pupil of Willaert and was probably connected to Rore, before becoming a member of the choir at Saint Mark’s in 1548. Cambio composed a madrigal for five voices for the sonnet “Se ’l breve suon che questo aer frale” published in 1545 in his book of madrigals for five voices. At that time, this musically themed sonnet, destined for certain success among musicians (it would go on to inspire compositions by Philippe de Monte and Costanzo Porta a generation later), was as yet unpublished, appearing only the following year in Valgrisi’s edition. The title notes that Cambio composed and published this book at his friends’ request.51 One of the compositions, “Deh perché” composed for poems by the Paduan poet Bartolomeo Gottifredi, is in fact quoted in the Dialogo della musica by G. B. Doni in 1544. In 1547, Perissone Cambio dedicated his first book of madrigals for four voices (which also contains works by his master C. de Rore) to Gaspara Stampa, whom he is very likely to have met through Domenico Venier—Venier in turn dedicated a funeral sonnet to Cambio.52 These diverse testimonies to his literary relations suggest that per degni ministri, e compagni della sua bellissima, et immortal fama, poiche qual stella espero è rimasta al mondo dopò l’occaso del suo chiarissimo sole. La onde à chi più conveniva che fussero presentati, che à V. S. Illustrissima, la quale quasi novella fenice è ritornata à rinovare il caro e glorioso nome, e le belle opre di cosi singular donna, et à render al mondo quell’ornamento ch’ella già se ne portò in cielo, talche posso dire di farle più presto riconoscere quel ch’è suo, che di donarle cosa veruna del mio.” 51   Madrigali a cinque voci per l’eccellente musico M. Perissone Cambio composti a compiacimento de diversi suoi amici, et a preghi di medemi hora fatti porre a luce, Et per lo medemo compositore corretti et revisti et aconci, non più ne veduti ne istampati. Quinque vocum (Venice, 1545). See Jane A. Bernstein, Music Printing in Renaissance Venice‬: The Scotto Press (1539–1572)‬(Oxford, 1998), no. 49 and “The Burning Salamander: Assigning a Printer to Some Sixteenth-Century Music Prints,” Music Library Association Notes, 42 (1985/86): 483–501 (reprinted in Sources and the Circulation of Renaissance Music ed. Mary S. Lewis [London, 2012]).‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ 52  See Martha Feldman, “Introduction,” in Perissone Cambio, Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1545) (London, 1990).

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Cambio used handwritten sources, probably passed around these cultivated circles. Nothing however suggests that this artistic activity supported links with reformist movements. Cambio is a perfect representative of Petrarchism set to music from the middle of the century, which perhaps is not unexpected given his literary connections. The musician wrote the dedication to Rore’s Vergine bella and Rore published Cambio’s madrigals in his second and third books for five voices. Cambio’s book for five voices (1545) contained six sonnets by Petrarch, including the very famous “Canti or piango” and “I’ piansi or canto,” the first in a long series of musical successes. These two madrigals reveal a very clear musical style of writing, with relatively long values, retaining a great understanding of the poetic text, which can broadly be traced back to Rore’s influence. Adrian Willaert also set these two sonnets to music in his Musica Nova (1559) and the compositions of the two musicians in Venice display explicit cross-references. Out of three books of madrigals mixing secular and spiritual texts that Cambio had printed, there are more than twenty sonnets and canzone stanzas derived from the Canzoniere, but also four dialogues by Petrarch (in the Secondo libro, 1550). By comparison, Cambio showed less interest in the Petrarchists of the first decades of the sixteenth century. The 1545 book for five voices offered a minor place to Bembo (one canzonette), to Sannazaro and to Colonna, one of whose sonnets was set to music, to Girolamo Muzio (one ballata), which he very unusually combined with a sonnet by Buonaccorso da Montemagno, and to several anonymous poems. These poetic choices are typical of the beginnings of the spiritual madrigal, focusing on Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The same trend can be seen in circles outside Venice. Niccolò Dorati, for example, the majority of whose source texts have remained anonymous, like all his generation largely privileged Petrarch, from whom he derived twenty musical madrigals, while he composed for just one by Bembo, a few ottave by Ariosto, a single madrigal by Strozzi, one by Cassola, and rather unusually, an ottava by Poliziano. Willaert and Rore’s musical influence also leads us to the second testimonial to Colonna’s musical popularity, written by Agostino Bonzanino (1518/19–1560) of Verona. While Cambio could have selected a sonnet by Colonna almost fortuitously, attracted by the evocation of music in its subject, for Bonzanino it is a different matter. His compositions illustrate the importance of Colonna’s musical reception in the devotional milieu connected to the Spirituali. Bonzanino was a founder member of the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, where he was music master from 1555 until his death in 1560. He left several musical manuscripts, including an important autograph one53 containing madrigals and 53  Verona, Accademia Filarmonica, ms. 221.

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motets for four, five and six voices, a precious testament to the musical activity of this academy. Bonzanino, who was not a musician by profession, borrowed entire sets of motets from Willaert and Rore, restricting himself to rewriting certain voices.54 Among the twenty-one secular and spiritual madrigals,55 one is composed for a sonnet by Veronica Gambara (“Scelse di tutta la futura gente,” divided into three by Bonzanino), twelve for sonnets by Colonna,56 and the others are anonymous. It is not known when copies of this manuscript were made, though it must have been before 1560; but at the start of 1549, Bonzanino had given a “letione sopra il sonetto della Peschara” among others given to the Accademia Filarmonica,57 after which it can be assumed that the sonnet that he had discussed was sung. These musical madrigals demonstrate how Colonna’s Rime were passed around the influential circles of Spirituali, through the intervention of Giovan Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona and long-standing friend of Colonna, who knew her in Rome during her husband’s lifetime when he himself was papal secretary. Giberti had invited Colonna to visit him in Verona, though in vain; but in 1541, while staying in Ferrara, she sent him a manuscript copy of her Rime.58 It can be argued that Bonzanino composed pieces from that manuscript or locally made copies of it, rather than referring to the Valgrisi edition of 1546, which contains all the sonnets that he set to music. If Bonzanino’s compositions illustrate the reformist footprint left by the Spirituali in Verona, the role played by the Veronese academy in promoting 54  Katelijne Schiltz and Inga Mai Groote, “An Amateur Musician and His Manuscript: Agostino Bonzanino’s Contribution to the Repertoire of the Accademia Filarmonica,” (Conference presentation, Bangor, 2008). 55  Certain critics have counted forty-two, separating out different parts of the same sonnet. Bonzanino applies a variable musical form to the sonnet: one single part (“Gli angeli eletti”), two parts (quatrains, then tercets) but also three parts (first quatrain, second quatrain, tercets; see “Scalse di tutta la futura gente” by Gambara and “Vorrei che sempr’un grido alto” by Colonna). 56  “Padre nostro e del ciel con quanto amor,” “Spiego per voi Signor indarno” (variation of “Spiego ver voi”), “Quand’il signore nell’hor’al padre,” “Deh potess’io veder per viva fede,” “Le braccia aprend’in croce et l’alme,” “Par che voli tal’hor l’alma rivolta,” “Quando dal lume ’l cui vivo,” “Spirto felice il cui chiar’ et altiero” (in two parts), “Vorrei che sempr’un grido alto” (in three parts), “Aprasi ’l ciel et di sue gratie tante” and “Gli angeli eletti” in one part. 57  For background on this letione and the links between Giberti and Colonna, see Powers, “The Spiritual Madrigal,” 141–42. Their relations were further confirmed by the fact that Vittoria Colonna, after Giberti’s death, employed his former secretary Francesco Mazo. 58  Alan Bullock, “A hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of 100 poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence,” Italian Studies 21 (1966): 42–56. Powers, “The Spiritual Madrigal,” 141.

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the spiritual madrigal is not unusual. On the contrary, the intellectual environment surrounding the musicians composing for Colonna’s poetry faithfully reflects the role that academies played—often very immersed in the life of the city, not only through the literary and theoretical emulation they fostered but also in the thinking devoted to the union of the arts, often in practical ways. The way members of the academies distributed secular and spiritual poetry among musicians has been well documented, and the dedications often make note of these links. Leone Leoni dedicated his collection Penitenza, madrigali spirituali59 to Francesco Todeschi, an important member of the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza. The Academy’s musical activities were well known and among its members were several dignitaries as well as artists, such as Maddalena Casulana and Gabriele Fiamma.60 Antonio Londogno, a member of the Accademia degli Affidati in Pavia, had at least four music books dedicated to him by Pietro Vinci between 1571 and 1581, when the musician was choirmaster at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. Arcimboldi, a member of the same academy, sent the composer sestine by Fiamma, asking him to set them to music;61 however, he did not get his wish, as Vinci returned to Sicily the year after his Quattordici sonetti spirituali were published.

Colonna versus Gambara: The Musicians of Lucca

In 1570 Girolamo Scotto in Venice published a book of madrigals by Niccolò Dorati (1513–1593) titled Stanze della signora Vittoria Colonna. A composer from Lucca, trombonist (like one of his brothers and several of his sons), then chapel director in the palace newly founded by the city government,62 Dorati already had four books of madrigals for five voices to his name. This latest one63 contained the twenty-seven ottave by Veronica Gambara that later editions would classify under the title La caducità dei beni terreni: the first twenty-six were set to music by Dorati for four voices, the last (“Dietro a l’orme di voi dunque venendo”) for six voices by his son-in-law Tomaso Burlamacchi. The

59   Penitenza. Primo libro de Madrigali Spirituali a cinque voci di Leon Leoni Maestro di Capella nel Duomo di Vicenza. Novamente composti e dati in luce (Venice, 1596). 60  Powers, “The Spiritual Madrigal,” 170, following examples 172, 174. 61  Dedication letter, Quarto libro de Madrigali a cinque voci . . . (Venice, 1573), unpaginated. 62  On Dorati, see Gabriella Biagi Ravenni: “I Dorati, musicisti lucchesi, alla luce di nuovi documenti d’archivio,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia VII (1972): 39–81. 63   Le Stanze della sig.ra Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara illustrissima.

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collection, which came with no opening dedication, concludes with a piece dedicated to Cosimo I de’ Medici. Dorati’s ignorance of the parentage of these stanzas only reflects the very common error of attributing poetry by Gambara64 and Colonna, to whom works by Francesco Maria Molza have also been attributed, as have those by Antonfrancesco Grazzini, il Lasca, whose spiritual sonnets began to circulate in Florence under the name Vittoria Colonna during the period when the poet herself was there. The ottave set to music by Dorati had been published under the name Gambara in the Fabrizio Luna edition that appeared in 1536;65 but at the time when the composer sent his Stanze for printing, they had already been published no fewer than fifteen times under the name Vittoria Colonna,66 from Stanze de la diva Vettoria Colonna di Pescara inclita Marchesana. Con un capitolo in sdrucciolo essortatorio a lassar l’ocio (neither location nor date given) to numerous editions of Colonna’s Rime, several of which give these stanzas as additions (“Cominciano le rime aggionte”) without questioning their parentage. In 1553, Girolamo Ruscelli’s collection of poems published in Venice restored these ottave to Gambara, with a clear opening note to that effect: “The verses which begin, Quando miro la terra ornata e bella, which have already been printed in the name of Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, are in truth by Signora Veronica Gambara, composed by her many years ago for the most illustrious Duke of Florence, as can be seen in the lines which run Dico di voi, ò de l’altera pianta / Felice ramo del ben nato Lauro.”67 Dorati therefore did not have this edition to hand; in addition, he did not know 64  Published in fragments in different Venetian anthologies, Gambara’s poems were only all drawn together in a complete edition in 1769 by Felice Rizzardi. See Veronica Gambara, Le Rime, ed. A. Bullock (Florence, 1995) and Veronica Gambara e la poesia del suo tempo nell’Italia settentrionale, ed. C. Bozzetti, P. Gibellini, and E. Sandal (Florence, 1989). 65   Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi non men oscuri che utili e necessarj del Furioso, Bocaccio, Petrarcha e Dante nuovamente dichiarati e raccolti da Fabricio Luna per alfabeta ad utilità di chi legge, scrive e favela (Naples, 1536). Gambara’s octaves were preceded by the note: “OTTAVE DELA S. VERONI /ca da Gambara in laude dela Virtu sempre verde / al E. S. Don Scipione Vintimiglia.” 66  See Alan Bullock, “Introduction. Testimonianze. B) Testimonianze parziali,” in Gambara, Le Rime, 36–47. 67  “Le stanze, che cominciano, Quando miro la terra ornata e bella, le quali furono già stampate sotto nome della Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana di Pescara, sono veramente della Signora Veronica Gambara, le quali ella scrisse già molt’anni all’Illustrissmo Sig. Duca di Fiorenza, come in esse ne fan fede i versi Dico di voi, ò de l’altera pianta / Felice ramo del ben nato Lauro . . .”: Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani (Venice, 1553), unpaginated.

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Colonna sufficiently well to have rectified by himself the mistake perpetuated in various printed editions. The question is all the more interesting because Dorati, whose exceptionally high-quality music manifests the clear influence of the Florentine madrigal, was obviously a Philo-Protestant. We know he had links to Cosimo I de’ Medici’s superintendent Pierfrancesco Riccio, whose Protestant leanings were well known,68 at a time when they still had the freedom of the city in Florentine intellectual life. We know that Dorati frequented heterodox households in the city. He could have met Colonna either in Florence, where he certainly had a position before serving in Lucca, or in his birthplace, when Colonna stayed at the Bagni di Lucca in 1538 before leaving for Rome.69 This stay in Lucca and Florence was for her a chance to intensify key intellectual and spiritual encounters, notably with Bernardino Ochino, who was also in Lucca in 1538, and with Reginald Pole. It is not known whether Dorati, who held a prominent post in this small city, met Colonna personally, or whether Riccio and the intellectual milieu of Lucca and Florence acted as intermediaries. Beyond these stanzas through which the composer aimed to spread and glorify Colonna’s work, Biagi Ravenni comments that an anonymous canzone published in Dorati’s first book of madrigals in 1549, dedicated to Riccio, seems to allude to Colonna, which would situate that poem in a long encomiastic tradition playing on the polysemy of the Colonna name. Yet this poem sings of the woman who guides men towards a better understanding of truth. Besides, some of the musician’s poetic choices, notably the careful selection of certain sonnets from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, while always remaining in the traditional Petrarchist vein, could reveal a reformist or spiritualist inclination:70 this same first book of madrigals contains four of Petrarch’s most violently critical sonnets, one condemning vice, the other three condemning the corrupt clergy of Avignon—a message that could easily be read as a thinly veiled criticism of the Roman Catholic Church. Add to this that Dorati’s last book of madrigals, published in 1579, was dedicated not to his Tuscan relations but to Marcantonio Colonna, then at the pinnacle of his brilliant career; we cannot exclude the hypothesis, in a similar way to Cimello, of an awareness of the symbolic direct line between the “divine” Vittoria, who was without direct descendants, and her brilliant nephew. 68  See Massimo Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo. Eresia, politica e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I (Turin, 1987). 69  Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 28, note 46. 70  Biagi Ravenni, “I Dorati, musicisti lucchesi,” 49–50.

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In 1570 Dorati inevitably used one of the two editions of Rime or manuscript copies which also perpetuated that error of attribution; the hypothetical links between the musician and Colonna were therefore not so strong as to allow the musician to clear up the very common error over attribution found among other musicians who also set to music one or several of these stanzas: “Quanti son poi che divenut’amanti” and “Chi vive senza mai trovar riposo” appear in madrigals by Hoste da Reggio (Primo libro a quattro voci, 1547 and 1556). The first stanza was also set to music by Pietro Taglia71 and by Jean de Castro.72  On the other hand it is possible that Dorati and other members of the Lucchese musical community played a part in disseminating Colonna’s verse, including Jacopo Corfini (Padua 1540–Lucca 1591), a pupil of Jacques Brumel in Ferrara, who arrived in Lucca in January 1557 as a very young man to take up the post of organist at the Church of San Martino. He composed two madrigals for Colonna’s sonnets: “Da Dio mandata angelica mia scorta” in his first book of madrigals for five voices (1565) dedicated to Gioseffo Bernardini (a Lucchese gentleman who was also the dedicatee of Dorati’s second book of madrigals, 1559) and “Quando più stringe il cor la fiamma ardente” in his second book (1568) dedicated to Giulio de’ Medici. Both madrigals exploit the theme of the flame and the ray of light. “Quando più stringe il cor la fiamma ardente” develops the motif of the heart clutched by an ardent flame, that is then reversed in the tercets to evoke the bright light from which darts a ray of hope, hope of a happy ending, hope sustained in fine by the topical figure of the sun-phoenix. The spiritual sonnet “Da Dio mandata angelica mia scorta” takes up the parable of the wise virgins preparing for their wedding night by stocking up on oil for their lamps (Matth. 25), which Rinaldo Corso in 1558 interpreted in an explicitly evangelical way, associating the rays of light with the words spoken by reformist preachers.73 As he pursued his career in a small town deeply influenced by Philo-Protestant reform movements, having dedicated some of his works to local nobility, and progressing in a musical milieu however narrow that may have been, Corfini was in contact with the heterodoxy widely circulated in Lucca, and inevitably frequented the Dorati family. The same book by Corfini in fact contains two madrigals of anonymous poems that Dorati also set to music in his first book of madrigals for four voices (1549). Corfini, who 71   Livre de Meslanges contenant un recueil de chansons à quatre parties, choisy des plus excellens aucteurs de nostre temps, par Jean Castro (Leuven, 1575). 72   Chansons, Madrigaux et Motetz a trois parties par M. Iean de Castro. Canzoni, Madrigali et Motetti a tre voci per M. Giovanni de Castro. Cantiones, Madrigales et Motetta trium vocum per M. Ioannem a Castro (Antwerp, 1582). 73  Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation, 165–66.

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had in addition to that published motets in the same anthology as Dorati and other Lucca-based composers,74 had his elder’s music books at his disposal. However, and despite the critical status of the spiritual sonnet that he chose, it is not known whether the composer’s poetic choices should be linked to a Philo-Protestant influence or to personal links to the Spirituali, which are not documented. Vinci, Monte, and the Circulation of the Rime While Bonzanino’s poetic sources are known, and Dorati’s ignorance throws into doubt the hypothesis of close ties to Colonna, it is still difficult to determine which edition or which manuscript of the Rime the composers used; all the more difficult because for the sixteenth century alone at least thirty-seven manuscripts of Colonna’s Rime have been identified,75 to which numerous copies, albeit partial, of her poetic works, should most likely be added. One well-known case is an exception to this however: that of Philippe de Monte. This Flemish musician, originally from Mechelen but established Europe-wide, rose to become the most prolific writer of madrigals in the entire century: even though his madrigals were published relatively late in his career, he went on to publish thirty-four books, of which five were entirely spiritual. The poetic choices of this emblematic figure for the madrigal are representative of the history of the genre, and sketch out a clear evolution. A large part of Monte’s madrigals were composed on anonymous texts, but as a whole they reveal the importance of Petrarchism in music, feeding the secular as well as the spiritual madrigal, and the progressive movement towards Guarini, who dominated the secular madrigal at the end of the century. Across Monte’s entire oeuvre, Petrarch clearly dominates, followed by Guarini (particularly after the publication in 1600 of an entire book of madrigals on Guarini’s Pastor fido); Orazio Guarguante is also over-represented as Monte devoted an entire book to him, the Eccellenze della Beata Vergine, which appeared in Venice in 1586. Poems by Girolamo Molinaro and Torquato Tasso are also present, spread across different books.76 The Petrarchist treatment evolves over the course of the thirty-four books. Initially concentrated on the Canzoniere that dominates 74   Sacrae cantiones (Nuremberg, 1585), containing works by the Lucca-based Dorati, Corfini, Guami, as well as Merulo and Palestrina. 75   B ullock: Rime. 76  Petrarch is set to music almost twice as often as any other poet: next comes Guarini, then Orazio Guarguante, then Girolamo Molinaro, Torquato Tasso, Pietro Bembo, Jacopo

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before the spiritual madrigal is adopted, Monte progressively swings towards the Petrarchists of the sixteenth century, such as Bembo, Sannazaro and Colonna. The choice of Colonna’s sonnets falls precisely into this later interest in the spiritual vein. Il primo libro de’ madrigali spirituali a cinque voci (1581)77 contains fifteen madrigals. Eight are composed for Colonna’s Rime Spirituali, while the opening sonnet (“Se gli occhi innalzo a rimirar talora”) is taken from Laura Battiferri degli Ammannati.78 The remaining six sonnets (numbers 3, 5, 12, 13, 14, and 15) are now considered to be anonymous. Despite the predominance of Colonna’s verse, Monte did not adopt a cyclical form. Although the madrigals are ordered depending on their style, the collection is not structured according to an obvious semantic or modal architecture. What follow are an evocation of Marian festivities, a sonnet about Catherine of Alexandria, and another on the Innocents. It is worth noting however that there are no less than three sonnets evoking sound and music, including two by Colonna79— which are also, statistically, the poems most often set to music—and that the most famous of these (“Se ’l breve suon di questo aer frale”) occupies a central place. Appearing in Venice in 1583, Il primo libro de’ madrigali spirituali a sei voci80 opens with six of Colonna’s sonnets.81 Nine other spiritual madrigals follow, among which are sonnets by Gabriele Fiamma, Giovanni Della Casa, Il Coppetta, and reworkings of Petrarch and of Sannazaro. Given the number and position of her poems in the music book, Colonna appears here again to be the central poetic figure of Monte’s book. “Fu sempre chiara” has sometimes been considered a homage by the composer to the poet. In reality, this sonnet, Sannazaro, Vittoria Colonna, Livio Celiano, Bernardo Tasso, Luigi Groto, Giuliano Goselini, Annibale Pocaterra, followed by other lesser-known authors. 77   Di Filippo Di Monte maestro di capella della sac. ces. maestà dell’imperatore Rodolfo Secondo, il Primo Libro de’ Madrigali spirituali a cinque voci da lui novamente composti et dati in luce (Venice, 1581). 78  Daniele V. Filippi, “Earthly Music, Interior Hearing, and Celestial Harmonies. Philippe de Monte’s First Book of Spiritual Madrigals (1581),” Journal of the Alamire Foundation 3 (2011): 208–34. 79  To those of Colonna should be added the anonymous “Ben che la dotta man,” comparing the soul of the believer to a lyre played by God (cf. Filippi, “Earthly Music,” 230). 80   Di Filippo Di Monte maestro di cappella della sac. ces. maestà dell’imperatore Rodolfo Secondo, il Primo Libro de Madrigali spirituali a sei voci da lui novamente composti, et dati in luce (Venice, 1583). 81  “Donna dal ciel gradita a tanto onore” 1, “Vergine pura che de’ raggi ardenti” 3, “Donna dal ciel gradita” 4, “Stella del nostro mar, chiara e secura,” “Vedea l’alto Signor, ch’ardendo langue” 6, “Dimmi lume del mondo e chiaro onore” 8.

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which sings the praises of sole and multiple victory (“vittoria”), playing on the ambiguity between the noun and the name, is addressed to the martyred Saint Victoria, who resists her shackles and to whom the gates of heaven open.82 Six years later, Il secondo libro de’ madrigali spirituali a sei voci83 borrows three more texts from Colonna,84 this time alternating spiritual sonnets with Latin texts. “Padre nostro e del ciel” by Colonna, placed third, closes the first section and follows a sonnet by Tasso that also paraphrases the Pater Noster. Two anonymous motets follow, then a sonnet by Raffaelle Bonello, and finally four madrigals of which two are sonnets by Colonna (“La bella donna” and “Quanta gioia,” the latter for seven voices). The lengthy final section comprises a motet also for seven voices, composed for the seven-part “Virgo vetustis edita” by Petrus Canisius. At the time he was composing these books of spiritual madrigals, Monte was at the archduke’s court at Vienna initially, then at Prague. An international city, at the hub of the European cultivated elite, Prague stayed on the periphery of the Italian poetry and music in circulation. Monte dedicated his first book of spiritual madrigals for five voices to Claudio Acquaviva, who had just been elected superior general of the Society of Jesus. In his brief dedicatory letter, the composer explains that he would not be permitted to have his madrigals published under the name of Acquaviva had they not been “spiritual and pious” (“spirituali, et pij”)—the precaution is purely oratorical, since it was necessary to get agreement from the dedicatee. Monte also points out that the madrigals were written at the moment of choosing the dedicatee, unavoidably late, since Acquaviva had only just been elected to this important role. The composer associates this “useful” composition with the view of music held by the Ancients; but to this somewhat uncontroversial justification there is added a particular link to the dedicatee: Monte affirms that he has received poems from Lorenzo Cottemanno (also known as Laurentius Cotemannus), also a member of the Society of Jesus, who had been his pupil—he had in effect been trained at the imperial chapel. This piece of information remains the only testimony left by a musician as to how he accessed Colonna’s poems—in this case, the circulation of poems sent between admirers and experts. The dedication however is quite impre82  “Anzi è vittoria illustre anzi son molte / vittorie in un’ per adornar quest’una.” 83   Di Filippo Di Monte maestro di cappella della sac. ces. maestà dell’imperatore Rodolfo Secondo, il Secondo Libro de Madrigali spirituali a sei, et sette voci, novamente da lui composti, et dati in luce (Venice, 1589). 84  “Padre nostro e del ciel con quanto amore,” “La bella donna a cui dolente preme’ and “Quanta gioia tu segno e stella ardente.”

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cise. Monte seems to be making a reference to a single document, without specifying whether this is a manuscript or a printed book, nor whether this source contains all or some of the poems published in his Primo libro from 1581. No published anthology of poems contains the fifteen sonnets from Monte’s first book for five voices. If the musician used only the collection sent by Cotemannus, it would therefore be a manuscript. It is not known whether the Jesuit’s consignment was also a source for the madrigals that Monte published in his two spiritual books for six voices, appearing respectively in 1583 and 1589. Monte could have used the Rime Spirituali published by Valgrisi in 1546, which contained all the sonnets that he set to music, and which constituted the first print publication of many of them. Yet his madrigals show textual variations in relation to this edition. The tercets of “Puri innocenti” become in the composer’s version “Voi senza fede desti [sic] il pianto solo,” but most notably “Ne l’alta eterna ruota il piè fermasti” becomes “Su l’alte eterne ruote il piè fermasti”—which might reveal a connection between Monte’s source and Michelangelo’s manuscript of Sonetti della Sig.ra Vittoria.85 Cotemannus’ collection could emanate from the Roman milieu, where we can assume copies of that manuscript were circulated. Michelangelo’s manuscript is in fact the only one that contains the eight sonnets published by Monte in 1581; but one of the sonnets that he published in his second book for six voices is missing (“La bella donna a cui dolente preme”). In other words, either Cotemannus’ consignment contained the sonnets that were missing from Michelangelo’s manuscript, or Monte had at his disposal other sources for Colonna’s verse. Monte’s five books of spiritual madrigals illustrate the popularity enjoyed from the outset by the spiritual madrigal outside Italy: before him, Portinaro’s books, those by Philippe de Duc, followed by those of Lassus, all had the type of success expected among German-speaking circles close to the imperial court. Monte’s first spiritual book also highlights the success of the poet among Jesuit circles in the final decades of the century; the dedication to Acquaviva and the note about a book of poems sent by Cotemannus are not isolated facts. In a letter addressed to the Duke of Bavaria, one of his agents lets slip the wish that as the duke is singing or listening to the madrigals of Monte’s first spiritual book, the Jesuits could provide other Italian poetry that Lassus could set to music.86 This oft-cited evidence confirms both the success of Monte’s book and the role

85  Vat. Lat. 11539. See Filippi, “Earthly Music,” 219. 86  Filippi, “Earthly Music,” 213.

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of the Jesuits in distributing Italian spiritual poetry around the Bavarian court, which Monte’s later works incidentally demonstrate.87 Pietro Vinci’s Quattordici sonetti spirituali on the other hand bears witness to the circulation of the 1548 edition of Rime Spirituali. That edition88 is the first to contain the fourteen sonnets set to music by Vinci,89 since “Rinasca in te me mio cor” (Madrigal 9), on the Virgin birth, is not in the Valgrisi edition from 1546. The composer chooses a very traditional treatment for the form of the sonnet, which he splits into two parts: the quatrains comprise the first part, the tercets the second. He creates an imbalance between the ottava of the first part and the sestet of the second, which generally (but not systematically) translates into having a more developed first than second part. This treatment in which the sonnet takes an irregular poetic form was the most common: it was adopted by Cambio, Corfini, Porta, as well as Marcantonio Ingegneri—who set to music “Lume del ciel che ne’ superni giri” and published it in his second book of madrigals for four voices (1579)—90 and Stefano Felis, who published “Vergine pura che dai raggi ardenti” in his fifth book for five voices (1583).91 Another possibility was to accentuate the imbalance between the two parts by setting to music the first quatrain on the one hand, and the second quatrain

87  In the second book of madrigals for six voices, blending vernacular and Latin spiritual texts, Monte sets to music an extract of De Maria Virgine incomparabili et Dei genitrice sacrosancta by Canisius, a figurehead for Jesuit Marian devotion in German-speaking areas. The welcome extended by the composer to the Jesuits’ role can also be seen in the dedication to William II of Bavaria in his third book of spiritual madrigals for six voices (1590). See Thorsten Hindrichs, Philipp de Monte (1521–1603). Komponist, Kapellmeister, Korrespondent (Göttingen, 2002), 102, and Filippi, “Earthly Music,” 213. 88   Le rime spirituali della illustrissima signora Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara. Alle quali di nuovo sono stati aggiunti, oltre quelli non pur dell’altrui stampe, ma ancho della nostra medesima, piu di trenta, o trentatre Sonetti, non mai piu altrove stampati; un capitolo; et in non pochi luoghi ricorrette, et piu chiaramente distinte (Venice, 1548). 89  “Padre nostro e del ciel con quanto amore,” “Le braccia aprendo in croce e l’alme e pure,” “Pende l’alto signor nel duro legno,” “Gli angioli eletti al gran ben infinito,” “Qui non è il luoco umil nelle pietose,” “Divino spirto il cui soave ardore,” “Vergine pura che dai raggi ardenti,” “Stella del nostro mar chiara e sicura,” “Rinasca in te mio cor quest’almo giorno,” “Quando senza spezzar né aprir la porta,” “Quando quell’empio tradimento aperse,” “La bella donna a cui dolente preme,” “Quanta gioia tu segno e stella ardente,” “Puri Innocenti il vostro invitto e forte.” 90   Il secondo libro de’ madrigali di Marc’Antonio Ingegneri a quattro voci, con due Arie di canzon francese per sonare (Venice, 1579). 91  Stefano Felis, Il Quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci . . . (Venice, 1583).

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and the tercets on the other. It was a solution adopted by Monte in his first spiritual book for six voices (“Dimmi lume del mondo e chiaro onore,” 8): Dimmi, Lume del mondo e chiaro onore del Cielo, or che ’n Te stesso il Tuo ben godi, qual virtù Ti sostenne, o pur quai nodi T’avinser nudo in croce cotant’ore? Io sol Ti scorgo afflitto, e dentro e fore offeso, e grave pender da tre chiodi. Risponde: “Io legato era in mille modi dal mio sempre vèr voi sì dolce amore, lo qual al morir mio fu schermo degno con l’alta ubidienza, ma l’ingrato spirto d’altrui più che ’l mio mal m’offese, ond’io non prendo il cor pentito a sdegno, già caldo e molle, ma il freddo indurato ch’a tanto foco mio mai non s’accese.”92 By opting for this imbalance, the composer reproduces in some way the semantic structure of the poem, by separating the initial question from the response of Christ on the cross in three phrases (“Io legato,” “Io qual al morir mio,” and “ond’io non prendo”). Among this generation, several composers instead opt for a continuous through-composed form. Two of the six sonnets published by Monte in 1583 (“Donna dal ciel gradita” and “Stella del nostro mar, chiara e secura”) and the three sonnets by Colonna included in the 1589 book appear as long, one-part madrigals. Another composer of the later madrigal who also opts for this solution on numerous occasions is Antonio Il Verso. In his work, the 92  “Tell me, light of the world and radiant glory/of the sky, now that you enjoy your bounty within yourself, / what virtue sustained you, and what knots / bound your nude body to the cross for so many hours? / I only see you wounded, offended from / within and without, hanging in pain from three nails.” He replies: “I was bound so tightly by my eternal sweet love for you, / which with divine obedience was a worthy shield / at the moment of my death, but the ungrateful / spirit of others hurt me more that the pain I bore. / For I do not scorn the repentant heart, / which is warm and soft, but the cold, hard one/which all my fire could not inflame”: Brundin, 2005, 127.

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continuous form is accentuated in certain madrigals by the rejection of an overemphasized cadential finish at the end of the first quatrain and the first tercet. Conversely the sonnet lends itself to being split not into two but three parts, by dissociating the two quatrains: Bonzanino handles “Vorrei che sempr’un grido alto” in this way,93 as does Antonio Il Verso right at the very end of the century (“Di lagrime di pianto nudrir l’alma,” variation of “Di lagrime di foco nutrir l’alma,” 1590).94 The different parts, generally associated by a common or similar mode and sometimes through re-use of the same melodic or contrapuntal material, could however be sung separately, even though the contents in music books in principle would indicate these as “2a” and “3a parte.” The division of the sonnet is only one means of interpreting the poetic form among others used by musicians. Metrical changes, which are extremely important for the listener, also create contrasts, as in Perissone Cambio’s madrigal “Se ’l breve suon che sol quest’aer frale” entirely composed in duple meter (¢) and chanted in a highly emphasized cadential ending), except for the last verse which takes on tempus perfectum (triple meter) (3/I)—a highly symbolic choice to close the madrigal on the notion of celestial concert, in the form of the question: “né si discorda il bel concento altero?” To this traditional form chosen by Vinci is added the grouping of the sonnets in twos, according to a unity that is both thematic and modal; the book is in this way comprised of seven sections of four pieces. In the epigraph of each madrigal, Vinci has indicated its devotional destination (a saint, a feast day). The madrigals are categorized according to a traditional theological order, not related to either liturgy or personal meditation: the first three couples of madrigals are reserved for the Trinity (the first to the Father, madrigals 2 to 5 to the Son, and 6 to the Holy Ghost). At the centre are four madrigals to the Virgin, while the last part is formed of two couples of sonnets that make reference, respectively, to the death of Jesus (sonnets to John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene) then in collective mode, to the Nativity (sonnets to the Magi and the Innocents).95 As contemporaries, Monte and Vinci almost simultaneously published Colonna’s sonnets set to music, including six in common, yet they display a fundamentally different reading of Colonna’s spiritual poetry. Both adopt 93  Verona, Accademia Filarmonica, ms. 221. 94  “Di lagrime di pianto,” Di Antonio Il Verso della città di Piazza. Il Primo Libro de’ Madrigali a cinque voci . . . 95  See also Gloria Patti, “Introduzione,” in Pietro Vinci, Quottordici sonetti spirituali della illustrissima e eccenllentissima divina Vittoria Colonna messi in canto a cinque voci (1580) (Florence, 2002), xv.

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features characteristic of the spiritual madrigal, which are more austere than the traditional madrigal from which it arises. Vinci’s Quattordici sonetti feature very few madrigalisms in comparison with his secular books. Also noteworthy is the use of a strongly connoted writing style: madrigalisms and effects of reply between voices (or of miniaturized double choir), as well as a strictly syllabic language inspired by the falsobordone (in Vinci especially) underline effortlessly the evocation of Heaven or spiritual perception. In general, attempts to find common stylistic characteristics among the music settings composed to Colonna’s poems would be in vain: they reflect the diversity of eras, places and social milieu where the spiritual madrigal flourished and circulated in Italy and north of the Alps. As a perfect example of the success of spiritual Petrarchism among musicians, Colonna’s poetry combines with a musical genre that is out of kilter chronologically with its poetic sources: the spiritual madrigal from after the Council of Trent exploited the verse of poets from the early decades of the century, such as Sannazaro, Bembo and Colonna, without turning away from Petrarch who continued to innervate secular and spiritual compositions. The sonnet form, which continued to prevail in the spiritual madrigal at the end of the century while the secular madrigal opened itself up to a diversification of poetic genres, is not a driving force in the preference for Colonna’s poetry, but rather a consequence of this marked taste for Colonna and her contemporary Petrarchists. The use of Colonna’s poetry does not assume the same meaning across time periods. While it was significant in Giberti’s Verona, at Bonzanino’s hand, Colonna’s work no longer had that air of spiritual heterodoxy at the end of the century when, rehabilitated and widely circulated, it came to be set to music by Vinci or Monte. On the contrary, the spiritual poems become in the first example an opportunity to make a thinly veiled appeal to a public figure; in the second case, Monte’s choice reveals a strong demand at the imperial court for a supply of diverse spiritual poems. What, therefore, are the musicians’ deeper motivations in choosing Colonna’s poetry? Musicians willingly chose sonnets that were similar to liturgical prayers and those which referred explicitly to sound. Cambio, Monte and Porta all set to music “Se ’l breve suon che questo aer frale,” subtitled “Domanda aiuto alla vergine Maria per la sua salute,” in the 1540 edition by Comin da Trino.96 As D. Filippi remarks, this sonnet evokes successively in the first quatrain the concept of music held by Colonna’s contemporaries, in the

96   R ime 1540.

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second the effects that music has on man,97 while the tercets focus on the evocation of celestial music.98 Colonna here takes up a Petrarchist commonplace as seen particularly in the last verses of Trionfo dell’eternità: that of the immeasurable nature of celestial bliss. The definitive distance, the hiatus that creates the necessary space for mystical aspiration, also offers the poet the conditions for a verbal evocation of this supreme world. The desire among madrigalists for poems evoking sonorous elements is well known, and is easily explained by the very concept of the expression in force in the polyphonic madrigal. The discredit that the poet pours on earthly music does not put off the musicians, who adopt various stylistic solutions to represent the celestial music evoked in the tercets. Perissone Cambio in this madrigal opts for a serious style common in the spiritual madrigal. He adopts a relatively syllabic writing style, but privileges long values, more than in his other madrigals, and almost in the manner of a motet. The relatively contrapuntal texture leaves room for homophonic and syllabic scansions; the evocation of celestial music is rendered through both madrigalisms and triads proceeded by descending fifths. For this sonnet, Monte composes a madrigal that is much more developed than the others, in the authentic F-mode, which distinguishes it from other pieces in the collection and places it at the centre of his book: the improvement is clear. Monte’s writing plays on the contrast between quatrains and tercets. Celestial music is evoked by means of writing that is hieratic, homophonic, diatonic, stripped of figuralisms, taking the diversity of human voices back to a collective sound and, in particular, to a form of clarity and of rarity of individual “noise.” The difficulty in evoking the unheard is seen more clearly in “Vorrei l’orecchia aver qui chiusa e sorda,” set to music by Monte in the same first book of madrigals for five voices. There is an undeniable contradiction between the seduction of the auto-referential discourse, appropriate to madrigalism and more generally to this “picture” of the poem that the madrigal makes a specialty of, and the deep sense of that evocation of sound in Colonna. That poetry of sound does not stop at evoking a sound-filled world born of human experience, as in the later madrigal inspired by the pastoral; on the contrary it is an expression of the definitive divorce between earthly life and the spiritual, often mystical, calling to a superior reality. The music is sometimes a promise, 97  “con tal dolcezza il cor sovente assale / che d’ogni cura vil s’erge e ritoglie, / sprona, accende ’l pensier, drizza le voglie / per gir volando al Ciel con leggiere ale.” 98  “che fia quand’udirà con vivo zelo / la celeste armonia l’anima pura / sol con l’orecchia interna intenta al vero / dinanzi al suo fattor nel sommo Cielo, /u’ non si perde mai tuono o misura, / né si discorda il bel concento altero?”

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sometimes a noise, discord, disturbance. The rejection of earthly music99 derives here from a rejection of exterior senses that would upset spiritual perception. There were many mystics who spurned not only all forms of music but also the spoken word, because it disturbed the interiority of prayer: a human noise that runs counter to the “silent dialogue” and which is prejudicial to communing with the divine. In this sonnet we recognize the mark of high spirituality: while the weak and the hesitant require perceptible support in elevating their souls, those whose spirits are prepared move easily from these ever transitory media. How then can music of this sensitive experience, musica mundana that is both perfect and intrinsically inaudible, be expressed by musica instrumentalis? Monte this time characterizes the angelic concert by polychorality, exchanges between voices which create an effect of space; but this expansion in texture gives way finally, here again, to a lucidity of homorhythmic writing in chords, leading to a long final homophonic cadence. The evocation of celestial music plays not only on the pleasure of contrast, nor even on the relationship between the art of sound and the divine, as conceptualized in Christian thought. It is also a means of demonstrating the privileged bond between music and the ineffable, which provides the substance of love madrigals as much as spiritual poetry. One of the challenges of the madrigal, which explains its huge success among the cultivated, is precisely to transgress the rapport between the poem and the world, not only by exalting the expression of it, but by joining the power of song to that of verse.

99  “Vorrei l’orecchia aver qui chiusa e sorda, / Per udir coi pensier più fermi e intenti / L’alte angeliche voci e i dolci accenti / Che certa pace in vero amor concorda.” See the analysis of these two madrigals by Monte in Filippi, “Earthly Music.”

Part 4 Vittoria Colonna and Religion

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Chapter 9

Prudential Friendship and Religious Reform: Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini* Stephen Bowd

The Problem of Party in Catholic Reform

During the hot summer of 1536 Gian Pietro Carafa planned to cool off by making a detour to visit the monasteries at Camaldoli and Vallombrosa in the refreshing shade of the Tuscan hills. He invited three or four friends to accompany him on his spiritual and corporal jaunt: Gregorio Cortese, Benedictine abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice; Reginald Pole, the English aristocrat in exile in the Veneto; Bishop Gian Matteo Giberti of Verona; and possibly Marcantonio Flaminio, a member of Giberti’s household.1 This was no mere pleasure trip. Each man was traveling from Venice to Rome on important papal business, having been appointed by Pope Paul III to sit on a commission preparing for the general council of the Church to be held in Mantua the following spring.2 Their participation in the commission was no doubt prompted by * I am grateful to the late Professor Thomas F. Mayer and to Professor Emerita Elisabeth G. Gleason for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1  Pole notes his plan to go to Rome in the company of Cortese in a letter to Contarini, Rovolon, 4 August 1536: Angelo Maria Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S. R. E. cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum. Part 1: Quae scriptas complectitur ab anno MDXX usque ad an. MDXXXVI. Scilicet a primo Reg. Poli Patavium adventu usque ad delatum ei a Paolo III. Cardinalatum. Praemittuntur animadversiones in epist. Jo: Georg. Schelhornii, Vita Cardinalis Poli, & quaedam hujus scripta, Atque diatriba ad easdem epistolas (Brescia, 1744), 475, no. 41. Pole asked Giberti to join them, but Cortese now planned to leave for Rome sooner than both of them: Pole to Giberti, Rovolon, 10 August 1536, in ibid., 479, no. 43. Cortese discusses the trip (and its monastic detour) in a letter to Contarini, Venice, 27 August 1536: Gregorio Cortese, Omnia quae huc usque colligi potuerunt, sive ab eo scripta, sive ad illum spectantia (Padua, 1774), pt. 1, 114. Four days later Pole was in Venice with Carafa, Cortese, and Giberti: Pole to Contarini, Venice, 31 August 1536, in Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldo Poli, I: 480–81, no. 44. 2  Their appointment— and the subsequent elevation of Carafa and Pole to the cardinalate—was greeted with pleasure and excitement by contemporaries such as the papal nuncio in Venice: “Questa elettione et chiamata de questi huomini letterati et di bona vita, che

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their reputations for holiness and good works and it was effectively assured by the appointment of their friend Cardinal Gasparo Contarini as its head.3 The report produced by the commission in 1537 is considered a key document in the history of Catholicism. The Consilium de emendanda ecclesia proposed a break with centuries of papal power and practice in secular matters or dispensations. The authors condemned with impolitic—if not ­unprecedented—frankness the abuses and “serious ills with which the church of God and especially the court of Rome have long been afflicted . . . [which] have brought the church to that ruinous condition in which we now see her.” In particular they viewed the benefice system—with the pope at its source—as gravely corrupted, a Trojan horse from which other abuses and clerical failings flowed to the detriment of the Christian laity. This explosive report soon circulated throughout Europe before being shelved.4 The German edition included mocking annotations by Martin Luther: “The pope is trailing his poor council around like a cat with kittens . . . So now they have invented a new stratagem, and that is this booklet which so beguilingly proclaims the reformation of the whole church. If this lie meets with belief, no council will henceforth be necessary.”5 This episode has often been considered significant in Catholic history for it marked the rise to power of Contarini and his supporters and reflected a struggle taking place within the curia and the Catholic Church as it attempted to confront the problem of Protestantism in the years preceding the opening of the first session of the Council of Trent in 1545. N. S. ha chiamati per queste cose del Concilio, li ha messa un’altra corona in capo, che ne è lodato assai.” Girolamo Verallo to Girolamo Dandino, Venice, 13 November 1536: Nunziature di Venezia, vol. 2: 9 gennaio 1536– 9 giugno 1542, ed. F. Gaeta (Rome, 1960), 78. 3  Contarini wrote of Pole’s (and Cortese’s) call to Rome in a letter to Pole, Rome, 12 July 1536: Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, I: 463–64, no. 36; and on the same matter see Contarini to Pole, Rome, 18 July 1536, in ibid., 465, no. 37; and Contarini to Pole, Rome, 22 July 1536, in ibid., 465–66, no. 38. For the official papal notification, see Pope Paul III to Pole, Rome, 19 July, in ibid., 466–67, no. 39. 4  Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum praelatorum, De emendanda Ecclesia, S. D. N. D. Paulo III. ipso iubente, conscriptum & exhibitum. Anno 1538 (n.p., n.d.), translated and printed as “Proposal of a Select Committee of Cardinals and other Prelates Concerning the Reform of the Church, Written and Presented by Order of His Holiness Pope Paul III (1537),” in Reform Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. and trans. Elisabeth G. Gleason (Chico, 1981), 85–100, here 85, 86. For an excellent discussion of the Consilium see: Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley, CA: 1993), 129–57. 5  Martin Luther, “Council of a Committee of Several Cardinals with Luther’s Preface,” Martin Luther’s Works, vol. 34: Career of the Reformer IV, ed. Helmut T. Lehman and Lewis W. Spitz (Philadelphia, 1960), 235, 239.

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Most of the men traveling to Rome in 1536 have usually been labeled spirituali and treated as a coherent circle closely associated with Church reform during that decade. Headed by either Gasparo Contarini or Reginald Pole, the formation of this circle has often been placed alongside the drafting of the Consilium as an important and controversial moment in the history of early modern Catholicism. Many historians have argued that its members—which include some of the signatories of the Consilium as well as Vittoria Colonna— held a “moderate” or inclusive view on concordance and charity toward the Protestants and that they were prepared to offer some degree of accommodation with the heretical interpretation of the Catholic doctrine of Justification by Faith which minimized human action. The “rise” of the circle is usually dated to the elevation of Contarini and Pole to the cardinalate in 1535, confirmed by the drafting of the Consilium, and capped by the near success of Contarini’s gamble at the Colloquy of Regensburg (1541) where he managed to reach an apparent agreement with the Protestants over the disputed role of Justification by Faith. However, the “decline” and ultimate “failure” of the spirituali is also said to date from this moment since Contarini’s compromise deal foundered as the political sands in Rome shifted under his feet in favor of “hardliners” such as Carafa (another signatory of the Consilium), who were vehemently opposed to any compromise with heretics.6 Historical understanding of the period and process known as the CounterReformation has often been based on preconceptions about the nature of reform in the Catholic Church before Trent. The disciplinary thrust and doctrinal clarity of Counter–Reformation Catholicism has been contrasted with curial indecision and the existence of a doctrinal “zona ombra” or “theologische Unklarheit” during the 1530s and 1540s. It is now much less clear, however, that the Counter-Reformation can stand in such stark opposition to elements of the program of spirituali before Contarini’s failure at Regensburg in 1541 and death in 1542. Historians now argue that neither term can encompass the myriad channels of spirituality and reform thought and action that run from the

6  For early historiographical references to the “circle” or discussions of reform in Venice, see Franz Dittrich, Gasparo Contarini, 1483–1542: eine Monographie (Braunsberg, 1885), 212; Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Ralph Francis Kerr (London, 1910), 10, 416. A cautionary note is introduced by Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 190–201; and by William V. Hudon, Marcello Cervini and Ecclesiastical Government in Tridentine Italy (DeKalb, IL: 1992), 161–74. See also Stephen D. Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2002), 208–30.

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late medieval conciliar era to the “waning” of the Renaissance.7 John O’Malley has suggested that “early modern Catholicism” provides a much better sense of continuity and change within the Catholic Church. Indeed, while the Council of Trent may have initiated a counter-reform in the post-Reformation period, it emerged in a world shaped by the reformers before the Reformation.8 The contradictions and tensions inherent in the Catholic position before Trent also form an important theme in the modern biography of Contarini. Elisabeth G. Gleason has asserted that Contarini and his friends were looking for a “more vital, personal, and unconstricted Christianity” in the period before Trent. She describes an Italian Church of the 1530s and 1540s, which was more “open and doctrinally indeterminate” than the Church of the CounterReformation after ca. 1545. Gleason distinguishes between Contarini’s personal conviction of Justification by Faith and the Church’s move to reject that doctrine, although her timetable for the emergence of the Tridentine Church, which is doctrinally clear and unequivocal seems to be rather vague, and appears to allow her to describe a Church that could both accommodate and reject Contarini’s views.9 Thomas F. Mayer, the most recent biographer of Reginald Pole, preferred the term “reform tendency” to describe the group of men and women once conveniently described as spirituali and intransigenti. He wrote: “Constantly shifting, realigning, metamorphosing, anything but a party, this tendency includes all those who expressed allegiance to reform and who usually cooperated with one another until driven apart by personality or politics, not in the first instance religious differences.”10 This view seems to be supported by a glance at the relationships between the men who proceeded southward to Rome in 1536. While they lived in Venice, a number of sources suggest, the 7   I echo here William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT: 2001). 8   See John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000); and John W. O’Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,” in Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform (Aldershot, 1993), ch. 12. See also Bowd, Reform before the Reformation, 25. 9   Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 225, 195. Compare ibid., 269, where Gleason appears to reject the “formulation” of theologische Unklarheit in the pre-Tridentine Church. There is a critique of Gleason’s reasoning by William V. Hudon, review of Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 623–24. 10  Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), 8. Mayer adds: “It seems useful to adopt [. . .] [the] argument that the real ‘substratum’ of Italian (and European) religious ferment after Luther was a revival of Augustine” (11).

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spirituali formed a coherent group centered on Contarini, the abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore under Cortese, or the hospital for syphilitics known as the incurabili. For example, in Antonio Brucioli’s 1537 dialogue Reginald Pole strolls through the gardens of San Giorgio Maggiore discussing virtue.11 In letters of 1536 to Contarini, Cortese fondly recalled happy hours spent in the same gardens, and declared Pole to be Contarini’s “living image.”12 In his turn, Pole described Cortese as the image of Contarini.13 Pole also compared Cortese and the monk Marco da Cremona with Enoch and Elijah as they wandered in discussion through the garden of the house belonging to the Cassinese at Rovolon near Padua, and he wrote of how his happiness would be complete if Contarini joined them there.14 However, the presence of Carafa, usually considered the leader of the intransigenti and an avowed enemy of the spirituali, in the summer party complicates the picture of happy unity. In a letter of 1540, a procurator of the incurabili recalled Contarini, Pole, and Carafa visiting the hospital “many times” (“molte volte”).15 In 1533 Flaminio gave Contarini and Cortese his work on the paraphrases of the Psalms for them to comment on, and in other letters he expressed high hopes for reform under Paul III and praised Contarini as an instrument of God in this matter.16 But he also described himself as a

11  Antonio Brucioli, Dialogi, ed. Aldo Landi (Naples, 1983), 278. Thirty years later these gardens provided the setting for debates about the French Huguenots and other religious topics according to evidence given to the Venetian Inquisition. See Marion Leathers Kuntz, The Anointment of Dionisio: Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Italy (University Park, PA, 2001), 146. 12  Cortese to Contarini, Venice, 8 March 1536, and idem to idem, Venice, 6 July 1536: Cortese Omnia quae huc, pt. 1, 103, 111. Also note Pietro Bembo’s comments at the time of Contarini’s elevation to the cardinalate and his imminent departure for Rome: “Tum et Polum, qui Venetiis est apud Contarenum frequens; et Lazarum [Lazzaro Bonamico], qui nobiscum.” Bembo to Sadoleto, Padua, 22 April 1535: Bembo: Lettere, III: 584, no. 1678. 13  “Abbas S. Georgii ante paucos dies huc rediit, cuius adventus fuit mihi eo gratior, quod in eo videor aliquam tui partem recuperasse, quem vivam tui imaginem iudico.” Pole to Contarini, Venice, 4 March 1536: Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, I: 437, no. 25. For an account of Pole’s activities in Venice during ca. 1521–36, see Mayer, Reginald Pole, 34–61. 14  “Quoties vero te in nostro sermone desideravimus, ut felicitatem nostram compleres!” Pole to Contarini, Rovolon, 4 August 1536: Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, I: 475, no. 41. 15  Piero Contarini to Paul III, Venice, 4 March 1540: Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, narrata col sussidio di fonti inedite (Rome, 1910), 1: 445. 16  Flaminio to Pietro Bembo, Verona, 12 November 1533: Marcantonio Flaminio, Lettere, ed. Alessandro Pastore (Rome, 1978), 20, no. 1; Flaminio to Contarini, Verona, 16 February 1536: ibid., 26–27, no. 3. See also ibid., 28 for indications that they had often been in

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“son” to Carafa whose order of austere regular clerics he had tried (and failed) to join.17 As for the summer party heading for Rome—it moved with no urgency and even less common purpose, and it seems that it almost broke down before it had left Venice. Cortese went on ahead of the others in order to rendezvous with the Archbishop of Salerno in Tuscany; Carafa and Pole left Venice a week late with five companions in the Theatine order of regular clergy, joining Giberti in Verona.18 In Verona Pole almost lost his nerve when he received letters from his relatives in England; the breach with his cousin King Henry VIII had become final.19 Contarini hurriedly assured Pole that he would be safer in Rome (lodged in the Vatican) than in Venice.20 Flaminio headed for Bologna correspondence before; and see Flaminio to Contarini, Verona, n.d. (but after 16 February 1536), in which Flaminio thanks Contarini for inviting him to Rome: ibid., 31–33, no. 4. 17  “Havendomi il reverendissimo vescovo di Chieti in luogo di figliolo, è debito mio haver cura di sua signoria come osservandissimo padre et signore.” Flaminio to Contarini, Florence, 7 October 1536: ibid., 40, no. 8. Flaminio also records Carafa’s help in gaining the priorate of San Colombano. Flaminio to Contarini, Verona, n.d. (but after 16 February 1536): ibid., 31, no. 4. 18  Cortese planned to depart for Rome (via Gubbio) on 2 September—before Giberti, Pole, and Carafa. See Cortese to Contarini, Venice, 27 August 1536: Cortese Omnia quae huc, part 1, 114. Giberti fell off his horse and had to wait in Verona for both remaining men. Carafa ought to have left Venice on 20 September, but Cortese had little hope of any of the trio fulfilling their desire to visit Vallombrosa or Camaldoli on the way to Rome since “parmi siano conjuncti Saturno, e Marte, perché uno sollecita, e l’altro tarda, & il Signor Ranaldo, come Mercurio, si accomoda all’uno, & l’altro.” Cortese to Contarini, Gubbio, 8 October 1536: ibid., 115–16. A contemporary diary records the departure of Carafa from Venice with five Theatine companions on 27 September 1536: Gregorio Marini quoted in a late seventeenth-century manuscript history in Rome, Archivio Generale Teatino, Casettino 14, no. 3, “Annali dei Padri Teatini della Casa di Venezia sul principio dell’anno 1524. 24. di giugno,” 30. The anonymous author of this manuscript notes that the diary was conserved in the Theatine archive of S. Silvestro [a Monte Cavallo] in Rome. However, the contents of this archive were transferred to the Theatine Church of S. Andrea della Valle in the Napoleonic era, and some of these were later moved to the Archivio di Stato in Rome. (Unfortunately, I have found no trace of the diary in either archive but I am grateful to the archivists there, especially the late Fr. Francesco Andreu, and Fr. Robson Antonio of the Theatine order for their kind encouragement and guidance.) The papal nuncio provided Carafa with warm clothes and provision for eight horses (“una per lui con cinque de’ suoi et doi cariagi”): Girolamo Verallo to Girolamo Dandino, Venice, 13 September 1536, in Nunziature di Venezia, vol. II: (9 gennaio 1536–9 giugno 1542), 78, no. 35. However, Carafa was penniless by the time he arrived in Florence early in October. 19  Mayer, Reginald Pole, 44. 20  Contarini to Pole, Rome, 18 July 1536: Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, I: 465, no. 37.

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on learning that his father had died there, and he subsequently proceeded to Florence. The following October he noted that the party had arrived in the latter city in a sorry state. Carafa, apparently a strict interpreter of the Theatine order’s vow of poverty, was penniless, exhausted, and ill (he had to be carried on a litter lent by Caterina Cibo, the duchess of Camerino). Flaminio therefore asked Contarini to use his offices with the pope to find some suitable lodgings for Carafa and Pole in Rome.21 For his part, Flaminio told Contarini that he was temperamentally unsuited to the courtly life of Rome and that he preferred the isolation and calm of the academic circles of Padua where he intended to study Aristotle unless he received a coveted benefice.22 United by a common purpose in Rome and perhaps by a shared regard for the pious and semieremitic Camaldolese, nevertheless this summer expedition was over before it had begun and provides an episode that suggests, in microcosm, the instability of the relationships between key reformers. The remainder of this chapter first examines the historically neglected relationship between Contarini and Vittoria Colonna for further evidence of shared admiration for reformed or reforming orders, especially those that seemed to encourage the imitation of Christ. An intense Eucharistic devotion and a personal desire to imitate Christ are clearly evident in the letters which passed between Contarini and Colonna, and the exploration of their engagement with debates about the respective roles of Christ and man forms the second major strand of this chapter. Finally, the private spiritual feelings of Contarini and Colonna must be placed in the broader context of their desire for a community in Christ and their active promotion of reform. The community in Christ formed by some of the men mentioned at the beginning of the chapter was hardly stable and it seems as if the unavoidable tension between personal feelings and communal or institutional structures was resolved in strikingly different ways by each member. This tension and its resolution mark the history of Catholicism at this time as much as doctrinal disputes and political calculations, and once again the example of the relationship between Contarini and Colonna can help to demonstrate this fact. 21  Flaminio to Contarini, Florence, 7 October 1536: Flaminio, Lettere, 40–41, no. 8. Pole wrote to Contarini from Siena on 10 October 1536: Querini, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, I: 483–85, no. 45. This suggests that Pole (if not the others) went directly from Florence to Siena without making the planned detour. On Carafa’s early austerity see Kenneth J. Jorgensen, S. J., “The Theatines,” in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York, 1994), 1–29, here 9–10 and 12–13. 22  Flaminio to Contarini, Verona, n.d. (but after 16 February 1536): ibid., 32–33, no. 4.

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In Imitation of Christ

One little studied relationship that was key to the spiritual discussions and reform thought of the era is that between the noble Vittoria Colonna and the patrician Gasparo Contarini. The two drew close during the 1530s and on her side the relationship was marked by admiration, common spiritual feeling, and also by some political calculation as she sought the older man’s support for her beloved Capuchin order. In 1536 Colonna addressed Contarini as the man who held the rudder of the ship of St Peter and steered it away from shipwreck.23 On Contarini’s death she wrote to his sister feelingly about his “pious and sweet letters . . . his doctrine, prudence and wisdom,” as well as the “excellent and divine example that he offered to everyone, and most important utility of the Church . . . such sweet conversation . . . such a humble soul.”24 For his part, Contarini worked to support the Capuchins, addressed letters to Colonna on the matter of free will and expected her to read his thoughts on justification and other matters of dispute with the Protestants. He visited her in Rome in 1538 in the company of Reginald Pole to discuss the hostile German edition of the Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia and the failure of the original document to produce reforms, and he later hoped she would intervene to stop her rebellious brother Ascanio attacking the pope, embarrassing the emperor, and ruining the colloquy of Regensburg.25 Colonna was considered a member of the “school” (“scuola”) around Contarini and Pole, and she may be included among those who had little sympathy with Carafa.26

23  Colonna to Contarini, n.p., 22 December [1536?], in Carteggio, 127–28. 24  “pie et dolci lettere [. . .] dottrina, prudentia et saper suo,” “ottimo et divino essempio, che dava a ciascuno, et alla molto importante utilità alla Chiesa [. . .] dolcissima conversatione [. . .] humilissima anima”: Colonna to Suora Serafina Contarini, Viterbo, [around September 1542], in ibid., 249–52. 25  Ottaviano Lotti to Ercole Gonzaga, Rome, 18 November 1538: Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista storica mantovana, 1 (1885): 1–52, here 46. On the affair of Ascanio Colonna, see Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 213–22. Contarini’s appeal (via Pole) to Vittoria Colonna for help is in The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, vol. 1: A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo, ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Aldershot, 2002), 259–60. 26  In a letter to Vittoria Colonna, Pietro Aretino caustically remarked that he would write nothing but misereri if he were to follow the principles of Carafa and his friends: Aretino to Vittoria Colonna, Venice, 9 January 1538: Pietro Aretino, Scritti scelti, ed. Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1970), 880. In a letter of 1540 Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger wrote to Colonna of how he missed “la scuola della Eccellentia Vostra et de’ reverendissimi miei Cardinali Contareno, Polo, Bembo, Fregoso, che era tutt’uno.” Carteggio, 193.

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The origins of Colonna’s friendship with Contarini lie in the struggle to protect the new order of Capuchins. The Capuchins formed a third branch of the Franciscan order, which aspired to strict observance of the Franciscan rule and imitation of the lives of St Francis and Christ. In their earliest days they attracted men who were appalled by the general of the order Paolo Pisotti and his failure to provide for the stricter observance of the kind urged by Gian Pietro Carafa and many others.27 Initially the discontented drew close to Fra Paolo Giustiniani’s relatively strict congregation of Camaldolese at Monte Corona and their later rule and form of life resembled aspects of this branch of the semi-eremitic order, for example in the wearing of beards and chanting of divine office on a monotone as well as in the ability to receive religious of other orders. The observant Franciscans, concerned with the defection of many friars from their ranks and the “scandal” caused by their zeal, tried to persuade the papacy to suppress the new branch.28 However, the new branch benefited from the early protection and encouragement of both Caterina Cibo, duchess of Camerino, and Vittoria Colonna who intervened with the pope to prevent its reabsorption into the observants and to ensure that pressing questions of internal discipline and organization were addressed at a chapter meeting at the end of 1535. The growing popularity of the Capuchins may partly be understood as a response to unsettled social and political conditions in the peninsula, which helped bring into existence other new orders including the early Ursulines and Somaschi. It can also be viewed as an Italian counterpart to the purificatory drive in religion that drove the Protestant Reformation north of the Alps. Indeed, the Capuchin emphasis on mental prayer and the 27  Having urged his addressee the Franciscan fra Bonaventura to impress upon the pope the necessity for more observant friars to be allowed to enter monasteries dedicated to strict Franciscan rule he states: “Already His Holiness can see the agitation in the Capuchin order and in others in different parts of the world: all shout, all are in an uproar and remain [in their orders] to the extent to which they have now lost hope in reform. But in the very hour when they lose such hope, I foresee with certainty that many in desperation will take reform into their own hands, which God in his mercy may not allow because we already have so many tribulations that they fully suffice.” Gian Pietro Carafa, “Memorial to Pope Clement VII” (1532), in Gleason, Reform Thought, 55–80, here 76–77. Three years later the general chapter of the observant Franciscans agreed that “houses of recollection” should be established in the provinces in order to prevent the migration of friars to rival orders, including the Capuchins. 28  Elisabeth G. Gleason, “The Capuchin Order in the Sixteenth Century,” in DeMolen, Religious Orders, 31–57; Father Cuthbert, The Capuchins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter-Reformation, 2 vols. (New York, 1929).

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delivery of relatively simple evangelical sermons contributed to accusations of Lutheranism.29 Colonna and Contarini (who had been a close friend of the founder of the Camaldolese of Monte Corona, Giustiniani) were probably attracted by these aspects of Capuchin piety as well as by its emphasis on the examples of Christ and St Francis to aid Christians reconcile the spirit and law in their own lives. Colonna’s appreciation and comprehension of the spiritual example of Christ was aided by the theology of Juan de Valdés, who arrived in Naples from Spain during the 1530s, and more directly by her friendship with the Capuchin preacher Bernardino Ochino who was based in the city.30 A strong sense of the nature of Colonna’s attraction to the Capuchins can be gleaned from a letter written in defense of the Capuchins and addressed to Contarini in 1536.31 At the beginning of that year Contarini was appointed to the commission of cardinals examining the relationship between the Capuchins and observant Franciscans. He was a sympathetic counterweight on that commission to the hostile cardinal-protector of the Franciscan order Francisco Quiñones and consequently he joined Paul III as the target for Colonna’s epistolary campaign against the subjection of the Capuchins to the

29  On Capuchin preaching, see the 1536 Constitutions and Arsenio D’Ascoli, La predicazione dei cappuccini nel Cinquecento in Italia (Loreto [Ancona], 1956). On the heretical taint of mental prayer, see Giorgio Caravale, Forbidden Prayer: Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy, trans. Peter Dawson (Aldershot, 2011), ch. 2. On the problem of sermons, see Emily Michelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2013). 30  “With the coming of Jesus Christ we are given the spirit with which to do what the law shows us is right. From this point we become aware that what we are unable to do with our own powers and effort, we can achieve by means of the favor of Jesus Christ. Experience teaches us that because of our own nature we can do nothing perfectly good and that through the favor of Jesus Christ we can do and fulfill all that we know is right. Thus, distrusting our own powers completely, we learn to trust entirely in divine favor and grace in whose hands with this knowledge we are glad to willingly place everything, certain that He will not fail us.” Juan de Valdés, “Dialogue on Christian Doctrine” (1529), in Valdés Two Catechisms: The Dialogue on Christian Doctrine and the Christian Instruction for Children, ed. José C. Nieto, trans. William B. and Carol D. Jones, 2nd ed. (Lawrence, KS, 1993), 170. Unsurprisingly, Erasmus’ Enchiridion is among the recommended reading: ibid., 229. On Colonna and Ochino, see the chapter by Emidio Campi in this volume. 31  For Colonna’s involvement with the Capuchins, see Concetta Ranieri, “ ‘Si san Francesco fu eretico li suoi imitatori son luterani’. Vittoria Colonna e la riforma dei cappuccini,” in Ludovico da Fossombrone e l’ordine dei cappuccini, ed. Vincenzo Criscuolo (Rome, 1994), 337–51.

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corrupted and power-hungry (as she viewed them) observant Franciscans.32 The Capuchin chapter meeting in 1536 had been riven with dissension between its founders and new members, and the order’s position was further weakened by accusations of heresy made in the wake of Bernardino Ochino’s Lenten preaching in Naples.33 Colonna addressed these problems confidently and directly in her earliest surviving letter to Contarini, who probably helped to persuade the pope to issue the bull Exponi vobis in favor of the new order in August 1536 in just the same way that he would persuade the pope to favor the new “reformed priests of Jesus” (“preti riformati del Iesu,” as Contarini put it, or the Jesuits as they became known) with an apostolic letter of foundation in 1539.34 Colonna’s summary of the accusations made against the Capuchins in her letter to Contarini begins with the suggestion “that they seem to be Lutherans, because they preach the liberty of the spirit.”35 In response to this troubling accusation she stated proleptically that St. Francis was a heretic if his imitators were indeed Lutherans. Indeed, if preaching “liberty of the spirit over vice” but subject to every order of the Church could be called an error then it was all the more an error to follow the Gospels, which say in many places: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are the spirit, and they are the life” (John 6:63). Their critics would understand them best, she wrote, when they comprehended the brothers’ humility, obedience, and poverty, life, example, customs and charity and, having done so, would cry out for 400,000 to join them. Throughout the remainder of her 32  Father Cuthbert, Capuchins, 1: 90–111. 33  Gian Pietro Carafa may have suspected Ochino of heresy as early as 1533: Andrea Vanni, “Fare diligente inquisition”: Gian Pietro Carafa e le origini dei chierici regolari teatini (Rome, 2010), 155. 34  B AV, Arch. Arcis S. Angeli, Arm. XVII, Ord. 2. C., fols. 145r–48r: Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, narrata col sussidio di fonti inedite (Rome, 1910), 1: 555. Contarini’s prompt defense of the proto-Jesuits against accusations of heresy is gratefully noted in a letter from Loyola to Piero Contarini, Rome, 2 December 1538: Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola, selected and translated by William J. Young, S. J. (Chicago, 1959), 37. See also Loyola to Piero Contarini, Rome, n.d.: Cartas de San Ignacio de Loyola, fundador de la Compañía de Jesús (Madrid, 1874), I, 84–85. Contarini’s meeting with the pope at Tivoli and presentation of the “cinque capitoli” is described in a brief letter from Contarini to Loyola, Tivoli, 3 September 1539: Cartas de San Ignacio de Loyola, I, 433–34. Loyola called Contarini the “instrumento y medio cerca de Su Santidad.” See Loyola to Piero Contarini, Rome, 18 December 1540: ibid., 98–99. 35  “che paiono Luterani, perchè predicano la libertà del spirito”: Colonna to Contarini, 1536, in Carteggio, 110–22, here 112.

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letter Colonna adroitly juxtaposed images of the unreformed, ambitious, and envious observant Franciscans with the poor and humble Capuchins who were following the path of St Francis and the leadership and example of Christ, who was the true “head” (“capo”). Besides the written support of previous popes they held “miraculous writings” in the form of “most fervent works, showing that each one of them singly and all together bear the bull of Christ’s wounds in their hearts and the brevi of St Francis’s stigmata in their minds, confirmed by infinite blessings that they have received and continue to receive daily by the sanctity of Our Lord.”36 Some critics clearly believed that the “freedom of the spirit” that they perceived in the evangelical style and content of Capuchin preaching and forms of religiosity such as mental prayer too closely resembled aspects of the Lutheran “priesthood of all believers.” However, this is precisely what appealed to Colonna and Contarini, and to their friends and contemporaries. For example, the success of the preaching of Bernardino Ochino is evident from a 1538 letter that Pietro Bembo wrote to Colonna, at the behest of “certain gentlemen” (“alquanti gentil uomini”) of the city, asking her to persuade Ochino to preach in the ancient Church of the Apostoli in Venice at Lent. Bembo assured her that not only Venetian gentlemen but also all citizens were in expectation of hearing his sermons.37 As Bembo subsequently assured Colonna, the Capuchin’s sermons, with their expressions of lively charity and love, impressed everyone and he noted that when Ochino left Venice he would take the heart of the city with him.38 In a subsequent letter, Bembo outlined his personal appreciation of Ochino, the most holy of men to whom he opened his heart and mind “as I would have opened it before Jesus Christ.”39 Ochino’s sermons were published twice in Venice in 1541 and their impact was felt beyond patrician circles; direct experience of preaching and contact with printed editions of the sermons were admitted by artisans investigated for heresy by the Venetian

36  “le ferventissime opere, che denotano ciascun d’epsi et tutti insieme havere la bulla de le piaghe di Christo nel core et li brevi delle stigmate di San Francesco ne la mente confirmate da infinite benedictioni, che ogni giorno hanno havuto et hanno de la Sanctità di Nostro Signore” (ibid., 113, 114). 37  Bembo to Colonna, Venice, 6 April 1538, in Bembo: Lettere, 4: 108. 38  Same to same, Venice, 23 February 1539, in ibid., 178. 39  “come arei aperto dinanzi a Gesù Christo”: idem to idem, Venice, 15 March 1539, in ibid., 184–85, here 185. Also note the praise for Ochino and “la sua voce apostolica” heard in the Venetian sermons in the letters of Pietro Aretino, Lettere, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Salerno, Rome, 1998), 2: 412, see also 70 et passim.

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inquisition in the 1540s.40 In their simplicity and directness the sermons conform to the Capuchin ideal while in their attention to the crucified Christ as the true mirror for pious reflection they evoke the piety of both Contarini and Colonna.41 This Christocentric piety and the spiritual attraction toward the Capuchins, and especially toward Ochino, which Colonna and Contarini shared is illuminated by their subsequent correspondence. In November 1536 Contarini wrote to Colonna in response to her letters and requests for an opinion on the question of free will, one of the key points of dispute between Catholics and Protestants.42 Contarini’s letter on this topic, which has been judged of little significance in relation to his ideas for reform, nevertheless provides a good insight into his position on this matter and his developing relationship with Colonna.43 The letter begins by invoking St Paul’s warning against vain human philosophy and his injunction to follow the philosophy of Christ (Colossians 2:8).44 He returns to this outlook at the end of the letter when he again cites St Paul and exalts the salvific role of Christ’s bloody sacrifice.45 In this philosophical vein Contarini guides Colonna through the different meanings of the term “free” (“libero”) before considering the “will” (“arbitrio”) of animals and humans in an ascending scale of amplitude derived from Aristotle. His exposition is enlivened by homely analogies he possibly 40  John Jeffries Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Baltimore, 1993), 87–89, 93. 41  Bernardino Ochino, Prediche del reuerendo padre frate Bernardino Occhino senese generale dell’Ordine di frati capuzzini, predicate nella inclita citta di Vinegia, del MDXXXIX (Venice, 1541); idem, Prediche noue predicate dal reuerendo padre frate Bernardino Occhino senese, generale dell’Ordine di frati capuzzini nella inclita città di Vinegia: del MDXXXIX che fu la prima la domenica di passione. La seconda il martedi. La terza il venerdi. La quarta il sabato dopo la detta domenica di passione, auanti la domenica dell’oliuo. La quinta il lunedi santo. La sesta il giouedi santo. La settima il lunedi di Pasqua. La ottaua il di della Maddalena. La nona il di di S. Nicolo alli scolari in Perugia. Nuouamente date in luce, e con grandissima diligenza stampate (Venice, 1541 del mese di maggio). See also idem, Dialogi quattro del reueren. frate Bernardino da Siena detto il Scapuzzino, oue si contengono del Ladrone in croce qual saluosii, del pentirsi presto, del peregrinaggio per andare al paradiso, della diuina professione con un spirituale testamento: opera nuoua con somma diligenza corretta, historiata, e nuouamente stampata (Venice, 1540), and see the English translation of one of the dialogues (“Concerning the Thief on the Cross”) in Gleason, Reform Thought, 37–44. 42  Contarini to Colonna, Rome, 13 November 1536, in Gasparo Contarini, Quattro Lettere di Monsig. Gasparo Contarinio Cardinale (Florence, 1558), 57–76. 43  Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 150. 44  Contarini, Quattro lettere, 57. 45  Ibid., 74–75.

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considered appropriate to the gender and social status of his correspondent— comparing the incomplete understanding of animals, which only follow their own nature in making decisions and do not make their own choices, with a young child led by the hand by its wet nurse or schoolmaster to school to learn the alphabet.46 Contarini asserts that the human will drives toward universal good and is in need of God’s imputed grace as a medicine for its diseased state. Contarini’s thoughts on this knotty matter of imputed grace were more extensively set out in his 1541 Epistola de iustificatione, which was addressed to Messer Angelo, a familiar of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, and circulated by Pietro Bembo to Pole and Colonna who was reported to have found it “most dear.”47 As Gleason has noted, the Epistola helps to elucidate Contarini’s thinking in relation to the important Article 5 (“On man’s justification”) formulated at the Colloquy of Regensburg.48 In this letter he argued for the role of both man’s inherent justice and Christ’s imputed justice in justification and suggested that in the first case man’s intellect was illuminated and his will moved by the Holy Spirit. Consequently man could co-operate with God in moving from sin toward Him. However, for Contarini imputed justice was the most perfect kind of justice and he argued that in themselves good works played no part in justification but served as evidence of true faith, which was active in love. The apparent contradiction or muddle in theological terms between the spiritual good work of man and Christ’s justice may be ascribed to Contarini’s lack of a thorough theological training and an irenic desire to echo the reformer Philip 46  Ibid., 61. Compare his comment in De magistratibus et republica Venetorum (drafted ca. 1523–35): “It seems to me, and as some have said with wisdom, that it is praiseworthy to expect that as one man is unfit to govern alone, his office should be taken up by something more divine. My point may be illustrated with reference to the behavior of different species of animals. The sheep does not govern the flock, nor does a horse or an ox rule over a herd of horses or oxen, but rather they are governed by a more excellent animal—I speak of man whose superiority to irrational creatures is very clear. Therefore, by the same token, men ought to be governed by something superior and more divine than man.” Gasparo Contarini, De Magistratibus et republica Venetorum (Paris, 1543), 8; my translation. See also The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Written by the Cardinall Gasper Contareno, and translated out of Italian into English, by Lewes Lewkenor Esquire . . . (London, 1599), 9–10. 47  Bembo to Contarini, Rome, 2 June 1541, in Bembo, Lettere, 4, 356. Alvise Priuli mentioned the reaction of Colonna in a letter of 15 July 1541: Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma. Studi sul Cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia, rev. ed. (Brescia, 2005), 167. 48  Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 229–35.

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Melanchthon’s stance, but has also been attributed to a desire to articulate his personal experience of Christ’s justice. The emotional depth of his experience was expressed in a passionate Pauline language at odds with the dry formulations of scholasticism. As Gleason states: “He sensed the unresolved tension between the formality of theological discourse and the reality of Christian experience, and opened Catholic theology to the possibility of a less technical as well as more personal understanding of the teaching about justification. That teaching would be accessible to laymen . . .”49 This personal understanding was reflected in the Epistola when he wrote that inherent justice gave man the freedom to consent to divine grace (and be moved by his will toward God, as he explained to Colonna) while imputed justice reaffirmed the supreme importance for salvation of Christ’s sacrifice, which was a position dear to Colonna’s heart.50 Contarini’s personal feelings about divine grace received by the faith of Christ as the basis for justification were certainly as deeply rooted and as passionately felt as those of Colonna. In a letter written from Valladolid in Spain in 1523 to his friend Fra Paolo Giustiniani, the Camaldolese hermit who sheltered early Capuchins, Contarini wrote of being tossed like a leaf in “the winds of the world” (“li venti mondani”) as he served the Venetian state in the capacity of ambassador to the peripatetic Emperor Charles V.51 Moving from reflections on the state of “public things” (“le cose publice”) to considerations of the state of his own “most unstable heart” (“instabilissimo core”), he wrote of how he had reached the firm conclusion that nobody could justify or purge his own soul of “affecti” but must resort to “the divine grace which we have through faith in Jesus Christ” (“la divina gratia la quale se ha per la fede in Iesu Christo”), as St Paul said, and with him also say: “Blessed is the man to whom our Lord hath not imputed sin, without works” (Psalm 32:2; conflating Romans 4:6, 4:8).52 It is precisely this invocation of justification without works that concludes the Epistola de iustificatione two decades later.53 Contarini’s sense of man’s helplessness in 1523 is indicated a little further on when he 49  Ibid., 234–35. 50  On Colonna’s Christology, see Emidio Campi’s contribution in this volume. 51  Contarini to Giustiniani, Valladolid, 7 February 1523, in Hubert Jedin, “Contarini und Camaldoli,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 2 (1959): 115. See also the abridged English version in Gleason, Reform Thought, 31–33. 52  “Beatus, cui non imputavit Dominus peccatum, sine operibus.” Quoted in Jedin, “Contarini und Camaldoli,” 117. 53  “Ideo ex operibus qui dicunt nos iustificari, verum dicunt; et qui dicunt nos iustificari non ex operibus, sed per fidem, verum etiam dicunt.” Contarini to “monacho cuidam Mantuano,” Regensburg, 25 May 1541, in Gasparo Contarini, Gegenreformatorische Schrifte

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recalls those “mad men” (“paci”) among the ancient philosophers who believed that they could purify the soul of its “affecti” by means of the exercise of “habits of virtue which repress the affections” (“habiti de le virtù le quale reprimesseno li affecti”). Such presumption, Contarini concludes, is human vanity and leads one to fall more easily.54 Therefore, it is necessary to be justified by the justice of Christ, to whom one joins oneself, and whose justice he makes our own and not to trust oneself in “the least part” (“un minimo puncto”), saying: “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).55

Communities in Christ

Eucharistic devotion and justification were also central preoccupations for Colonna, and this shared concern helps explain her friendship with Contarini.56 In Colonna’s case personal illumination by means of meditation on Christ’s sacrifice and its salvific meaning for men and women was aided by the production of texts such as her meditation on the Passion, but also by poetry such as the sonnet for Michelangelo beginning “Le braccia aprendo in croce e l’alme e pure / Piaghe largo, Signore, apristi il cielo, / Il limbo, i sassi, i monumenti, il velo / Posto a nostri occhi, e l’ombre e le figure.”57 These works, like Contarini’s letters, could establish a community in Christ among a fairly restricted number of individuals who read them in manuscript. As Brian Richardson has argued, the participants in this “manuscript culture”—the authors themselves as well as the transmitters and recipients of manuscripts—appreciated the relatively restricted circulation of material inherent in the medium.58 Scribal publication confirmed the exclusivity of a group and it encouraged particularly close or limited interaction between authors and readers as manuscripts passed (1530 c.–1542) (Münster, 1923), 34. “Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works” (Romans 4:6). 54  Contarini to Giustiniani, Valladolid, 7 February 1523, in Jedin, “Contarini und Camaldoli,” 117. He quotes Psalm 38:6 as follows: “quod universa vanitas omnis homo vivens.” 55  “A nobis retulimus responsum mortis.” Quoted in ibid. 56  Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), ch. 2. 57  “Opening wide your arms upon the cross and your blessed / and pure wounds, oh Lord, you opened the heavens / and limbo, rent the rocks, monuments, and the veil / which cloaked our eyes, the shadows and figures”: Brundin 2005, 110–11. See also the chapter by Emidio Campi in this volume. 58  Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009).

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from hand to hand and were copied out by readers or their scribes. Scribal publication was a relatively safe way of offering clandestine works to a sympathetic readership. As an “informal” means of communication which could be less easy to control and censor than print the manuscript offered relatively greater freedom of expression, flexibility of form, and convenience. As a result, the manuscript was an important vehicle for both anticlerical attacks and the more considered plans of religious reformers. An interesting case in point is the Beneficio di Cristo, which expressed a Christocentric and “sola fideist” piety partially derived from the work of Juan de Valdés and Jean Calvin. This work has been considered one of the most important texts of Italian reform and it first emerged in manuscript form among a network of friends and acquaintances including Contarini and Pole before it was published in Venice in 1543 in an enormous edition of 10,000 copies.59 Both scribal and printed editions were so effectively suppressed by the Church that only one copy of each edition remains extant although its influence was great at almost every social level. The elite destination of the Beneficio in its first phase of scribal diffusion is suggested by the “refined nature” of the surviving manuscript version.60 However, the flowing and stylish humanist cursive hand of this manuscript stands in contrast to the “workaday typography” of the Venetian printed edition aimed at a much broader readership. In addition, the manuscript version not only incorporated the words of Calvin in its main text but was also copied alongside Gasparo Contarini’s 1541 letter on justification, and with works by Jacopo Sadoleto and Valdés himself. In this way, the manuscript could act as an echo chamber of ideas, a relatively free space congenial to the irenicist bent of the reformers. Such communities in Christ, which elevated the role of learned and spiritual women, drew on humanist models of friendship, which were superseding communities of men or women in enclosed orders as ideals of religious fellowship.61 The social range of these real and paper communities has generally been considered restricted but, as has been noted, printed copies of the Beneficio could reach the hands of Venetian artisans and there is evidence that 59  Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo con le version del secolo XVI, documenti e testimonianze, ed. Salvatore Caponetto (Florence, 1972). See also Tommaso Bozza, Nuovi studi sulla Riforma in Italia, vol. 1: Il Beneficio di Cristo (Rome, 1976). 60  Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 180. 61  Constance Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2006). See also Stephen Bowd, “Swarming with Hermits: Religious Friendship in Renaissance Italy, 1490–1540,” in Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Aldershot, 2009), 9–31.

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some female servants of Giulia Gonzaga in Naples read and discussed Valdesian ideas in the middle of the century.62 The case of the Beneficio suggests that there was a close link between the evangelical dissemination of religious ideas derived from Valdés and the use of the vernacular. Given their interest in the Beneficio and in Valdesian ideas the question of the extent to which Contarini and Colonna considered the broader community in Christ, beyond the members of the Capuchins or Jesuits, clearly deserves some consideration before reaching a general conclusion about the nature of their friendship and its significance for Italian religious reform.63 In addition to a network of like-minded friends maintained over many years at considerable distance (especially in the case of the roving ambassador Contarini), both Contarini and Colonna were drawn to the expression of religious devotion by means of the pulpit. As we have seen Colonna defended the preaching of the Capuchins and she wrote to Contarini in expectation that he would share her point of view. Bembo’s warm words of praise for Ochino the Capuchin preacher, and his report that all Venice gave its heart to him, testify to the preacher’s broad appeal.64 Contarini himself was hostile toward the discussion of complex theological problems within sermons directed at unlettered laypeople, but he may have followed the prescription of St Francis, drawn from the Constitutions of the Capuchins, when he enjoined preachers (in advice on preaching in his own diocese of Belluno composed in 1538) to emphasize the nature and rewards of virtue and the punishments for vice in their sermons for the “ignorant multitude.”65 Contarini seems to have felt here that preachers should avoid giving sermons about matters, such as predestination or the belief that man can be justified without good works, which might lead the audience to draw the wrong conclusions or neglect good works. This cautious approach to preaching has been called a “two-tier model of the Christian community, drawing a sharp horizontal line between the mass of believers and

62  Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Turnhout, 2006), 85–87. 63  For a pioneering exploration of the link between vernacular literature, gender, and “evangelism,” see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “The Lettere volgari and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975): 639–88. See also Carlo Dionisotti, “La letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio,” in Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina: atti del convegno storico internazionale, Trento, 2–6 settembre 1963, 2 vols. (Rome, 1965), I, 317–43. 64  See also Gigliola Fragnito, “Gli “spirituali” e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino,” Rivista Storica Italiana 84 (1972): 777–813 (reprinted in her Gasparo Contarini: un magistrato veneziano al servizio della cristianità [Florence, 1988], 251–306). 65  Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 266–67, note 41.

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the educated elite of the church.”66 This interpretation of Contarini’s outlook is supported by a glance at the brief discussion of preaching in his De officio episcopi (1517).67 Here Contarini thought the “ancient practice” of the bishop giving a sermon during the Mass should be revived so that they might teach “those ignorant of Christian doctrine and wonderfully” encourage “all to a good life.” On feast days and days of celebration, at least, the bishop could explain the gospel in a sermon and “bring forward for discussion something from the sacred scriptures or from moral philosophy, if not before the whole people, at least with the clergy present and listening, for through the clergy that sermon will also very likely flow out to everybody.”68 Contarini’s preference for the simple homiletic sermon, which avoided complex theological problems, was shared by many contemporaries.69 His more general vision of the ideal bishop providing an example of holiness to clergy and laity is also in accord with the advice of contemporary bishops including Gian Matteo Giberti, who formed part of Carafa’s summer party in 1536.70 However, Contarini’s belief that an educated elite could discuss difficult theological matters and leave the preacher to provide more simple fare for the mass of people was modified in a discussion of preaching commissioned by Paul III in 1541. In this work, the two-tier model was “much mitigated” and the role of the institutional church for all believers, for example in the sacrament of penance and the role of ceremonies and rituals, rather than learned debate was emphasized.71 Gleason has attributed Contarini’s more conservative position in 1541 with respect to his earlier advice to the preachers in Belluno to his experience of the divisions in Germany exhibited at the Colloquy of Regensburg.72 It is also likely that reports sent to Giovanni Morone of discussions about faith, free will, purgatory, the Eucharist, and predestination in shops and on street corners in his own diocese of Modena were shared 66  Ibid., 268. 67  For a different view, see William V. Hudon, “Two Instructions for Preachers from the Tridentine Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 457–70. 68  Gasparo Contarini, The Office of a Bishop (De Officio viri boni et probi episcopi), ed. and trans. John Patrick Donnelly, S. J. (Milwaukee, 2002), 105. 69  Note the popularity of pious layman Ludovico Pittorio’s vernacular homiletic sermons which were reissued thirty-five times between 1506 and 1599: Michelson, Pulpit and the Press, 26–27. Michelson also notes a sharp surge in the publication of sermon literature in Italy during the 1540s, and of homilies during the 1550s. Vernacular printed sermons outstripped Latin publications at the same time: ibid., 28, 29 fig. 1; 30, 31 fig. 3; 30 fig. 2. 70  Ibid., 48–49. 71  Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 273. 72  Ibid., 274.

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with his respected colleague Contarini in Regensburg who feared the spread of heresy from Germany into Italy.73 In Modena the situation had been exacerbated by a “battle of the pulpit” from the end of the 1530s, which had seen Ochino appear in the city in February 1541 “apparently to the satisfaction of all sides.”74 Contarini was drawn into this affair at Morone’s behest and it resulted in a confession of faith on the sacraments, notably the Eucharist, and some other matters in dispute such as the cult of saints to which the leading figures in the scandal were expected to put their names. Contarini’s intervention may also have contributed to Morone’s suggestion that a learned, resident, effective preaching bishop be appointed to root out suspect beliefs.75 It has been suggested that the incident at Modena represents a final failure of the irenic approach of Contarini as he struggled to paper over doctrinal doubts with broad definitions (omitting to mention transubstantiation in his confession of faith, for example) and avoid Roman interference in the form of an inquisition (which was now also mooted for Naples, the nest of Valdesianism) by proposing instead a preaching bishop. The supposed coolness with which Pole greeted Contarini’s formula for an agreement over articles of faith in Modena, and especially his last statement on penance in which he outlined the necessity for human atonement for sins against natural and human law, has also been viewed as a confirmation of a split between the “moderate” and “progressive” wings of the spirituali, the latter grouped around the English cardinal at Viterbo and including Colonna.76 Massimo Firpo has furthermore suggested that until this moment a common polemic against ecclesiastical abuses 73  On the reports, see ibid., 285. On possible shared news from Modena and fears in 1541, see Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580) (Aldershot, 2012), 45. Contarini was present at the Diet of Worms in 1521 as Venetian ambassador to Charles V and he would have been aware of signs of the spread of heresy in Venice and its empire: Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies. On heresy in Brescia in the 1540s, see Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville, MO, 1999), 175–81. Contarini visited this city on 18 August 1541, entering with the Venetian rectors of the city and a company of local nobles, and was “con grandissimo honore riceputo.” Tomaso [sic] Mercando, “Cronaca (1532–1546),” in Le cronache bresciane inedite dei secoli XV–XIX, ed. Paolo Guerrini, vol. 1 (Brescia, 1922), 160. 74  Robinson, Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, 47. 75  Ibid., 48–51. On the Confession of Faith, see Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 286–92. 76   The historiography is reviewed in Robinson, Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, 51–53. The main proponent of the crisis thesis is Massimo Firpo, Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma. Studi sul Cardinal Giovanni Morone e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna, 1992), esp. 67–68, 102. His view is rejected or qualified by Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 290–301, and by Mayer, Reginald Pole, 108–25.

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and past inertia held together both those people who focused on institutional reform and those who followed their personal doctrines to a logical conclusion often at odds with official views. In Viterbo, he says, Valdesianism then offered a way of covering a range of doctrinal positions and institutional loyalties which was increasingly attractive after the perceived failure of Contarini’s irenic strategy. This picture of a clear ideological split is not entirely convincing. Reginald Pole’s supposedly “evasive” response to the copy of the Modenese confession of faith may be suggestive of a unified group since it was written in the name “of all our company here and most of all of the illustrious marchesa [Vittoria Colonna].”77 However, Colonna also wrote her own “poliza” forwarded by Pole’s secretary to Contarini’s secretary, which formed her response to the confession of faith (and was unfortunately destroyed by the latter on the former’s suggestion after the death of Contarini).78 In the light of the evidence presented in this chapter and given what is known about Colonna’s spiritual outlook it is not difficult to imagine that her lost “poliza” carried on the animated discussions about free will, justification by faith, and personal engagement with Christ contained in their surviving correspondence with her characteristic independence of mind. At the same time, much united Colonna and Contarini, like many members of the summer party, and they participated in a network of friendships loosely connected by attraction to aspects of the monastic ideal, a desire for reform of the hierarchy beginning at the top, and a marked soteriological bias. The friendship of Contarini and Colonna shows how a passionate, interiorized and flexible spirituality could be built on such foundations. It is true, however, that this spiritual outlook and network of friends was socially limited and lacked institutional support, especially as key figures turned toward heresy. As a token of this it is worth reflecting in conclusion that although the Capuchin Bernardino Ochino could rely on Colonna’s “tacit complicity” (“tacita complicità”) when he wrote to her announcing his intention to avoid the Inquisition in Rome in 1542 on the eve of his flight to Calvinist Geneva, nevertheless she felt it prudent to pass on to Marcello Cervini, papal secretary, a letter and book of sermons she received from him.79 Therefore, the relationship between Colonna and Contarini, cut short by his death in 1542, should be more accurately described as a “prudential” friendship. This term is 77  “di tutta questa compagnia nostra qua et maxime de la illustrissima signora marchesa”: Firpo, Inquisizione Romana, 68–69. See Pole to Contarini, Viterbo, 20 June 1542, in Reginald Pole, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, 5 vols. (Brescia, 1744–57), 3: 58. 78  Alvise Priuli quoted in Firpo, Inquisizione Romana, 72–74, notes 110 and 112. 79  Fragnito, “Gli ‘Spirituali’ e la fuga,” 264.

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useful because it recognizes common interests animated by personal and epistolary connections, and sometimes expressed in vernacular publications and preaching with quite broad appeal, but it is also reminds us that the expression of such views could be tempered by a concern for conformity to institutions and by a recognition that prudence was required when engaging more broadly with Italian society.80 80  I adapt here John Martin’s concept of the “prudential self.” See John Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke, 2004), 117.

Chapter 10

Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino Emidio Campi For historians of the Church, attempting to decipher the religious beliefs of Vittoria Colonna is fascinating and daunting in equal measure. The founder of sixteenth-century female Petrarchism, a person with an intense religious and philanthropic fervor, Colonna also grappled extensively with theological problems. Yet despite her evident passion for the study of theology, Colonna never actually produced any unambiguous statement of her own religious views. The fact that she never explicitly clarified her stance with regard to the doctrine of justification by faith, the Eucharist or Mariology, makes it difficult to establish her place in relation to contemporary theological debates. Although her figure stands tall on the literary stage of the sixteenth century, she is scarcely ever acknowledged as a theological thinker of her time. For this reason, the task of reconstructing her religious beliefs imposes both the responsibilities of dealing with a well-known historical figure, and the philological difficulties involved in studying a “minor” author. Even the issue of sources is far from straightforward. On the one hand there is a wealth of works by Colonna, including letters, printed works, and other documents brought to light by scholars in the last sixty years or so. On the other hand, these sources prove considerably less enlightening than they might appear at first glance, at least as far as Colonna’s religious views are concerned. They cover all manner of topics—ranging from family, to finances, to political and ecclesiastical questions—but fail to provide many clues as to the views Colonna held on doctrinal issues at the time when she was composing her greatest works. It is true that both the Carteggio and the Rime feature references to Biblical themes (particularly numerous are references to Paul and John), expressed in the emblematic language of the new Valdesian movement, from which we may draw some interesting reflections. That said, there is no escaping the fact that, in terms of theological history, it remains very difficult to identify and describe Colonna’s religious convictions with any kind of certainty. The problem is compounded by the fact that one cannot necessarily rely on assertions by Colonna’s contemporaries. The hagiographical Vita di Vittoria Colonna by Filonico Alicarnasseo (pseudonym of Costantino Castriota), and an aggressive Pasquino alla Marchesana di Pescara (a scurrilous text from the

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early 1540s) both appear to attest to Colonna’s devout asceticism and commitment to philanthropy.1 By contrast, the protonotary Pietro Carnesecchi, who came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition and was eventually executed for heresy, had a strong incentive to emphasize the literary talents of Colonna, and (albeit with some hesitation and reticence) to downplay her familiarity with heterodox works by Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Brenz, Melanchthon, and her association with the spirituali. Our understanding of Colonna’s relationship to this movement is much clearer than it once was, thanks to research carried out in recent decades. If, in 1947, Hubert Jedin still denied that Colonna nurtured any sympathy for heterodox convictions,2 now it is widely accepted that Colonna was actively involved in the circle of the spirituali, and that her religious thought was profoundly influenced by the illustrious preacher Bernardino Ochino, as well as by the cardinals Giovanni Morone and Reginald Pole.3 The goal now, therefore, is to go beyond observing lexical echoes of the beliefs of the spirituali in Colonna’s literary works or in the proceedings of the Inquisition, and to develop a more precise understanding of Colonna’s religious culture, based on

1  On this point see Giacomo Moro, “Vittoria Colonna e i Farnese nel 1540: Conflitti d’interesse e sospetti sull’ortodossia (documenti e congetture),” Schifanoia 36–37 (2009): 187–96, here 192. 2  Hubert Jedin, “Il cardinale Pole e Vittoria Colonna,” Italia francescana 22 (1947): 13–30. 3  Important sources include: Ugo Rozzo, “Nuovi contributi su Bernardino Ochino,” Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi 146 (1979): 51–83; Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” in Firpo, Inquisizione romana e Controriforma: studi sul cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580) e il suo processo d’eresia (Bologna, 1992), 119–75; Gigliola Fragnito, “Gli ‘spirituali’ e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino,” in Fragnito, Gasparo Contarini. Un magistrato veneziano al servizio della Cristianità (Florence, 1988), 251–306; Sergio M. Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City, 1989); Rinaldina Russell, “The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine. A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,” Forum Italicum 26 (1992): 14–27; Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna: un dialogo artistico-teologico ispirato da Bernardino Ochino, e altri saggi di storia della Riforma (Turin, 1994); Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Vienna, 1997); Philip McNair, introduction to Patterns of Perfection. Seven Sermons Preached in Patria by Bernardino Ochino (Cambridge, 1999), ix–xli. More recently, other important publications have appeared: Giovanni Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino,” Italique 4 (2001): 61–101; Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” Italian Studies 57 (2002): 61–74; Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008); Gigliola Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 97–144; Monica Bianco, “Per la datazione di un sonetto di Vittoria Colonna (e di un probabile ritratto della poetessa ad opera di Sebastiano del Piombo),” Italique 11 (2008): 91–107.

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clear theological analysis. Due to space limitations this chapter cannot fulfill a goal of such magnitude, but in laying the groundwork for possible future studies, it sets out to analyze and compare the doctrinal positions of Colonna and Ochino. This analysis centers on three fundamental themes—Scripture, Christology, and Mariology. Colonna’s interactions with the spirituali, and in particular her closeness— “intrinsichezza,” as Carnesecchi would later describe it4—with Bernardino Ochino, have been successfully demonstrated by many scholars, hence the following overview presents only the most important discoveries.5 Research to date has not unearthed any source indicating that Colonna and Juan de Valdés were ever directly in touch; nor that Colonna was acquainted with the unpublished works of Valdés prior to 1540/41. Rather, it seems probable that it was Colonna’s acquaintance with Ochino which inspired her to turn toward Valdesian theology, in the religious crisis triggered by the death of her husband. It is likely that the first meeting between Colonna and Ochino, the famous Capuchin preacher, took place in 1534 in Rome; in any case, it is certain that they met in the following year, when Ochino held his Lent sermons in San Lorenzo in Damaso.6 From that moment onwards, Ochino became a key point of reference for Colonna, who made him her spiritual guide. Indeed, Colonna’s Carteggio describes in detail how, in 1537 and 1538, she devotedly shadowed Ochino’s preaching itinerary, following him from Ferrara to Bologna, to Florence, Pisa and Lucca, and attending all his sermons in these cities. Ochino, for his part, paid visits to Colonna in Arpino and in Rome.7 4  I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567). Edizione critica, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, vol. 1: I processi sotto Paolo IV e Pio V (1557–1561), vol. 2, t. 1–3: Il processo sotto Pio V (1566–1567) (Vatican City, 1998–2000), 1030. 5  See note 3. The most essential biographies of Ochino are Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino von Siena: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformation: mit Original-Dokumenten, Porträt und Schriftprobe (Leipzig, 1875) and Roland H. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino esule e riformatore senese del Cinquecento (1487–1563) (Florence, 1940), both of which are excellent, although urgently in need of updating. 6  Letter from Agostino Gonzaga to Isabella d’Este, dated 12 marzo 1535, in Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista storica mantovana 1 (1885): 1–52, here 26: “Essa S.ra di Pescara alloggia cum le sore di S.to Silvestro, né vole che alcuno la visiti et quando va per Roma va sconosciuta, in un abito abiettissimo. Queste due mattine è stata alla predica in S.to Lorenzo in Damaso, ove è uno ex.mo predicatore de l’ordine de quelli Capucini di s.to Francesco chiamato fra Bernardino da Siena, homo di santissima vita et molto dotto. Le prediche sue sono tutte sopra la dichiaratione de li evangelii, né attendono ad altro che a insegnare come se habbi da caminare per la via del Paradiso.” 7  Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 65.

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Her status as a “great friend and devotee of Bernardino da Siena (“amicissima et domestichissima di fra Bernardino da Siena”)8 is indicated by the fact that the religious and civil authorities, keen to hear Ochino’s captivating sermons firsthand, would sometimes prevail upon Colonna to persuade Ochino to include their church or city in his busy preaching schedule, which took him up and down the country. Colonna’s respect for Ochino also emerges very clearly from her unconditional support for the Capuchin order (alongside the Duchess of Camerino), as well as from her impassioned interventions on behalf of Ochino when he came under attack on suspicion of heresy.9 Some scholars believe that Colonna’s earliest rime spirituali were strongly influenced, in terms of both content and form, by Ochino’s sermons and by the many conversations Colonna held with him.10 Others, meanwhile, offer more cautious interpretations, observing that Ochino’s influence “could well have led Colonna to consider the poetic potential of evangelism and, vice versa, the enormous evangelizing potential of poetry.”11 I consider it plausible that Colonna’s poetry does indeed contain ideas and images drawn from Ochino’s sermons. In any case, the close relationship between the Ochino and Colonna (evoked by Carnesecchi’s mention of “intrinsichezza”) seems to be quite conclusively demonstrated by the fact that Ochino, who was still in Florence on 22 August 1542, wrote Colonna a dramatic letter, explaining his reasons for going into exile.12 After Ochino fled Italy, Colonna established closer ties with Cardinal Reginald Pole. The two of them met at the Valdesian group in Viterbo, the socalled Ecclesia Viterbiensis, where new and reformist theological hypotheses were multiplying and flourishing. Under the guidance of Pole, Colonna developed a deeper understanding of the theology of Juan de Valdés. Valdés was a highly influential figure, whose teachings had shaped the theology of Pole himself and of Ochino, not to mention Caterina Cibo, Giulia Gonzaga, Alvise Priuli, Ludovico Beccadelli, Marcantonio Flaminio, Pietro Carnesecchi, and many others. Chief among the ideas that Colonna absorbed from Valdés and Pole was the doctrine of justification (by faith), which, for Colonna personally, must have provided consolation and laid some of her spiritual anxieties to rest. Colonna’s correspondence and the proceedings of the Inquisition provide 8    I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, vol. 2/2, 432. 9   Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 66–67; McNair, Patterns of Perfection, xviii. 10  For example, Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 85–86; Bianco, “Per la datazione di un sonetto di Vittoria Colonna,” 96. 11  Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform,” 68. 12  C arteggio, 247–49.

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ample evidence that she held Pole in high esteem, and that she was grateful to him for having guided her toward the liberating discovery of the “beneficio di Cristo.” That said, it appears that the feeling was not necessarily mutual: Pole, apparently, wished to avoid being on very close terms with an individual as tortured and unsettled as Colonna.13 All of the above facts have been recapitulated here by way of introduction to the following thematic exploration of Colonna’s works, in which poetry becomes theology, merging also with the writings of Bernardino Ochino, from the period predating his exile.14 Scripture Colonna had a detailed firsthand knowledge of the text of the Bible. She had gained this knowledge through her own diligent reading, through private meditation, and through liturgical practice. Her poetry and correspondence alike are littered with quotations from Christian Scripture and with references to 13  Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e gli ‘spirituali,’ ” 121, considers Pole the “maestro che aveva segnato la svolta decisiva del suo [Vittoria Colonna] itinerario verso la scoperta liberatoria del ‘beneficio di Cristo.’ ” BRUNDIN 2005, 17, does, however, point out that “a number of her letters testify to Colonna’s disappointment at being neglected or abandoned by Pole.” 14  I cite only those works that were probably or definitely written between 1538 and 1541, according to the dates indicated in the critical edition: Bullock: Rime. The notation S1 is used to indicate the Rime spirituali, while S2 denotes a reference to the Rime disperse. For Ochino, the texts referenced are as follows: a) Prediche lucchesi, from 1538 but printed in 1541: Prediche Predicate dal R . . . Padre Frate Bernardino da Siena dell’ordine de Frati Capuccini. Ristampate Novamente. Et giontovi un’altra Predica (Venice: per Bernardino de Viano de Lexona Vercellese, Anno Domini) MDXXXXI (Adì XVI Marzo). This rare work exists in a modern edition, edited by the same author who discovered it, Philip McNair (see note 3; this is the work cited henceforth); b) Prediche veneziane from 1539 but printed in 1541: Prediche del Reverendo Padre Frate Bernardino Occhino Senese, Generale dell’ordine di frati Capuzzini nella Inclita Città di Vinegia, del MDXXXIX, [in the colophon] per Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni & Mapheo Pasini compagni. Del mese di Decembrio. Nelli anni della Incarnatione del Signore MDXLI. There is another edition of this same collection, printed in Venice and published in May of the same year, by Nicolò d’Aristotile da Ferrara, known as il Zoppino; c) Dialogi sette from 1540: I “Dialogi sette” e altri scritti del tempo della fuga, ed. Ugo Rozzo (Turin, 1985); d) Prediche ginevrine, published in Geneva in 1542, but written in the context of Ochino’s life as it was up until a few months before he went into exile (August 1542): Prediche di Bernardino Ochino da Siena / Si me persequuti sunt, et vos persequentur, sed Omnia vincit Veritas [Geneva: s.t.] 1542 die X. Octobris.

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Biblical episodes, sometimes made explicit and sometimes concealed behind a construction or the weighting of a phrase. For Colonna the Bible was a vast canvas, an inexhaustible well of tales, themes, expressions and, above all, inspiration. In the absence of any systematic analysis documenting the number and frequency of Biblical references in Colonna’s work, a few preliminary observations may be made.15 Among the many traces scattered throughout the corpus of Colonna’s writings, some of the most striking (aside from direct quotations) are the references to certain New Testament authors whom Colonna considered genuine auctoritates: such writers include Paul and the Evangelists John and Luke. Within the Old Testament, Colonna quotes extensively from the book of Psalms as well as from the Pentateuch, most notably from Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Of the prophets, Isaiah is the most prevalent in terms of the quantity of citations; meanwhile, references to the books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are surprisingly few and far between. Colonna’s detailed knowledge of the Biblical texts is reflected in her remarks concerning the relationship between the Old and the New Testament: she highlights the continuity between the two Testaments, while also pointing out their differences. Three of her sonnets, for example, present Noah’s Ark as a figure and model of the Church;16 and, in another two compositions, dedicated to comparing Adam and Christ, Colonna outlines the basic doctrine of sin and redemption, very much as it appears in Romans 5:12–21.17 The same observation applies to the mixing of Biblical figures and episodes drawn from the Old and the New Testament, such as the encounter between the elderly Simeon and Jesus—that is, between the old and the new Man. It is, moreover, interesting to note that the distinction between Law and Gospel, so clear-cut in Lutheran thought, is almost entirely absent in Colonna’s writing; indeed, there is no definite break between the “first” and “second” temples (il “primo tempio,” il “secondo tempio”): one is the “shadow and figure” (“ombra e figura”) 15  The following essays are useful explorations, though far from exhaustive: Tamar Herzig, “Le donne, la Riforma e la Bibbia in Italia,” in Donne e Bibbia nella crisi dell’Europa cattolica (secoli XVI–XVII), ed. Maria Laura Giordano and Adriana Valerio (Trapani, 2014), 37–47; Guido Laurenti, “Le poetesse e la Bibbia: Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Gaspara Stampa,” in La Bibbia nella letteratura italiana, vol. 5: Dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, ed. Grazia Melli and Marialuigia Sipione (Brescia, 2013), 569–90. Meanwhile, Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: The Correspondence of Marguerite D’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna 1540–1545. Studies in Reformed Theology and History, N.S., no. 6 (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 119–23 limits itself to offering a few enlightening examples drawn from Colonna’s epistolary exchange with Marguerite D’Angoulême. 16   B ullock: Rime, S1: 111, S1: 112, S1: 113. 17  Ibid., S1: 93, S1: 157, S2: 4.

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of the other, despite the fact that they occupy different chronological positions in the divine plan for salvation.18 Colonna’s religious thought was so profoundly imbued with Scripture that, if one were to create a catalog of sources, even a simple list of the Biblical references implied in the Rime would occupy a great deal of space.19 Fewer in number, though equally significant, are the explicit references to Biblical episodes and figures. Sonnets clearly inspired by the Gospels include those recounting the baptism of Jesus,20 the dialogues between Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4:1–28) and between Jesus and Zaccheus (Luke 19:1–10), the healing of the blind man (John 9:1–41), and the dialogue between Thomas and the resurrected Lord (John 20:24–29). All of these are verses of exceptional beauty, rich in symbolism and dense with theological meaning. Even with her synthetic allusions and wide variety of formulations, Colonna’s poetry clearly reflects a belief that God treats his suffering, repentant creatures with generous forgiveness, surpassing all strict notions of legal justice and in spite of all humanity’s faults and doubts.21 If scholars are unanimous in believing that the Rime are firmly anchored in Scripture, it must also be said that Colonna’s faith was by no means the proverbial foi du charbonnier, in the sense that she mixed Biblical and classical texts very freely; indeed, classical texts undoubtedly account for the vast majority of quotations and allusions in both her verse and prose works. Yet the reader nevertheless forms the impression that this central, classical component of Colonna’s culture is constantly seeking the seal of faith, the comfort of holy words.22 Colonna cited the Bible more or less from memory, paying limited attention to philological matters. As a consequence it is virtually impossible to establish whether her references were drawn from the Latin text of the Vulgate or from an early translation into the vernacular, such as the Biblia vulgarizzata by Malermi (1471), or the Biblia in lingua vulgare (1471), known as the “Jensonian” Bible after the name of its printer. Combined with its abundance 18  Ibid., S1: 114, S1: 115. 19  For example: S1: 8, with the reference to the parable of the ten virgins (Mt 25: 1–13); S1: 17, reference to the Last Supper (Gv 13: 21–30); S1: 21, reference to the birth of Jesus (Lc 2: 1–20); S1: 25, reference to the massacre of the innocents (Mt 2: 13–18); S1: 151, reference to Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane (Mt 26: 36–46). 20  Ibid., S1: 26. 21  Ibid., S1: 173; S1: 57; S2: 28; S1: 118. 22  Such is the case, for instance, in the reference to Apollo, in ibid., S1: 2, S1: 4, S1: 102, S2: 3, or to Aurora, in ibid., S2: 36, where a host of classical references culminates in a vision of the “Vergin, d’ogni virtù exempio” (“Virgin, example of every virtue”).

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of typographical errors, the rather cumbersome format of the Biblia in lingua vulgare may account for its lack of popularity with the general public, and, presumably, also with Colonna. The Malermi Bible, on the other hand, was reprinted numerous times up until the 1560s, and probably did find its way into Colonna’s hands. Malermi’s version was, essentially, a rewriting of the medieval Bible, inspired by a desire to bring it closer to the text of the Vulgate. Besides these two fifteenth-century vernacular versions, the first half of the sixteenth century also saw the appearance of many new translations, although these were usually only translations of certain sections, whose authors remain anonymous. Of these versions, the most important in terms of Italy’s religious history was the heterodox translation by the Florentine Antonio Brucioli (ca. 1495–1566), entitled La Biblia, and first published in Venice by Lucantonio Giunta in May 1532. According to Brucioli himself, the source texts for his translation were the original Hebrew and Greek texts, although he did also compare his version against Sante Pagnini’s translation of the Old Testament and the translation of the New Testament by Erasmus. La Biblia adopted a simple and accessible physical form, also featuring illustrations, which made it appealing to readers. Appearing in nine editions between 1532 and 1551, La Biblia was remarkably well received. It enjoyed popularity both in the courts of the various states in the peninsula (including Urbino, Mantua, Florence, and Ferrara), and also made its way into the homes of merchants, artisans, artists, none of whom would have known Latin, but who were sufficiently educated to desire a direct engagement with the text of the Bible.23 It seems reasonable to suppose that a woman as cultured as Colonna, and with such acute sensitivity to religious debates, would have preferred to read the Bible in the Italian translation by Brucioli, as, indeed, did Michelangelo.24 That said, it is difficult to gauge with certainty whether Colonna studied Brucioli’s Commento al Vecchio Testamento or the Commento al Nuovo Testamento, two hefty works published in Venice by Bartolomeo Zanetti between 1540 and 1544, and which demonstrated the ways in which Brucioli’s Biblical exegesis relied upon the doctrine of theologians such as Luther, Calvin and Bucer.

23  See my work “Bibles in Italian,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The Early Modern World c. 1450–c. 1750 (Cambridge, 2015). 24  See the recent work by Ambra Moroncini, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: A Lutheran Belief?,” in Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture, ed. Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson (New York, 2014), 55–76.

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Christology Carlo Ossola is convinced that, in Colonna’s Rime, the “celebration of the mysterium salutis poured forth upon the cross must not be read in continuity with the traditional figures and stylistic tropes of exalted pietà and devotions (even in popular interpretations), in relation to the countless depictions of the Passion, or the codified stations of the Via Crucis”; on the contrary, the scene must be interpreted in relation to the Valdesian “economy of the ‘beneficio di Cristo.’ ”25 This raises a question with important implications for the present investigation: namely, whether the centrality of Christ ought to be considered a marginal aspect of Colonna’s religious thought (on a par, for example, with the medieval contemplation of the Passion), or whether it represents something more fundamental, whether it is actually the key to unlocking the rest of Colonna’s spirituality. This is a specific hermeneutical problem, which it should be possible to resolve by venturing beyond generic observations about Colonna’s inspiration and conducting a strictly theological analysis of her works written between 1538 and 1541. An initial clue lies in the observation that the Christological moments in the Rime refer more to Christ’s work than to the actual person of Christ. In theological terms, one might say that Colonna seems more attracted by soteriology than by Christology. Even when she reflects upon the two natures of Christ, she immediately refers them both back to Christ’s sacrifice, and with the gain that follows from that act of atonement: Quel pietoso miracol grande, ond’ io sento, la sua mercé, due parti estreme, il divino e l’uman, sì giunte insieme ch’ è Dio vero uomo e l’uomo è vero Dio, erge tant’alto il mio basso desio e scalda in guisa la mia fredda speme che ’l cor libero e franco più non geme sotto l’incarco periglioso e rio. Con la piagata man dolce e soave giogo m’ ha posto al collo, e lieve peso sembiar mi face col Suo lume chiaro;

25  Carlo Ossola, “Introduzione storica,” in Juan de Valdés, Lo Evangelio di San Matteo (Rome, 1985), 83, 85–86.

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a l’alme umili con secreta chiave apre il tesoro Suo, del quale avaro ad ogni cor d’altere voglie acceso.26 The striking texture of the first two quatrains in this sonnet, the compenetration of the human and the divine in the single person of Jesus, and the discovery of the salvation that this affords, are perceived collectively as the “great miracle” (“miracol grande”) of Christian faith. The faithful soul oscillates between the affirmation of Jesus’s pure humanity and the exaltation of his divinity, seemingly struggling at times to piece together Christ’s two natures and to recognize Him as the one who “to all humble souls with his secret key, [he] opens up his treasure” (“a l’alme umili con secreta chiave apre il tesoro Suo”). Less still is it possible for the human mind to fathom the deep meaning of the clamorous moment when the “Lord, made man, defeated all Hell and earth” (“Signor, quand’Ei fatt’uom qui vinse / l’Inferno e ’l mondo”).27 Yet, that “pure and sacred body” (“sacro e puro corpo”), to quote another of Colonna’s sonnets (which also resonates with clear echoes of expressions used by Ochino), represents the greatest conceivable joy: Felice giorno, a noi festo e giocondo, quando offerse il Signore del sacro e puro corpo nudrirne, e render l’uom sicuro di star sempre con Lui nel cieco mondo.28

26   B ullock: Rime, S1: 54. “The wondrous and holy miracle, by which / through his mercy I perceive two opposed beings, / one divine and one human, so fused into one / that God becomes a true man and man a true God, / causes my lowly desire to soar so high / and in the same way so inflames my chilly hope / that my free and candid heart no longer trembles / beneath the evil worthless burdens of the world. / With his sweet gentle wounded hand / he has placed a yoke around my neck, and in the beautiful / clear light I see it is an easy weight to bear; / to all humble souls with his secret key / he opens up his treasure, jealously guarded / from any heart inspired by proud ambition”: Brundin 2005, 59. 27  Ibid., S1: 63. 28  Ibid, S1: 22. “Happy day, joyful and wondrous for us, / on which God offered up his sacred and pure / body as nourishment, and made man sure / of his eternal presence in this blind world”: Brundin 2005, 101. See also Ochino, Prediche veneziane, 11r.: “Oh happy day, joyous day for us . . ., that day upon which the eternal Father made peace with human nature” (“O felice giorno, o giocondo giorno questo per noi . . ., questo fu quel giorno che l’eterno Padre volse far pace con la humana natura”).

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Faced with God’s offer of a “life-giving gift” (“dono che dà vita”), man becomes aware of and marvels at the immeasurable distance that divides him, an unworthy being, from God’s mercy, and is horrified at the realization of his own spiritual pride: onde sol meraviglia e grande orrore diede al superbo quell’alta mercede di dar per nostro cibo a noi Se stesso, e solo a quei che l’odio con l’amore avean vinto, e la legge con la fede, il dono che dà vita al cor fu impresso.29 This insistence on the intimate connection between the two natures of Christ is neither unique nor particular to Colonna; on the contrary, it can be traced back to the Christological formula of faith: vere Deus, vere homo, at once truly God and truly human. Since its adoption by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, in the wake of protracted theological disputes, this formula had been considered (with a few exceptions) a central tenet of Christian theology. As is well known, the clear-cut affirmation of a hypostatic union had weakened considerably over time, giving rise to the typically late-medieval moralizing and simplistic vision of Jesus, which, dominated by the idea of kenosis, tended to emphasize the human nature of Christ. The suffering and humiliation endured by the destitute Christ became mere reflections of the suffering and humiliation of ordinary people. Thus, rather than a symbol of the conditions that must be fulfilled, of the expiation required for the redemption of humankind, Christ was instead held up as a shining example of consolation for those who found themselves prey to the torment of anxiety. The union between the divine and the human natures in the single person of Christ had been powerfully reaffirmed both by the spirituali and by reformers generally. It became the subject of considerable controversy, generating new questions and inaugurating a series of debates that were unprecedented prior to the Cinquecento.30 To interpret the reaffirmation of the doctrine of 29  B rundin 2005, 101–3: “Thus only awe and then immense horror / was given to the proud man by Christ’s infinite mercy / in offering himself to us to be our food, / and only those who had overcome hatred / with love, and vanquished the law through faith, / felt the imprint on their hearts of this life-affirming gift.” 30  Ochino, Prediche veneziane, 33v underlines the soteriological aspect, declaring that it is not enough to contemplate Christ upon the cross, with “such flagellation and suffering [. . .] but one must go even further, to consider what cause moved God to send his

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Chalcedon as a dry exercise in logic, or indeed as a theological eccentricity, would be extremely misguided. In fact it is an issue of great importance and concerns nothing less than eternal salvation. The union of the divine and the human natures in Christ is the pivotal point in the sealing of relations between God and humankind, as in this one person both parties are truly and fully represented and reconciled. Moreover, this union reveals to humankind the depths of God’s grace for us. Because he is vere Deus, vere homo, Christ is the sole mediator between God and humankind (1 Tim 2: 5), in him alone is effected that fellowship with God for which we were created but which has been vitiated through sin. Christ as the Word of God takes on a fully human form in order to heal humankind and make humanity capable of communion with God. Such is the understanding of the historia salutis that the spirituali and reformers were so deeply committed to promoting. As we have seen, important traces of this concept also survive in Colonna’s Rime. This is a crucial observation, which makes it possible not only to gain a deeper insight into Colonna’s religious thought, but also to clarify her position in relation to shifts and directions in contemporary Christian theology. A second clue is found in the expression: “the life-giving gift impressed upon the heart” (“il dono che dà vita al cor fu impresso”), found in sonnet S1: 22. Considerations of poetic symbolism aside, this is a clear reference to the theme of justification, which obliges us to grapple with the associated theological problems. At roughly the same time as Colonna was composing her sonnet, Gasparo Contarini (a well-known Venetian cardinal closely related to the spirituali) was attending the Colloquy of Regensburg (27 April–22 May 1541), representing the Pope. The Colloquy had been called by Emperor Charles V, in the hope that Protestants and Catholics could reach an agreement on this thorny question. Although the two parties did almost manage to settle their differences in regard to this particular theological point, their disagreement on other matters was simply too great; as a consequence, one of the last and greatest sixteenth-century attempts at religious reconciliation ended in

only Son into the world; the cause was in fact none other than His great charity, which God and Christ have brought to all the elect” (“tanti flagelli e tanti crociati [. . .] ma ti bisogna andare anchora più avanti, cioè considerare la causa che Dio si ha mosso a mandar l’unigenito figliuol suo al mondo non esser stato altro se non la grande charità che Dio e Christo hanno portato a tutti gli suoi eletti”). On the reformers, see Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology, An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1997), ch. 9; Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2009), ch. 8–9.

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failure.31 Meanwhile, Contarini himself became an object of suspicion for Rome. As Ochino recalled in his Prediche ginevrine, “passing through Bologna, and visiting the Cardinal [. . .], he told me that, although he had strongly contested the opinions of Protestants at the Diet, nonetheless, on his return to Italy, twelve counts of heresy were brought against him. Among other things, he was accused of having, in secret, and together with others who claimed to belong to the Catholic faith, accepted the doctrine of justification by faith.”32 It is safe to suppose that Colonna was abreast of the events described by Ochino; and it is also reasonable to assume that a woman as educated and culturally aware as Colonna would have known about the various theological currents of her time, and their positions in relation to the doctrine of justification. Hence the question that arises in the mind of the reader, contemplating “the life-giving gift impressed upon the heart,” is: How did Colonna herself interpret this doctrine? Do her Rime reflect the positions of the via moderna, insisting upon facere quod in se est in the process of justification, or do they rather follow the schola augustiniana moderna, emphasizing the infusion of God’s grace into man, whereby sinners are strengthened in their quest to become worthy of salvation?33 Or alternatively, does Colonna understand justification in the Valdesian sense of “a work executed by God alone [. . .] which human reason can neither penetrate nor comprehend, and which exists in radical opposition to ‘human wisdom’ (‘prudenzia humana’)”?34 Does she adopt the imputative Lutheran meaning; or does she follow the harmonizing precedent of Melanchthon, who combines imputation and infusion of grace, interpreting them as different degrees of the same process?35 31  Anthony N. S. Lane, Cardinal Contarini and Article 5 of the Regensburg Colloquy (1541), in Grenzgänge der Theologie. Professor Alexandre Ganoczy zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Otmar Meuffels and Jürgen Bründl (Münster, 2004), 163–90. 32  “[Q]uando passai per Bologna et visitai el Cardinale [. . .], mi dixe che se bene alla dieta haveva virilmente impugnate le opinioni delli Protestanti, con tutto questo, ritornando in Italia, di dodici articoli lo havevano imputato, infra li quali uno era che haveva, con un velo in torno, però et in secreto, con quelli che sonno chiamati catholici, aceptata la iustificatione per Christo”: Ochino, Prediche ginevrine, 6r–6v. These statements are analyzed in Bainton, Bernardino Ochino, 53–54. 33  Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei. A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, vol. 1: The Beginnings to the Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 4. 34  “[O]pera compiuta esclusivamente da Dio [. . .] che la ragione umana non può né intendere né concepire ed è anzi in radicale opposizione alla ‘prudenzia humana.’ ” This is the Valdesian conception, as synthesized by Wolfgang Otto, Juan de Valdés und die Reformation in Spanien im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 93. 35  McGrath, Iustitia Dei, vol. 2: From 1500 to the Present Day, ch. 6.

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Colonna seems knowledgeable about these distinctions, and, for the most part, avoids getting caught up in them.36 She does, however, demonstrate a clear allegiance to the Valdesian camp, through her affirmation that “God’s death upon the bitter cross surpasses all human thought, so that we do not see it with all the power of our minds” (“il morir di Dio su l’aspra croce excede ogni umano pensier, onde no ’l vede / con tutto il valor suo nostro intelletto”). It is not hard to imagine the joy Ochino must have felt upon reading these verses penned by his spiritual disciple:37 Suol nascer dubbio se di più legarsi il donare ad altrui segno maggiore, o se ’l ricever con pietoso amore pegno è sicuro assai di più obligarsi; ma il vero Amante, Dio, che non mai scarsi fece partiti, a noi diede il Suo amore divino, e per Sé prese il nostro errore umano, e volse in terra mortal farsi, onde dai larghi doni umile e grato l’uomo fosse, e dal ricever suo sicuro, sì che di fede viva e d’amor arda; ma la tanta Sua luce il nostro oscuro occhio, da color farsi qui turbato, quanto risplende più meno riguarda.38 36  See S1: 33, 101, where Colonna does seem to voice—albeit very courteously—her dislike for the trafficking of indulgences: “il vil breve tesoro,” “cieco guadagno.” Colonna also presents a partially concealed defence of the notion that divine forgiveness can never be earned: the “pensier, che troppo in alto poggia.” 37  Ochino, Prediche veneziane, 20r: “se tu mi dicesti or: Dio fu pur crudele a volere punire un giusto, ti dico che è tutto il contrario, anzi Dio è benigno e amorevole verso ogni creatura, ma poiché l’amore suo non è in se stesso ma in ogni altra cosa, fu conveniente che la carne de Christo patisse essendo Dio et huomo, perché un altro homo non haria sodisfatto.” See also 13v: “in questo Dio et huomo se conclude ogni cosa”; 83r: “per Christo vederai la potenza de Dio, per Christo la suprema giustitia de Dio, perché per punirti del tuo errore si è pagato del sangue del proprio figliuolo, per Christo tu vederai l’ardente charità, dolcezza, amore.” 38   B ullock: Rime, S2: 12. “A doubt arises if it is a greater sign / to seek to offer gifts to others, / or if receiving with pious love / is a secure enough pledge to justify the greater obligation; / for God, the true lover, who never offered / poor rewards, gave to us his divine / love, and took our human error as his own, / and chose to come to earth in mortal form, / so that man should be humbled and grateful for / the generous gifts, yet so sure of receiving them /

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In another sonnet, Colonna offers further clarification, removing any remaining doubt and confirming her belief that the meaning of that great exchange is revealed on one, and only one condition: Quei ch’ avrà sol in Lui [Cristo Crocifisso] le luci fisse, non quei ch’ intese meglio, o che più lesse volumi in terra, in Ciel sarà beato; in carte questa legge non si scrisse, ma con la stampa Sua nel cuor purgato col foco de l’amor Gesù l’impresse.39 As in the Lent sermons that Ochino had delivered in Venice, Colonna’s appeal to make Christ upon the cross one’s sole object of contemplation does not reflect the medieval contemplatio crucis, centered on a number of devotional interests, with its own self-justifications and religious certainties. Instead, it represents the joyous rediscovery of an ancient and seemingly forgotten truth “hidden amongst the many precepts of the bitterly just law of fear” (“ascosa in quei tanti precetti de l’aspra e giusta legge del timore”), of which one can no longer live in ignorance, because “spreading his arms upon the cross” (“le braccia aprendo in croce”), Christ illuminated “human minds, until then bathed in darkness, and, melting the frost, filled them with a burning zeal which then opened [His] holy Scriptures” (“le menti umane infin alora oscure e dileguando il gielo le [riempì] d’un ardente zelo ch’aperse poi le sacre [Sue] Scritture”).40 In his grace, the heavenly Father issued an exhortation to “disentangle oneself from oneself” (“snodarsi da se stesso”), to let oneself be enveloped in “powerful knots” and “firm nails” (“possenti nodi,” “saldi chiodi”).41 This is the solemn that he burns with living faith and love; / but in our dark eyes blinded here / by false colors, the brighter his great light / burns the less easily we can see it”: Brundin 2005, 87. 39  S1: 78. “Thus he who can fix his eyes upon God, / not he who better understood or who read more / books on earth, will be blessed in heaven. / This law was not written upon paper, / but rather with his seal it was imprinted by Jesus / with the fire of his love upon the purified heart”: Brundin 2005, 119. 40  S1: 94. 41  S1: 95: “Padre nostro e del Ciel, con quanto amore, / con quanta grazia e in quanti vari modi / dal mondo e da se stesso l’uomo snodi / acciò libero a te rivolga il core! / Rivolto, poi di puro interno ardore / l’accendi, e leghi con possenti nodi; / indi lo fermi con sì saldi chiodi / ch’ogni aspra morte il par dolce onore.” (“Oh heavenly Father, with what love, / grace, light, sweetness and in how many ways do you / untie man from the world and his desires, / so that he may turn his heart freely towards you. / Once he has turned, with a pure internal flame / you set him alight, and you tether him with far stronger bonds; /

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profession of a faith centered on and rooted in Christ, who embodies all the power of redemption, and whose “eternal legacy, that great good, appears to us through his open wounds” (“eterna eredita, l’ampia mercede, fra l’aperte Sue piaghe a noi traluce”).42 It is difficult to see what arguments one could adduce to contradict the imputative and extrinsic character of justification, as is so clearly illustrated in the following verses: L’innocenzia da noi per nostro errore veggio punire, e ’l ricco Signore degno pien d’ infamia morir nudo sul legno per tornar noi nel già perduto onore. Veggio offender con odio il vero amore e ferir l’umiltà con fiero sdegno; usar di crudeltade ogni aspro segno contra Colui che sol per pietà more. Alor l’alta bontà di Dio si stese in parte al mondo, ond’ ogni fedel petto si fé più forte a le più acerbe offese; Paulo, Dionisio ed ogni alto intelletto si dié prigion al vero alor ch’ intese la mirabil cagion di tanto effetto.43 This conviction is reiterated in another sonnet, which actually repeats the expression “vivo ne l’aspra croce il Signore” (“the Lord alive upon the bitter cross”), and which might also evoke a link with Michelangelo’s famous Crucifix for Vittoria Colonna:44

then you fix him with such secure nails / that even a cruel death seems to him a sweet honour”: Brundin 2005, 66–69 (with some variations). 42  S1: 61. 43  S1: 59. “I see the innocent punished by us / through our own error, and our great noble Lord / die in infamy naked upon the cross / to return us to our lost honour. / I see that true love is sullied by hatred / and humility is wounded by proud disdain, / harsh acts of cruelty are turned / against the one who died for pity alone. / At that time the wondrous bounty of God was offered / in part to the world, so that all faithful hearts / were fortified against the bitterest assaults; / Paul, Dionysius, and all great minds / captured the truth once they had understood / the miraculous cause of such effect”: Brundin 2005, 111–13. 44  Ferino, Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, 405–12, 445–51.

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Quando in se stesso il pensier nostro riede e poi sopra di sé s’erge la mente, si che d’altra virtù fatta possente vivo ne l’aspra croce il Signor vede, sale a cotanto ardir che pur non crede esser Suo caro membro, anzi alor sente le spine, i chiodi, il fele e quell’ardente Sua fiamma in parte sol per viva fede. Son queste grazie Sue, non nostre, ond’ hanno per regola e per guida quel di sopra Spirto, che dove più Li piace spira; e s’alcun si confida in fragil opra mortal col primo padre indarno aspira ad altro ch’a ricever novo inganno.45 Clearly, a question as complex as that of justification cannot be resolved simply by quoting extracts from Colonna’s works. Nevertheless, it is undeniably

45  S1: 41. “When our thought retreats into itself and then the mind rises above itself, so that, fortified with another virtue, it sees the Lord alive upon the bitter cross, its ardour is such that it can scarcely believe the limbs belong to Him, for, through faith alone, it feels the thorns, the nails, the bile and His burning flame. These are His graces, not ours, that guide and govern that Spirit above, and blow it around according to Its own will alone; and if anyone should trust in fragile mortal deeds, to the first father he will aspire in vain to receive anything other than new deceptions.” The valuable synoptic tables in Alan Bullock’s edition (469 and 479) reveal that this sonnet was included neither in the manuscript copy of the Rime that Colonna gave to Michelangelo, nor in the printed editions of the Rime from 1538, 1539, 1540, 1542, or 1544; it features only in Le Rime spirituali (Venice, 1546). It is therefore impossible to say whether Michelangelo’s drawing was inspired by Colonna’s outstanding poetic expression, or whether it was in fact the drawing that came first and influenced Colonna’s poetry. The expression recurs in another composition by Bullock: Rime, S1: 165: “Doi modi abbiam da veder l’alte e care / grazie del Ciel: l’uno guardando spesso / le sacre carte ov’è quel Lume expresso / ch’a l’occhio vivo si lucente appare; / l’altro è alzando del cor le luci chiare / al libro de la croce, ov’Egli stesso / si mostra a noi sì vivo e sì da presso / che l’alma allor non può per l’occhio errare.” (“We have two ways of seeing the great and dear graces of Heaven: one, by reading often the holy pages upon which that Light is expressed, which gleams so brightly before the living eye; the other, by raising the bright eyes of the heart to the book of the cross, where He shows himself so alive and so close by, that the human soul can no longer be deceived by the eye.”) But this sonnet S1: 165, too, appears only in the Venetian edition of 1546.

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significant that one of Colonna’s sonnets, included in the Venetian edition of 1546, features the following verses: Io per me son un’ombra indegna e vile, sol per virtù de l’alme piaghe sante del mio Signor, non per mio merto viva; Egli giusta mi rende, sciolta e priva del vecchio Adamo, e tu, mio caro amante, rendimi ognor più accesa, ognor più umile.46 These last lines provide a third insight into Colonna’s religious beliefs: indeed, it seems impossible to interpret them except as an affirmation of the righteousness that God extends to sinners. Colonna does not say: God declares me justified, reputare iusta, which, from a theological standpoint, would seem to exclude the possibility of sanctification. Instead, she says: God makes me just, iusta facere. In other words, the purpose of Christ’s imputed righteousness is to truly make righteous the sinner who has been declared such; the remission of sins already marks the beginning of a new life. But how exactly does this understanding of imputed righteousness differ from the scholastic understanding of the infused righteousness (iustitia infusa)? The fact that Colonna does not simply adhere to the prevailing medieval conception is made evident by the many passages of the Rime in which justification is identified with the act of God wherein he forgives the sins of believers and accepts them as righteous, not on account of their own righteousness, but on account of the imputative righteousness (iustitia imputativa) of Christ located outside them. Faith alone justifies us, not because it is a superior human work, but because it is exclusively oriented to God’s mercy in Christ and claims nothing for itself. Faith alone, not the consideration of free will, the merit of works, cooperating grace, preparations for grace, and the like, is the exclusive means by which we may appropriate that gracious judgment of God which is our justification. Practically every page conveys the comforting Valdesian and Ochinian concepts of “living faith” 46  S1: 157: “As for myself, I am an unworthy, lowly shadow, alive only thanks to the wretched holy wounds of my Lord and not through my own merits; He makes me righteous, released and free from the old Adam, and you, my dear lover, I pray that you make my faith still greater, myself still humbler.” Although present only in the edition of 1546, see also S1: 176: “Ei [Cristo] degno e giusto agli occhi Tuoi ricopre / me ingiusta e indegna con quel largo manto / col quale me nasconde e Se stesso opre.” (“He [Christ], worthy and righteous in Your eyes, covers me, unworthy and unrighteous, with his broad cloak, with which he conceals me and reveals Himself.”)

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(“viva fede”), which inspires a “divine love” (“divino amore”) in the human soul, kindling in it an ardent desire to do God’s will; hence, the soul is no longer moved by self-interest, but “falls in love” (“innamora”) with Christ. “While it lives in this earthly realm” (“Mentre vive in questa scorza terrena”), the soul is spurred on, by its great love (“grande amore”), to “make itself a dwelling for the Lord” (“dar albergo a Dio”).47 Perceiving the “beautiful signs of heavenly ardor” (“Sentendo in sé i bei segni del celeste ardore”), the soul invokes God, and, “by calling Him, acquires a firm, ornate habit” (“dal chiamarLo assai fermo ed ornato abito acquista”), ready to embark upon “the final battle, so hard for us, of the ancient host” (“a l’ultima guerra, a noi sì dura, dell’oste antico”).48 On other occasions, as a way of expressing the intimate communion between the crucified Christ and the believer, whose spiritual life is thereby renewed, Colonna employs the allegory of a marriage between Christ and the soul. Faced with the “endless gifts” (“doni infiniti”) lavished upon her by her husband, the soul cannot remain indifferent: she must “honor Him, reverent and honest, / having extinguished all the other desires of her heart” (“onorarLo reverente onesta, / avendo al cor gli altri desiri spenti”), in order that it will not be said of her: “Here is that blind woman, whose knowledge of her splendid Sun was obscured by so many bright rays!” (“Ecco la cieca che non scerse / fra tanti chiari raggi il suo bel Sole!”).49 Elsewhere, the life of this faith, which can never be cut loose from its original source, is expressed using the Evangelical simile of a vine and its shoots (John 15: 1–8): there can be no “fruit” without communion, and, likewise, no communion that does not yield “fruit”: Padre eterno del Ciel, se Tua mercede vivo ramo son io ne l’ampia e vera Vite ch’abbraccia il mondo e Seco intera vuol la nostra virtù solo per fede, [. . .] Purgami si ch’io rimanendo Teco mi cibi ognor de la rugiada santa 47  S1: 20. The effects here are very similar to those found in Ochino’s fifth Predica lucchese, 38–39. 48  S1: 29. 49  S1: 8. Here, the simile seems to highlight not so much the mystical union, but the legal relationship binding the spouses, as in Ochino’s Prediche ginevrine, 5r: “l’anima diventa di Christo, perché chome la moglie non ha potestà del suo corpo, ma el marito, nella 1a alli Corinzi al 7, così l’anima diventa di Christo.” The allegory of the soul wed to Christ is present and extensively developed in chapter IV of the Beneficio di Cristo, dedicated to the “effetti della viva fede.” See Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo, ed. Salvatore Caponetto (Florence, 1972), 27–31.

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e rinfreschi col pianto la radice. Verità sei; dicesti d’esser meco; vien dunque omai, si ch’io frutto felice faccia in Te degno di sì cara Pianta.50 The need to consider Christian spirituality as a single, harmonious system does not, however, lead to the treatment of faith as an abstract concept, detached from action. Some of the expressions used in quietist mysticism and highlighted by Ossola—for example, “secret peace,” “safe port,” “inner love” (“secreta pace,” “sicuro porto,” “amore interno”)—are not in fact present, either in the manuscript collection of sonnets or in the printed editions produced between 1538 and 1542, but only in the edition dating from 1546.51 If, by contrast, one examines the verses from the period that concerns us, it emerges that “falling in love” with Christ (“innamorarsi”) does not draw the soul toward quietism, but rather toward a very active conception of Christian life,52 which is easy to square with our extensive knowledge of Colonna’s own interests in the affairs of the temporal world.53 The theological tone of Colonna’s sonnets in those years is set by two distinguishing features: firstly, the understanding that the believer’s soul is renewed, and, secondly, the acceptance of the doctrine of imputed righteousness, which discounts the value of human merit and achievement. In Colonna’s later poetry, the first of these characteristics becomes progressively weakened, which would suggest, if nothing else, that Colonna’s move to Viterbo marked the moment when her adherence to Ochino’s ideas was increasingly replaced by the influence of Cardinal Pole. However, the notion that man is not saved by God through any intrinsic righteousness, but thanks instead to the righteousness expressed through the wounds of Christ upon the cross, is a constant characteristic of Colonna’s thought and is expressed throughout her Rime.

50  S1: 12; see also S1: 154. “Eternal heavenly Father, as by your mercy / I am a living branch on the broad vine of truth, / which embraces the world and enfolds in its girth / our virtue offered up through faith, [. . .] Cleanse my soul, so that close by your side / I am nourished eternally by your holy dew / and my roots are refreshed with tears. / You are the truth; you promised to be with me; / come to me joyfully, so that I may grow / sweet fruits in you worthy of this blessed vine”: Brundin 2005, 71–73. 51  Ossola, Introduction to Juan de Valdés, Lo Evangelio di San Matteo, 86. 52   B ullock: Rime, S1: 14; S1: 18; S1: 34; S1: 51; S1: 67; S1: 134; S2: 22; S2: 30. 53  Moro, “Vittoria Colonna e i Farnese nel 1540,” 188.

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Mariology The treatment of Marian themes in Colonna’s prose and verse works has been analyzed with consummate skill by Paolo Simoncelli, Abigail Brundin, Giovanni Bardazzi, and Ambra Moroncini, all of whom have highlighted how expertly Colonna intertwines historical material and literary ideas, and even theological concepts.54 The theme of Mariology is, moreover, extensively addressed in two of Colonna’s prose works—Sermone sopra la Vergine Addolorata and Parafrasi sopra l’Avemaria—written between 1539 and 1541, and printed posthumously in 1562/63, under the title of Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo, con un’ Oratione della medesima sopra l’Ave Maria.55 As explained by Paolo Simoncelli, the Sermone sopra la Vergine Addolorata (or Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo) is, in fact, a “letter-treatise” on the pietà of the Madonna. Colonna addressed this work to Ochino, probably sometime between 1539 and 1541, in response to his fourth Predica veneziana and to the first of his Dialogi sette, in both of which the great preacher addressed the contemplation of the dead Christ following his deposition from the Cross.56 The points adduced by Simoncelli in support of his argument are further substantiated by lengthy passages of Colonna’s Rime, as well as by some of Ochino’s writings, brought to light by Brundin and Bardazzi. In short, there is plenty of evidence on the basis of which to undertake a comparative theological analysis of the texts. For the purpose of this analysis, the following paragraphs will leave aside the brief Oratione sopra l’Ave Maria, which is little more than a literary exercise full of commonplace tropes. Although possessed of a certain formal elegance and devotional inspiration, the Oratione is not a vehicle for presenting authentic theological arguments.57 54  Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome, 1979), 209–25; Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61–81; Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 133– 54; Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 80–83; Ambra Moroncini, “I disegni di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna e la poesia del Beneficio di Cristo,” Italian Studies 64 (2009): 38–55; Moroncini, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: A Lutheran Belief?,” 55–76. 55  The two works are reproduced as an appendix to Simoncelli’s work, Evangelismo, 423– 28 and 429–32. For a detailed study of the works, see Eleonora Carinci’s chapter in this volume. 56  Ochino, Prediche veneziane (fourth sermon), 33r; Ochino, Dialogi sette (Dialogo del modo dell’innamorarsi di Dio), 54. 57  In “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary” (72–73), Brundin offers a thought-provoking interpretation of the work, highlighting its “incarnational theology,” a term adopted by John O’Malley to describe the sermons held at the papal court between the fifteenth and

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There can be no doubt that, as far as her knowledge of theology was concerned, Colonna was self-taught. Still, despite not having undertaken a formal course of study, Colonna had a great deal more expertise than the average individual: besides establishing personal relationships with high-ranking and extremely learned men of the Church, she also read the Scriptures and various theological treatises, both orthodox and heterodox. She was thus well informed about the most heated theological debates taking place in her lifetime. It seems improbable, then, that she would have been unaware of the harsh criticisms that Erasmus58 and the Reformers59 had leveled at the dogmatic medieval approach to the figure of Mary. Neither could Colonna have been ignorant of the devotional practices of Marian worship in her own time, located somewhere between idolatry and superstition. And yet, no traces of any of this are found in the Sermone. Rather, it would seem that Colonna took every care to avoid both these extremes, seeking instead to locate Mary within a more nuanced type of spirituality, whose form and content exhibit definite similarities with the attitudes of the spirituali, and, in particular, with the message of those sermons that Bernardino Ochino had travelled far and wide to preach.60 In essence, this type of spirituality proclaimed the centrality of Christ, while continuing to advocate Marian worship. Ochino’s position in relation to the question is dialectical but clear: he accepts the doctrine of eternal virginity and of the Theotókos, as it was understood by the early church, and, like the great scholastic theologians, does not pronounce an opinion on the immaculate conception. His allusions to the virtues embodied by Mary (for instance, her role as a model of faith and humility) establish her as a figure worthy of admiration and praise, but without actually elevating her to any key role in the economy of salvation revolving around Christ. Although Ochino sixteenth centuries. I myself do not consider this motif one of the most crucial elements of the work. For a further alternative reading of the Oratione, see Carinci’s chapter in this volume. 58  Léon E. Halkin, “La mariologie d’Erasme,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 32–54; Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge, 2007), 46–51. 59  Christoph Burger, “Spätmittelalterliche und reformatorische Marienpredigten,” in Medialität, Unmittelbarkeit, Präsenz. Die Nähe des Heils im Verständnis der Reformation, ed. Johanna Haberer and Berndt Hamm (Tübingen, 2012), 117–28. 60  On Mariology in the Beneficio di Cristo and in the Oratione fatta da un divotissimo huomo nel Venerdi santo, sopra la passione di Christo (anonymous, but attributed to Marcantonio Flaminio), see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 56–63. On Ochino’s Mariology, see Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 33–37 and Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 80–85.

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is usually intolerant of excessive exaltation of the Virgin, nonetheless, if he feels any temptation to denigrate her, he never succumbs to it. This is, presumably, a cautious effort on his part to contain the discourse about the mother of God within the limits of fact and knowledge, established by the Bible, the subapostolic tradition and the great ecumenical symbols. Reading between the lines, it can be seen that Ochino reinterprets the role of Mary, putting it into a different perspective. What is striking is the fact that this very same approach resurfaces in Colonna’s own Sermone. In an understated fashion, without making any bold statements or proposing dramatic breaks with traditional doctrine, Colonna erases every Marian attribute not based upon Scripture or upon a thematic connection with Christ. It is significant, for example, that Colonna never makes reference to Mary’s immaculate nature, even though the idea that Mary had been conceived untainted by sin had triggered a bitter dispute, dividing the Western Church in the late Middle Ages. In fact, Colonna’s views are completely logical. For an individual like her, whose belief in original sin was strong enough to convince her that the remission of sins was possible only through imputed and extrinsic righteousness, it would indeed have been impossible to agree with the “immaculist” theory, either in its most extreme form (stating that Mary was conceived without sin), or in the looser guise of the conceptio duplex, which argues that Mary became free of sin at the moment when her soul was planted. No less surprising is Colonna’s silence on the Madonna’s Assumption.61 Given that Mary’s assumption into heaven is not recorded in the New Testament, it is entirely legitimate, in the Valdesian-Ochinian school of thought, to remove her from the central nucleus of Christian faith, albeit without any dramatic ruptures or open manifestations of dogmatic dissent. The same may be said of other recurrent titles used in the worship of Mary, such as “Mother of the faithful,” “Wisdom of God,” “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” all of which would, needless to say, have been 61  I refer here to the above-mentioned Sermone. Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna,” 100, note 101, finds a reference to the Madonna Assunta in Bullock: Rime, S1: 64, vv. 9–10: “Quella, poi, che in velo uman per gloria / seconda onora il Ciel, più presso al vero / lume del Figlio ed a la Luce prima.” (“She, in human guise, who honours Heaven through reflected glory, the closest of all to the true light of the Son and the first Light.”) It would, however, be a mistake to interpret the dogma defined by Pius XII in the Bolla Munificentissimus Deus (1950) as a reference to the anticipation of Mary’s bodily and spiritual resurrection and assumption. The terzina cannot express anything other than the general acceptance of this idea in contemporary Western Christianity. Accepting the same concept with caution, the Reformers proposed the notion of “transit” (“transito”), meaning the soul’s entry into the glory of heaven. See Burger, “Spätmittelalterliche und reformatorische Marienpredigten.”

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entirely meaningless for Ochino and his followers. Only once do we encounter the expression “Queen of Heaven” (“Regina del Cielo”)—and yet, in the light of the idea that there is no Assumption, this expression cannot be interpreted as an affirmation that Mary is the sovereign recipient of heavenly graces (in line with the doctrine of Marian mediation); rather, it seems to allude to her status as a descendant of the royal tribe of David. Not only are the terms “mediator,” “advocate” (“mediatrice,” “avvocata”) absent throughout the letter-treatise, but there is, moreover, not a single trace of the compassio Mariae: that is, of Mary’s direct participation in her son’s sacrifice, which would go some way toward justifying her privileged role in the economy of salvation. That said, Colonna does offer a powerful and moving depiction of Mary’s immense grief.62 There are references to the principium consortii, a principle endorsed by the Church Fathers, and which claimed that there was a communion of life and action between Mary and her son, but without deriving from this that Mary must be a sort of co-redeemer. Neither do we find in Colonna’s Sermone the well-known parallelism (particularly common in sacred oratory of the period) between Eve and Mary: this presented Mary as a second Eve, whose mission was to repair the damage that the first Eve had wreaked upon humanity. And so, softly and carefully, while displaying a profound love for Mary, Colonna extinguished some of the brightest stars in the firmament of contemporary Marian spirituality. She did so less out of the kind of caution that motivated the spirituali than for the simple reason that, with the “beneficio di Cristo,” these ideas had become redundant. Moving away from implied ideas to the more explicit affirmations of the text, Colonna’s Sermone grants much space to the distinctly unmedieval idea that salvation has a single protagonist, the crucified Christ, and that there is only one path to salvation—namely, faith. If it is clear that Colonna, like Ochino, writes cautiously about the Virgin Mary, it is also true that her “Mariology” does not reveal any traces of the dogmatic framework of late-medieval Latin Christianity. The only two addresses featuring in the work are: “Mother of God” (“madre di Dio,” Theotókos, Dei genitrix) and “ever Virgin” (“sempre Vergine,” 62  B ullock: Rime, S1: 108. Here, there are echoes of Ochino’s ideas in Prediche veneziane, 35r: “Non è stata nissuna creatura in questo mondo che più interamente habbia sentita in sé la passion di Christo quanto la Maddalena. Ma non però in quel modo che dicono alcuni: che la gridava e si dilaniava e simili altre pazzie. No, no, non credere che la madre di Dio facessi simil cose, perché era prudentissima, e mai non uscì dai termini di ragione. Ma stava cheta, e la sentiva dentro di sé, come tu hai che conservabat omnia verba hae conferens in corde suo, nel cuor suo ruminava e masticava quello misterio della passion di Christo.” See also Prediche lucchesi, 64–65.

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semper virgo). Colonna’s Mariology rests, essentially, upon these two pillars. Were that not enough, the capitals adorning these columns are, moreover, extremely classical. In line with the usage of the early church, the term “madre di Dio” does not convey any exaltation of human merit. The title “Virgin” continues to be used, as it is in the Scripture and in the apostolic symbol, and in the writings of Valdés63 and Ochino,64 not with a biological meaning, but simply to designate Mary’s exceptional parthenogenesis. The two solemn titles Dei genitrix and semper virgo, which in the early church were originally used to define the relationship between the two natures of Christ, are used here not to exalt the “divine mother” (“madre divina”), but instead as a straightforward illustration of the meaning of the incarnation and the redemption. All of this evidence supports the theory that Colonna was indeed proposing a subtle yet radical transformation of traditional Mariology. To focus on the figure of Mary within the Sermone, treating her in her own right rather than in relation to the person and the role of Christ, would be to misconstrue Colonna’s text entirely. Everything that Colonna writes about the mother of God is, in fact, systematically subordinated to Christology and soteriology. This same reinterpretation of Mariology, observed in Colonna’s lettertreatise, also appears in ten sonnets of the Rime, and in two of the Rime spirituali sparse that deal explicitly with Mary’s role.65 With just one exception,66 the titles used are either those of the Creed, or ancient symbols of Christian faith: “mother,” “true mother of God,” “pure Virgin,” “holy Virgin” (“madre,” “madre vera di Dio,” “vergine pura,” “vergin sacra”). “Mother,” however, denotes the flesh of the Word made flesh, rather than a divine mother who participates in humanity’s redemption, and who, as such, is a prototype and compendium of the Church. Read in the context of the rest of the piece, dominated by the figure of the Redeemer, the poetic image of “the Virgin, in the carriage on His right hand side; I saw the Virgin, model of all virtues, by which we may escape eternal damnation” (“sul carro a la Sua dextra in real scanno / la Vergin vidi, d’ ogni virtù exempio, / per cui possiam fuggir l’eterno danno”) does not express 63  Juan de Valdés, Lo Evangelio di San Matteo, 131–32: “In che modo fusse concetto Iesu Cristo, nostro Signore, per opera di Spirito nel ventre della Santissima Vergine, é più sicuro crederlo che risolverlo, e per tanto mi rimetto a coloro che fanno professione di risolver e dichiarare ogni cosa, contentandomi io con credere che la concettione di Cristo fu per opera di Spirito Santo, senza che in essa intervenisse seme di uomo.” 64  Bernardino Ochino, Prediche veneziane, 16v: “Et accioché tu non te meravigli che essendo vergine tu possi concipere e partorire rimanendo intatta, sappi che appresso a Dio per la sua onnipotentia nessuna cosa è impossibile.” 65   B ullock: Rime, S1: 100–09; S2: 22, S2: 36, vv. 118–45. 66  S1: 101: Mary is referred to as “Star of our sea” (“Stella del nostro mar”).

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an acknowledgement of Mary’s regal dignity, but instead praises her “great and sure faith” (“alta fe’ sicura”). No longer the girl of Nazareth, Mary does not earn her place, but is granted it through God’s gift and grace. She is “blessed” (“beata”) because “she rejected the fruit and the root of the world, and now through her Lord, enjoys another, everlasting sweetness” (“ ’l frutto e la radice / sprezzò del mondo, e dal suo Signor ora / altra dolcezza e sempiterna elice”).67 Like all saints, Mary is immersed in the mystery of eternal life, and lives in the unparalleled joy of the blessed in Christ’s company. There is one final trait, related to the aforementioned points, which characterizes Colonna’s thinking: that is, Mary’s role as an example. This is a feature of Mary that also surfaces in the writings of Ochino. But the idea that Mary embodied and enacted all virtues in their most noble and sublime guise is a topos of medieval Marian worship, and, as such, cannot be deemed definite proof of Colonna’s adherence to Ochino’s beliefs. Conversely, it is clear that Colonna and Ochino are united in their conviction that these virtues do not in themselves determine Mary’s exemplarity. Colonna and Ochino do not deny the value of these virtues, but they consider them in relation to God, who is the source of them, rather than as attributes of Mary, who is merely their recipient. Mary is an example because she is the most intuitive proof of God’s omnipotence, of God’s mysterious ways of working, illustrated by His decision to incorporate a humble girl within his plan for salvation. As Colonna explains in a letter (undated, but probably written before 1545) to her cousin Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini, the Duchess of Amalfi, “in this candid and most pure glass [Mary], one sees the supreme and invisible light; and it seems here that the great Father is satisfied with the display of his invincible power in this powerful maiden. The Son, in His wisdom, rejoices in having such a wise mother, while the Holy Spirit gladly sees His excellent goodness reflected in this most perfect bride.”68 At the same time, Mary’s role as an example unfolds in the sphere of faith, underpinned not by fleeting human sureties, but by God himself, who, like a bright ray of sunshine, plumbs the depths of the believer’s soul and encourages men to follow Christ on earth:

67  S2: 36, vv. 118–20, 130, 139–41. 68  C arteggio, 297: “[V]edesi in questo candido et purissimo cristallo [Maria] l’invisibile luce suprema; et pare che ivi si sazii il gran Padre d’aver mostrato la sua invitta potenza nella potente figliuola, e il Figliuol gode d’aversi con la sua sapienza ordinata sì sapiente madre, si consola lo Spirito Santo di veder rilucere in questa perfettissima sposa l’ottima sua bontade.”

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Quando senza spezzar né aprir la porta del bel cristallo, ov’ era chiuso intorno, volse uscir fuori per far al mondo giorno quel Sol, che sempre gli è fidata scorta, la castità, benché si fosse accorta che l’era onor e non vergogna o scorno il Suo venir, pur timida al ritorno le si fe’ incontro pallidetta e smorta; ma la fede la tenne, e disse ch’ella guardasse Apollo, il cui raggio lucente rende col suo passar ciascuna stella, e che questo più chiaro e più possente mentre toccherà lei sempre più bella risplender la farà di gente in gente.69 Mary’s combination of innocence, humility, and trust in abandoning herself to God’s will, is striking and unparalleled. Constantly emphasized, these qualities converge to bring about a situation of surprising present-day relevance, especially when one considers the century-long prohibition against ordaining women as ministers of the Church. In the aforementioned letter to Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini, in an almost autobiographical tone recalling the writer’s energetic character, Colonna recalls Mary’s exemplary role in announcing the good news of the redemption, a role to which she has been called by the “maestro primo”: Just think what enlightened words she formed then, what wise and inspiring expressions issued from her saintly mouth, what bountiful and bright rays burned in those divine eyes, with what most astute advice, without contravening any law, she laid down the law for those who heard her, as a

69   B ullock: Rime, S1: 102. “When, without shattering or opening the beautiful glass door by which He was surrounded, that Sun, always her faithful consort, wanted to go out and shed light upon the world, Chastity, since she had realised that his coming brought honour and not shame, timidly she approached, pale and drawn; but faith seized her, and told her that she should look to Apollo, whose gleaming rays light every star in his passing; and that these rays will grow brighter and stronger as they touch her growing beauty, and will make ever more radiant, each person who gazes upon her.”

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true teacher constituted by the first teacher to bring his commandments to the world, which he composed with his own blood.70 The considerations laid out above clearly point to Colonna’s reconsideration of the traditional figure of Mary, in line with the beliefs of her spiritual guide Ochino. Whereas in contemporary dogma and worship the life and mission of the Virgin seemed to be scarcely less important than those of Christ Himself, Colonna subordinates Mary to Christ, relocating her to the place she feels she belongs. In Colonna’s eyes, precisely by virtue of this subordinate position, Mary, the simple, humble girl from Nazareth, paradoxically has her stature and importance even further magnified. Colonna therefore feels justified in speaking of Mary with profound love, in praising and honoring her, insofar as this emphasizes the glory of Christ. For even as Colonna magnifies Mary, she is singing the praises of Christ. In case such a conclusion might seem too bold or specious to some, it is worth recalling the words of Colonna herself, clear and touching in their simplicity: Mary, “through nourishing the Author of all life, was herself internally nourished by him, through sustaining him she was sustained, gently raising him from the ground she was raised high into heaven, and in granting him brief moments of peaceful rest she was herself granted eternal peace.”71 70  C arteggio, 299: “Pensa che illuminati accenti allhor formava, che sagge ignite parole uscivan dalla santa bocca, che pietosi et chiari raggi lampeggiavano da quei lumi divini, che rettissimi consigli senza uscir delle leggi davan legge a chi l’udiva come maestra vera constituita dal maestro primo a fermare quelli ordini al mondo, che aveva egli fondati col proprio sangue.” The translated text is in Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 151. 71  C arteggio, 298: “(. . .) nudrendo l’Autor d’ogni vita, era interamente nodrita da lui, come sostenendolo si sosteneva, et soavemente levandolo da terra era altamente elevata in cielo, et per dargli col sonno breve riposo, le era eterna pace per ricompensa concessa.” The translation is in Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 150.

Chapter 11

Religious Prose Writings Eleonora Carinci Piango di lui ciò che mi è tolto, le braccia magre, la fronte, il volto, ogni sua vita che vive ancora, che vedo spegnersi ora per ora. Figlio nel sangue, figlio nel cuore e chi ti chiama Nostro Signore nella fatica del tuo sorriso cerca un ritaglio di paradiso. Per me sei figlio, vita morente, ti portò cieco questo mio ventre, come nel grembo, e adesso in croce, ti chiama amore questa mia voce. Non fossi stato figlio di Dio t’avrei ancora per figlio mio. —Fabrizio De Andrè, Tre Madri1

Compared to her other literary works, Vittoria Colonna’s religious prose writings have been relatively neglected. Only recently, after centuries of oblivion, have they finally attracted critical attention. The two texts to which I am referring, and which together form the focus of this essay, are: first, the Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la Passione di Christo, a meditation by Colonna on the Madonna’s reaction as she holds her dead son once he is taken down from the cross; and, second, the Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria, a line by line commentary of the Ave Maria. Both works were printed for the first time in 1556, but

1  “I cry for that part of him now lost to me, / his thin arms, his forehead, his face, / every life of his that lives on still, / that I see extinguished hour by hour. / Son of my blood, son of my heart, / those who call you Our Lord, / seek in your weary smile / the refuge of paradise. / Dying life, you are a son to me, / this womb of mine bore you blind, / and when you were in my womb, as you are now upon the cross, / this voice of mine calls you love. / Had you not been the son of God, / I should still have you as my son.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_013

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had previously circulated in manuscript form.2 In the manuscript held in the Vatican Secret Archives, the Pianto is entitled Meditazione del Venerdì Santo; it also has another alternative title in the index of these same archives, where it is listed as Sermone sopra la Vergine addolorata. The Orazione, meanwhile, before becoming known as such, was entitled Meditazione sopra l’Ave Maria. As we shall see, these earlier titles offer a clearer indication of the content of each text than the titles used in the printed editions.3 It was only when scholars began to take an interest in Colonna’s relationships within evangelical circles that the true value of these writings started to be appreciated. The texts provide a key insight into the influence of contemporary evangelism on a woman who was highly cultured, and was the only member of her sex to belong to the Ecclesia Viterbiensis. Furthermore, these works by Colonna shed light on the type of religious ideas which were circulating within the evangelical group at that time.4 While it is impossible to isolate these texts from the religious context in which they were created, it is also essential to analyse them in relation to the literary tradition that informed them. The religious and the literary are two complementary aspects, both of which have a crucial part to play in achieving a complete understanding of the works in question. One must also bear in mind that Colonna was a female author, grappling with a subject that had hitherto been explored and interpreted mainly by men. A remarkably gifted poet, Colonna had already succeeded in carving out a niche for herself within a lyric tradition that privileged male subjects: a task that had required her to find ways of reinventing Petrarchan poetry, so that it worked from a female perspective.5 This is a crucial point, which cannot be stressed enough. Following a brief overview of the history of Colonna’s texts, 2  Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la Passione di Christo. Oratione della medesima, sopra l’Aue Maria. Oratione fatta il Venerdi santo, sopra la Passione di Christo (Venice, 1556). 3  Ms A.S.V., Misc. Arm. II, vol. 79, ff. 229r–237r, published in Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento. Questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome, 1979), 423–32, and Eva-Maria Jung-Inglessis, “Il Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la Passione di Christo. Introduzione,” in Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 10 (1997): 149–64. 4  On Colonna’s relationship to Italian evangelism, see Jung-Inglessis, “Introduzione,” in Il Pianto, 115–47; Simoncelli, Evangelismo; Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna. Un dialogo artistico-religioso con Bernardino Ochino e altri saggi di storia della Riforma (Turin, 1994); Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 37–65. 5  See Maria Serena Sapegno, “La costruzione di un Io lirico al femminile nella poesia di Vittoria Colonna,” Versants 46 (2003): 15–48; eadem “ ‘Sterili i corpi fur, l’alme feconde’ (Vittoria Colonna, Rime, A 30),” in “L’una et l’altra chiave.” Figure e momenti del petrarchismo femminile europeo. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Zurigo 4–5 giugno 2004 (Rome, 2005), 31–44.

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and of the cultural and religious context that inspired them, I analyze the texts in relation to the tradition upon which they are modelled (or from which they depart), adopting an approach that places special emphasis on gender. Thanks to the studies by Eva-Maria Jung-Inglessis and Paolo Simoncelli— who, independently of each other, reached similar conclusions—we now have a relatively clear idea of the circumstances that inspired Vittoria Colonna to write the Pianto and the Orazione, and are able to date these works with reasonable precision.6 According to the convincing conclusions formulated by these scholars, the Pianto was originally written as a letter to Bernardino Ochino, similar to other letter-treatises on religious themes, which were typical of the period.7 It appears that Colonna composed the Pianto sometime between 1539, the year in which Ochino presented his Prediche Nove in Venice (refered to in the Pianto), and 1542, the date of his escape to Switzerland; the Pianto may thus have been written in 1540–41, at which time Colonna was also writing other letters to Ochino.8 The Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria was, according to Jung-Inglessis, probably composed after the Pianto; even so, the Orazione was published only together with the Pianto, and is also present in the Vatican manuscript (where it is copied by a different hand). The influence of contemporary evangelism on the Pianto is further highlighted by Emidio Campi, who devotes particular attention to the mutual influences between Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo and Bernardino Ochino.9 Little is known about the circumstances surrounding the publication of Colonna’s Pianto and Orazione. The intention of the publisher was, apparently, to offer a collection of texts relating to Italian evangelism. Indeed, in all five of their sixteenth-century editions, the two works by Colonna are always accompanied by a Meditazione fatta da un devotissimo huomo sopra la Passione di Christo, which Simoncelli attributes to Marcantonio Flaminio, co-author of the well-known and controversial Beneficio di Christo, which first appeared in print in 1543.10 Additionally, the Bolognese edition of the Pianto from 1557 incorporates the Sermone fatto alla Croce e recitato il Venerdì Santo nella Compagnia di S. Domenico l’anno MDXLIX da M. Benedetto Varchi, which Simoncelli considers a kind of rewriting of the Beneficio di Christo, as well as a capitolo by Vittoria 6 Jung-Inglessis, Pianto, 144; Simoncelli, Evangelismo, 211–14. 7 See Simoncelli, Evangelismo, 211. 8 See CARTEGGIO, 241–46. 9 See Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna. 10  [Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio], Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Christo Chrocifisso verso i Christiani (Venice, 1543). See Salvatore Caponetto, “Introduzione,” in Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio, Il Beneficio di Cristo (Turin, 1975), 7–24.

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Colonna on the Triumph of Christ.11 The texts in question are connected both to one another and to the evangelical movement. If the Pianto had been forged in connection with unorthodox ideas, an attempt to make this less apparent may be detected in the omission (in the printed version) of all direct references to Ochino. By that time, Ochino and the majority of evangelist sympathizers whom Colonna had befriended had fled abroad, in order to preach their beliefs freely and to avoid the Inquisition. These were, after all, years in which the supporters of reform in Italy were obliged to exercise a great deal more caution than would have been required twenty years earlier. By contrast, in the Vatican manuscript, Colonna addresses herself directly to a Reverend Father (“Reverendo Padre”), a direct and unmistakeable reference to Ochino himself. Tradition The fact that these two works by Colonna are focused on the pivotal figure of the Virgin Mary endows them with special interest. Not only was Colonna’s choice of subject matter a particularly delicate one at the moment in which she composed these works, but it also sheds light on her own religious sensibilities. The Catholic tradition had always accorded a central role to the cult of the Virgin Mary, to whom important pages had been dedicated by some of the most illustrious authors, including Dante and Petrarch.12 Mary was the virgin mother, the intercessor, the queen of heaven, a woman whose divine associations were so powerful that her identity as a “woman” seemed to fade into the background. Mary’s humanity and her “femininity,” a quantity traditionally associated with irrationality and weakness, are most clearly demonstrated at the moment when she witnesses Christ’s Passion. As mentioned earlier, the Pianto was titled as such only in printed editions. In all probability, the title reflects not Colonna’s own choice, but rather the 11  For a detailed description of the sixteenth-century editions (the first of which, in 1556, was followed by subsequent editions in 1557 [Bologna], 1561 [Venice], 1562 and 1563 [both Venice]), see Jung-Inglessis, Pianto, 115–28. 12  For a history of the cult of the Virgin Mary, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1976); Klaus Schreiner, Vergine, madre, regina. I volti di Maria nell’universo cristiano (Rome, 1995); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries. Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT, 1998); Mary. The Complete Resource, ed. by Sara Jane Boss (London, 2007); Storia della Mariologia, vol. I: Dal modello biblico al modello letterario, ed. Enrico Dal Covolo and Aristide Serra (Rome, 2009); Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London, 2009). Dante, Paradiso 33; RVF, 366.

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long medieval tradition of the Planctus Mariae. The cult of Mary, a Mater dolorosa who contemplates her son flagellated and dead on the cross, had been a feature of Catholic faith since the twelfth century. Most prominent in the liturgy of Good Friday, this aspect of the Virgin Mary’s persona was also extensively thematized in sacre rappresentazioni, meditations, literary texts (either in Latin or in the vernacular), musical lyrics, and works of art.13 Although the Virgin’s grief had been the focus of a richly varied tradition, the only one of the canonical Gospels which alludes to her presence before the cross is John (19: 25–27), in the scene where Jesus entrusts his mother to St John the Evangelist; the book of John does not depict Mary’s emotions, or her “pianto.” Luke and Matthew depict women in the act of grieving, but without making specific reference to the Virgin.14 Therefore, like all other stories concerning Mary, her sorrow at her son’s suffering and death must be traced back to the apocryphal tradition. Even so, the topos was peacefully accepted by the Catholic Church as a form of popular worship, which touched the hearts of the faithful, reinforced the faith of those who were less educated, and served as a stimulus for writers and painters to depict the Christian story.15 Some of the most famous examples include the dramatic lauda by Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1236–1306), Donna de’ Paradiso, also known as the Pianto della Madonna, which stages a dialogue between the Madonna and her son on the cross;16 the well-known hymn Stabat Mater, also attributed to Jacopone, which re-evokes the sorrow of the Virgin as she stands at the foot of the cross, and the desire of the Christian to participate in her “pianto,” transformed here into a request;17 the Lamentatio Beatae Virginis by Enselmino da Montebelluna, a short poem in the vernacular (dating from sometime between the late 1200s and mid1300s): here, at the request of the author, the Madonna gives a first-person account of her own suffering at the Passion and death of her son.18 Moreover, all texts about Christ’s life or Passion, or about the Virgin—whether in Latin 13  Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. R. Berringean (Athens, 1988); Marina Warner, Alone of All, 206–23. 14  Lk. 23: 27–31; Mt. 27: 55–56. 15  See, for instance, “Vangelo di Nicodemo” (260–61) and “Vangelo di Gamaliele” (346–55), in Gli Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento, I/2, ed. by Mario Erbetta (Casale Monferrato, 1983). 16  Jacopone da Todi, “Pianto de la Madonna de la passion del figliolo Iesù Christo” in Laude di Frate Jacopone da Todi secondo la stampa fiorentina del 1490, ed. Giovanni Ferri (Rome, 1910), 153–55. 17  See Stabat Mater: “Fac me tecum pie flere, /crucifixo condolere, /donec ego vixero,” vv. 37–39. 18  Enselmino’s Lamentatio was widely diffused, as attested by numerous manuscripts, and by the production of twenty or so printed editions between the late 1400s and mid-1500s.

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or the vernacular, in prose or verse—present the figure of the mater dolorosa, who, like the other pious women, feels a crushing weight of grief for the sufferings inflicted upon her son.19 Interesting examples of this type of literature, dating from the same period as the Pianto, include the religious works of Pietro Aretino, especially the Passione di Christo (1534), subsequently incorporated into the broader work Humanità di Christo (1535), and the Vita di Maria Vergine (1539), some of which Colonna probably read.20 Meditation on the life and Passion of Christ was a very common practice, especially for women, as attested by the numerous meditation manuels in circulation, initially in manuscript form and later in print.21 The most famous example of this genre is provided by the Meditations on the Life of Christ (Meditationes Vitae Christi) by pseudo-Bonaventure, which describes each moment of Christ’s life in detail, inviting the reader to visualize the scene, meditate upon it, pray, and essentially to relive the moment and share in the emotions of those present at the scene. The Passion was a scene that lent itself particularly well to this kind of activity; indeed, it had provided the focus for meditations since the Middle Ages, and the meditations of pseudo-­Bonaventure on this theme were already circulating in numerous printed vernacular versions by the end of the fifteenth century.22 In the devotional books of Rosary See also Alvise Andreose, “Introduzione,” in Enselmino da Montebelluna, Lamentatio Beate Virginis Marie (Pianto della Vergine), ed. A. Andreose (Rome, 2010). 19  Examples of poetry written in the vernacular include Antonio Cornazzano, De la Sanctissima Vita di Nostra Donna (Venice, 1471); Nicolò Cicerchia (14th-c.), La Passione di Nostro Signore. Poema in ottava rima, ed. Marchese di Montrone (Naples, 1827). 20  Pietro Aretino, La Passione di Christo (Venice, 1534), which in 1538 would be incorporated into the Humanità di Christo (Venice, 1535); Vita di Maria Vergine (Venice, 1539). In a letter to Aretino, dated February 6 1538, Colonna mentions a work sent to her by Aretino, which Giovanni Aquilecchia believes may have been the Passione itself: “Non so s’io debbo più lodarvi o dislodarvi del libro che m’avete mandato. Lodarvi perché veramente il meritate in questa composizione, e dislodarvi perché così buono ingegno abbiate a occupare in altre cose che in quelle di Christo, mostrandovi men grato a Dio e meno utile al mondo.” See the letters exchanged between Colonna and Aretino in CARTEGGIO, 148–53. See also Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Pietro Aretino e la ‘Riforma Cattolica,’ ” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1996): 9–23. 21  The history of meditations on the Passion, and their associations with women, are discussed in Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, 2010). 22  See, for instance, Le devote meditatione sopra la passione del nostro Signore (Venice, 1491), and especially the “Meditazione di ciò che accadette da poi la morte di Jesù & del pianto di Maria con le altre” (fols. e1v–e4r): here, the Christian is invited to contemplate “non senza effusione di lachrime con pia compassione la dolcissima madre, la qual stava con le

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meditations, which enjoyed a wide diffusion in the period, the individual was invited to recite the rosary while meditating upon each moment of Christ and Mary’s life together, from the nativity to the resurrection. The life of Christ and Mary was made up of “mysteries,” divided into three distinct types: joyful, sorrowful and glorious, with this latter category of “glorious mysteries” comprising the episodes of the Passion and the death of Christ. For example, in Alberto da Castello’s Rosario della Beata Vergine Maria, a work which achieved great popularity, readers are encouraged to shed tears as they contemplate the Madonna, distraught at her son’s death.23 Further examples are found in the popular tradition of processions, and the re-enactment of mysteries during holy week (customary in many regions in Italy), in which the sorrowful Madonna grieves for her son, before being reunited with him after the resurrection.24 The Madonna addolorata thus constituted an essential part of the imagery relating to the Passion. This imagery was itself reflected in a devotional tradition which in the course of its long existence had developed both literary and iconographic facets, and which Colonna clearly had in mind when she wrote the Pianto. Whoever imposed the later title of the Pianto was evidently aware of this. In the years of the Reformation and the Council of Trent, the figure of the Virgin became highly controversial; so much so that, by the mid-1500s, Catholic authors tended to avoid writing about her, indicating that they were waiting for the Council to adopt a clear stance on this point.25 Basing themselves on the Holy Scriptures, reformers from other countries had in fact re-evaluated the importance that the Catholic Church traditionally attached to the Virgin as coredeemer and intercessor, generating debate on the matter. For these reformist thinkers, Mary was a shining example of Christian faith and a model braze aperte expectando con anxiato desiderio de poter tochare quello lo qual con gaudio soleva abraciare” (fol. e2v). 23  “Contempla qui, anima devota e devotamente piangi quando consideri il presente misterio, cioè che havendo inteso la mestissima madre de Jesù vergine purissima che el suo carissimo figliolo era stato preso [. . .] vene per vederlo [. . .] e e non ebbe gratia di vederlo se non quando fu menato alla morte”: Alberto da Castello, Rosario della glo.sa V.gine Maria (1521), fol. 130r. 24  See, for instance, Francesco Faeta and Antonello Ricci, Le forme della festa: la Settimana Santa in Calabria: studi e materiali (Rome, 2007). 25  The gap in publications on the figure of the Virgin, between 1550 and 1570, is revealed by the bibliographical references listed in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books 1465–1550: A Finding List (Geneva, 1983), and in Donna, disciplina e creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo. Studi e testi a stampa, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 1996), 407–705.

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of humility, but one who nonetheless remained human and played no part in the salvation of mankind. While the Virgin was to be admired for her humility, for her true and unwavering faith, for being “full of grace” (in the Lutheran sense of the term), it was neither fitting nor worthwhile to ask her for grace. Grace was conferred by God alone, and could not be granted by the Virgin, any more than it could be earned through personal merit or good works. To seek to gain salvation through the Virgin’s intercession was to undervalue the gift that God had bestowed upon humanity when he sacrificed Christ on the cross. Such ideas are highlighted by Luther himself, in his commentaries on the Magnificat (1520–21) and on the Ave Maria (1522).26 These were the same principles which were adopted by Ochino and the rest of the spirituali, and which Colonna was also grappling with in her “Marian” writings. Bernardino Ochino’s third Venetian sermon (refered to, not coincidentally, in Colonna’s Pianto) urges believers to rejoice in Christ’s crucifixion as the source of humanity’s salvation, claiming that it is a universal source of gladness, for the angels, God, Christ himself, for the apostles, and also Mary. Specifically, Ochino rejects the tradition that portrayed the Virgin as the Mater dolorosa, and imagines how she would respond when asked whether it pleased her that her son should die on the cross: .

Indeed I am glad, for this has allowed the salvation of humankind, and for this reason I am glad that my son is nailed to the cross, flagellated, beaten, scorned and unjustly condemned to suffer the bitterness of death; and finally, drained of his strength and suffering the ultimate humiliation of death on the cross, between two common thieves, with such torture and so many pains, the object of such venom and bile. I am glad, too, when I see his crown of thorns, the nails that pierce his hands and feet. And last of all, I am glad to see him on Calvary, where he said: It is finished. And of this I am glad, for although he is most innocent, an immaculate lamb so unjustly put to death on the cross, yet his passion and death have afforded the erasure of sinners, their angelic nature restored, when they had been expelled from paradise for pride, in order that the empty seats in heaven might be filled.27 26  See Comunità di Bose, ed., Maria. Testi teologici e spirituali dal I al XX secolo (Milan, 2000), 781–95. 27  “Mi contento, accioché per questo vi sia salvata l’humana natura, e per questa cagione io mi contento ch’il mio figliuolo sia appeso, sia flagellato, battuto, schernito et ingiustamente condannato a patire l’acerba morte, e finalmente exinanito e humiliato fino alla morte della croce in mezzo a due ladroni, con tanto cruciato, con tante pene, abbeverato

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The Pianto seems to be a response precisely to this passage. While recognizing that the vision of the spirituali revolved around Christ himself, Colonna also emphasizes the role of the Virgin as a central figure within Christianity. At the same time, without diminishing the joy of salvation, Colonna gives the Virgin the right to mourn the death of her son, thereby reconciling Catholic tradition with reformist ideas, in accordance with the agenda of contemporary evangelism. From a weak and desperate Mater dolorosa, Mary is transformed by Colonna into a grieving human woman, who nonetheless does not lose sight of the ultimate good behind her son’s sacrifice. The Pianto Despite being fundamentally imprecise and misleading, the ambiguous title of the Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la Passione di Christo nonetheless captures something important about the work. On the one hand, the title presents the Marchesa di Pescara as the author of a “Pianto,” a literary genre that was well established and extensively codified; in which case, Colonna is clearly the author, and the “pianto,” the act of weeping itself, is implicitly performed by the Madonna. On the other hand, the title also allows for the possibility that the act of weeping may be attributed to the Marchesa herself, thus making the mourning of the dead Christ a more personal affair. Ultimately, this semantic ambiguity reflects the extent to which the identities of Colonna and Mary converge in the text. Enselmino had enabled the Madonna to speak through a sort of ventriloquistic mechanism, inviting Christians to perform rosary meditations and to observe the suffering of the Virgin, empathizing with her and participating in her “pianto.” Colonna, meanwhile, ventures beyond the perspective of the observer struck by compassion for the suffering mother. Rather than imagining the Virgin’s point of view, and thereby allowing her to speak indirectly, Colonna offers her own interpretation of Mary’s reactions, making di felle e di aceto. Anchor mi contento vederlo coronato di spine e gli piedi e le mani state trapassati da chiodi. E finalmente io son contenta di vederlo sul monte Calvario tanto al fine che disse: Consummatum est. E questo perché, se ben lui innocentissimo et agnello immaculato sia stato così iniquamente crocifisso e morto, pure accioché per la passione e morte sua siano cancellati gli peccatori e ch’il sia risarcita la natura angelica che per il peccato della superbia furono scacciati dal paradiso, accioché siano riempite le sedie vacue”: Bernardino Ochino, Terza predica predicata in Vinegia . . . il Venerdì dopo la Domenica di Passione 1539, in Prediche del Reverendo Padre Frate Bernardino Ochino Senese . . . predicate nella inclita città di Vinegia (Venice, 1541), cited in Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 102–3.

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them her own. She does not merely shed tears alongside the Madonna; instead, she commits an act of identification, putting herself directly in her place. At the opening of the Pianto, Colonna declares that she will “write of [her] sorrow at seeing the dead Christ in his mother’s arms,”28 but the text is in fact a meditation, a deeply personal interpretation of the Virgin’s reactions in that moment when she cradles her dead son.29 The scene comprises various elements: first, a subject, Colonna, who describes and meditates upon the image of the Pietà; second, a main object—the dead Christ—who is, at least in theory, the central focal point of the scene. Christ is a necessary presence (even in his absence), and the original cause for the “pianto.” The gaze of his mother sustains his life, through her memory of his past actions, and in the hope of his future resurrection. Third, there is the Madonna herself, a second object in the scene, who cradles and mourns her dead son, and whose experience of suffering is the focus of the author’s gaze, as well, perhaps, as the author’s envy. At the same time, the Madonna is also a subject, since she is present at the death of Christ, recalling and reflecting upon this, feeling all the emotional power—and sometimes the emotional conflict—of the scene, as described by Colonna. Remaining on earth after her son is gone, Mary steps into his former role, becoming the symbol of true faith. But that is not all. When Colonna states that she intends to describe the sorrow she herself feels upon seeing the dead Christ in his mother’s arms, she is in fact describing the Madonna’s own reaction to Christ’s death. This is, therefore, a moment when the perspectives of the author and the Virgin converge, creating an overlapping effect that must be borne in mind when reading the rest of the text. Colonna claims that she has been inspired to write by the fact it is a Friday (“giorno del Venere”), and by the late hour (“hora tarda”). Friday recalls Good Friday, the day of Christ’s death, and the day whose events all Christians are bound to commemorate and relive, through intense meditation and prayer.30 The “late hour” is probably a reference to Compline, the latest of the canonical hours, which recalls the moment when Christ was deposed from the cross

28  “[S]criver del pietoso effetto di veder Christo morto in braccio a la Madre.” 29  This, and all the following quotations from the Pianto and from the Orazione, are taken from the transcription of the Vatican Manuscript in Simoncelli, Evangelismo. Translations of extracts from the Pianto quoted hereafter are from “Vittoria Colonna’s Plaint of the Marchesa di Pescara,” in Who Is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary, ed. and trans. Susan Haskins (Chicago, 2008), 53–65. 30  For instance, in Pseudo Bonaventura’s Meditationes, the meditations on the Passion were reserved for the “Die Veneris.”

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and then buried.31 Colonna seems almost reluctant to embark on her literary enterprise, and yet she feels compelled to by virtue of her obedience. The first question that arises concerns this sense of obedience, and to what or to whom Colonna feels she owes it. Simoncelli has advanced a theory that it was Ochino himself who encouraged Colonna to write about this subject, either by means of a direct suggestion or through the indirect influence of his sermons. Equally, however, Colonna’s sense of duty might be dictated by her faith, and by the fact that Good Friday is the day on which all Christians are encouraged to meditate upon Christ’s Passion. As in all other meditations, the believer (in this case, Colonna), speaks in the first person, using verbs such as “I see,” and “it appears to me,” typical of the vocabulary for meditations.32 Yet this is not a meditation on the crucifix, nor on the Passion. If anything, it could be considered a post-mortem reflection, in which the author homes in on the exact moment of the “pietà,” on the scene of the mother cradling her dead son after his deposition from the cross, and before his burial. Mary, presented as “tied by so many chains in the love of her son [. . .] made herself a resting place for her dead son [. . .] but to make of her own almost dead body a sepulcher in that hour.”33 Thus, the Madonna is transformed from an object of devotion, praise and admiration (the guise in which she was traditionally represented) into a corporeal subject in her own right. The same body of the virgin mother who had given life to Christ, re-absorbs his body into hers at the moment of his death. As has been observed, the image reads very much like a description of Michelangelo’s drawing of the Pietà, made for (or commissioned by) Colonna, in those same years,34 although it is not known whether the text was inspired by the drawing, 31  In one nineteenth-century Italian translation of Pseudo Bonaventura’s Meditationes, the “Pietà” is described in the “Meditazione de la passione nell’ora de la compieta.” See Cento Meditazioni di S. Bonaventura sulla vita di Gesù Cristo, ed. Bartolomeo Sorio (Rome, 1847), 276–79. 32  See, among others, “Della Corona di Spine,” in Luis de Granada, Rosario figurato: “Veggo oscurata la luce di questa fronte, e questi sereni occhi cecati con la pioggia del tuo sangue. Veggo le gocce di Sangue stillare dal capo” (O2r). 33  “[C]on tante catene ligata ne l’amor del figliuolo [. . .] se stessa per letto al morto figliolo [. . .] immo da far del suo corpo quasi morto una sepoltura in quella hora.” 34  Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà (ca. 1540), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA. Among the many studies exploring the relationships and mutual influences between Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo and the group of the spirituali, see, for example, Campi, Michelangelo e Vittora Colonna; Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali”: Religiosità e vita artistica a Roma negli anni Quaranta (Rome, 2009); Ambra Moroncini, “I disegni di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna e la poesia del Beneficio di Cristo,” Italian Studies 68 (2009): 38–55.

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or vice versa.35 The scene is prefigured by Enselmino, who writes: “Do not think to give him any other burial, except in my arms: there I want him to stay, for as long as my sad life shall last.”36 Colonna, however, gives a different interpretation to that embrace, associating it with salvation. Whereas Enselmino simply said that Mary wanted to bury her son in her embrace until the moment of her own death, Colonna’s Mary finds in that same embrace the “life” of salvation. Colonna’s decision to have Mary’s “pianto” begin in the wake of Christ’s death represents a break with the tradition of the Planctus. Traditionally, the mother’s “pianto” takes place throughout the Passion of Christ, and ceases following his burial. In Colonna’s version, Mary’s “pianto” commences only once Christ is already dead: It seems to me the grief, which all day long the Virgin had stored up in her heart, so as to consume that most noble part, and the fire of love and torment her high-mindedness had scorned to display outwardly, and which had consumed and penetrated the depths of her soul, now, in touching Christ’s sacred body, grew with infinite abundance, and flowed through her eyes in bitterest tears, and through her lips in more burning sighs.37 The onset of Mary’s “pianto” coincides with the moment when she “touches” (“tocca”) the dead body of her son. Her reaction is a physical and instinctive one, described in powerfully human terms. Giovanni Aquilecchia identifies this passage as an antithesis of Pietro Aretino’s Passione di Christo. Published in 1534, and probably read and appreciated by Colonna, Aretino’s work depicts a Madonna who remains silent at her son’s tomb, having worn herself out with

35  The question is still under debate. For an overview of the discussion and an analysis of the possible connections and differences between the Pianto and Michelangelo’s drawing, see Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali,” 63–85. 36  “Non creder tu darli altra sepoltura / Che in le mie brace: lì voio che stia / Defin che la mia vita trista dura”: Enselmino, Lamentatio, vv. 1306–8, 572. It is worth noting Aretino’s words in the Passione: “Volendo ciascuna [delle pie donne] che il suo grembo gli fosse sepolchro, ecco la nostra Donna, che non sendole rimase più voci, né più singhiozzi, né più lagrime, né più sospiri, come persona senza lingua, gli prese la testa.” Aretino, La Passione di Christo (Venice, 1535), fol. I 2 r–v. 37  “Parmi che ’l dolor qual tutto il giorno era stato raccolto nel cor de la Vergine per consumar la più nobil sua parte et quel fuoco de amor et de tormento che se era desdignato per la grandezza sua mostrarsi tutto fore, haveva consumato et penetrato l’intimo dell’anima, hora nel toccar el sacro Corpo de Christo se allargò con maxima abondantia, et uscì per li occhi con più amare lacrime, et per la bocca con più accesi suspiri.”

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grief during the Passion.38 Élise Boillet, by contrast, highlights the parallels between the two texts, arguing that Aretino’s Passione di Christo served as a source of inspiration for the imagery employed by Colonna.39 Indeed, although Colonna and Aretino differed profoundly in their ideas, sensibilities and aspirations, they were acquainted with each other. Colonna had probably read one of Aretino’s religious works: presumably either the Passione or the Humanità di Christo. It therefore seems plausible that Colonna drew inspiration from whichever work she read, at a time when it was not yet a crime against decency to name the so-called “Flagello dei principi.” Particularly interesting in this respect is Colonna’s use, in the aforementioned passage, of nominalized adjectives, such as “depths” (“l’intimo”), typical of Aretino’s style.40 Yet Colonna’s decision to depict the Virgin’s “pianto” as beginning only after Christ’s deposition from the cross distances her not only from Aretino, but from the entire tradition of the Planctus Mariae. Colonna’s choice represents at least a partial acceptance of Ochino’s idea that: There was no creature on this earth who felt Christ’s passion more keenly than the Madonna; but not in the way that some say, when they relate that she cried out, tore her hair, and other such mad gestures. No, no, do not believe that the mother of God did such things as these, because she was very wise, and never departed from the realm of reason; instead, she remained quiet, feeling everything on the inside, as you are told, that conservabat omnia verba in haec conferens in corde suo. In her heart she pondered and digested this mystery of the passion of Christ.41 Mary’s lament was traditionally manifested in cries and swooning and occurred throughout the Passion, whereas in Colonna’s text Mary begins her “pianto” 38  See Aquilecchia, “Pietro Aretino e la ‘Riforma Cattolica.’ ” 39  Élise Boillet, L’Aretin et la Bible (Geneva, 2007), 119–22. 40  For example, in the Vita di Maria Vergine, Aretino makes extensive use of nominalized adjectives. See Eleonora Carinci, “Una riscrittura di Pietro Aretino. La Vita di Maria Vergine di Lucrezia Marinella e le sue fonti,” Italianist 33 (2013): 361–89. 41  “Non è stata nessuna creatura in questo mondo che più interamente habbia sentito in sé la passion di Christo quanto la Madonna; ma non però in quel modo che dicono alcuni: che la gridava e si dilaniava e simili altre pazzie. No, no, non credere che la madre di Dio facesse simil cose, perché era prudentissima, e mai non uscì fuor dei termini della ragione; ma stava cheta e la sentiva dentro di sé, come tu hai, che conservabat omnia verba in haec conferens in corde suo. Nel cuor suo ruminava e masticava questo misterio della passion di Christo”: Bernardino Ochino, Prediche nove, fol. 29r, cited in Simoncelli, Evangelismo, 214.

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only after the event, having suffered in silence during the Passion itself. When she does finally cry, her “pianto” gives vent to an immeasurable grief, which does not, however, cause her to lose all lucidity. No dialogue with Christ on the cross takes place, as it does in the lauds and the Lamentatio, and so there is no opportunity for a response: the “pianto” is not the key to obtaining grace, any more than good works are. Salvation becomes possible only through faith and knowledge of the gift offered by Christ when he dies on the cross. Through her tears and her “pianto” in the wake of her son’s death, Mary takes upon herself the task of keeping faith alive on earth. This aspect admits of differing interpretations, when one considers that all of Colonna’s lyric poetry occurs in mourning for the object of her love. In her lyric poetry, Colonna expresses in writing her very raw grief in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and her love for him, modifying the paradigm of the Petrarchan canzoniere, which is divided “in vita” and “in morte,” and thereby defining a formerly inexistent female lyric voice.42 The Pianto is characterized by a similar operation: here, Colonna repeats some of the same linguistic and thematic motifs in order to describe, from a female perspective, the Virgin’s grief at the loss of her son, and how she processes it. This in turn establishes a certain continuity between her poetry and her religious prose. Such continuity is not expressed merely through the presence of evangelical motifs in Colonna’s rime spirituali; it also extends to her rime amorose. Colonna found relief and satisfaction in poetry, and then in a spiritual dimension. Here, by contrast, the Madonna—and, by association, Colonna herself—who wishes to die with Christ and to return to being one person with him, making her own body a tomb for him, will find joy again after Christ’s future resurrection. This hypothesis is reinforced by the use of words associated with love poetry, and by the presence of other related motifs, including the desire to escape one’s own body in order to be united with one’s beloved. The connection between Colonna’s love poetry and her religious prose writings is one that would certainly be deserving of further critical investigation. Colonna’s meditation proceeds by describing the beauty of the dead Christ. Here, a sort of transformative process takes place, moving from physical contact with Christ’s body, the trigger for the Virgin’s “pianto,” into a spiritual dimension: “death’s ugliness was not only beautiful in this most beautiful face, but pride turned into great sweetness, darkness into clear light [. . .] O how desirable was that face, which in other dead people it seems one should

42  For an analysis of this strategy, see Sapegno, “La costruzione di un Io lirico al femminile.”

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shun!”43 Here, too, Colonna distances herself from a tradition which shows Mary lamenting the defilment of her son’s beauty, now that he is flagellated and defaced. The dead Christ has a beautiful body, but not only physically, as a son’s body might appear to his mother. Death itself becomes beautiful, containing an implicit promise of joy and hope. This process of sublimation is very similar to that which Colonna sets in motion in the following paragraph. As we have seen, the Pianto had originally taken the form of a letter addressed to Bernardino Ochino. While Ochino had highlighted the necessary sense of joy felt by the Virgin at the death of her son, Colonna problematizes this moment. As observed by Campi, she too describes the death of Christ as a source of joy for mankind, and yet she is clearly intent upon emphasizing the human grief that a mother feels upon witnessing her son’s death. In fact, according to Colonna, Mary’s “pianto” for Christ expressed itself “in many ways” (“in più modi”). Here, too, we find a process which is initated by physical, concrete gestures, and then progresses to questions of spirituality—and, I would add, questions about doctrine. The different “ways” evoked by Colonna may, in fact, correspond to readings of the same image on different levels, which seem to recall the four traditional exegetical senses (literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical). First of all, Mary’s “pianto” takes a “human” form, a literal expression: First as a human being, seeing this most beautiful body, created from her own flesh, entirely torn and that hair, cherished by her with such care, having brought him torment, which, full of his precious blood, fell around his face; the closed eyes that gave him perpetual light; the mouth, as reward for such great and so much teaching, full of the bitterness of vinegar; the hands, which had blessed her as her Lord, and served her as a son, wounded; and his feet. And I believe limb by limb she mourned him, remembering how they had served him and how they had acted on her and our behalf on earth.44 43   “[L]a bruttezza della morte era non solo bella nel bellissimo volto, ma la fierezza se convertì in dolcezza grande, la oscurità in chiara luce [. . .] O quanto era desiderabile in quel volto quel che negli altri pare si debbia fugire.” 44  “Prima come humano, vedendo il bellissimo corpo formato della sua propria carne tutto lacerato et quei capelli, con tanto studio da lei conservati, esserli stati cagion de molestia, ché pieni del precioso sangue gli cadevano sul volto; serrati li occhi che li davan perpetuo lume, la bocca, per premio di tale et tanta dottrina, piena de la amaritudine del fiele; le man che la benedissero come di Signore e la serviron come figlio, piagate, e i piedi, et credo membro per membro, recordandosi come li haveva serviti, et quanto havevan essi operato per lei et per noi in terra li piagesse.”

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In listing the parts of Christ’s body that have been wounded and injured, Colonna evokes the tradition of the Madonna’s “pianto,” giving it a more personal interpretation. The list of Christ’s body parts occurs, for instance, in Enselmino’s work, where Mary, before the crucified Christ, cries and re-evokes his beauty which is now lost: non è quela la faca excelente che inspirò nela faca dell’homo spiracolo de vita inprimamente . . . non è quella la faca in cui dexira continuamente gli agnoli guardare? Mo’ pare abusione a chi la mira . . . non è qui ochi qui ch’eran lucenti più che no è il sol quand’è più chiarissimo? Omé, ch’io veco lor sì turbolenti . . . o fiol mio, non è quella la bocha da cui baxata brama esser la spoxa? . . . Dov’è, fiol mio dolce, tanto odore como era in quella bocca monda e bella che par mo’ piena di tanto fetore? . . . non è quella la bocha che parlava sul monte a Moisès a faca a faca quando desti la lege a qui che erava? . . . non è quelle le orechie, lasa omei che aldire solea li ancoli cantare? . . . o fiol mio, non è quelle le mane che destendeva el cielo como pelle e che fondò la tera e l’eque piane?45 45  “Is that not the lovely face which sparked in the face of man the first glimmer of life / is that not the face, now ripped apart, upon which angels forever gaze? To all who look upon it now it seems a crime / are these not the eyes so shining, that even the sun at its brighest is scarcely more so, but which are now so troubled / Oh, son of mine, is that not the mouth, by which the bride longs to be kissed? / Where, my sweet son, is the scent that was in that clean, beautiful mouth, and which now seems so full of the stench of death? / Is

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Unlike Enselmino, however, Colonna does not express the idea that the beauty of Christ has been lost. Although Christ’s body has undergone humiliation and death, its characteristics remain intact. Rather, Colonna emphasizes the bewilderment and distress of a mother who has witnessed the defilement of that body to whom she is so intimately connected, which was “formed from her own flesh,” and which she nurtured and raised. Thus, the first way in which Mary mourns Christ recalls the special relationship binding mother and son together. An injury to the son’s body is also an injury to the mother. Following this first list of the flagellated body parts, Colonna presents another list of the same parts, this time offering a more detached, allegorical reading of the scene: But then raised to a loftier thought, I believe that she was contemplating the sacred pierced head as the rich vessel in which all wisdom, divine and human, was gathered. The closed eyes in which were the sun of justice and mercy; the brow at whose command angels tremble and the elements obey; the wounded hands, which created the heavens, and thus the feet, which trod the stars; the closed lips, out of which breathed the fervor of the holy spirit.46 The third, “moral way” of mourning takes the form of a reflection on Christ’s virtues—charity, obedience, humility and patience, all mirrored in his facial expression—and embodied in his final words on the cross. These are, not coincidentally, the same words Ochino recalls and interprets in this sermon, which provides clear evidence of his reformist sympathies.47 Then she meditated upon, even saw depicted in the divine face, the vestiges of charity, obedience, humility, patience, and peace: saw first charity in its true seat, when he said: “Forgive them, for they know not what they that not the mouth which spoke, face to face with Moses on the mountain when you proclaimed the law to those present? / are those not the ears, alas, at whose behest the angels the used to sing? / Oh, my son, are those not the hands that stretched the sky as though it were mere skin, that built all the earth and the level plains?” Enselmino, Lamentatio, vv. 602, 524–32. See also Veronica Copello, “La tradizione laudistica in Vittoria Colonna”, Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà, 28 (2015): 261–308. 46  “Ma poi elevata e degna consideration, credo che rimirava la Reverenda testa perforata esser el riccho vaso ove tutta la sapientia divina et humana era raccolta, gli occhi serrati che eran el sol della Jiustitia et de la misericordia; el ciglio basso, al cui cenno treman gli Angeli, obediscon gli elementi; le man piagate, che formorno i Cieli, et così li piedi, che calcavan le stelle; la bocca chiusa, ove spirava l’ardor del spirito santo.” 47  Simoncelli, Evangelismo, 212.

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do”; patience in saying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Why do you make me sacrifice myself, when through love and patience I would prefer not to do it so soon, but endure it much longer? Obedience, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”; and peace, when he said, “Woman, behold thy son”; and humility, “It is finished.”48 As he dies on the cross, Christ reaffirms his human and divine qualities, performing an act that demonstrates his boundless love for humanity. The fourth and final “way” in which Mary’s “pianto” is expressed may be interpreted as anagogical, insofar as it concerns the divine significance of the body of Christ. Christ’s soul abandons his body, but leaves upon it an imprint (“impressione”) of its celestial graces, until the resurrection. The graces visible in Christ’s face are more easily recognizable to Mary than to anyone else.49 Here, Mary’s process of gaining knowledge reaches its climax, and we come full circle: the “pianto” started off as a visceral emotional reaction, and has now become an expression of the faith and power of Mary, who is able to perceive both the divine and the human aspects of her son’s nature, and is pained by the fact that this ability is not shared by others. This passage clearly exemplifies the vast distance dividing Mary, as she is described by Colonna, from other figures of the “Vergini addolorate.” Even as she enacts the “pianto,” Mary feels and comprehends the mystery of the resurrection, more so than others do. She is able to imagine Christ’s soul descending into the underworld, into Limbo, a soul still encased in its body, which can speak in order to open doors (Attollite portas principes vestras, “lift up your gates, O ye princes”), and yet whose physical mouth remains closed (“serrata”). Mary is also aware that Christ’s death will be a source of great joy for humanity: “She reflected that her weeping was the cause of joy to so many souls

48  “Poi considerava, anzi vedeva nel Divin volto depinto i vestigij della charità, della humiltà, della pacientia, et della pace; havessi visto la carità nel suo vero seggio al’hor che disse: Ignosce illis quia nesciunt quid faciunt; la pacientia in dir: Deus Meus Deus meus cur me dereliquisti?, cioè, perché me fai fornir el martyre che vorria per amor e pacientia, [come la Reverentia vostra disse] molto più longamente tolerarlo; la obedentia: in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum; et la pace quando disse: Mulier, ecce filius tuus; la humiltà: consumatum est.” 49  This is a clear illustration of the importance Colonna attributes to the intimate connection between the divine and human natures of Christ, a belief that “forms part of the common heritage, by about the 1540s, shared by the Valdesi, the reformist movement, the Lutheran current, as well as Zwinglianism and Calvinism” (Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 41–42).

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dearest to her, who had awaited so long that blessed day.”50 In Ochino’s work, the apparent contradiction between grief for the loss of her son, and gladness for the benefit of mankind, had been resolved by allowing Mary to feel the same happiness as others around her. Colonna, however, does something different, and resolves the contradiction by means of a synthesis. She recognizes Christ’s sacrifice as a cause for rejoicing, but without erasing the exquisitely human grief of a mother who witnesses the death of her beloved son; in this way, she allows grief and joy to coexist.51 Mary’s spiritual journey may be seen as the same journey undertaken by the Christian (and, indeed, by Colonna herself), culminating in the recognition of Christ’s great gift to mankind. Unlike traditional depictions of despairing Madonnas swooning at every step, the Vergine addolorata described by Colonna “was never free to think of giving way and grieving” during the Passion, so great was her “enormous anxiety of giving Him succour, the continuous beseeching of the Father to alleviate it,” in order that God might put an end to her pain.52 Only once Mary holds her dead son in her arms is she free to cry. “Like someone who, to escape death, grasps a sword that cuts his hand, so she feeling herself swoon, grasped Christ’s body, which sustained her, with his even greater wound.”53 As she embraced and kissed the body of her son, Colonna’s Virgin Mary “wanted everyone in the entire world to be able to see what she saw, so that they might enjoy such immense grace”54—the grace to suffer for such great love, to lay a hand upon the sacred body of Christ, the bringer of salvation and faith—and “would feel great compassion for those who could have been there, but were not.”55 Mary lists and rebukes all those followers of Christ who had benefited from his miracles and would have benefited from his death (Peter, Jacob, Matthew, Lazarus, the Samaritan, the centurion, Zacchaeus), but who were not present to see his dead body, and to suffer for his humanity. Here, 50  “Considerava ch’el pianto suo era cagion d’alegrezza a tante anime chiarissime a lei, quali sì longamente havevano expectato quel benedetto giorno.” 51  It is worth noting that Colonna expresses the same concept in one of her sonnets: “L’aspre Sue piaghe e ’l varïato aspetto / l’accresceva il tormento acerbo e fero, / ma la vittoria de l’eterno impero / portava a l’alma novo alto diletto.” See Bullock: Rime, S1: 108 1–4, 139. 52  “Non ebbe mai libera la consideration di sfogarse e dolerse”; “l’ansia excessiva del soccorrerlo, el continuo orare al Patre.” 53  “[F]aceva come colui che per campar de la morte si strenge con alcun ferro che si taglia la mano, cosi’ lei, sentendosi venir meno, se stringeva con quel corpo che la sostenne viva con più larga ferita.” 54  “[D]esiderava che tutto il mondo fosse a veder quello che lei vedeva, perché godessero di sì immensa grazia.” 55  “Gran pietà averria di quelli che potendo esservi non vi furno.”

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Colonna refers to the apocryphal tradition, according to which Mary sought out the apostles who had fled, and rebuked Peter for having denied Christ.56 Stepping into the Virgin’s shoes, and making her perspective her own, Colonna expresses a wish to have been present herself, together with the Virgin, at Christ’s Passion. At this point, the voices of Colonna and Mary merge into one, becoming all but indistinguishable. Traditionally, the task of invoking those who were “absent,” and who ought to have been present, had fallen to Mary; but here it is Colonna who voices her opinion, extending the category of nonattendees to encompass women who ought to have identified more deeply with her pain—the adulteress, the Samaritan—and praising, by contrast, those who did attend—Joseph, Nicodemus, and, above all, Mary Magdalene.57 She concludes by revealing her own point of view, so closely tied to that of Mary: “O how envious will I always be of those who were there and how much compassion to whoever was able to be there and was not.”58 As Brundin has observed, the Virgin depicted by Colonna is a model of female strength and independence, who takes upon herself the duty of keeping faith alive, and of offering an example to Christian women.59 But such a role inevitably exacts payment, and in the Virgin’s case this takes the form of unavoidable solitude: [She] alone kept faith alive in her holy breast, whence she alone carried out the duty of mercy, humility, and perfect charity, as well as the act of true gratitude. She alone morned her loss, the ingratitude of others, and the blindness of the Hebrews. She alone had to thank Joseph, satisfy

56  See Vangelo di Gamaliele, in Apocrifi del nuovo testamento, ed. Erbetta, 348; Copello, “La tradizione laudistica.” 57  Joseph and Nicodemo appear in Gv 19, 39–42. On the importance of the figure of Mary Magdalene in Colonna’s work, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 13–154 et passim. 58  “O quanta invidia havrò sempre a quelli che vi furno et quanta compassione a chi posseva esserce et non vi fu.” 59  “Colonna expresses a profound connection with the Madonna, recognising her potential for great strength and autonomy as well as her central role as the primary example of the way through faith to Christ”: Brundin, Vittoria Colonna, 145. This idea is confirmed elsewhere in Colonna’s writings, including in the manuscript she gave to Marguerite de Navarre, and the three letters written to her cousin Costanza D’Avalos, which mention the Virgin Mary or other women from the Holy Scriptures as models of strong femininity. See Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61–81.

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John, comfort the Magdalen, sustain herself through obeying him, whom she would have followed with such joy had she been allowed.60 Were it granted her, the Virgin would die together with her son, but since it is not, she humbly accepts that she must remain alive in order to fulfil her duty. Mary’s desire to die with Christ is present throughout the tradition of the Planctus, but it is, and remains, the affirmation of a mother who feels desperation for the loss of her son. Colonna portrays a different Marian figure, who humbly accepts her task of remaining human, renouncing her own “allegrezza” while also retaining her power, and thanking the Holy Spirit who “made her delight in this suffering.”61 From this perspective, Colonna’s ideas appear to be perfectly aligned with those of Ochino. Colonna represents a Madonna who, with “deep humility,” effectively replaces her son in the world. Like the king who goes in search of a gentleman and finds only his servant (hierarchically inferior to his employer, but able to replace the latter temporarily in order to pay homage to the king), so Mary, in the absence of Jesus’s soul, now in Limbo, takes on the role of Christ on earth: [She] saw that the great task of undertaking so large a debt belonged to her alone. Therefore she would have wanted to melt away, be consumed, even immolate herself in the fire of love, and in her tears of compassion to remove ingratitude from the world and herself, and to render God the humility and worship that were due to him.62 The role of coredeemer thus belongs not to a Madonna who has been assumed into heaven, but rather to a Madonna who remains on earth, a representative of her son’s humanity, and of his redeeming sacrifice. Colonna insists upon the Virgin’s “solitude,” magnifying this and taking it beyond the solitude with which Mary was traditionally associated, by virtue of her status as a virgin and a mother, an exceptional and inimitable example. The Madonna is physically 60  “Sola sostenne viva la fede nel sacro petto per donde sola faceva l’officio della pietà, de la humiltà e de la charità perfetta et l’atto della gratitudin vera, essa sola se doleva del suo danno, de la ingratitudine de li altri et de la cecità de li hebrei, essa sola haveva da ringratiar Josef, da satisfar Giovanni, da confortar Madalena, da sostener se stessa per obedir colui che con tanta alegrezza avria seguito se li fusse stato concesso.” 61  “[L]a faceva dilettar in questa pena.” 62  “Li pareva che a lei sola appartenesse el grand’offitio de supplire a tanto debito, onde havria voluto liquefarsi, consumarvisi, anzi, farsi ultima nel fuoco de l’amore et ne le lacrime della compassione per togliere al mondo e a se stessa l’ingratitudine, et rendere a Dio lo ossequio et il colto che li convenia.”

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“sola” as she holds Christ’s body in her arms; she suffers alone; she is the only one who can, and must, accept the task of keeping faith alive. Perhaps Colonna feels equally alone, as she defends her own status as a woman, attributing a renewed importance to the Virgin. But Mary’s position is neither pacific nor painless, and Colonna appears to be well aware of this. The Madonna is portrayed amidst all her many fears and conflicting feelings: All those virtues, which, like the soul’s food, could feed her, were now flavored with sorrow’s poison, so that rather than nourishing her, they consumed her. Love, humility, patience, obedience, all gave her sorrow. The more she loved, the more she sorrowed, knowing the goodness of her son. The humbler she was, the more she punished herself, seeing God’s greatness so humiliated. The more forbearing she wished to be, the more distressed she became, that body seeming to her to symbolize Christ’s unconquerable endurance. The more she wished to obey, the more she remembered that he had been obedient until death, so that those virtues that had helped her in the past now wounded her. Her shield had wounded her; the cure was further suffering. Only faith kept her in life, and she kept faith alive by reinvesting the whole world with it.63 Only faith, then, can save her and resolve her doubts and her pain, that “living faith” (“fede viva”), which was advocated by the spirituali, and which, according to Colonna, would have been extinguished were it not for Mary’s act of faith. Far from dispensing grace and salvation, the Madonna is therefore, in Colonna’s eyes, the physical, inimitable example of living faith.

63  “Tutte quelle virtù che sono como cibi de l’animo la solevano pascere erano al’hor conditi dal velen del dolore, in modo che in cambio de nutrir la consumavano, lo amore, l’humanità, la pacientia, la obedientia, tutte le daven pena, quanto più amava più si doleva, cognosendo la bontà del figliuolo, quanto più si humiliava, tanto più si affliggeva vedendosi sì humiliata la grandezza de Dio; quanto più voleva haver pacientia, più se inquietava representandoli quel capo la invitta pacientia de Christo; quanto più voleva obedir, tanto più se recordava che lui era stato obediente insino a la morte, siché quelle virtù che li solevan giuvare in questo caso lo offendevano, lo scudo gli era ferita, el remedio danno, solo la fede la sostenne in vita et lei sostenne viva la fede per reinvestirne tutto il mondo.”

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The Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria

In comparison to the Pianto, the Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria is generally considered by critics to be less enlightening with regard to Vittoria Colonna’s evangelism. Aside from their Marian theme, the two works appear to have little in common, and the Orazione has often been neglected by scholars. The text was first published by Simoncelli, and later again by Jung-Inglessis, although neither of these versions were accompanied by any critical commentary. Campi, meanwhile, sees the text as evidence of the minor role of the Madonna, but otherwise devoid of significant literary or theological implications.64 Brundin is the only critic who highlights the importance of the Orazione in the context of Vittoria Colonna’s “mariology,” and for understanding the role that Colonna attributes to the Virgin.65 In fact, numerous points of connection exist between the Orazione and the Pianto. The moment when Christ is deposed from the cross and taken into his mother’s arms marks the endpoint of an extraordinary journey, which originally began with the annunciation by the angel Gabriel, who addressed the Virgin Mary with the words, “Ave Maria.”66 The connection between the two moments was recognized by both Enselmino and Nicolò Cicerchia, even if they defined it in different ways. Both of them represent Mary as so overwhelmed by grief that she is unable to utter the “Ave Maria” as she stands before her dead son on the cross. Enselmino attributes to the Virgin the following words: Tu me dicesti imprimamente “Ave Gracia plena’ e ca questo te niego, per ch’io non ho d’alguna gracia chiave Tu mi dicesti “Lo Signor sia tiego” Et io l’ho perso e piango qui soleta Tu mi dicesti ch’io era benedeta Fra l’altre done, et ancuoy me reputo Sopra tute le done maledeta Tu me dicesti “Benedeto il fruto Del ventre to’, et anchuo’ in questo corno Da molti maledire io l’ho veduto.67 64  Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna, 49. 65  See Brundin’s “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary”, and her Vittoria Colonna, 133–54. 66  Lk. 1:28. 67  “At first you said to me, ‘Ave, Full of grace,’ and this was not true, for I hold not the key to grace. You said to me, ‘The Lord be with you,’ and I lost him and now cry here, alone. You

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Cicerchia writes something to a similar effect, in the space of several octaves: O dolce mio figliuolo è questo l’Ave Che mi facesti dir da Gabriello Che mi fu tanto allor dolce e soave? Omè quanto mi torna in gran flagello? Figliuolo, io sento pena tanto grave L’anima passa un pungente coltello Tu mi facesti dir Ave Maria: Or son dolente più ch’altra che sia. Dir mi facesti che piena di grazia Io era, ed or son tanto dolorosa! O figliuol mio, questa gente ti strazia O figliuol mio, quanto son tenebrosa O figliuol mio, di toccarti mi sazia Prima ch’io muoia cotanto penosa. Poi ch’io mi veggio in tanta doglia affissa, Figliuol, fa ch’io sia teco crucifissa. . . . Ancor mi disse ch’ero benedetta Infra le donne più che mai nessuna. Ora mi veggio di dolor costretta. Figliuol, perdendo te fatta son bruna. O figliuol, s’io da te sarò negletta, Per me non c’è, figliuol, persona alcuna. De’ discepoli tuoi c’è sol Giovanni: E non m’ha abbandonata in tanti affanni.68

said to me that I was blessed among women, and yet I believe, there is no other woman so cursed as myself. You said to me, ‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, and still in this I have known so many curses.’ ” Enselmino, Lamentatio, vv. 1124–35, 560–61. 68  “Oh my sweet son, is this the Ave you had Gabriel speak to me, that was to me then so sweet and pleasant, and which now wounds me in equal measure? My son, I feel such sorrow, my soul is pierced with a knife so sharYou had me speak the Ave Maria: now I grieve more than any other. You had him tell me I was full of grace; indeed I was, as much as I am now filled with sorrow! Oh, my son, these people torture you, oh, my son, how it pains me, oh, my son, let me touch your body before this sorrow kills me; since I see myself stuck in such grief, my son, let me be crucified with you. . . . Still he told me I was blessed among women, more so than any other. Now I see myself shackled by grief. Oh, my son, losing you has cast me into gloom. Oh, my son, if I should be deserted by you, for me no-one

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Both authors attribute to the Virgin human and irrational emotions, so strong that she almost denies her own existence and questions the word of God. Colonna’s Orazione was published together with the Pianto, where she had acknowledged the legitimacy of a mother’s grief for the death of her son, and had given a new face to Mary’s humanity. By doing this, Colonna seems to reassert the theological significance of the “Ave Maria,” as a prayer that is able to define the Virgin’s role within Christianity. Colonna exalts Mary’s constant faith, humility, and obedience, portraying her as a woman who is active and aware of the significance of events taking place around her. Colonna’s Virgin is afflicted by grief, but accepts God’s will, just as she previously accepted Gabriel’s proposal, and even learns to feel gladness for this. In her commentary on the first verse—“Ave Maria”—Colonna recalls the words spoken by Gabriel at the moment of the Annunciation (Lk. 1:28), underlining the marked contrast between the characteristics of the angel Gabriel and herself, faithful yet sinful. Only if she were to become an angel would she have the right to greet the Virgin—unless, that is, the Virgin is already prepared to receive her prayer, with the same humility she previously showed toward Gabriel. Then you humbled yourself before the eternal Father, divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit; now you humble yourself before a miserable sinner. Then you saved all humankind; now you will save a single, lowly creature.69 How, though, can Mary offer Colonna salvation? Will she do this by virtue of her role as intercessor and co-redeemer, as in the Catholic tradition, or by offering a strong model of Christian humility? In order to obtain salvation, what precisely is Colonna asking of the Madonna? Is she requesting intercession, or a model of faith? Here, the references to reformist ideas seem to emerge from between the lines. Colonna does not give a clear answer, but her exaltation of humility as the only means of reaching heaven (“the more I am bold and require that you show your humility, the more my hell makes your heaven grow”)70 evokes the Lutheran notion that the chief virtue of the Virgin—and, exists at all. Of your disciplies only John remains, and he has not abandoned me amidst such heartache.” Cicerchia, La Passione, octaves 149–53. 69  “Alhor te humiliasti al padre eterno, alla Sapientia divina et al Spirito Santo, et hora te humilij ad una misera peccatrice. Alhor salvasti la generatione humana, hora salvarai una sol vil creatura.” 70  “quanto più col ardir mio son cagion farti usar la tua humiltà, più col mio inferno cresco il tuo paradiso.”

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indeed, of every Christian—is humility, and that this is the reason for which Mary must be admired. It is possible that Colonna had indeed read or heard something about Lutheran interpretations of the “Ave Maria”: Luther’s ideas were widely present among the evangelical circles in which Colonna moved.71 Still allowing for some form of Marian devotion in the reformed Church, Luther claimed, in his commentary on the “Ave Maria,” that: There are two things that we may do (when reciting the Ave Maria). First, we may say the Ave Maria, as if it were a meditation, in which we recall the grace that God granted Mary. Second, (we may make of it) a wish as well: a wish that she may earn recognition and consideration on the basis of all this (that is, as one who had received God’s blessing).72 In her meditation Colonna expresses similar ideas, although she does continue to invest the Virgin with a role in the process of salvation, and sticks to a form of prayer (advised against by Luther) that addresses itself directly to Mary. Chosen by God, Mary is full of grace which she “diffuses constantly” (“sempre la diffonde”). Mary’s grace is made up of “all the powers and virtues of the soul, full of God in every way, the desire for love, memory and divine blessings, the intellect of light, the mind of holy thoughts.”73 But it is really in the commentary on the “Dominus Tecum” that the Orazione appears most similar to the Pianto. Colonna sees the Virgin as being intimately connected to her son, since it was she who bore him, first in her womb and later in her arms, after his deposition from the cross. The two moments are linked: Christ in his human form belongs to Mary, the two of them are inextricably bound together in life and in death. This a point that Colonna emphasizes: “He was yours, he dwelt within your womb, your mind and your arms; with your spirit and your body your served him, and you continue to serve him in life and in death.”74 Still more surprising is Colonna’s request to the Virgin to “lend” Christ to her:

71  See Gigliola Fragnito, “Vittoria Colonna e il dissenso religioso,” in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 97–105; and Massimo Firpo, “Vittoria Colonna, Giovanni Morone e ‘gli spirituali,’ ” in Inquisizione Romana e Controriforma. Studi sul cardinal Morone e il suo processo d’Eresia (Bologna, 1992), 119–75, here 130. 72  Comunità di Bose, ed., Maria, 792. 73  “Tutte le potentie et virtù dell’anima piene di Dio in tutti i modi, la voluntà de amor, la memoria de’ divini benefitij, l’inteletto de’ lume, la mente de’ santi pensieri.” 74  “Tuo fu, e con teco nel ventre, nella mente e nelle braccia; con lo spirito e col corpo lo servisti e et servi continuo ne la vita e nela morte.”

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I ask you to lend me you Child, not when he is happy and full of your sacred milk, but when he is thirsty from bitterness and bile [. . .] I dare not call him after his raising of the Archisynagogue’s daughter, or of the widow, or when he rejoiced in the resurrection of Lazarus; instead, I call him as he is about to be buried. Give him to me, my Lady, since you must give him to the grave [. . .] give him to me thus, dead, and he will immediately live again for me, his holy wounds will heal my own in a second; and this I promise you, that he will return, resurrected in glory, on the third day; for me, it is enough to embrace him in death.75 Colonna’s desire to embrace the dead Christ, just as Mary had done, once again reveals her aspiration to emulate the Virgin. In the Pianto, the Virgin “grasped Christ’s body, which sustained her with its even greater wound” (“se stringeva con quel corpo che la sostenne viva con più larga ferita”). Similarly, in the Orazione, Colonna seeks to save herself, and to “return to life” (“tornare viva”) by embracing Christ. Here, again, Colonna projects her own identity onto the figure of the Madonna, just as she does in the final part of the Orazione, where she prays to the Virgin: “Grant me that, beneath the mantle of your humility, I might acquire grace and live in Christ’s heart.”76 Colonna also asks Mary: Pray for me, who every day am consumed with your love, renewed by your grace; pray for me, who hour by hour am melted in the fire of charity, enlightened by the truth, suffocated by the sweetness of divine goodness.77 In the Pianto, it was the Virgin herself who, as she embraced Christ, “would have wanted to melt away, be consumed, even immolate herself in the fire of love” (“voluto liquefarsi, consumarvisi, anzi, farsi ultima nel fuoco de l’amore”). Here Colonna even goes so far as to ask Mary that she might remain “always 75  “Non ti prego che mel presti Bambino lieto e satio del tuo sacro latte, ma essetato con l’amaritudine del fele [. . .] non ardisco chiamarlo quando suscitò la figliola dell’Arcisinagoga, o della vedua, o quando se allegrò che era exaudito nella resurrettione di Lazaro, ma nel tempo che ponesti lui ne la sepoltura. Dammelo Signora mia, poiché sei costretta a darlo al sepolcro [. . .] dammelo così morto, me tornerà subito viva, le sue sante piaghe saneranno le mie in un momento; io te prometto che te tornerà il terzo di’ resuscitato, glorioso; a me basta abbracciarlo morto.” 76  “Concedimi che sotto il manto della tua humiltà acquisti la gratia et viva nel cor de Christo.” 77  “Ora per me ché ogni dì mi consumi per amor e mi rinnovi per gratia, ora per me che ogni ora mi liquefaccia per foco de charità, mi risolva per lume de intelligentia, et mi suffoca per dolcezza della divina bontà.”

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with you and with your sweet son, now, in the hour of death, and for all eternity” (“sempre teco et col tuo dolce figliolo adesso, nel’hora della morte et in eterno”). Colonna’s request is highly original, and seems to form an extension of the mirroring effects she creates between herself, Mary and Christ, a feature of both the Pianto and the Orazione. Even when she comments on the last verse, “pray for me, a sinner” (“ora pro me peccatrice”), Colonna seems to underline her gender (the equivalent in Catholic prayer would be the “ora pro nobis peccatoribus”). The Madonna’s intercession in the process of salvation is implicitly affirmed, but without altering the centrality of Christ in the process of redemption. All that Mary can “give” is the body of Christ, which represents her faith in the salvation that Christ has given humanity. Colonna does not ask the Virgin to interecede for her salvation; however, she does ask her to save her, by helping her to follow her example, to have the same faith and the same fervour, so that she too might overcome her contradictions in the name of faith, just as Mary did in the moment of the Pietà. For Colonna, the role of Mary, in her capacity as earthly mother of Christ, is to have “freed the world from eternal damnation” (“liberato il mondo dalla perpetua maledictione”), and to have offered a model of living faith for all Christians. The fact that a role of such magnitude is delegated to a woman—moreover, a woman with fundamentally human characteristics— is important, because it invests the female sex with a new and rare kind of power. In this sense, the Orazione fits perfectly with the Pianto, and may be seen as its complement. The fact that the works always appeared side by side in sixteenth-century editions can be taken as a sign that publishers recognized the connection.

Editorial Fortune

Although there is no definitive proof that the Pianto and the Orazione were in circulation before 1556, it can be safely assumed that they had previously circulated in manuscript form, being passed between those who frequented the same social circles as Colonna. The fact that the works appeared in five printed editions is certainly indicative of the editorial success they enjoyed. In 1568, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, who had already printed the Pianto (along with various other works) in 1562 and 1563, expressed a desire to reprint the work once again. Giolito’s idea was to publish the Pianto together with a Discorso del R. Padre Fra Nicolò Aurifico Senese carmelitano (the latter, described by Simoncelli as “anti-Ochinian,” had originally been published in 1567), with the aim of proving to various authorities “how fitting, indeed, how necessary it is to

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mourn, meditating upon the most bitter Passion of our Savior Jesus Christ.” The idea never came to fruition, however, because, as explained in Giolito’s own epilogue to the Discorso, it was claimed that there existed “just impediments” (“giusti impedimenti”) to the reprinting of the work. The exact nature of these impediments is not specified, but it is possible that they arose in connection with warnings issued by the Inquisition.78 In his dedication to Raffaella Pisana, “abbess of the Venetian monastery of St Luigi,” Aurifico defines the Pianto as a work that “truly understood, in the same terms as the Catholic Church, that it was not only permissible, but positively necessary to show mourning for this most bitter and cruel passion. The concealment of this mourning is a sign that the grief is less keenly felt, for it is true that inner feelings are manifested in outward actions.”79 An interpretation of this kind, which only partially reflects the viewpoint of Colonna, was certainly more in keeping with post-Tridentine culture. It also serves as a reminder of Giolito’s failed attempt to relaunch a work by Colonna, whose religious beliefs had aroused suspicion; after all, the Pianto had previously been published alongside other texts which were transparently connected with the Evangelist movement. If the Pianto was to be reprinted, it would need to be clad in a different guise, and adapted to a religious context which, in the space of a few short years, had undergone some fairly drastic changes. An attempt to “normalize” and “Catholicize” Colonna’s text—which, by its very nature, bordered on the unorthodox—and to republish it, is further indicated by the fact that the Pianto featured among the list of suggested readings for nuns in Bonaventura Gonzaga da Reggio’s Alcuni avvertimenti nella vita monacale, published by Giolito himself in 1568.80 There are, 78   Discorso del R. Padre Fra Nicolò Aurifico Senese carmelitano. Nel quale si mostra con ragioni et authorità sì delle Scritture Sacre, sì anco di molti Dottori Santi Greci e Latini, quanto sia conveniente anzi necessario piangere, meditando l’acerbissima Passione del Salvator nostro Giesù Christo. Vi si mostra ancora qual sia il vero modo di contemplar piamente tanto misterio (Venice, 1567). See also Jung-Inglessis, Pianto, 132 and Simoncelli, Evangelismo. 79  “[I]ntese veramente secondo il senso della Chiesa Cattolica che non solamente è lecito, ma necessario piangere anco esteriormente questa acerbisima et crudelissima passione, e che non mostra gustarla col cuore chi non la piange al di fuori, essendo vero che le opere esteriori sono testimoni dell’affetto interiore.” See Simoncelli, Evangelismo, 216. 80  See Bonaventura Gonzaga da Reggio, Alcuni avvertimenti nella vita monacale, utili e necessari a ciascheduna vergine di Christo (Venice, 1568): “Come base, & fondamento del restante sarà le Pistole, & i Vangelij usciti poco fa dalle stampe del signor Giolito, & annotati così utilmente dal R.Remigio. Leggete le prediche del vescovo di Bitonto [Cornelio Musso], perché in esse avrete quanto varrà a disporvi alla salute, e a procacciarvela. Specchiate la vita vostra nel libro c’ha titolo Specchio di Croce. Confrontate la vita vostra co ’l libro delle vite dei Santi. Habbiate le vite di quelle gloriose Vergini Geltruda & Caterina da

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however, no further references to the Pianto until 1612, when it was reprinted in Naples by Lazzaro Scorriggio (this time unaccompanied by the Orazione), as part of a miscellaneous collection.81 In 1590, the Lucchese poet Chiara Matraini (1515–1604), who was famous for her Petrarchism and a great admirer of Colonna, published a Breve discorso sulla Vita della beata Vergine Maria.82 Although the latter contains no direct references to the Pianto, it does present certain features suggesting that Matraini had read this illicit text, and had been inspired by Colonna’s representation of the Virgin.83 This seems more plausible when one considers that Matraini herself may well have had some involvement with heterodox ideas, and possibly also nurtured reformist sympathies. In fact, of all Mary’s many virtues, Matraini reserves particular praise for her humble attitude before God, at a time when the figure of Mary was increasingly coming to be valued as a model of chaste, obedient womanhood, subservient to God and mankind alike.84 From this point on, and for some centuries, the religious writings of Vittoria Colonna lay gathering dust on library shelves, before finally resurfacing in recent years.

Siena. Imparate di conoscere le qualità e quantità de’ peccati da’ miei Ragionamenti sopra i Sette Salmi. Drizzate le attioni vostre co ’l Corso del Cristiano. Contemplate con Tullio Crispoldo, con i discorsi spirituali sopra i sette salmi, co ’l pianto della Marchesa di Pescara nella Passione di Gesù Signor nostro. Essercitatevi nel patire e nell’andare a Christo co ’l trattato del Cacciaguerra; accompagnate Cristo alla croce, co ’l Mondognetto, & finalmente consolatevi co’l fiore di consolatione” (“Della lettione,” 333–34). 81  See Jung-Inglessis, Pianto, 120. 82  Giovanna Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. by Letizia Panizza, (Oxford, 2000), 478–97 (484). 83  Cf. Eleonora Carinci, Lives of the Virgin Mary by Women in Post Tridentine Italy, Phd Thesis (University of Cambridge, 2009), 58–113; Daniela Marcheschi, Chiara Matraini. Poetessa lucchese e la letteratura delle donne nei nuovi fermenti religiosi del ’500 (Lucca, 2008). 84  Between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the literary genre of the Life of the Virgin became increasingly popular. Whilst works in this genre did not diminish Mary’s divinity, they almost invariably presented her as the epitome of female chastity, obedience and submission, a model that could be adopted by daughters, wives, mothers, widows and nuns. See Carinci, Lives of the Virgin Mary.

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Conclusion Despite adopting the name, and sometimes the imagery associated with a well-established genre, the Pianto is far removed from the long tradition of the Planctus Mariae; and, similarly, the Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria reads more like a commentary than a prayer. Reinterpreting the traditional and literary images of the Maria Addolorata, Colonna traces an inner journey toward faith: a journey of which she herself is the protagonist, but which also clarifies the role played by Mary in Christian doctrine. In so doing, Colonna makes her contribution to an ongoing debate, as she reasserts humanity’s debt of gratitude to the Virgin and her importance for all Christians. Colonna’s perspective is perfectly aligned with the contemporary Evangelical agenda, which was to reconcile the reformist doctrine of sola fide with the existing beliefs of the Catholic Church. To label the Pianto (or, indeed, its author) as either “Catholic” or “reformist” might, therefore, be misleading. There is no doubt that Colonna shared many of the same ideas as those who, shortly afterwards, would go on to embrace a reformed version of Christianity; but all the same, she and her friends inevitably interpreted these new beliefs in the light of their traditional Catholic faith, trying to find a compromise between the two. Starting from the Christocentric vision proposed by Evangelism, which she fully endorses, Colonna accords a heightened attention to the figure of the Virgin, whose viewpoint is adopted as the privileged lens through which to see Christ’s redemptive power. That the perspective adopted here is that of a woman—and not just any woman—is a highly significant fact, the importance of which can scarcely be overstated. Through her writing, Colonna seemingly attempts to carve out a new space for Mary, still accommodating her within the Evangelist set of beliefs. She incorporates certain aspects of the traditional Marian cult, seeking all the while to demonstrate their compatibility with the reformist ideas embraced by the spirituali. The Virgin Mary described by Colonna is neither the Vergine Addolorata of popular tradition, passive and crushed beneath the weight of her grief, nor the Madonna Assunta. Neither is she simply the mother of God, as described by Luther: that is, a woman who deserves praise, but who is entirely subject, like every other Christian, to divine power. Colonna’s Virgin retains her humanity, with all the emotions and contradictions this brings, and yet, at the same time, her figure and role are assimilated to those of Christ on earth. With her humility and her acceptance of her earthly role, she holds and dispenses faith, thereby contributing to the process of salvation. Although it is not given to Mary to grant grace, since God alone can do this, it is possible to pray to her, in the hope that one might be granted her same strength, her constancy in

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faith and her love for Christ. By proclaiming her wish to be like Mary, Colonna commits a striking act of self-affirmation, and also offers other women the possibility of following her example. In the course of the Pianto and the Orazione, the first-person meditator, Colonna, and the figure of the Virgin become intertwined. They present a series of shared characteristics, which encourage us to perceive the Virgin as a sort of alter ego for the author. The Virgin possesses all the traits that the author claims or aspires to possess, both in her religious prose and in her poetic production: she suffers the loss of a love, and traverses the grieving process through her faith; she wishes to die, to free herself from her own body in order to follow the object of her love, but this wish is denied her. Mary’s spiritual journey is thus reminiscent of the personal journey already undertaken by Colonna in her poetry. Among the typical characteristics of lyric poetry, one may identify particular lexical elements (“tied by so many chains in the love of her son”); metaphors of feeding, which abound in Colonna’s poetry, and also appear in the Pianto (“All those virtues, which, like the soul’s food, could feed her, were now flavored with sorrow’s poison, so that rather than nourishing her, they consumed her”); the Petrarchan image of the body as a prison which is almost erased, and which the Virgin, too, seems to experience: “the spirit drifted away with Christ’s soul, and her soul remained to honor the Divinity and to weep for his dead body.” For Colonna and the Virgin alike, the soul remains imprisoned within a body. And this body is not only human; it is, significantly, also female.85

85  On the significance of the body in Colonna’s work, see Sapegno, “ ‘Sterili i corpi fur, l’alme feconde.’ ”

Part 5 Vittoria Colonna as Literary Model and Authority Figure

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Chapter 12

The Lyric Voices of Vittoria Colonna and the Women of the Giolito Anthologies, 1545–1559* Diana Robin Between 1545 and 1560, the prominent Venetian publisher Gabriele Giolito and several associated printers in Venice, Bologna, and Lucca published a series of fifteen poetry anthologies in which the works of more than fifty women and well over three-hundred men appeared together for the first time. Poetry anthologies were phenomena spawned by the commercial success of such presses as Giolito, Sessa, Giaccarello, and Busdraghi: by mid-century, collections of verse were produced in print runs of 1,000 copies.1 The printed anthologies of poetry composed by hundreds of authors offered a double benefit within a single volume: contemporary writers, among whom were an unprecedented number of women, had the opportunity to reach a wider public than ever before with the circulation of their manuscripts by hand; at the same time, the public quickly came in contact with new literary works, tastes, themes, and issues. This chapter focuses on the reception of the poems of Vittoria Colonna and nine of her female contemporaries who were anthologized by Giolito and his associates. The literary careers of these women were differently impacted by their publication in the anthologies. Both Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara were already well known before their appearance in the Giolito Rime diverse. Both women had been previously published by Pietro Bembo in the second edition of his Rime (1535),2 and both had been acclaimed as important poets in Ariosto’s Orlando furiouso. Colonna and Gambara were also the only women writers whose works were cited in Fabrizio Luna’s Vocabulario di

* I want to thank Paul F. Gehl and Elissa Weaver for their invaluable suggestions and corrections and for their incomparable knowledge of sixteenth-century writers, their presses, and their issues. Many thanks go also to the Special Collections librarians at the Newberry Library without whose daily assistance I could not have written this chapter. 1  Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999), 21; in Venice, Aldo Manuzio produced a print run of 3,000 copies for an edition of three Latin poets. 2  Delle Rime di M. Pietro Bembo (Venice, 1535).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi ��.��63/9789004322332_014

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cinquemila vocabuli toschi,3 where three of Colonna’s sonnets and a long poem in ottava rima of Gambara’s were presented as exempla.4 Moreover, by 1545, the year the first volume of the Giolito anthologies came out, twelve solo editions of Colonna’s Rime had already been published and were circulating widely. So Colonna’s and Gambara’s publication in the first volume of the Giolito anthologies brought prestige to the volume editor, the project, and the publisher. For some women, Gaspara Stampa and Chiara Matraini among them, publication in the anthologies served as an entry to the literary world. For them, publication in the Giolito series preceded their débuts in solo-authored volumes under their own names. For still others—namely, Tullia d’Aragona, Laura Terracina, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Colonna herself—publication in volumes of their own preceded their appearance in the anthologies and had the effect of lending legitimacy and authority to the anthologies. Other wellknown women poets did not succeed in publishing a volume of their own work during their lifetimes—and some of these were prolific as in the case of Veronica Gambara and Virginia Salvi; others left only a small oeuvre as in the case of Isabella di Morra and Laudomia Forteguerri, though they gained celebrity through their repeat performances in the anthologies of the period.

The Venetian Poetry Anthologies and the Inquisition: A Climate of Repression, 1549–1559

In 1542, Pope Paul III inaugurated the Roman Inquisition with the bull Licet ab initio in an attempt to confront heresy within the ranks of the clergy as well as the laity. In 1545, he convoked the Council of Trent to address the growing pressure for doctrinal reform coming from inside and outside the Church. The repercussions of the Inquisition would be dire for writers and intellectuals and also for the publishing industry. On 7 May 1549, Valgrisi, the publisher of two editions of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime Spirituali in Venice (1546, 1548), was ordered by the Council of Ten in Venice to produce a Catalogue of Prohibited

3  Fabrizio Luna, Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi non meno oscuri che necessari (Naples, 1536). 4  B ullock: Rime, 280–81. Luna published Colonna’s poems numbered A2: 1; A2: 13; and E: 1; Veronica Gambara, Le Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Florence, 1995); and Gambara’s twenty-seven stanza work, Quando miro la terra, ornata e bella.

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Books.5 The 1549 Catalogo criminalized the works of the prominent contemporary theologians Juan de Valdés, Bernardino Ochino, and Pier Paolo Vergerio, men whom Colonna had known, admired, and followed since the 1530s. Also banned in the 1549 Index were such standard works in the humanist curriculum as Dante’s De Monarchia, Valla’s De Libero Arbitrio, and Marsilio of Padua’s De Defensor pacis. For the next ten years, the publishers and book guildsmen in Venice and other cities fought back against a succession of Indexes of authors and book titles promulgated by the Holy Office in Rome, culminating in Pope Paul IV’s 1559 Catalogo, which banned the publication and sale of 550 authors, among whom were Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Poggio Bracciolini, Pietro Aretino, Francesco Berni, Ortensio Lando, Bernardino Tomitano, and even Giovanni della Casa, who had authored the 1549 Catalogo and was a friend of Colonna.6 In this climate of repression and fear, Giolito and other important presses were able to publish hundreds of modern poets (some of whom were officially banned) in anthologies under such titles as Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi autori. I turn now to the principal focus of this chapter, the production in the socalled Giolito anthologies,7 certainly the most important of the ensembles of contemporary poets published in the second half of the sixteenth century, of the personae of Vittoria Colonna and nine of her contemporaries. An analysis of the placement and thematics of Colonna’s Rime in contrast to those of other female poets in the Giolito anthologies provides a key to the reception of her poetic corpus and her emerging literary persona.8

5  Catalogo di diversi opere, compositioni, et libri, li quali come heretici, sospetti, impii e scandolosi si dichiarono damnati, e prohibiti in questa inclita città di Vinegia (Venice, 1549); Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1603 (Princeton, 1977), 85–89. 6  Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 116; Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago, 2007), 58, 105. 7  Salvatore Bongi, ed., Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato, 2 vols. (Rome, 1890, 1895) treated these books as a suite of texts that must be regarded as a group despite the fact that some of the volumes in the suite were produced by other printers. 8  Giovanna Rabitti, “Vittoria Colonna as a Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford, 2000), 478–97; Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), 80–120; Julia L. Hairston, ed. and trans., The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others: A Bilingual Edition (Toronto, 2014), 48–52; Rinaldina Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT, 1994), xvi–xxxi.

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The Women of Book 1 of the Anthologies: Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Laura Terracina, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Francesca Baffa

In each of the three editions of Book 1 of the Giolito poetry anthologies (1545, 1546, 1549) edited by Lodovico Domenichi, the poems of three to five women and eighty to eighty-nine men were included. These inaugural editions showcased four of Colonna’s sonnets, two of them religious; ten of Gambara’s poems on a variety of themes; two love sonnets by the singer Francesca Baffa; a long encomium by Laura Terracina dedicated to Domenichi; and a single sonnet by Laudomia Forteguerri. These works forecast a wide range of tones for women’s voices in the series. In the first edition of Book 1 of the series, Colonna’s contributions included two elegies for the dead.9 The first of these sonnets laments the death of her cousin and beloved friend Cardinal Pompeo Colonna (d. 1532). A poet himself, Pompeo had written a treatise in defense of women in honor of Vittoria who attended his funeral and circulated this sonnet after his death: Tanti lumi, che già questa fosca ombra del mondo a noi rendean sì pura e chiara, ha spenti l’empia Morte, ingorda e avara, ch’i più cari tesor più presto sgombra. Or fra’ beati spirti, i quali ingombra de la vista del Sol gioia alta e rara, ha posto il buon Pompeo, per cui s’impara come i bassi pensieri un cor disgombra. Gl’altri, ch’ornar questa colonna salda, dimostrar quant’onor sperar potea vero valor fra le fatiche gravi; Costui, con l’alma sempre al ben far calda, vinse il mondo e se stesso; a lui devea darsi il governo de le sante chiavi.10 9 Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 122–26. 10  E: 8: “So many lights, which make this gloomy shade / of the world so pure and clear to us, / cruel death has extinguished, greedy and mean, / for the dearest treasures are sooner lost. / Now among blessed spirits, who are filled / with high and rare joy at the sight of the Sun, / death has placed good Pompeo, to teach us / how low thoughts clutter the heart. / The others, to decorate this firm column [Colonna], / can demonstrate how much honour

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The two other poems by Colonna that appeared in the first book of the Giolito anthology series suggest that she was anything but intimidated by Pope Paul III’s inauguration of the Inquisition in 1542. Both poems bear the mark of the reform doctrines she shared with her mentors Juan de Valdés, Bernardino Ochino, and Cardinal Reginald Pole who taught that the Church could not be the intermediary between the Christian and God and that only by faith could the grace of God be attained, not by works. In Colonna’s sonnet, the Church is portrayed as a boat burdened by its cargo, “a net clogged with seaweed and mud.” Veggio d’alga e di fango omai si carca, Pietro, la rete tua, che se qualche onda di fuor l’assale, o intorno la circonda, potria spezzarsi, e a rischio andar la barca, La qual non come suol, leggiera e scarca, sovra ’l turbato mar corre a seconda, ma in poppa e ’n prora, a l’una e l’altra sponda, è grave, si ch’a gran periglio varca, Il tuo buon successor, ch’alta cagione dirittamente elesse, e cor e mano move sovente per condurla a porto; Ma contra il voler suo ratto s’oppone l’altrui malizia, onde ciascun s’è accorto ch’egli senza ’l tuo aiuto adopra invano.11 Colonna’s other religious poem published in Book 1, “Se ’l breve suon che sol quest’aer frale,” strikes a similarly evangelical tone: the road to God and heavenly harmony can only be sought with an inflamed mind that can “fly to heaven on light wings”: true valour / can hope for among grave travails; / he, with his soul always burning to do good, / conquered the world and himself; they should have / given him governance of the sacred keys” (f. 268). 11  S1:116: “I see your net so laden with weeds and mud, / Peter, that if some wave/ breaks over it or engulfs it/it may be torn and endanger your boat, / for it does not, as it should, float easily, / light and unburdened, over the turbulent sea, / but rather, in bow and stern, from one shore to the other, / is so weighed down that it sails in grave danger. / Your noble successor [Pope Paul III], elected by / just reason, often turns his heart and his hand / to the task of guiding the boat to port,/ but the wickedness of others/ swiftly pits itself against his will, so that all now realize / that without your help he acts in vain”: Brundin 2005, 136 (f. 267).

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Se ’l breve suon che sol quest’aer frale circonda e move, e l’aura che raccoglie lo spirto dentro, e poi l’apre e discioglie soavemente in voce egra e mortale, con tal dolcezza il cor sovente assale che d’ogni cura vil s’erge e ritoglie, sprona, accende ’l pensier, drizza le voglie per gir volando al Ciel con leggiere ale, che fia quando’udirà con vivo zelo la celeste armonia l’anima pura sol con l’orecchia interna intenta al vero dinanzi al suo fattor nel sommo Cielo, u’ non si perde mai tuono o misura, né si discorda il bel concento altero?12 Of Gambara’s ten sonnets in the three editions of Book 1 of the Giolito anthologies, seven of them are Petrarchan love sonnets. Although Gambara, like Colonna, had friends who were active in the spirituali movement, her poems for the most part are amatory or encomiastic rather than religious. Her two other sonnets in Book 1 include a poem of praise for the beauty of her native Brescia (Onorate acque, e voi, liti beati, Gambara, Le Rime 38); and a reflection upon the love poetry she wrote as a foolish young girl (Mentre da vaghi, e giovenil pensieri, f. 287; Gambara, Le Rime 41). A third prayer for a longed-for peace between King Francis I of France and the Emperor Charles V (Vinca gli sdegni e l’odio vostro antico) was originally assigned by Domenichi to Gambara. It was later reassigned to Colonna by Bullock as E: 29; but more recently Virginia Cox has identified the work as Gambara’s.13 Unlike Colonna and Gambara, the poet Laura Terracina (1519–ca. 1577) came from a middle-class family loyal to the Spanish monarchy in Naples. The most

12  S1: 27: “If the faint sound, which alone stirs and /moves the frail air and the breeze, which gathers /up the spirit and then opens and melts it / softly in a weak mortal whisper // assails the heart with such a gentle touch/ that it rises up, shedding all vile cares, / and spurs on and inflames the mind and stiffens the resolve/ to fly toward heaven on light wings, / what then will the pure heart do when—fired with hope, and with the inner ear tuned to the truth—/ it hears the music of the celestial choirs / in the presence of our maker in the heavens above, / where the steady rhythm is never broken / and the heavenly harmony never grows discordant?”: Brundin 2005, 80. 13  Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2013), 308.

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popular of all the sixteenth-century women writers,14 Terracina published nine volumes of her own poetry between 1548 and 1561. Among the literati, she had already become a household name by the time Giolito published her first solo book of poems, her Rime, in 1548. That year she was the first and only woman inducted into the elite Neapolitan Academy, the Incogniti. In 1549, her most famous work, the Discorso sopra tutti i primi canti di Orlando furioso, was published by Giolito; and in the next twelve years, the Discorso would go through four more printings. So by the time the third edition of Book 1 of Giolito’s Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi auttori went to press in 1549, the presence of Terracina’s name in its tavola gave the volume a certain cachet for its buyers, though her sole contribution to this new edition was an eight-stanza encomium that extolled the virtues of the volume’s editor, Lodovico Domenichi: Bench’io vi scriva, anchor non vi conosco, / O Domenichi, mio chiaro, e divino (ff. 262–65). Terracina’s poems would not appear again in the Giolito poetry series until Book 7. But the Giolito anthologies represented more than just the Colonnas and the Terracinas of the literary world. From the start, editors had been on the lookout for new writers. Domenichi in fact had published two relatively unknown women poets in Book 1: the young Sienese poet Laudomia Forteguerri (1515–55) and the Venetian singer and poet Francesca Baffa (fl. 1543–52). Forteguerri’s sonnet, Hora ten’ va superbo, hor corri altero, had created something of a sensation when it first appeared in 1541 in a slim volume containing only one of her poems, accompanied by the first literary critical essay ever devoted to one writer’s work. Alessandro Piccolomini, a distinguished Sienese poet and classical scholar active in two literary academies, the Intronati of Siena and the Infiammati of Padua, was the author of both the edition of Forteguerri’s sonnet and a critical essay on the work which he titled Lettura. Forteguerri’s poems would not appear again in the Giolito poetry series until Book 10 (1559).15 In this final edition of the Giolito anthologies, Domenichi would publish four more amatory sonnets of Forteguerri’s, thus creating a miniature sonnet-cycle dedicated to the Emperor Charles V’s daughter Margaret of Austria, with whom it appeared that Laudomia had “fallen in love.”16 14  Virgina Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter Reformation Italy (Baltimore, 2011), 51. 15  “Book 10,” is my designation. Bibliographers disagree on the connection of this volume to the other nine books in the anthology series begun by Giolito. On this question, see Bongi’s theory in Robin, Publishing Women, 328, note 6. 16  Konrad Eisenbichler, “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria,” in Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesco C. Sautman and Pamela

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Two sonnets by Francesca Baffa are known,17 both of them published by Domenichi in all three editions of Book 1. Born in Venice to the Venetian provveditore Girolamo Baffo, Baffa is known as a character in two of Giuseppe Betussi’s dialogues, the Dialogo amoroso (1543) and his Raverta (1544). Her poems are not seen again in the Giolito anthologies. In both her sonnets in Book 1, Baffa mourns the departure of her lover “Camillo,” who has left her to go to war: Così tosto vi veggia in alto, et degno (f. 332); La fama, che rimbomba in ogne parte (f. 333).

Books 2–4 of the Anthologies, 1547–1551

The presence of women’s works is considerably limited in Books 2, 3, and 4. Women poets other than the anonymous “Guglia” are virtually absent in Books 2 and 3,18 with the exception of Gambara who alone appears in Book 2 and Colonna whose poems are included with Gambara’s in Book 3. Neither poet makes a major return to the anthologies until Book 8. Each of Giolito’s two editions of Book 2 (1547, 1548) has only one and the same sonnet of Gambara’s. Its theme is reformist and spiritual, a singularity among Gambara’s poems anthologized in the Giolito series, which are otherwise encomiastic or amatory rather than religious or philosophical. In this case, she posits the Calvinist idea of predestination for an elect few: Scelse da tutta la futura gente gli eletti Suoi l’alta Bontà infinita, predestinati a la beata vita Per voler sol de la divina mente.19 Sheingorn (New York, 2001), 277–304; Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Notre Dame, IN, 2012), 114–28. 17  Claudio Mutini, “Baffo, Franceschina,” in Dbi, 5: 163. 18  “Guglia,” the anonymous author of sixteen principally amatory sonnets published in books 2a and 2b of the anthologies, is not identified. A single sonnet perhaps by the same poet, this time with the name written “Giulia Aragona,” appears in book 4. “Guglia” and “Giulia Aragona” are not to be confused with the famous courtesan poet Tullia d’Aragona, whose complete poetic corpus has been published in a bilingual edition by Hairston, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others. 19  “He chose from among all future peoples / His elect and the great infinite Good, / predestined for a blessed life / solely by the wish of the divine mind”: Gambara, Le Rime, 157 (ff. 112v–113v): Bullock notes that sonnet 57 paraphrases Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 8: 29–30.

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The years 1549 and 1550 marked the spiking of religious reform activism among writers and publishers in Italy. The Officers of the Inquisition in Rome and Venice collaborated, as I noted above, in their efforts to stem the tide of heterodox writing and preaching. In 1549, the Venetian Republic banned the works of many of Colonna’s close friends and mentors, including the popular anonymous reform treatise, the Beneficio di Christo, which is thought to have been revised by Colonna’s long-time friend, Marcantonio Flaminio.20 Moreover, the compiler of the 1549 Catalogo was Colonna’s friend the poet and cleric Giovanni della Casa, who shared space with Colonna in the pages of Books 1, 4, and 6 of the Giolito anthologies. Yet such was the climate of heresy-hunting in Rome in the 1550s that the works of della Casa himself would be banned in Pope Paul IV’s Index of 1559.21

Book 3

In 1550, three years after Colonna’s death, the influential reform thinker Andrea Arrivabene edited Book 3 of the Giolito poetry anthologies for the Venetian printer Bartolomeo Cesana. By the time of its publication, thirteen solo editions of Colonna’s Rime were already in print and circulating. Four of these Venetian solo editions of Colonna’s works were titled Rime Spirituali della illustrissima Signora Vittoria Colonna (Valgrisi 1546; Valgrisi 1548; Comin da Trino 1548); and Libro Primo delle Rime Spirituali, Parte Nuovamente raccolte (Al segno della Speranza 1550). Colonna and Gambara were the only women Arrivabene (AR) included in his Book 3 of the Giolito-inspired poetry series. He attributed to Colonna six of the poems by women that he edited for Book 3, but only two are actually hers. The other four poems are Gambara’s and all four contain flattering tributes that are typical of Gambara’s oeuvre:

• In giovenil etate il mondo vinse AR 1550, f. 17 (for Pope Paul III; Gambara, Le Rime 60). • Là dove più con le sue lucid’onde AR 1550, f. 16v (for Emperor Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 46).

20   On the criminalization of the Beneficio, see Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville, MO, 1999), 70–73, 78–79; on Flaminio’s revision of the Beneficio, see Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), 119ff. 21  Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 116.

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• Quella felice stella, e in ciel fatale AR 1550, f. 17r (for Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 48). • Quel che di tutto il bel ricco Oriente AR 1550, f. 16r (for Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 47). • Vincer i cor più saggi, e Re più alteri AR 1550, f. 17v (Bullock: Rime, E: 27). • Sono il principio, e parlo a voi mortali AR 1550, f. 190r (Bullock: Rime, S2: 6). Three additional sonnets are attributed to Gambara in Book 3:

• Altri boschi, altri prati ed altri monti f. 68 (a funeral elegy; Gambara, Le Rime 65). • Guida con la man forte al camin dritto. f. 68 (a prayer for the victory of Emperor Charles V against the Turks; Gambara, Le Rime 40). • Quel nodo in cui la mia beata sorte f. 67 (her grief on the death of her husband; Gambara, Le Rime 28).

Book 3 again showcases a long list of the best-known contemporary male poets including many of the same names that appeared in Domenichi’s tavole for the three editions of Book 1 of the anthologies. The prolific Laura Terracina, who was on the roster of the second and third editions (1546, 1549) though not the first edition (1545) of Giolito’s Book 1 of the anthologies, was dropped from Andrea Arrivabene’s tavola. Nonetheless, that year and also the next, Giolito published her solo work, Discorso sopra tutti i primi canti di Orlando Furioso (1550, 1551).22

Book 4

Four years after Colonna’s death, in 1551, the editor Hercole Bottrigaro published only one sonnet of hers in Book 4 of the Giolito-inspired anthology series, produced this time by the associated firm of Anselmo Giaccarello in Bologna under the title Libro quarto delle rime di diversi eccellentiss. autori nella lingua volgare. Bottrigaro placed Colonna’s sonnet prominently at the front of his volume, immediately following the volume’s opening suite of sonnets by Francesco Maria Molza, a poet whose work she admired.23 The sonnet is addressed to Cardinal Reginald Pole as her “figlio e signor,” underlining her intimate 22  Valvassori also kept Terracina on his roster, publishing her Discorso and a solo edition of her poetry, titled Quinte rime, the same year (Venice, 1550). 23  C arteggio, 494.

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connection to one of the leaders of the Italian reform movement as both her protector and at the same time one whom she both nurtures and protects:24 Figlio, e signor, se la tua prima, e vera, Madre vive prigion, non gli è già tolto L’anima bella, o ’l chiaro spirto sciolto, Né di tante vertù l’invitta schiera. A’ me, che mostrò andar libera, e altiera, e ’n poca terra ho il cor chiuso, ed involto, convien c’habbia tal’ hor l’occhio rivolto che la seconda tua madre non pera. Tu per gli aperti, e spatiosi campi del Ciel camini, e non più nebbia ò pietra ritarda, o ingombra il tuo spedito corso. Io grave d’anni, agghiaccio, hor tu che avampi Di alta fiamma celeste, humile impetra dal commun Padre eterno homai soccorso.25 Following this sonnet, two poems by Colonna’s friend and fellow advocate of religious reform, Marguerite de Navarre, offer a response to Colonna’s sonnet. Four of Veronica Gambara’s sonnets appear in Book 4, none of them religious. The first two of Gambara’s sonnets are funeral elegies on the death of Pietro Bembo.26 The third is a hymeneal song, perhaps celebrating her brother Brunoro’s marriage to Virginia Pallavicini. The fourth and last of her sonnets in this volume is a hymn to Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and Bacchus, god of wine:

24  The identification of Pole is Abigail Brundin’s in Brundin 2005, 169 and notes 278–79, 134–35. 25  “My son and master, if your first and true / mother abides in prison, yet still her wisdom / is not stolen from her, nor is her noble spirit defeated, / nor are the many virtues taken from her unconquered companions. / To me, who seem to move about unburdened and free / and to keep my heart confined and buried in a small plot, / I pray you turn your eyes from time to time / so that your second mother does not perish. / You walk upon the open spacious fields / of heaven, and no shadow or rock / can now delay or obstruct your swift progress. / I, burdened by my years, am frozen here; therefore you / who are aflame with divine fire, pray humbly on my behalf / for help from our common father”: Brundin 2005, 135. The text is from BOT 1551, f. 12; Bullock’s text (S1: 141) is slightly different. 26  The identification of the dedicatees and subjects for all four sonnets are Bullock’s: see Gambara, Le Rime, 94n, 100n, 164n, 165n.

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• Hor che sei ritornata alma felice f. 19 (Gambara, Le Rime 63). • Riser gli spirti angelici, e celesti f. 19 (Gambara, Le Rime 64). • Sciogli le treccie d’oro, e d’ogni intorno f. 20 (Gambara, Le Rime 35). • Tu che mostrasti, al rozo mondo prima f. 20 (Gambara, Le Rime 39). Regarding the poems by the other four women included in Book 4— Sor Gieronima Castellana, Virginia Salvi, Faustina Vallentina, and Giulia Aragona—none are religious in nature except those by Sor Gieronima. Also included in Bottrigaro’s volume are four love poems by Rinaldo Corso (ff. 89–90), whose learned commentary and edition of Colonna’s Rime spirituali may have given him an entrée to publication in the anthologies.27

Book 6, 1553

Not only was Venice the centre of the print world, it also proved central to the Inquisition. On August 12, 1553, Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV) and Michele Ghislieri, the Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Office in Rome, ordered the Venetian Republic to outlaw the printing of Hebrew books in Venice and to condemn the Talmud to public burnings in cities throughout Italy. In 1554/55, on orders from the Holy Office, Giolito himself produced a Catalogo that banned the works of some 290 authors, including—for the first time—contemporary poets.28 In response, the Venetian book guildsmen protested and the Venetian Senate withdrew Giolito’s Catalogo. Meanwhile Giolito’s colleagues in the industry flooded the market with poetry anthologies, among which were Girolamo Ruscelli’s Book 6 of the Giolito series, Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori, printed now by Andrea Arrivabene (Venice, 1553); and two years later Ruscelli’s massive poetry anthology titled Del Tempio alla divina signora donna Giovanna d’Aragona, fabricato da tutti i più gentili Spiriti, & in tutte le lingue principali del mondo (Venice, 1555). In the three inaugural editions of his poetry series (1545, 1546, 1549), Giolito and his editor Domenichi had featured such writers as Colonna, Gambara, and

27   Dichiaratione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della Divina Vittoria Collonna [sic] Marchesana di Pescara. Da Rinaldo Corso alla molto Illust. Mad. Veronica Gambara da Correggio; et alle Donne gentili dedicata. Nelle quale i Sonetti spiritali [sic] da lei fino adesso composti, Et un Triompho di Croce si contiene. Con la Tavola sua (Bologna, 1543). 28  Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 93, 98–99.

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Terracina, all of them well known to the public.29 In 1553, the canny Venetian editor Girolamo Ruscelli recruited works from the poet Tullia d’Aragona for publication in Book 6 of the Giolito-inspired poetry series. By that time, d’Aragona had already achieved celebrity status in Rome, Venice, Siena, and Florence as a courtesan and a published writer. On 1 May 1547, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici himself issued a decree recognizing d’Aragona’s “rare knowledge of poetry and philosophy” (“rara scienzia di poesia et filosofia”) and waiving in her case the Florentine statute requiring prostitutes to wear the yellow veil.30 D’Aragona was already the author of two books of her own that year, both published by Giolito: Rime della signora Tullia d’Aragona; et di diversi a lei (1547); and the risqué Dialogo della signora Tullia d’Aragona della infinità di amore (1547, reprinted 1549 and 1552), in which she debated matters of love and sex in propria persona as a seasoned courtesan with the university professor Benedetto Varchi—a man who was no stranger to scandal himself.31 Despite the differences in the lives and writings of Veronica Gambara, Vittoria Colonna, and Laura Terracina, her predecessors in the anthologies, the two poems by d’Aragona which the learned Venetian editor Girolamo Ruscelli selected for inclusion in Book 6 in no way threatened the chaste tone of the series established by Domenichi in 1545, the poems of Francesca Baffa notwithstanding.32 D’Aragona’s two contributions to Book 6 were a spiritually-themed sonnet (Sacro pastor, che la tua greggia humile); and an encomiastic canzone addressed to the Cardinal de Tournon (Signor, nel cui divino alto valore).33 D’Aragona’s poems would not appear again in the Giolito anthology series. The Giolito series was revolutionary not only because it popularized the poetry anthology, a genre new to sixteenth-century print culture, but also because it published and circulated for the first time in Italy the poetry of a 29  Fifteen editions of Colonna’s solo-authored Rime had been published by 1548; Terracina’s Rime of 1548 would subsequently go through seventeen editions; Gambara’s poems circulated in manuscript. On Terracina’s great celebrity, see Cox, The Prodigious Muse, 51, 53. 30  Salvatore Bongi, “Il velo giallo di Tullia d’Aragona,” Rivista critica della letteratura italiana 3 (1886): 86–95; see also Bongi, Annali, 1: 186; Deana Basile, “Fasseli gratia per poetessa: Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Role in the Florentine Literary Circle of Tullia d’Aragona,” in The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot, 2001), 135–48; Hairston, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others, 23–24. 31  Umberto Pirotti, Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo (Florence, 1971), 46–56; Varchi had been charged at least twice for violation of the sodomy laws. 32  See above on Baffa in Domenichi, Rime diverse (1545, 1546, 1549). 33  Girolamo Ruscelli, ed., Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori (Venice, 1553), ff. 182–83; Hairston, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona, 276–80.

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significant number of women. Book 6, Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori (Venice, 1553), must therefore be seen as a centre of gravity for the series, in terms of its role as a showcase for women’s poetry, not only because of their number and importance in this book but also because of the stature of their role model, Vittoria Colonna, whose sonnets are also on display in Book 6. The majority of the women represented in Il sesto libro had already seen Colonna’s collected Rime published in solo-authored volumes by the most prestigious presses in Venice: Zoppino, Comin da Trino, Valvassori, Imperadore, Valgrisi, and Giolito.34 Colonna was not only the leading female poet in Italy; she was also well regarded among the prominent reform intellectuals of her time. Interestingly, while Book 6 has a preface by the known reformist thinker and publisher Andrea Arrivabene, the book’s editor was Girolamo Ruscelli, one of the few intellectuals regarded in this epoch as above suspicion by the Officers of the Inquisition.35 Vittoria Colonna’s trio of sonnets in Book 6 establishes her social place, rank, and persona as a noblewoman, poet, and grieving widow who hymns the wartime glories of the noble d’Avalos men. In the first two sonnets, she mourns the loss of her husband, Marchese Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos of Pescara, who died serving the Emperor Charles V in the Battle of Pavia in 1525. In the third sonnet, she pays homage to her husband’s beloved nephew, Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, also a captain in the service of Charles V. She prays for his victory in a campaign “to raise up the afflicted kingdom of Jesus” (“per alzare di Gesù l’aflitto impero”).36 The capoversi of the three poems are as follows:37

• Alma mia luce, infin ch’al ciel tornasti Rusc 1553, f. 10r (Bullock: Rime A2:24). • Sovra del mio mortal leggiera, e sola Rusc 1553, f. 10r (Bullock: Rime A2:38). Hor, • che pien d’alto sdegno, e pietà grande Rusc 1553, f. 9v (Bullock: Rime E:3).

The short poems of the eight women included in Book 6 are randomly dispersed throughout the volume. Gaspara Stampa (1523–54), whose solo-authored book containing over three-hundred of her poems would come out posthumously in 1554, notably made her début with three sonnets in this anthology. A long 34  All this despite Colonna’s lifelong disavowal of any connection to the presses. 35  Bongi, Annali, 1: 466. 36  Maria Musiol, Vittoria Colonna: A Woman’s Renaissance (Berlin, 2013), 94–95. 37  See note 22 on Bullock’s classifications.

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Petrarchan love lament in ottava rima by Virginia Martini Salvi (1510–71) serves as the centerpiece of the works of these eight women:

• Vittoria Colonna (three sonnets: two amatory, one epistolary, ff. 9v-10). • Gaspara Stampa (three amatory poems, ff. 68v–69). • Veronica Gambara (two poems praising the hills and shores of her native Brescia, ff. 85–86). • Maria Spinola (three amatory sonnets, ff. 94v–95). • Virginia Martini Salvi (one amatory poem in ottava rima, ff. 109v–111v). • Ippolita Mirtilla (one spiritual sonnet and two amatory sonnets, ff. 128–128v). • Tullia d’Aragona (one spiritual sonnet and one encomiastic canzone, ff. 182r–183r). • Coletta Pasquale (five amatory sonnets, ff. 239–40). The women’s poems in Book 6 run the emotional and intellectual gamut. Preceded by the solemn love sonnets Colonna addresses to her dead husband, they range from the pious sonnet sent by the courtesan Tullia d’Aragona to the French Cardinal François de Tournon (Sacro pastor, che la tua greggia humile)38 to the frankly erotic sonnet Gaspara Stampa seems to have crafted for her lover’s eyes only (Fa ch’io rivegga Amor’ anzi ch’io moia).39 While the predominant mode and register of the women’s poetry in Book 6 is amatory and Petrarchan, the thematic distance between d’Aragona’s and Stampa’s sonnets is striking: Sacro pastor, che la tua greggia humile di caritade acceso, e d’Amor pieno, guidi fuor del mortal camin terreno, per ricondurla al suo Celeste ovile; Se ’l ben oprar ti rende a Dio simile, hor che raggio divin le scalda il seno, 38  D’Aragona, The Poems and Letters, 277–81: Julia Hairston has identified the unnamed addressee as Cardinal François de Tournon (1489–1562). 39  See now Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus, trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago, 2010), 124–25. I include Tylus’s translation of the first two quatrains: “Love, before I die, let me see those eyes again / for which I sigh and moan from far away; /all else I see and gaze upon / with my own eyes seem shadows, and it wearies. /All the fires Etna vomits forth, /or the pitiless blaze that once burned Troy—/ they’re little or nothing next to the flame/ of my torments, rather, they’re peace and joy.”

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ricevi, O santo, nel tuo pasco ameno questa tua pecorella errante, e vile. Si che possa, ridotta in piaggie apriche, ove nocer non può contraria sorte, né fiere Stelle al nostro danno intente, Poste in oblio l’acerbe sue fatiche, fuggir le pompe, e disprezzar la morte, tenendo sempre in Dio ferma la mente.40 Fa ch’io rivegga Amor’ anzi ch’io moia gli occhi, che di lontan chiamo e sospiro, fuor de’ quai ciò ch’io veggio, e ciò ch’io miro con questi miei mi par tenebre e noia. Quante fiamme hor vome Etna, arser già Troia In quell’incendio dispietato e diro,41 À petto à le mie fiamme, al mio martiro Son poco, ò nulla; anzi son pace e gioia. E, se ’l Sol de le luci mie divine, Chi ’l crederia? Tornando non lo smorza, Sento che ’l mio incendio è senza fine. Ó mirabil d’Amor’ e nova forza; Che dova avien, ch’un foco l’altro affine, Qui solo un foco l’altro vince e sforza.42 40  Tullia d’Aragona, Il sesto libro (1553), f. 182; Hairston, The Poems and Letters of Tullia d’Aragona and Others, f. 276: “Sacred shepherd, who guide your humble flock / ignited by charity and full of love, / away from the mortal, earthly terrain, / and conduct it to its Celestial fold; / if good works render you similar to God, / now that the divine ray warms her breast, / receive, o Saint, into your verdant pasture / this your little sheep, errant and lowly; so that she may take refuge in open fields/ where neither adverse fate can hurt her / nor cruel Stars intent on our harm, / having consigned to oblivion her bitter travails, / to escape all pomp, and disdain death, / her mind fixed firmly on God.” 41  The reading diro is testified to both by the 1553 edition of Book 6 (f. 69) and by the editio princeps of Gaspara Stampa, titled Rime (on p. 40), edited by Stampa’s sister Cassandra Stampa and published by Pietro Petrasanta in Venice in 1554. 42  Gaspara Stampa, Il sesto libro (1553), f. 69; “Love, before I die, let me see those eyes again / for which I sigh and moan from far away; / all else I see and all I gaze upon / with my own eyes seem shadows, and it wearies. / All the fires Etna vomits forth, / or the pitiless blaze that once burned Troy—/ they’re little or nothing next to the flame / of my torments; rather, they’re peace and joy. / And if the sun of my lights divine—who / would believe it?—doesn’t quench this fire when / he returns, I’ll know my ardor is unending. / Novel, marvelous force of Love! We know / one fire tends to fuel another; here alone, / one flame the other conquers and destroys”: Tower and Tylus, Gaspara Stampa, 124–27.

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Books 5 and 7, 1551–1556: A New Narrative Frame for Book 6

In the 1550s and 1560s, the now-prestigious Giolito anthologies served as a feeder to the presses and their editors who were scouting for new poets whom they could profitably produce in solo-authored books of their own. The solo-authored edition of Gaspara Stampa’s 310 poems had come out notably one year after her publication in the learned editor Girolamo Ruscelli’s contribution to the Giolito series, Book 6. Likewise, the anthologizing of Chiara Matraini in Book 7 and Laura Battiferri in Book 9 set the stage for their publication in solo-authored volumes of their own. Stampa’s collected Petrarchan Rime, which chronicle her romantic involvements first with Count Collaltino di Collalto and later Bartolomeo Zen, were published a year after her death by Plinio Pietrasanta, whose shop was in Ruscelli’s house. Chiara Matraini (1515– 1604), whose turbulent affair with the poet Bartolomeo Graziani provided material for her sonnets, suggests a similar example of the productive relationship that existed between the anthologies and solo-authored editions at the presses. During the year that Lodovico Dolce was editing 100 sonnets composed by Matraini for their inclusion in Book 7 of the Giolito anthologies, the publisher Vincenzo Busdraghi in Lucca preempted Dolce’s anthologizing of Matraini with his own edition in 1555 of her complete oeuvre, which he titled Rime e prose di madonna Chiara Matraini gentildonna Lucchese. Similarly, the publication of two sonnets attributed to Laura Battiferri (1523–89) for the first time in Book 9 of the Giolito-inspired anthology series in 1560 may have accelerated, and certainly enhanced, the début of her solo-authored poetry collection, Il primo libro delle opere toscane, produced by the Medici-supported Giunti press in Florence later that year.43 Battiferri herself was a protégée of the Florentine professor and scholar Benedetto Varchi, who was both a patron of Gaspara Stampa and a friend and collaborator of Tullia d’Aragona. Varchi was also an insider in the Venetian-Florentine axis of the presses. Four years after the death of Vittoria Colonna, a new female voice was introduced to readers of the Giolito anthologies: that of the Neapolitan poet Isabella di Morra (1520–45).

43   Rime di diversi autori eccellentiss. Libro Nono (Cremona, 1560). Of the two sonnets attributed to Battiferri in Conti’s anthology, only one of the sonnets (O sonno, o de l’amena ombra fugace, f. 259) is attested in Victoria Kirkham, ed. and trans., Laura Battiferra and Her Circle (Chicago, 2006), 266. Laura Battiferri degli Ammannati, Il primo libro delle opere toscane, ed. Enrico Maria Guidi (Urbino, 2000) contains neither of the two sonnets in Conti’s anthology.

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A corpus of thirteen poems written by Morra narrating the story of her short life in propria persona was recovered by Giolito’s editor Lodovico Dolce from the Neapolitan scholar and bookseller Marcantonio Passero. Between 1551 and 1556, Dolce published Morra’s corpus in four installments, all with Gabriel Giolito: three editions of Book 5 came out in 1551–55; and one edition of Book 7 went to press in 1556.44 In ten sonnets and three canzoni spread across Books 5 and 7, Isabella di Morra presents a narrative of her physical and emotional isolation in a remote mountain town south of Naples, thus providing in Books 5 and 7 not only a thematic connection to the Petrarchan women poets of Book 6 who lament their desolation but also a thematic frame for Book 6. But the object of Morra’s desire and the source of her pain is not a lover but her absent father.45 The posthumous publication of Isabella di Morra’s poetry added a sensational aspect to the anthology series. Morra had been murdered by her own brothers in 1546, and after the staggered publication of her thirteen poems between the years 1551 to 1556, Domenichi would publish her complete corpus in Book 10 of the Giolito-style poetry anthologies, Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne, in Lucca in 1559.

Book 8 of the Anthologies, 1558

By the time Book 8 of the Giolito-inspired poetry anthologies came out in 1558, Colonna had been dead for over a decade, and Gambara had been gone 44  Eight of her amatory sonnets and one religious canzone are reprinted in Dolce’s three editions of Book 5: the first edition (5), Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobiliss. intelletti; nuovamente raccolte, et non più stampate. Terzo Libro allo illus. S. Ferrante Carrafa (Venice, 1551–52); the second edition (5a), Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobiliss. ingegni. Nuovamente raccolte, et con nuova additione ristampate. Libro Quinto. Allo illus. S. Ferrante Carrafa. New dedicatory letter by Dolce (Venice, 1552); and the third edition (5b), Libro quinto delle rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani, e d’altri nobilissimi ingegni. Nuovamente raccolte, e con nova additione ristampate, allo illus. S, Ferrante Carrafa (Venice, 1555). Two more of her sonnets and two more canzoni, one religious and one amatory are printed in the first and only edition of Book 7, Rime di diversi signori napoletani, e d’altri. Nuovamente raccolte et imprese. Libro Settimo, ed. Lodovico Dolce (Venice, 1556). 45  For a psychoanalytic interpretation of Morra’s persona, see Juliana Schiesari, “The Gendering of Melancholia: Torquato Tasso and Isabella di Morra,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 233–62.

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for eight years. They were the only women published in Book 8, titled I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri nuovamente raccolti, which was edited by Girolamo Ruscelli and printed by the premier Venetian printers Giovanni Battista and Melchior Sessa. In Book 8, the voices of the two leading exponents of women’s lyric emerge as more different from one another than ever before. Why was this? Apart from the fact that the two noblewomen led very different lives, their publication history could hardly have differed more. Gambara did not publish extensively outside the anthologies, and in fact, not a single solo edition of her poetry would be published until 1759,46 whereas Colonna’s works had been produced at the rate of a new edition almost every year since 1539. Ruscelli had just published a solo-authored edition of Colonna’s complete sonnets titled Tutte le rime della illustriss. et eccellentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna, marchesana di Pescara. Con l’espositione del Signor Rinaldo Corso. Included were 158 of Colonna’s Rime, of which 119 are classified by Bullock as amorose, 38 as spirituali, and one as epistolare (Venice: Sessa 1558).47 It was the nineteenth solo edition of her Rime. Despite Colonna’s vaunted aversion to the presses, her works were simply better known than Gambara’s because of their availability in numerous, relatively inexpensive editions. A comparison of Colonna’s and Gambara’s poems in Book 8 shows a preponderance of amatory sonnets over other genres in both poets’ collected works. However, the balance between religious and amatory poems in the solo editions of Colonna’s Rime changed radically between 1539 and 1558. Whereas the first five editions of Colonna’s Rime (1538–39) contained only fifteen sonetti spirituali out of total of 145 poems, by 1546, Valgrisi was producing solo editions of Colonna’s poetry containing 180 of her rime spirituali and no love poems.48 By 1558, in Ruscelli’s solo edition of her Rime published by Sessa,49 the proportion of religious to amatory poems had changed again, with amatory verse in the ascendancy. In I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri, Book 8 and the last of the anthologies he would edit, Ruscelli lists Colonna as the author of thirty sonnets, three 46  Selections from Gambara’s works were anthologized in sixty-eight published books of poetry collections prior to the first solo publication of her poetry and prose in the eighteenth century: Rime e Lettere di Veronica Gambara raccolte da Felice Rizzardi (Brescia, 1759); the modern edition I refer to in this article is Gambara, Le Rime. 47  B ullock: Rime, 266–67. 48  In this chapter, I rely on Bullock’s tabulations of Colonna’s rime spirituali as compared to her amorose. 49  R ime 1558.

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of which Bullock has identified as Gambara’s.50 Of the twenty-seven poems firmly established as Colonna’s in I fiori, Bullock has categorized eighteen of them as amorose, five as spirituali, and four as epistolari.51 But Ruscelli, following the practice of the earliest editions, did not attempt to separate Colonna’s amatory poetry from her religious verses.52 I list here the capoversi of all the rime assigned to Colonna in Book 8, showing also the order in which they were placed in this book (noted as Rusc-2 1558). The appearance of the following sonnets both in the earlier Giolito anthologies and in Colonna’s solo-authored 1539 edition is also indicated:

• Hor, che pien d’alto sdegno, e pietà grande Rusc 1553, f. 9v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 588 (Bullock: Rime E:3). Sovra del mio mortal leggiera, e sola Rime 1539, f. 17r; Rusc 1553, f. 10; Rusc-2 • 1558, f. 589 (Bullock: Rime A2:38). • Alma mia luce, infin ch’al ciel tornasti Rusc 1553, f. 10r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 589 (Bullock: Rime A2:24). • *Quella felice stella, e in ciel fatale AR 1550, f. 17r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 590 (Gambara, Le Rime 48). • *Quel che di tutto il bel ricco Oriente AR 1550, f. 16r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 590 (Gambara, Le Rime 47). *In • giovenil’ etate il mondo vinse AR 1550, f. 17; Rusc-2 1558, f. 591 (Gambara, Le Rime 60).53 • Vincer’ i cor più saggi, e Re più alteri AR 1550, f. 17; Rusc-2 1558, f. 591 (Bullock: Rime E:27).54 • Tralucer dentro al mortal vel cosparte Rime 1539, f. 34v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 592 (Bullock: Rime A2:28). • Ahi quanto fu al mio Sol contrario il Fato Rime 1539, f. 28v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 592 (Bullock: Rime A1:71). • Questo Sol, ch’oggi à gli occhi nostri splende Rime 1539, f. 9r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 593 (Bullock: Rime A1:21).55

50  See Bullock’s indexes of the capoversi in Bullock: Rime and in Gambara, Le Rime. 51  Again these are Bullock’s classifications. 52  B rundin 2005 and Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation make clear the coherence of Colonna’s reformist thought and the influence of her circle on the evolution of her thought. 53  I have marked each of the three Gambara sonnets misattributed to Colonna with asterisks. Apostrophe in Rusc-2 1558 is not in Bullock. 54  Apostrophe in Rusc-2 1558 is not in Bullock. 55  Bullock agli occhi.

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• Perché del Tauro l’infiammato corno Rime 1539, f. 2v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 593 (Bullock: Rime A2:12). • Vergine pura, che da i raggi ardenti Rime 1539, f. 26v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 594 (Bullock: Rime S1: 100). • Padre eterno del ciel, se tua mercede Rime 1539, f. 37v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 594 (Bullock: Rime S1:12). • Molza, ch’ al ciel quest’altra tua Beatrice Rime 1539, f. 34v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 595 (Bullock: Rime E:17). • S’io mossa con Zacheo d’intenso affetto Rusc-2 1558, f. 595 (Bullock: Rime S1:57: S’io piena). • Qui’ fece il mio bel Sole e à noi ritorno Rime 1539, f. 20v; Rusc-2 1558, f.596 (Bullock: Rime A1:61). Spirto gentil, del cui gran nome, altero Rime 1539, f. 38v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 596 • (Bullock: Rime E:14). • L’antiche offerte al primo Tempio il pondo Rime 1539, f. 36v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 597 (Bullock: Rime S1:14). • Mentre il pensier da l’altre cure sciolto Rime 1539, f. 4r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 597 (Bullock: Rime A1:40). • Mentre l’Aura amorosa, e ’l mio bel lume Rime 1539, f. 7r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 598 (Bullock: Rime A1:35). • S’a la mia bella fiamma, ardente speme Rime 1539, f. 1v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 598 (Bullock: Rime A1: 23). • Occhi, l’usanza par che vi sospinga Rime 1539, f. 23r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 599 (Bullock: Rime A1:70). • Quando già stanco il mio dolce pensiero Rime 1539, f. 12r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 599 (Bullock: Rime A1:20). • Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse Rime 1539, f. 6r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 600 (Bullock: Rime A1:7). • Sento per gran timor con alto grido Rime 1539, f. 17r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 600 (Bullock: Rime E:25). • Le tante opre divine, e ’l sacro impero Rime 1539, f. 24r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 601 (Bullock: Rime S1:139). • Quand’io son tutta col pensier rivolta Rime 1539, f. 5r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 601 (Bullock: Rime A1:60). Quel • fior d’ogni virtute in un bel prato Rime 1539, f. 22r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 602 (Bullock: Rime A1:38). • Per cagion d’un profondo alto pensiero Rime 1539, f. 1r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 602 (Bullock: Rime A1:2). • Quel giorno, che l’amata imagin Rime 1539, f. 14v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 603 (Bullock: Rime A1:85).

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• Qual’ huom, cui folta nebbia al viso ha spente Rime 1539, f. 24v; Rusc-2 1558, f. 603 (Bullock: Rime A1:80). • Da Dio mandata Angelica mia scorta Rime 1539, f. 36r; Rusc-2 1558, f. 604 (Bullock: Rime S1:7).

Bullock’s classifications assume a strict division between Colonna’s rime amorose, those sonnets that would articulate the poet’s love and grief over the death of her husband, and the sonetti spirituali, which would cohere around Colonna’s reformist thought and her religious faith. But such classifications of Colonna’s poetry are problematic. To cite only one example of the difficulty with such generic simplifications, let us turn to Virginia Cox’s commentary on Colonna’s sonnet Questo Sol, ch’oggi agli occhi nostri splende (as above, classified by Bullock as A1:21): in this sonnet, Colonna’s amorous theme of the Petrarchan rivalry between two suns (her beloved and the actual sun) becomes religiously complicated “with the introduction of a third, true sun (God), of whose spiritual light the light of the second sun, the soul of her dead husband, is a reflection.”56 Should this sonnet be categorized exclusively as a rima amorosa or should it be grouped rather with the sonetti spirituali? Ruscelli lists thirteen poems as Gambara’s in Book 8. Her poems, which are very different from Colonna’s, show a variety of themes: encomia, political themes, love sonnets, and praise of the landscape of her native Brescia. Religious themes are rare in Gambara’s sonnets. Only one spiritual sonnet of hers is presented in Book 8: Scelse da tutta la futura gente/gli eletti Suoi l’alta Bontà infinita (Rusc-2 1558, f. 569; Bullock 57). Gambara suggests here that salvation is attained through God’s grace alone and that God’s elect (gli eletti Suoi) are determined solely by predestination. This sonnet appears only once elsewhere in the anthologies, in both editions of Book 2 (1547, 1548), edited by Gabriel Giolito himself. Six of Gambara’s love poems are included in Book 8. In contrast to Colonna’s sole focus on the love of her life, her deceased husband, Gambara’s gaze is trained on the beautiful, luminous, Petrarchan eyes of her beloved, whoever he may be. Here are the capoversi:

• Dal veder voi, occhi sereni, e chiari Rusc-2 1558, f. 567 (Gambara, Le Rime 20). • Occhi lucenti, e belli Rusc-2 1558, f. 571 (Gambara, Le Rime 21). • Se più stanno apparir quei due bei lumi Rusc-2 1558, f. 568 (Gambara, Le Rime 23). Vero • albergo d’Amor, occhi lucenti Rusc-2 1558, f. 567 (Gambara, Le Rime 22). 56  Cox, Lyric Poetry, 137, notes the problem with such classifications in regard to A1:21.

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• Poscia, che’l mio destin fermo, e fatale Rusc-2 1558, f. 568 (her focus again: her source of light, her beloved eyes, her “almo mio Sole”: Gambara, Le Rime 19).

Two more amatory poems are included in Gambara’s oeuvre in Book 8, a funeral elegy for her beloved (perhaps her husband Giberto X of Correggio), and a sonnet repenting her foolish young infatuations:

• Quel nodo, in cui la mia beata sorte Rusc-2 1558, f. 569 (Gambara, Le Rime 28). • Mentre da vaghi, e giovenil pensieri Rusc-2 1558, f. 565 (Gambara, Le Rime 41). Gambara’s remaining poems in Book 8 include a funeral elegy for her friend Bardo and two encomiums for her longtime friend and patron, the Emperor Charles V, urging him to bring peace to Florence; and a final plea for peace addressed to the Emperor Charles and King Francis I of France:

• Altri boschi, altri prati, e altri monti Rusc-2 1558, f. 570 (Gambara, Le Rime 65). • Guida con la man forte al camin dritto Rusc-2 1558, f. 570 (Gambara, Le Rime 40). • La bella flora, che da voi sol spera Rusc-2 1558, f. 566 (Gambara, Le Rime 49). • Vinca gli sdegni, e l’odio vostro antico Rusc-2 1558, f. 566 (Bullock: Rime E:29).57



Book 10

In 1559, Lodovico Domenichi, the original editor of the Giolito series of poetry anthologies, produced the first collection of women’s verse ever published in Italy. Presenting works by fifty-three women, Domenichi published the tenth and final volume of the Giolito-inspired poetry series, the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne, not in Venice but with the printer Vincenzo Busdraghi in Lucca.58 57  Cox, Lyric Poetry, 308–9; Bullock: Rime, cataloged this sonnet as Colonna’s: E:29; Cox has reassigned it to Gambara. 58  Marie-Françoise Piéjus, “La première anthologie de poèmes féminins: L’écriture filtrée et orientée,” in Le pouvoir et la plume: incitation, contrôle, et répression dans l’Italie du 16e siècle (Paris, 1982), 193–213; Robin, Publishing Women, 59–61; Deanna Shemek, “The Collector’s Cabinet: Lodovico Domenichi’s Gallery of Women,” in Strong Voices, Weak

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Relations had worsened between the presses in Venice and Pope Paul IV that year. On 22 August 1559, fifty-seven publishers were subpoenaed by the Holy Office in Venice.59 In January, the booksellers and their representatives in Venice rejected the pope’s latest Catalogo of forbidden books and refused to submit their inventories to him; and in April, officers of the Holy Office seized and searched the contents of their stores. Fearing he might be at risk himself since he had been sent to prison on a conviction of heresy seven years before, Domenichi left Venice and moved to Florence under the protection of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. In 1558, the Duke commissioned Domenichi to write a Storia delle guerre di Siena.60 Pleased with the manuscript he submitted to Cosimo on Siena’s wars, the Duke appointed Domenichi court historian and gave him an apartment in the ducal palace. Cosimo’s two commissions for modern histories of Siena and the Medici court made it possible for Domenichi to gather the material he would incorporate in his 1559 anthology of women poets, many of whom had never been previously published. Since Duke Cosimo had annexed the republic of Siena to Florence in 1555 after his three-year siege of the city, the production of an anthology featuring the women poets of Siena—the trophies of war—must have given the Duke pleasure.61 Among the Sienese women poets anthologized in Domenichi’s Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne were Aurelia Petrucci, Cassandra Petrucci, Francesca B. Sanese, Honorata Pecci, Laudomia Forteguerri, Silvia Marchesa de Piccolomini, and the little known poet Virginia Martini Salvi, whose forty-five poems exceeded the number of poems contributed to the 1559 anthology by any other poet represented there, including Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. It is also interesting to note that other, much-published sixteenth-century women poets, such as Laura Terracina, Tullia d’Aragona, and Chiara Matraini were not included among the fifty-three female poets Domenichi selected for publication in this concluding anthology in the series. History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, ed. Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), 239–62; Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 105–6, and Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, esp. 211–14. 59  Robin, Publishing Women, 58–60; Grendler; The Roman Inquisition, 118–20. 60  Angela Piscini, “Domenichi, Lodovico,” in Dbi, 40: 595–600. The manuscript of Domenichi’s work on the Sienese wars is extant in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. 61  Piéjus, “La première anthologie de poèmes féminins,” 201–2, first called attention to the dominance of Sienese women poets in the anthology; Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 105–6, has suggested that the anthology’s “showcasing” of Sienese women poets celebrates Cosimo’s conquest of the city; see also Shemek, “The Collector’s Cabinet,” 239–62, on the anthology’s large number of Sienese and Tuscan poets.

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Domenichi’s inclusion of forty-five poems by Virginia Martini Salvi constitutes a strange choice. Salvi, who took part in Alessandro Piccolomini’s Tombaide, a poetry collection in which a number of other literary Sienese women participated, disappears from the records after 1553, only to resurface in Rome in 1556.62 The majority of her poems in Book 10 are either encomia sent to her patrons or prospective patrons in Rome (many of them cardinals), or appeals to Catherine de’ Medici and Marguerite de Valois requesting aid for the Sienese exiles (herself included) in the imperial city. An exception to her encomia and pleas for assistance is a long poem in ottava rima reprised from Book 6, Da fiamma sì gentil nasce il m’ ardore (ff. 109–111v), in which Salvi catalogues all the Petrarchan tortures and torments of love that she suffers. The poem is addressed to an anonymous “S. S.”63 The Petrarchan love lyrics of three other women poets also stand out in Domenichi’s Book 10. The works of the Sienese poet Laudomia Forteguerri (Books 1b and 1c), the Neapolitan lyricist Isabella di Morra (Books 5 and 7), and the Padua-born Gaspara Stampa (Book 6) are each reprised in the 1559 anthology, posthumously in the case of all three women. Domenichi has expanded the contribution of each of these three women poets to the anthology by adding two or more poems to their oeuvres, thus forming a miniature canzoniere or Petrarchan narrative for each of these three female lyricists. In each case, the poet fixates on the unattainable object of her affection; she is tormented by the rejection of her beloved and his absence; and finally, she seeks deliverance from her misery and she prays for divine intervention. To the single sonnet Forteguerri published in Books 1b and 1c (1546, 1549), Hor te ’n va superbo, hor corre altero, Domenichi added four more of her compositions in Book 10, creating a suite of five amorous poems addressed to Margaret of Austria, the daughter of the Emperor Charles V.64 In the case of Isabella di Morra, Domenichi combined her eight sonnets and one religious canzone (all of which appear in the three editions of Book 5) with the two sonnets and two canzoni he published of hers in Book 7. Taken together in Book 10, Morra’s ten sonnets and three canzoni form a narrative of her tragic life in Favale and her longing for her absent father: a miniature canzoniere in effect. Fleshing out Gaspara Stampa’s vita in the same spirit, Domenichi added two new poems in Book 10 to the three love sonnets of Stampa’s which his colleague Ruscelli had already published in Book 6: in one of these, Questo felice e glorioso tempio, 62  Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 170–214. 63  Eisenbichler prints the same poem in The Sword and the Pen, 273, with a slightly different first line: Da fuoco così bel nasce il mio ardore. 64  Book 10, ff. 102–4; see Eisenbichler as noted above on the same-sex love question.

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Stampa vaunts her connections to the Venier salon; in the other, Dotto, saggio, gentil, chiaro Bonetto, she poses a philosophical question about the worth of love. While the love objects of Forteguerri, Morra, and Stampa are very different (an emperor’s daughter, an absentee father, and a titled aristocrat), the Petrarchan themes in each of their narratives remain similar: the silence and/ or rejection by the poet’s beloved; the torment the poet suffers; the comparison of the beloved to a God or force in nature; the recognition of the beloved’s betrayal; the hostility of nature itself to the suffering poet; and finally, thoughts of suicide and/or prayers for divine intervention.

Gambara and Colonna in Book 10

Busdraghi’s production of Book 10 wrapped up the groundbreaking Giolitoinspired poetry series with a certain symmetry. Just as the publication of the two best known female poets in Italy in 1545 had opened up the new genre of the verse anthology to a token number of women, so the tenth and final book of the series concluded with a cornucopia of lyric poetry by fifty-three women, among whose works those of Colonna and Gambara still retained their status and their celebrity. Domenichi selected twenty-three poems from Gambara’s oeuvre for publication in his 1559 anthology. In comparison to Colonna’s twenty-five poems of this book, the majority of which are religious, Domenichi’s selections from Gambara’s oeuvre cover a variety of themes. There are nine poems here on the subject of love, only two of which appear to lament the death of her husband. Unlike Colonna’s amorose, all of which are devoted to the memory and mourning of her deceased husband Francesco d’Avalos, all but two of Gambara’s love poems appear to address unnamed lovers. Seven of Gambara’s sonnets in Book 10 are poems of praise or entreaties for peace addressing her longtime friend and protector the Emperor Charles V. A prayer for peace addresses both Charles and King Francis I of France; and an elegy laments the death of a friend. A pair of sonnets hymn the natural beauty of Brescia, Gambara’s patria; and a sonnet to Vittoria Colonna renounces the youthful love poetry that Gambara herself once wrote:

• Occhi lucenti et belli f. Le Rime 21).65

159 (On her lover’s beautiful eyes; Gambara,

65  All the numbers in this list refer to Bullock’s 1995 edition of Gambara.

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• Donna gentil, che così largamente f. 160 (Encomium for Maria d’Aragona, wife of Alfonso d’Avalos; Gambara, Le Rime 34). • Se, quando per Adone, over per Marte Stanze ff. 160–161. (On her lover’s beauty; Gambara, Le Rime 25). • Vero albergo d’Amore, occhi lucenti f. 152 (On her lover’s lovely eyes; Gambara, Le Rime 22). Dal • veder Voi, occhi sereni, e chiari f. 152 (On her love for her deceased beloved; Gambara, Le Rime 20). • Quel nodo, in cui la mia beata sorte f. 153 (On her love for her deceased husband; Gambara, Le Rime 28). • Se stan più ad apparir quel duo bei lumi f. 157 (On her lover’s beautiful eyes; Gambara, Le Rime 23). • Poscia che ’l mio destin fermo, et fatale f. 157 (On her burning, amorous desires; Gambara, Le Rime 19). • Mentre da vaghi, e giovenil pensieri f. 150 (renunciation of love poetry; Gambara, Le Rime 41). • Scelse da tutta la futura gente f. 158 (Religious, on predestination; Gambara, Le Rime 57). • de la nostra etade unica gloria f. 149 (Encomium for Vittoria Colonna; Gambara, Le Rime 42). • Altri boschi, altri prati, e altri monti f. 153 (funeral elegy for “Bardo”; Gambara, Le Rime 65). • Vinca gli sdegni e l’odio vostro antico f. 152 (to the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I, a plea for peace; Bullock: Rime lists as Colonna’s E:29).66 • La bella Flora, che da voi sol spera f. 152 (Gambara asks Charles V to preserve Florence from war; Gambara, Le Rime 49). • Guida con la man forte al camin dritto f. 154 (prayer for Charles V’s victory over the Turks; Gambara, Le Rime 40). • Quel, che di tutto il bel ricco Oriente f. 154 (encomium for Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 47). • Là dove più con le sue lucid’ onde f. 155 (encomium for Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 46). • Quella felice stella, è in ciel fatale f. 155 (encomium for Charles V; Gambara, Le Rime 48). • In giovenile etate il mondo vinse f. 156 (eulogy for Pope Paul III Alessandro Farnese, d. 1549; Gambara, Le Rime 60). • Honoratae acque, e voi liti beati f. 159 (praising Brescia’s landscape; Gambara, Le Rime 38).

66  Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women, 308, lists it as Gambara’s.

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• Poiché per mia ventura a veder torno f. 15 (on Brescia’s beauty; Gambara, Le Rime 37).

Among the twenty-five poems by Colonna that Domenichi selected to include in Book 10, twenty are classified by Bullock as spirituali, three as epistolari, and two as rime amorose. The prominence of Colonna’s rime spirituali in Book 10 contrasts sharply with Ruscelli’s selection of her verses the year before for publication in Book 8 of the anthologies, where the vast majority of Colonna’s poems have been classified as rime amorose, with her sonetti spirituali accounting for a small proportion of her works there.67 It is important to note that the following sonnets of Colonna’s appear for the first time in Book 10 and are not found in the earlier books of the Giolito anthologies. I list the capoversi only:

• Al buon Padre del Ciel per vario effetto Dom 1559, f. 214 (Bullock: Rime S1:168). • Alma, poiché di vivo, e dolce humore Dom 1559, f. 207 (Bullock: Rime S1:87). • Angel Beato, a cui il gran Padre espresse Dom 1559, f. 211 (Bullock: Rime S1:31). • Anima chiara, hor pur larga espedita Dom 1559, f. 213 (Bullock: Rime S1:163). • Anima, il Signor viene: homai disgombra Dom 1559, f. 215 (Bullock: Rime S1:19). Aprasi il Cielo, e di sue gratie tante Dom 1559, f. 208 (Bullock: Rime S1:23). • • Del mondo, e del nimico folle, e vano Dom 1559, f. 217 (Bullock: Rime S1:92). • Due modi habbiam da veder l’alte, e care Dom 1559, f. 213 (Bullock: Rime S1:165). • Di nuovo il cielo de l’antica gloria Dom 1559, f. 149 (Bullock: Rime E:13). • Donna accesa animosa, e da l’errante Dom 1559, f. 210 (Bullock: Rime S1:121). • Eterna Luna allhor, che fra’l Sol vero Dom 1559, f. 209 (Bullock: Rime S1:110). • Gli Angeli eletti al gran bene infinito Dom 1559, f. 208 (Bullock: Rime S1:24). • Il nobil vostro spirito non s’è involto Dom 1559, f. 212 (Bullock: Rime S1:140). • La bella donna, a cui dolente preme Dom 1559, f. 206 (Bullock: Rime S1:155).

67  These classifications are Bullock’s.

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• Lasciar non posso i miei saldi pensieri Dom 1559, f. 150 (Bullock: Rime A1:65). • L’occhio grande e divino; il cui valore Dom 1559, f. 217 (Bullock: Rime S1:80). Mira • l’alto principio, onde deriva Dom 1559, f. 206 (Bullock: Rime S1:86). • Non può meco parlar de l’infinita Dom 1559, f. 212 (Bullock: Rime S1:144). • Or veggio; chel ’l gran Sol vivo, e possente Dom 1559, f. 209 (Bullock: Rime S1:146). • Ovunque Io gli occhi, infermi fiso o’l core Dom 1559, f. 216 (Bullock: Rime S1:69).68 • Per far col seme suo buon frutto in Noi Dom 1559, f. 214 (Bullock: Rime S1:174). • Quando dal proprio lume, e da l’ingrato Dom 1559, f. 215 (Bullock: Rime S1:178). • Riman la gloria tua larga, e infinita Dom 1559, f. 210 (Bullock: Rime A1:57). • Rinasca in te il mio cor quest’almo giorno Dom 1559, f. 211 (Bullock: Rime S2:22). • Riverenza m’affrena, e grande amore Dom 1559, f. 207 (Bullock: Rime S1:20). • Talhor l’humana mente alzata a volo Dom 1559, 216 (Bullock: Rime S1:66). • Vinca gli sdegni, e l’odio vostro antico Dom 1559, f. 151 (Bullock: Rime E:29).69

Colonna’s spiritual poems in the final book in the series are striking in that they differ in theme, image, and idea from the poetry of any other woman poet in the Giolito-inspired anthology series. Her poems in Book 10 are markedly reflective of the intellectually formative years she spent as a member of Cardinal Pole’s reformist circle at Viterbo in the 1540s. Four themes stand out in Colonna’s religious sonnets in Book 10 (cited above): the emphasis on faith alone (sola fide) as the path to grace and God, as opposed to works; the personal, unmediated relationship of the Christian with Christ; the role of the Virgin Mary as mediatrix between humankind and Christ and Mary’s multifaceted role as role as mother and bride of Christ;70 and finally, the role of Mary Magdalene as the “first bride of Christ” and Jesus’s devoted disciple.71 The sonnet Vincere i cor

68   B ullock: Rime S1:69: Ovunque giro gli occhi o fermo il core. 69  See note 58 on Bullock’s mistaken attribution to Colonna. 70  B rundin 2005, 91, nn. 123–27 (S1:105; S1:107). 71  B rundin 2005, 77, nn. 73–76 (S1:121).

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piu saggi, e i Re piu alteri, which appears under Colonna’s name in Book 3 and Book 8, is attributed to Gambara by Domenichi in Book 10.72 Conclusion Colonna was primarily an intellectual, a writer, and an activist in the reform movement who sought in her prodigious oeuvre to come to grips with her religious beliefs, her spirituality, and her life as a widow. With the same intellectual and emotional charge that she brought to her spiritual poetry, Colonna expressed her homage to the power of secular love—for the husband she had lost after sixteen years of marriage, in the war with France. She remained a role model for several generations of women poets long after her death, powerfully articulating both her religious faith and her passionate longing for her deceased husband in the solo-authored editions of her poetry and the many anthologies in which her poems were published. Whereas Gambara’s lyric persona, though not expressed for the most part in religious or spiritual terms, projects loyalty to the memory of her husband, delight in her friendships and the pastoral beauty of her native land, and an enduring commitment to the members of her court, Colonna, on the other hand, expresses in her poetry her evangelical convictions, her unabated passion for her husband, and her devotion to her friends and family, despite her failure to allude to her publication of more than fifteen books of her own during in her lifetime—a feat in which she never ceased to deny interest or pride. Colonna’s unique voice and appeal for her female readers and writers, whether in her solo-authored books or in the anthologies, lay in her insertion, as Abigail Brundin has argued, of her own evangelism into the secular, mainstream genre of courtly Petrarchism.73 The women poets who read Colonna and Gambara in the anthologies—Forteguerri, Terracina, and Morra, and certainly subsequent generations of women writers—saw a model for themselves in her life and works, even though some younger female poets such as Stampa and Matraini may have looked more to Sappho (who was beginning to be known through the early translations of her by Longinus and others) and to Sappho’s translator, Catullus, for their inspiration.

72   B ullock: Rime attributes the sonnet to Colonna and lists it as E:27. 73  Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation, 170.

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Appendix: Abbreviations74



DOM 1545

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Book 1a. 1st ed. Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1545. Rime diverse di molti eccellentiss. auttori nuovamente raccolte. Libro primo. Con Gratia e Privilegio. Editor’s dedicatory letter by Lodovico Domenichi to Don Diego Hurtado di Mendozza. Poets include eightynine men; three women: Francesca Baffo, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

DOM 1546

Book 1b. 2nd ed. Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1546. Rime diverse di molti eccellentiss. auttori nuovamente raccolte. Libro primo, con nuova additione ristampato. Con Gratia and Privilegio. Same dedicatory letter by Lodovico Domenichi as above. Poets include ninety-seven men; five women: Francesca Baffo, Vittoria Colonna (listed here as Marchesa di Pescara), Laodamia Forteguerra, Veronica Gambara, Laura Terracina. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.



DOM 1549

Book 1c. 3rd ed. Reprint of the second edition. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

RIME DI DIVERSI 1547

Book 2a. 1st ed. Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1547. Rime di diversi nobili huomini et eccellenti poeti nella lingua thoscana. Libro secondo. Con Gratia e privilegio. Editor’s dedicatory letter by Giolito to S. F. dalle Torre. Poets include sixty-nine men; two women: Veronica Gambara and Guglia. Newberry Library Case. Y 7184.7452.



DELLE RIME 1548

Book 2b. 2nd ed. Delle rime di diversi nobili huomini et eccellenti poeti nella lingua thoscana. Nuovamente ristampate. Libro secondo. Con Privilegio. With the same dedicatory letter by Giolito to S. F. dalla Torre. Poets include sixty-three men; two women: Veronica Gambara and Guglia. Newberry Library Case. Y 7184.7452.

74  Abbreviations for all anthology editions of works by Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara are Bullock’s: Veronica Gambara, Le Rime (Florence, 1995), 38–45; and BULLOCK: RIME, 280–88.

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AR 1550

Book 3. Venice: Bartolomeo Cesana. Al Segno del Pozzo, 1550. [Libro terzo] delle rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori nuovamente raccolte. Mutilated title page is missing top and is pasted onto a new page. Bongi indicates title was Libro terzo delle rime, etc., as above.75 Editor’s dedicatory letter by Andrea Arrivabene to Luca Grimaldo. Poets include sixty-nine men; two women: Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. Newberry Library Case Y 7184.7482.

BOT 1551

Book 4. Bologna: Anselmo Giaccarello, 1551. Libro quarto delle rime di diversi eccellentiss. autori nella lingua volgare nuovamente raccolte. [No “privilegio” since it was published in Bologna.] Editor’s dedicatory letter by Hercole Bottrigaro to Giulio Grimmani. Poets include 81 men; 8 women: Giulia Aragona, Lucia Bertana, Gieronima Castellana, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Marguerite de Navarre (listed as la Regina di Navara [sic]), Verginia Salvi, and Faustina Vallentina. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.



DOL 1551



DOL 1552



DOL 1555

Book 5. 1st ed. Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1551–52. Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobiliss. intelletti; Nuovamente raccolte, et non piu stampate. Terzo libro. Editor’s dedicatory letter by Lodovico Dolce to S. Ferrante Carrafa dated December 9, 1551. Poets include thirty-six men; one woman: Isabella di Morra. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

Book 5a. 2nd ed. Venice: Giolito, 1552. Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobiliss. ingegni; Nuovamente raccolte, et con nuova addtione ristampate. Libro quinto. Con privilegio. New editor’s dedicatory letter by Lodovico Dolce to S. Ferrante Carrafa, dated 10 May 1552. Poets include fifty-five men; one woman: Isabella di Morra. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

Book 5b. 3rd ed. Venice: Giolito, 1555. Libro quinto delle rime di dibersi illsutri signori napoletani, e d’altri nobilissimi ingegni. Nuovamente raccolte, e con nova additione ristampate, allo illus. S. Ferrante Carrafa. Con privilegio. A third completely new

75  Salvatore Bongi, ed., Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato, 2 vols. (Rome, 1890, 1895).

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dedicatory letter by Lodovico Dolce to Carrafa, 11 May 1555. Poets include sixty-two men; one woman: Isabella di Morra. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.



RUSC 1553



DOL 1556



RUSC-2 1558

Book 6. Venice: Giovan Maria Bonelli, Al Segno del Pozzo, 1553. Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori, nuovamente raccolte, et mandate in luce. Con un discorso di Girolamo Ruscelli. Al molto reverendo, et honoratiss. Monsignor Girolamo Artusio. Con gratia e Privilegio. Edited by Ruscelli,76 with a dedicatory letter by Andrea Arrivabene to Monsignor Girolamo Artusio. Poets include 104 men; 8 women: Colette Pasquale, Gaspara Stampa, Ippolita Mirtilla, Maria Spinola, Tullia d’ Aragona, Veronica Gambara, Virginia Salvi, and Virginia Colonna. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

Book 7. Venice: Giolito, 1556. Rime di diversi signori napoletani ed’aktru nuovamente raccolte et imprese. Libro settimo. Con privilegio. Dedicatory letter by Lodovico Dolce addressed to Signor Mattheo Montenero Genovese. Poets include thirty-seven men; five women: Chiara Matraini, Lucretia di Raimondi, Laura Terracina, Caterina Pellegrina, and Isabella di Morra. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

Book 8.77 Venice: Gio. Battista & Melchior Sessa Fratelli, 1558. I fiori delle rime de’ poeti illustri, novamente raccolti et ordinati da Girolamo Ruscelli. Con Privilegii. Editor’s dedicatory letter by Ruscelli to Aurelio Porcelaga. Poets include thirty-seven men; two women: Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. Newberry Library. Case Y 7184.7452.

CON 1560

Book 9. Cremona: Vincenzo Conti, 1560. Rime di diversi autori eccellentiiss. Libro nono. Editor’s dedicatory letter by Vincenzo Conti to Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duca di Mantova. Poets include seventy-two men; three women: Lucia Bertana, Laura Battiferri, and Virginia Salvi.

76  Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, 1: 466. 77  See Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito, 1: 487–88, on volume eight of the Giolito anthology series.

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Book 10. Lucca: Vincenzo Busdragho, 1559. Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne, raccolte per M. Lodovico Domenichi, e intitolate al Signor Giannoto Castiglione gentil’huomo milanese. Editor’s dedicatory letter is by Lodovico Domenichi to Castiglione, and a second dedicatory letter is by the publisher of the volume Vincenzo Busdragho to Gerardo Spada (“gentilhuomo milanese”). Poets include fifty-three women; eight sonnets by male poets are also included in this anthology, almost all of which are responses to poems by women. Special Collections, University of Iowa Library PQ 4213 A5 D64.

Chapter 13

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna Virginia Cox That Vittoria Colonna was an exemplary woman was a truth universally acknowledged among sixteenth-century Italian observers. The only question that remained to be established, rhetorically, is quite how exemplary she was. Lodovico Ariosto set the bar high already in the 1532 edition of the Orlando furioso, where he singled the forty-year-old Colonna out as the archetype of the emerging cultural figure of the woman writer, saying that he had chosen her precisely in order to evade the invidious task of choosing a selection of contemporary women writers to name. Sceglieronne una; e sceglierolla tale che superato avrà l’invidia in modo che nessun’altra potrà havere a male se l’altre taccio, e se lei sola lodo.1 Ariosto presents Colonna’s superiority in this passage as self-evident, to the extent that no other woman could be offended at her being preferred. She inhabits a different sphere than the anonymous “others”: una and sola (unique and alone). Although this passage in Ariosto is already highly complimentary, Colonna is here being singled out only among female poets. In other texts, more ambitiously, we find her being proposed as superior to other women tout court. A striking example of this is offered by Giuseppe Betussi’s Delle donne illustri of 1545, a collection of female biographies combining a translation of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus with fifty new biographies of modern “illustrious women.” Betussi places Colonna last in his series of biographies, and “with good reason,” 1  “I shall choose one, and I shall choose her such that she will float above all envy, so that no lady can resent it if I am silent on the others, but praise this lady alone”: Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Cesare Segre, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1976), 954 (Canto 37, st. 16, ll. 1–4; punctuation amended). For discussion of the passage and its context, see Virginia Cox, “Women Writers and the Canon in Sixteenth-Century Italy: the Case of Vittoria Colonna,” in Strong Voices, Weak History: Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, ed. Pamela J. Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 14–31, here 17–19.

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as the author notes, because her excellence makes it proper that she should appear as a climax. I can conclude my list of illustrious women with her [Colonna] with good reason, for, just as she may be accounted the equal, if not the superior, of all those ancient and modern women worthies who have left a distinguished memory behind them, so also it may be judged that she embraces all the particular virtues and merits of the others.2 Colonna is described here quite explicitly as an epitome or summation of all that is best in womankind; indeed, in a later passage, Betussi suggests that laxer women should use her as an exemplary mirror in which to scrutinize themselves and recognize their flaws.3 While Betussi modestly holds back from proclaiming Colonna categorically the greatest woman (or secular woman) of all history, not all of her encomiasts were so cautious. An anonymous memorial lecture delivered in the Accademia Fiorentina to mark Colonna’s death in 1547 advances the thesis that the recently deceased poet had set a new bar for secular feminine achievement, outshining the legendary donne illustri of classical antiquity entirely. Greece need no longer boast of Sappho and Penelope; Rome of Corinna and Lucretia. In Colonna, the modern world had found an example of femininity that embraced both the moral virtue of Penelope and Lucretia, and the intellectual virtue of Sappho and Corinna, which had never in antiquity been found combined in a single figure.4 Here was a lady of stalwart moral integrity and propriety, yet renowned 2  “Ragionevolmente in costei posso per hora conchiudere il numero delle Donne illustri, la quale sì come al paro di quante degne antiche e moderne, c’habbiano lasciato degna memoria a noi, si può agguagliare, non voglio dir porre innanzi, così giuditio è ch’ella abbracci tutte le particulari virtù e meriti delle altre”: I cite from the second edition: Libro di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri, tradotto per Messer Giuseppe Betussi, con una additione fatta dal medesimo delle donne famose dal tempo di M. Giovanni fino a i giorni nostri, & alcune altre state per inanzi (Venice, 1547), 208v. Citations from sixteenth-century texts in this chapter have been slightly modernized in respect of accents and punctuation. All translations are my own. 3  Delle donne illustri, 210r: “Ma dell’essempio suo mi rivolgerò a tutte l’altre, e ciòè a quelle, che gittano i giorni suoi in delicatezze e lascivie, e le metterò inanzi gli occhi questo specchio, e lume di virtù.” 4  The text of the lecture may be found in Michel Plaisance, L’Accademia e il suo Principe: cultura e politica a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo I e di Francesco de’ Medici; L’Académie et le Prince: culture et politique à Florence au temps de Côme Ier et de François de Médicis (Manziana, 2004), 294–309.

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also for her erudition and poetic genius: a living reproach to the popular prejudice that associated learning in women with a propensity to sexual misconduct. The Renaissance liked its exempla. It liked its illustrious men, and it liked its illustrious women. Several factors within Renaissance culture combined to give special weight to discourses of exemplarity.5 There were humanistic factors, such as the salience the tradition of classical rhetoric gave to examples as imaginatively compelling modes of argument; and there were also Christian, devotional reasons, such as the long-engrained habit of modeling one’s spiritual identity on patterns offered by the saints, the Virgin, and, ultimately, Christ (this is an important source for Betussi’s mirror imagery). Even a fashion trend such as the vogue for emblems and devices encouraged the practice of epitomization and self-epitomization. “What do I represent?” the emblem asks. “What do I mean? What in me might serve to edify others?” Even within this general carnival of exemplarity, however, Vittoria Colonna seems to have been regarded as exemplarily exemplary. She becomes a shorthand for a certain modern ideal of femininity, in far more than the three texts cited above.6 The reason for this may in part be suggested by the 1547 Florentine lecture just referred to. The ancient world offered numerous examples of morally admirable women, exemplars of probity, fortitude, temperance, chastity, and marital devotion: both salient individuals, such as Lucretia, Penelope, and Artemisia, and collective female heroic subjects, such as the women of ancient Sparta, famed for a warlike patriotism that matched that of their men. Classical antiquity also offered a much smaller and somewhat shadowy cohort of intellectually outstanding women, including Sappho, the best attested; the Greek philosophers Aspasia and Diotima (the latter considered a historical figure); and a scattering of Roman poets and orators, such as Corinna and Hortensia. Examples of women who qualified on both counts were rare, except among the ranks of saints such as Catherine of Alexandria. Classical intellectual women were not infrequently characterized as immodest, such as the orator Gaia Afrania, mentioned by Valerius Maximus; or sexually wayward, such as Ovid’s (or pseudo-Ovid’s) Sappho. Even Scipio Africanus’s daughter Cornelia, 5  The classic study of exemplarity is Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1990). 6  For discussions of the encomiastic discourses surrounding Colonna, see Concetta Ranieri, “Vittoria Colonna: dediche, libri, e manoscritti,” Critica letteraria 47 (1985): 249–70; Mirella Scala, “Encomi e dediche nelle prime relazioni culturali di Vittoria Colonna,” Periodico della Società Storica Comense 54 (1990): 95–112; Cox, “Women Writers”; Kenneth Gouwens, “Female Beauty and the Embodiment of Virtue: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women,” Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015): 33–97.

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a rare example of a respectable Roman matron with a literary profile, was difficult to cite unequivocally as an instance of domestic exemplarity, given the character and fate of her sons, the Gracchi.7 By the early sixteenth century, therefore, an exemplum was needed quite urgently to lend discursive visibility and stability to the emerging type of the culturally active and intellectually aspiring secular noblewoman: the type that Betussi is intent on defining in his treatise, using precisely the example of Colonna. The fifteenth century had produced a few such examples, including several figures from Colonna’s own maternal line: Battista da Montefeltro Malatesta, in the early fifteenth century; Battista’s granddaughter, Costanza Varano; and Costanza’s daughter and Colonna’s grandmother Battista Sforza, wife of Federico da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino.8 These figures were, however, women praised for their erudition, rather than women whose eloquence might be sampled concretely by readers; and they lived before the spread of print technology and the strong emergence of the vernacular in the late fifteenth century had begun to disseminate the culture of the courts to the broader urban elites, male and female. It was only in the early sixteenth century—and, perhaps, precisely from the 1530s—that Italy had its first true national icons of female intellectual and moral exemplarity, in Colonna, and, to a slightly lesser extent, in Veronica Gambara, countess of Correggio: both poets, both widely respected intellectual figures, and both widows of exemplary reputation.9 A new cultural prototype was crafted, one of considerable diffusion: precisely that of the Florentine oration, the Sappho-Lucretia or the Penelope-Corinna. The functionality and cultural utility of the example represented by Colonna is strikingly illustrated by her survival as icon into the seemingly unpropitious terrain of later sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation Italy. Given Colonna’s strong associations with the Catholic Reform movement, and with controversial reformist intellectuals such as Bernardino Ochino, it might have been expected that her star would wane in the post-Tridentine period; or even that she might become a negative exemplum, of the danger that ­intellectual and spiritual curiosity could lead a woman into inappropriate religious s­ peculation. 7  On Cornelia, see Danielle Clarke, “Renaissance eloquence and female exemplarity: Coriolanus and the matrona docta,” Renaissance Studies 28 (2013): 128–46, esp. 132–37. On Gaia Afrania, see Laurie Caldwell, Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity (Cambridge, 2015), 28–29. On Ovid’s Sappho (in the Heroides), see Sara H. Lindman, Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (Madison, 2003), 155–75. 8  On these and other fifteenth-century “learned ladies,” see Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore, 2008), 2–17. 9  On the factors in Italian culture around 1530 that facilitated the emergence of Colonna and Gambara as national figures, see Cox, Women’s Writing, 37–79.

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In practice, however, this does not seem to have happened; rather, Colonna continued to be cited with respect by male writers, and to serve as a legitimizing example for female intellectuals, down to the late sixteenth century and beyond.10 To the instances I have noted elsewhere of Colonna’s late fortuna may be added an interesting portrait medal of her, probably made in the 1580s or 1590s, which represents her all’antica and with an extravagant top-knot hairstyle that may be intended to evoke the figure of Sappho in Raphael’s School of Athens (Figure 13.1).11 Philip Attwood has speculated that this work may have been produced as a commercial venture, rather than as a private commission.12 If so, this would be an intriguing illustration of the extent, as well as the durability, of Colonna’s appeal. Colonna’s fortunes in the sixteenth century are now reasonably well mapped in secondary literature, and it not my intention here to revisit this territory here. Instead, the intention of this essay is to examine the way in which Colonna herself used classical exempla as a medium for self-expression and self-fashioning. This seems a useful method to trial in the study of Renaissance culture. It offers a means of reading Renaissance lives that can help capture the distinctive and circular dynamic of self-exegesis and self-representation whereby humanists, and those influenced by humanistic culture, finetooled their identities and crafted their brands. It also helps to make salient an important medium of humanistic self-expression that we risk passing over as a kind of discursive wallpaper. Exempla are easily ignored in Renaissance texts, precisely because of their ubiquity. Our eyes can easily glaze over as we encounter the twentieth, or fiftieth, classical exemplum in a text we are reading—especially since many exempla familiar to Renaissance readers are scarcely household names today. Nonetheless, the language of classical exempla is one that is necessary to master in order to reach an adequate understanding of Renaissance humanistic culture, Latin and vernacular. It is a language, a signifying system; and, while many utterances in it are banal and conventional, it is possible to make interesting and sophisticated and distinctive utterances within this ­language, by using exempla in particular contexts and combinations (“combinations” should perhaps especially be stressed.) 10  See Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore, 2011), 56–57. 11   See Philip Attwood, Italian Medals, 1530–1600, 2 vols. (London, 2003), vol. 1, 427 (no. 1064). For the allusion to Sappho, see Marjorie Och, “Portrait Medals of Vittoria Colonna: Representing the Learned Woman,” in Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Shifrin (Aldershot, 2002), 153–63, here 155–56. 12  Attwood, Italian Medals, vol. 1, 31.

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figure 13.1 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.



Vittoria Colonna and the Language of Exemplarity

A good starting point in approaching this subject is offered by a rare theoretical statement by Colonna herself on the power of exempla and the dynamics of exemplarity. This occurs in a passage in a letter to Marguerite de Navarre of 15 February 1540, dating from an early point in the two women’s epistolary

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relationship.13 The passage concerning exemplarity occurs toward the beginning of Colonna’s letter: Since we all have need, in this long and difficult journey of life, of guides to show us the way with their learning, while at the same time spurring us on with their deeds to forget the fatigue of the journey; and since it seemed to me that exemplars of our own sex are more appropriate, and may be more decorously followed, I turned to the great ladies of Italy, to learn from them and imitate them. And, although I saw many who were worthy, I did not judge that there was any whom all the others might take almost as their norm. In one sole lady, outside Italy, could the perfections of the will be seen conjoined to those of the intellect.14 The first point Colonna makes here is simply that all need role models to help them in this difficult pilgrimage of life. Her second point concerns the definition of the particular forms of assistance that these exemplars will be able to provide. First, they will act as philosophical or spiritual guides, leading us on our way through their learning (dottrina); and, secondly, they should also be able to offer moral inspiration through their actions. Colonna’s third and final point is that we ideally need examples of our own sex, since these will be more appropriate to us (più proportionati), and since it will be more socially permissible (lecito) for us to follow them. Following this passage of theoretical reflection, Colonna recounts that she attempted to survey the women of Italy to find a role model meeting this prescription. She found many vertuose but none that could serve as an absolute norm—as a “mirror,” in the sense we saw in Betussi. Only outside Italy, in France, in Marguerite, did she find a woman who was qualified for this role, in that she combined perfection of intellect with perfection of will.15 The pairing of intellect and will here seems to refer back to the dual functionality that Colonna had identified in the ideal role model: that she should be able to show 13  See Carteggio, 185–88 (no. CXII). 14  “havendo noi bisogno in questa lunga et difficil via della vita di guida, che ne mostri il camino con la dottrina, et con l’opre insieme ne inviti a superar la fatica; et parendomi che gli essempii del suo proprio sesso a ciascuno sian più proportionati, et il seguir l’un l’altro più lecito; mi rivoltava alle donne grandi dell’Italia, per imparare da loro, et imitarle: et benchè ne vedessi molte vertuose, non però giudicava che giustamente l’altre tutte quasi per norma se la proponesseno: in una sola, fuor d’Italia, s’intendeva esser congioncte le perfettioni della volontà insieme con quelle de l’intelletto”: Carteggio, 186. 15  Carteggio, 187.

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the way through her “doctrine,” or teaching (almost certainly, in this context, conceived of as religious) and also to inspire through her deeds. One thing to note here is that the combination of intellect and moral excellence Colonna points to as unusual and exemplary in Marguerite is exactly what we saw the author of the 1547 Florentine academic “obituary” for Colonna point out as unusual and exemplary in her. This raises the important question of the degree to which Colonna, in her own meditations on exemplarity, helped script her own reception as an exemplary woman. As Abigail Brundin has noted, Colonna’s exchange with Navarre had a public dimension. The letter cited here appeared in print for the first time only two years after its date of composition, in the Aldine anthology Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini of 1542. Also contained in that anthology was a letter from Marguerite de Navarre to Colonna, reciprocating Colonna’s courtly compliments by proposing her in turn as a role model to be followed.16 As Brundin comments, “Although each woman seems to defer to the other, the indication is that they are undertaking a mutual process of self-assertion, subtly demonstrating their aptitude as models for imitation for other women, as writers, public figures, and spiritual mentors.”17 A second point worth underlining in the passage under discussion is that the kind of existential and ethical imitation on which the whole logic of exemplarity rests is modeled on the exercise of literary imitation. Colonna in this letter represents herself as working with a notion of exclusive imitation of a single model, comparable with the neo-Ciceronian literary imitation made fashionable by Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua of 1525. She represents herself as looking for a sole, insuperable, catch-all model, whom she can take as a norm (quasi per norma), just as poets all over Italy at this time were taking Petrarch, under Bembo’s guidance, as a norm. As in the case of literary imitation, however, so also in the case of ethical imitation, the Ciceronian, single-norm model was not the only one available. We find an alternative, eclectic model proposed by Angelo Poliziano, in his famous letter to Paolo Cortesi of the 1480s, which advises the apprentice writer to read widely and fuse a multitude of stylistic influences into one.18 Baldassarre Castiglione, whose own position on literary imitation was closer 16  Carteggio, 202–6 (CXX). 17  Abigail Brundin, “Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary,” Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 61–81, here 61–62. 18  On Renaissance theories of imitation, see Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1996). On Poliziano’s theory and practice of imitation, see 187–227.

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to Poliziano’s than Bembo’s, sketches a model of how this practice might be transferred into the sphere of existential self-formation in his discussion of the courtier’s training in arms in Book I of the Libro del Cortegiano. Whoever wishes to be a good pupil, besides doing things well, must always be most diligent in imitating his master, to the extent of actually becoming him, if that were possible. And when he feels he has made progress, it is very useful to observe various men in that profession, and, governing himself always with that good judgment that must always be his guide, to proceed by choosing various things, now from one man and now from another.19 A two-stage process of imitation is suggested here: the first using a single model or template; the second drawing on multiple models. The first is seen as an essential foundation; the second, as a more advanced technique to be employed once a basic level has been reached. In his subsequent development of the point regarding eclectic imitation, Castiglione employs the apian metaphor used by classical authors like Seneca and Quintilian in speaking of literary imitation. Like a bee gathering pollen from various flowers and fusing its gatherings into honey, so too the courtier must draw from a variety of human exempla, avoiding the kind of mindless aping of a single role model that can result in the hapless imitator even imitating his model’s flaws. Castiglione’s sketch of the way in which literary practices of imitation might serve as a model for the courtier’s self-scripting may be usefully borne in mind as we turn to examine the way in which Colonna uses exempla in her own public and dramatized performance of identity construction. Outside the encomiastic context of her letter to Navarre, Colonna is not a “Ciceronian” in her quest for inspirational guides. She does not search out a sole model, and seek to “become” her, as in Castiglione’s initial formula for the courtier’s selfformation. Rather, she ranges widely and draws on a diverse selection of classical exempla of famous women, like the Senecan bee grazing widely for pollen before producing a honey all her own.

19  “Chi adunque vorrà esser bon discipulo, oltre al far le cose bene, sempre ha da metter ogni diligenzia per assimigliarsi al maestro e, se possibil fosse, transformarsi in lui. E quando già si sente aver fatto profitto, giova molto veder diversi omini di tal professione e, governandosi con quel bon giudicio che sempre gli ha da esser guida, andar scegliendo or da un or da un altro varie cose”: Baldassar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Ettore Bonora, with a commentary by Paolo Zoccola (Milan, 1972–1981), 61 (1.26).

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The Type of the Ideal Wife

In embarking on an analysis of Colonna’s exemplary self-fashioning in practice, a good starting point is her earliest surviving poem, the capitolo “Eccelso mio signore, questa ti scrivo,” sometimes referred to by the genre title of pistola, or “epistle,” under which it appeared in its first printed edition, of 1536.20 This least representative of Colonna’s surviving poems is also one of her best known, due to its intriguing autobiographical subject-matter and its status as the earliest sustained attempt by a female poet in Italy to engage with the prime classical tradition of female-voiced love lyric, Ovid’s Heroides.21 Colonna adopts the Ovidian form of the verse epistle to lament her “abandonment” by her husband, who has gone north to fight for the Spanish forces and ended a captive of the French at the battle of Ravenna. More specifically, Colonna echoes Ovid’s letter of Penelope to Ulysses: a rare example in the Heroides of a marital love letter. Colonna has her poet-figure vividly recount her fear and trepidation and forebodings in her husband’s absence, like Ovid’s Penelope, using a markedly Latinate language and constant reference to the classical world. For much of the pistola, Colonna writes in a voice that broadly confirms and reinforces traditional perceptions of gender difference. Men are represented as bold and carefree, pursuing military honors regardless of the suffering they impose on the women they leave behind them, while women are depicted as tenderhearted and timorous, living for love as their husbands live for glory. This moral difference corresponds to spatial and kinetic differences familiar to any student of Aristotelian gender theory, whereby men move and quest in the wide world of travel and warfare, while women remain stationary in the home. At the end of the poem, however, in a sharp change of tone, Colonna’s poet reproaches her husband for leaving her behind when he went to war, punningly noting that, if he wanted victory, Vittoria, he should have taken her with him. She then names two classical wives whose husbands lived to regret 20  The text was first printed in Fabrizio Luna, Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi non meno oscuri che necessari (Naples, 1536), Gg1r–Gg2r. 21  For the text and for commentary, see Cox, Lyric Poetry, 77–83; also Carlo Vecce, “Vittoria Colonna: il codice epistolare della poesia femminile,” Critica letteraria 21 (1993): 3–34; Shannon McHugh, “Rethinking Vittoria Colonna: Gender and Desire in the Rime amorose,” The Italianist 33 (2013): 349–52. On the role of the Heroides as an inspiration for female-authored love lyric in the Italian Renaissance generally, see Patricia Phillippy, “ ‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid’s Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco,” Italica 69 (1992): 1–18; Cox, Lyric Poetry, 16–17.

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leaving them behind when they went into danger (Cornelia, wife of Pompey, and Marcia, wife of Cato the Younger), and one, more exotic example of a wife who accompanied her husband into battle, Hypsicratea, wife of Mithridates of Pontus.22 Se Vittoria volevi io t’era a presso, ma tu, lasciando me, lassasti lei, e cerca ognun seguir chi fugge adesso. Nocque a Pompeo, come saper tu dei, lasciar Cornelia, et a Catone ancora nocque lassando Marsia in pianti rei. Seguir se deve il sposo dentro e fora, e s’egli pate affanno, ella patisca, e lieto lieta, e se vi more mora; a quel che arrisca l’un l’altro s’arrisca; equali in vita, equali siano in morte, e ciò che avien a lui a lei sortisca. Felice Mitridate e sua [sic] consorte, che faceste equalmente di fortuna i fausti giorni e le disgratie torte!23

93 96 99 102 105

Colonna’s source for her two Roman examples is likely to be Lucan’s Pharsalia or Bellum civile. Lucan shows Cornelia accompanying Pompey in his war against Caesar in Greece, but toward the end of Book 8, Pompey leaves her to row across to his death on the Egyptian shore, as she bewails being left behind (lines 575–662).24 Earlier in the same book, in lines that may have influenced 22  Cox, Lyric Poetry, 79, following the text of the first (Luna) edition. 23  “If you wanted Victory [Vittoria], I could have been at your side; but you, in leaving me, also left her, and now all seek to follow her as she flees. It harmed Pompey, as you must know, to leave his wife Cornelia; and Cato too regretted leaving his wife Marcia weeping. A wife should follow her husband at home and abroad; if he suffers hardship, let her suffer too; if he is fortunate, let her share in his happiness; if he dies, let her die alongside him. What one spouse risks, the other should risk; they are equal in life; let them be equal in death; what he undergoes, let her too undergo. O happy Mithridates and his wife, who equally shared in all Fortune brought, both the days of victory and the distress that followed!” 24   De bello civili libri X, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Stuttgart, 1988), 215–18. For discussion of the female figures in Lucan, see Ruth R. Caston, “Lucan’s Elegiac Moments,” in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden, 2011), 133–52, esp. 136–41, on Marcia, and 142–46 on Cornelia.

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Colonna’s self-representation as abandoned and grieving wife in Ischia earlier in the pistola, Lucan represents Cornelia on the island of Lesbos, where Pompey had left her for safe keeping, racked with presentiments of disaster and gazing from the cliff-tops to see whether she can glimpse a sail bringing her husband to her (lines 40–54).25 The Cornelia-Pompey example is reinforced as a prototype within Lucan’s own text, as he gives Marcia a speech in Book 2 of the poem begging Cato to take her with him to the battlefield (da mihi castra sequi), just as Pompey took Cornelia (lines 348–49); this may have linked the two figures in Colonna’s mind.26 Where the Hypsicratea example is concerned, the most likely source is Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, which was widely available in manuscript, and had been printed in Venice in 1506.27 In total, then, in the pistola, we have quite a rich and distinctive and unexpected mosaic of classical exempla, fused together to form a composite of the heroic political or military wife. Penelope is present to evoke constancy, chastity, and shrewd custodianship of the family home in her husband’s absence, and Marcia, Cornelia and Hypsicratea to represent women prepared to undergo physical danger and duress to follow their husbands, in good times and bad—Cornelia and Marcia in a decorous Roman manner; Hypsicratea in a more exotic, cross-dressed, virilized, warlike guise. Reinforcing the element of virilization and militarization of the heroic wife in Colonna’s poem, the poem also contains an allusion, embedded in the v­ittoria-Vittoria pun, to Colonna’s classical-goddess onomastic archetype Victoria or Nike, who was charioteer to Jove during the war between the Olympians and the Titans. Given the humanistic character of her family’s culture and nomenclature (Colonna’s brothers included a Camillo and an Ascanio, along with a less classicizing Federico), it seems unlikely that Colonna was unaware of the classical resonances of her “fateful name” (fatale nomen), and the tales of the goddess who bore it.28 Colonna’s cousin Pompeo Colonna, in the dedicatory letter of his Apologia mulierum, probably written ca. 1529–32, writes to the modern Vittoria of the beauty and prudence of her classical

25   De bello civili, 196–97. 26  Ibid., 36. 27  For Boccaccio’s (highly laudatory) biography of Hypsicratea, see Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 323–29. 28  For the “fateful name” topos, see Walter Cupperi, “Il nome fatale di Vittoria: note su due medaglie della Marchesa di Pescara,” in Lo sguardo archeologico: i normalisti per Paul Zanker, ed. Francesco De Angelis (Pisa, 2007), 239–53, esp. 239, note 1, and 243–47.

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­ amesake, and recalls her role in counseling Jove in his defeat of the Titans.29 n This appears to be a reference to Book 2 of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca: an arcane text, but seemingly known, on this evidence, within Colonna’s family circle. Nonnus’s account of the Titan wars gives unusual salience to the figure of Nike, whom he makes a daughter of Zeus, reporting verbatim an exhortation she delivers to her father on the eve of the battle, as well as showing her assisting him in battle.30 Keeping this self-portrait as military wife in the verse epistle in mind, we may turn now to a visual representation of Colonna as wife: a striking portrait medal of the 1520s or the early 1530s, recently identified by Philip Attwood and Walter Cupperi as by Giovanni Bernardi da Castelbolognese.31 The medal bears an image of Colonna on one side, facing right, and her husband on the other side, facing left, circled by their names, in the form VICTORIA COLUMNA DAVALA and FER[RANS] FRA[NCISCUS] PISC[ARIE] MAR[CHIO] CAE[SARIS] DUX MAX[IMUS] (Figures 13.2 and 13.3). Both figures are portrayed all’antica. D’Avalos wears a splendid plumed, Greek-style helmet, while Colonna is similarly portrayed in antique dress and with a complex all’antica hairstyle. A tiny star, difficult to see in reproduction, hangs above her head under the “N” of COLUMNA. A rarer variant of the medal, surviving in a single copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, shows the Colonna image on the obverse and an allegory featuring a winged Victory and a military triumph on the reverse.32 29  Pompeo Colonna, Apologia mulierum. In difesa delle donne, ed. Franco Minonzio (Como, 2015), 141 for the Latin text; 83 for an Italian translation. I have followed Minonzio’s hypothesis for the dating of the treatise. 30  See Nonnus de Panopolis, Les Dionysiaques, trans. Francis Vian et al., 18 vols. (Paris, 1976– 2003), vol. 1, esp. 113–16 (Book 2, lines 205–37); see also ibid., 76, for discussion for Nike’s role in the poem. On Nonnus’s fortuna in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries see Luisa Ciammitti, “Dosso as a Story-Teller: Reflections on His Mythological Paintings,” in Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and Salvatore Settis (Los Angeles, 1998), 83–112, here 89–90. 31  Attwood, Italian Medals, vol. 1, 373; Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 247–48. For bibliography on the medal, see Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 240, note 4, to which should be added Och, Portrait Medals, 156; Novella Macola, Sguardi e scritture: figure con libro nella ritrattistica italiana della prima metà del Cinquecento (Venice, 2007), 44; Gouwens, “Female Beauty,” 57–58. For a reproduction, see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna. Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos (Vienna, 1997), 137 (I. 54). 32  For discussion, see Och, Portrait Medals, 155; Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 245–47; George F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini (London, 1930), vol. I, 299 (no. 1154). Hill identifies the image as a restitution. The allegory shows a Roman military

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Figure 13.2 Italian, Medal of Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

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Figure 13.3 Italian, Medal of Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, sixteenth century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The dating of the medals is uncertain, although the inscription identifying Ferrante d’Avalos on the double portrait medal provides a terminus post quem of early 1524, when d’Avalos assumed the office of general of the imperial army (CAESARIS DUX MAXIMUS) on the death of Prospero Colonna.33 If Attwood and Cupperi’s attribution of the medal to Bernardi is correct, then the likeliest time for a commission of this kind seems after around 1530, when Bernardi moved to Rome, although the allegorical medal in particular would match well with the period following the Battle of Pavia in February 1525, when d’Avalos was celebrated by many poets as the proud possessor of “two victories” (victoriae/vittorie), prior to his death in early December of that year. Whether the medals were commissioned by Colonna and/or d’Avalos themselves, or by someone in their circle, is destined to remain uncertain unless new documentary evidence emerges. Cupperi has suggested Paolo Giovio as a possibility, partly on the strength of his closeness to the artist.34

triumph flanked by a crowned female figure, perhaps Italy, and a winged Victory holding a shield and a cross. 33  Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 251. 34  Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 248–50.

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The double-portrait medal of Colonna and d’Avalos is a fascinating artifact from the point of view of gender representation, deserving of being considered alongside other spousal portrait diptychs such as that famously crafted by Piero della Francesca of Colonna’s maternal grandparents, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, now in the Uffizi. The portrait of Colonna is especially striking. All’antica portraits of Italian noblewomen were not completely unprecedented at this time, but the choice to be represented in ­classical, rather than contemporary, style was still extremely unusual; and two features of Colonna’s representation are still more unwonted. One is the style of her hair, which is portrayed as half-up, but with strands loose and falling down the back of her neck. The other, more immediately striking, is that the figure in the Colonna portrait is portrayed with one breast bared. Both these features are sufficiently unusual to deserve comment. Although it looks perfectly decorous to us today, it seems likely that the hairstyle of the Colonna medal may have struck observers of the time as unconventional and perhaps even daring, especially in a married woman. Most portraits of women on Italian Renaissance medals that seek to recall classical models show their hair fully up, in styles reminiscent of those worn by ancient empresses such as Faustina on Roman coins.35 As a precedent for the looser and more fanciful hairstyle seen on the Colonna medal, a medal of Caterina Sforza’s might be cited, seemingly datable to the early years of her first marriage, in the 1480s, and especially close to the Colonna medal in its language (Figure 13.4). Caterina is similarly shown in classical garb and with her hair up, though with one strand falling loose.36 Closer to the Colonna medal in time, another example of a female portrait medal showing the sitter with her hair caught up but loose at the back—though in a style notably more flamboyant than those of Colonna or of Caterina Sforza—is a famous medal of Isabella d’Este by Giancristoforo Romano, dating from 1498 (Figure 13.5). Evelyn Welch has recently underlined the novelty of Isabella’s hairstyle in the Romano medal, 35  On the importance of Faustina (or the two Faustinas) as a prototype for female medal portraits, see Luke Syson, “Consorts, Mistresses and Exemplary Women: The Female Medallic Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in The Sculpted Object, 1400–1700, ed. Stuart Currie and Peta Motture (Aldershot, 1997), 43–64, esp. 44–45 and 48–50. 36  See Joyce de Vries, “Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and Representation at the Italian Renaissance Court,” in Women’s Art Journal 24 (2003): 23–28. A nonmedallic portrait, also of the fifteenth century, that recalls the Colonna medal in terms of the hairstyle represented, is a bas relief of Colonna’s grandmother Battista Sforza, in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini and probably dating from before 1482. I am grateful to Melissa Swain for pointing out this parallel.

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Figure 13.4 Italian, Medal of Caterina Sforza, 1495. London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum.

and the challenge it offered to decorum. Welch cites it, along with a medal representing Isabella’s sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia of 1505 as rare instances of married women being portrayed with their hair wholly or partially loose.37 The Isabella d’Este medal has particular relevance to the Colonna one, since it also offers a precedent for the star motif found in the Colonna medal, which has sometimes been taken as indicative that the subject of the portrait was dead.38 In the case of the d’Este medal, the star, found on the reverse of the medal, is accompanied by a Sagittarius, indicative of astral influence and its role in determining Isabella’s genius (Figure 13.6). It seems likely that the probable author of the Colonna medal, Giovanni Bernardi, knew the d’Este medal, 37  Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 241–68, esp. 246–47. For discussion of the Isabella d’Este medal, see Luke Syson, “Reading Faces: Giancristoforo Romano’s Medal of Isabella d’Este,” in La corte di Mantova nell’età di Andrea Mantegna: 1450–1550/The Court of Mantua in the Age of Andrea Mantegna, 1450–1550, ed. Cesare Mozzarelli, Robert Oresko, and Leandro Ventura (Rome, 1997), 281–94. 38  See Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 241, for a summary of interpretations of the star motif. Cupperi himself reads it as an allusion to Colonna’s dead husband (ibid., 22–43).

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as he worked for Isabella’s brother, Alfonso d’Este, in the early part of his career, and it also seems far from impossible that Colonna herself was acquainted with this image, which was widely distributed.39 The medal’s author, Giancristoforo Romano, visited Naples in 1507, taking a copy of his medal of Isabella with him, at a time when the young Colonna was living on Ischia with her future husband’s aunt, Costanza d’Avalos. A letter from the Mantuan ambassador in Naples records that the medal won the warm admiration of noblewomen there.40 It is much more difficult to find precedents for the other notable detail of the representation of the figure on the Colonna medal, the bared breast. There are no precedents for representations of identifiable contemporary aristocratic women, as far as I have been able to discover, though there are a very few examples later in the century (Giovanni Battista Cambi, detto Bombarda (d. 1582), represents his wife Leonora in that guise (Figure 13.7), as also the wife of the poet Giovanni Battista Pigna and an otherwise unidentified Anna Maurella Oldofredi d’Iseo).41 A possible precedent in paint would be Piero di Cosimo’s supposed portrait of Simonetta Vespucci in the Musée Condé, Chantilly; yet the arguments for the identification of Piero’s sitter as Simonetta are very far from watertight, and, even if they were to be accepted, this would merely make the Colonna medal highly unusual for the era.42 If the detail of the loose hair in the Colonna portrait is unusual and provocative by contemporary standards of decorum, the detail of the bared breast flaunts sartorial decorum to such an extent that it seems problematic to categorize the medal’s representation as a portrait in any literal manner. Rather than Colonna herself, it seems likely that we are intended to understand this medallic microportrait as representing some classical archetype allusive to Colonna or representative of her virtues: a “fantasy portrait,” to appropriate

39  On the distribution of the medal, see Syson, Reading Faces, 286. 40  Ibid., 287–88. 41  See John Graham Pollard, with the assistance of Eleonora Luciano and Maria Pollard, Renaissance Medals, vol. 1: Italy. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2007), 526–27 (no. 523) and 530 (no. 528); Christine Chiorian Walken, Beauty, Power, Propaganda, and Celebration: Profiling Women in Sixteenth-Century Italian Commemorative Medals (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2012), 92–99. 42  The arguments in favor of the identification of the Chantilly image as Simonetta may be found in Dennis Geronimous, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven, CT, 2007), 56–59. The case against this identification is argued in Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention, and Fantasia (London, 1993), 93–95.

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Figure 13.5

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Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, 1505 (recto). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Figure 13.6

Gian Cristoforo Romano, Medal of Isabella d’Este, 1505 (verso). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett. Image courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum.

a term used by Dennis Geronimous of Piero’s supposed portrait of Simonetta Vespucci.43 Walter Cupperi and Kenneth Gouwens have both suggested, independently, that the image may allude to Colonna’s name-goddess Victoria-Nike, 43  See, by contrast, Gouwens, Female Beauty, 57–58, who reads the image as a literal portrait of Colonna. On the exemplary and non-naturalistic character of female Renaissance medallic portraits generally, see Syson, Consorts. For an example of a later sixteenth-­ century coin representing the subject as a classical figure (in this case, probably Athena), see Attwood, Italian Medals, 284 (no. 653).

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

Figure 13.7

485

Andrea Cambi, called Bombarda, Leonora, Wife of Andrea Cambi, the Medalist, late sixteenth century. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

noting that this figure is often represented bare-breasted.44 This seems an attractive suggestion, given the onomastic connection, although it is problematized by the absence of that goddess’s main identifying attribute of 44  Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 243–47; Gouwens, Female Beauty, 61.

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wings. Images of winged Victories make frequent appearances on Renaissance medals, appearing, for example, on the reverse of the medals of Caterina Sforza and of Isabella d’Este discussed above. We also see an image of a winged Victory on the reverse of a portrait medal of Ferrante d’Avalos in Vienna, where a pun similar to the one Colonna herself makes in the pistola (“Se Vittoria volevi . . .”) is almost certainly intended.45 Although a wingless Victory is not inconceivable, perhaps—Pausanias mentions a temple to an Apteros Nike on the Acropolis—in the usual iconography of Victory, wings would be not only expected but defining. Another interesting suggestion of a possible identification for the figure on the Colonna medal has been advanced by Marjorie Och, that it may be an allusion to the traditional iconography of the Amazons, who are often shown with one breast bared.46 This suggestion seems worth pursuing given the allusion to the warrior couple Mithridates and Hypsicratea in Colonna’s pistola, and her flirtation there, more generally, with the notion of the husband-wife couple venturing forth together to war. Although the popular notion of Amazons does not associate them with marriage, a married Amazon does exist in Greek mythology, in the form of Hippolyta, the wife of Theseus. The pair feature saliently in Boccaccio’s Teseida, where their relationship is treated romantically, and Hippolyta (or Ippolita) is described as a model of beauty and of political sagacity, as well as of military valor. This reflects the generally positive connotations of Amazons and warrior women in humanistic art and literature, where they are often associated with a model of combative chastity similar to that of Diana, as well as with virile achievement in any field: the kind of logic that led Poliziano to address the learned Cassandra Fedele in a letter with Virgil’s apostrophe to his warrior-maiden Camilla, O decus Italiae virgo.47 Whether the Colonna portrait medal alludes to Victoria or Hippolyta, or more generically to the type of the classical warrior woman, it does seem probable that some such martial and active classical female prototype is intended by the bare-breasted figure. Unlike Bombarda’s later medallic portraits of barebreasted women, with their elaborate jewelry and intricately braided hair, the Colonna image is relatively austere, with some allusion to action possibly encoded in the detail of the partially loose hair. This does not, of course, mean, that the portrait is not also intended to display the subject’s beauty, 45  The medal is illustrated in Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna, 84 (I. 27). 46  Och, Portrait Medals, 156. On the artistic tradition of representing Amazons with a single breast bared, see Edward J. Olszewski, “The Amazon in Rosso Fiorentino’s Uffizi Moses,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 28 (2008): 25–29. 47  Cox, Women’s Writing, 18.

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

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as is very clearly the case in the Bombarda images. As the example of Boccaccio’s Hippolyta, or the golden-haired Bradamante of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso well demonstrate, the Renaissance imagination had no difficulty in ­seeing “virile” prowess and fortitude combined with feminine beauty in a single figure. Indeed, this is close to the formula of Paolo Giovio’s description of Colonna in his Dialogus de viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus, of around 1527, which contains an extended blazon of her physical beauty, incorporating a surprisingly voluptuous description of her breasts; but which, at the same time, emphasizes the “virile severity” of her actions in the public sphere, and her knowledge of political and military affairs.48 Concluding this section, we may say that Colonna’s pistola, quite explicitly, and probably also the Bernardi double-portrait medal, more allusively, express an ideal of a marriage of equals, a marriage of heroes, like that of Mithridates and Hypsicratea: not the traditional, “separate spheres” ideal of the chaste and beautiful noblewoman married to the brave and strong knight, but something less gender-differentiated and more truly equal. The ideal is close to that ­articulated by Ariosto in his Orlando furioso in the figures of Ruggiero and Bradamante, again using the trope of the warrior woman. The cultural tradition of the warrior couple should probably not be seen as indicative of any literal notion that women should accompany their husbands into war, even though this is something that cannot be entirely excluded. We find a few examples of modern warrior women in lists of donne illustri, such as the Orsina Visconti and Bona Lombarda of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Gynevera, de le clare donne (ca. 1490), both of whom are represented as exemplary wives as well as women of exceptional valor.49 Within Colonna’s own circle, Paolo Giovio praises Vittoria’s illegitimate half-sister Beatrice Colonna, for participating actively in the war that her husband, Rodolfo da Varano, waged in 1527 to oust his stepmother Caterina Cibo from Camerino. Giovio speaks of Beatrice as “wielding arms, mustering troops, and strenuously conducting war, dividing the labors with her husband.”50 48  Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 373, 502–33. The phrase “virile severity” (virilis severitas) is found at 520. For discussion of Giovio’s encomium, see Gouwens, Female Beauty, esp. 54–55, 77; also Diana Robin, “The Breasts of Vittoria Colonna,” California Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 1–15. 49  Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Gynevera, de le clare donne, ed. Corrado Ricchi and Alberto Bacchi della Lega (Bologna, 1887). Orsina Visconti’s biography is also found, derivatively, in Jacopo Filippo Foresti, De claris selectisque mulieribus (1497) and in Betussi, Delle donne illustri. 50  Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 502 [“arma impigre tractare, auxilia cogere, et strenue divisis cum viro muneribus bellum gerere”].

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Giovio says nothing of the kind of Vittoria Colonna, although he does emphasize in some detail her theoretical expertise in military matters, which he attributes to her having been raised viriliter in a military household.51 It seems likely that, in Colonna herself, as in Ariosto, the warrior couple came to express the ideal of a husband-wife pair both marked by virility, in the sense of a capacity for the kind of qualities reserved for men within a traditionalist, Aristotelian-scholastic gendered virtue system, such as spirit, courage, valor, rationality, eloquence, and capacity for command.52 Military prowess lent itself well to expressing this diverse set of virtues metonymically, and the image of the courageous and beautiful armed woman became one of the icons of the age, appearing frequently in literature and also in artworks, such as Mantegna’s armed Minerva, painted for the studiolo of Isabella d’Este (Figure 13.8). Colonna’s flirtation with this imagery offers an interesting anticipation of later female writers’ interest in the figure of the guerriera, married or otherwise, with Moderata Fonte’s Risamante and Margherita Sarrocchi’s Rosmonda particularly interesting examples.53

The Type of the Ideal Widow

The set of exempla that have interested us up to this point—Penelope, Cornelia and Marcia, Hypsicratea, perhaps Hippolyta—are all of wives remarkable for their devotion to their husbands, as well as for their own prudence or valor. After Colonna’s widowhood, we also find her engaging with a second set of examples, of widows and other women famed for their grief at the loss of their loves. Colonna’s most interesting writing on this theme is found in her canzone Mentre la nave mia, longe dal porto—one of her most remarkable and original poems, although a text that has attracted surprisingly little critical attention to date.54 The date of the poem cannot be ascertained, though it was certainly written before 1538, when Colonna’s verse was first published.

51  Ibid., 522. 52  On the Aristotelian-scholastic sex-gender system, and on humanists’ contestation of it, see Cox, Women’s Writing, 19–23. 53  See Cox, Prodigious Muse, 179–83. 54  For the text and a commentary, see Cox, Lyric Poetry, 141–45. The text is also discussed in Maria Serena Sapegno,” La costruzione d’un ‘io’ poetico al femminile nella poesia di Vittoria Colonna,” Versants 46 (2003): 15–48, esp. 33–37.

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Figure 13.8

Andrea Mantegna, Detail of Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, ca. 1520. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Gérard Blot, courtesy of Réunion des musées nationaux/ Art Resource, New York.

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The canzone, which comprises six twelve-line stanzas, takes the form of a syncrisis or comparatio, one of the progymnasmata identified by classical rhetorical theorists, consisting of an evaluative comparison of two or more things. In Priscian’s definition, the syncrisis is “a comparison of similar or dissimilar things, or of lesser things to greater or greater things to lesser.”55 Across the first four stanze of the poem, Colonna’s poet compares her suffering, as grieving widow, to five classical heroines famed for the strength of their love and the depths of the suffering induced by erotic loss. The first four of the heroines derive from Ovid’s Heroides, as Maria Serena Sapegno has noted. The first, reprised from the 1512 poem, is Penelope, grieving in the absence of Ulysses. The second, also from the Trojan war, is Laodamia, newly married wife of Protesilaus, who killed herself after hearing of her husband’s death. The third and fourth, rather unexpectedly, are women abandoned by their lovers who found an outlet in anger and indignation, Ariadne and Medea. The fifth heroine, Portia, wife of Brutus, Caesar’s assassin, is the only non-Ovidian example and marks a return to Colonna’s favored type of the loyal wife. Following these extended comparisons, Colonna’s poem then briefly alludes to endless other “exemplars of true and false love” (“esempi . . . di veri e falsi amori”), evoked in a way that recalls the damned lovers of Canto V of Dante’s Inferno.56 She then concludes that her suffering is greater than that of all of these figures, since it has no escape or conclusion, whether through anger, madness, or suicide. Together with the letter to Marguerite de Navarre, Mentre la nave mia constitutes Colonna’s richest metaliterary meditation on exemplarity. Especially interesting is the element of religious critique of the practice of drawing exemplary ethical models from Greek and Roman pagan culture. Suicide is ruled out as a solution in the canzone because a Christian woman cannot find this same exit route from despair without forfeiting her eternal soul and the prospect of being reunited with her beloved in heaven. This is addressed very explicitly in the fourth stanza, dealing with Portia; the poet’s hope of the alma serena vita immortal leads her to tolerate her present, intolerable life:

55  The term comparatio appears in Giovanni Maria Cattaneo’s Latin translation of Apthonius, first published in 1507; see 159r–v of the Aldine rhetorical compendium of 1523 ­(Continentur hoc volumine. Georgii Trapezuntii Rhetoricorum libri V . . .). Priscian’s definition may be found at 154v of the same edition (“Comparatio est vel similium, vel diversorum, vel minorum ad maiora, vel maiorum ad minora collatio”). Translations of the main Greek discussions of the exercise may be found in George A. Kennedy, ed., Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2003). 56  For the Dantean allusions, see Cox, Lyric Poetry, 145.

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The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

Porzia sovra d’ogn’altra me rivolse tant’al suo danno che sovente insieme piansi l’acerbo martir nostro equale; ma parmi il tempo che costei si dolse quasi un breve sospir; con poca speme d’altra vita miglior le diede altr’ale; e nel mio cor dolor vivo e mortale siede mai sempre, e de l’alma serena vita immortal questa speranza toglie forza a l’ardite voglie; né pur sol il timor d’eterna pena, ma ’l gir longi al mio Sol la man raffrena.57

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Colonna’s argument here recalls Augustine’s City of God, which uses the example of Portia’s father Cato, along with Lucretia, in its famous critique of the pagan cult of heroic suicide. Augustine counterposes this classical notion of fortitude exhibited in action with a Christian notion of fortitude exhibited in suffering, exactly as Colonna does in the poem.58 We find a similar argument rehearsed by Veronica Gambara in a sonnet of her widowhood, Quel nodo in cui la mia beata sorte. Gambara’s perspective, however, is exclusively Christian; it differs from Colonna’s and Augustine’s in its lack of an explicit allusion to the difference between Christian and classical ethical norms.59 As in the case of the 1512 terza rima poem, we can find echoes of the themes of Mentre la nave mia in one of Colonna’s portrait medals, this one with a certain terminus post quem of her widowhood. This medal shows on the obverse, Colonna wearing a widow’s veil and conventional modern clothing (Figure 13.9). On the reverse, we see a phoenix burning in its eternal fire, looking to the sun, surrounded by a laurel wreath (Figure 13.10).60 The c­ ontrast with 57  “Portia above all others drew me so to her pain that I often wept together with her over our same cruel torment. But the time she suffered seems to me merely that of a brief sigh; with little hope of another, better life, she fled from this. Yet in my heart, living mortal pain presides always, and my rash promptings are held back by the hope of immortal life. Nor does only the prospect of eternal punishment restrain my hand but the thought of being far from my Sun.” 58  See especially Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1957–72), vol. I, 82–91 and 96–107. 59  For the text, see Cox, Lyric Poetry, 133. 60  For discussion, see Cupperi, Il nome fatale, 251, note 35; Och, Portrait Medals, 157–58; Attwood, Italian Medals, vol. 1, 420 (no. 1030). Another medal of Colonna using the widow portrait has a column with a laurel branch on the reverse; see Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna, 143 (I. 58).

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Figure 13.9 Italian, Vittoria Colonna Medal, sixteenth century (recto). London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum.

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Figure 13.10 Italian, Vittoria Colonna Medal, sixteenth century (verso). London, The British Museum. Image courtesy of The British Museum.

the medal discussed earlier is striking: the all’antica style has been a­ bandoned, and the portrait offers what almost seems an inversion or erasure of the previous image, with the figure’s hair and breasts as rigorously covered as they had been displayed before. The trajectory is reminiscent of that found in Caterina Sforza’s successive medals, with the classicizing type mentioned earlier ­succeeded in later medals by a modern, “straight” representation of the sitter as widow. In the catalogue of the 2005 Casa Buonarroti exhibition on Colonna and Michelangelo, the Colonna-phoenix medal is identified as posthumous, on the strength of the use of the initial “D” for DIVA to introduce Colonna’s name.61 While it is true that that the term divus/diva should be reserved for the dead and deified, according to classical usage, Renaissance portrait medal practice is not consistent on that score; there are several examples of medals produced during the lives of their sitters that use this convention.62 It seems quite possible, then, that this medal was issued during Colonna’s lifetime, and, indeed, the visual language of the medal seems quite consonant with Colonna’s self-crafting in the canzone as a new and anticlassical model of heroic widow, combining the fierce, live-consuming love of the great pagans 61  Fiorenza Vannel Toderi, in Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence, 2005), 108 (no. 29). 62  Syson, Consorts, 48.

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The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

with the endurance and submission to God’s will required of a Christian. The phoenix clearly alludes to the hope of immortality, the same hope that saves the poet from suicide in the canzone. Yet the bird may also be taken as a reference to Colonna’s state of perpetual burning in life—in the sense of perpetual pain—as she looks to the sun beyond, which figures in her poetry as a metaphor both of her dead husband and of Christ. The phoenix is referenced within the canzone itself, in the final stanza before the congedo, in precisely this sense: Onde a che volger più l’antiche carte de’ mali altrui, né far de l’infelice schiera moderna paragon ancora, se ’nferior ne l’altre chiare parte, e ’n questa del dolor quasi fenice mi veggio rinovar nel foco ognora? Perché ’l mio vivo Sol dentro innamora l’anima accesa e la copre e rinforza d’un schermo tal che minor luce sdegna, e su dal Ciel l’insegna d’amar e sofferir, ond’ella a forza in sì gran mal sostien quest’umil scorza.63

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Read together with the canzone, the phoenix image becomes an extraordinarily dense and polysemous one, especially if we note that the phoenix image is circled by a laurel wreath, as if to indicate that this image is about Colonna’s poetry, as well as her spiritual and emotional state. The suffering caused by her husband’s death does not remain in a state of sterile despair; on the contrary, her ever-living, phoenix-like fire finds expression in her commemorative verse for her husband, which immortalizes both him and her. This was, of course, the image of Colonna as wife and widow that became crystallized in the 1530s and 1540s; that we find expressed in Ariosto; in Betussi; in the 1547 Florentine lecture; and in much of the lyric verse addressed to her in the last two decades of her life. The dominant exemplum used for Colonna in this period was Artemisia, the fourth-century queen of Caria, 63  “So why continue to turn the ancient pages that tell of others’ ills, or to look for peers in the unhappy ranks of modern lovers? I may be less than these heroines in their other fine qualities, but in my pain I am like the phoenix, eternally renewing myself in the fire. My living Sun fills my burning soul with love from within, covering it and stoking it so that it disdains all lesser lights, and from heaven he teaches me to love and to suffer, sustaining the humble shell of my body in this great pain by which it is racked.”

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known primarily for her posthumous glorification of her husband Mausulus through the construction of the extraordinary Mausoleum, celebrated as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Artemisia is a kind of anti-Portia, or corrective to Portia; where Portia commits suicide by ingesting burning coals, Artemisia instead drinks her husband’s ashes, mixed with water—feeding on her grief, rather than escaping it through violence. Artemisia’s grief also has the constructive, immortalizing element that Colonna’s apologists celebrated in her. The Mausoleum served as a monument to her husband’s glory, and at the same time expressed Artemisia’s own magnificence as ruler, just as Colonna’s verse both immortalized the dead Marquis of Pescara and set the seal on her own fame as poet. The parallel is developed with particular fullness by Pierio Valeriano in Book XXII of his Hieroglyphica, dedicated to Colonna: “It might be said that Artemisia acted more magnificently, as to commemorate her husband she constructed him a tomb such as to rank among the seven wonders of the world; but you every day build fresh monuments to your husband, erect new statues, and raise new columns.”64 There is no allusion to Artemisia among Colonna’s portrait medals, but there is one piece of visual evidence that may corroborate that she encouraged her association with Artemisia: a rather mysterious portrait in Harewood House, attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo, showing a woman carrying a small urn (Figure 13.11). This appears to be the same woman who is shown in another portrait attributed to Sebastiano in Barcelona, pointing at a spiritual sonnet by Vittoria Colonna, Ovunque giro gli occhi o fermo il core.65 The subject of the Harewood House image was sufficiently obscure for some copies of it to have eyes painted on the urn, making it an image of St Lucy. Recently, however, Novella Macola and Monica Bianco have persuasively argued that this could be an image of Vittoria Colonna in the guise of Artemisia holding the ashes of Mausolus.66 The likelihood of the identification is increased by the fact that Vasari speaks of Sebastiano having painted portraits of both Colonna and of her husband.67 64  Cited from Macola, Sguardi e scritture, 50–51 (“Magnificentius dicat forte aliquis Artemisiam fecisse quae marito celebrationis tante sepulchrae struxerit, ut inter septem orbis miracula nomen habere meruerit. At tu quotidie tuo Mausolea facis, quotidie novas statuas ponis, quotidie columnas erigis”). 65  For discussion and reproductions of the Barcelona image, see Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna, 133–35 (I. 52); Ragionieri, Vittoria Colonna, 49–51 (no. 10). For the Harewood house image, see ibid., 52–53 (no. 11). 66  See Macola, Sguardi e scritture, 47–51 and 158–60; Monica Bianco, “Per la datazione di un sonetto di Vittoria Colonna (e di un probabile ritratto della poetessa ad opera di Sebastiano del Piombo,” Italique XI (2008): 92–107. 67  Bianco, “Per la datazione,” 98.

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

Figure 13.11



495

Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Lady (Vittoria Colonna as Artemisia?), ca. 1526. Leeds, Harewood House, Earl of Harewood Collection. Photo: reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood Will Trust and the Trustees of the Harewood House Trust.

Polysemy in the Language of Exempla: The Case of Portia

Although Artemisia was ultimately to offer the most successful exemplary encapsulation of Colonna’s ethos as widow, it is perhaps one of the rejected widow archetypes of the canzone Mentre la nave mia who represents the most complex example of Colonna’s engagement with the exercise of self-definition through exempla. This is Brutus’s wife Portia, who, as we saw, was revealed in

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the canzone as unsuitable as a role-model for the modern Christian women, in that she has recourse to the unacceptable gesture of suicide as a means of escaping her grief. Although Portia fails as an exemplum of heroic widowhood, the canzone makes it clear that Portia has a special role in Colonna’s exemplary autobiography, and that she perceives her as especially germane to her case—“germane” in the sense of relevant, but also in the literal, etymological sense of twinned or sibling. Portia is the last of the heroines of Mentre la nave mia, and she has an entire stanza to herself in the canzone, where the other classical exempla are treated two to a stanza. Colonna has her poet speak warmly of the sistership in grief she feels with her: Porzia sovra d’ogn’altra me rivolse tant’al suo danno che sovente insieme piansi l’acerbo martir nostro equale.68 The rather odd grammatical construction of this phrase places Portia in the initial subject position, giving her an unusual degree of agency; she commands the poet’s attention, rather than waiting passively to be plucked from the “ancient pages” from which the other heroines are drawn. The mismatch between the adverb “insieme” and the singular “piansi” that follows—given special relief by the line break—underlines Colonna’s identification with Portia, even before the emphatic closing phrase, which makes the two women’s suffering one and the same. Mentre la nave mia is not the only one of Colonna’s poems that alludes to Portia as an archetype. Another is the sonnet Veggio ai mie’ danni acceso e largo il Cielo, which cites Portia’s suicide envyingly in its tercets, in a manner reminiscent of the canzone, before similarly concluding that fear of eternal punishment was enough to hold the poet back from following her lead.69 Taken together, these texts clearly invite us to compare the ancient and the modern heroine; and the comparison, when investigated, proves a strikingly rich one. This case illustrates very well the kind of surplus of meaning one can often find in well-chosen exempla, going way beyond the obvious and explicit ­comparison—here, that both women love their husbands and suffer extreme grief at their deaths.

68  “Portia above all others drew me so to her pain that I often wept together with her over our same cruel torment.” 69  Bullock: Rime, A1: 78.

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A first supplemental parallel between Portia and Colonna is offered by the character of their relationship with the men around them. Portia represented an exemplary case of the type of the Roman woman who was considered to transcend the proverbial feebleness of her sex through her association with great men. In addition to being the wife of Brutus, she was the daughter of the younger Cato (also a heroic suicide). Plutarch, in his Life of Brutus, tells a story in which Portia wounds herself deliberately to prove her fortitude, in order to convince Brutus that she deserves to be taken into his political confidence at the time of the conspiracy against Caesar. In Plutarch’s version, Portia argues this both on the grounds of her proven courage—proven by her selfwounding—but also on the grounds of her special status as wife and daughter of heroes. The argument is encapsulated by Shakespeare, in his reprise of this speech in Julius Caesar, “Think you I am no stronger than my sex, / being so fathered and so husbanded?”70 This status gave Portia a particular appeal to that category of Renaissance women who could claim reflected distinction from both their fathers and their husbands. A good example is offered by a painting of Portia and Brutus by Ercole de’ Roberti that seems to have been painted for Eleonora d’Aragona, duchess of Ferrara in the 1480s, and which is now found in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. De’ Roberti’s painting alludes to the episode of Portia’s self-wounding, plausibly as a compliment to Eleonora, who was wife to a duke, Ercole d’Este, but also daughter to a king, Ferdinando I d’Aragona, king of Naples.71 Fathered and husbanded in such a manner, Eleonora is perforce superior to the common run of women in prudence and fortitude, and she is thus deserving of sharing in her husband’s rule, just as Portia earned her role in Brutus’s political life. This same argument was almost certainly a factor in Colonna’s self-­ identification with Portia. Like Portia, she was the wife of a prominent man and the daughter of another, the imperial general Fabrizio Colonna. She was also the granddaughter of another renowned condottiere, Federico da Montefeltro, as Paolo Giovio underlines.72 Colonna pairs her father and husband in two of her poems, in such a way as to emphasize this double connection to masculine prowess. One is the pistola, which opens with a description 70  William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Ramussen (New York, 2007), 1823 ( Julius Caesar, 2.1). For discussion of the speech in Plutarch, see Virginia Cox, “Gender and Eloquence in Ercole de’ Roberti’s Portia and Brutus,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 61–101, here 69–70. 71  See Cox, “Gender and Eloquence,” 70–71. 72  Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 516, 522.

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of the poet’s distress at seeing Fabrizio Colonna and Ferrante d’Avalos captured by the French after Ravenna; the other, the curious sonnet S’io non dipingo in carte il sovra umano, where Colonna seems to apologize for not posthumously eulogizing “the bountiful and superhuman valor of our Roman father” in her verse in the same way as she has done so famously for her ­husband.73 It is perhaps worth noting that the Amazon Hippolyta, cited earlier as a possible archetype for Colonna’s styling in the Bernardi portrait medal, was another “Portia” in this sense, as the daughter of the war god Ares, as well as Theseus’s wife. It is telling that Colonna privileges “Romanity” in her description of her father’s valor in the sonnet S’io non dipingo, as this points us to another subtext of her allusions to Portia. By associating herself with Portia, Colonna underlines her connections with Rome, and hence with the legendary fortitude and courage of the ancient Romans, which exempla such as Portia and Veturia, mother of Coriolanus, showed was not limited to men. The point about the shared Roman origins of Colonna and Portia is made explicit in a Latin epigram published in a verse collection of 1532 by the Sicilian poet Pietro Gravina, a client of Prospero and of Pompeo Colonna. “Non vivam sine te, mi Brute,” exterrita dixit Portia, et ardentes sorbuit ore faces; “Avale, te extincto,” dixit Victoria, “vivam perpetuo moestos sic dolitura dies.” Utraque Romana est, sed in hoc Victoria maior, nulla dolere potest mortua, viva dolet.74 A further geographic coincidence that almost certainly contributed to Colonna’s self-identification with Portia was their shared connections to the Neapolitan coast. Colonna’s home for many years, often referred to in her verse, was the island of Ischia, off Naples. The nearby island of Nisida was the site of a villa owned by Brutus, traditionally identified as the location of Portia’s 73  Bullock: Rime, A2: 31 (“il sovra umano/del roman nostro padre almo valore”). 74  ‘I shall not live without you, my Brutus,’ the terrified Portia said, and she drank the burning coals. ‘Avalos,’ said Vittoria, ‘with you dead, I shall live out my sad days, in perpetual grieving.’ Both are Roman; yet in this Vittoria is greater: nothing can pain a dead woman, while a living feels pain.’ Petri Gravinae Neapolitani poematum libri (Naples, 1532), 40v (with exterita corrected to exterrita, as indicated in the Errata; and Ramana corrected to Romana). The epigram, which echoes Martial’s 1. 42, is sometimes found with other attributions, for example to Marcantonio Flaminio.

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

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suicide. Colonna’s lonely vigil of perpetual grief was hence lived out within a few miles of the place where Portia terminated her mourning with her “bold death.” It might be noted in passing that islands play a strong role in Colonna’s exemplary geography more generally. One reason why Penelope works so well as an alter ego for Colonna in her pistola is that both women’s yearning wait for their husbands’ return is located on islands: Ithaca in one case; Ischia in the other. Returning to the question of Colonna’s and Portia’s Romanity, a final point that can be made about the analogy between the two women is political. It seems quite possible that Colonna perceived a connection between Portia’s and Cato’s republican sentiments and her own family’s defense of Roman prerogatives against the incursions of the papacy. Colonna’s cousin, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, to whom she was close, led two uprisings against the papacy, in 1511 and 1526.75 Earlier, in the 1430s, the Colonna had rebelled against and briefly ejected from Rome the Venetian pope Eugenius IV. The tendency within humanistic culture to construct such anti-papal rebellions as reiterations of the heroic age of Roman republicanism is well illustrated by the example of the antipapal revolutionary Stefano Porcari, executed in 1453 after a failed conspiracy against Nicholas V. Porcari’s surviving orations show him to have quite explicitly claimed the mantle of Brutus and Cato, to the extent that he even assumed the name of “Porcius,” with reference to Cato.76 Pompeo Colonna appears to have shared Porcari’s ideology to a considerable extent, and especially his conviction that what he perceived as the decadence of Rome under the popes could be cured only by a return to the freedom and virtus of the ancient Roman republic.77 This republican, or pseudo-republican, context may help to explain the allusion in Colonna’s pistola to Marcia, Cato’s wife, which seems otherwise to accord ill with the normal emphases of Colonna’s language of female exemplarity. Marcia does not fall into the usual category of with the usual faithful univirae wives to which Colonna preferred to make reference. On the 75  See Ludwig Pastor, Storia dei papi dalla fine del Medo Evo, trans. Angelo Mercati, 17 vols. (Rome, 1950–63), vol. III, 790–93 and vol. IV, pt. II, 215–18; Alessandro Serio, Una gloriosa sconfitta: I Colonna tra papato e impero nella prima età moderna (1431–1530) (Rome, 2008), 176–80, 312–13; P. Colonna, Apologia mulierum, 12. 14, 30–32, 37–39. 76  Anthony F. D’Elia, “Stefano Porcari’s Conspiracy Against Nicholas V and Republican Culture in Papal Rome,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 207–31, here 221. 77  Pompeo Colonna’s antipapal ideology, as portrayed by historians such as Paolo Giovio and Francesco Guicciardini, is discussed in Serio, Una gloriosa sconfitta, 176–77; P. Colonna, Apologia mulierum, 31.

500

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contrary, she had a somewhat tortuous and peculiar marital history, having been divorced by Cato, remarried to Hortensius, and then taken back by Cato after Hortensius’s death. The political context in which Colonna was writing, however, can help explain Colonna’s emphasis in the pistola on Roman republican history and her use of pro-republican sources (it will be recalled that the pistola cites Pompey’s Cornelia, as well as Marcia, and draws on the antiCaesarean Lucan as a source). The pistola was written around 1512, only a year after Pompeo Colonna’s attack on Rome during a grave illness of Pope Julius II, which looked likely to prove fatal. The onomastic coincidence of the two protagonists here with their classical archetypes, Pompey and Caesar, must have underlined the parallels between the two eras. This political reading of Colonna’s self-identification with Portia finds support in Rinaldo Corso’s 1558 commentary on the Rime, where the analogy between Colonna and Portia is described in a similar sense, though with reference to her husband’s political sympathies, rather than those of her natal family. Portia’s suffering was the same as Vittoria’s, because both arose from their husbands, who were both Latins; and both were suffered in Roman breasts, and on account of death, not some lesser ill. Besides, Portia had lost Brutus, who was a friend to Roman liberty; and Vittoria her Sun, a defender of the Roman Empire, which has now taken the place of that liberty.78 For Corso, Ferrante d’Avalos is a “defender of the Roman Empire” by virtue of his service to the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V, which may be seen as the true heir to the Roman liberty for which Brutus struggled and died. Although this argument may seem convoluted and counter-intuitive to us today, within a sixteenth-century pro-imperial context it possessed a certain logic. A long tradition existed, dating back to Augustus, of positing the Empire as heir to 78  “Eguale era il martire di Portia à quel di Vittoria, perché da due mariti nasce, Latini amendue, & in due petti Romani, & per morte, non per minore accidente. Oltre ciò Portia haveva perduto Bruto amico della libertà Romana, Vittoria il suo Sole difensor dell’Impero Romano, sustituito oggi in luogo di quella libertà”: Rime 1558, 382. See on this commentary Monica Bianco, “Rinaldo Corso e il Canzoniere di Vittoria Colonna,” Italique 1 (1998): 35–45; idem, “Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Studi di filologia italiana 56 (1998): 271–95; Chiara Cinquini, “Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle Rime di Vittoria Colonna,” Aevum 73 (1999): 669–96.

The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna

501

and fruition of the Roman republic; while the popes could be presented as illegitimate, “Caesarean” power-grabbers, in their secular, political role. In this context, “Empire” and “freedom” might be compatible political slogans in this context in a way that would have perplexed classic republican thinkers such as Cicero or Leonardo Bruni. Several sources confirm that Pompeo Colonna’s troops roused the Roman populace against Clement VII in 1526 with a battle cry of Imperio, Colonna, libertà.79 Conclusion There is much more that can be said on the theme of Colonna’s use of exempla and the dialectic between this use of exempla and her self-construction of her own exemplarity. The present essay has limited itself to secular, classical examples, but the same argument could very well be extended to Colonna’s use of religious exempla, and especially her self-identification with Mary Magdalene in her religious verse, and in the painting she seems to have commissioned from Titian via Federico Gonzaga. This adds a further, very dense and rich, chapter to the story of Colonna’s self-fashioning.80 It should be noted, however, that, despite these allusions to Mary Magdalene, it is possible to identify a certain diminution of Colonna’s engagement with exempla across the course of her life. It is noteworthy that one of her most exuberant engagements with classical exempla in her poetry, the pistola, is the earliest datable poem known by her, while the other, Mentre la nave mia, written prior to 1538, has a valedictory air, in that it dramatizes the poet’s superseding of ancient exempla and the ethical truths they sought to teach. It seems telling in this regard that Mentre la nave mia concludes with the image of a phoenix—a symbol of perpetual erotic suffering and of spiritual immortality, as was noted earlier, but also an emblem of uniqueness and singularity. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, by the last decade or so of her life, Vittoria Colonna no longer needed exempla to figure herself, classical or religious. Phoenix-like, she had become an exemplum in herself.

79  See Pastor, Storia dei papi, vol. IV, pt. II, 216; Rime 1840. 80  For discussion, see Nirit Ben-Ayreh Debby, “Vittoria Colonna and Titian’s Pitti Magdalen,” Women’s Art Journal 24 (2003): 29–33.

Bibliography

Primary Works by Vittoria Colonna



In Manuscript Manuscripts Containing the Rime

A Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Y 124 sup., Milan. Bo Biblioteca Universitaria, 828 (1250), Bologna. Cas1 Biblioteca Casanatense, 897 (D.VI.38), Rome. Cor Biblioteca Corsiniana, 263 (45.D.9). F1 Biblioteca Nazionale, II.IX.30, Florence. L Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashburnham 1153, Florence. Madrid, Biblioteca Real 617. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Y.124 sup. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS.626 (Ital.251). Na* (modern edition) Sonetti in morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos marchese di Pescara. Edizione del ms. XIII.G.43 della Biblioteca nazionale di Napoli, ed. Tobia R. Toscano (Milan, 1998). Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, V.E.52. Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, 226. Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, 2051. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 5172. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 50 (F.IV.52). V2 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 11539, Rome. V3* Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Chigi L IV. 79, Rome. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, It.IX.300 (6649).



Other Works

Meditazione del Venerdì Santo [Sermone sopra la Vergine addolorata], Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Misc. Arm. II, vol 79, ff. 229r–237r.



In Print

Rime de la divina Vittoria Colonna marchesa di Pescara, novamente stampate con privilegio (Parma: Viotti, 1538). Rime della divina Vettoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo ristampate, aggiuntovi le sue stanze, e con diligenza corrette (n.p., 1539). Rime della divina Vettoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara, di nuovo ristampate, aggiuntovi le sue stanze, e con diligenza corrette (n.p.: Zoppino, 1539).

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Le rime di Vittoria Colonna corrette su i testi a penna e pubblicate con la vita della medesima dal cavaliere Pietro Ercole Visconti. Si aggiungono le poesie ommesse [sic] nelle precedenti edizioni e le inedite (Rome, 1840). Mélodies composées par Vittoria Colonna (Paris, 1850). Rime e Lettere di Vittoria Colonna, marchesana di Pescara, ed. G. Enrico Saltini (Florence, 1860). Carteggio, ed. Ernesto Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller, supplement by Domenico Tordi (Turin, 1892). Nuove lettere inedite di Vittoria Colonna, ed. Pietro Tacchi-Venturi (Rome, 1901). Sonnets for Michelangelo, bilingual edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005).



Primary Works by Other Authors

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Index Abbate Francesco 78 n. 47, 242 n. 7 Abbiate Filippo 78 Acquaviva Claudio 338–339 Addesso Cristiana Anna 246 n. 10 Adriana Capriotti 306 n. 116, 311 n. 126 Agosti Barbara 28 n. 61, 66 n. 89, 280 n. 23 Agoston Laura Camille 288 n. 60 Alamanni Luigi 23 Albanelli Nunzio 238 n. 2, 253 n. 20 Alberti Alessia 292 n. 77, 294 n. 81 Alberto da Castello. See  Castellano Alberto Albonico Simone 77, 99 n. 115 Alexander the Great 327 Alfieri Gabriella 103 n. 126 Alighieri Dante 17, 20, 146, 149–150, 154, 157, 163–164, 171–172, 174, 180–181, 194–196, 198, 206, 210, 227, 231, 237, 261, 265–267, 269, 402 n. 12, 435, 490 Altamura Antonio 86 n. 73 Altissimo. See  Cristoforo dell’Altissimo Ames Lewis Francis 296 n. 83 Ammirato Scipione 60 Andrea del Castagno 265 n. 36 Andrea del Sarto 257 Andreini Isabella 123 n. 194, 128 n. 211 Andreoli Ilaria 109 n. 141, 123 n. 195 Andreose Alvise 404 n. 18 Andres Giovanni 78 n. 47 Anerio Felice 320 Animuccia Giovanni 323 n. 29 Antinori Carlo 75 n. 31 Apelles 327 Aquilano Serafino 315 n. 3 Aquilecchia Giovanni 404, 410 Aragona Giulia 440 n. 18, 444, 464 Arcadelt Jacques 315, 317–318, 321 Arcimboldi Antonello 332 Aretino Pietro 21 n. 36, 30, 72, 76, 84–88, 91–92, 97 n. 106, 115, 356 n. 26, 360 n. 39, 404, 410, 411 nn. 38, 40, 435 Ariadne (daughter of Minos) 17, 490 Arienti Giovanni Sabadino degli 487 Ariosto Ludovico 11, 39 n. 2, 79, 86, 91 n. 92, 109, 115, 125 n. 200, 135, 141, 198, 206, 259, 433, 467, 487–488, 493 Arrivabene Andrea 441–442, 444, 446

Artemisia (wife of Mausolus) 259–260, 269, 469, 493, 494–495 Ascarelli Fernanda 75 n. 31, 97 n. 106, 109 n. 139 Ascoli Albert Russell 39 n. 2 Asola Giovanni Matteo 324 n. 33 Asor Rosa Alberto 120 n. 180 Aspasia 469 Asso Paolo 477 n. 24 Atanagi Dionigi 23 n. 43 Attanasio Agostino 201 n. 14 Attwood Philip 471, 479–480, 484 n. 43, 491 n. 60 Augustine of Hippo Saint 26, 29, 33, 187 n. 140, 352 n. 10, 491 Aurifico Nicolò 426–427 Bacchiacca. See  Ubertini Francesco known as Bacchiacchia Bacchi della Lega Alberto 487 n. 49 Baffa Francesca 436, 439–440, 445 Baffo Francesca 463 Baffo Girolamo 440 Bainton Roland H. 373 n. 5, 383 n. 32 Baldacchini Lorenzo 91, 92 n. 93, 96 n. 104, 97 nn. 106–107 Baldissone Giusi 238, 240 n. 4 Bardazzi Giovanni 4 n. 5, 28 n. 59, 287 n. 56, 289 n. 63, 372 n. 3, 373 n. 7, 374 nn. 9–10, 391, 392 n. 60, 393 n. 61 Barnes Bernardine 274 n. 6, 294 nn. 80, 82, 296 nn. 83–84 Barocchi Paola 251 n. 15, 270 n. 1, 275 n. 9, 286 n. 51 Bartoli Girolamo 319 Bartoli Langeli Attilio 198 n. 7 Basile Deana 445 n. 30 Bassanese Fiora A. 315 n. 2 Battiferri Laura 128 n. 211, 256–257, 449, 465 Battista da Montefeltro Malatesta 470 Beatrizet Nicolas 270, 273 n. 2, 274, 294 Beazzano Agostino 74 n. 25 Beccadelli Ludovico 312, 374 Beccuti Francesco 337 Beethoven monument. See  Beethoven festival 1845

544 Bellini Giovanni 255 Bellonci Maria 314 n. 2 Bellosi Luciano 273 n. 3 Belprato Vincenzo 326 Belting Hans 284 n. 43 Beltramini Guido 265 n. 36 Bembo Pietro xi, 4, 15–16, 29–33, 45–46, 49, 51, 53 n. 46, 55, 57–58, 63–75, 78, 86–88, 90, 96–100, 110, 147, 159, 194–196, 201–203, 205, 210–217, 223, 227, 228 n. 104, 230, 232, 259, 265 n. 36, 336 n. 76, 353 nn. 12, 16, 356 n. 26, 360 n. 37, 362 n. 47, 433, 474–475 Benedetto da Mantova 365 n. 59, 389 n. 49, 401 n. 10 Benedict Saint 193 Benrath Karl 373 n. 5 Benson Pamela J. 39 n. 2, 456 n. 58, 467 n. 1 Berbena Girolamo 114 n. 158 Bernardi Giovanni 479–480, 482, 487, 498 Bernardini Gioseffo 335 Bernardini Maria Grazia 253 n. 18, 265 n. 37, 267 n. 40, 278 n. 19 Bernardino de Viano de Lessona Vercellese 375 n. 14 Bernardy Amy A. 3 n. 1 Berndt Hamm 392 n. 59 Berni Francesco 45, 435 Bernstein Jane A. 314 n. *, 329 n. 51 Berry Craig A. 39 n. 2 Bertana Lucia 464–465 Bertano Pietro 306–308, 311 n. 126 Bessone Aurelj Maria Antonietta 276 n. 10, 279 n. 21, 2sss83 n. 42, 284 n. 44, 286 n. 53, 288 n. 60 Bettarini Rosanna 251 n. 15 Betussi Giuseppe 13–14, 440, 467–470, 473, 493 Biagi Ravenni Gabriella 332 n. 62, 334 Bianchi Patricia 201 n. 15, 202 nn. 15–16 Bianchi Stefano 60 n. 72 Bianco Monica 28, 105 n. 133, 112 n. 150, 116–118, 119 n. 178, 142 n. 7, 149 n. 26, 151 n. 30, 152 nn. 33, 35, 190 n. 150, 225 n. 94, 372 n. 3, 374 n. 10, 494, 500 n. 78 biblical citations 2 Corinthians 364 Colossians 361 Deuteronomy 376 Ecclesiastes 376

Index Exodus 376 Genesis 376 Isaiah 376 Job 376 John 28–29, 187 n. 140, 208 n. 42, 359, 371, 376–377, 391 n. 57, 418 n. 57 Kings 35 Luke 28, 208 n. 43, 287, 376, 377 n. 19, 403 n. 14, 421 n. 66 Matthew 129, 185 n. 137, 208 n. 41, 252 n. 18, 287, 377 n. 19, 403 n. 14 Paul 371, 376, 382, 386 n. 43 Pentateuch 376 Proverbs 376 Psalms 363, 376 Romans 363, 440 n. 19 Biferali Fabrizio 292 n. 73 Bilhères-Lagraulas Jean de 303 Bindoni Agostino 93 Bindoni Francesco di Alessandro 375 n. 14 Boccaccio Giovanni 13, 14 n. 13, 17, 18 n. 30, 96, 196, 206, 210, 227, 231, 435, 467, 478, 486–487 Boccardi Riccardo 316 Bodeo Joan 321 Boillet Élise 411 Bolzoni Lina 109 n. 140, 125 n. 200 Bombarda. See  Cambi Giovanni Battista known as Bombarda Bonardo Bartolomeo 112 n. 149 Bonasone Giulio 274, 292 Bonelli Giovan Maria 465 Bonello Raffaelle 338 Bongi Salvatore 62 n. 75, 82–83, 86 n. 71, 435 n. 7, 439 n. 15, 445 n. 30, 446 n. 35, 464 n. 75 Bonora Ettore 475 n. 19 Bonzanino Agostino 323, 330–332, 336, 342–343 Boorsch Suzanne 270 n. 2, 274 n. 5 Borghini Maria Selvaggia 128 n. 211 Borgia Lucrezia 482 Borgi Antonio 78 Borland Phyllis 298 n. 92 Borraccini Rosa Marisi 92 n. 97 Borromeo Federico 59 n. 69 Borromeo Ippolita 24 Bossier Philiep 111 n. 145 Boss Sara Jane 402 n. 12 Botticelli Sandro 245–247, 250

Index Bottrigaro Ercole 442, 444, 464 Bouwsma William J. 352 n. 7 Bowd Stephen 8–9, 280 n. 26, 351 n. 6, 352 n. 8, 365 n. 61 Bozza Tommaso 365 n. 59 Bracciolini Poggio 435 Braden Gordon 211 n. 53 Braida Lodovica 116 n. 166 Bramanti Vanni 100 n. 118 Branchesi Pacifico M. 126 n. 206 Brembati Giovanni Battista 114 n. 160, 225 Brenz Johann 372 Breseña Isabella xi Briseis (daughter of Briseus) 17 Britonio da Sancignano 240 Britonio Girolamo xi, 3, 210 Bromwich William xiii Bronzino Agnolo 256, 261 Brown Anna xiii Brown Virginia 478 n. 27 Brucioli Antonio 353, 378 Brumel Jacques 335 Brundin Abigail xiii, 7, 33 n. 81, 39, 41 n. 7, 44 n. 14, 47 n. 27, 49 nn. 31–32, 53 n. 47, 54 n. 48, 55 nn. 52–53, 56 n. 55, 59 n. 67, 66 n. 92, 88 n. 82, 140 n. 3, 116 n. 166, 122 n. 184, 124 n. 196, 141 n. 5, 148 nn. 23–24, 149 n. 27, 154 n. 38, 156 n. 46, 171 nn. 103–104, 180 n. 125, 181 n. 128, 185 n. 135, 187 n. 140, 188 n. 146, 209 n. 44, 277 n. 15, 290 n. 67, 334 n. 69, 335 n. 73, 364 nn. 56–57, 365 n. 61, 372 n. 3, 374 n. 11, 375 n. 13, 391 nn. 54, 57, 392 n. 60, 398 nn. 70–71, 400 n. 4, 418 nn. 57, 59, 421 n. 65, 436 n. 9, 443 n. 24, 452 n. 52, 462, 474 Bründl Jürgen 383 n. 31 Brunelli Giampiero 281 n. 29 Bruni Francesco 196 n. 1, 198 n. 7, 200 n. 10, 202 n. 15 Bruni Leonardo 501 Brutus Marcus Junius 490, 495, 497–500 Bucer Martin 372, 378 Bulifon Antonio 128, 129 Bullock Alan 7 n. 9, 40, 42 n. 9, 43, 44 n. 15, 45–46, 47 n. 26, 48 nn. 28, 30, 52 nn. 40–41, 44, 53 n. 46, 56 n. 57, 59 n. 68, 62–63, 71 n. 10, 73 nn. 22, 25, 82 n. 59, 88–91, 92 n. 96, 104–105, 112

545 nn. 149–150, 118 n. 175, 121 n. 182, 122, 123 nn. 190, 193, 124, 126–127, 132 n. 219, 133, 134 n. 221, 135 n. 223, 136, 140, 228 n. 104, 331 n. 58, 333 nn. 64, 66, 375 n. 14, 387 n. 45, 440 n. 19, 443 n. 26, 451–452, 454, 455 n. 57, 461 n. 69 Buonaccorso da Montemagno 330 Buonarroti Leonardo 54, 298 n. 94 Buonarroti Michelangelo xii–xiii, 5–6, 8, 15, 28, 49, 52–56, 67–68, 121–123, 127, 134 n. 221, 140, 144, 148, 183, 189–191, 194, 207, 237, 238 n. 2, 239, 249–252, 255, 270, 284 n. 46, 297 n. 88, 372 n. 3, 378 n. 24, 387 n. 45, 391 n. 54, 392 n. 60, 409 n. 34, 410 n. 35, 492 Burger Christoph 392 n. 59, 393 n. 61 Burke Peter 221 n. 82 Burlamacchi Tomaso 332 Busdraghi Vincenzo 24 n. 44, 449, 455, 458, 466 Bussagli Marco 253 n. 18, 265 n. 37, 267 n. 40, 278 n. 19, 285 n. 49, 306 n. 116, 308 n. 121, 312 n. 133 Bussi Rolando 5 n. 7 Bustelli Giuseppe 113 n. 154 Caccini Francesca 316 Caesar Gaius Iulius 477, 497, 500 Calcagni Tiberio 277 Caldwell Laurie 470 n. 7 Calligaro Silvia 99 n. 115, 140 n. 2 Calvin Jean 365 Calvin John xi Cambi Giovanni Battista known as Bombarda 483, 485–487 Cambi Leonora 485 Cambio Perissone 314 n. 2, 321, 323, 329–330, 340, 342–344 Campanile Iacopo known as Capanio xi, 85 n. 70, 246 Campi Emidio xiii, 4 n. 5, 9 n. 7, 179 n. 122, 192 n. 153, 281 n. 28, 284 nn. 46–47, 289 nn. 64–65, 290 n. 68, 291 n. 70, 302 n. 103, 304, 305 nn. 112, 114, 358 n. 30, 363 n. 50, 364 n. 57, 371, 372 n. 3, 392 n. 60, 400 n. 4, 401, 407 n. 27, 409 n. 34, 416 n. 49, 413, 421 Cancer Mattia 86 n. 73 Canguilhem Philippe 314 n. *

546 Canisius Petrus 338, 340 n. 87 Canossa Ludovico 216 Capanio. See  Campanile Iacopo Capasso Giosuè 239 n. 3 Capata Alessandro 85 n. 70 Capelli Simona 296 n. 83 Caponetto Salvatore 365 n. 59, 368 n. 73, 389 n. 49, 401 n. 10, 441 n. 20 Capponi Gisella 309 n. 123 Caracciolo Antonio 291 n. 71 Caracciolo Teresa 316 n. 9 Carafa Gian Pietro 281, 291 n. 71, 349, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 359 n. 33, 367.  Vedi Paul IV Caravale Giorgio 358 n. 29 Carboni Fabio 43 nn. 12–13, 46, 47 n. 26, 48 n. 28, 78, 89, 102 n. 125, 122 n. 188, 140 n. 2 Cardamone Donna 318 n. 14 Carinci Eleonora xiii, 9, 180 n. 125, 302 n. 103, 304 n. 109, 391 n. 55, 392 n. 57, 411 n. 40, 428 nn. 83–84 Cariteo xi, 3. See Gareth Benedetto Carnesecchi Pietro xii, 34 Caro Annibal 15, 215 Carosi Attilio 126 n. 206 Carrafa Ferrante 464–465 Carusi Enrico 54 n. 48, 140, 141 n. 4 Casapullo Rosa 103 n. 126 Cassola Luigi 330 Castellana Gieronima 444, 464 Castellani Pollidori Ornella 221 n. 86 Castellano Alberto 405 n. 23 Castelvecchi Alberto 221 n. 84 Castiglione Baldassarre xi, 4, 15, 23, 72, 76 n. 35, 86, 159, 197–198, 199 n. 8, 200–201, 211–212, 215–221, 474–475 Castiglione Giannotto 466 Caston Ruth R. 477 n. 24 Castriota Costantino 71 n. 9, 240, 261 Castro Jean de 335 Casulana Maddalena 332 Caterina da Piovene 66 n. 92 Catherine of Alexandria Saint 9, 27, 469 Catherine of Siena Saint 25, 267 Cato Marcus Porcius Uticensis 20, 477–478, 491, 497, 499–500 Cattaneo Giovanni Maria 490 n. 55 Catullus Gaius Valerius 462 Cavalieri Tommaso 274, 285, 294, 298, 300, 303, 309 n. 123

Index Celiano Livio 337 n. 76 Ceriana Matteo 265 n. 36 Cervini Marcello 282, 369, 351 n. 6 Cesana Bartolomeo 441 Cesano Gabriele 23 Chabot Federico 78 n. 46 Charles V xi, 3, 46, 63–65, 78, 86 n. 74, 194, 208 n. 39, 209, 215, 368 n. 73, 438–439, 441–442, 446, 455, 458–459, 500 Chartier Roger 79 n. 51 Chemello Adriana xiii, 6, 11, 18 n. 30, 28 n. 60, 123 n. 194, 129 n. 215, 133 n. 220, 205 n. 28 Cherubino da Spoleto 80 n. 56 Christopher Faggioli Sarah 112, 114 n. 159, 224 n. 91 Ciammitti Luisa 479 Cibo Caterina 4, 355, 357, 374, 487 Cicerchia Nicolò 404 n. 19, 421–422, 423 n. 68 Cicero Marcus Tullius 196, 227, 501 Cimello Giovanni Tommaso 318, 321, 325–327, 334 Cinquini Chiara 113 n. 155, 114 n. 158, 225 n. 94, 143 n. 10, 151 n. 31, 500 n. 78 Cirilli Fiammetta 70 n. 7, 72 n. 16, 80 n. 54 Cirillo Archer 292 n. 75 Clarke Danielle 470 n. 7 Clement VII 68 n. 100, 207 n. 39, 215, 222 n. 88, 357 n. 27, 501 Clovio Giulio 273 n. 2 Cocco Ombretta 296 n. 86, 300 n. 98 Collaltino di Collalto 449 Collett Barry 57 n. 59, 208 n. 39, 376 n. 15 Colonna Ascanio 46, 53, 62, 122–123, 128 n. 213, 208 n. 39, 328 n. 49, 356 n. 25, 478 Colonna Beatrice 487 Colonna Camillo 478 Colonna Fabrizio xi, 3, 128 n. 213, 145, 497–498 Colonna Fabrizio (son of Ascanio) 327 Colonna Federico 62, 478 Colonna Marcantonio (prince of Paliano) 316 n. 9 Colonna Marcantonio (son of Ascanio) 101, 256, 327 Colonna Pompeo xi, 135, 436, 479 n. 29, 478, 498–501 Colonna Prospero 480, 498 Colonna Teresa 316

547

Index

CLXVIII 26, 34–35 CLXVIII–CLXX 25–26, 28 CLXX 25, 27 CLXXII 207 n. 37 CCXXIV 305 n. 112 Other letters Gasparo Contarini to Colonna 361, 363 to Alvise Priuli 277 n. 14 to Pietro Bembo 32 n. 76 to Reginald Pole 34 n. 86 to Reginald Pole 34 n. 85 to Reginald Pole 33 n. 84

Colonna Vittoria (daughter of Ascanio) 328 n. 49 Colonna Vittoria (daughter of Marcantonio) 328 Colonna Vittoria, Carteggio I 204 n. 27 suppl. XVII 356 XVIII 218, 219 nn. 76–77 XXV 203 XXVII 68 n. 100 XXXIV 220 XXXVIII 24 XL 46 n. 23, 64, 212 XLI 31, 213 XLIII 221, 222 n. 88 LII 31, 66 n. 93 LVII 222 n. 88 LXVIII 279 LXXI 207 nn. 38–39, 208, 209 n. 44, 359 n. 35, 360 n. 36 LXXIV 67 n. 94 LXXV 279 LXXVI 356 n. 23 LXXXIII 281 nn. 29, 31 LXXXIV 281 n. 27 LXXXV 286 n. 54 XCIII 32 n. 77, 360 n. 37 XCIX 208 n. 39 C 32 n. 78, 360 n. 38 CII 32 n. 78 CIV 32 n. 78, 33 n. 79 CXII 473 CXLII 282 n. 37 CXLIV 28, 29 n. 65, 207 n. 36, 401 n. 8 CXLVI 282 n. 33, 374 n. 12 CXLIX 282 n. 35 CXLVII 24 n. 45, 356 n. 24 CXLVIII 207 n. 37 CXV 282 n. 36, 356 n. 26 CXXII 286 n. 52 CXXIII 291 n. 69 CXXIV 207 n. 35 CXXXVI 208 n. 39 CXXXVII 208 n. 39 CLVII 276 n. 12 CLXIII 277 n. 14 CLXIX 27, 396 n. 68, 398 nn. 70–71, 442 n. 23

Colonna Vittoria, Rime: Amorose A1

1 1 n. 2, 39, 45, 145–146, 151, 153–154, 164–165 2 160 n. 60, 164 n. 81, 453 3 154 n. 38 4 160 nn. 62, 65, 164 n. 82 5 161 nn. 66, 67, 165 n. 86 6 161 n. 68 7 320, 322, 453 10 177, 175 n. 114 11 169 n. 95 13 166 n. 88 14 163 n. 75, 164 n. 78 20 160 n. 62, 167 n. 93, 453 21 158 n. 54, 452, 454 22 162 n. 73 23 453 24 154 n. 40 27 167 n. 92 29 172, 173 n. 109, 177 30 177 31 176 n. 115, 178, 498 32 158 n. 55 33 158 n. 56 35 453 36 158 n. 57 38 168 n. 94, 453 40 453 45 174 n. 113 46 170 n. 99 48 170 n. 100 51 152, 165 n. 84 52 165 n. 87 54 172 n. 108

548

Index

Colonna Vittoria, Rime: Amorose (cont.) 56 172 n. 107 57 461 58 162 n. 71 60 453 61 161 n. 69, 169 n. 98, 453 62 161 n. 70 63 163 n. 74 64 171 n. 105 65 461 66 170 n. 101 68 158 n. 53, 321 69 254, 494 70 453 71 44 n. 15, 69, 88, 213 n. 62, 452 74 166 n. 90 78 496 80 454 85 453 88 83 89 151, 169 n. 97, 321, 488, 490–491, 493, 496, 501 A2

1 xi, 4, 16, 18–20, 35, 44, 71, 145, 209, 476–477, 486–487, 491, 497, 499, 500–501 3 446 5 165 n. 83 12 453 13 71, 88 17 154, 155 n. 42 18 172 n. 107 19 154 n. 39 20 172 n. 106 24 446, 452 28 104, 230, 452 31 498 n. 73 32 321, 324, 335 36 320, 322 38 446, 452 41 165 n. 85

Colonna Vittoria, Rime: Epistolari E

1 1 3 8

71, 88 32, 53 n. 46 452 436

13 14 17 18 25 27 29

460 453 83, 104, 453 83, 120 n. 179 453 442, 452, 462 n. 72 438, 455, 459, 461

Colonna Vittoria, Rime: Spirituali S1

1 55–56, 104 n. 129, 148–150, 153, 155, 179, 122, 185, 227 2 104, 377 n. 22 3 156 n. 46 4 156 n. 47, 377 n. 22 5 95 n. 101, 185 6 103 n. 128, 119, 171 n. 102, 186 n. 138 7 95, 185 n. 136, 324, 335, 454 8 95 n. 101, 171 n. 103, 185 n. 137, 377 n. 19, 389 n. 49 9 331 n. 56 10 95 n. 101, 331 n. 56 12 103, 390 n. 50, 453 13 103 14 390 n. 52, 453 15 331 n. 56 16 318, 322 17 377 n. 19 18 95 n. 101, 390 n. 52 19 460 20 389 n. 47, 461 21 377 n. 19 22 380 n. 28, 382 23 331 n. 56, 460 24 228, 331 nn. 55–56, 460 25 337, 339 26 377 n. 20 27 316, 329, 337, 342–343, 438 n. 12 28 337, 344, 345 n. 99 29 29 n. 55, 331 nn. 55–56, 342, 389 n. 48 30 337 n. 81 31 460 33 384 n. 36 34 390 n. 52 41 189 n. 149, 185 n. 134, 387 n. 45 46 157 n. 49 47 188 n. 147 49 167 n. 91

549

Index 50 103 51 95, 390 n. 52 52 103 53 103 54 95, 179 n. 123, 380 n. 26 55 95 n. 101 57 103, 377 n. 21, 453 59 386 n. 43 61 386 n. 42 63 380 n. 27 64 393 n. 61 66 187 n. 143, 461 67 390 n. 52 69 254 n. 21, 461 78 191 n. 152, 385 n. 39 80 461 83 95 n. 101, 187 n. 144 84 103 86 461 87 460 89 190 n. 151, 337 n. 81, 341 92 95 n. 101, 460 93 376 n. 17 94 188 n. 145, 331 n. 56, 364, 385 n. 40 95 104, 323, 331 n. 56, 338 n. 84, 385 n. 41, 340 n. 89 98 103, 171 n. 104 100 59, 95, 180, 181 n. 127, 337 n. 81, 340 n. 89, 453 100–09 395 n. 65 101 182 n. 129, 323, 337 n. 81, 341, 395 n. 66 102 323, 377 n. 22, 397 n. 69, 340 n. 89 103 182 n. 130, 341, 337 n. 81 105 461 n. 70 107 183 n. 132, 461 n. 70 108 184 n. 133, 394 n. 62 110 180, 183 n. 131, 460 111 95, 376 n. 16 112 376 n. 16 113 376 n. 16 114 104, 377 n. 18 115 104, 377 n. 18 116 437 n. 11 118 377 n. 21 121 28 n. 60, 460, 461 n. 71 122 337, 339 126 340 132 103 133 338

S2

134 135 137 139 140 141 144 146 151 154 155 157 163 165 167 168 173 174 178 179

95 n. 101, 390 n. 52 331 n. 56 55, 68 n. 98 158 n. 50, 453 460 55, 443 n. 25 461 159 n. 58, 461 331 n. 56, 377 n. 19 390 n. 50 28 n. 60, 338–339, 340 n. 89, 460 376 n. 17, 388 n. 46 460 192 n. 154, 460, 387 n. 45 331 n. 56 460 377 n. 21 461 461 68 n. 99, 122, 150–151

1 104 3 377 n. 22 4 376 n. 17 5 103 n. 128, 187 n. 142 6 442 11 95, 119 12 193 n. 157, 384 n. 38 22 95 n. 101, 340, 390 n. 52, 395 n. 66, 461 24 417 n. 51 28 377 n. 21 30 390 n. 52 32 187 n. 141 34 189 n. 148 36 103, 186, 226, 377 n. 22, 395 n. 65, 396 n. 67 Colonna Vittoria: Other works: Meditatione del Venerdì Santo 302, 304, 305 n. 112, 364, 399, 401–408, 412–413, 421, 423–430 Orazione sopra l’Ave Maria 399–401, 408 n. 29, 421, 423–426, 428–430 Colonnelli Cornelia 297 Comin da Trino 24, 102, 121 n. 182, 446 Comunità di Bose 406 n. 26, 424 n. 72 Condivi Ascanio 3 n. 1, 270, 274–275, 277–278, 284 n. 45, 285–287, 302 Contarini Gasparo xii, 4, 9, 16, 63, 68 n. 102, 194, 207, 280, 282, 287, 349–356, 358–368, 369 n. 77

550 Contarini Piero 359 Contarini Serafina 23 n. 41, 24, 356 n. 24 Contile Luca 3 n. 1, 30, 35, 110 Contin Giuseppe 62 n. 75 Conti Vincenzo 465 Conrad Gianna xiii Copello Veronica xiii, 50 n. 33, 62 n. 75, 100 n. 118, 101 nn. 120–121, 127 n. 207, 415 n. 45 Coppens Christian 126 n. 205 Coppetta il. See  Beccuti Francesco Corfini Jacopo 321, 323–324, 335–336, 340 Corinna (Greek poet) 468–470 Cornazzano Antonio 404 n. 19 Cornelia (mother of the Gracchi) 20, 469, 470 n. 7, 477–478, 488, 500 Corsaro Antonio 43 n. 11, 53 n. 47, 85 n. 67, 289 n. 66 Corsi Stefano 253 n. 18, 261 n. 33 Corso Rinaldo 23 n. 43, 54 n. 50, 90, 100, 102 n. 125, 110–114, 116–121, 124, 127, 134, 137–139, 142–143, 151–152, 215 n. 66, 223–231, 444, 451, 500 Corte Bartolomeo 77 n. 39 Corteccia Francesco 317–318 Cortese Gregorio 349, 350 n. 3, 353–354 Cortesi Paolo 474 Costanza d’Avalos (duchess of Francavilla) 201 Cottemanno Lorenzo 338–339 Cox Edwin Marion 73, 91, 92 n. 96, 103 n. 127 Cox Virginia 5 n. 8, 9, 16 n. 25, 18 n. 31, 39 n. 2, 51 n. 37, 66 n. 92, 67 n. 96, 70 n. 5, 101, 110 n. 142, 126 n. 206, 129 n. 215, 146 nn. 20–21, 209 n. 45, 210 n. 51, 211 nn. 53–55, 215 n. 65, 290 n. 67, 326 n. 43, 435 n. 8, 438, 439 n. 14, 445 n. 29, 454, 455 n. 57, 456 nn. 58, 61, 459 n. 66, 467, 469 n. 6, 470 nn. 8–9, 471 n. 10, 476 n. 21, 477 n. 22, 486 nn. 47, 52, 488 n. 54, 490 n. 56, 491 n. 59, 497 nn. 70–71 Cremaschino Antonio known as 82 Criscuolo Vincenzo 358 n. 31 Cristelli Franco 316 n. 9 Cristoforo dell’Altissimo 253 n. 18, 261–263, 265–267, 269, 278 Crivelli Protasio 242 Crivelli Tatiana xiii, 7, 13 n. 9, 24 n. 44, 40, 42, 43 n. 13, 99 n. 115, 126 n. 206, 140 n. 2,

Index 141 n. 5, 143 n. 9, 177 n. 117, 223 n. 90, 232 n. 114 Croce Benedetto 203 n. 19 Cupperi Walter 478 n. 28, 479–480, 482 n. 38, 484, 485 n. 44, 491 n. 60 Currie Stuart 481 n. 35 Curtius Ernst Robert 178 n. 120 Cusick Suzanne G. 316 n. 6 Cuthbert Father 357 n. 28, 359 n. 32 Dal Covolo Enrico 402 n. 12 D’Alessandro Lorenza M. G. 285 n. 49, 306 n. 116, 308 n. 121, 309 n. 123, 311 nn. 127, 130, 312 n. 131, 313 n. 134 Dall’Aglio Stefano 41 n. 5 Dalla Torre Sigismondo Fanzino 463 Dal Pozzo Modesta 488 Da Messina Antonello 243 Da Montefeltro Agnese xi, 3 Da Montefeltro Federico 3 Da Montefeltro Guidubaldo 216 Dandino Girolamo 350 n. 2, 354 n. 18 Dane Joseph A. 48 Daniele da Volterra 278 Dante da Maiano 227 D’Aragona Eleonora 497 D’Aragona Ferdinando I 497 D’Aragona Ferdinando II (the Catholic) 202 D’Aragona Giovanna 46, 53, 62, 328 n. 49 D’Aragona Maria 78, 86 n. 74, 459 D’Aragona Tullia 63 n. 79, 126 n. 205, 128 n. 211, 434, 440 n. 18, 435 n. 8, 445, 447, 449, 456 D’Ascoli Arsenio 358 n. 29 Da Silva Miguel 216 D’Atri Antonio 106 n. 135 D’Avalos Alfonso 28, 31, 44, 46–47, 49–50, 62, 78, 86 n. 74, 91, 222 n. 88, 446, 459 D’Avalos Costanza (duchess of Francavilla) 50, 201, 203, 207 D’Avalos Costanza (Piccolomini) 3, 16, 21, 25–26, 28, 33, 208, 209 n. 44, 239–240, 242, 269, 418 n. 59, 483 D’Avalos Francesco Ferrante xi, 3, 4, 13, 44–46, 69 n. 2, 70, 91, 145, 201, 203, 209, 210, 239, 242–243, 247, 248–249, 255–256, 269, 446, 479–481, 486, 494, 498, 500 Da Vinci Leonardo 243

Index Davis Natalie Zemon 58 n. 65 Dawson Peter 358 n. 29 De Andrè Fabrizio 399 De Angelis Francesco 478 n. 28 Debby Nirit Ben-Ayreh 501 n. 80 De Blasi Nicola 201 n. 15, 202 nn. 15–17, 19 De Campos Redig 294 n. 79 De Caro Gaspare 50 n. 35, 128 n. 211 De Castris Pierluigi Leone 59 n. 70, 201 n. 14, 242 De Donno Fabrizio 378 n. 24 De’ Franceschi Francesco Senese 101 n. 122 De’ Franceschi Giovanni 121 n. 182 De Frede Carlo 123 n. 192 De Garatori Giacopo 103 n. 127 Degl’Innocenti Luca 91 n. 92, 97 n. 106 De Grado Francesco 129, 130 De Gruyter Walter 79 n. 51 De Holanda Francisco 276, 279, 284, 286 Del Bene Giovanni 319 n. 17 D’Elia Antony F. 499 n. 76 Della Casa Giovanni 110, 321, 435, 441 Della Rovere Francesco Maria I 208, 216 Della Rovere Francesco Maria II 297–298 Della Torre Francesco 51–52 Del Tufo Giovan Battista 202 De Marinis Tammaro 109 n. 141 DeMolen Richard L. 355 n. 21, 357 n. 28 De Montmorency Anne 58 n. 63 De’ Roberti Ercole 497 De Rossi Properzia 273, 274 n. 4 Destefani Sibilla xiii Deswarte-Rosa Sylvie 270 n. 1, 279 n. 22, 280 n. 26 De Tournon François 445, 447 De Viano Alessandro 25 n. 49 De Voragine Jacobus. See  Jacopo Da Varazze De Vries Joyce 481 n. 36 Di Dio Alessia 99 n. 115, 140 n. 2 Dido 17 Di Falco Benedetto 202 Di Filippo Bareggi Claudia 84 n. 67, 115 n. 162, 124 n. 199 Dillon Gianvittorio 109 n. 139 D’Indy Vincent 316 Dionisotti Carlo 15 n. 21, 25 n. 48, 30 n. 69, 52 nn. 41, 45, 56 n. 58, 57 n. 61, 58 n. 63, 59 n. 66, 64 n. 80, 71, 74–75, 77, 88 n. 82, 89, 98 n. 112, 99, 110 n. 143, 141 n. 5, 145

551 n. 17, 204 n. 26, 212 n. 58, 214 n. 63, 232 n. 115, 278 n. 18, 366 n. 63 Diotima of Mantinea 469 Diotisalvi di Pietro da Siena 103 n. 127 Di Raimondi Lucretia 465 Discepoli Girolamo 126, 143 n. 13 Dittrich Franz 351 n. 6 Doglio Maria Luisa 25 n. 49 Dolce Lodovico 21 n. 36, 23 n. 41, 24, 67 n. 94, 84–86, 115, 124–125, 134, 206 n. 28, 449–450, 464–465 Domenichi Lodovico 436, 438–440, 442, 444–445, 450, 455–458, 460, 462–463, 466 Domenico di Michelino 265 Donati Lamberto 109 n. 141 Donato Baldassarre 322 n. 28 Dondi Cristina 48 n. 29 Doni Giovanni Battista 329 Donnelly John Patrick 367 n. 68 Dorati Niccolò 324, 327, 330, 332–336 Dorico Valerio 323 Dragoni Giovanni Andrea 320 Drei Giovanni 75 n. 31 Drusi Riccardo 197 n. 3, 204 n. 25 Duc Philippe 324 n. 33, 339 Duke of Ferrara. See  Este Ercole d’ II Durling Robert M. 173 n. 112 Einstein Alfred 317 n. 12, 326 n. 42 Eisenbichler Konrad 439 n. 16, 440 n. 16, 445 n. 30, 456 n. 58, 457 nn. 62–64 Elam Caroline 275 n. 7 Elijah 353 Enoch 353 Enselmino da Montebelluna 403, 403 n. 18, 408, 410, 414–415, 421, 422 n. 67 Ephrussi Charles 109 n. 141 Epigram 207 n. 32, 498 Equicola Mario 200, 204 Erasmus of Rotterdam 358 n. 30, 365 n. 61, 378, 392 Erbetta Mario 403 n. 15, 18 n. 56 Erhardt Michelle A. 280 n. 24 Erizzo Sebastiano 116 n. 168 Essling Victor Masséna 104 n. 130, 109 n. 141 Este Alfonso d’ 483 Este Ercole d’ 497 Este Ercole II d’ xi, 58

552 Este Ippolito d’ 222 Este Isabella d’ 315, 373 n. 6, 481–482, 484, 486, 488 Este Lucrezia d’ 297 Eugenius IV 499 Euripides 227 Faelli Giovanni Battista 112, 114, 224 Faentino Baldassarre 82 Faeta Francesco 405 n. 24 Falardo Domenica 86 n. 74 Falaschi Enid T. 109 n. 139 Farnetti Monica 28 n. 60, 123 n. 194 Fattucci Gianfrancesco 54 Faustina (wife of the Roman emperor) 481 Favaro Elena 109 n. 141 Fedele Cassandra 486 Federico da Montefeltro 470, 481, 497 Fedi Roberto 160 n. 63 Feldman Martha 329 n. 52 Felis Stefano 323, 340 Ferino-Pagden Sylvia 201 n. 14, 242 n. 6, 247 nn. 12–13, 252 n. 18, 253 nn. 19–20, 257 n. 27, 270 n. 1, 278 n. 19, 372 n. 3, 386 n. 44, 479 n. 31, 486 n. 45, 491 n. 60, 494 n. 65 Fermor Sharon 483 n. 42 Ferrabosco Alfonso 321 Ferrero Ermanno 15, 275 n. 8 Ferrero Giuseppe Guido 356 n. 26 Ferri Giovanni 403 n. 16 Ferroni Giovanni 101 n. 121 Fiamm a Gabriele 101, 332 Filippi Daniele V. 340, 337 nn. 78–79, 339 nn. 85–86, 340 n. 87, 343, 345 n. 99 Filonico Alicarnasseo. See  Castriota Costantino Fini Daniele 207 Finucci Valeria 146 n. 21 Finzi Riccardo 114 n. 158 Firenzuola Angelo 196 Firpo Massimo  5 n. 7, 33 nn. 82–83, 34 n. 87, 35 n. 89, 123 nn. 191–192, 147 n. 22, 280 n. 26, 281 n. 28, 282 nn. 34, 37, 283 nn. 39–41, 288 n. 59, 291 nn. 71–72, 292 nn. 73, 76, 294 n. 78, 334 n. 68, 362 n. 47, 368, 369 n. 77, 372, 373 n. 4, 375 n. 13, 424 n. 71

Index Flaminio Marcantonio xi, 4, 212, 283, 349, 353–355, 392 n. 60, 401 n. 10, 441, 498 n. 74 Flemming Victoria von 257 Flora Francesco 21 n. 36 Forcellino Antonio 281 n. 26, 285 n. 49, 291 n. 71, 294 n. 80, 296 n. 86, 298 n. 93, 300 n. 98, 301 n. 99, 309 n. 122, 311 n. 130, 312 n. 132 Forcellino Maria xiii, 8, 56 n. 56, 251 n. 17, 252, 253 n. 18, 260 n. 31, 267, 284 nn. 7, 45, 286 n. 52, 291 nn. 69–70, 294 n. 79, 296 nn. 83, 86–87, 297 n. 90, 298 nn. 91–93, 301 n. 100, 303 n. 108, 306 n. 115, 307 n. 119, 308 n. 121, 311 n. 129, 409 n. 34, 410 n. 35 Foresti Jacopo Filippo 487 n. 49 Forteguerra Laodamia 110 n. 142, 434, 436, 439, 456–458, 462, 463 Fortini Laura 28 n. 60, 123 n. 194 Fortunio Giovanni Francesco 95, 195, 210 Foscolo Ugo 206 Fracastoro Girolamo 14 n. 16 Fragnito Gigliola 4 nn. 3, 5, 147 n. 22, 280 n. 25, 281 nn. 30–31, 366 n. 64, 369 n. 77, 372, 424 n. 71 Francesco da Prato 83 Francis I 438, 455, 458–459 Francis Saint 193, 357–360 Franco Battista 292 François I xi, 56 Franco Nicolò 42, 84–86, 124 Freedberg David 284 n. 43 Fregoso Federico 282, 356 n. 26 Freuler Gaudenz 8, 129 n. 216, 278 n. 19 Frommel Christoph L. 300 n. 95, 301 n. 101 Furey Constance 365 n. 61 Fuscano Giovanni Berardino 246 Gabrieli Andrea 322 n. 28 Gaeta Franco 350 n. 2 Gaia Afrania 469, 470 n. 7 Galeazzo di Tarsia 240 Galteruzzi Carlo 30 Gambara Brunoro 443 Gambara Veronica 23, 24 n. 44, 40 n. 3, 42, 49 n. 32, 63–64, 66, 69 n. 1, 70, 79, 90, 102, 110–111, 113, 115 n. 160, 117 n. 172, 123

Index n. 194, 128 n. 211, 142, 151 n. 30, 211, 215 n. 66, 223–228, 331 n. 55, 376 n. 15, 433–434, 436, 438, 440–445, 447, 450–452, 454–456, 458–459, 462–465, 470, 491 Gambara Violante 24 Gardano Angelo 322 Gareth Benedetto (Cariteo) 201 Gasparotto Davide 265 n. 36 Gehl Paul F. 433 n. * Gelli Giovan Battista 196 Genovese Gianluca 125 n. 200 Geronimous Dennis 484 Gherardo Paolo 24, 25, 28 Gheri Cosimo 101 n. 123, 306 n. 117 Ghinassi Ghino 217 n. 72 Ghislieri Michele 444 Ghisoni Fermo 311 n. 126 Giaccarello Anselmo 442, 464 Giambullari Pierfrancesco 196 Giani Elisabetta 309 n. 123 Giberti Gian Matteo 23, 51–52, 331, 343, 349 n. 1, 354 n. 18 Giberto X of Correggio 455 Gigliucci Roberto 85 n. 70 Gillespie Alexandra 48 Gilson Simon 378 n. 24 Giochi Filippo M. 92 n. 97 Giolito de’ Ferrari Gabriele 24, 82–83, 86 n. 71, 124–125, 126 n. 205, 127, 134, 433–435, 437–442, 444–446, 449–450, 452, 454–455, 458, 460, 463–465 Giordano Maria Laura 376 n. 15 Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarella known as) 131, 255 Giotto di Bondone 266 Giovanardi Claudio 197 n. 3 Giovanni da L’Aquila 231 n. 110 Giovio Paolo 23 n. 43, 30–31, 39 n. 1, 46–47, 49–50, 51 nn. 37, 39, 61–62, 64–65, 78, 194, 203, 209, 212–213, 215, 261–263, 314 n. 1, 469 n. 6, 480, 487–488, 497, 499 n. 77 Giunta Lucantonio 378 Giunti (editor) 91, 449 Giuseppe degli Aromatari 231 n. 110 Giussano Andrea 77 n. 39 Giustiniani Orsato 322 Giustiniani Paolo 357–358, 363, 364 n. 54

553 Gizzi Chiara 115 n. 164 Gleason Elisabeth G. 349 n. *, 350, 351 n. 6, 352, 356 n. 25, 357 nn. 27–28; 361–363, 366 n. 65, 367, 368 nn. 75–76 Gnoli Teresa 13 Gonzaga Agostino 373 n. 6 Gonzaga da Reggio Bonaventura 427 Gonzaga Eleonora 208 Gonzaga Ercole 60, 280 n. 26, 281, 283 n. 39, 286–287, 306–307, 308 n. 121, 311 n. 126, 356 n. 25 Gonzaga Federico 501 Gonzaga Federico II 49–50, 204 Gonzaga Ferrante 327 Gonzaga Giulia xi, 4, 16, 33, 256 n. 26, 261, 282 n. 37, 363, 366 n. 62 Gonzaga Guglielmo 465 Gonzaga Ippolita 327 Gonzaga Isabella 225 Gorni Guglielmo 120 Gotti Aurelio 278 n. 17, 297 n. 89, 298 n. 94 Gottifredi Bartolomeo 329 Gouwens Kenneth 39, 51 nn. 37, 39; 262 n. 35, 314 n. 1, 469 n. 6, 479 n. 31, 484, 485 n. 44, 487 n. 48 Gozzoli Benozzo 265 n. 36 Gradinico Giorgio 125 Gravina Pietro 498 Graziani Bartolomeo 449 Grazzini Anton Francesco 42 n. 9 Grendler Paul 79 n. 49, 435 nn. 5–6, 441 n. 21, 444 n. 28, 456 n. 59 Griffio Giovanni the elder 109 n. 139 Griffith Gwynfor T. 196 n. 1 Grimmani Giulio 464 Grimm Herman 312 Grivel Marianne 273 n. 2 Gronau George 301 n. 101 Groote Inga Mai 331 n. 54 Gualteruzzi Carlo 14 n. 16, 31, 51–52, 57, 64–65, 67 n. 95, 72–74, 88, 98–99, 101, 212, 223, 281 n. 28 Guami Gioseffo 336 n. 74 Guardiani Francesco 126 n. 206 Guarguante Orazio 336 Guarini Giovan Battista 336 Guerralda Bernardino 210 Guerrini Emily 358 n. 29 Guerrini Paolo 368 n. 73

554 Guglia 440 Guicciardini Francesco 499 n. 77 Guidiccioni Giovanni 15, 30, 215 Guidi Enrico Maria 449 n. 43 Guittone d’Arezzo 227 Haar James 318 n. 14, 325 n. 38, 326 Haberer Johanna 392 n. 59 Hairston Julia L. 63 n. 79, 435 n. 8, 440 n. 18, 445 n. 30, 447 n. 38 Halkin Léon E. 392 n. 58 Hall James 289 n. 62 Hampton Timothy 469 n. 5 Hannibal Barca 91 Harewood Earl of 495 Harris Neil 48 n. 29, 92 n. 92, 96 Haskins Susan 408 n. 29 Heal Bridget 392 n. 58 Hemina. See Cassius Hemina Hendrix Harald 43 n. 11, 85 n. 67 Henry VIII 354 Hermann Fiore Kristina 292 n. 75, 306 n. 116, 309 nn. 123, 125 Herzig Tamar 376 n. 15 Hill George F. 479 n. 32 Hindrichs Thorsten 340 n. 87 Hippolyta (wife of Theseus) 486–488, 498 Hirst Michael 260 n. 31, 275 n. 7, 280 n. 23, 288 n. 57, 296 n. 87, 300 n. 95 Hollar Wencelaus 129, 131 Homer 227 Hortensia (Roman orator) 469 Hortensius Quintus Hortalus 500 Hosker Lucy xiii Hoste da Reggio 335 Hudon William V. 351 n. 6, 352 n. 9, 367 n. 67 Hurtado di Mendozza Diego 463 Hypsicratea (wife of Mithridates) 477–478, 486–488 Iannace Florinda M. 180 n. 125 Ignatius of Loyola Saint 203 n. 22, 352 n. 8, 359 Il Verso Antonio 320, 321, 322, 341 Imperadore Bartolomeo known as 105, 446 Infelise Mario 198 n. 7 Ingegneri Marcantonio 323, 340 Ippolito da Ferrara 79 n. 52, 80, 82–83, 84 n. 66, 96

Index Ipsicratea 20 Israels Machtelt 41 n. 7 Jacob Apostole Saint 418 Jacobson Schutte Anne 366 n. 63 Jacopo da Varazze 209 n. 44 Jacopone da Todi 403 Jedin Hubert 363, 364 n. 54, 372 Jeremiah 149 n. 26 Joannides Paul 273 n. 2, 296 nn. 83, 85 John the Evangelist Saint 342 Jones Carol D. 358 n. 30 Jones William B. 358 n. 30 Jorgensen Kenneth J. 355 n. 21 Joseph of Arimathea 417 Julius II xi, 500 Jung-Inglessis Eva-Maria 400 nn. 3–4, 401, 402 n. 11, 421, 427 n. 78, 428 n. 81 Kallendorf Craig 80 n. 55 Kamp Georg W. 296 n. 83 Kaplan Steven Laurence 79 n. 51 Karl Frey 278 n. 17 Kennedy George A. 490 n. 55 Kerr Ralph Francis 351 n. 6 King John N. 48 n. 29 Kirkham Victoria 39 n. 2, 449 n. 43, 456 n. 58, 467 n. 1 Kress Samuel H. 131, 472, 485 Kuntz Marion Leathers 353 n. 11 Lacerda Laurenza 129 Lachmann Karl 133 Lando Ortensio 435 Lane Anthony N. S. 383 n. 31 Lanza Giovanni 232 Laodamia (wife of Protesilaus) 17, 490 Larson Keith A. 327 n. 46 Lasagni Roberto 75 n. 31, 76 n. 33 Lassus Orlande de 322 n. 28, 325, 339 Laurenti Guido 376 Lauri Achille 315 Lazarus 417 Lehman Helmut T. 350 n. 5 Leoni Leone 332 Leo X xi, 74, 212, 216 Lesure Francois 317 n. 12 Lewis Mary S. 329 n. 51 Librandi Rita 197 n. 4, 201 n. 15 Lindman Sara H. 470 n. 7

Index Lombarda Bona 487 Lombardi Giambattista 110 n. 144 Lombardi Lucrezia 231 Londogno Antonio 332 Longinus 462 Longo Nicola 199 n. 8 Lorenzo da Pavia 315 n. 3 Lotti Ottaviano 280 n. 26, 287, 356 n. 25 Love Harold 60 n. 71 Lowry Martin 48 Lucan Marcus Annaeus 477, 478, 500 Lucco Mauro 255 n. 23 Lucinus Caius Fabritius 327 Lucretia (wife of Collatinus) 468, 469, 470, 491 Luis de Granada 409 n. 32 Luna Fabrizio 4 n. 4, 17, 44 n. 15, 70–72, 86, 88, 90, 113, 209, 433, 434 n. 3, 476 n. 20 Luther Martin 111 n. 146, 279, 350, 352 n. 10, 372, 378, 406, 424, 429 Luzio Alessandro 50 n. 33, 356 n. 25, 373 n. 6 Machiavelli Niccolò 3, 206, 435 Macola Novella 252 n. 18, 255 n. 22, 256 n. 26, 257 n. 28, 258–260, 479 n. 31, 494 Magdalene Saint 10, 26–28, 193, 461, 501 Maggione Giovanni Paolo 209 n. 44 Magnanini Suzanne 128 n. 211 Maier Bruno 159 n. 59 Malatesta Giuseppe Pandolfo 77 n. 39 Malermi Nicolò 377, 378 Mangione Felice Antonio 72 n. 16 Mantegna Andrea 488–489 Manuzio Aldo 23 nn. 40, 42, 96, 433 n. 1 Manuzio Paolo 22, 23 Manzi Pietro 70 n. 7 Marazzini Claudio 196 n. 1 Marc’Antonio da Carpi 112 n. 149 Marcatto Dario 123 n. 191, 373 n. 4 Marcheschi Daniela 428 n. 83 Marcia (wife of Cato) 20 n. 34, 477, 478, 488, 499, 500 Marco da Cremona (monk) 353 Marcolini Francesco 85 n. 70, 87 n. 77, 195 Marcus Aurelius Probus 249 Margaret of Austria (daughter of Charles V) 439, 457 Marguerite de Navarre xi, 4–6, 10, 23–24, 56–59, 75, 88 n. 82, 206 n. 28, 208 n. 39,

555 376 n. 15, 418 n. 59, 443, 464, 472–475, 490 Marguerite de Valois 457 Marinella Lucrezia 126 n. 206, 128 n. 211 Marini Paolo 115 n. 162, 225 n. 95 Marongiu Marcella 247 Marqués Mena 260 n. 31 Marquis of Pescara. See D’Avalos Francesco Ferrante Marquis of Vasto. See D’Avalos Alfonso Marsilio of Padua 435 Martelli Lodovico 196, 221, 222 n. 87 Martial Marcus Valerius 498 n. 74 Martini Francesco di Giorgio 481 n. 36 Martini Salvi Virginia 447, 456–457 Martin John Jeffries 361 n. 40, 368 n. 73, 370 n. 80 Mary (Mother of God) 9–10, 26–27, 59, 169, 178, 180–181, 183–184, 188, 193, 303–305, 342, 392–394, 395 n. 66, 396–398, 402–403, 405–421, 423, 461, 418 n. 59 Mascarenhas Pedro 279 Masi Gianluca 306 n. 116, 309 n. 125 Masi Giorgio 111 n. 145 Massari Stefania 274 n. 5, 292 n. 75, 294 n. 81 Mastocola Paola 284 n. 46 Mathieu-Castellani Gisèle 110 n. 143, 225 n. 94 Matraini Chiara 23, 24 n. 44, 428, 434, 449, 456, 462 Matthew Evangelist Saint 418 Mausulus 494 Mayer Thomas F. 33 n. 81, 349 n. *, 352, 353 n. 13, 354 n. 19, 356 n. 25, 368 n. 76, 441 n. 20 Maylender Michele 78 n. 43, 110 n. 144, 111 n. 147 Mayr Gudula 280 n. 23 Mazzetti Mila 153 n. 36 McCracken George E. 491 n. 58 McGrath Alister E. 382 n. 30, 383 nn. 33, 35 McHugh Shannon 120 n. 181, 476 n. 21 McIver Katherine A. 274 n. 4 McLaughlin Martin 474 n. 18 McNair Philip 372 n. 3, 374 n. 9, 375 n. 14 McNamer Sarah 404 n. 21 Medea (wife of Jason) 17, 490 Medici Catherine de’ 457 Medici Cosimo I de’ 261, 333–334, 445–456

556 Medici Giulio de’ 335 Medici Lorenzo de’ 206 Melanchthon Philip 363, 372, 383 Melli Grazia 376 n. 15 Meloni Silvia 311 n. 128 Menato Marco 75 n. 31, 97 n. 106, 109 n. 139 Mercalli Marica 309 nn. 123–124, 312 n. 130 Mercando Tomaso 368 n. 73 Mercati Angelo 499 n. 75 Merlo Alessandro 324 n. 33 Merulo Claudio 322 n. 28, 336 n. 74 Meuffels Otmar 383 n. 31 Michelson Emily 367 Michiel Giovanni 23 n. 42 Migiel Mayilyn 450 n. 45 Migliorini Bruno 196 n. 1 Milanesi Gaetano 256 n. 24 Milburn Erika 71 n. 11 Minonzio Franco 479 n. 29 Miroballo Maddalena 129 Mirtilla Ippolita 447 Mischiati Oscar 319 n. 16 Mitchell Katharine 233 n. 118 Mithridates 20 n. 34, 486, 487 Moderata Fonte. See Dal Pozzo Modesta Modroni Grazia 276 n. 10, 279 n. 20 Molinaro Girolamo 336 Molino-Colombini Giulia 232 Molza Francesco Maria 83, 88, 63, 99, 123 n. 190, 127 n. 207, 135, 136 n. 223, 194, 228 n. 104, 442 Mongiat Farina Caterina 196 n. 1 Montagna Davide Maria 126 n. 206 Montecchia Elena 13 Montenero Mattheo 465 Monte Philippe de 317 n. 12, 320, 322 n. 28, 329, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340–344, 345 Mora Costanza 285 n. 49, 306 n. 116, 308 n. 121, 309 nn. 123, 124, 312 n. 130 Mordenti Alessandro 92 n. 97 Moro Giacomo 25 n. 50, 26 n. 52, 28 n. 63, 29 n. 67, 110 n. 143, 111 n. 145, 112, 372 n. 1, 390 n. 53 Moro Giovanni 225 n. 94 Moroncini Ambra 378 n. 24, 391, 409 n. 34 Morone Giovanni 34, 207, 367–368, 375 n. 13 Moroni Ornella 88 n. 82, 101 n. 123 Morra Isabella 123 n. 194, 128 n. 211, 434, 449–450, 457–458, 462, 464–465 Morris Amy M. 280 n. 24

Index Mortimer Ruth 104 Motture Peta 481 n. 35 Mozzarelli Cesare 482 n. 37 Müller Giuseppe 15 Murphy Paul 281 n. 29 Musa Mark 246 n. 9 Musiol Maria 446 n. 36 Mutini Claudio 440 n. 17 Muzio Girolamo 23 n. 43, 330 Nagel Alexander 251 n. 16 Naldini Giovanni Battista 264, 265 Nanino Giovanni Maria 322 n. 28 Nasco Jan 321 Navarrini Dell’Atti Lucia 316 n. 9, 317 n. 10 Navò Curzio Troiano 93 Negri Virginia 24 Nencioni Giovanni 275 n. 7 Nicholas V 499 Nicodemus 418 Nicolini Benedetto 62 Nicolini da Sabbio Giovanni Antonio 69, 112 n. 152 Nicolini da Sabbio Pietro 93, 95 Nicolò d’Aristotele known as Zoppino 91–92, 95–97, 100, 102, 105–107, 110, 113, 119 n. 177, 134, 136–137, 142, 375 n. 14, 446 Nieto José C. 358 n. 30 Noah 376 Nonnus de Panopolis 479 Norton Frederick John 97 n. 108 Nuovo Angela 76 n. 33, 87 nn. 76, 79, 123 n. 195, 126 n. 205 Ochino Bernardino xi, xii–xiii, 4, 9, 16, 28–29, 33, 116 n. 169, 117, 124, 127, 149 n. 26, 152, 192, 207, 281–282, 289–290, 302–304, 334, 358–361, 366, 368–369, 371–375, 380, 381 n. 30, 383–385, 389 nn. 47, 49, 390–392, 394 n. 62, 395 n. 64, 407 n. 27, 411 n. 41, 435, 437, 470 Och Marjorie 471 n. 11, 274 n. 4, 479 nn. 31–32, 486 O’Collins Gerald 382 n. 30 Oldofredi d’Iseo Anna Maurella 483 Olszewski Edward J. 486 n. 46 O’Malley John 391 n. 57 O’Malley John W. 352 Ordeaschi Francesca 255

Index Oresko Robert 482 n. 37 Orfei Enrica 13 Ossola Carlo 166 n. 89, 188 n. 146, 379, 390 Ostrow Steven F. 479 n. 30 Otto Wolfgang 383 n. 34 Ovid Publius Naso 16–7, 21 n. 35, 35, 178, 469, 470 n. 7, 476, 490 Pacioli Luca 197 n. 5 Padovano Annibale 322 n. 28 Paduano Guido 36 n. 92 Pagano Sergio M. 33 nn. 81–84, 62 n. 75, 277 n. 14, 372 n. 3 Pagella Giovanni 316, 317 n 10 Pagnini Sante 378 Paladini Luisa Amalia 13 Palcewski John xiii Palestrina Giovanni Pierluigi da 315, 317 n. 12, 321–322, 324 n. 33, 325, 336 n. 74 Palladio Blosio 279 Pallavicini Virginia 443 Palone Marcello 66 Panigada Costantino 203 n. 21 Panizza Letizia 144 n. 15, 428 n. 82, 435 n. 8 Papworth Amelia 63 n. 77 Parabosco Girolamo 315 n. 2 Pascal Julien 311 n. 125 Pasini Mapheo 375 n. 14 Pasolini Pier Desiderio 62 n. 75 Pasquale Coletta 447 Pasquazi Silvio 207 n. 32 Pasquino 371 Passero Marcantonio 450 Pastore Alessandro 283 n. 38 Pastorello Ester 109 n. 139 Pastor Ludwig von 351 n. 6, 499 n. 75, 501 n. 79 Patrizi Giorgio 212 n. 56, 215 n. 67 Patti Gloria 342 n. 95 Paul III 63, 74, 76, 207 n. 39, 280, 350 nn. 3–4, 353 n. 15, 441, 434, 437, 459 Paul IV xii, 152 n. 34, 186, 435, 441, 444, 456 Paul Saint 26, 33 Pausanias (geographer) 486 Pavesi Mauro 78 n. 42 Pecci Onorata 456 Pelikan Jaroslav 402 n. 12 Pellegrina Caterina 465 Penco Mariagrazia 262 n. 35

557 Penelope (wife of Ulysses) 17, 21, 468–470, 476, 478, 488, 490, 499 Perina Gherardo 274 Persia Franca 296 n. 86, 300 n. 97 Pesenti Tiziana 123 n. 195 Peter Saint 418 Petrarch Francesco 17, 20, 96, 103 n. 127, 115, 120 n. 181, 146–147, 149, 150, 152 n. 33, 154, 158, 164 n. 80, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177–178, 180, 186, 194–196, 198, 206, 210, 213, 227–229, 230 n. 107, 231, 326 nn. 44–45, 237, 239, 245, 246 n. 9, 256–257, 261, 263, 265–267, 269, 337, 474 Petrasanta Pietro 448 n. 41 Petrella Giancarlo 80, 82 n. 58, 87 n. 78 Petrucci Aurelia 456 Petrucci Cassandra 456 Peyronel Rambaldi Susanna 60 n. 73 Pezzini Serena 109 n. 140 Philibert de Chalon 24 Philip II 78 Phillippy Patricia 476 n. 21 Phyllis 17 Pianto sopra la Passione di Christo. See Colonna Vittoria, Other works: Meditatione del Venerdì Santo Piccaglia Giacomo 109 n. 139 Piccolomini Alessandro 110 n. 142, 439, 457 Piccolomini Silvia Marchesa de 456 Piéjus Anne xiii, 8, 41 n. 5, 319 n. 15 Piéjus Marie-Françoise 455 n. 58, 456 n. 61 Piero di Cosimo 483–484 Pietrasanta Plinio 449 Pietro da Lucca 80 Pigna Giovanni Battista 483 Pignatti Franco 42 n. 11, 84 n. 67, 86 nn. 71–72 Piovene Caterina 71 n. 12 Pirogallo Filippo xii, 39, 42, 77, 78 n. 42, 83, 88, 90 n. 88 Pirotti Umberto 445 n. 31 Pisana Raffaella 427 Piscini Angela 456 n. 60 Pisotti Paolo 357 Pittorino Rosa xiii Pittorio Ludovico 367 n. 69 Plaisance Michel 110 n. 143, 225 n. 94, 468 n. 4

558 Plato 172 n. 106 Plescia Iolanda xiii Plutarch 497 Poggi Giovanni 275 n. 9 Pole Reginald xii, 4–6, 16, 33 n. 84, 84–35, 49, 52, 53 n. 46, 55, 63, 123, 185, 194, 208 n. 39, 277, 280, 282–283, 287, 291, 305–306, 312, 334, 349–350, 352 n. 10, 353 n. 13, 354 nn. 19–20, 356 n. 25, 368 n. 76, 369 n. 77, 372 n. 2, 375 n. 13, 437, 442, 443 n. 24, 461 Policreti Giuseppe 126 n. 206 Politi Ambrogio Catarino 279, 283–284 Poliziano Angelo 330, 474–475, 486 Pollard John Graham 483 n. 41 Pompeo Colonna 62 Pompey Gnaeus Magnus 20 n. 34, 477–478, 500 Pompilio Angelo 317 n. 12 Pon Lisa 80 n. 55 Pontormo Jacopo 280 Porcari Stefano 499 Porcelaga Aurelio 465 Porta Costanzo 316, 322 n. 28, 323, 329, 343 Portia (wife of Brutus) 326, 490–491, 494–500 Portinaro Francesco 324 n. 33, 339 Powers Katherine 331, 320 n. 17, 332 n. 60 Priest Beatrice xiii Prince of Orange. See Philibert de Chalon Priuli Alvise 277, 362 n. 47, 369 n. 77, 374 Prizer William F. 315 n. 3–4 Procaccioli Paolo 43 n. 11, 84 n. 67, 85 n. 67, 87 n. 77, 115 n. 162–163, 115 nn. 165, 167, 225 n. 95, 360 n. 39 Prosperi Adriano 25 n. 47 52 n. 42, 280 n. 26, 302 n. 103–105 Pseudo Bonaventura 404, 408 n. 30, 409 n. 31 Putt Neal 285 n. 49 Querini Angelo Maria 349, 350 n. 3, 353, 354 n. 20, 355 n. 21 Quiñones Francisco de 358 Quintilian Marcus Fabius 227, 475 Quondam Amedeo 15 n. 20, 22, 72 n. 14, 79 n. 50, 101, 217 n. 73, 102 n. 124, 115 n. 161, 127 n. 208

Index Rabitti Giovanna 144 n. 15, 194 n. 158, 205 n. 28, 212 n. 58, 428 n. 82, 435 n. 8 Rafanelli Maria Rita 280 n. 24 Ragionieri Pina 4 n. 3, 28 n. 61, 55 n. 50, 147 n. 22, 242 n. 6, 247 n. 13, 252 n. 18, 253 n. 18, 256 n. 26, 261 nn. 33–34, 267 n. 40, 372 n. 3, 424 n. 71, 492 n. 61, 494 n. 65 Rahner Hugo 203 n. 22 Rangone Claudia 23 n. 43 Ranieri Concetta 13, 30, 32 n. 76, 33 nn. 81, 84, 34 n. 86, 62 n. 75, 201 n. 14, 277 n. 14, 358 n. 31, 372 n. 3, 469 n. 6 Rava Carlo Enrico 104 n. 130 Reeve Michael D. 48 n. 29 Renée de France xi, 4, 24 Rial Costas Benito 80 n. 54 Ricchi Corrado 487 n. 49 Ricci Antonello 405 n. 24 Ricci Laura 200 n. 10 Riccio Pierfrancesco 334 Richardson Brian 40 n. 3, 41 nn. 5–7, 42 nn. 8–9, 59 n. 69, 60 nn. 72–73, 61 n. 73, 62 nn. 75–76, 63 n. 78, 66 n. 90, 67 n. 95, 68 n. 101, 197 n. 2, 201 n. 13, 221 n. 85, 364 n. 58, 365 n. 60, 433 n. 1 Rill Gerhard 306 n. 115 Ristori Renzo 275 n. 9 Rizzardi Felice 333 n. 64 Rizzarelli Giovanna 109 n. 140 Rizzo Merli da Correggio 112 n. 151 Robin Diana 9, 39 n. 1, 41 n. 7, 51 n. 38, 83 n. 64, 435 n. 6, 433, 439 n. 15, 455 n. 58, 456 n. 59, 487 n. 48 Robinson Adam Patrick 368 n. 73–74, 76 Rocca Guido 217 n. 70 Roman d’Elia Una 187 n. 139, 289 n. 61, 292 n. 74 Romani Vittoria 190 n. 150, 285 n. 49 Romano Giancristoforo 481–484 Romano Giulio 311 n. 126 Romei Giovanna 111 n. 147 Rore Cipriano de 314 n. 2, 329–331 Rosati Gianpiero 21 n. 35 Rospocher Massimo 97 n. 106 Rossi Aldo 273 n. 3 Rossi Massimiliano 314 n. * Rossini Giuseppe 97 n. 106 Rossi Vittorio 80 n. 54

Index Rostirolla Giancarlo 319 n. 16 Rota Berardino 60, 110 Rota Giambattista 129 Rotili Mario 270 n. 2, 292 nn. 76–77 Rovetta Alessandro 298 n. 92, 300 n. 97, 301 n. 101, 306 n. 116 Rozzo Ugo 372 n. 3, 375 n. 14 Rubin Miri 402 n. 12 Ruffinelli Venturino 93 Rullo Donato 122–124 Ruscelli Girolamo 15, 24 n. 44, 54 n. 50, 90 n. 86, 114–119, 143 n. 14, 151, 124, 151, 206 n. 28, 225–226, 227 n. 101, 366 n. 62, 444–446, 449, 451–452, 454, 457, 460, 465 Russell Rinaldina 124, 153 n. 36, 180 n. 125, 372 n. 3, 435 n. 8 Sabatini Andrea 242 Sabbatino Pasquale 72 n. 15, 202 n. 19 Sacrati Alberto 58 sacred music. See  church music Sadoleto Jacopo xi, 4, 216, 353 n. 12 Salamone Cannata Nadia 197 n. 3 Saltini Guglielmo Enrico 12, 133 Salvi Virginia 434, 444, 465, 464 Salvioni Marco 92–93, 95 Salza Abd-El-Kader 62 n. 75 Salzberg Rosa 80 n. 55, 82, 83 n. 61 Samaritan woman 417 Sánchez Garcia Encarnación 101 n. 121 Sander Max 104 n. 130 Sanese Francesca B. 456 Sannazaro Jacopo xi, 3, 47, 63, 109, 145, 194, 201, 337 Sanson Helena 8, 59 n. 70, 113 n. 156, 195, 199 n. 9, 206 n. 30, 207 n. 34, 211 n. 52, 217 n. 74, 231 nn. 109, 111, 113, 233 nn. 117–118 Sansovino Francesco 231 n. 110 Santagata Marco 135 n. 223 Santoro Marco 92 n. 97, 201 Sanzio Raphael 238 n. 2, 255, 471 Sapegno Maria Serena xiii, 7, 120, 140, 145 n. 18, 154 n. 37, 177 n. 117, 178 n. 120, 400 n. 5, 412 n. 42, 430 n. 85, 488 n. 54, 490 Sappho 462, 468–469, 470–471 Sarrocchi Margherita 488 Sartori Claudio 317 n. 12

559 Sautman Francesca C. 439 n. 16 Savonarola Girolamo 284 Scala Mirella 13 n. 10, 469 n. 6 Scaraffia Lucetta 25 n. 47 Scarpati Claudio 122 n. 186 Scheffer Rolien 111 n. 145 Schiesari Juliana 450 n. 45 Schiltz Katelijne 331 n. 54 Schreiner Klaus 402 n. 12 Schwarzenbach Michael xiii Schumacher Andreas 246 n. 10, 251 n. 16 Schutte Anne Jacobson 405 n. 25 Scipio Publius Cornelius Africanus 91, 469 Scorriggio Lazzaro 428 Scotti Mario 206 n. 29 Scotto Girolamo 328, 332 Sebastiano del Piombo 129, 131–132, 237–238, 252–253, 255–257, 258 n. 29, 259–262, 267, 269, 278 n. 19, 494–495 Secchi Tarugi Luisa 306 n. 116 Segatori Samanta 92 n. 97 Segre Cesare 467 n. 1 Seidel Menchi Silvana 111 n. 146 Seneca Lucius Annaeus 227, 475 Serianni Luca 196 n. 1, 197 n. 4 Serio Alessandro 499 nn. 75, 77 Sernini Nino 283 n. 39 Serra Aristide 402 n. 12 Servolini Luigi 109 n. 141 Sessa Giovan Battista 451, 465 Sessa Melchiorre 451, 465 Settis Salvatore 479 n. 30 Severi Luigi 92 n. 94, 96 n. 102, 97 n. 105, 98 n. 110, 104 105 n. 131, 135 n. 222 Sforza Battista 3, 470, 481 Sforza Caterina 481–482, 486, 492 Sforza Isabella 24 Shackleton Bailey David Roy 477 n. 24 Shakespeare William 497 Sheingorn Pamela 440 n. 16 Shemek Deanna 455 n. 58, 456 n. 61 Shifrin Susan 471 n. 11 Siekiera Anna 125 n. 203 Simeon 376 Simiani Carlo 85 n. 70  Simoncelli Paolo 62 n. 75, 391, 400 nn. 3–4, 401, 408 n. 29, 409, 411 n. 41, 415 n. 47, 421, 427 nn. 78–79

560 Sipione Marialuigia 376 n. 15 Sirleto Guglielmo 325 Soarda Bona Maria 24 Sonnabend Martin 249 n. 14 Soranzo Vittore 64–65 Sorio Bartolomeo 409 n. 31 Spada Gerardo 466 Spatafora Bartolomeo 276 Speranza Fabio 242 n. 6 Spike John 274 n. 5 Spinola Maria 447 Spitz Lewis W. 350 n. 5 Spontone Bartolomeo 322 n. 28 Stampa Baldassare 314 n. 2 Stampa Cassandra 314 n. 2, 448 n. 41 Stampa Gaspara 314–315, 329, 376 n. 15, 434, 446–447, 448 nn. 41–42, 449, 457–458, 462 Stewart Gartner Isabella 409 n. 34 Sticca Sandro 403 n. 13 Striggio Alessandro 322 n. 28 Strozzi Ercole 330 Sultzbach Giovanni 70 Suthor Nicola 301 n. 101 Swain Melissa 481 n. 36 Syson Luke 481 n. 35, 482 n. 37, 483 n. 39, 484 n. 43, 492 n. 62 Tacchi-Venturi Pietro 62 n. 75, 353 n. 15, 359 n. 34 Taddei Rosa 13 Taglia Pietro 335 Tansillo Luigi 50 n. 36, 325 n. 36 Targoff Ramie 68 n. 100 Tarsia Galeazzo di xi, 3 Tasso Bernardo 15, 30, 337 n. 76 Tasso Torquato 336, 338 Tedeschi Anne C. 368 n. 73, 441 n. 20 Tedeschi John 368 n. 73, 441 n. 20 Teotochi Albrizzi Isabella 3 n. 1 Terpening Ronnie H. 124 n. 199, 125 n. 201 Terracina Laura 63, 125 n. 200, 128 n. 211, 434, 436, 438, 442, 445, 456, 462–463, 465 Tesi Riccardo 197 n. 3 Thérault Suzanne 3 n. 3, 45 n. 18, 210 n. 50, 212 n. 57, 242 n. 6 Thomas Aquinas Saint 193, 240 Ticozzi Stefano 78 n. 47

Index Tinto Alberto 77 n. 36 Titian Vecellio 28, 131, 501 Todeschi Francesco 332 Tolnay Charles 285 n. 48, 288 n. 58, 292 n. 77, 296 nn. 84–85, 297 n. 90, 300 n. 95, 302 n. 106, 303 n. 107 Tolomei Claudio 196, 221, 222 n. 88 Tolomei Lattanzio 51, 279 Tomasi Franco 111 n. 145, 116 n. 168 Tomitano Bernardino 435 Tordi Domenico 48 n. 28, 51 n. 38, 52 n. 43, 54 n. 49, 56 nn. 57–58, 57 n. 60, 58 n. 64, 73 n. 25, 88, 90 n. 87, 91 n. 89, 92 n. 96, 103 n. 127, 105 nn. 132, 134, 107 n. 136, 114 n. 159, 121 n. 182, 125 n. 205, 126 nn. 205–206 Torraca Francesco 239 n. 3 Toscano Tobia R. 3 n. 3, 13, 43–46, 49–50, 52 n. 41, 56 n. 58, 57 n. 62, 58 n. 64, 59 n. 66, 71 n. 9, 72 n. 16, 73 n. 23, 79, 89, 117, 215 n. 64 Tosco Annibal, n. 43 23 Tower Troy 447 n. 39 Trabalza Ciro 113 n. 153 Trapp Joseph Burney 48 n. 29 Travi Ernesto 68 n. 101, 211 n. 53, 262 n. 35 Treherne Matthew 365 n. 61 Trifone Pietro 196 n. 1, 197 n. 4, 200 n. 10, 203 n. 24 Trinchieri Camiz Franca 315 n. 5 Trissino Gian Giorgio 198, 221 Trovato Paolo 95 n. 100, 115 n. 162, 196 n. 1, 225 n. 95 Tudino Cesare 323 n. 29 Tura Adolfo 265 n. 36 Turchi Francesco 23 n. 43 Turlino Damiano 80 n. 56 Tylus Jane 447 n. 39 Ubertini Francesco 251 Ugoleto Francesco 75 Vadalà Maria Enrica 76 n. 33 Vahland Kia 256, 260 Valdés Juan de xi, 166 n. 89, 283, 289, 358, 365–366, 373, 379 n. 25, 383 n. 34, 390 n. 51, 395 n. 63, 435, 437 Valeriano Pierio 259, 494 Valerio Adriana 376 n. 15

561

Index Valerius Maximus 469 Valgrisi Vincenzo 100, 102 n. 125, 104 n. 130, 121–124, 126–128, 134 n. 221, 143, 434, 446 Valier Giovan Francesco 217 n. 72 Valla Lorenzo 435 Vallentina Faustina 444, 464 Valvassori Florio 106 Valvassori Giovanni Andrea known as Guadagnino 105–106, 109–110, 442 n. 22, 446 Vannel Toderi Fiorenza 492 n. 61 Vanni Andrea 359 n. 33 Varano Costanza 470 Varano Rodolfo da 487 Varchi Benedetto 99, 100 n. 118, 196, 401, 445, 449 Vàrvaro Alberto 201 n. 15 Vasari Giorgio 251, 253, 256, 260–261, 270, 273–274, 278, 284 n. 45, 285–287, 291–292, 311, 494 Vecce Carlo 17 nn. 26–27, 29, 31 n. 71, 54 n. 50, 55 n. 51, 64 n. 82, 145 n. 16, 148 n. 23, 210 n. 46, 476 n. 21 Vellutello Alessandro 118, 133, 152 n. 33 Veneziano Francesco 105 Venier Domenico 329 Venier Lorenzo 82 Ventura Leandro 482 n. 37 Venusti Marcello 8, 294 n. 81, 296–297, 298 n. 92 Verallo Girolamo 350 n. 2, 354 n. 18 Vercelli Alessandro 46, 77, 83 Vergerio Pier Paolo 23, 282, 356 n. 26, 435 Vermigli Pietro Martire xi, xii, 4 Veronese Paolo 238 n. 2 Verrius. See  Festus Vespucci Simonetta 245–247, 250, 483–484 Veturia (mother of Coriolanus) 498 Vian Francis 479 n. 30 Viani Alessandro 82 Vian Paolo 308 n. 121 Vico Enea 253 n. 20

Vidman Vincenzo 128 n. 212 Vincenzo di Polo 97 Vinci Pietro 320–321, 324–325, 328, 332, 336, 340, 342–343 Violi Patrizia 17 n. 28 Viotti Antonio 75–77, 80, 83, 223 Viotti Seth 222 Virgil Publius Maro 154, 196, 227, 486 Visconti Orsina 487 Visconti Pietro Ercole 11–13, 15, 132, 143 n. 13, 207 n. 32 Vitale Maurizio 196 n. 1 Vitali Bernardino 93 Vitali Filippo 316 Vogel Emil 317 n. 12 Waldman Louis 41 n. 7 Walken Christine Chiorian 483 n. 41 Wallace William E. 296 n. 83 Warner Marina 402 n. 12, 403 n. 13 Weaver Elissa 433 n. * Welch Evelyn 481–482 Wert Jacques de 322 n. 28 Willaert Adrian 316, 321, 329–331 Wyss Johann J. 210 n. 49 Young William J. 359 n. 34 Zacchaeus 417 Zanetti Bartolomeo 378 Zappella Giuseppina 76 n. 32 Zardin Danilo 319 n. 16 Zarri Gabriella 18 n. 30, 25 n. 47, 205 n. 28, 206 n. 28, 405 n. 25 Zen Bartolomeo 449 Ziletti Giordano 24 Zimmermann T. C. Price 201 n. 14, 207 n. 33, 212 n. 60 Zoccola Paolo 475 n. 19 Zoppino. See Nicolò d’ Aristotele Zoppo Agostino 264 n. 36, 265