Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  The reason for celebrating the engagement in Naples rather than in Marino was no doubt largely practical: Naples was the capital of the Spanish kingdom, and Marino quite remote. This was a match made for political reasons, and its political capital was to be fully reaped. One of the major social events of that year, the party brought together both the Italian and the Spanish aristocracy living in the city. Most people today think of Florence and Rome as the centers of the Italian Renaissance, and in many respects this characterization is true. But Naples, which was at the time one of the largest metropolises in Europe—its population was almost three times that of London, and five times that of Rome—was also the most cosmopolitan, and reached an extraordinary height of cultural achievement. The guest list for the Colonna fete reflected the great diversity of the city, and included cardinals, bishops, poets, scholars, princes, dukes, military generals, ambassadors, and members of both Vittoria’s and Ferrante’s extended families.

  The celebration of Vittoria and Ferrante’s marital contract was followed by another period of waiting: more than two years passed before the couple took their vows on December 27, 1509, at the castle on Ischia. Why the wedding was not held sooner is not clear, but certainly the number of events to be held required a great deal of planning—aristocratic weddings in the Renaissance were not one-day affairs, but typically lasted close to a week. Every detail of the festivities would have been choreographed, beginning with Vittoria’s departure from her castle in Marino.

  To get from Marino to Naples—a distance of 105 miles—took an average of three days, and the trip was probably broken up by stops at the various Colonna castles that lined the way. In these feudal towns, the wedding party would have been hosted, and celebrated, with great ceremony: crowds of citizens and local nobility awaited the future bride and her family’s arrival, and provided them with a festive meal within the castle walls. According to one eyewitness, “the bride was conducted by the most stately and grandiose procession, as was fitting for the magnificence of the two families.” In addition to the carriages and coaches drawn by horses that transported the family, there were less noble animals in the rear of the convoy, bearing the bride’s possessions and all of the baggage: yoked oxen hauled trunks filled with clothes and precious gifts, and mules trudged along wearing heavily stuffed saddles. At some point en route, the Colonna entourage was met by members of the d’Avalos family, all of whom were heading to the port at Naples to board boats for Ischia.

  It is surprising that such a long-awaited wedding in so remote a location was planned for late December, one of the least pleasant times of year, and with the shortest days. But however gloomy the natural landscape may have been on a volcanic island in winter, this gloominess would have been more than compensated for by elaborate artifice. For a wedding of this grandeur, there was no limit to the ornamentation that enhanced the event. We might imagine bowers of beautiful foliage lining Vittoria’s path as she walked to the cathedral, children dressed in white throwing petals, bells and cannons pealing through the air, and performers wearing elaborate costumes and reciting verses such as these, from the late fifteenth-century wedding of a comparably aristocratic bride and groom, Costanzo Sforza and Camilla Marzano d’Aragona:

  I come from heaven just to welcome you

  here into your realm, O glorious lady,

  everyone rejoices, everyone comes to shake

  your hand, to say be welcome, my lady,

  the streets, the castle, and the town cheer

  Long live Costanzo and his Camilla.

  According to one of the guests at Vittoria and Ferrante’s wedding who left behind a written description, Vittoria was a splendid bride, dressed in white silk brocade interwoven with gold, with a rich blue cloak lined with white fur covering her shoulders. (Ferrante’s clothes were not mentioned, but we can safely assume they were equally luxurious.) The ceremony likely began in one of the halls of the castle, where the couple exchanged their vows with a notary presiding. It was not until the 1560s, after the end of the Council of Trent—an event we will return to later on—that jurisdiction over marriage was given to the church; until that time, oaths or vows were always taken in a secular setting. During this ceremony, there was no blessing from a priest or promise of God’s love and protection—it was simply a business transaction. Religion entered the picture only after the contract had been signed, when there was a nuptial Mass celebrated in church. And then the festivities began.

  There is no record of the wedding feast served for Vittoria and Ferrante. But banquets of this sort were extraordinary affairs that might last six or seven hours and include forty or fifty different courses. The menu from the Sforza and d’Aragona wedding gives us a sense of the kind of meal that would have been served, which combined theatrical pageantry with the most artful display of food imaginable. Costanzo and Camilla’s banquet was divided into two parts, dedicated respectively to the sun and the moon; each part was then further divided into six courses identified with a single god or goddess who either “appeared” in person or sent another mythological figure as his or her messenger to present the food (the servants must have been kept very busy changing their costumes from one course to the next). From the first half of the banquet, here are the dishes presented by Iris, and delivered by Juno, which made up the fourth course:

  An enormous quantity of roast meat: loins of veal, roast kid, roast capons, pullets, pigeons; cameline sauce [made from raisins, nuts, and breadcrumbs]; oranges, citrons, and lemons; a veal pie for each person; peacocks for all tables dressed in their feathers standing on golden plates [these were a common feature at banquets, and were dressed so that when cooked, the bird still appeared to be alive, and even spewed fire from its beak]; roast peacocks with gilded beaks and feet for everyone; peacock sauce [made of hard-boiled eggs, pullet livers, and toasted almonds]; and young peacocks cooked pheasant-style.

  After this very heavy set of dishes revolving around different preparations of peacock, another set of delicacies appeared. This time the food was presented by Orpheus on behalf of his father, Apollo, and included “various types of pies with crusts made with eggs, sugar, and rose water, in which were quails and other live birds that flew around the hall; and very large, sculpted Parmesan cheeses, gilded and painted in Costanzo’s armorial colors; three for the high table and two each for the other tables.” According to a 1549 Italian cookbook, the birds that flew out of the pies were a popular mid-meal entertainment, designed to delight—if not startle—the guests.

  When the guests recovered from the feast prepared for Vittoria and Ferrante, there were likely several days of festivities that followed, which might have included pageants and parades with elaborate floats; daylong hunts; musical concerts and dances; jousts; and theatrical plays. The cost of these events was, needless to say, mind-boggling. In the words of the great humanist Leonardo Bruni, who paid for his own festivities: “I have not just spent money on my marriage, but almost entirely used up my patrimony on one wedding. It is unbelievable how much is spent on these new weddings; habits have become so disgusting.”

  Following their wedding, Vittoria and Ferrante had as their primary residence a palace in Naples on the slope of the hill of Sant’Elmo, with the ruins of the great medieval castle hovering above (the castle had been damaged by an earthquake in 1456, and was not refortified until the 1540s). Thanks to the status of both families, they moved in the highest echelons of Neapolitan society. Ferrante took part in jousting tournaments, which Vittoria attended as a spectator. They went to see plays (usually in Spanish) performed in the palaces of their friends and relatives. They attended the kingdom’s most extravagant parties.

  One such occasion stands out in the record, and gives us a glimpse of Vittoria that is hard to reconcile with her much more reserved persona of later years. On December 6, 1517, a party was held in the twelfth-century Castel Capuano to celebrate the engagement of Bona Sforza, the daughter of Isabella d’Aragona and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, to Sigismund I of
Poland. Oddly, Sigismund himself did not attend the party—he sent a proxy, a Polish nobleman named Stanislaw Ostoróg, to represent him. Ferrante was also not present, but Vittoria was there in full splendor. Dressed in a gown of crimson velvet embroidered with gold, a beautiful golden bonnet, and a crimson sash in satin with the same golden embroidery as the dress, she was accompanied by a group of her ladies-in-waiting, wearing blue damask, and her male valets, dressed in blue and yellow satin. Even the horse she arrived on was an accessory to her appearance: it had a luxurious saddle with fringes of gold and silver.

  Vittoria stood out at this party not simply for her sumptuous attire—many of the women were no doubt dressed with equal magnificence—but for her striking performance of a solo Hungarian dance. She must have learned it for the occasion, in order to honor the ties between Poland and Hungary, which had been forged through Sigismund’s first marriage, to the Hungarian princess Barbara Zápolya, who had died in 1515. Vittoria was not the only one to emphasize the Hungarian connections of the groom: the menu for the banquet included a dish of “boiled wild meat with Hungarian potage,” not typical fare for the Neapolitans. But she seems to have been the only guest who performed a Hungarian dance.

  We know about Vittoria’s dance because Ferrante’s cousin Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, was present at the party and described her performance in great detail in a conversation he had with Giovio some ten years later (see color plate 8). Alfonso had been orphaned as a young child and raised by Costanza at the castle in Ischia; Vittoria and he were very close, and she considered him almost like a son (he was twelve years her junior). Vittoria, he recounted, had been the center of attention at the engagement party, drawing praise from everyone present. “From what woman,” he asked,

  even the most skilled, did she not snatch away first prize in performing the dance? She wanted to perform a Hungarian dance, which is a type of solo ritual dance accompanied by foreign-style music; the other women, being untrained in it, were dumbstruck at her performance. She carried it out knowledgeably, and with such charm and dignity, that when she performed alone with no young man accompanying her in the spacious yet crowded room, everyone formed a circle around her and gazed with admiration.

  In the middle of the grand hall of Castel Capuano, with hundreds of elegant Polish, Spanish, Italian, and possibly Hungarian guests watching in silence, Vittoria danced alone, to the tune of a single flute. “Nothing was more attractive,” Alfonso concluded, “than when, with the most pleasing gestures, she matched all her movements to the rhythms of the dance, whether she was pretending to wave her feathery fan to stir the air or was gathering up her long flowering sleeves, or when she swept the floor with her wide skirts tracing delicate circles.” This enchanting vision captures Vittoria’s self-composure and confidence at the time. It is also the most sensual account of her that has survived.

  All of this must have seemed like the very distant past as Vittoria reconciled herself to her new status as a widow on that late autumn day in Viterbo eight years later. She was not only now a childless widow, but also a very wealthy one. Given that both of her parents had recently died—Fabrizio in 1520, and Agnese in 1523—her sizable dowry would be returned directly to her. She found herself, therefore, in an extremely unusual position of independence. Although her brother Ascanio had taken her father’s place as the head of the family (another brother, Federico, also younger than Vittoria, had died in 1516), and although Alfonso d’Avalos would be named Ferrante’s heir, neither man was officially authorized to make decisions on her behalf. For the first time ever, Vittoria’s life was hers to shape.

  The most obvious choice to make was to remarry. Her age, admittedly, was not ideal: according to a census done of fifteenth-century Florence, only one in ten widows between thirty and thirty-nine remarried. But Vittoria was no ordinary widow, and from the perspective of the marriage market, she must have feared, like Odysseus’s Penelope, having many suitors to ward off. To get some idea of the prospects that awaited her, we might consider the story of her contemporary Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia was subjected to one marriage after another by her scheming father and her brother Cesare, whose ruthless and vengeful character supplied Machiavelli with one of his prime examples of the Renaissance prince. After her first marriage, to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and Count of Cotignola, was annulled on dubious grounds—Alexander VI (her father) claimed the union had not been consummated so as to break the family’s ties with the Sforza, who had fallen from power—Lucrezia was married to Alfonso d’Aragona, Duke of Bisceglie, an illegitimate son of Alfonso II of Naples. After Alfonso was mysteriously murdered, she was married a third time, to Alfonso I d’Este, son of Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara, who upon his father’s death in 1505 became duke himself. This match, made two years before Alexander VI’s death in 1503, seems finally to have satisfied both her father’s and Cesare’s ambitions, and Lucrezia remained at the court of Ferrara until her own death in 1519.

  Portrait of an idealized woman often identified as Lucrezia Borgia, by the early sixteenth-century painter Bartolomeo Veneto (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

  Vittoria, however, did not want to remarry, and there was no one to force her to do anything against her will. Although she left behind no explanation for her decision, there are three very different but equally compelling ways to understand her resistance. First, she was still passionately tied to Ferrante. Despite how ill-suited he was for her temperamentally, and his frustratingly long absences and infidelities, everything she ever wrote in her letters and poems suggests that she was deeply devoted to him. In a letter from August 1524 to her friend the papal secretary Gian Matteo Giberti, who was nominated bishop of Verona that month, she described how angry she was about gossip that had reached her about both Ferrante and her marriage. She was ill at the time, but explained that her illness was not due entirely to her poor physical health. “What they blame me for, maddeningly,” she wrote, “and what needs to be cut out at its cause [in order for me to be well], is the idea that the Marquis was not worth what he is worth, that we were not two in one flesh, and that I was not so obligated to him as I am.”

  This is the only instance in Vittoria’s surviving correspondence in which she spoke frankly about what people thought of her marriage, and she affirmed in the strongest terms the depth of her and Ferrante’s bond. Despite rumors to the contrary, she insisted that they were “one flesh” (the Italian phrase, “due in carne una,” is similar to the language used in the marriage ceremony, where the spouses are declared to be “una carne sola”). To be Ferrante’s widow, then, was a way for her to keep their marriage alive, and preserve its memory in the best possible terms. This is what we might call the romantic explanation for her decision not to remarry, and the best proof for it comes in the sonnets she wrote to him after his death, which we will turn to later on.

  The second possible explanation for her decision not to remarry pulls in the opposite direction (we might call it the antiromantic, or feminist, position): namely, that the very last thing she wanted was to be tied down by another man. After years of feeling that she was not free to move around as she liked—we will remember her bitterness at being left behind on Ischia while Ferrante was fighting alongside her father in the north—the idea of being unbeholden to anyone had a strong appeal. Why would she want to submit to the will of another husband when she could finally live on her own? This may sound like a projection of a modern sensibility onto someone from a very different world, but there were certainly expressions of such feelings in the Renaissance. The most famous example comes from a literary text. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice responds to her uncle’s remark “Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband” with these fighting words: “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust?”

  Vittoria certainly was never so outspoken
about her choices, but there is ample evidence that she came to treasure her freedom. She never settled down in a single place—she moved, in fact, almost every two or three years—and her own interests dictated where she went, and with whom. There were a few occasions when conflicts involving her family compelled her to take refuge at Marino or another family home, but these were exceptions to her normal pattern, and she typically left as soon as she could. Otherwise, when she wanted to visit a particular friend, or follow her favorite preacher from one city to the next, there was no one to stop her. In her 1512 verse epistle, she complained about being restricted by the roles of both daughter and wife. In 1525, Vittoria was about as free as any Renaissance woman could be.

  The third reason (and ultimately perhaps the strongest) for Vittoria’s not wanting to remarry was her desire to lead a predominantly religious life. It was by no means unusual for someone like Vittoria to be very devout—indeed, Renaissance Italy was saturated with religion to a degree difficult to imagine today. But Vittoria was unusually focused on her faith, and in the aftermath of Ferrante’s death, she wanted to put her religious practice at the very center of her existence. In a conversation I had a few years ago about Vittoria with a very worldly nun, I commented that Vittoria was an extremely pious woman, and she replied, “All women were pious at that time.” I demurred, and asked about Lucrezia Borgia, for example—surely she wasn’t pious?—to which she gave me the wonderful response: “Lucrezia Borgia was not moral, but she was pious. There’s an important difference.” Vittoria, needless to say, was both moral and pious: on this front, we quickly agreed.

  The clearest evidence for Vittoria’s desire to lead a life shaped at its core by religion lies in the choices she made over the next few decades about the company she kept, the places she lived, and the way she spent her days—these are, in effect, the stories at the heart of this book. But in the immediate moment of confronting Ferrante’s death and pondering what to do next, Vittoria’s first decision already revealed the path she most wanted to take. She did not go to the funeral service for Ferrante in Milan, where his corpse was laid out at the Gothic church of San Pietro in Gessate with real pompa, or royal ceremony—in fairness, even had she wanted to attend, she may well have arrived too late. Instead, she returned to Rome, where she promptly took up residence as a guest in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite.