to Heaven, ending these long, painful days.
My own hand, encouraged so often by grief,
would have done it, but then my burning zeal
to find him again keeps holding me back.*
As in Petrarch’s fantasies about Laura, Vittoria was clearly imagining a posthumous reunion with her husband in heaven. (She may have overestimated Ferrante’s whereabouts—purgatory at best seems a more realistic bet.)
We knew that Vittoria spent much of her day fulfilling her duties as a widow. But nowhere outside the sonnets did she express frustration with her mourning or the desire to put it behind her. Indeed, in a few of the poems that typically appeared late in the series, she makes a startling confession: she is tired of mourning and wants to embark on a new path. So she begins one sonnet:
Why endlessly implore the deaf ears of Death
and cry to the Heavens with my sad plaint
if I might defeat my strong desire
myself and bring a quick end to my grief?
Why beat on the closed doors of others
if I can open within me a door to forget
and close the window to my thoughts,
so that I deceive my ill-fated star?
The notion of bringing “a quick end to my grief” or “open[ing] within me a door to forget” sounds as if it will lead to another consideration of suicide. But at the volta in line 9—in this instance, she uses the opportunity to shift gears afforded by the rhyme scheme to great effect—it becomes clear that she has something very different in mind:
How many defenses have I tried in vain,
How many ways have I sought to free
my soul from this blind prison of grief.
I am left only to see if I have
reason enough within me that I might
turn my unsound desires to better works.*
To describe her widowhood as a “blind prison of grief” (“carcer cieco del mio grave dolor”) and her mourning for Ferrante as sick or unsound desire (the Italian is insano, which was used in the period more often to indicate poor judgment rather than actual insanity) takes us far from anything we might expect a devout Catholic woman to say. But the sonnet is not, in the end, impious or irreverent—on the contrary. It is a quiet declaration of her intention to shift from mourning her husband’s death to serving God. Vittoria wants to perform “better works” (“miglior opre”), a phrase that picks up on the Catholic Church’s commitment to works alongside faith as the means to salvation. In this sonnet, we glimpse the earliest hints of her preparing to lead an exclusively religious life.
We knew that Vittoria was devoted to both Ferrante and God. But nowhere outside the sonnets did she express her fear that her two loves were potentially incompatible. In one sonnet, she compares the influence of Ferrante’s heavenly spirit to the burning heat of the sun dissolving ice, or the north wind scattering clouds. “So my beloved Sun forbids,” she declares, “all base thoughts from polluting my heart.” If Ferrante’s influence is so strong while she is on earth, how can she even imagine what it will be like to “perceive his splendor unimpeded?” Her joyous anticipation of seeing Ferrante in heaven provokes, however, one of the most interesting conflicts raised in the sonnets:
As the burning heat of the sun dissolves
the ice, and the northern wind scatters
the clouds, so my beloved Sun forbids
all base thoughts from polluting my heart.
My lord enters his dominion and clears
my mind of its enemies, so that he
illuminates my spirit with his blessed light,
and extinguishes all other concerns.
Now if this is my fate on earth, what then
will await me when I lose my mortal flesh
and perceive his splendor unimpeded?
I fear only that my joy in his rays
will block from my view Heaven’s greater light
and no other fire will ignite me.*
Perhaps, she worries, her great love for Ferrante will actually impede her from being “ignite[d]” by God’s love (the Italian verb is accendere, which is what one does with a candle). In a moment of profound honesty, she asks whether her love for her husband, however chaste and pious, might not prove an obstacle in her heavenly future.
Given the religious and intellectual world in which Vittoria lived, the question she raises in this sonnet is quite radical. For it runs directly counter to the central tenets of Florentine Neoplatonism, the school of philosophy that dominated Italian ideas about love in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Neoplatonism came into fashion in Renaissance Italy largely due to the work of a single man, Marsilio Ficino, who was born near Florence in 1433. The son of the personal physician of Cosimo il Vecchio de’ Medici—the founder of the Medici dynasty—Ficino was educated in a city newly inspired by Platonism, thanks to a visit to Cosimo’s court in the 1430s by a passionate Platonist from Constantinople, George Gemistos Plethon. In the 1460s, Ficino took on the enormous task of translating the complete works of Plato (he also translated, along the way, all of Plotinus). By making Plato available to such a wide readership—nearly all educated Europeans in the fifteenth century read Latin—he dramatically transformed the philosophical landscape.
For Renaissance poets interested in love, Ficino’s greatest contribution was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium. More an original dialogue than a straightforward translation, Ficino’s work was written in Latin, but he translated it almost immediately into Italian, thereby reaching an even greater audience. The popularity of his book, written in the late 1460s, centered on his treatment of a single speech of the female philosopher Diotima in the Symposium, which introduced the idea of the so-called ladder of love. At the end of the long, drunken banquet attended by Socrates and his friends, Diotima explains that there need be no incompatibility between loving the beauty of a single person and loving the abstract idea of beauty—these are merely stages on a continuum. Love leads, she affirms, from the earthly to the heavenly spheres without interruption or conflict:
The correct way for [someone] to go, or be led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beautiful things in this world, and using these as steps, to climb ever upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from beautiful practices to beautiful kinds of knowledge, and from beautiful kinds of knowledge finally to that particular knowledge which is knowledge solely of the beautiful itself, so that at last [he or she] may know what the beautiful itself really is.
In the hands of Ficino, Diotima’s ladder of love was adapted to a Christian model, whereby love of a single person could ultimately lead to love of the divine. This was an immensely useful concept for Italian poets, who found in Diotima’s words a justification for their adoration of their earthly beloveds. It also represented an important change from what Petrarch had done in his Canzoniere, written a century before Ficino’s translation of the Symposium—a text that Petrarch likely knew about, but probably never read (despite his great learning, he did not know Greek). At the very end of the Canzoniere, Petrarch officially renounces his love for Laura and turns his devotion to the Virgin Mary. “Escort me to the better path,” he implores, “and accept my changed desires.”* How sincere Petrarch was in making such a renunciation is a matter of debate, but what is important is his sense that he needed to do so.
One hundred years later, however, and equipped with Ficino’s commentary, Italian poets no longer needed to fear—as Petrarch evidently had—that their love of a woman was inherently idolatrous. Located somewhere along Diotima’s ladder, earthly love could be justified as a means to a spiritual end. Ficino made possible, that is, a completely harmonious transition from human to divine love, and his ideas spread throughout Italian courtly and poetic circles. The strongest example of this diffusion came in a book written by one of Vittoria’s friends, Baldassarre Castiglione, ent
itled Il Cortegiano, known in English as The Courtier (see color plate 9). In a speech at the end of The Courtier, which became one of the most popular books in all of Europe, the great poet and humanist Pietro Bembo (who was also Vittoria’s friend) summarized the Christian interpretation of Diotima’s speech (see color plate 10). “The lover,” Bembo declared, “will make use of this love as a step by which to mount to a love far more sublime … By the ladder that bears the image of sensual beauty at its lowest rung, let us ascend to the lofty mansion where heavenly, lovely, and true beauty dwells, which lies hidden in the inmost secret recesses of God.”
Vittoria may well have read Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium—she was an avid reader—and she certainly knew the Neoplatonic poetry, Bembo’s included, that had been written in the fifty years since Ficino’s book first appeared in print. But all signs suggest she was no Neoplatonist, and she actively resisted the very idea that she might reconcile her earthly and divine love. The fact that after finishing the sonnets to Ferrante Vittoria abandoned the project of love poetry altogether is the strongest possible proof of her misgivings about climbing the Platonic ladder.
Vittoria began writing her sonnets to Ferrante sometime in 1526, when her grief was fresh. She was still working on the poems—and working through her mourning—seven years later, as she announces in one of the sonnets:
I hoped that with time my ardent desire
would cool down some, or that my mortal grief
would so overwhelm my heart that by now,
this seventh year, my sighs would be heard no more.*
This long period of mourning—and writing—was also described in an ode addressed to Vittoria by her friend Bernardo Tasso (father of the more famous poet Torquato, author of the great epic Gerusalemme liberata):
But you in the seventh year
weep as much as in the first,
and with heavy grief,
call to your great d’Avalos,
now with your voice, now with your ink.†
We will return to the way in which Vittoria’s poems circulated during this period, as well as to the praise she received from Tasso and other poets. But there is ample evidence that during the seven-year period Vittoria and Tasso described—roughly between 1526 and 1533—the sonnets she wrote after Ferrante’s death were being widely read within literary circles, if not also by a larger public audience. By the end of those seven years, as we shall see, her mourning was behind her, and she had begun to dedicate herself to spiritual verse. Yet however much she may have wanted to distance herself from her poems to Ferrante later in her life, they played a crucial role in her self-understanding both as a poet and as a woman. It was through these sonnets that she was able to say things that had no place in the official language of Renaissance widowhood—things that were meant to be repressed, along with loud wailing and loose hair—and came to recognize her desire to forge her own path, outside her obligations to the dead. Through her sonnets to Ferrante, Vittoria became a powerful artist, with a vocation of her own.
5
THE SACK OF ROME
VITTORIA BEGAN THE PROJECT of writing her sonnets to Ferrante around the time of her move to Marino during the spring of 1526. Marino, which despite its name was far from the sea, occupied a strategically important location as one of the first elevations in the lands above the surrounding plain in the area to the east of Rome. (The town’s Latin name, Castrimoenium, from castrum, or castle, and moenium, fortification, was a better fit.) Located directly on the postal route that led from Rome to Naples, it had also become something of a commercial hub, and was much more lively than many of the neighboring Colonna towns. Today Marino is far from the A1 autostrada that leads from Rome to Naples. Apart from several partially ruined towers, the castle has left few traces, and the town feels worlds away from either the metropolis or the battlefield. There is no reason, frankly, for tourists to go to Marino, and the people I have met on my multiple visits there seemed incredulous that I had come on purpose. It’s a perfectly pleasant city, but there are no wonderful churches or squares, and no monuments of note.
How Vittoria felt about her birthplace is not clear. Unlike Ischia, whose landscape she praised on multiple occasions, she never mentioned Marino in any detail. There were certainly things in Marino that would have appealed to her, especially its religious sites. At the Sanctuary of Santa Maria dell’Orto, a cult site dedicated to the Virgin, there was a beautiful altarpiece of the Madonna dating to the eighth or ninth century; the lovely Gothic church, Santa Lucia da Siracusa, had as its prize possession a Byzantine icon known as the Madonna del Popolo, which a member of Vittoria’s family, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, had brought home from Constantinople around 1280. Given how many of Vittoria’s religious poems and meditations later in her life were dedicated to the Virgin, it is tempting to think some of her inspiration may have come from her early encounters with these works of art.
Even if Marino were full of places and objects that Vittoria loved, it was not where she had wanted to live following Ferrante’s death. Although she had been prevented from taking vows as a nun, she did not intend to spend her years as a widow residing in a family castle. What she wanted most of all, as Pope Clement’s letter from the spring of 1526 made clear, was to be left to mourn in peace. We will recall Clement’s explanation for why he was granting her the special permission to set up a private religious house in Naples: “in order,” he wrote, “to give rest and recovery to your mind and for a retreat free from human concerns.” Perhaps in some respects the castle in Marino provided this kind of retreat: Vittoria could hide away in her rooms to pray or write as she liked, while her brother and his allies busied themselves with planning their latest attacks.
By May 1526, Ascanio and his cousin Pompeo Colonna were actively preparing their armies to join Charles V’s troops in battle against the pope. On the surface of things, Pompeo was an odd partner in this enterprise, having been named a cardinal by Leo X in 1517. This choice of profession, however, was not his own: when his uncle, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, was dying, Pompeo was the only relative eligible to take over Giovanni’s office, as his three older brothers were already married (the church tried to keep benefices within the family if at all possible). In his heart, Pompeo remained a soldier, and he spent most of his career serving the kings of Naples. Indeed, his loyalties leaned so heavily toward the Spanish that he was twice excommunicated from the church: first, in 1501, when he fought on behalf of the Spanish against the French allies of Pope Alexander VI; and again following the events of 1526.
Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici (the future Clement VII) and Luigi de’ Rossi, by Raphael (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence)
Ascanio and Pompeo were directly involved with Charles’s plan to attack Clement on his own terrain and raid the city of Rome. The combined forces of the Colonna’s armies and the available troops of the emperor, led by the Spanish general Hugo of Moncada, were approximately five thousand infantry and more than three hundred horsemen. By contrast, Clement had sent much of his army to Lombardy, in the north of the peninsula, where he was also fighting against imperial troops, and was left in Rome with roughly two hundred infantry and a hundred horsemen.
When the Colonna troops entered the gates of Rome in September 1526, the local citizens apparently did not even attempt to interfere: the family enjoyed great popularity among the people, many of whom shared their hostility toward the pope. The citizens were therefore shocked by the heavy looting and destruction that followed as the soldiers, joined by the Spanish troops led by Moncada, made their way toward the Vatican. Pope Clement fled to the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo along the banks of the Tiber to take refuge, and there was almost no resistance to the troops’ advance.
Around this time, Ascanio seems to have decided that Vittoria was not safe in Marino, where the pope’s army was likely to strike back. This would not have been the first time in Vittoria’s life that papal troops had assaulted
the family castle. In 1501, Alexander VI ordered the castle in Marino, along with several other Colonna castles in the area, to be razed to the ground in retaliation for Vittoria’s father Fabrizio’s having destroyed the harvest of several of the pope’s allies in the region. This was part of a much larger conflict between Alexander and the Neapolitan king Ferdinand IV, in which the Spanish and the Colonna troops were ultimately defeated. Fabrizio was taken prisoner and subsequently excommunicated, along with his cousin Pompeo; Alexander also deprived them of their feuds and all of their temporal goods.
Fabrizio and Pompeo’s losses lasted only until Pope Alexander’s death in 1503, when they made peace with his son Cesare Borgia, captain general of the papal army. The new pope, Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere, was on much better terms with the Colonna than Alexander had been—his family had close ties both to the Colonna and to the family of Vittoria’s mother, the Montefeltro of Urbino. Julius not only welcomed Fabrizio and his relatives back into the church, but also returned to them their properties, several of which had actually been refortified at great expense by Pope Alexander.
Ascanio may not have been old enough to register what was happening when the family fled from Marino in 1501—his birthdate is not certain but is estimated to be a few years before 1500. Vittoria, however, was eleven, and would no doubt have remembered the flight from home, if not the conflagration itself (there are no records of the family’s movements at this moment, but it is likely they left Marino before the attack on the castle). In the fall of 1526, history repeated itself: the papal troops once again attacked the Colonna estates, and destroyed Marino along with fourteen of their other feudal territories. The destruction was carried out by papal soldiers from the nearby city of Velletri, who, in addition to burning down as much as they could of the Marino castle, also stole the celebrated icon of the Madonna del Popolo and the bells in the campanile from the church of Santa Lucia. This gave rise to a famous chant among the Marinesi about their neighbors the Velletrani: “Velletrani, rubba Madonne, rubba campane” (“the Velletrani, they steal Madonnas, they steal church bells”—it has more of a ring in Italian).
Renaissance Woman Page 8