Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  What is surprising, however, about Vittoria’s wish in this instance was how far away a pilgrimage was from anything Ochino or Valdés might have recommended. Indeed, making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was a quintessentially traditional (and not reformed) thing to do. Luther included attacks on the cult of saints and the granting of indulgences, both important features of pilgrimage, in his Ninety-Five Theses, and reformers decried the idea of pilgrimage as expensive, corrupt, and superstitious. At the very moment Vittoria was becoming increasingly involved with the spirituali, she wanted nonetheless to intensify the nature of her own spirituality in a manner deeply associated with those practices of the Catholic Church—granting indulgences and the worship of saints and relics—specifically targeted for reform. Once again, her life seemed full of contradictions.

  In early 1537, Vittoria sent Pope Paul another letter, this time requesting permission for her pilgrimage. Her letter is lost, but Paul’s response has survived. As in his brief to her from the previous year, he seems simply to have reiterated, and granted, her requests, which makes it possible for us to reconstruct exactly what she had in mind. Paul’s letter began by praising Vittoria for her great piety and commitment to her faith, qualities that have convinced him to allow her to make the journey. “After having been relayed to us,” he declared, “the desire of your nobility to set out abroad and visit, in addition to the churches of Saint James in Compostella and of Saint Maximinus in Provence, in which the body of the Blessed Mary Magdalene is believed to have been laid, the sacred tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ, has greatly enlarged our opinion of your probity, your devotion, and your piety towards God the Highest.”

  “Because you have put this pilgrimage, laborious indeed and dangerous, before your rest, your wealth, and your many comforts,” Paul continued,

  and because you have not been able to be shaken from it by the prayers of your close and extended family, and because you have set the love of Jesus Christ before all human emotions, you have shown most clearly a manly spirit in a woman’s body, for which we, who desire to kindle your fervor rather than to extinguish it in any way, bless you, daughter in Christ, and we ask God that he favor your pilgrimage and that he deem it worthy that you be accompanied on your journey.

  This was all an elaborate prelude for the privileges he then extended to her:

  Having listened to your requests, we therefore concede and grant to you by apostolic authority in the spirit of the circumstances, that you be able to visit the tomb, and that you lead with you on this pious effort up to fifteen people including our beloved son Girolamo of Montepulciano of the order of the congregation of the minor Capuchins, your confessor, and two other of his companions at the discretion of their superior.

  Outside this letter, there is no mention of Vittoria’s plan to visit the two European sites, but perhaps she had in mind a future occasion when she might make a second pilgrimage without crossing the seas. From a reformed point of view, both of these sites were linked to the worst forms of Catholic superstition. At Santiago de Compostela, Vittoria would have seen the relics of the apostle Saint James the Greater, whose body was said to have been removed by angels from the Holy Land following his death and made its own way, by boat, to the coast of Spain. Legend had it that an enormous rock closed around James’s relics, miraculously protecting them, until they were safely enshrined at the cathedral in Compostela. At Saint Maximin in France, Vittoria would have visited the site believed to be the burial place of Mary Magdalene. Once again, a miraculous journey over seas was involved: Mary Magdalene was said to have fled the Holy Land in a boat without rudder or sail and made it all the way to the southeast of France, where she hid in a cave at the foot of the Sainte Baume mountains for the last thirty years of her life. In 1279, it was claimed that her sarcophagus was found in the cave with most of her body intact; shortly thereafter, a Gothic basilica was built nearby in the town of Saint Maximin, where her remains, including her skull, encased in gold, can still be seen today.

  In addition to its marked departure from the more reformed practice of religion she had recently become so engaged with, for Vittoria to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was also a potentially dangerous undertaking. Of course, pilgrims both male and female had gone on such journeys for more than a millennium—readers of English literature will recall Chaucer’s famous widow, the Wife of Bath, who boasted of having been to Jerusalem three times. But however freely Vittoria moved around as a widow, she had never even left the Italian peninsula, let alone traveled on the pirate-ridden seas. All of her other trips, moreover—from Rome to Naples, or Ischia to Viterbo—had always been particularly catered to her needs and comfort. For the trip to the Holy Land, she would have participated in the Renaissance equivalent of mass tourism.

  By the early sixteenth century, pilgrimage to the Holy Land had become a major industry. The trips ranged widely in both length and destinations: the shortest pilgrimages were around four months long, and the longest could be more than a year. Just to make the journey from Venice, where most Italian pilgrimages began, to the port of Jaffa took an average of five weeks, and was considered the most difficult part of the trip. In addition to the risks associated with the rough seas, the food and wine were generally horrible, the water spoiled, fights between pilgrims frequent, and crews often dishonest. Sometimes the ships were also carrying horses, whose constant scraping of their hooves on the planks of the galleys exacerbated the already unpleasant atmosphere.

  Manuals giving advice as to how best to survive all aspects of the trips, from seasickness to fleas to pirates, were widely available in both manuscript and print, and the cost of the trips varied sufficiently so that people from a wide range of social classes could choose according to their means (there were both luxury and low-frill options). A popular French guide by Anthoine Regnaut published in 1573 included an eleven-point list for the average pilgrim to follow on his or her journey. Among the highlights were these pieces of advice:

  1.  Take two purses on the journey: one full of the virtue of patience, the other with two hundred gold Venetian ducats.

  2.  Find a place on board the pilgrim galley to put your belongings in the part of the ship nearest the entry; this way you’ll have the maximum amount of fresh air.

  3.  Buy eggs, chicken, preserves, and fruit each time you stop at port.  You’ll need the extra food for when captain and crew are too busy resisting storms to cook.

  4.  Dress poorly, so as to avoid having to pay endless tips.

  5.  Once in the Holy Land, carry your bedding with you. Don’t, ever, leave the caravan, and don’t argue with the locals, for there is great danger.

  6.  Take letters of permission to travel from your bishop, and the safe-conduct from the king, and, before leaving Jerusalem, get a certificate from the pope’s commissary to say you have been there.

  It is hard to imagine Vittoria reading such a book—she did not generally concern herself with the details of travel, and certainly all of the arrangements would have been made for her. Once in Jerusalem, however, her experience probably would not have been different from that of other Christian pilgrims, since nearly all visits to the holy sites were organized by the Franciscan friars who lived there, and pilgrims were lodged in Franciscan monasteries. Unfortunately, none of the details of the trip that was planned has survived; we know only that she left Rome in the spring of 1537 immensely excited, with the pope’s letter of permission in hand.

  Shortly after arriving in the northern city of Ferrara, where she had been invited by Ercole II d’Este to stay at the ducal palace on her way to Venice, the pilgrimage was canceled. There is no explanation for this anywhere in the archive, but the most likely reason was her health. She referred in multiple letters from this period to suffering from a serious case of catarrh—a condition in which her nose and air passages filled with mucus and made it difficult at times to breathe—and the long and demanding journey may have seemed more than she could safely bear. He
r only direct acknowledgment of the canceled trip took the form of asides in two different letters. First, in a letter written from Ferrara on June 12, 1537, to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, the son of Isabella d’Este and Francesco II Gonzaga, Vittoria said that she had thought about coming to visit him, “not being able for the moment to go to Jerusalem,” but then changed her mind because she feared that Mantua—roughly forty-five miles from Ferrara—would be too crowded due to the papal council being held there at the time.

  Second, in a letter Vittoria sent in September 1538 to Pietro Aretino—a very surprising acquaintance, given his reputation as a writer of both literary pornography and caustic satire—she explained that she was in Lucca, not in Pisa, as Aretino had somehow imagined. “Not being able to go to Jerusalem,” she wrote, “I have taken consolation here, but now I am constrained by His Holiness to return to Rome, instigated by my and your Marquis of Vasto [Alfonso d’Avalos].” Alfonso had been Aretino’s patron for a short time in the early 1530s, although the relationship ultimately disintegrated, as did Aretino’s relationships with other patrons, including Alessandro di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, and Federico II Gonzaga (Aretino was too irreverent, if not openly unpleasant, to maintain courtly ties, which earned him the epithet “the scourge of princes” from the far more diplomatic poet Ariosto). In Vittoria’s account to Aretino of her whereabouts, we find a subtle hint of the regret she felt about missing the opportunity for the pilgrimage: some eighteen months after she would have embarked, she was still searching for “consolation.”

  It is hard not to feel that whatever the reason for Vittoria’s not making her trip—the phrase she used to both Gonzaga and Aretino was “non possendo passer in Jerusalem,” not being able to get to Jerusalem—it was yet another instance in which she had been thwarted from satisfying her deepest desires: to be a nun; to live with other chaste women in a religious house of her own; to visit the Holy Land. But once again, what looked like a pure loss turned out to have surprising gains. The time she ended up spending in Ferrara not only was richly productive for her as a poet, but also deepened her understanding of the current mood of religious reform. It was in the ducal palace of Ferrara that Vittoria was introduced to the work of the most radical reformer in Europe: John Calvin. Calvin had been a guest of Duke Ercole’s wife, the French princess Renée, a year before Vittoria herself arrived in Ferrara, and had profoundly influenced Renée and her court. Without forewarning, our devout Catholic heroine found herself in the den of Protestantism.

  8

  HIDDEN HERETICS

  VITTORIA ARRIVED IN FERRARA in April 1537, accompanied by six female companions and an unspecified number of male servants. The city was unlike anywhere she had been before. Ferrara was part of the Holy Roman Empire from the late twelfth century until 1471, when it was officially transferred to the Papal States. But the real rulers of Ferrara were the powerful Este lords, who had first emerged as leaders of the Guelphs—the faction to which Dante’s family belonged—in the famous wars between the Guelphs and Ghibellines fought in Italy in the Middle Ages. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Este family gained dominion over Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio in Emilia. Ercole I d’Este, the grandfather of Vittoria’s friend Ercole II, was one of the Renaissance’s most important patrons of the arts, rivaling only Vittoria’s grandfather Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino and the Medici lords in Florence. In his thirty-four-year reign as duke of Ferrara (1471–1505), Ercole I brought to his city some of the most outstanding painters, musicians, and poets in all of Europe.

  What made Ercole I so distinctive, however, was his commitment to urban design and planning. His greatest innovation, known as the Herculean Addition, was one of the first architectural plans based on the idea of perspective, and involved a dramatic reshaping of Ferrara’s boundaries by pushing back the walls on its northern border, introducing a network of waterways and streets, and constructing new palaces for the nobility that were in harmony with the environment around them. Ercole also made important changes to the ducal palace, including the creation of an exquisite outdoor garden in the court facing the castle. Known as the Garden of the Duchesses, it spanned an area of more than thirty thousand square feet, and was graced with beautiful hedges and flowers, trees of all variety, graceful porticoes, and a gilded fountain.

  Although Vittoria was arriving from the south, and hence would not immediately have seen the glorious northern walls and their surroundings, her introduction to Ferrara would have been equally grand. Her exact route is not known, but let us imagine that she passed in front of the city’s cathedral with its splendid combination of Gothic and Romanesque façade, and then through the beautiful archway known as the Volto del Cavallo, named for the equestrian statue of Ercole I’s father, Niccolò III d’Este, atop the column to the right of the arch. To the left of the Volto del Cavallo was a second column with a statue of Borso d’Este, Niccolò III’s illegitimate son and duke of Ferrara from 1450 until his death in 1471. This column had a disturbing subsequent history: after having been destroyed by a fire in 1716, it was reconstructed using gravestones removed from the nearby Jewish cemetery. (The Este rulers had been welcoming to the Jews as part of their efforts to strengthen the economic conditions of the city, and had even protected them against Pope Sixtus IV’s request for their expulsion in 1473.) The early eighteenth-century authorities claimed that there was a shortage of marble in the city and that they were forced to take what they could find. If you look carefully at the column today, you can still see Hebrew inscriptions literally supporting the Este duke.

  Once she passed through the arch with Borso on one side and Niccolò III on the other, Vittoria would then have had her first glimpse of the ducal court—the grand public space in front of the castle where the Este family staged their lavish entertainments. This was where, for example, some of the first Renaissance performances of the ancient Roman playwright Plautus took place. Plautus, who was born in the mid-third century B.C.E. to the south of Ferrara in present-day Emilia-Romagna, had a risqué sense of humor well suited for the Este, a family well known for its love of pleasure. (A century later, Shakespeare would transform one of Plautus’s most celebrated plays, The Menaechmi, into The Comedy of Errors.)

  After crossing the grand piazza, Vittoria would have been led to the magnificent staircase known as the scalone monumentale, which was built by one of Ercole I’s court architects to create an impressive entrance to the palace. Lined with marble columns and covered with a vaulted ceiling, it featured at its halfway point a small dome in the Venetian style that fused Byzantine and Moorish elements. At the top of the stairs, she would finally have found herself within the ducal palace. Beautiful public rooms, such as the Golden Hall, shimmered from the diamond panels and golden stucco rosettes lining the ceilings, and frescoes featuring tritons—the sons of Poseidon—were set against a deep crimson background. There were also exquisite private chambers, like the studiolo, or private study, designed by Ercole II’s father, Alfonso I, which was filled with paintings by Bellini, Titian, and Raphael; or the apartment of Ercole II’s mother, Lucrezia Borgia, who renovated two different sets of rooms for herself during her seventeen years in the castle, each with sumptuous tapestries, luxurious silks, and painted friezes. Alfonso was Lucrezia’s third, and final, husband, and the match, arranged by Lucrezia’s brother Cesare, had been made against Alfonso’s will—just months before they were wed, she had appeared in public with a three-year-old boy believed to be fathered either by her brother or by her father, Alexander VI. But the marriage was relatively peaceful.

  Given her preference for spiritual works of art, Vittoria may well have been taken aback by the overwhelmingly pagan decorations in Ferrara’s palace. There were many depictions of Greek and Roman gods—Aurora and Apollo were especially dear to the Este family—as well as elaborate frescoes of mythological and allegorical figures known as “grotesques.” In this, as in everything else, the palace was at the height of contemporary fashion. The grotes
que style of painting was very much in vogue following the discovery around 1480 of Nero’s imperial residence in Rome. In one of the most fortunate accidents of the Renaissance, a young Roman walking on the Esquiline Hill literally fell through a cleft. He found himself in what looked like a lavishly painted grotto, with images of fanciful and sometimes frightening creatures, interwoven with elaborate foliage and geometric designs. Thus the particular decorative schemes found there came to be known as grottesche, or grotesques (had the figures been beautiful cherubs and not unattractive creatures, the term “grotesque” would now mean something altogether different).

  The cave-like space that the man fell into was only the smallest part of Nero’s Domus Aurea, or Golden House—a massive palace complex covering hundreds of acres and stretching across much of the city. According to the ancient historian Suetonius, there was “a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high” in the courtyard, and a triple portico extended a full mile in length. The villa had been dismantled and stripped of its riches following Nero’s suicide in 68 C.E.; the Romans then began to build new structures on top of its ruins, burying what remained of the imperial residence. Even more than its nearly unfathomable size, the Domus Aurea became famous for its sumptuous interiors, covered with precious marble, gold, ivory, and jewels. This was a level of luxury that even Renaissance princes and popes may not have imagined. What could most easily be imitated were the grotesques they found on the walls.

  The figures that Vittoria encountered on the surfaces of the ducal palace in Ferrara were in fact part of a much larger trend in the Este family of adorning their homes with secular, if not pagan, art. The most extravagant example was the Palazzo Schifanoia built by Niccolò III’s father, Alberto V d’Este, in the late fourteenth century as a banqueting house and hunting lodge less than a mile from the ducal place. Schifanoia literally translates as “escape from boredom,” and the Palazzo Schifanoia was designed to amuse its inhabitants and visitors as much as possible. If Vittoria visited this palace during her long stay in Ferrara, she would have seen the stunning fresco cycle commissioned by Borso d’Este in the 1460s for its central hall, whose theme was the calendar: each of the twelve months was figured with a pagan god riding on his or her triumphal cart, the appropriate signs of the zodiac, and portraits of Borso and his courtiers involved in activities related to the time of year. The effect was—and is still today—truly overwhelming, and showed off both the brilliance of Ferrarese painting and the fantastic inventiveness of its designs.