As in Ferrara’s ducal palace, the Palazzo Schifanoia was striking for its total lack of engagement with Christianity. The Este family’s aesthetic commitment to paganism was by no means unusual: it was at the very heart of the period’s interest in recovering the artistic and literary glories of antiquity. But it was terribly at odds with the dominant religious mood of the Ferrara court at the time of Vittoria’s visit. In Ferrara, perhaps more than anywhere else in her life, Vittoria was confronted with the incompatibility of two cultures: on the one hand, a seemingly unrestrained and often wild embrace of paganism; on the other hand, a serious and unrelenting engagement with Protestantism. The exuberance of the Italian Renaissance was clashing before her eyes with the demands of the Reformation.
This clash of cultures was the result of Ercole II’s marriage to Renée of France, the daughter of King Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, who had embraced Protestant beliefs at a very early age. When Ercole married Renée in 1528, he could hardly have imagined how much trouble she would cause him. Like her childhood friend Anne Boleyn, who became a member of the French royal court in 1514 when Renée’s sister Claude married their second cousin Francis I, Renée was hardly the demure Catholic princess Ercole had hoped she would be. Orphaned at the age of four, she had been raised by tutors and governesses strongly influenced by Luther’s program for reform. A visitor to France during this period reported that Anne Boleyn was reading the Bible in French and studying St. Paul’s Epistles—it was Paul who ultimately inspired Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith—and it is likely that Renée was doing the same.
By the time the seventeen-year-old Renée married Ercole, she was a fully committed Protestant, and she filled the ducal palace with French courtiers and servants who shared her beliefs. When Vittoria arrived on her visit nine years later, the duchess had earned a reputation throughout Italy as a radical reformer. French Protestants fleeing from persecution in their native land came straight to Ferrara, where, much to Ercole’s dismay, Renée offered them shelter. In the company of Renée, Vittoria found herself surrounded by people whose tastes for reform went far beyond anything she had found in Naples or Rome.
Portrait of Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara, by the early sixteenth-century French artist Jean Clouet (Musée Conde, Chantilly)
Among the most impressive of Renée’s guests was her secretary Clément Marot, who was one of the great French poets of the period. Among his many accomplishments, he gained fame in particular for popularizing the blason, a poetic form that praised the female body, usually from head to toe, in great detail. He also introduced a range of classical genres into French (the elegy, the eclogue, the epigram) and translated many of the great Latin poets, including Ovid and Virgil. In addition to his literary innovations, Marot was a staunch religious reformer. After authoring several fiercely anti-Catholic pamphlets, and having been arrested for eating meat during Lent—a sure sign of Protestant sympathies—Marot fled to Ferrara.
No sooner had Marot arrived than Ercole received a warning from a papal legate in Venice, informing him that his new houseguest was a Lutheran, “who would bring with him that plague that God does not want” to his court. Although Marot returned to France for several years in 1537, he ultimately came back to Ferrara after being condemned for his translations of the Psalms, which were the first poetic renderings into French (Marot claimed he translated the Psalms directly from the Hebrew, but it is generally believed that he used Jerome’s Latin Bible as his primary source). According to the university authorities at the Sorbonne, who were actively fighting Francis I’s relative tolerance toward the Lutherans, Marot’s texts smacked of Protestantism, and he was forced into exile again.
Marot was a mild heretic, however, compared with Calvin, who stayed at the palace for roughly a month in the spring of 1536. The twenty-six-year-old Calvin arrived in flight from authorities in France dressed in disguise, and traveling under the pseudonym Charles d’Espeville. None of this fooled anyone, of course: the papal authorities in Ferrara immediately took note of his presence, and Ercole received another letter informing him that his wife was harboring “Lutheran outlaws from France.” Little did they know that “Lutheran” was an inadequate tag for Renée’s new guest, who was carrying with him the first edition of his revolutionary book of theology, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Published in Latin in Basel, Switzerland, around the time of Calvin’s arrival in Ferrara, the Institutes forever changed—and hardened—the face of Protestantism.
The book that Calvin brought to the ducal palace in 1536 went through many elaborate revisions and expansions over the next twenty years (the first edition had only six chapters; the final edition, published in 1559, boasted eighty), but it already contained the key doctrines that came to be known as Calvinism. Although Calvin’s theology was based at its core on the teachings of Luther, the young Frenchman pushed Luther’s ideas—on the sacraments, on salvation, on predestination—further than the German reformer had ever intended, and in ways that were not to his liking. The two men never met in person, and Calvin was spared the terrific venom that Luther released on some of his fellow Swiss Protestants, most notably Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, who shared Calvin’s idea of the Eucharist as “memorial”—that is, as an act done in memory of Christ’s sacrifice, but not containing any traces of Christ’s presence. Luther was on the whole, as his modern biographer Lyndal Roper puts it, “a grand hater,” and viciously attacked anyone who crossed him. Calvin nonetheless maintained respect for the great German reformer, and claimed that “even though he were to call me a devil, I would nevertheless hold him in such honor that I would acknowledge him to be a distinguished servant of God.”
There is no way to know if Vittoria read through the dense Latin pages of Calvin’s Institutes when she was in Ferrara. But she would have heard a great deal about it, and probably found some of it quite shocking. For at its core, the Institutes challenged many of the rituals and practices Vittoria had grown up with and had been taught to consider absolutely essential for Christian salvation. Calvin not only regarded most of the sacraments as unnecessary, but also dismissed all but Baptism and the Eucharist as vain creations of man: Penance; Extreme Unction (the anointing of the sick or dying); Holy Orders (the bestowing of the office of the priesthood); Confirmation; and even Matrimony were each individually denounced. In the 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin declared, for example, that the “holy oil” of Confirmation was not “worth one piece of dung,” and defined Extreme Unction as the spreading of grease on “half-dead corpses.”
This attack on the sacraments was part of a much larger assault on the corruption of the Roman church, and especially on ecclesiastical hierarchy. The papists, he exclaimed, “think only of gold and silver, and are so dazzled … that they cannot raise their minds to heaven”; the bishops are often so ignorant that “many peasants and artisans who have never tasted letters” had more knowledge of the “principles of their faith.” As for the monks, many of whom Vittoria greatly admired, Calvin had nothing but disdain: “They are all completely unlearned asses, though because of their long robes they have a reputation for learning.”
Calvin’s vitriol against the church was certainly more aggressive than what Vittoria had heard from Valdés or Ochino, but in its larger aims, it was not entirely dissimilar. Where Calvin departed entirely from the Italian reformers was in his notion of “double predestination.” Luther had already argued that God predestined certain individuals to salvation, but he allowed for the possibility that the fate of the rest of the world was not yet fully decided. Calvin, however, took the Lutheran position one very drastic step further. Not only did God choose who would be saved; he also chose who would be damned. According to this severe theology, a man who was not born “elect” had no chance of improving his fate, however pious a life he led. There was no flexibility in the system.
Vittoria and the other guests at Ferrara in 1537 did not read the full-blown, terrifying expression of Ca
lvin’s doctrine of double predestination—it grew stronger over the course of his lifetime. Already in the 1536 Institutes, however, he defined the true church as “the number of the elect,” and affirmed that some souls were “condemned” by God’s “eternal plan.” In theory, Calvinism was supposed to be comforting to those who felt they were among the chosen. But how anyone knew whether he or she would be saved is a question that kept generations up at night. According to the early twentieth-century German sociologist Max Weber, it also gave birth to the Protestant work ethic.
Vittoria herself never warmed to Calvin’s idea, and may in fact never have fully abandoned the Catholic doctrine that salvation could be earned. According to her friend Pietro Carnesecchi, “she came to observe and follow the advice that she said was given to her by [Reginald Pole], whom she believed like an oracle, namely that she should act as though on the one hand she had faith alone to save her, and on the other hand as though her salvation consisted in works [alone].” From our perspective, Vittoria’s position may appear nothing more than a useful strategy for staying out of trouble with the church. But in the 1530s—a decade before the Council of Trent convened and initiated the Counter-Reformation—Vittoria’s straddling of the line between Catholicism and Protestantism was surprisingly common. Indeed, many of the Italian reformers with whom she was in contact made demands for change, but stopped far short of Luther, let alone Calvin. In 1537, Vittoria would have had no reason to see the differences between the evangelical project of Valdés and the more moderate group of cardinals advising Pope Paul as irreconcilable.
It was precisely Vittoria’s more cautious approach to reform that made her attractive to Ercole, who encouraged her to stay in Ferrara for as long as possible. Ercole was hostile to Protestantism, and horrified by the negative attention that Renée was visiting upon him; he seems to have hoped Vittoria might be a calming or conservative influence on his wife. In the months preceding Vittoria’s arrival, Ercole had seen to it that several members of Renée’s circle were arrested for their heretical behavior, which was embarrassing him before his own court. One of the singers in his choir, Jeannet de Bouchefort, had hurled insults at the Eucharist during the celebration of Mass, and then refused to bow before the cross during the traditional Good Friday service. Even closer to home, Renée’s trusted secretary and treasurer Jean Cornillau was accused of both denouncing the pope and rejecting the idea of free will.
As a sign of how bad relations were between the duke and duchess, Ercole not only forbade the two men to return to France, but also requested papal permission to keep them locked up in Ferrara. It was only when Francis I intervened on behalf of his former sister-in-law (and cousin) Renée that Ercole relented, and obtained permission from Rome to release the prisoners. In an effort to cleanse the palace of the taint of heresy, Ercole had also seen fit to dismiss Renée’s childhood governess and companion Michelle de Saubonne, known as Madame de Soubise, who was one of the people first responsible for introducing the French princess to Protestantism. In the words of the great writer François Rabelais, who visited Renée on his way to Rome with Cardinal Jean du Bellay, “The said duke has already taken from [the duchess] her governess Madame de Soubise and had her served by Italian women, which is not a good sign.” Du Bellay himself wrote to Francis to suggest that if he cared about Renée, he should consider taking her under his protection.
Unfortunately, the situation between Renée and Ercole only worsened in the years to come. In the early 1540s, the duchess stopped celebrating the Catholic Mass and chose instead to worship in the manner prescribed by Calvin, along with other members of her household. Ercole finally became so exasperated that in 1554 he himself denounced Renée before the inquisitorial court that had been established in Ferrara some nine years earlier as part of the church’s newly expanded efforts to root out heresy. Due to his incriminating testimony, Renée was condemned as a heretic and detained as a prisoner in the city’s old castle. Before she was freed and allowed to return to her former position at court, she was forced to dismiss from her service all of her fellow Protestants (her preacher, her children’s tutor, and her almoner—the distributor of her alms, or charity—were specifically named); attend Mass every day; recite the Divine Office of the Virgin and the Rosary; hear only sermons approved by the duke; and convert to Catholicism.
Although Renée officially agreed to all of these conditions, she never altered her beliefs, and longed above all to return to her native France. In 1560, following Ercole’s death the previous year, she finally realized her dream and spent the final fifteen years of her life at her estate at Montargis, roughly sixty miles south of Paris. Now free to follow her own beliefs unencumbered, she maintained the castle as an asylum for French Protestants, known as Huguenots, who were routinely persecuted during the religious wars that culminated in the horrendous massacre on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (Renée was herself in Paris on the day of the massacre but managed to return, unharmed, to Montargis, where she offered protection to the survivors in the region). Throughout all of the turmoil of her time in Ferrara and her first years back in France, Renée never gave up her close correspondence with Calvin. One of his final letters, sent from his deathbed in 1564, was addressed to her.
It is not clear how much Renée shared her religious beliefs with Vittoria during the time of her visit, or how familiar Vittoria was with the state of her hosts’ marriage. Although she came to Ferrara as their guest, Vittoria had chosen not to stay in the palace, but seems to have resided in the nearby convent of Santa Caterina di Siena. This was the kind of choice she made repeatedly over the course of her widowhood: she preferred living with nuns to living at court. At Santa Caterina, Vittoria would have been surrounded by frescoes depicting the extraordinary life of the fourteenth-century female saint to whom the convent was dedicated, and who was a great source of inspiration to her. Born in Siena in 1347, Catherine began to have visions and ecstatic experiences as a very young girl. After joining the Dominican order as a “tertiary”—a member of a monastic order who does not take religious vows and lives outside of the monastery—she divided her life between on the one hand deepening her own personal spirituality, and on the other hand bringing peace to the world around her. Both Catherine’s celebrated mystical dialogue, Libro della divina dottrina (The Book of Divine Doctrine), which was published in 1475—one of the very first books written by a woman to see print—and the hundreds of letters she wrote in her beautiful Italian (or, more precisely, Tuscan) echoed throughout Vittoria’s own works. It is tempting to think she may have had these volumes by her side during her time at the convent in Ferrara.
During the months in Ferrara, Vittoria also found inspiration in a contemporary woman: Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre (a small, independent kingdom) and sister of Francis I (see color plate 13). Marguerite and Vittoria, who were introduced through Renée, never met in person: their friendship, which lasted until Vittoria’s death in 1547, was conducted entirely through letters. But once they began their correspondence, they wrote to each other in such intimate and familiar terms that their physical distance counted for very little. Part of their closeness was due to the fact that they were nearly exact contemporaries (Vittoria was two years Marguerite’s senior) and had led oddly parallel lives. Both were born into the most elite circles imaginable and received extremely good educations. Marguerite, who was raised alongside her brother, was taught a wide range of Latin literature and philosophy, several foreign languages (especially Italian and Spanish), and deep familiarity with the Bible. Details of Vittoria’s childhood education are not known, but her earliest writings already display a fluency in both classical and Italian literature, and it is likely that the Colonna chose their children’s tutors from the many impressive humanist scholars in Naples and Rome at the time.
Both Marguerite and Vittoria were married in their teens to important noblemen. King Louis, who became Marguerite’s guardian following the death of her father in 1496, when she was
not yet four years old, had offered her hand early on to a number of different foreign nobles, including Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1500, and his brother, Henry, Duke of York (the future Henry VIII), in 1502, but these offers were not accepted. Several years later, Louis rejected marriage proposals for Marguerite from the same English family—indeed, Henry VII generously offered either to marry Marguerite himself or to wed her to his son Henry, on whose behalf the match had been rejected several years earlier. But this time the French king did not want an English match: his ambitions had shifted toward obtaining more territory within France, and he saw Marguerite as a useful pawn for his expansion. Thus he chose for her husband Charles, Duke d’Alençon, who owned much of Normandy and had inherited a claim to the county of Armagnac; Louis made the deal irresistible by giving her a dowry of sixty thousand crowns (roughly the equivalent of Vittoria’s fourteen thousand ducats).
Both Vittoria’s and Marguerite’s husbands had fought in the Battle of Pavia, although on opposite sides—Charles, in fact, earned the dubious honor of being the only French officer not captured by the imperial army, which led to his being widely blamed for abandoning his king. Both women were widowed in 1525 by deaths related to the battle. Ferrante died nine months later, as we have already seen, having never fully recovered from his wounds; Charles died of mysterious causes within two months of returning to France (it was rumored that he had died of shame). At this point, the obvious parallels end. Marguerite was remarried in 1526 to the king of Navarre, Henry II, and bore him two children; Vittoria remained a widow.
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