One of the keys to the success of Vittoria’s Rime—and to volumes such as Domenichi’s—was the strong presence of Italian women as readers and buyers of books. Female literacy in Italy was, relatively speaking, impressively high. At the end of the fifteenth century, 33 percent of Italian men were literate, and 13 percent of women. We can compare this, for example, with 10 percent of men, and 1 percent of women, in England. Although in his dedicatory letter to Vittoria’s first edition, Pirogallo represented her poems as intended for a male audience—“I consider it less of an error to displease one woman (however rare and great) than to deny so many men what they want”—there is good reason to believe that women made up a significant share of Vittoria’s readers, as they did of vernacular poetry in general. The fact that the Rime was printed in such a small format, and on what Bembo regarded as poor paper, also meant that it was certainly cheaper to buy than many of the more elaborately produced volumes of verse.
The most compelling evidence of Vittoria’s strong female readership is the increasingly religious emphasis in the poems’ presentation over the course of the 1540s. It is hard to say exactly what books were purchased or read specifically by women within a Renaissance household, as inventories of family libraries generally listed all of the titles together. In the examples that have been passed down of women’s personal collections, however, the titles leaned heavily toward religious topics. Most of the books were by men, but Saint Catherine of Siena’s mystical dialogue, The Book of Divine Doctrine, and her collection of letters frequently appeared, as did the small handful of devotional books also published by women in the early 1500s.
It is therefore not surprising that after the first few editions of the Rime, which were composed almost exclusively of the sonnets to Ferrante, Vittoria’s success as a poet came to depend upon her spiritual poetry. Indeed, the shift in her representation from aristocratic widow to religious author was clearly a deliberate decision on the part of her publishers. The first sign of this change was the Venice edition of 1540, whose title page included a somewhat primitive woodcut of a veiled religious woman, possibly a nun, praying before a crucifix (see page 5). This image appeared just below the title, giving the very strong impression that it was a portrait of Vittoria herself. On the back of this page, to reinforce the religious message, there was an image of the crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John at the foot of the cross. (The title pages of the Parma editions, we will recall, had a purely decorative clover.) Along with the conspicuously religious title page and illustrations, the contents of the 1540 volume were arranged, as had already happened in the 1539 Zoppino volume, so that the spiritual sonnets were in the very front, and those to Ferrante relegated to the back.
There is no way to know for sure whether these alterations to the Rime were specifically targeted to women. It is certainly the case, however, that whereas reading love sonnets was not necessarily regarded as morally instructive or improving (even when the poems were written by a chaste widow to her deceased husband), reading a book of religious sonnets was deemed spiritually useful. Women were encouraged, moreover, to emulate exceptionally pious women and female saints, so that the poems Vittoria wrote to the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene may have been considered especially inspirational for her female audience. Given that the 1540 edition’s title page depicted a veiled figure, it is hard not to think Vittoria was being presented as a model for female piety herself.
Adding to this sense of Vittoria’s poems as exemplary religious texts for women was the 1543 publication of a book of commentary on thirty-six of her spiritual sonnets, written by a very young scholar from Correggio, Rinaldo Corso (he was only seventeen or eighteen when the book appeared in print). The commentary was commissioned by and dedicated to Gambara, who was also from Correggio. In Corso’s preface, he specified that he hoped the commentary would be useful especially for amorose donne, or “women in love.” Entitled Dichiaratione fatta sopra la seconda parte delle Rime della Divina Vittoria Collonna [sic], or Exposition on the second part of the poetry of the Divine Vittoria Colonna, this was in fact another milestone in Italian literary history: Vittoria was the first poet, male or female, to have a commentary published on her verse during her lifetime.
Corso’s volume was followed by a 1544 edition of the collected Rime, two editions in 1546—one exclusively dedicated to the spiritual sonnets (this is the book Vittoria complained about to Rullo), and the other including the poems to Ferrante—and two more editions of the spiritual sonnets in 1548. In the 1546 edition of the spiritual sonnets, there was a dedicatory letter written by the editor Vincenzo Valgrisi, which rehearsed certain features of Pirogallo’s letter that served as a preface to the first edition of 1538. Like Pirogallo, Valgrisi declared that he was doing the world a favor by publishing these miraculous poems, hitherto hidden from sight. But this time, the message was pointedly religious:
It would seem to me too great an injustice to the world to keep such a great treasure hidden, so I am publishing [her poems], begging all of the singular minds who delight in poetry to devote their own language and style to God by imitating this most noble lady, if they want to acquire real immortality, which they cannot acquire, but can only lose, along with their talent and their time, both precious gifts of God, by writing vain fables and fictions.
Valgrisi’s praise of Vittoria’s poems as sacred verse came one year before her death. However much she resented the publication of the volume, it is hard not to believe this account of the poems would have given her some satisfaction. For the idea that her sonnets might pave the way for others to write sacred verse—the idea that her words, like those of Ochino or Valdés, might inspire her readers to look deeper inside their souls and forge more personal relationships to God—corresponded to her deepest beliefs about the power of spiritual writing. In her own quiet way, and perhaps against her better judgment, she had become the most celebrated religious poet of the era.
10
MICHELANGELO IN LOVE
ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in October 1538—just around the time that the Rime first appeared in print—Vittoria sat in the church of San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome listening to a lesson on the Epistles of Saint Paul. Not far above her family’s primary residence in the city, the Palazzo Colonna in Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, where Vittoria was a regular visitor during her Roman sojourns, San Silvestro al Quirinale sat on the highest of the original seven hills of Rome. In ancient days, the Quirinal was the site of a small village where the Sabines erected altars to their god Quirinus; tombs have been found on the site dating to the eighth century BCE. Later the Quirinal Hill was home to a temple dedicated to Semo Sancus, also known as Dius Fidius, the god of oaths and light worshipped by the Romans, the Umbrians, and also possibly the Sabines—the ancient Italic tribe whose women the first Roman men supposedly raped (a more accurate translation of the Latin word, raptus, would be “kidnapped”) around 750 B.C.E. In the fourth century C.E., the emperor Constantine chose the Quirinal Hill as the site for his elaborate baths, the very last complex of this sort erected in imperial Rome.
Long after it was stripped of its ancient gods and thermal baths, the Quirinal came to be known for the colossal ancient statues known as the Horse Tamers, which were commonly identified as Castor and Pollux, and their horses. The sculptural group, which stood roughly eighteen feet high, was first brought to the hill by Constantine to grace his baths; in 1589, Pope Sixtus V moved it to the Quirinal’s central piazza. It was at this time that the popes began to spend their summers there, in search of cooler air, in a new palazzo originally conceived by Gregory XIII in 1574 and dramatically expanded over the next few centuries. The Palazzo del Quirinale remained the summer residence of the popes until 1870. Today it is the official home of the president of the Italian Republic, the Italian equivalent of the White House.
Vittoria came to San Silvestro al Quirinale from her lodgings at the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, just over a half mile away, to hear the weekly lessons delivered
by the Dominican friar Ambrogio Catarino. Several years later, Catarino emerged as one of the most vocal enemies of the Italian reformers, and wrote scathing attacks both on Vittoria’s friend Cardinal Contarini and on Ochino (Catarino had, in fact, already published a Latin treatise denouncing Ochino in 1537, which appeared in an Italian translation in 1544). In 1538, however, Catarino was still interested in some of the reformers’ ideas, and obviously did not identify Vittoria with Ochino. Indeed, in 1540 he dedicated the first edition of his book on heresy, the Speculum haereticorum, to her, and addressed her as a “saintly widow and the grace and glory of the women of our age.” (The second edition of the Speculum, which appeared the following year, was dedicated to Paul III.)
Vittoria, for her part, was always eager to learn more about Saint Paul’s Epistles, one of her favorite biblical texts, and Catarino was known to be a very gifted theologian. She attended his lessons with a group of reform-minded friends, who would then gather afterward, often joined by Catarino himself, in the sacristy of the church or outside in its gardens to talk at leisure about religion, art, and poetry. Among the friends who regularly met, Vittoria treasured above all the company of Michelangelo Buonarroti (see color plate 14).
On this particular day in October, Vittoria did not find Michelangelo among those in the pews—the church was small, and it was therefore easy to see who was there—but she joined a mutual friend of theirs, the Sienese ambassador Lattanzio Tolomei. Toward the end of the lesson, a new acquaintance of Tolomei appeared: the Portuguese miniature painter Francisco de Hollanda, who had recently arrived in Rome. In truth, Hollanda had come to the church not to hear Catarino but to meet the great Michelangelo, whom Tolomei had said would be present. It was for this reason, no doubt, that Hollanda arrived so late: he was eager for the conversations that followed the theological lesson, not for the lesson itself.
Or at least this was Vittoria’s interpretation of his tardy arrival. As Hollanda related it, “When [Vittoria] had bidden me be seated, and the lesson and praises for it came to an end, she looked at me and at Messer Lattanzio and began to say: ‘If I am not mistaken, Francisco de Hollanda would rather listen to Michelangelo discoursing on painting than Fra Ambrogio giving this lesson.’” Hollanda took offense, and asked if she really believed that he was “worthless, or capable of nothing more than painting.” “In truth,” he declared, “I shall always be delighted to listen to Michelangelo, but when the Epistles of Saint Paul are read, I would rather listen to Fra Ambrogio.” Vittoria, he reported, simply smiled. Several minutes later, she quietly sought to fulfill his wish. Summoning one of her servants (she was never without attendants), she bid him to go to Michelangelo’s house to ask him “if he wishes to come and squander a bit of the day with us, [so] that we may gain it with him.”
Michelangelo lived a short distance away from San Silvestro al Quirinale—a mere five-minute walk—on a street then known as the Macello dei Corvi, across from the ruins of the early second-century forum of Trajan. One of the grandest ancient Roman sites, the forum had so dazzled Constantine two hundred years later that he wanted it reproduced in his new capital of Constantinople. In the Renaissance, the site was best known for the magnificent Column of Trajan. Its marble frieze spiraling round and round roughly 125 feet high told the story, in 155 separate scenes, of the emperor’s triumph over the barbarian kingdom of the Dacians, who ruled the territory north of the Danube River in what is now Romania. (One of the most underrated sites in all of modern Rome is the Fascist-era Museo della Civiltà Romana in EUR, the extraordinary district Mussolini built to host the 1942 world’s fair. Among the museum’s many extravagant models, there is a plaster reproduction of Trajan’s column completely unwound, so that it forms several long aisles.) Michelangelo would have passed this symbol of Roman grandeur—one of the great testaments to the sheer power of both the empire and classical art—in his comings and goings every day. Perhaps he also occasionally craned his neck up to the sky to glimpse the bronze statue of Trajan, which crowned the top until 1588, when Pope Sixtus V replaced it with a statue of Saint Peter.
Before enough time had passed for Vittoria’s servant even to have reached Michelangelo’s house, the artist arrived at the church and climbed the narrow flight of stairs that led from the noisy street below to the quiet of San Silvestro’s central nave. He was sixty-three at the time, but outside of the pronounced wrinkles on his face, he seemed a much younger man, with a full head of mostly dark hair, and a body still strong and muscular. Michelangelo explained to Vittoria that he had been walking up the Via Esquilina when he ran into her messenger, and had rushed immediately to meet her. Indeed, he was so delighted by the sight of his beloved friend that he later claimed not even to have noticed the presence of Hollanda.
Michelangelo and Vittoria had one of the most celebrated friendships of the Renaissance. The two were not lovers, or at least not in the usual sense of the word. She seems to have been erotically uninterested in men after the death of her husband, and his erotic interests were never in women. The great romantic love of Michelangelo’s life was the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532, when Tommaso was about twenty-three years old and Michelangelo fifty-seven. The artist’s passion for Tommaso produced a great outpouring of art and poetry: within a few years of their first meeting, he wrote a series of sonnets and madrigals dedicated to him, and gave him at least five finished drawings. One of these, The Rape of Ganymede, depicted an older man (Zeus, here disguised as an eagle) abducting a beautiful young boy.
Michelangelo’s love for Vittoria was of a quieter sort, but no less profound. He did not merely regard Vittoria as his “muse,” as she has often been described, although she did play that role for him at times. Nor, for her part, did she simply consider Michelangelo an artistic genius whom she should patronize and adore. Instead, despite the differences in their backgrounds—Michelangelo came from a family of middling status in Florence, where his father held minor government jobs—and the differences in their age (Vittoria was fifteen years his junior), their friendship was one between equals, marked by ease and familiarity on both sides. Although only a small number of the letters they exchanged have survived, we are lucky to have many other traces of their bond, which together create a deeply moving portrait of what was shared between them.
One of the richest of these traces is the book that Hollanda wrote upon his return to Portugal in June 1540, Da pintura antigua, or On Antique Painting. The first half of this work was an unremarkable treatise on the theory and practice of painting, but in the second half, Hollanda recorded four separate “dialogues” that he had during his time in Rome, including the visits to San Silvestro al Quirinale. In his pages, we sit beside Michelangelo and Vittoria in the small garden behind the church, and hear their voices come alive. The topics they discussed were lofty and serious. How does Flemish art compare to Italian? How does poetry compare to painting? What is the greatest art, and who are the greatest artists? To get Michelangelo even to broach these topics required great tact. He was reluctant to talk about art, especially his own, and Hollanda described Vittoria’s skill in luring him into conversation. “I saw her act like one who means to attack an impregnable city through cunning and wiles,” he reported, “and likewise we saw the painter on his guard and vigilant as if he were the besieged, placing sentinels here and erecting bridges there, making mines and girding all the walls and towers; but in the end the Marchesa was bound to win.”
And win she did. Vittoria warmed Michelangelo up by seeking his advice about a new project of her own. Pope Paul, she reported, had given her permission to build a convent for the Poor Clares on the very slopes of the Quirinal Hill where they were conversing; the exact location was to be the site of the broken portico where legend had it the emperor Nero had watched Rome burn during the great fire of 64 C.E. She commented on how appropriate this was as a way of cleansing the site of its wicked past: “other, more virtuous footsteps of women,” she remarked, “may stamp o
ut such evil footprints of a man.” Turning then to Michelangelo, Vittoria posed a series of questions about the convent’s architectural design: “What form and proportions to give to the house? Where the door might go? And whether it is possible to adapt some part of the old structure to the new?” Michelangelo thought for a minute before responding, “Yes, Signora, the broken portico can serve as a bell tower.” He then offered to visit the site with her when they left the church later that day, and to “make a plan of it for you.”
Outside this moment in Hollanda’s book, there is no further record of Vittoria’s plans for the convent, nor do any drawings of Michelangelo’s related to it survive (the artist famously burned many of his drawings for unfinished projects, so we will likely never know whether he made Vittoria’s plans). In 1536, Pope Paul had given Vittoria permission, as we have already seen, to celebrate Mass in a chapel either already in existence or newly constructed, but he did not specify that she could found a new convent altogether. It is possible that an additional letter giving her this permission has been lost. From Hollanda’s perspective, however, the conversation about the plans for the convent was simply a ruse on Vittoria’s part to get Michelangelo talking. Soon after this brief exchange, Vittoria asked if she might “put a question to Michelangelo about painting,” to which he responded: “Your Excellency has but to ask of me something that I can give, and it shall be yours.” The gallantry with which he addressed her was not necessarily Michelangelo’s usual manner—he was notoriously grumpy—but with Vittoria, he seems to have been at his most gracious.
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