What made this remarkable assembly in Viterbo possible was not only the arrival of Pole, but also the death of Valdés in the summer of 1541, which resulted in the fracturing of his tight-knit spirituali circle in Naples. Certain members of that group had already begun to disperse due to the perceived threat from the office of the Spanish Inquisition, which seemed to be weighing the possibility of expanding its jurisdiction to the Kingdom of Naples (the Roman Inquisition had not yet been reestablished, as we shall discuss shortly, but the Spanish sought to operate through bishops and even secular authorities). These men were in search of a safe haven when Pole moved to Viterbo and established what came to be known as the Ecclesia Viterbiensis, as if it were a church of its own. Among Valdés’s followers who came to Viterbo was Pietro Carnesecchi, who had long enjoyed the patronage of the Medici family and was one of the absolute favorites of Clement VII, for whom he had served as papal secretary. Carnesecchi was at the same time deeply involved with the spirituali movement, and a close friend of Valdés’s great devotee Giulia Gonzaga. This combination of papal privilege and reformist zeal was not unusual for this group, many of whom held major positions in the church.
What took place at Viterbo in the first years of the 1540s was different from anything Vittoria had participated in over the past decade. She was no stranger to reformist circles: she had spent, as we have seen, nearly a year at the ducal palace in Ferrara with Renée and her fellow French Protestants, and she had been around the followers of Ochino and Valdés for several years in Rome. But the atmosphere in Viterbo was much more tense. By the fall of 1541, the problems facing the Roman church had taken on real urgency, and Pole and his friends were desperately trying to hold on to whatever strands of reform they could. There was, in effect, a bomb ticking under the floors of the Ecclesia Viterbiensis: the bomb of the Counter-Reformation.
Portrait of Pietro Carnesecchi, Vittoria’s friend and fellow reformer, by the sixteenth-century painter Domenico Puligo (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence)
The members of Pole’s circle were as aware as they could possibly be, without the benefit of hindsight, that they were living at one of the most crucial moments of transition in the history of Western Christianity. The immediate context for the crisis was the collapse of negotiations between Protestants and Catholics at the Diet of Regensburg, which Charles V had convened in the spring of 1541 in an effort to calm the ever-growing religious tensions within his realm. This was not the first time Charles had called such a meeting: there were two other conferences held in 1534 and 1539 at Leipzig, but neither had achieved any success, and the emperor had been determined to do everything possible to reach an agreement at Regensburg. He chose six theologians to participate in the discussions: three Protestants, including the famous Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, and three Catholics, whose names are less well known. The dialogue lasted approximately a month before ending on a note of failure in late May 1541.
Contarini had served as the papal representative to Regensburg and had tried, often against Pope Paul’s will, to forge a compromise with the Protestants on the central issue of justification by faith. He brought back to Rome the agreement he had proposed in Germany with the hope that it might be adopted by the papal curia. Pole and others in Viterbo, meanwhile, were in regular contact with Contarini, with the aim of finding a solution that might placate the different camps. But the battle lines had been drawn on both sides. For the committed Italian Lutherans, the proposals put forward by Pole and his allies were nothing short of embarrassing. Thus Francesco Negri, an ex-Benedictine schoolmaster and Protestant enthusiast, exclaimed:
I cannot but be amazed at Cardinal Pole of England with his Priuli and Flaminio, at Cardinal Morone, at Signor Ascanio Colonna … who seem to have created a new school of Christianity fashioned to suit themselves, where, true, they do not deny that the justification of man is accomplished by Jesus Christ but then do not want to admit the consequences which necessarily flow from them. Because they want just the same to have the pope, they want to have Masses, they want to observe a thousand other papist superstitions and impieties, all wholly contrary to truly Christian piety.
The whole group at Viterbo was accused of conceding too much to the papal cause, and compromising the crucial message of the Reformation. (The mention of Ascanio, meanwhile, who was in exile at the time and could hardly be considered a major player, was perhaps in lieu of naming his actively involved sister.)
On the other end of the spectrum, Paul was under great pressure within the papal curia from the increasingly powerful Gian Pietro Carafa, a fiercely conservative cardinal of violent tendencies who wanted to prevent any contamination of Catholicism by the Lutherans. Carafa, who came from an aristocratic family in the kingdom of Naples, and later became a truly tyrannical pope as Paul IV, was himself a zealous reformer, but in a direction diametrically opposed to the Protestants. He wanted a much stricter adherence to Catholic doctrine, and a more ascetic approach to clerical life. He was, in effect, a fundamentalist. Carafa especially hated the Jews, whom he punished with one of the most repressive bulls ever issued, restricting them to the Roman ghetto, which was locked up every night, and limiting their ownership of property, their employment, even their right to keep accounting books in Hebrew (they had to be in Italian). In addition to his immensely unpopular religious measures, he also made some grievous political mistakes: swayed by his manipulative and treacherous nephew Carlo Carafa, Paul IV forged an alliance with the French and went to war against Spain, resulting in the massive defeat of the papal armies in 1557. So loathed was the Carafa pope by the entire Roman populace that when he died in 1559, the people rioted in the streets and laid waste to his statues, as well as to the palaces he had built for the church.
Portrait of Gian Pietro Carafa after he became Pope Paul IV, by an eighteenth-century artist from the Veneto (Accademia di Belle Arti Tadini, Lovere)
In the early 1540s, Pope Paul III fell under Cardinal Carafa’s sway, and was ultimately persuaded to close all talks with Contarini and the other moderates in the curia. In July 1542, Paul issued his fateful bull known as the Licet ab initio, which reconstituted the office of the Inquisition in Rome (the earliest known document of the Roman Inquisition dates from 1266, but it then entered a dormant state for several centuries). In Renaissance Italy, there were inquisitorial courts operating locally—individual cities and states had their own inquisitors, who were dedicated to rooting out heresy in the area—but the church had no real administration dedicated to the cause. In Spain, for example, the most independent of the national churches, the Inquisition was famously active, but it did not coordinate its efforts with Rome. This was why Valdés was able to escape from the Spanish inquisitors to the safe haven of Rome in the early 1530s.
Efforts on the part of the pope to coordinate the various offices of the Inquisition dated back to the thirteenth century, but it was not until after Paul III published the Licet ab initio that Rome sought to centralize the persecution of heresy. Paul called for a church council, to be held at the northern city of Trent, in order to consolidate the Catholic faith and tighten the noose around anyone who broke away from its most orthodox positions. In this respect, the Council of Trent had the opposite aim of the Diet of Regensburg, which had been Charles V’s attempt to bring Protestants and Catholics together. From the moment the council was invoked, the reformers inside the curia were no longer colleagues. They were potential heretics.
Although Paul began to gather delegates in Trent in 1542, the council officially began in 1545, and ended eighteen years later, in 1563. Over the course of its twenty-five sessions, it shaped the positions of the church for the next four hundred years. The delegates at Trent, who ranged in number, depending on the session, from 34 to more than 250, systematically clarified, and hardened, nearly every position in Catholic theology. The sacraments were given new emphasis; justification by faith was denounced; Lutheran ideas of predestination were roundly condemned. Holy Scripture, the council decr
eed, could be read only after a license was obtained in writing from the proper church authorities—something that happened in the rarest of cases—and booksellers were prohibited from selling Bibles in any language. The so-called Index of Forbidden Books was introduced, naming all of the heretical texts that could not be printed or read, under pain of severe punishment. Clerical morals and behavior were more narrowly defined, and the enclosure of nuns much more strenuously enforced. These positions, and seemingly innumerable others, came to define the Catholic Church, so that religious scholars typically divide its history between pre- and post-Trent. The extravagance and laxity that Luther so despised were now strictly reined in, but certainly not in the direction he had hoped.
Let us return, however, to the moment before the door closed on the Italian reformers, the moment when change still seemed within their grasp. In the early 1540s, it was not only an elite group of cardinals and humanists in Viterbo—or Ferrara or Naples—who were drawn to the tenets of Protestantism. Luther’s ideas were spreading far and wide, and there were priests throughout the Italian peninsula both preaching against the corruptions of the papacy and advocating for serious changes in the way individuals understood their relationship to God. Italian translations of the Bible were circulating widely, almost all of which had a distinctly Protestant orientation. The most popular of these, a translation by the humanist scholar and reformer Antonio Brucioli, was dedicated to Anna d’Este, the daughter of Renée and Ercole II. Brucioli began his text with a prefatory letter challenging the church’s monopoly over access to Holy Scripture:
Some may indeed exclaim that it is an unworthy thing for a woman, or a shoemaker to speak of Sacred Scriptures and attempt to comprehend it through their own reading. Let us consider, also, who were Christ’s listeners, oh, do we not find a varied multitude of blind men, cripples, mendicants, publicans, centurions, craftsmen, women, and children? Should Christ now be deprived of being read by those by whom he wanted to be heard?
In addition to reading the Bible in their mother tongue, Italians interested in reformist ideas also had access to several very popular books of spirituality. The most successful of these was entitled the Beneficio di Cristo. The earliest version of the Beneficio was written by a Benedictine monk known as Benedetto of Mantua during his residence in the late 1530s at the monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena in the Sicilian city of Catania; his text was then extensively revised by Flaminio, possibly with the help of others in the Viterbo circle. The Beneficio was published in 1543, but circulated in manuscript a few years earlier. In late 1541 or early 1542, a fierce attack on it was written by Catarino, the same friar who had delivered the sermons Vittoria and Michelangelo attended so enthusiastically at San Silvestro in 1537.
Despite Catarino’s opposition, the Beneficio captured in nearly every way what people like Vittoria and Michelangelo found appealing about reformed theology. At its core, it set out to persuade its readers that all they needed for salvation was the love of Christ. The authors were not interested in institutional problems, nor did they engage very much with matters of ecclesiastical authority. In this respect, the book was above the fray of contemporary debate, its tone more mystical than political. But although its central message—that the most important relationship in Christianity was between the individual believer and Christ—may not sound polemical, it threatened the very core of the church establishment. The problem was a simple one: If each individual, however humble or poor, can receive the “benefit of Christ” directly, what need is there for priests and bishops and popes? The Beneficio was not consistently Lutheran, but it openly embraced the doctrine of sola fide. “Faith itself justifies,” the author concluded, “meaning that God receives as just, all those who truly believe that Jesus Christ has satisfied for their sins.”
Condemned by the Council of Trent in 1546, the Beneficio di Cristo was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1549. But in the years between its publication in 1543 and its arrival on the Index, it was said to have sold forty thousand copies in Venice alone. The bishop of Modena, Morone, even commissioned a local bookseller to distribute free copies to all interested members of his diocese. This was a rather extravagant gesture of proselytizing, and it shows how openly, and aggressively, the ideas of reform were being pushed. From our perspective, the book gives a tantalizing glimpse of the direction the Catholic Church could have taken if things had gone differently: if the Diet of Regensburg had been successful and a compromise had been reached between Catholics and Protestants; if the pope had been more open-minded and listened to Contarini and Pole; if Carafa had not assumed so much power; the list goes on. The Beneficio captured the spirit of optimism and ambition that was still in the air on the eve of Trent.
This was the climate that Vittoria entered when she came to Viterbo in 1541. As always, she eschewed lodgings in the palaces or villas of friends, and took up residence instead in the convent of Santa Caterina, located just inside the formidable city walls on the outskirts of Viterbo’s medieval center. The convent itself has not survived, and the original building has been extensively changed over the centuries, but the piazza on which it stood still boasts a beautiful church, San Giovanni Zoccoli, whose origins date to the early eleventh century, and an impressive stone fountain built in 1246, whose lions were therefore spouting their water when Vittoria came and went from her rooms.
It is not clear, however, that Vittoria ventured out very often. Unlike her comings and goings from the convent to the ducal palace in Ferrara, her life in Viterbo seems to have been more sedentary. This was almost certainly due to her state of health, which continued to decline. But her lack of physical mobility did not mean she was in any way removed from the conversations of the Viterbo group. In a letter she sent to Giulia Gonzaga in December 1541 thanking her for sending Valdés’s commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, she indicated that she and the others had been discussing the book together. “It was,” she wrote, “in great demand, especially by me, who needs it the most.” Another indication of her engagement came in a letter Contarini sent to Pole in the summer of 1542 describing in detail his position on penance, in which he specifically solicited Vittoria’s opinion: “It is up to you and your sancta et docta compagnia [your holy and learned company] including the Marchesa, and to the pilgrims, to examine this carefully and to correct whatever needs correction.” Vittoria also referred frequently in her letters to visits that various members of the group made to her rooms at Santa Caterina, including Priuli, Flaminio, Morone, Carnesecchi, and—albeit less regularly than she would have liked—Pole himself.
At the same time that Vittoria was clearly enjoying the stimulating atmosphere at Viterbo, she was also going through a spiritual crisis. The remark she made to Giulia about her having “the most need” of the commentary on Paul was linked to her feeling overwhelmed by her own sinfulness, and unsure of the path to take in order to find some relief. This crisis was likely in part precipitated by her having lost Ochino as her spiritual guide shortly after her arrival in Viterbo. The Capuchin monk had been under the pope’s surveillance for many years, but in 1542, he was finally summoned to Rome. Guessing, correctly, that this could only be very bad news—life in prison, torture, burning at the stake were all very real possibilities—Ochino shed his cassock and fled Italy dressed as a layman. According to some contemporary reports, he was helped by Ascanio, who gave him a horse and a servant. Others claimed he went to Ferrara, where Renée furnished him with supplies. Whoever aided him in his journey, Ochino crossed the border to Switzerland and ended up in Calvin’s Geneva, where he became preacher to the community of Italian Protestant exiles living in the city. There, he made any future return to Italy extremely unlikely by publishing several virulent works against the pope.
Vittoria almost certainly had nothing to do with Ochino’s escape—indeed, she expressed genuine disapproval. She was in her heart very cautious, and would no doubt have preferred Ochino to reach some kind of compromise with Paul rather than d
isobey him so flagrantly. His disobedience to the pope was also threatening to her personally: given her well-known closeness to Ochino, she was rightly concerned that suspicion could turn to her. With these fears likely in mind, she had already begun to withdraw from her spiritual mentor and friend the year before his flight. Ochino sent her several letters that went unanswered, and even complained that she seemed to have forgotten him. “I would have been more than grateful to speak with you,” he wrote to her from Florence just before leaving Italy in August 1542, “or to have … a letter from you, but it has been more than a month since I have heard from you.”
Even receiving a letter from Geneva, the hotbed of Calvinism, was a red flag at the time, and Vittoria quickly passed the next letter that Ochino sent her on to the papal authorities. In her cover letter to the archly conservative Marcello Cervini—the cardinal who presided over the Council of Trent and in 1555 was elected to the papacy as Marcellus II, a position that he held for only twenty-one days before dying of an apoplectic fit—she explained that she was well aware that “if a letter or anything else should come to me from Fra Bernardino [Ochino], I had better send it to your most reverend Lordship without answering it.” She also indicated that she was enclosing both Ochino’s letter and a small book that he had sent her. “The whole was in one packet,” she specified, “without any other writing inside.” The only palpable note of distress in her letter came in the postscript, where she scribbled: “It grieves me very much that the more Ochino thinks to excuse himself, the more he accuses himself, and the more he thinks to save others from shipwreck, the more he exposes them to the flood, since he is already outside of the ark that saves and secures.” Vittoria clearly felt exposed, if not abandoned, by Ochino, whose behavior by no means protected her interests. However much she may have still cared for him, she had no intention of leaving the ark of the church and finding herself among the drowning.
Renaissance Woman Page 25