Whatever the rationale behind the persistence of damnatio memoriae, the Holy Office in Rome routinely conducted such trials: in the same miscellaneous volume in which Vittoria’s file was found, there were documents from a damnatio memoriae against a noblewoman from Naples, Isabella Brisegna, who was put on trial for heresy in 1570. There is no comparable evidence for any such proceedings against Vittoria, and based on the materials in the Quinternus, it seems quite certain that the trial against her never took place. But the fact that the Quinternus exists at all—the fact, that is, that the Holy Office took the time not only to collect some of Vittoria’s letters, but also to appoint a censor to read through them and write up a formal report—confirms that they were pursuing some kind of further action.
At roughly the same time that the censor was poring over Vittoria’s letters for signs of heresy, the Colonna family was enjoying a restoration to its former glory. This reversal in fortunes was largely thanks to the triumphant military service of Ascanio’s son Marcantonio at the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. During this naval contest fought in the waters off the southwest coast of Greece, Marcantonio, who was the admiral of the papal fleet, helped to lead the Holy League—a union made up of Spain, Venice, and a number of smaller Italian states—to a stunning defeat of the Turks. Lepanto was widely regarded as the most important victory of Christian Europe over the Ottomans of the entire period, and it successfully curtailed the Turks’ expansion over the Mediterranean.
Portrait of Vittoria’s nephew Marcantonio II Colonna, by the late sixteenth-century painter Scipione Pulzone (Galleria Colonna, Rome)
In Rome, the victory was celebrated extravagantly. There were triumphs and processions reminiscent of the glory days of the Roman Empire, and Turkish slaves were dragged through the streets in chains. Pius V named October 7 a new holiday in the liturgical calendar: the feast of Our Lady of Victory (the name was subsequently changed to Our Lady of the Rosary). He also commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint frescoes of the naval battle on the walls of the Sala Regia outside the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican Palace. The historical accuracy of Vasari’s depiction of the battle formation—he supposedly consulted with Marcantonio himself—is oddly juxtaposed with its heavily allegorical program: the frescoes include divine spirits that crown figures representing the Christian forces, a personification of the church wearing a papal tiara, and villainous images of the Turks. There is no way to know for certain the impact of the victory at Lepanto on Vittoria’s posthumous fate. But it seems altogether possible that the pope decided not to pursue charges against the beloved aunt of his great military hero. Whatever the reasons, Vittoria’s file was all but forgotten until Pagano’s discovery more than four hundred years later.
Today Vittoria’s distant relatives still celebrate the Battle of Lepanto in the central hall of the Palazzo Colonna, where above the vault of the Room of the Battle Column that leads down to the main gallery, there is a magnificent fresco painted in 1700 by Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, depicting the apotheosis of Marcantonio, who is presented to the Virgin Mary in heaven. This space, familiar to many of us as the site where Audrey Hepburn’s character, Princess Ann, greets the press at the end of Roman Holiday, was created as part of Cardinal Girolamo I Colonna’s ambitious renovations to the palazzo in the mid-seventeenth century. As you descend the stairs—one of which still bears an actual cannonball shot by the French army in 1849 from the top of the Janiculum Hill, more than a mile away—you may be too overwhelmed by the baroque splendor of the marble columns, the sumptuous painted mirrors, the golden statues supporting the tables, the magnificent paintings separated by decorative stucco, and the many chandeliers to notice a very modest portrait of a Renaissance lady on your right (see color plate 19). She is dressed in a rich green velvet gown with a high lace collar, her hair discreetly covered by a long white veil; she wears no jewelry outside of a simple string of pearls, and holds a handkerchief in her right hand. This is the Vittoria that the Colonna family has chosen to remember: a young, aristocratic woman of serious disposition, who had not yet made her name. How much more there was to her—how rich and complex a life she led—would take most visitors by surprise.
It is hard to say what exactly made Vittoria the remarkable person she was, or what single feature was most responsible for her fame. From the perspective of Italian literary history, she has the obvious distinction of being the first woman ever to see a book of her own poems in print. But the simple designation she is given on the card next to her portrait—“poetess and friend to Michelangelo”—does not begin, as I hope this book has shown, to capture her. Who was Vittoria Colonna? A religious pioneer who embraced Protestant ideas at the very moment when the Catholic Church came closest to a reformation of its own; a canny and strategic diplomat who negotiated on behalf of her family with emperors and popes; an important critic and friend of the greatest writers and artists of her time; a spiritual inspiration to many of those around her, who regarded both her sonnets and her company as uplifting to their souls; a role model for women throughout Italy and the continent, whose example emboldened endless numbers of women both to write and to publish their own works. Vittoria was, in short, at the very heart of what we celebrate when we think about sixteenth-century Italy. Once her story has been told, it is impossible to imagine the Renaissance without her.
1. Portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, by Titian (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
2. Portrait of Pope Clement VII, by Sebastiano del Piombo (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
3. Unattributed altarpiece from Ischia depicting Vittoria Colonna and Costanza d’Avalos (Sant’Antonio di Padova, Ischia)
4. Portrait of the beautiful Spanish noblewoman Isabel de Requesens, with whom Ferrante d’Avalos fell in love early in his marriage to Vittoria, by Giulio Romano and Raphael (Louvre, Paris)
5. Portrait of Ferrante d’Avalos, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (Museo Correr, Venice)
6. Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, by Cristofano dell’Altissimo (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence)
7. Portrait generally believed to be of Vittoria Colonna, pointing to a manuscript containing one of her sonnets, by Sebastiano del Piombo (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona)
8. Portrait of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, Ferrante d’Avalos’s cousin and heir, by Titian (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
9. Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Courtier and friend of Vittoria’s, by Raphael (Louvre, Paris)
10. Portrait of the great poet and man of letters Pietro Bembo, after he was made a cardinal in 1536, by Titian (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
11. Portrait of Pope Paul III, the enemy of Vittoria’s brother Ascanio, by Titian (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples)
12. Double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino and grandparents of Vittoria, by Piero della Francesca (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence)
13. Portrait of Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre, a fellow poet and reformer whom Vittoria never met in person but corresponded with until her death, by Jean Clouet (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)
14. Portrait of Michelangelo, attributed to his friend Sebastiano del Piombo (Galerie Hans, Hamburg)
15. The Penitent Magdalene, by Titian. This is believed to be the painting of the Magdalene that Vittoria commissioned. (Palazzo Pitti, Florence)
16. Detail of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Some believe the female figure behind Saint Lawrence is a portrait of Vittoria. (Sistine Chapel, Vatican City)
17. Noli me tangere, executed as a painting based on the drawing done by Michelangelo following a commission from Vittoria, by Jacopo Pontormo (Casa Buonarroti, Florence)
18. Portrait of Reginald Pole, the English-born cardinal who was perhaps the greatest love of Vittoria’s life, by Sebastiano del Piombo (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)
19. Portrait of Vittoria Colonna painted after her death, and the only image of her hangi
ng in the gallery inside the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, by Bartolomeo Cancellieri (Galleria Colonna, Rome)
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the Italian texts of Vittoria Colonna’s sonnets addressed to Ferrante and all miscellaneous poems by her, see the edition of the Rime by Alan Bullock (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1982), unless otherwise specified. For the Italian texts of the spiritual sonnets, labeled with the letter “S” in footnotes, see Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Abigail Brundin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
For letters to and from Vittoria, see the Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, ed. Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller (Turin: Loescher, 1892), unless otherwise noted.
All translations of Vittoria’s poems and letters, as well as all other translations from Italian sources, are my own, unless otherwise noted. My translations of the letters have been edited and slightly emended by Troy Tower.
INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF VITTORIA COLONNA
For a history of the monastery and early printing activities at Subiaco, see St. Scholastica’s Abbey—Subiaco: An Historical and Artistic Guide (Subiaco, Italy: Edizioni S. Scolastica, 1986). On the Colonna archive in Subiaco, see Prudence Renée Baernstein, “‘In My Own Hand’: Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 66.1 (2013).
For an extensive genealogy of the Colonna family, see George Williams, Papal Genealogy: The Families and Descendants of the Popes (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 1998). Further genealogy of the Colonna and other Roman families is in Francesco Sansovino, Cronologia del mondo (Venice: Luna, 1580).
On the birthdate of Vittoria, the majority of scholars accept 1490, the year proposed by Giambattista Rota in his 1760 edition of Colonna’s Rime (Bergamo: Lancilotti). Domenico Tordi argues for 1492 in his “Luogo ed anno della nascita di Vittoria Colonna,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 19 (1892).
On the question of Vittoria’s siblings, Ascanio is the only brother who figures in her correspondence, but there are references in a number of sources to a second brother, Federico, who died in 1516. Beyond these two brothers, historians have argued for a range of other siblings who remain completely missing from the documents Vittoria left behind. For the most recent account of her family, see Christine Shaw, The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus IV to Clement VII: Barons and Factions in the Papal States (Rome: Istituto Storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2007).
For Burckhardt’s description, see The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay, trans. Samuel Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1960); for the German text, see Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, ed. Horst Günther (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1989).
General Reference and Further Bibliography
Stanislao Benito Andreotti, “L’Archivio e la Biblioteca,” in Claudio Giumelli, ed., I monasteri benedettini di Subiaco (Cinisello Balsamo, Italy: Silvana, 1982).
Agostino Attanasio, “La documentazione delle famiglie gentilizie romane negli studi storici: il caso dell’Archivio Colonna,” in Lucio Lume, ed., Archivi ed archivistica a Roma dopo l’Unità. Genesi storica, ordinamenti, interrelazioni. Atti del convegno, Roma, 12–14 marzo 1990 (Rome: Minestero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1994).
1. THE VIEW FROM THE CLIFF
For the role of Costanza d’Avalos in Spanish military affairs, see Suzanne Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna, châtelaine d’Ischia (Florence: Sansoni, 1968).
On the various occupations of Naples and Ischia, see Luca Cerchiai, Lorena Janelli, and Fausto Longo, eds., The Greek Cities of Magna Graecia and Sicily (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2004); see also Ronald Musto, Medieval Naples: A Documentary History, 400–1400 (New York: Italica, 2013).
The authoritative history of the relationships between the papacy and the Colonna and other noble families is Christine Shaw, The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus IV to Clement VII: Barons and Factions in the Papal States (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2007), which prints the Italian text of Ferdinand’s remarks about the Roman barons. For documentation of the Colonna family’s finances and acquisitions, see Antonio Coppi, ed., Memorie colonnesi (Rome: Salviucci, 1855).
For the history of the Palazzo Colonna in Marino, see Gilbert Bagnani, The Roman Campagna and Its Treasures (London: Methuen, 1929); for the claim that Vittoria was born in the Marino castle, primarily based on a Latin poem by the sixteenth-century poet Marcantonio Flaminio celebrating her association with the castle, see Domenico Tordi, “Luogo ed anno della nascita di Vittoria Colonna,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 19 (1892).
On the interiors of early modern castles and palazzi, see Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006).
On travel, epistolary culture, and other everyday practices in early modern Europe, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. and ed. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). On the epistolary practices of Vittoria and other early modern women, see James Daybell, ed., Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001); Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, “Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern Culture: An Introduction,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 3 (2014).
The brief from Leo X to Agnese da Montefeltro is cited in Shaw, The Political Role of the Orsini; the translation from Latin to Italian was done by Francesco Caruso; the English translation is my own.
For a more detailed description of the complex political situation of the Italian peninsula in these decades, including accounts of the financial and military relationships with other European states, see Michael Edward Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2014).
For an account of the Battle of Ravenna, see Frederick Lewis Taylor, The Art of War in Italy: 1494–1529, rev. ed. (London: Greenhill, 1993).
On the commission for The Last Supper, see Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (New York: Walker, 2012). For a full history of Leonardo’s patronage, see Massimiliano Capati, Leonardo: A Life Through Paintings, trans. Catherine Bolton (Florence: Mandragora, 2009).
Machiavelli’s account of the Sforza family’s machinations is found in chapter 7 of The Prince.
Paolo Giovio’s Latin biography of Ferrante was translated into Italian by Ludovico Domenichi in 1551; for a modern printing of Domenichi, whose text I have cited and translated into English here, see Giovio, Le vite del Gran Capitano e del marchese di Pescara, trans. Ludovico Domenichi, ed. Constantino Panigada (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1931).
For Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia, see Silvana Seidel Menchi’s Italian edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). The English translation is from The History of Italy, trans. Austin Parke Goddard (London: John Towers, 1755).
General Reference and Further Bibliography
Scipione Ammirato, Delle famiglie nobili napoletane (Florence: Marscotti, 1580).
The Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1842–1844).
Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Martin Kemp (London: Penguin, 1988).
Alberto Maria Ghisalberti, gen. ed., Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960–).
Lisa Kaborycha, A Short History of Renaissance Italy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011).
Martin Kemp, “‘Your Humble Servant and Painter’: Towards a History of Leonardo da Vinci in His Contexts of Employment,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 140 (2002).
Pompeo Litta Biumi, I Colonna di Roma (Milan: Ferrario, 1836), volume 3 of Celebri famiglie italiane, ed. Luigi Passerini, Federico Odorici, Federico Stefani, and Francesco di Mauro (various Italian impri
nts, 1819–1885).
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince: With Related Documents, trans. and ed. William Connell (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
Filadelfo Muñoz, Historia della augustissima famiglia Colonna (Venice: Turrini, 1658).
Charles William Chadwick Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1937).
Meredith Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Jean Paul Richter, ed., The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. R. C. Bell (London: Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883).
Diana Robin, Anne Larsen, and Carole Levin, eds., Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007).
Giuseppe Tomassetti, La campagna romana antica, medioevale e moderna, rev. ed., eds. Luisa Chiumenti and Fernando Bilancia (Florence: Olschki, 1979–1980).
2. DONNING WIDOW’S WEEDS
On early modern Viterbo, see Simonetta Valtieri and Enzo Bentivoglio, Viterbo nel Rinascimento (Rome: Ginevra Bentivoglio, 2012). For a history of carriage travel, see John Hunt, “Carriages, Violence, and Masculinity in Early Modern Rome,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17.1 (2014).
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