Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. Cesare Guasti (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1863).

  Emidio Campi, Michelangelo e Vittoria Colonna. Un dialogo artistico-teologico ispirato da Bernardino Ochino e altri saggi di storia della Riforma (Turin: Claudiana, 1994).

  Robert Clements, “The Authenticity of de Hollanda’s Dialogos em Roma,” PMLA 61.4 (1946).

  Stephen Dando-Collins, The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2010).

  Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed., An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology (London: Dearborn, 1996).

  Serena De Leonardis and Stefano Masi, Art and History: Rome and the Vatican, trans. Paula Boomsliter (Sesto Fiorentino, Italy: Bonechi, 1999).

  Franca Falletti and Jonathan Katz Nelson, eds., Venere e Amore. Michelangelo e la nuova bellezza ideale / Venus and Love: Michelangelo and the New Ideal of Beauty (Florence: Giunti, 2002).

  Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed. Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos (Vienna/Milan: Kunsthistorisches Museum/Skira, 1997).

  Herman Friedrich Grimm, Life of Michael Angelo, trans. Fanny Elizabeth Bunnett (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890–1891).

  Susan Haskins, trans. and ed., Who Is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  Michael Hirst, Tre saggi su Michelangelo, trans. Barbara Agosti (Florence: Mandragora, 2004).

  Tyler Lansford, The Latin Inscriptions of Rome: A Walking Guide (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  Maria Ruvoldt, “Michelangelo’s Dream,” Art Bulletin 85.1 (2003).

  Donald Emrys Strong, Roman Art, 2nd ed., ed. Jocelyn Toynbee, revised by Roger Ling (London: Penguin, 1988).

  Tommaso Tovaglieri, “Francesco Arcangeli—Alfredo Costa. Attorno al Noli me tangere del Pontormo,” Concorso 6 (2012–2014).

  11. SALT WAR

  Brunamonte de’ Rossi’s letters are published in Domenico Tordi, “Vittoria Colonna in Orvieto durante la guerra del sale,” Bollettino della Società Umbra di Storia Patria 1.3 (1895); the translations are from Maud Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times (London: Dent, 1906), with some small emendations.

  On the salt trade in early modern Italy, see Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker, 2002). For the events following Paul III’s salt tax in Italy, see Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). The biblical passage to which Paul alludes is from Numbers 33.52–55.

  Accounts of the abduction of Livia Colonna are found in Roberto Zapperi, “Alessandro Farnese, Giovanni della Casa and Titian’s Danae in Naples,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991).

  On the norms surrounding the illegitimate children of popes, see Gerard Noel, The Renaissance Popes: Culture, Power, and the Making of the Borgia Myth (London: Constable, 2006).

  Francesco Contarini’s account to the Venetian senate is translated in Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  For the Latin text of letters to and from Reginald Pole in this chapter, see the Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S. R. E. cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum collectio, ed. Angelo Maria Querini (Brescia, Italy: Rizzardi, 1744–1757). The letters are summarized in Thomas Mayer, ed., The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), and were translated by Troy Tower.

  On the failed marriages of Margaret of Austria, also known as Margaret of Parma, see Charles Steen, Margaret of Parma: A Life (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013). Details of the Colonna-Farnese proposal are found in Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna.

  Vittoria’s letter to Ascanio in which she declares that “it is hard to understand this pope” and her letter that ends with the postscript “To the emperor I write that the agreements were impossible” were translated by Troy Tower, with my occasional emendations.

  For the reception thrown for Vittoria by Orvieto city officials, see Damon DiMauro, “Vittoria Colonna in Orvieto,” a three-part article published in 2009 by the Studio for Art, Faith and History at Gordon College, Wenham, MA, http://www.gordon.edu/lettersfromeurope/dimauro.

  Guidiccioni’s letters are translated in Robin, Publishing Women, and printed in Tordi, “Vittoria Colonna in Orvieto.”

  Giovanna d’Aragona’s letter to the pope was translated by Troy Tower; the Italian text is in Robin, Publishing Women.

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Mark Hudson, Titian: The Last Days (New York: Walker, 2010).

  Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1500–1600, trans. Mary Hottinger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

  Peter Partner, The Lands of St Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

  Maria Grazia Picozzi, Palazzo Colonna. Appartamenti: Sculture antiche e dall’antico (Rome: De Luca, 2010).

  Samuel Ball Platner, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, ed. Thomas Ashby (London: Oxford University Press, 1929).

  Clare Robertson, ‘Il gran cardinale’: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

  Luis de Salazar y Castro, Historia genealogica de la casa de Lara justificada con instrumentos y escritores de inviolable fe (Madrid: Mateo de Llanos y Gozman, 1694–1697).

  12. LATE LOVE

  For details on when Vittoria and Reginald Pole may have met, see Maria Forcellino, “Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo: Drawings and Paintings,” in Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Sapegno, eds., A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016). For more on the life and career of Pole, see Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Cromwell’s suggestion that Pole read Machiavelli, see Thomas Mayer, “Pole, Reginald (1500–1558),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For the composition of Pole’s De unitate, see Thomas Dunn, “The Development of the Text of Pole’s De Unitate Ecclesiae,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70.4 (1976).

  For Pole’s comments about Henry VIII as an enemy of the human race, see the Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S. R. E. cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum collectio, ed. Angelo Maria Querini (Brescia, Italy: Rizzardi, 1744–1757), 2:36.

  On Viterbo and Italian reformist activity, see Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, trans. Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), which also includes English translations of Francesco Negri’s and Antonio Brucioli’s prefaces.

  Pole’s relationship with Priuli, culminating in their request for a joint burial (confirmed by an epitaph in Morone’s papers in the Vatican Secret Archive) is discussed in Mayer, Reginald Pole, which also cites Ludovico Beccadelli’s biography.

  On the life and reign of Paul IV, see Miles Pattenden, Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  For details on the history of the Inquisition, see Thomas Mayer, The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, c. 1590–1640 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). On the cooperation between the Spanish Inquisition and Neapolitan officials, see Gigliola Fragnito, “The Central and Peripheral Organization of Censorship,” in Gigliola Fragnito, ed., Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), which is in response to Massimo Firpo, “Valdésianesimo ed evangelismo: alle origini dell’ecclesia Viterbiensis (1541),” Schifanoia 5.1 (1985).

  For further details on the Council of Trent, see, among others, John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013).

  On the popularity and prohibition of the Beneficio, see Ruth Prel
owski, trans. and ed., “The «Beneficio di Cristo»,” in John Tedeschi, ed., Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965), which is the translation used here. See also Adriano Prosperi and Carlo Ginzburg, Giochi di pazienza: un seminario sul «Beneficio di Cristo» (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); and Robert Pierce, Pier Paolo Vergerio the Propagandist (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003). The free copies Morone arranged for Modena are treated in Prelowski, trans. and ed., “The «Beneficio di Cristo».”

  Contarini’s letter to Pole, translated by Troy Tower with my emendations, is in Thomas Mayer, ed., The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).

  Ochino’s flight out of Italy is reported in Karl Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena: A Contribution Towards the History of the Reformation, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: Nisbet, 1876).

  For further biography on Margaret Pole, see Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). The description of her execution is from Eustace Chapuys’s letter to the queen of Hungary dated June 10, 1541; it is summarized from the French in Pascual de Gayangos, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Spain, volume 6, part 1, 1538–1542 (London, 1890). On the Pole family’s involvement in the Exeter Conspiracy, see Mayer, “Pole, Reginald.”

  The remark of Margaret Pole’s inquisitor William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, is printed in Hazel Pierce, “Pole, Margaret, suo jure countess of Salisbury (1473–1541),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. The spelling has been modernized here.

  Pole’s letter to Vittoria proposing that she become his new mother is letter 139 in Ferrero and Müller’s Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna; it was translated by Troy Tower, as was Pole’s letter to Pucci, letter 3:44 in Querini’s Epistolarum.

  Carnesecchi describes Vittoria’s spiritual practices in his later interrogation by the Roman Inquisition. See the transcriptions in Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, eds., I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567) (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998–2000); English translations are by Troy Tower.

  Vittoria’s letter to Priuli is dated according to Mayer’s chronology and features his translation; see Mayer, ed., Correspondence, entry 407. All of Vittoria’s other letters adhere to the chronology established in Ferrero and Müller’s Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna.

  The translation of Pole’s last letter to Vittoria is based on Jerrold, with my emendations. The Parable of the Guests is in Luke 14.

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Félix Bungener, History of the Council of Trent, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. John McClintock (New York: Harper, 1855).

  Giorgio Caravale, The Italian Reformation Outside Italy: Francesco Pucci’s Heresy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015).

  Charles Cocquelines, ed., Bullarum romanorum, privilegiorum ac diplomatum romanorum pontificum amplissima collection (Rome: Girolamo Mainardi, 1739–1762).

  Roland Connelly, The Women of the Catholic Resistance: In England 1540–1680 (Edinburgh: Pentland, 1997).

  Aaron C. Denlinger, Omnes in Adam ex pacto Dei: Ambrogio Catarino’s Doctrine of Covenantal Solidarity and Its Influence on Post-Reformation Reformed Theologians (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).

  Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, trans. Richard Bates (London: Routledge, 2016).

  Carlo Ginzburg and Adriana Prosperi, “Le due redazioni del ‘Beneficio di Cristo,’” in Albano Biondi, ed., Eresia e riforma nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Florence/Chicago: Sansoni/Newberry Library, 1974).

  Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. Annie Hamilton (London: Bell, 1900–1906).

  Denys Hay and John Easton Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380–1530 (London: Longman, 1989).

  Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).

  Hazel Pierce, “The King’s Cousin: The Life, Career and Welsh Connection of Sir Richard Pole, 1458–1504,” Welsh History Review/Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru 19.2 (1998).

  Antonio Santosuosso, “An Account of the Election of Paul IV to the Pontificate,” Renaissance Quarterly 31.4 (1978).

  John Shearman, “Three Portraits by Andrea del Sarto and His Circle,” Burlington Magazine 102.683 (1960).

  13. LAST RITES

  Claudio Tolomei’s letters to Giuseppe Cincio are printed in Delle lettere di M. Claudio Tolomei libri sette, ed. Vincenzo Cioffi (Naples: Albergo de’ Poveri, 1829); the translations here are adapted from Maud Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times (London: Dent, 1906). Bembo’s letter is in Ernesto Travi’s edition of the Lettere (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1992).

  Fracastoro’s letter is printed in a 1574 anthology edited in Venice by Bernardino Pino (or Pini), Della nuova scelta di lettere di diversi nobilissimi; the translation here is from Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with my emendations. Lady Macbeth’s physician suggests mental disturbance in Macbeth 5:3.

  Vittoria’s attendant Prudenza, listed in her will as “D[omina] Prudentia de Palma d[e] arpino,” appears in several documents treated by Reumont, Vittoria Colonna.

  For Vittoria’s letter to Saint Ignatius and her meeting with Salmerón, see Hugo Rahner, Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women, trans. Kathleen Pond and S.A.H. Weetman (Freiburg/Edinburgh: Herder/Nelson, 1960); for the Spanish texts, see Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Jesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones (Madrid: Lopez del Horno, 1903), the first volume of the Monumenta Ignatiana in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu series.

  The translation of Vittoria’s letter to Giovanni Morone is adapted from Jerrold’s, in Vittoria Colonna.

  The Italian text of Marguerite’s letter to Georges d’Armagnac is printed in Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City: Archivio Vaticano, 1989).

  Martinengo’s letter is printed in Alfred von Reumont, Vittoria Colonna, marchesa di Pescara: vita, fede e poesia nel secolo decimosesto, trans. Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller (Turin: Loescher, 1892).

  On the public lectures based on Vittoria’s poetry, see Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).

  On the literary cultivation of Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini, see Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); see also Suzanne Thérault, Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna, châtelaine d’Ischia (Florence: Sansoni, 1968).

  For details about Vittoria’s death and burial, see Fabrizio Colonna, Sulla tomba di Vittoria Colonna (Rome: Stabilito Tipografico dell’Opinione, 1887); and Bruto Amante, La tomba di Vittoria Colonna e i testamenti finora inediti della poetessa (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1896).

  Vittoria’s will is kept in the Archivio Notarile Distrettuale in Rome; copies are in the Archivio Colonna and a transcription is in Amante, La tomba di Vittoria Colonna. For the letter of Don Maggio, kept in the Colonna archive, see Colonna, Sulla tomba di Vittoria Colonna. Transcriptions and translations of Bonorio’s letters to Ascanio are my own; the originals are in the Colonna archive and passages are printed in Amante, La tomba di Vittoria Colonna, and Fabrizio Colonna, Sulla tomba di Vittoria Colonna. The translation of Condivi’s account is Alice Sedgwick Wohl’s, in Life of Michelangelo, 2nd ed., ed. Hellmut Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

  Michelangelo’s letters are translated in E. Hartley Ramsden, trans. and ed., The Letters of Michelangelo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963).

  Pole’s letters are printed in the Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli S. R. E. cardinalis et aliorum ad ipsum collectio, ed. Angelo Maria Querini (Brescia, Italy: Rizzardi, 1744–1757), and summarized in Thomas Mayer, ed., The
Correspondence of Reginald Pole (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). A sixteenth-century copy of Pole’s letter to Ascanio, summarized from Italian manuscripts in Mayer, ed., Correspondence, was consulted at the British Library; the translation is mine.

  On the poet’s niece, Vittoria Colonna, see Tobia Toscano, “Galeazzo di Tarsia: indizi per la riapertura di una pratica archiviata,” in Renzo Cremante, ed., La lirica del Cinquecento. Seminario di studi in memoria di Cesare Bozzetti (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004).

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Ann Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

  William Bangert, Claude Jay and Alfonso Salmerón: Two Early Jesuits (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985).

  Massimo Firpo, Vittore Soranzo vescovo ed eretico. Riforma della Chiesa e Inquisizione nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2006).

  Alberto Galieti, “La tomba di Prosperetto Colonna in Cività Latina,” Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria 31.1 (1908).

  Michael Lovano, All Things Julius Caesar: An Encyclopedia of Caesar’s World and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015).

  Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  Rosa Salzberg, “In the Mouths of Charlatans: Street Performers and the Dissemination of Pamphlets in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 24.5 (2010).

  Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, Castilla y Nápoles en el siglo XVI. El virrey Pedro de Toledo: linaje, estado y cultura (1532–1553) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1994.

  Johann Wyss, Vittoria Colonna und ihr Kanzoniere, dissertation, Universität Zürich, 1916.

  CONCLUSION: IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE INQUISITION

  For a general account of the activities of the Roman Inquisition, see Thomas Mayer, The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, c. 1590–1640 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Jane Wickersham, Rituals of Prosecution: The Roman Inquisition and the Prosecution of Philo-Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Andrea del Col and Giovanna Paolin, eds., L’Inquisizione Romana in Italia nell’età moderna. Archivi, problemi di metodo e nuove ricerche. Atti del seminario internazionale Trieste 18–20 maggio 1988 (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1991); and Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016).