Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  In his dedicatory letter to the first edition, which appeared in 1528, Castiglione named Vittoria as responsible for having rushed him to publish the book prematurely:

  Being informed from Italy that signora Vittoria della Colonna, [Marchesa] of Pescara, to whom I had already given a copy of the book, had, contrary to her promise, caused a large part of it to be transcribed, I could not but feel a certain annoyance, fearing the considerable mischief that can arise in such cases … Wherefore, alarmed at this danger, I decided to revise at once such small part of the book as time would permit, with the intention of publishing it, thinking it better to let it be seen even slightly corrected by my own hand than much mutilated by the hands of others.

  No doubt he was using Vittoria’s name to his advantage—she was a famous noblewoman, who added prestige to the book—and there is evidence that he had already made arrangements to print The Courtier regardless of whether Vittoria returned the manuscript to him. But in the dedicatory letter, he wanted to stage his resistance to print, for all of his readers to see.

  In a private letter to Vittoria, meanwhile, from late September 1527, Castiglione claimed to forgive her for what he called her theft. “I remain in fact more indebted to you,” he wrote, “because the necessity of having the book printed immediately has relieved me from the chore of adding many things to it.” And yet, his bitterness lingered. He compared himself to a “father who saw his son maltreated, as if he were abandoned in the street to the whims of nature” (he was the father of three children), and then complained that whatever was good about the book had been ruined, because it had been deprived of its only virtue: novelty.

  As it turns out, Castiglione was both overestimating the number of people in Vittoria’s circle who read the book, and greatly underestimating the number of people across Europe who would soon be his readers. By the early 1600s, there were at least 110 editions of The Courtier in print—60 of those in Italian and 50 in other languages, including French, Spanish, German, English, and Latin. The book traveled far and wide, even beyond European borders: in 1586, a Florentine merchant found a copy of The Courtier in a match-seller’s shop in India. It was, in short, one of the bestselling books of the era, and its success reveals how strong an appeal the elite world of Renaissance Italy had for the rest of the globe.

  Vittoria certainly would have had The Courtier in mind when she got to Ischia in the summer of 1527. Not only was she in the middle of her exchange with Castiglione about the book’s publication, but she found herself for the first time in her life in the position of its female protagonist as the hostess of a lively social world. Ferrante’s aunt Costanza was still living in Ischia, but she was by then in her late sixties, and seems to have handed many of the responsibilities of entertaining the guests to her niece. How consciously Vittoria imagined the parallels between her own circumstances and those of her aunt Elisabetta is not clear, but it is telling that within months of her arrival, she had asked one of her guests, Paolo Giovio, to write a version of The Courtier situated at the Aragonese castle.

  Giovio was the perfect choice to write such a book. Born into a patrician family in the north of Italy in 1483, he had studied both philosophy and medicine, but his real passion was contemporary history (it was he who later wrote Ferrante’s biography, also commissioned by Vittoria). The notion that his own world deserved to be recorded reflects an unusual awareness that some Italians had during this period of living at an extraordinary time. The more traditional subject for historical inquiry was the ancient past, which Renaissance humanists had both studied and emulated. But starting in the sixteenth century, there was also a sense of the present moment as remarkable in itself. Hence books such as Castiglione’s Courtier, or Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, which told the history of Italian art from the late thirteenth-century Tuscan artist Cimabue to Michelangelo, began to appear; contemporary figures were treated as equivalent in their talents and accomplishments to the great ancient Romans.

  Giovio had entered the service of Clement VII as one of his personal physicians, while also fulfilling various humanistic roles, and remained at his side during the Sack of Rome. While they were holed up in Castel Sant’Angelo during the summer of 1527, the pope rewarded him for his loyal service by naming him the bishop of Nocera dei Pagani, a region south of Naples. Shortly after conferring this honor upon him, however, Clement was forced to dismiss Giovio from the fortress due to the enemy’s demands that he reduce the number of his retainers. Giovio remained in Rome, which was overwhelmed with plague, before accepting an invitation from Vittoria to come to Ischia. He stayed for a little more than a year. During this time, he began writing De viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus, or Notable Men and Women of Our Time.

  Giovio’s book, like Castiglione’s, purported to record a series of conversations that took place in a single location over the course of a few days—in Castiglione’s case, there were four dialogues, and in Giovio’s, three. The conversations on Ischia were limited to three of the guests: Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, who at twenty-five was a rising star in Charles’s army—he had become commander of the emperor’s entire infantry; a Neapolitan statesman and humanist, Giovanni Muscettola, who had been sent to the island to urge Alfonso to return to his military duties (it seems he was taking too long of a vacation); and Giovio himself. There were many other interesting figures at the castle, including the young Latin poet Antonio Sebastiani, known as Minturno; the learned and beautiful Princess of Salerno, Isabella Villamarino; Alfonso Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi, and his wife, Costanza d’Avalos (who was Alfonso’s sister and a close friend of Vittoria’s); and the very talented wives of Alfonso and Ascanio, the sisters Maria and Giovanna d’Aragona.

  Each of the three days that Giovio recorded was dedicated to a single topic of conversation. On the first day, the three men discussed the most outstanding soldiers; on the second, the finest men of letters; and on the third, the most excellent noblewomen. In this respect, Notable Men and Women was more like a lofty gossip column than a handbook that might be useful to its readers: it rehearsed the virtues, and sometimes the flaws, of particular people living at the time. Over the course of describing his contemporaries, Giovio also narrated the activities of the other guests with whom he was living. The events surrounding the first of the three dialogues were the most richly recorded, and give us a good sense of what life at the castle was like during this extraordinary period. The weather that day was fine, and a large group of men and women assembled early in the morning to embark on an ambitious outing. They traveled from the isolated cliffs of the castle to the mainland of the island, where above the scorched rocks was a lake surrounded by “a very beautiful amphitheater, which the leafy hills on all sides, as if drawn in a circle by a compass, display to the singular delight of observers.” In this natural theater, the men were to hunt waterfowl. Hunting was one of the central activities on Ischia—in addition to waterfowl, there were regular hunts for deer, partridge, and other game—and the women accompanied the men as spectators.

  Giovio described the day’s hunt with great ethnographic detail, as if he imagined an audience for whom the events would be both unfamiliar and of great interest. “Young men armed with poles and dogs trained in swamp hunting formed a blockade along the shores,” he wrote, while others with bows boarded boats from which they shot clay missiles. Once the hunt began, the birds “were scattered and attacked on every side by a constant rain of missiles, accompanied by applause and mutual congratulations.” After those birds that survived retreated from the shoreline into the reeds—“they were too fat, sluggish, and timid to dare to fly out either into the hills or to the adjacent sea”—the battle was resumed in a gorier form on land, with the dogs, wading into the reeds, catching the birds directly in their mouths, and the men killing them with stones and clubs. By the end, there were more than three hundred birds either captured or dead, which were indecorously placed inside the ladies’ boats for transport back to the castle.


  When the hunt came to an end, the entire group prepared to leave. The women were apparently unwilling to get back on their boats—they were no doubt rightly concerned about becoming nauseated due to the piles of dead birds they would have been sitting with—and the chief magistrate of the island managed at the last minute to arrange for a group of horses to transport the women back to the castle. Giovio lamented, however, that his conversation with Alfonso and Muscettola was brought to an abrupt end. In the modern edition of Giovio’s text, this dialogue alone is roughly one hundred pages of small print, so it had in fact been a rather long day.

  Giovio’s account of the events became even more interesting for our purposes when the group returned to the castle. It was at this point that he first mentioned the fact that Vittoria had not been with them. “Once we had entered the fortress,” he wrote, “we offered the entire catch to Vittoria Colonna—because she, having imposed constant mourning upon herself owing to her grief at the loss of her illustrious husband, was not only keeping herself from the public light, but, enclosed in darkened bedchambers, allowed nothing into her grief-stricken mind except for solemn readings and holy sermons.” Two years after Ferrante’s death, and notwithstanding the company of so many friends, Vittoria’s grief had not yet abated. On the contrary: while her guests were out hunting—or swimming, as the Neapolitan queens used to do by the little islands that were subsequently known as the Queens’ Rocks; or visiting the ancient temple of Neptune; or relaxing at the beach on benches carved out of mossy tufa—she remained in her dark chambers, reading prayers and sermons. “Such is her lofty and incredible piety,” Giovio declared, “that she subdues the flower of her youth by fasting; she covers her delicate flanks not with a silken but rather a woolen vest as her tunic, she wears out her back and knees with daily supplications before statues of the saints; and she even lashes private parts of her body [pudicas corporis partes] with the stinging blows of a whip, a punishment undeserved.”

  How Giovio learned these intimate details about what Vittoria wore under her garments, or in what fashion she whipped her “private parts,” was not revealed—perhaps one of her maids was particularly indiscreet. Yet whatever his source, he judged her religious fervor to be excessive: “But why may perpetual divine services be heard at almost every hour? Why are there holy readings from the Old and the New Testament, why the pious meditations, when even she herself would acknowledge in a lofty preamble that chastity does not reside in great and difficult labor, but in a certain steadfast and firm application of the mind and in a good and zealous will?” From this account, it seems that Vittoria had arranged for a full schedule of liturgical hours and scriptural readings at the castle, possibly within a private chapel of her own. Perhaps she wanted to realize at least partially the dream she had the previous year of creating her own religious house in Naples before the horrors of the Sack of Rome.

  At the same time that Vittoria was absorbed by her mourning, she was also successfully playing the role of worldly chatelaine. In Giovio’s portrait of her, two very different images emerged. On the one hand, Vittoria was the would-be nun, overdoing her penance, arranging for extra services, and refusing to come outdoors. On the other hand, she was the elegant and gracious hostess, who not only took care of her guests, but also genuinely enjoyed their company. According to Giovio, though she herself was “abstemious,” she “brings enthusiasm to choosing the wines, lest the guests find anything lacking. Moreover, she measures the delight of the feast in accordance with desire rather than satiety, and she gauges its splendor, not in terms of recherché, elaborate, and extravagant dishes, but in healthful and delicate provisions as well as elegant and consistently immaculate service.”

  In addition to choosing the meals and managing the staff with “a hand that is so very generous as almost to be prodigal,” Vittoria also strove to create a sophisticated, convivial atmosphere. She had always been accustomed, Giovio remarked, “to receive those calling upon her in a friendly, pleasant and dignified fashion; and if elegant men are present, and especially those renowned in literature, she converses beautifully about matters of the heart and about the entire range of cultivated pleasures. And since she has ears that are neither gloomy nor severe, she takes pleasure in her own wit and in the jokes of others.” This is the first instance in the historical record where Vittoria is described as having a good sense of humor, although there is certainly some evidence of this in her letters. But what Giovio especially wanted to emphasize was her commitment to literary conversation. For Vittoria, he added, there was “nothing finer than to rescue those cast out by shipwreck and by the savage waves of a hostile storm,” especially those “who have derived some commendation and praise from the excellent study of literature.”

  It is not a coincidence that many of Vittoria’s guests at the time of Giovio’s visit were interested in discussing literature. Indeed, the 1520s were a very rich decade for Italian poetry, which was having a Renaissance all its own. Although Dante and Petrarch had written the most famous of all Italian verse centuries earlier, it was only in the early sixteenth century that Italian achieved real parity with Latin. The Italian that the poets chose was not always their mother tongue: there were many different dialects spoken at the time (as there still are today), and the dominant literary language was that of Dante and Petrarch, namely Tuscan. Giovio, in fact, referred to Vittoria’s sonnets as her “Tuscan poems,” which shows that she was well aware of current trends and had adjusted her own language accordingly.

  The second day of Giovio’s conversation on Ischia was dedicated to the most distinguished men of letters, and began with Alfonso’s asking Muscettola why “most of those schooled in Latin and Greek literature have in this age turned their attention entirely to the vernacular tongue, departing from the usage of their predecessors?” The question arose during their discussion of Bembo, who in 1525 had published a treatise on the Italian language, entitled Prose della volgar lingua, or Discussions of the Vernacular Language. It is hard fully to capture the cultural authority that Bembo enjoyed at this time. After leaving Urbino, where he had been at the very center of Duke Guidobaldo’s court, he took up a position in Rome as secretary to Leo X, who was the brother of his friend Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico). Already famous throughout the peninsula for his elegant writings in both Latin and Italian—he was often compared to Cicero—that circulated during his nearly ten-year stay in Rome, Bembo became one of the most influential cultural figures of the era.

  Bembo had begun writing Discussions of the Vernacular Language in his final years in Urbino, but he did not finish it until roughly twelve years later, and it subsequently appeared in print with a dedication to Pope Clement himself. Thus his book carried with it not only the prestige of Bembo’s own name, but also, in effect, a papal imprimatur. His argument, meanwhile, was a polemical one: he wanted to defend the vernacular, and specifically Tuscan, as equal to Latin in literary value. Along the way, he also established a set of grammatical and orthographic norms that he thought all writers in Italy should follow. The fact that Giovio and his friends were already debating the virtues of Bembo’s work and the extent of its influence within two years of its publication gives us some sense of its success. Another sure indication was the fact that many of the most important Italian authors, including Ariosto and Castiglione, revised their own works to make sure they conformed to Bembo’s new norms.

  One of the unforeseen consequences of Italian replacing Latin as the standard language for composing poetry was that many more women entered the literary field. Although many aristocratic girls studied Latin as children, they were not typically educated at the same level as their male counterparts, and generally lacked the formal humanist training that would have enabled them to feel comfortable writing Latin verse. When Vittoria began composing her sonnets in the 1520s, more women than ever before—albeit mostly from the upper classes—were writing poems in Italian, and circulating them among their friends. As we saw with C
astiglione’s Courtier, sharing literary manuscripts did not necessarily involve publication, but it also did not mean that readership was strictly limited to the author’s immediate circle: poems were routinely copied out, and passed along, without the author’s permission. Someone entirely unconnected to Vittoria could have had access to her sonnets without her knowing anything about it.

  Vittoria’s sonnets first traveled far from the shores of Ischia through Giovio himself. During his stay at the castle, Vittoria had given him her sonnets to read, and he must have had a copy of them made before he left the island in the fall of 1528. One year later, he attended the congress held in Bologna to finalize the settlement reached between Clement VII and Charles V—the occasion when the pope finally recognized Charles as Holy Roman Emperor. Among the many papers that Giovio brought with him to the congress were Vittoria’s poems.

  It is worth pausing to think about what it meant for Vittoria’s sonnets to have circulated at this great event, which was attended by diplomats and statesmen from all across Europe. Charles arrived in November 1529 with hundreds of courtiers and literally thousands of soldiers; the Italians accompanying the pope were comparably represented. It was during this congress that Bembo, who was there as part of Clement’s entourage, first read Vittoria’s poems. Vittoria was not altogether a stranger to Bembo. The two may have met roughly a decade earlier in Rome, when the festivities were held to celebrate her cousin Pompeo’s cardinalship, and they certainly had dealings with each other in 1525 in relation to the small papal city of Benevento, which was under Ferrante’s rule. Benevento had a commenda, or ecclesiastical benefice, belonging to the religious order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, which Pope Julius II had given to Bembo in 1508, and which he had fully taken possession of in 1517. The appointment turned out to be much more problematic than Bembo had ever imagined, however, due largely to the town’s conflicted loyalties between Rome and Naples. In 1525, when Ferrante was away at war and Vittoria was acting as governor in his place, Bembo appealed to her for help. She managed to have some success, largely through the intervention of Pompeo, although the resolution was short-lived: once Ferrante was dead and Vittoria was no longer ruling Benevento, the benefice met with even more serious trouble, especially in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome.