Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  Vittoria could not have predicted any of this as she worked peacefully on her poems in the tranquility of Ferrara’s convent of Santa Caterina di Siena, and visited the duke and duchess at the palace. We know the time she spent in Ferrara was immensely satisfying to her from letters she sent both during and after her visit. First, in June 1537, she wrote to Ercole’s cousin Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga: “It has pleased God that here in Ferrara I should be very calm and consoled, praised be God, as his Excellence the Duke and all the others respect my great desire for the freedom to attend only to true acts of charity and not to those mixed acts produced by conversation.” Her emphasis on the tranquility of her days suggests that the time at the convent may have been more pleasing to her than the visits to the ducal palace. In her correspondence with Ercole after her departure, however, Vittoria stressed the pleasure she took both with the nuns and in the company of his court. She also conjured up an image of Ercole’s happy family, which, despite the obvious problems between husband and wife, was nonetheless growing at a fast pace. When Vittoria arrived, there were already three small children; a fourth was born during her visit, and a fifth the following year. “I pray to God,” she wrote from Rome in December 1539, “that he will allow me to return to your sweetest Ferrara to be with Your Excellency, my many friends, relatives, and sisters [at the convent], and with your duchess and divine children.” Several years later, she signed another letter to Ercole: “From Santa Caterina, but not that most beautiful one in Ferrara, rather this mediocre one in Viterbo.”

  Ferrara clearly suited Vittoria’s soul, but it served her body less well. Her pilgrimage had been canceled almost certainly due to her health, and Ferrara’s damp climate had not been conducive to a full recovery. Toward the end of 1537, she wrote to Aretino to say that the air in Ferrara was so harmful to her that she was leaving for the healthier climate of Bologna. The two cities are very close to each other—a mere twenty-three miles separate them—but Ferrara is famously marshy and full of mosquitoes, which regularly brought malaria, literally mal aria, or “bad air,” whereas Bologna is near the Appenine foothills and much drier.

  Ercole marked the occasion of Vittoria’s departure by throwing a grand dinner in her honor, which coincided with the festivities for Carnival. Among the many guests was Ercole’s aunt, Isabella d’Este. Vittoria had almost certainly met Isabella before: she had been a guest at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome in 1525, and would also have attended many of the same weddings and festivities as Vittoria over the years. This evening in Ferrara is the only occasion, however, that we know the two women—perhaps the most illustrious women of the period—were together.

  Isabella d’Este combined many of the qualities that Vittoria had most admired in two of her earlier role models: her aunts Costanza d’Avalos and Elisabetta Gonzaga, the latter of whom was also Isabella’s sister-in-law (Isabella had been married to Francesco II Gonzaga). Like Costanza, Isabella was a very accomplished female ruler, having been the active regent of Mantua following her husband’s death in 1519. She was famous for her fine negotiation of foreign treaties, her skillful control over the military, and her successful defense of the city. She was also known for her kindness to her people, who showered her with love. Like Elisabetta, Isabella presided with supreme elegance over her court, and was the patron of some of the most important artists of the period. She commissioned two portraits from Titian—the first, painted when she was fifty-five years old, she regarded as too matronly; the second, done seven years later, represents her as a young woman in her twenties. When she was in truth twenty-five, she commissioned a portrait from Leonardo da Vinci. This never got beyond a preliminary drawing, done in black and red chalk and roughly two feet in length, but even in its unfinished state, the head-and-shoulders portrait has a regal serenity not unlike Leonardo’s infinitely more famous work also at the Louvre, the Mona Lisa.

  At the time of Ercole’s dinner for Vittoria, Isabella was sixty-four years old, and nearing the end of her life; she died the following year. A letter written by Benedetto Accolti, cardinal of Ravenna, to one of Isabella’s daughters described the pleasures of the evening in some detail:

  This morning, to the great sadness of the Lord Duke’s Excellency and myself and this whole city, the Signora Marchesa di Pescara left for Bologna, but his Most Excellent Lordship and I took in some most divine entertainment and, too, we console ourselves with the promises that her Ladyship made us that she would return soon. Yesterday evening we enjoyed dinner all together, the Lord Duke’s Excellency and myself, and the most illustrious lady mother to Your Most Illustrious Lordship, with whom we dined and likewise dined the Lady Marchesa mentioned above. After dinner five sonnets by the above-mentioned Lady Marchesa were read aloud, which were so beautiful that I am certain an angel from Heaven could not create anything more perfect; after these were read aloud, to everyone’s endless delight and applause, the maidens of the Lady your mother, and Signora Anna played some small pieces on the harpsichord excellently; then moving into some dances Morgantino leapt out with the lady Delia and they did great things with their little bodies.

  This is a fortunate letter to have survived, for it offers one of the loveliest images we have of Vittoria immersed in her world: sharing her poems, listening to the harpsichord, enjoying the dancing performed by the little people Delia and Morgantino, Isabella’s beloved jesters. Here are the elegant pastimes of the Renaissance nobility just as Castiglione described them, with Vittoria at their very center.

  In February 1538, Vittoria left Ferrara for Bologna. Upon her arrival, she wasted no time in seeking out the best sermons in the city: she went to hear the young Franciscan monk Cornelio Musso, who was rising in fame as both a teacher of metaphysics and a preacher, and was on his way to becoming one of Pope Paul’s favorites. A few weeks later, however, she was once again on the move, following the trail of Ochino. Perhaps her health had improved, or perhaps she was simply determined to hear more of Ochino’s preaching, and confident that the spring air in Tuscany would be fine. After attending Ochino’s sermons in Pisa and Florence, where she also met her brother Ascanio, she seems to have settled for a few months to take the thermal baths in the town known today as Bagni di Lucca. For the first time in her life, she seems to have devoted herself to taking care of her body.

  Bagni di Lucca had been famous for its springs since the time of the ancient Etruscans—the baths the Romans built there were still largely intact at the time of Vittoria’s visit. In the early nineteenth century, following Napoleon’s conquest of northern Italy, his sister Marie Anne Elisa, to whom he had given the principality of Lucca, along with that of Piombino, transformed Bagni di Lucca into one of the most sought-after social destinations for European nobility, and many members of Napoleon’s court spent their summers there. Elisa’s principal innovation was the introduction of individual tubs, rather than common pools (a genuine revolution in the history of spas), but she also sought to make the town a more lively social destination by building a dance hall and casino. In the sixteenth century, Bagni di Lucca was strictly a spa—a retreat from the demands of court life—and Vittoria’s visit there was therapeutic.

  If Vittoria adhered to the recommended course of treatment, she would have followed a demanding regimen of drinking the waters and bathing. Another visitor some forty years later, the great French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, recorded drinking seven glasses of the water in a row just after sunrise, and remarked that this was nothing compared with the sixteen or seventeen glasses drunk by several of his fellow guests. According to the Latin inscription on the marble tablet outside one of the baths, the result of the treatment was to “cure all stomach illnesses, aid digestion, stimulate appetite, restrict vomiting, clean the kidneys, diminish stones, eliminate fevers, restore an optimal complexion, heal the lungs, strengthen the frail, remove all obstructions from the veins completely, and rid the body of all ulcers and sores.” No wonder Vittoria stayed so long.

  Vittoria might
well have chosen to stay even longer had she not been recalled to Rome in September 1538. In the letter to Aretino written from Lucca on September 25 that we looked at earlier, she complained that His Holiness had requested her to return at the urging of Alfonso d’Avalos. There was no account of why Alfonso needed her, but however free she may have felt in her movements, there was no avoiding a summons from the pope. By October, she was back in her familiar quarters in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, just in time to absorb some astonishing news. Vittoria had become a published poet.

  9

  THE POWER OF PRINT

  FROM THE TIME OF HER LITERARY SALON on Ischia in the late 1520s through her visit to the ducal palace in Ferrara ten years later, Vittoria had grown accustomed to sharing her sonnets with friends. These poems, as we have seen, were on the whole very personal: she gave voice to her anguish over her husband’s death; her frustration with her mourning; her longing to live a religious life; her desire for greater intimacy with God. As she said in the first of the posthumous sonnets to Ferrante, “I write only to vent my inward pain.” However comfortable Vittoria was circulating her poems in literary circles, she had no ambition to be a public figure, nor did she ever express a desire for fame. In her poetry, as in her personal life, she cherished her privacy. This was a woman, after all, who had wanted to spend her days in the cloister of the convent.

  It is therefore not surprising that the idea of printing her poems—and, in so doing, making her innermost thoughts available to an anonymous and unknown audience of readers—had no appeal to Vittoria. The problem was not that she considered the medium of print to be beneath her, as if publishing were an inherently vulgar thing to do. Such an attitude, commonly referred to by literary historians as “the stigma of print,” was common in Renaissance England: even a great poet such as John Donne described his regret at feeling “under an unescapable necessity” to publish his verse, as if he would do anything to avoid such a fate. (In the end, Donne managed to resist printing more than a small number of occasional poems, with the result that the first edition of his splendid “Songs and Sonnets” appeared in 1633, two years after his death.)

  There was no comparable prejudice against publishing in Italy—Bembo and his fellow aristocratic poets printed their poetry with great frequency—and Vittoria was under increasing pressure to do so. The problem for Vittoria was not part of a general resistance among the Italian elite to allowing their works to be printed; it was more particular to her. Part of this no doubt came from the fact that no woman in Italy had ever published a book of poems, and all evidence suggests that Vittoria never imagined herself as a path-breaker. When the poet and humanist Benedetto Varchi came to visit her in Ferrara in 1537 and raised the question of publication to her directly, she responded by saying that she wanted the poems to be left alone.

  We can imagine Vittoria’s reaction, then, in 1538, when an unknown printing house in the northern city of Parma published a book of her sonnets without her permission. Entitled Rime de la divina Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara, the book was printed by Antonio Viotti and edited by Filippo Pirogallo—neither of whom had any personal connection to Vittoria—and contained 145 poems. Nine of these were in fact wrongly attributed to Vittoria; of the remaining 136 poems, 17 were spiritual sonnets, and the rest were secular. In his dedicatory letter, Pirogallo described his own labors in obtaining Vittoria’s poems; he claimed that he copied out whatever sonnets he could find, and then assembled them himself. This account made clear that he was not part of her inner circle: he had not received a personal manuscript or borrowed one from someone who knew her. He represented the world outside.

  Viotti and Pirogallo chose to print the Rime in the small format known as ottavo, which was one of the cheapest and most portable sizes. The names of book sizes referred to the number of times each large printed sheet of paper was folded over: the largest was the folio, which had one fold in the sheet, producing two pages; the quarto, folded twice to become four pages, was the size of a modern paperback; and the ottavo was a small book made from folding each sheet four times to render eight (otto) small pages. The book was austere in its presentation, and other than a clover on the title page, it was entirely without ornamentation.

  Title page of the first edition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime (Parma: Viotti, 1538) (*IC5 C7191R 1538, Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  The fact that Vittoria’s Rime was printed in a pirated edition was by no means uncommon at the time—it was not even illegal. In 1545, after one too many complaints from authors fed up with their lack of control over their own publications, the authorities in Venice, which was the capital of the Italian publishing industry, ruled that books could no longer be published without the author’s consent. According to a decree issued by the powerful governing body known as the Council of Ten: “The audacity and greed for gain of some printers in this city of ours has grown to such an extent that they permit themselves to print what they like and to name the authors of the things they print without their knowledge, indeed completely against their wishes.” The new Venetian laws against pirating did not mean, however, that authors necessarily profited from the sales of their books; our modern system of royalties had yet to be invented. In order for authors to make money personally, they needed to have invested directly in the costs of the printing. This was, in fact, a fairly regular occurrence, and legal agreements were signed with printers or publishers that specified how profits, should there be any, were to be distributed. Less financially well-off authors often found the support of a patron who subsidized the publication and had their own arrangement with the printer. But there was no such thing as copyright during this period—the first copyright statute in Europe was passed in England in 1709—and authors had no inherent rights to what we now consider their intellectual property.

  However common the practice of publishing works without authorial permission may have been in 1538, it was a very bold move in relation to Vittoria. This was something that Viotti and Pirogallo openly recognized, and even capitalized on in presenting the book. In the dedicatory letter addressed to his friend, “The Most Learned Alessandro Vercelli,” Pirogallo boasted about publishing the poems against Vittoria’s will: “I present you with the sonnets of the Divine Pescara, which I have personally collected over a long period of time … I have had the great desire to publish them, even if it goes against the wishes of so great a lady, for I consider it less of an error to displease one woman (however rare and great) than to deny so many men what they want.” “Even if it goes against the wishes of so great a lady”: the idea of displeasing one woman in order to give “so many men what they want” sounded a provocative note on grounds of both class and gender. Pirogallo was laying hold of a precious and protected commodity, and sharing it with the masses.

  Because Pirogallo did not have access to Vittoria’s own manuscripts, he also acknowledged that his edition was almost certainly full of errors:

  Maybe the mistakes that you will find in the poems, I having been unable to take them from their original [texts], will make them seem less beautiful or pleasurable. But your wise judgment will no doubt emend the errors made by the diversity of different pens that have copied them out, since I for one have not felt confident doing so, because of the prospect of not concurring with that most immortal Lady who has produced these miraculous poems.

  There had been, he declared, many different “pens,” or hands, involved in copying the poems out, which meant that by the time the poems reached him, they had accumulated no end of mistakes. Pirogallo consoled himself, however, by assuming that even in their flawed state, the poems would be “useful” to many young men, who would forever be grateful to him for bringing the book into the world. Even Vittoria, he concluded, adopting a conspicuously male metaphor for the first published female poet, “seeing the fruit that thanks to her seed will mature in the minds of the most talented youth, will in the end be satisfied with it.”

  The allure of publishi
ng Vittoria’s Rime depended upon the fact that she had already earned a reputation in Italy as an important poet. Her fame, that is, did not depend on the publication of her poems: on the contrary, the publication of the poems built upon the fact of her celebrity. We will recall that as early as 1519, Vittoria’s name appeared in the Neapolitan poet Girolamo Britonio’s La gelosia del Sole: he called her “this gentle new Phoenix in the world.” Gaining her much more attention, she was praised in the 1532 edition of the greatest epic poem of the period, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which told the tale of the Christian knight Orlando (better known in English by his French name, Roland). In the introduction to canto thirty-seven, dedicated to the story of the female warriors Bradamante and Marfisa and their victory over the tyrant Marganorre, Ariosto laments how difficult it is for women to be recognized in the manner they deserve, and offers his own defense of their excellence as writers. He singles out one woman in particular—Vittoria—whom he admires for “a sweetness I have never heard bettered.” Apollo, he declares, “gives such power to her lofty words that in our day he has adorned the heavens with another sun.”

  Ariosto’s praise of Vittoria was not entirely unmotivated. Despite his terrific talent, he had failed to find a worthy patron to support him; his long-term relations with both Cardinal Ippolito d’Este and Ippolito’s brother Alfonso I d’Este (Ercole II’s father) had never produced the income that he had hoped for. It was only in 1531 that he received a major pension, from none other than Alfonso d’Avalos, whose relation to Vittoria was certainly well known. Whatever Ariosto’s reasons for complimenting her so extravagantly, the appearance of her name in such a prominent place cannot be overstated. Then, three years after the final edition of Ariosto’s epic appeared, Bembo published his sonnet exchange with Vittoria in the new edition of his own poems. By 1535, the two most famous poets in Italy had honored Vittoria in print.