Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  At the same time, however, Michelangelo was not courtly at the expense of honesty, and he shared his opinions with her frankly, even when they ran counter to her own. Hence in response to her first question about painting—“I want very much to know what the painting of Flanders is, and whom it pleases, for it seems to me more devout than the Italian manner”—Michelangelo scoffed, declaring that Flemish art may look good at first glance, “but it is in truth executed without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion.” “Only works that are done in Italy,” he remarked, “can we call in effect true painting.” Who knows if Vittoria meant what she said or was merely trying to provoke her friend into a more lively conversation: there is no indication elsewhere that she particularly admired Flemish devotional art, and her own collection seems to have been entirely Italian.

  Vittoria pursued her line of questioning about Italian art in their second meeting—when Hollanda once again managed to miss the lesson on Saint Paul’s Epistles, arriving only after Catarino had already left the church. On this occasion, Vittoria lavished praise on Michelangelo’s art, while also perhaps teasing him for how long he took with some of his commissions. In his ceiling fresco for the Sistine Chapel, she declared, he had portrayed God’s creation in “a divine manner”: “And what is extraordinary is that, while he has done nothing more than this work, which he still has not completed, having begun it when he was a young man, the work of twenty painters together is contained there on that single ceiling.” It is not clear exactly what Vittoria meant: Michelangelo had finished the Sistine ceiling more than twenty years earlier, but he was working at the time on The Last Judgment, and perhaps she had this in mind. She may also have been alluding to his multi-decade, endlessly thwarted project of building Pope Julius II’s tomb. This was first commissioned in 1505 by Julius himself, and Michelangelo began work on a very grand, three-story monument with more than forty figures, to be sited within Saint Peter’s. The tomb was completed in a drastically reduced form thirty years later, and placed in the minor basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, where it stands today. The central figure of Moses, which dates from 1515, gives some sense of the majesty of the original design.

  When the conversations took place in San Silvestro al Quirinale, Vittoria and Michelangelo were very comfortable in their friendship, and spoke to each other without reserve. No one knows for sure when they first met, but it was most likely around 1534, after Michelangelo left Florence to live permanently in Rome, and Vittoria had returned to the city from Ischia. Some historians speculate that they were introduced through Pope Paul, who had named Michelangelo the “supreme architect, sculptor, and painter of the Apostolic Palace” in 1535. Others think it was Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, whom Vittoria also knew, who brought them together. However they came to meet, Vittoria already knew about Michelangelo as a celebrated artist. The two of them also had a prior history, albeit indirect, which formed an interesting contrast with the intimate friendship they later enjoyed.

  In 1531, when Vittoria was still in Ischia, she desired to obtain several paintings of Mary Magdalene. As a fallen woman, the biblical Magdalene may seem an odd choice for the chaste Vittoria, but there was a well-known apocryphal tradition in which she was presented as an exemplary widow who lived a life of prayer and penitence (Vittoria, we will recall, was living just such a life at the castle). She may also simply have regarded the Magdalene as an inspiring example of unswerving faith, as she described in a long poem on the triumph of the cross, which was first printed in the 1540 edition of the Rime:

  At the holy feet of God I saw the woman

  whom the same name [of Mary] also honors,

  burning with love, shining splendidly, with golden hair.

  She was moved by true piety to weep here,

  so that in place of the seeds of sorrow

  God wills her to reap those of glory.*

  Vittoria’s first move to acquire her paintings was to appeal to Isabella d’Este’s son Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who was a great patron of the arts. No record of Vittoria’s initial request survived, but in a letter Federico subsequently sent to her he confirmed her wish for a Mary Magdalene as “beautiful and tearful as possible,” and informed her that the painting would be done by Titian. He also reassured her that it would not take a long time: he had asked Titian to finish it quickly.

  Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, first Duke of Mantua and son of Isabella d’Este, by Titian (Prado, Madrid)

  There is no definitive record of which of the many Mary Magdalenes Titian painted in his career was Vittoria’s painting: he (and his workshop) painted the Magdalene more than forty times. But the most likely candidate is the The Penitent Magdalene in Florence’s Palazzo Pitti (see color plate 15). This painting, dated to 1531, certainly fits the requirement that Vittoria gave to the artist for the Magdalene to be as “beautiful and tearful as possible.” It is in fact the most erotic version that Titian painted, despite the claims of the sixteenth-century painter and historian of art Giorgio Vasari, who insisted that “although she is very beautiful, [the picture] moves not to lust but to compassion.” Unlike Titian’s other Magdalenes, in which she is at least partially dressed, the Pitti Magdalene is naked, her breasts scantily covered by her luxurious golden hair. The Magdalene’s nudity was part of the legend that had surrounded her since the Middle Ages. In her long years of repentance in the desert following Christ’s ascension, her clothes apparently fell apart.

  It is hard to imagine how Vittoria would have responded to the sensuality of Titian’s painting. We know only that she thanked Federico warmly: “For the Magdalene,” she wrote, “I thank you infinite times.” Along with her letter she sent him a lovely, if somewhat odd, gift of several small pillows filled with rose petals, for which he in turn thanked her rather extravagantly in a subsequent letter (the pillow would not have represented Titian’s payment for the work, but simply a gesture of gratitude for her friend). Federico also reported having shared her praise of the painting with Titian himself. It is worth noting that Vittoria’s letter was dated May 25, 1531, only two and a half months after Federico had written to her promising that the painting would be done as quickly as possible. Given that it would have taken at least ten days to transport the canvas from the northern city of Mantua to the southern island of Ischia, Titian must have taken Federico’s instructions to rush very seriously.

  The second painting of Mary Magdalene that Vittoria commissioned was from none other than Michelangelo. Once again, the commission did not come directly from her. In a letter sent to Federico from his agent in Florence on May 19, 1531—only six days before Vittoria wrote her letter thanking Federico for the Titian—he related that Michelangelo had received a request from Alfonso d’Avalos for a painting of the Magdalene, to be done for the Marchesa of Pescara. Michelangelo was clearly put off by the request—the name Vittoria Colonna meant nothing to him at the time—and said he would not accept the job unless instructed to do so by Pope Clement himself. Clement had in fact given him strict orders to accept no new projects beyond his papal commissions, but in this case, the pope must have made an exception to satisfy his friend Vittoria. In the summer of 1531, Michelangelo began work on Vittoria’s Magdalene.

  Unlike Titian, who depicted Mary Magdalene alone in a state of penitential rapture, Michelangelo opted for a more chaste and biblically resonant moment in the Magdalene’s life. Without even knowing Vittoria, he seems intuitively to have known her tastes, or, more likely, his tastes were similar to her own. The specific encounter he chose to represent was between the Magdalene and Christ immediately following the Resurrection, a scene that is known as the “Noli me tangere” after Christ’s famous utterance as related in the Gospel of John. Jesus said to Mary Magdalene: “Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father and to my God, and your God.” Then Mary Magdalene, John continued, “came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and
that he had spoken these things unto her.”

  Michelangelo began with a drawing intended as a preliminary study for the painting, which, according to instructions he had received from one of Clement’s advisers, was to be done on either canvas or wood, and should not be too large. He was told the painting was meant “to be in chambers, rather than a hall or church.” Vittoria’s intentions for this work of art were fundamentally private: she was not planning to hang her painting in one of the public spaces of the Ischia castle, but wanted it for her own devotional purposes. This use of her art resonates as well with something that Hollanda recorded her as having said to Michelangelo. “What virtuous and quiet man is there,” she asked the artist, “who (even if he looks down upon it out of piety) does not greatly revere and worship devout and spiritual contemplations of sacred painting? I believe that time is more likely to run out than material or praises for this virtue. In those who are melancholy it inspires happiness; in those who are content and those who are troubled, [it inspires] recognition of human suffering.” However beautiful the works of art she possessed may have been, their beauty ultimately served a devotional end. For Vittoria, art was a spiritual tool.

  Vittoria did not end up, at least at this point in her life, with a work by Michelangelo to add to her collection. According to letters from the time, he finished the drawing of the “Noli me tangere” in a great hurry and was not happy with the result. Given how little time he had been given to deliver the painting—like Titian, he had been told to finish quickly—he decided to pass the job on to his fellow artist Jacopo Pontormo, who executed the painting based on Michelangelo’s drawing. This was not the only time that Michelangelo relied on Pontormo in this way. The following year, in 1532, he gave Pontormo a drawing of Venus and Cupid for a commission from the wealthy Florentine Bartolomeo Bettini, who wanted to decorate a room in his sumptuous palazzo with images celebrating the “poets who have sung of love in Tuscan prose and verse.” Michelangelo’s original cartoon is lost, but Pontormo’s painting, a version of which can be seen today at the Accademia in Florence, was one of the most widely copied images in the period: there are records of thirty-six copies, of which nineteen have survived, including one by Vasari.

  Michelangelo’s drawing for the Mary Magdalene is also lost, but the Pontormo panel made for Vittoria was discovered in a private collection in Italy in 1956 (see color plate 17). Assuming, as scholars have reason to believe, that Pontormo’s painting closely adhered to Michelangelo’s sketch, what is perhaps most striking is the posture Michelangelo chose for his female subject. In most depictions of the “Noli me tangere,” the Magdalene sits passively on her knees before Christ. In Michelangelo’s version, she is on her feet with her arms outstretched, while Christ in turn retracts in a quiet gesture of arrest. Michelangelo captured the exact moment that mattered most of all: the moment when Christ uttered his famous words and instructed the Magdalene to leave his side, so that she might share the news of his resurrection with others.

  Even if Michelangelo did not execute Vittoria’s painting himself, it seems altogether fitting that the first interaction between the two friends involved an image of Christ with a faithful female servant. For what perhaps drew Michelangelo and Vittoria to each other above all was their shared conviction that faith was not something that could be taught by the church: it needed to be experienced personally. Both of them also believed that one of the best ways to enhance such an experience was through works of art. Michelangelo and Vittoria were at heart religious artists, and the art that they exchanged was profoundly influenced by the ideas that shaped the Reformation.

  The idea that Michelangelo, the great artist of the popes, had Protestant leanings may come as a shock: How could it be that the painter of the Sistine Chapel was sympathetic to Lutheranism? But there is no question that he was very interested in the Italian reformers, and that he owed his interest in no small degree to his relationship with Vittoria. In the many letters, poems, and drawings that the two friends exchanged over the years, the emphasis always fell, in a manner that Ochino and Valdés would very much have approved, on the personal experience of the divine. Although Michelangelo was for many of these years working on the most crowded and frenetic of biblical scenes—his fresco of the Last Judgment—in the drawings he made for Vittoria, he opted for scenes of exquisite intimacy.

  Vittoria received from Michelangelo at least three presentation drawings (finished works rather than preparatory drawings for works in another medium), two of which directly addressed her own interests in female figures and their relationship to Christ. The first of these was of Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, based on an episode in the Gospel of John in which Christ revealed himself as the Messiah. The drawing is lost, but Vittoria referred to it in a letter she sent Michelangelo in 1542 or 1543 when she was living in Viterbo. “I hope,” she wrote, that “upon my return to Rome, I will find you and your true faith with his [the Lord’s] image so renewed and alive in your soul, as you have depicted it so well in my Samaritan woman.” For Vittoria, Michelangelo’s drawing brought to life what the text of Scripture could only suggest: what it felt like to be the Samaritan woman, and to have “true faith in your soul.” She also implied that Michelangelo’s own faith might have been revived through making the drawing itself.

  The second drawing that Michelangelo gave to Vittoria figuring Christ with a woman was his splendid Pietà. Ascanio Condivi, a minor painter who worked in Michelangelo’s workshop beginning around 1545 and wrote the artist’s first biography—some believe Michelangelo more or less dictated the text to him—described Vittoria’s having asked for this drawing herself: “At this lady’s request, he made a nude figure of Christ when He is taken from the cross, which would fall as an abandoned corpse at the feet of His most holy mother, if it were not supported under the arms by two little angels.” Vittoria was focused on the Virgin Mary in her own writing at the time; in addition to composing a number of sonnets to the Virgin, she also wrote a prose meditation on the Pietà. This work, which was posthumously published with the title Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo (The Weeping of the Marchesa of Pescara on the Passion of Christ), took the form of a letter addressed to Ochino, whose preaching on the topic had been deeply inspiring to Vittoria.

  Michelangelo’s Pietà, one of the drawings given to Vittoria Colonna as a gift (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)

  Vittoria’s meditation opened with a vision: “The day of Venus [this is the literal translation of venerdì, or Friday] and the late hour move me to write of the moving scene of seeing Christ, dead, in the arms of his mother … I see the sweet mother whose breast is full of the most ardent compassion, tied so deeply to the love of her son.” “The Virgin,” she declared several lines later, “has made of her nearly dead body a sepulcher in that hour.” To describe Mary as she took Christ in her arms as herself “nearly dead” (“suo corpo quasi morto”) and then to imagine her nearly dead body as the tomb for her dead son was a remarkable way to understand the Pietà, and it resonated in interesting ways with Michelangelo’s drawing. For Michelangelo has the Virgin seated with Christ’s body suspended between her legs, his arms draped over her knees (each arm is held by a small angel, but they seem to bear very little of the burden). As Mary supports Christ’s weight with whatever strength she has left, she looks up to the heavens for consolation.

  Of the three drawings that Vittoria received from Michelangelo, the one for which we have the fullest record of her impressions is the magnificent Christ on the Cross. Unlike the Pietà, in this drawing Christ looks surprisingly undefeated. Despite his tortured position on the cross, his eyes are wide open, and his body, which has not yet been pierced, seems remarkably strong. He is flanked, moreover, not by the traditional two thieves, but instead by two lamenting angels, whose presence pulls us toward his heavenly future at the very moment of his agony. He is, in effect, already victorious.

  Vittoria was deeply moved by the drawing
, and shared her feelings with Michelangelo in two different letters. Both are undated, so there is no way to know which came first. In one letter, she explained how the drawing had replaced for her all other images of the Crucifixion. Or rather, she wrote, it performed within her a crucifixion of its own:

  I have seen the crucifix, which certainly has crucified in my memory whatever other pictures I have ever seen, nor could one imagine a design better made, more alive or more beautifully executed. Certainly I could not ever explain how subtly and wonderfully it is made … I have looked at it well in the light, and with a magnifying glass and a mirror, and I never saw anything more perfectly done.

  This description of studying the drawing with a magnifying glass was one way for Vittoria to acknowledge the very fine work Michelangelo had done. Through techniques known as stippling and hatching, he created what looks like a three-dimensional image, so that Christ’s body seems to be immediately before us, with the cross and then the angels receding into the background. Vittoria’s looking at the drawing in a mirror is a less obvious thing to do, but perhaps showed her appreciation of Michelangelo’s work on a more devotional, and less technical, register. To hold the drawing up to the mirror was to free it from its status as an artifact, and render it pure spirit.

  Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross (British Museum, London)

  In the second letter to Michelangelo on the subject of the Christ on the Cross, Vittoria focused precisely on its role in stirring her faith: