Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  The things you’ve done necessarily excite the judgment of anyone who looks at them, and after seeing them I can speak with real experience of the possibility of adding goodness to perfect things. And I have seen that omnia possibilia sunt credenti [all things are possible for one who believes]. I had the greatest faith in God that He would give you a supernatural grace to make this Christ: then I saw it to be so marvelous that it surpassed all of my expectations.

  Vittoria described here a more or less explicitly Protestant understanding of vocation: the drawing proved, as it were, Michelangelo’s status among the elect. She concluded with a more traditional account of putting the drawing to devotional use. “In this interim I don’t know how else to serve you,” she declared, “but by praying to this sweet Christ, whom you have depicted so well and so perfectly, and by praying to you, that you command me as one who is entirely yours [in tutto e per tutto].”

  Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross was not only the gift that Vittoria seems to have most treasured, but it was also the occasion for the friends’ only recorded disagreement. Vittoria knew that Michelangelo was making the drawing for her, and she was growing increasingly impatient with his slow progress (from her earlier commissions for the Mary Magdalenes, it seems clear that patience was not her strong suit). She wrote to him, therefore, as always in her own hand—all seven of her surviving letters to him were written by her personally, not by a secretary—to ask him kindly to send her the drawing right away, in whatever state it was in:

  My dearest Michelangelo, I beg you to send me the Crucifix for a little while even if it’s not finished, because I want to show it to the gentlemen who have come from the Most Reverend Cardinal of Mantua [Ercole Gonzaga]; and if you are not busy with work today, you might come to talk to me at your leisure.

  Yours to command, The Marchesa of Pescara

  There is something comical about her closing, “Yours to command” (“Al commando vostro”), given the demanding nature of the letter. There is also something charming about the casual invitation to come visit: Michelangelo presumably dropped by the convent of San Silvestro in Capite to see her on his days off from the Sistine Chapel.

  Letter from Vittoria Colonna to Michelangelo, undated but probably written around 1539–40 (Casa Buonarroti, Florence)

  Michelangelo, however, was not amused in the slightest by Vittoria’s letter, and sent back this angry response:

  Signora Marchesa. Given that I am myself in Rome, there was no need to leave the crucifix with Messer Tommaso, and to make him a messenger between Your Ladyship and me, your servant, especially since I serve you, and have the most desire possible to do more for you, than for any man whom I have ever known in the world; but the demanding work [occupazione grande] that I have taken on, and am still involved in, has not permitted me to make this known to Your Ladyship. And because I know that you know that love admits no taskmaster, and that the lover never sleeps, I did not think an intermediary was necessary. And although it may have seemed that I had forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about in order to deliver a surprise. But my purpose has been spoiled. Mal fa chi tanta fè

  It’s hard not to sympathize with Michelangelo. Busy at the time with nothing less than The Last Judgment (his “occupazione grande”), he wanted to finish the drawing for Vittoria in his own time and have the pleasure of surprising her with his gift. Her asking for the drawing was to him a sign not only of her impatience, but also of her lack of faith. The detail about leaving the crucifix with Tommaso (almost certainly Tommaso de’ Cavalieri) remains opaque. Vittoria may have left a different crucifix with Tommaso to give to Michelangelo in order to jog, as it were, his memory of the promised gift. It is also possible that she had asked Michelangelo in a letter that has not survived to give the crucifix she was waiting for to Tommaso, who would deliver it to her. It is not clear, in other words, who is leaving which crucifix with Tommaso, but it is certainly the case that Vittoria’s unnecessary involvement of Tommaso enraged Michelangelo.

  Whatever the opening remark may refer to, the conclusion Michelangelo ultimately reached—“my purpose has been spoiled” (“È stato guasto il mio disegno”)—brilliantly conveyed the depth of his dismay. The Italian is much richer and more nuanced than the English: guasto literally means something like “busted”—travelers to Italy will have seen this word on broken toilets or ticket machines—and “disegno” can mean both “drawing” and “design,” in the sense of “intention.” By asking for her present before its time, Vittoria has ruined both the gesture of giving the gift and the gift itself. Michelangelo closed the letter by citing the first half of an unusually bitter line from Petrarch’s Canzoniere: “Mal fa chi tanta fè sì tosto oblia” (“He does ill who forgets such faith so quickly”). She had, in short, disappointed him.

  There is no way to know how Vittoria answered this letter, as no response has survived. But given her general sensitivity, it is likely that she took in all too well the pain she had caused her friend. It is universally understood that to demand a gift meant as a surprise ruins its pleasure; this is not specific to any particular culture or period. But in the case of Michelangelo’s drawing, Vittoria had also committed an additional offense particular to the reformed theology that both of them to some degree espoused. For Luther and his followers, the idea of the gift was directly linked to Christ’s sacrifice. Since there was no way to earn or repay this gift, the true believer needed to receive Christ’s love simply with gratitude and faith. Vittoria’s tone of entitlement in her letter to Michelangelo—her behaving as if the gift were already hers, as if she had an inherent right to demand it—violated the Protestant principle of our fundamental lack of merit. Michelangelo wanted his gift of the drawing, like the gift of Christ’s sacrifice itself, to be a pure act of generosity, and not a means of satisfying a request from his friend. Guasto indeed.

  The letter that Michelangelo sent to Vittoria has survived only in a drafted version. Paper in the Renaissance was a much more expensive commodity than it is now, and Michelangelo regularly used the same sheet for multiple purposes, so that drafts of letters and poems are mixed together, along with sketches or studies for drawings—his pages were almost always full. In the left corner of the sheet that contains the draft of his letter to Vittoria, which was written horizontally across the top from left to right, there is a draft of a poem, written vertically from the bottom of the page. This poem, a madrigal, was also addressed to Vittoria:

  Now on my right foot, and then on my left,

  I walk with unease, seeking salvation.

  Torn between vice and virtue

  my confused heart wearies and exhausts me;

  like one who does not see the heavens,

  and loses his way on every path.

  I give to you a blank page

  to fill with your sacred ink, so that

  love will mislead me no longer, and truth prevail:

  may my soul be liberated from itself

  and fall not into further errors

  in the short time that remains, may I live less blind.

  I ask you, my lady, high and divine,

  if the humble sinner has a lower place

  in heaven than he who has done only good.*

  We might imagine Michelangelo picking up the piece of paper with the letter to Vittoria and turning it ninety degrees to the left to write out the madrigal. Perhaps he even reserved particular pieces of paper for particular people, so that this was a Vittoria page. The two texts that he wrote to his friend were so different in mood and tone, however, that they must have been written on separate occasions. The letter was petulant and self-righteous, the poem humble and self-doubting. The letter conveyed Michelangelo’s sense of superiority, the poem his total abjection. The letter highly valued the gift he wanted to give her; the poem asked Vittoria to fill his “blank page” with her sacred ink.

  Of all Michelangelo’s letters to Vittoria—and there is no way of estimating how many there may have been—o
nly two, both undated, have survived. The other letter was also on the subject of gifts, although in this case the gift was from Vittoria to Michelangelo. He begins by expressing his initial reluctance to accept what she has given him: “Before taking possession, Signora, of the things which Your Ladyship has several times wished to give to me, I wanted, in order to receive them as little unworthily as possible, to execute something for you by my own hand.” There is no mention of what exactly the “things” (“le cose”) she wanted so often to give him were, but the most likely guess would be her poems. This makes sense as well of his impulse to reciprocate with something made “with my own hand” (“di mia mano”), since the poems were made with hers.

  Letter from Michelangelo to Vittoria Colonna, with draft of poem (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City)

  It is possible that this letter preceded Michelangelo’s giving Vittoria one of his drawings, although it is more likely that he did not in the end respond with a gift of his own, for later in the letter, he made clear that he had changed his mind. Before receiving her gift, he explained, he had thought about sending her something of his own in return. But he ultimately came to a different conclusion, one much more in keeping with the Protestant ideas about gifts and reciprocity that were raised in the letter about his Christ on the Cross. Michelangelo realized, that is, that his idea of being unworthy of her gift was an error—a theological error, he might have added—that he needed to correct. This was not because he was worthy: on the contrary. From a Protestant perspective, worth played absolutely no role in receiving God’s grace. At this point the letter reads, in fact, like a Protestant catechistical lesson: “Then I came to realize that the grace of God cannot be bought, and that to keep you waiting is a grievous sin. I confess my fault and willingly accept the things in question.”

  Having spelled out like a good schoolboy what he had come to understand, Michelangelo then shifted gears entirely and closed the letter with a beautiful expression of love for his friend: “And when [the poems] are in my possession, I shall think myself in paradise, not because they are in my house, but because I am in theirs.” Coming from just about anyone, this would have been a magnificent compliment. But for the painter of the Sistine ceiling to tell Vittoria that her gift made his home feel like paradise must have given her a special sense of satisfaction.

  Michelangelo’s letter responding to Vittoria’s gift has also survived only in draft, and the sheet of paper on which he wrote it once again also contains a poem addressed to her. In this case, however, the letter and poem seem to have been written at the same time, or at least in the same spirit: they are both concerned with the challenge of accepting Vittoria’s gift. The poem, a sonnet, begins by recapitulating the problem Michelangelo faced:

  In order to be less unworthy, high lady,

  of the gift of your immense kindness,

  at first I thought my lowly talent

  might return your gift, fueled by my full heart.

  He then reaches more or less the same conclusion that he came to in the letter: that the gift of grace can never be reciprocated. This time, however, he imagines Vittoria herself as the divine figure:

  But once I saw that my own merit

  could never reach so high a point,

  my bold error now begs your pardon,

  and I grow ever wiser from my mistake.

  I see now how he errs, who thinks the heavenly grace

  that pours out from you, divine one,

  might be equaled by my works, so fleeting and frail.

  Genius, art, and memory all give way:

  for your celestial gift cannot be repaid

  with even a thousand earthly gestures.*

  The poem is in effect simultaneously Protestant and idolatrous, for it is Vittoria’s grace that cannot be equaled or repaid. His “high lady” becomes the equivalent of Christ pouring out her grace upon him. “Voi divina,” he calls Vittoria, “divine you.”

  There is no record of how Vittoria responded to the beautiful compliments that Michelangelo showered upon her from the very beginning of their friendship. His central perception of her as “divine”—this is the single term that resonates throughout his poems—came to him in one of the very first poems he wrote to her, a madrigal written sometime between 1536 and 1538:

  If, lady, it is true that you,

  divine in your beauty, can live

  as if a mere mortal,

  and eat and sleep and talk here among us,

  what punishment would match

  the immense sin of not following you,

  your grace and goodness having canceled all doubts?

  A man wrapped up in his own thoughts,

  whose eye does not see before him,

  by his nature is slow to fall in love.

  Draw inside me from without,

  as I do with stone or on a white sheet

  that has nothing within it, and becomes what I want.*

  Here, too, Vittoria replaces for him the figure of Christ: it is her “grace and goodness” that has “canceled all doubts”; it is she who holds the key to his salvation. She also becomes the artist, working upon his blank slate.

  “A man in a woman,” Michelangelo declares in another poem,

  or rather a god

  speaks through her mouth,

  so that listening to her

  I am so transformed, that I will never be mine own again.

  I well believe that since I was taken

  by her away from myself,

  now being outside myself, I can show myself pity.

  So high above vain desire

  her beautiful face moves me,

  that I see only death in all other beauty.

  O lady who takes souls

  through water and fire to joyous days,

  please do unto me so that I never return to myself.*

  He was equally dazzled, it seems, by her beauty and her spiritual power. Thanks to her, he imagines himself reborn.

  Given how much Michelangelo esteemed Vittoria both spiritually and physically—as he puts it in the poem above, he sees “death in all other beauty”—it is surprising that he never painted her portrait. He writes about preserving her beauty for posterity, however, in one of his sonnets:

  How is it, lady, as one can see

  from long experience, that images

  made in rugged stone outlive their maker,

  whom the years reduce to mere ashes?

  The cause tilts and yields to the effect,

  whereby nature is conquered by art.

  This I know, as I see in beautiful sculpture

  upon which time and death lose all power.

  Thus I can give to us both long life,

  in whatever form, either paint or stone,

  by picturing us, your face and mine;

  so that a thousand years after our deaths

  it will be known how beautiful you were,

  and how in loving you I, poor wretch, was no fool.†

  The modesty he usually expressed in relation to his talent is strikingly absent from this poem—indeed, he embraces the ancient idea that his art would be immortal, or at least endure for a very long time. The great Roman poet Horace famously boasted that his poetry would last as long as the “priest climbs the Capitol with the silent virgin,” a ritual associated with the Roman Empire whose end he could not imagine. In a similar spirit, Michelangelo mentions the period of a thousand years. What Michelangelo dreams of in this poem is in fact a portrait of himself and Vittoria together, giving “us both long life / in whatever form, either paint or stone.” He wanted, that is, to commemorate them as a couple. This dream may never have been fulfilled. But some believe it is Vittoria lurking behind the figure of Saint Lawrence in The Last Judgment, gazing over toward Michelangelo’s self-portrait figured on the skin that Saint Bartholomew holds in his hand (see color plate 16).

  Although Vittoria was by far the more prolific poet of the two, she did not write poems for Mic
helangelo. By the time they became close, she was already fully immersed in the project of her spiritual sonnets. She did, however, compose a sonnet responding to Michelangelo’s madrigal, “Now on my right foot, and then on my left,” which begins with an address to Christ, whom she calls her dolce conforto (“sweet comfort”):

  I cannot say to you, my sweet comfort,

  that the place or time or hour is not right

  to reveal with works so great a passion,

  which is the desire I carry within.

  But if this or that little diversion

  distracts my senses from honoring you

  always, I have through your grace a firm heart,

  and never direct my sail toward other ports.

  In the tercets, she turns away from her holy address and ponders, in the spirit of Michelangelo’s poem, the path to salvation:

  I realize now that in this world twigs and thorns

  cannot twist the right foot of the wise man,

  from the straight path he foresees the end,

  but our great love for ourselves, and our poor faith

  in things invisible, high and divine,

  slow us down on the path toward salvation.*

  The reference to the “right foot” (“il destro piede”) invokes Michelangelo’s opening image of moving hesitantly from one step to the next—his slow pace reflects his uncertainty about the right path to take—but Vittoria otherwise maintains her distance from his poem, and speaks in generalizations. The wise man will choose the right foot, she declares, but she does not reassure her friend that he is among the wise. There is no comfort given.

  Vittoria may not have written Michelangelo poems that were either admiring, in the manner of his poems to her, or encouraging in the way he might have hoped. But she did give him what was probably her most precious gift: a manuscript of her spiritual sonnets. This manuscript, now owned by the Vatican Library, is most likely what Michelangelo wrote to her about when he described his feelings of unworthiness—“Before taking possession, Signora, of the things [le cose] which Your Ladyship has several times wished to give to me”—and “the things” a reference to the 103 sonnets included in the book’s pages.