Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  This outward showing of hospitality belied, however, the governor’s secret distrust of his celebrated guest. Indeed, although the convent may in some sense have been the safe haven that Vittoria sought—there is no reason to suspect the nuns—Orvieto was enemy territory. Whether she was fully aware of what was going on is difficult to say: she was certainly already being careful in her letters to Ascanio, and no doubt kept up her guard in all of her correspondence. But the idea that someone was keeping track of whom she talked to, and watching her when she received a package, represented entirely new levels of surveillance. “I have not failed,” de’ Rossi wrote to Cardinal Farnese, “nor will I fail, to visit the Signora Marchesa di Pescara continually, with the greatest assiduity possible.”

  De’ Rossi’s first letter, sent on April 1, described the religious and quiet life Vittoria was living, and had no news to report. In his letter of April 9, however, he presented a few bits of what he regarded as more valuable information, which he boasted to have obtained directly from the local bishop: “I have cautiously found out and heard from the Bishop of Orvieto that, about a week ago, a retainer, secretary or servant of the most reverend Cardinal Fregoso, came here and spoke with the said Marchesa, and stopped and lodged one evening with her servants, and only brought one other horse with him; and the Bishop tells me that he came solely to inform her Excellence about the war.” The idea that someone was bringing Vittoria news, and that he had “only brought one other horse with him,” hardly seems worthy of attention. But the governor was clearly committed to reporting absolutely anything related to this important noblewoman, and the fact that Federico Fregoso, an old friend of Bembo’s who was one of the central figures in the conversations recorded in Castiglione’s Courtier, was visiting her was the best that he could muster up at the time.

  De’ Rossi began to make more progress, however, if not with Vittoria, then with the bishop, who shared more concrete news with him at their next meeting. He proudly related to Cardinal Farnese: “I write to inform you that, when I was in conversation with the Bishop of Orvieto a few days ago, I wormed out of him that the aforesaid Signora Marchesa, who seems to repose great confidence in his most reverend Lordship, has shown him two letters: one was from his Caesarian Majesty the Emperor [Charles V], and the other from the Marquis of Vasto.” Neither of the two letters the bishop had managed to intercept revealed much of anything: they both encouraged her to maintain her goodwill (“buona voglia”). But the sheer fact that Vittoria was receiving personal letters from the Holy Roman Emperor was certainly worthy of notice.

  The attempts on the part of Charles and Alfonso to keep up Vittoria’s spirits were ultimately in vain, as the war was going very badly for Ascanio. Within weeks of the fighting having begun, one Colonna castle after another was taken by the papal army. By early April, Rocca di Papa had fallen, leaving only the remote fortress of Paliano, some eighteen miles east of Rocca, in Ascanio’s hands. The papal soldiers, meanwhile, had been ruthless in their treatment of both soldiers and civilians. In dispatches sent to Pope Paul from the field, his commissioner Giovanni Guidiccioni reported the terror of the local townspeople. “Fearing our soldiers and not having the protection they need to return to their homes,” he wrote, they “are simply taking to the road in desperation.” Giovanna, who kept abreast of the events even while in Ischia, sent a desperate letter to the pope:

  I appeal to [Your Holiness] begging you … to desist from such an invasion and [such] ruin for the people and poor vassals, for who, Most Holy and Beatified Father, will be pious, who will be merciful if piety and mercy cannot be found in the heir and legitimate possessor of the sacrosanct and divine keys of the early pastor Saint Peter, ever just and good?… May it please you to allow that no more blood is shed by the sheep, for whom Your Holiness is the real shepherd.

  Vittoria, for her part, did something she had never done before: she put her poetry to use as a political tool. In what was likely to have been an act of desperation, she wrote two sonnets to Paul in which she begged him to show mercy and end the violence being wrought upon her people. One of the two sonnets begins with a vision of bloodshed in the Colonna lands, and then implores Paul to remember the common bonds that tie them together:

  I see only armed soldiers light up

  my vast, great fields, and I hear all song

  turned to weeping, all laughter to tears,

  there, where I first touched my homeland …

  Under a single sky, within one womb,

  Born and nurtured together in the sweet shade

  of a single city were our people.*

  The second sonnet was subtler in its message, and adopted a tone of prayer. Vittoria asked God to fill Paul’s heart with “so great a flame of divine fire” that his anger would abate:

  Then will you see the sheep leave their flocks

  to seek your lap, to be warmed by the torch

  that the great fire of Heaven lights on earth.

  Then will your sacred and glorious nets

  already be full; with the scepter of peace,

  not the arms of war, will the world be yours.†

  However moving Giovanna’s letter or Vittoria’s sonnets may have been, they had little effect on Paul, whose army continued its advance upon Paliano. Located at the top of a high hill between two sets of mountains, and well off the main road that leads from Palestrina to Genazzano, this was the most isolated of the Colonna properties in the region, and Ascanio had retreated to the upper town with what remained of his troops. (Even today, visitors need to leave their cars behind after climbing a good distance on a windy road, and then ascend several very steep ramps and vertical flights of stairs by foot.) Both the soldiers and the townspeople in Paliano were suffering from a nearly complete lack of provisions, and according to one of Guidiccioni’s reports to Pope Paul, Ascanio was a desperate man. Although nearly emptied out of supplies, however, he forbade his soldiers to surrender. “He did not willingly allow them to leave the fortress,” Guidiccioni wrote, “which is also a sign that he does not have too many people, and he said that in order to get bread, wine and oil, they were bargaining with everything they had—especially shoes, which cost a half a scudo the pair.” Having no money to pay the troops, Ascanio’s officers began to distribute his personal property—valuable silks and silver vessels—to appease the soldiers’ increasing discontent. But the men were discouraged by something greater than their lack of pay: there were fewer than nine hundred of them, and they were facing some eight thousand papal troops. After a long battle that lasted more than a month, the Colonna army finally surrendered on May 9. The pope had decisively won the war.

  In the aftermath of the Colonna surrender, Paul began his final round of destruction. Despite fervent pleas from Charles to spare a few of the Colonna’s feudal lands, he razed the fortifications of Marino, Rocca di Papa, and Paliano to the ground. Ascanio was declared an enemy of the Papal States, and went into exile in the kingdom of Naples, living in holdings he had inherited from his father at Albe and Tagliacozzo, roughly forty miles to the east of Marino. Charles continued to plead on Ascanio’s behalf, asking the pope at least to allow Ascanio’s son Marcantonio to have possession of some of the Colonna fiefs, but Paul was not to be dissuaded. Ascanio remained in exile until Paul’s death in 1549; the new pope, Julius III (born Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte), offered him pardon and returned his lands. As a gesture of thanks, Ascanio gave Julius an enormous porphyry basin, dug up from the ruins near the Colosseum, which is now in the rotunda of the Pio Clementino Museum in the Vatican. The reconciliation lasted only a few years: in 1556, Julius excommunicated Ascanio again and confiscated all of his goods. But that is another story.

  And Vittoria? How did she react to her brother’s exile and the loss of so many of the family’s properties? In a letter sent to Cardinal Farnese on May 14, de’ Rossi described a recent conversation he had with her: “Great satisfaction is universally felt at the taking of Paliano, which I immediately made
known and published everywhere … Nor did I fail to report the news to the Signora Marchesa, who replied: ‘Possessions come and go, so long as people are safe.’” Of all the splendid things Vittoria said in her poems or letters, this comment is among her finest. What a perfect retort to the gloating governor, who was so pleased with the bad news he had to share; what an elegant and sharp and humanly decent response to the loss of Paliano and the destruction of so much of her family’s lands.

  The only other comment of Vittoria’s that has survived comes in a letter she sent to Ercole II d’Este two weeks after de’ Rossi’s letter to Farnese. “Your Excellence should know,” she began, “that I am most consoled in my distress, and I thank God that with the loss of worldly goods, fortune has given me the occasion to acquire goods of the mind.” Vittoria hardly needed a reminder of this lesson: When was it not the case that spiritual goods were more important to her than earthly possessions? But she had allowed herself to get involved in this conflict in a way she never had before, and the emotional cost was high. Despite her reassurances to Ercole, Vittoria seems to have struggled to reconcile herself to what had befallen her family, and she made an unusually quick series of moves in search of a new home. First she took leave of Orvieto, which had given her little more than chickens and marzipan, and found her way back to Rome. But Rome did not suit her, it seems, at this time; perhaps she needed to be farther away from everything that had just transpired. Within a few months of her arrival, she set out again in pursuit of a more strictly spiritual community, drawn by the presence of a particular holy man.

  12

  LATE LOVE

  IN AUGUST 1541, Reginald Pole was preparing to take up his new post as legate of the patrimony of Peter, the area of the Papal States centered in Viterbo. The position of legate was equivalent to that of governor for the provincial cities ruled by Rome, and the cardinals who assumed these roles were in charge of the ecclesiastical administration in each region. Vittoria had come to know Pole in Rome sometime between 1536 and 1538, and found him one of the most compelling people she had ever met. Pole was by birth an English aristocrat of the highest rank. His mother, Margaret Pole (née Plantagenet), Countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of the kings Edward IV and Richard III. Clarence was one of the principal players during the final throes of the War of the Roses, the civil war that divided England in the second half of the fifteenth century. After betraying his brother Edward’s interests on several occasions, Clarence was ultimately brought before Parliament on charges of treason and executed in the Tower of London in 1478. (Shakespeare’s version of the story in Richard III is largely a distortion of the facts.) Pole’s father, Sir Richard, was an important nobleman from North Wales, and served as the personal chamberlain to Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII. Arthur was briefly married to Catherine of Aragon before dying at the age of seventeen, leaving his bride, with famously disastrous consequences, to his brother.

  Reginald Pole began his own career promisingly enough. He was a favorite of Henry VIII, who granted him a handsome position in the English church—the deanery of Wimborne Minster in Dorset—when he was only eighteen years old. Three years later, in 1521, Pole persuaded Henry’s lord chancellor, the (at the time) all-powerful Sir Thomas Wolsey, to send him to Padua to study. In Padua, Pole was introduced to the rich world of Italian humanism by none other than Bembo, who took the young Englishman under his wing. Pole returned to England in 1527, but was soon sent off to Paris to help secure support for Henry’s divorce from Catherine. At this point, relations began to sour between Pole and Henry, due to Pole’s negative opinion of the divorce. Before long, he ran into opposition from none other than Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief henchman, who gave him the sinister advice that he should read Machiavelli’s Prince more carefully.

  By 1532, Pole found himself in more trouble due to rumors that a marriage was being arranged for him with Catherine’s daughter, Princess Mary, the future Mary I. The idea of such a union, with English royalty on both sides, was threatening to Henry, who was finalizing plans to wed Anne Boleyn and had high hopes of producing a male heir. Whether or not the rumors of the match between Mary and Pole were true, Pole realized he had become a target of Henry’s suspicion, and decided to flee England. After some months in France, he returned to Padua, where he once again received a very warm reception. Between the time of his arrival in Padua and his being called to Rome in 1536, he wrote what would become his most famous book, De unitate, or A Defense of the Unity of the Church, which circulated for several years in manuscript before its publication in 1539. As its title suggests, this was a treatise in favor of holding the church together with the pope at its helm, and hence argued against Henry’s claim for royal supremacy. It concluded with a strong warning to the English king to repent.

  At the same time that De unitate defended the pope’s authority, its doctrinal position was unequivocally in favor of Protestant-minded reform. For Pole used the occasion both to lay out the arguments for justification by faith, and to stress the importance of personal experience over the sacraments or priestly instruction as the basis for religious belief. This combination of loyalty to the institution of the Catholic Church and a commitment to core tenets of Protestantism would come to haunt Pole later in his career—Catholics accused him of being a Lutheran; Lutherans accused him of being a Catholic. But in the 1530s, it was still possible to bring these two strands together. Indeed, Pope Paul rewarded Pole for De unitate by making him a cardinal in 1536, along with Bembo and Contarini. In retrospect, this was the moment of Paul’s greatest interest in reform. Henry, meanwhile, was ever more incensed by Pole’s behavior, and with good reason: in addition to attacking Henry’s claims for independence from Rome, Pole was also responsible for spreading rumors that Henry had burned the bones of Thomas Becket, the supreme Catholic martyr of the English church. Henry ultimately blamed Pole for his excommunication from the Roman church in December 1538, and tried multiple times to arrange for Pole’s assassination. Pole, in turn, called the rulers of England “offensive to the whole human race.”

  It is likely that Vittoria met Pole around the time of his appointment to the curia—Pope Paul supposedly consulted with her about his choice of new cardinals, so she would certainly have heard about the unusual Englishman at this time. Whenever it was that she came to know him personally, he seems to have made a strong impression upon her as a deeply spiritual being. In a letter to Marguerite de Navarre written in February 1540, she described the lofty conversations she and Pole had together, and declared that he was “always in the heavens, and only for the needs of others does he look to and bother with the earth.” This account of Pole does not entirely square with a life spent maneuvering between factions in England and Italy, and surviving plot after plot against him (in this regard, he had read his Machiavelli very well). But Vittoria was obviously uninterested in these aspects of her new friend. What she saw was his manner, which was innocent and unassuming—he was a man of slender build, with a cheerful face and an immensely bushy beard (see color plate 18)—and his habits, which were especially abstemious for a cardinal of the Roman church. He did not eat large meals, he slept very little, and he had no interest in accumulating wealth. In his modest self-presentation, along with his aristocratic pedigree and his subtle intertwining of Protestant ideas with loyalty to the Catholic Church, Pole may have reminded Vittoria a bit of herself—they were, in many respects, secret-sharers. Whatever the source of the attraction, Vittoria was sufficiently drawn to Pole by the fall of 1541 that she followed him to Viterbo.

  Vittoria’s decision to move to Viterbo within a month or two of resettling at the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome was in many ways surprising. Viterbo was not a city she knew well, and her only experience there had been traumatic: it was in Viterbo that she had received the news of Ferrante’s death in the fall of 1525. Rome, however, may well have felt gloomy to her following the recent devastation vis
ited upon her family; not only was Ascanio in exile and his properties in the Castelli Romani all lost, but the pope had even seized the Palazzo Colonna at the foot of the Quirinal Hill. Despite the many friends she still had in the city, including Michelangelo, Vittoria felt the urge to move, as she had on so many other occasions in her life. It is quite extraordinary, in fact, how frequently she moved from place to place: the idea that she had once wanted to live the rest of her days within the walls of a single convent seems hard to believe.

  The choice of Viterbo, as opposed to the many cities in which she had friends and relations, made sense only in terms of her desire to be near Pole and the extraordinary group of people he was assembling around him. In the space of a few months, Viterbo had become the absolute center of the Italian reform movement. Pole was known to be one of the strongest advocates for reform in the Roman church, and from his days in Padua, he had developed close ties with a number of the leading Italian reformers. This group included Giovanni Morone, the bishop of Modena (and, by coincidence, the son of the man whom Ferrante had betrayed behind the arras in 1525); Marcantonio Flaminio, the great humanist and philosopher; and Alvise Priuli, the Venetian nobleman whom Pole met when he first came to Padua in 1521, and who became Pole’s lifelong companion. According to Pole’s recent biographer, the two men lived more or less as a married couple for thirty years; Priuli accompanied Pole whenever possible on his travels, and Pole retired for long stretches of time to Priuli’s beautiful home in the Veneto. There is even evidence that they requested (but were denied) a joint burial.