Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  It was surely no coincidence that Vittoria turned her full attention to Pole at the moment of losing Ochino. However close she was to Michelangelo, she craved the presence of a religious figure who could help with the spiritual crisis she was undergoing. The choice of Pole, meanwhile, was a much safer one than Ochino had ever been: he was a distinguished member of the church elite, and enjoyed, at least at the time, the full protection of the pope. But there was nothing strictly rational or strategic about Vittoria’s attachment to Pole, which became like an obsession, and at times seemed to nurse rather than heal what she regarded as her disease.

  The first important episode in Vittoria’s friendship with Pole came a year before Ochino’s flight. At this time, Pole made an extraordinary gesture: he asked Vittoria, who was ten years his senior, to be his new mother. Pole’s real mother, Margaret, had met a horrific end earlier that spring at the hands of Henry VIII. Her execution was largely a form of retaliation against Pole, who had become an ever greater enemy of Henry’s, and yet continued to escape his grasp. Normally Henry was not known for having trouble killing those in his way, but he somehow could not get his hands on Pole. When Pole was staying at Priuli’s house in the Veneto in 1538, an English agent named Harry Phillips made an assassination attempt, but Pole was unscathed, and proceeded to Toledo on a mission to convince Charles V to help depose Henry by ending all trade relations with him. Pole’s bid was unsuccessful, but Henry seems to have learned of the meeting, and subsequently outlawed Pole from England. Meanwhile, Pole’s two brothers, Henry, Lord Montagu, and Sir Geoffrey, were also working from within England to depose Henry, and were arrested for their involvement in the so-called Exeter Conspiracy, a supposed plot to replace the king with Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, a close ally of the Pole family. Geoffrey was ultimately pardoned, but Montagu was beheaded along with Exeter himself.

  Margaret Pole, too, was arrested at the time, and became Henry’s prisoner. The king regarded her as an enemy not only because of her involvement with her sons’ various plots against him, but also due to her continued closeness to his own daughter Mary, whom he had denounced as a bastard. Indeed, Henry held Margaret personally responsible for having tried to arrange the marriage between his daughter and her son (Reginald) years earlier. In 1539, there was also rumor of a threatened invasion of England by the French king, Francis I, with the possible involvement of Charles V. Due to Pole’s ties to Henry’s enemies, his mother’s estates on England’s south coast were regarded as a potentially dangerous staging ground for the foreign troops crossing the Channel and, in November 1539, Margaret was taken to the Tower of London. She remained there for nearly a year and a half, when, on the morning of May 27, 1541, she was brought to East Smithfield Green, where a wooden block awaited her. According to one witness, she was met by “a wretched and blundering youth … who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.” Even her interrogators conceded that she was a heroic figure. “We have dealt with such a one as men have not dealt with before us,” one of them said, and “may call her rather a strong and constant man than a woman.”

  When the news of Margaret’s death reached Pole, he was hiding away in the remote town of Capranica on top of a rocky outcrop in the north of Lazio. According to his secretary and first biographer, Ludovico Beccadelli, Pole reacted by withdrawing into his oratory for an hour, and then emerged in good humor, declaring that he was now the son of a martyr. A few months later, Pole approached Vittoria to take Margaret’s place. This idea had first been proposed by Vittoria herself, in a sonnet she sent to Pole sometime after his mother was imprisoned. “My son and my lord,” the sonnet began,

  if your first and true

  mother lives in prison, they have not taken

  her wise soul or stripped her fine spirit …

  To me, who seem to go about free and light,

  and keep my closed heart buried in a small space,

  may it please you to turn your glance here,

  so that your second mother does not perish.*

  Following Margaret’s death, Pole warmly embraced the idea. The letter of condolence Vittoria sent to him is missing, but in Pole’s response from early August 1541, he eagerly affirmed her new role:

  It is fitting that your Excellence do so, You whom I have always revered after recognizing in your virtues the highest gifts of God, and especially now, since Pharaoh’s madness has ripped away from me my own mother, I accept you in her place, not like the woman whose son Moses later denied being, although she was the daughter of the Pharaoh, but like the woman whom, if you should undertake to care for me, I will surely always be praising—I who seem no less deserted than Moses as an infant, exposed not only to the dangers of the river as he was, but also to those of the land and sea … I who will be received by the daughter of a great king, the same who deserted the Pharaoh and his army.

  In this extraordinary use of the biblical story, Pole casts himself as Moses, the abandoned infant, desperately in need of maternal care. Vittoria, meanwhile, is not the maternal surrogate, Pharaoh’s daughter—a poor substitute for Moses’s real mother—but the equivalent of Jochebed herself, who pretended to be a nursemaid in order to suckle her son. Since Pharaoh is so clearly identified with Henry VIII, it seems Pole ultimately identifies Vittoria both as his new mother and as the pope’s spiritual daughter: she is “the daughter of a great king,” who has given up the treasonous ruler.

  Vittoria’s role as Pole’s new mother was not a passing fancy that arose in the immediate aftermath of his loss. On the contrary, he treated it as an official position. In a letter written in mid-August 1541 to Antonio Pucci, the governor of Bagnoregio, he referred to Vittoria’s new role as if it were official: “I cannot omit,” he concluded, “that the Marchesa of Pescara, my new mother, whom I saw recently at Bagnoregio, has been well served by relatives of your Lord and guests in your name.” Bagnoregio, a beautiful town not far from Orvieto, was where Pole spent much of the summer of 1541; Vittoria presumably stopped there on her way back from Orvieto to Rome. Word of the new arrangement between Vittoria and Pole, meanwhile, circulated among their mutual friends. In a letter sent to Vittoria that fall, Bembo referred to Pole as “vostro figliuolo,” or “your little boy.”

  At first Vittoria embraced the idea of assuming a maternal relationship to Pole. There was, of course, a real poignancy to this: as a childless woman, she seems to have welcomed the opportunity to occupy the role of mother, however artificial the ties might be. We see her trying out the part, as it were, in her only letter to Pole from the summer of 1541 that has survived. She began by apologizing for bothering him with her “frascarie,” or “worthless ramblings”—the word literally means “twigs”—and then begged him to accept what she, as his mother, could give him: “If Your Lordship is truly wont to say, in the words of Saint Paul, that it is better to give than to receive, allow me this blessedness, and allow yourself to be deprived of the desire to be more blessed than your mother, given that Saint Paul says it is the parents who should give to their children, not the children to parents.”

  No sooner, however, did Vittoria declare her desire to be the generous one—to give rather than receive—than she asked him to acknowledge her great indebtedness to him. “And believe,” she continued, “that I am extremely obligated to you, both for spiritual things and for worldly things, which in my great need and exile, you of all people have given to me, and consoled me, and helped me, and accommodated me, and I kiss your hands.” Vittoria’s mention of her “exile” may offer a clue as to what drew her to Pole. Perhaps the devastating losses sustained by her family earlier that year had made her feel homeless; perhaps she felt that Pole, himself in exile from England, understood what it felt like to be unmoored in this way. But even more important than the idea of exile was her feeling of being “extremely obligated” (“extremamente obligata”). With this phrase, the pretense of her being in loco parentis fell away, and the desperate emotional dependence
she felt in relation to Pole came flooding over her. However much she wanted to be his parent, she inevitably ended up as his child. As she candidly put it in a letter to Morone: “I confess to your Lordship that I was never so obliged to anyone as I am to Pole.”

  What was it about Pole that made Vittoria feel so dependent? One of the earliest and most revealing explanations came in a letter she sent to Giulia in the fall of 1541—the same letter in which she thanked Giulia for sending Valdés’s commentary on Saint Paul to Viterbo. There, she wrote that she owed to Pole “the health of both my soul and my body, whereby the one for superstition, the other for bad governance, were in danger.” According to Carnesecchi, who had occasion to give testimony about Vittoria’s letter more than twenty years later, under circumstances to which we will return:

  The Lady Marchesa, before she took up a friendship with the cardinal, afflicted herself so much with fasting, hairshirts, and other types of mortifications of the flesh that she was reduced almost to skin and bones; and she did all this perhaps by putting too much faith in such works, imagining that in these lay true piety and religiosity, and, consequently, the salvation of her soul.

  Fasts, hairshirts, mortifications of the flesh: these were practices that Giovio had already described Vittoria’s partaking in with too much enthusiasm in 1527. It is possible she had never given them up, and also possible that she resumed her strict bodily penitence in times of turmoil or sadness.

  Carnesecchi also explained that Vittoria had come to change her ways while she was in Viterbo, thanks to Pole’s intervention: “But once she was admonished by the cardinal that by using such austerity and rigor against her body she was actually offending God more than anything else … the abovementioned lady began to withdraw from such an austere life, slowly scaling herself down to a reasonable and honest middle ground.” We can conjure up the scene before us: Pole visiting the fragile and emaciated Vittoria in her rooms at Santa Caterina, where she was starving herself, and urging her, even commanding her, to treat her body as God’s vessel.

  Vittoria sent Morone a similar account of Pole’s having rescued her from the brink:

  Every word of my Monsignor [Pole] is—I won’t say the law that reduces the spirit into servitude, but an infallible rule, which liberates me to go along the straight path … If on this truest subject, which is so dear to me, I could have expounded, Your Magnificence would have seen the chaos of ignorance in which I used to dwell, and the labyrinth of errors where I used to walk in safety, in which I believed that I walked safely, dressed in that gold of light that flashes without holding up to the comparison of true faith.

  A “chaos of ignorance,” a “labyrinth of errors”: this is how Vittoria characterized her life before meeting Pole. “My body,” she continued, “[was] continually moving to find inner tranquility, and my mind in constant agitation trying to find peace. And God willed that he [Pole] address me, saying Fiat lux [Let there be light], which showed me that I was nothing and that in Christ I would find all things.” Pole had, in short, saved her from herself.

  For Vittoria, the relationship with Pole was so obviously spiritual that it was above all suspicion of carnal desire. Priuli, however, saw it otherwise, and was clearly irritated, if not threatened, by Vittoria’s attention to his companion. In a letter Vittoria sent to Priuli in the spring of 1543, she defended herself against his accusation that she was too physically drawn to Pole:

  As concerns my too famous flesh, that you all speak about, that is, that I have too much affection for such a spirit of God [Pole], which according to you can be a temptation … in writing about this to others, [our most venerable monsignor] has made me understand that it is not an error, for if it were error and temptation, his compassion would never have permitted him to declare it a sign of good.

  Vittoria concluded with a strong affirmation of the spiritual bond between them: “with the monsignor, I further practice my faith by being as directly receptive to God as he is.” Vittoria and Priuli had a prickly relationship, and she was clearly jealous of his much greater intimacy with her beloved cardinal. But this letter serves as the strongest example of her conviction that her feelings were proper and chaste.

  How exactly Pole produced such strong feelings in Vittoria remains something of a mystery. He was neither a powerful preacher like Ochino, nor a brilliant artist like Michelangelo; there were no sermons or paintings to move her. But Vittoria seemed to crave the company of Pole more than anyone she had ever known (with the possible exception of Ferrante when she was a young bride). In July 1543, a month or two after she defended herself to Priuli, she wrote Pole a long letter in which she tried to explain her devotion to him:

  The Lord knows that I don’t desire excessively to speak with you but for the fact that I perceive in [you] an order of spirit, which only the spirit senses, and which pulls me up to that fullness of light [so] that it does not let me wallow too long in my own misery, but rather with such high and substantial ideas it shows me the greatness up there and this baseness and lowness here below.

  It is not clear whether Pole himself may have questioned her desire to speak with him, or whether she was still responding to Priuli’s accusations. “The closer I, through His grace, walk toward Him,” she continued,

  the more I need to speak to you, not out of anxiety or doubts or any worries I might have or fear to have through the goodness of He who assures these things, but because every time Your Lordship speaks of that stupendous sacrifice of eternal election, of being rewarded and of what was hidden being found on those mountains, gates and fountains … It makes my soul soar with its wings, sure that it is flying to the desired nest.

  In all of Vittoria’s correspondence, nothing comes close to the mysticism of this letter. Nowhere else did she describe her sensation of her spirit soaring, her recognition of the smallness of this world compared with the heavens, her perception of the brilliant radiance surrounding the divine. This kind of visionary rapture was what Pole alone unleashed in her. At the end of the letter, she declared: “For me, speaking with you is like speaking with an intimate friend of my groom [Christ], who readies me through this medium, and calls me to him and wills that I engage in discussions to spark and console me.” Vittoria may have stared at Michelangelo’s drawings of Christ for hours at a time. But the closest she came to experiencing Christ’s presence on earth was in the company of Pole.

  Sometime the following year, in early 1544, Vittoria sent a letter to Pole in which she complained about Priuli’s treatment of her. Relations between the two of them seem to have deteriorated further, and she claimed Priuli had actually chased her away from visiting Pole at all. “It seemed to [Priuli],” she bitterly remarked, “to take a thousand years before he could get me to leave, in order to protect you from the bother of a woman’s visits.” She then reassured herself, however, that her bonds to Pole could never be severed by mere physical distance. “I find in every way that this is the greatest truth,” she exclaimed, “what you have written to me: namely, that we don’t need to have our own place in this life, and in this regard I thank God, who saw fit to use Your Most Reverend Lordship to set for me the happiest place, reached through my faith, at your right hand, like a shoot of that true vine, which alone is sweet-smelling and dear.” Vittoria’s “we” is ambiguous—and Pole’s original letter to which she is responding has not survived—but it could refer either to women, who are not assigned a place in the world in the same way as men, or to human beings more generally, whose life on this earth is inevitably temporary. But whoever else was included in this “we,” for Vittoria the sentiment had a special resonance. As someone who had spent the previous two decades moving from place to place without ever fully settling, she finally thought she had found her home on this earth, at Pole’s side.

  At least this is where she would like to be, she declared, if only Pole would give her some sign of his dedication to her: “If I could truly feel that your only delight is to provide me with justice and wisdom an
d sanctification and redemption, I would not only be consoled in my wandering, even if the journey were full of thorns, but I would also have such a guarantee of the joy awaiting me at the port, that I would feel as if I were already on the path to peace, and not only on the path of hope.” Vittoria may not ever have made her trip to the Holy Land, but she imagined her life as a pilgrimage—the verb she used here for “wandering” is peregrinare, the act of being a pilgrim—and Pole as her spiritual leader. For this reason, the letter concluded, she needed him to be near her: “since I cannot smell from far away the sweet smell of Christ borne in Your Most Reverend Lordship’s voice, even if the mind has quieted the anxiety of its outer ills, my desires have grown through the nearer hope for my inner wellness.” For someone whose language was almost always decorous and restrained, these words stand out as exceptional. It is hard not to think that Vittoria had fallen deeply in love, whatever that might mean, and that, as had happened to her with Ferrante some thirty years earlier, Pole’s failure to return her affection was nearly unbearable.

  All of this, needless to say, went far beyond anything Pole had bargained for when he asked Vittoria to be his mother. At times, he was clearly overwhelmed by her needs or demands. She sent him lengthy letters, he answered with short replies. “Two letters I’ve had from you,” she wrote in August 1543, adopting the tone of a jilted lover, “which I must say was miraculous, more so to someone who did not know how brief they are, and that they are responses to many [letters] of mine.” In letters to Morone, who had accompanied Pole to Trent when the council there was first convened, Vittoria complained about her loneliness in Viterbo, confiding that she felt “alone, cold, and unwell” (“io sola fredda et inferma”). Her only comfort, she said, came from “the certainty that [Your Lordship and Pole] pray to God for me and that Your Lordship consider my matters worthy of aiding.”