Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  There is one long letter from Pole to Vittoria, however, in which he expressed some of the complexity, if not outright anguish, of his feelings about her love. Written in October 1546, and addressed to “the Most Illustrious Lady and most honored mother,” it reads like an apology—and perhaps also a justification—for the ways he had failed her. Pole began by recounting a conversation he had recently had at Bembo’s house in Padua, where he had received a visit from an English friend, George Lily. Lily had come from Rome, where he had seen Vittoria, who had talked to him at length about her devotion to Pole (on this subject, it seems she shared her feelings quite freely). “No sooner had our Lily arrived here,” Pole reported, “than he tired himself out in his first talk with me in vehemently trying to make me understand how heartily your Excellence wishes me well; and, as if this were something new and not already known to me, I let him go on as long as he liked (which was a long time), awaiting the conclusion he might draw from this.”

  Although Lily did not reproach Pole directly for his failure to reciprocate Vittoria’s love, Pole made this point himself: “If this [conclusion] had been that which it deserved to be, drawing a comparison between my behavior and your great, and more than motherly love in order to condemn me for my ingratitude … I certainly would have taken pleasure in such a just reproof delivered with that simplicity which I have always treasured in him.” “More than motherly love” (“più che materno amore”)—the phrase is an intriguing one, and suggests that Pole was well aware that the title of “mother” did not fully accommodate the range of Vittoria’s feelings. He continued:

  But, as he did not conclude thus, I will draw this conclusion myself, as so much the more to my embarrassment as I feel myself to have erred greatly in this and not ever to have set myself to correct the error, although I cannot say that I haven’t worked hard to do that, which I know I ought to do in this regard, but, finding by experience that I cannot succeed as I would like, I let it go, as if God had deprived me of that grace of being able to satisfy my mind in that thing which I so much desire to do, which, in truth, sometimes gives me much trouble.

  For Pole to say that “God had deprived me of that grace” of loving Vittoria, for him to wish that he could have returned her affection: this was the most honest, and no doubt the most painful, confession he ever made to her. He had tried to love her, and he had failed.

  At this point in the letter, after having plumbed the depths of his self-reproach, Pole’s tone became more pastoral:

  And when I try to console myself, I find no other form of consolation except to persuade myself, as I have said and written to Your Excellence on other occasions, that the divine will is such that it will give you the full reward that it promises to all of those who do not expect any reward, as our Lord declares in the parable of those who invite the poor to share their feast.

  Pole invoked here the Parable of the Guests in the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus instructed his disciples: “when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind / And thou shalt be blessed.” It was with this hope of her future reward, Pole continued, that “I console myself, praying to God that he will make you ample restitution with as much affection of the soul as I am found on my part infinitely lacking in it.” He ended by asking for her “pardon for my shortcomings.” This was the last letter that Pole sent to Vittoria, or at least the last that has survived. Written only four months before her death, it was, in effect, a farewell to his friend.

  When Vittoria received Pole’s letter in the fall of 1546, the intense circle of reformers in Viterbo had dispersed. Pole had spent much of the previous year at Trent before withdrawing that summer to Priuli’s house in the Veneto, and then continuing on to Padua. His official reason for leaving the council was due to his poor health, although some accused him of feigning illness to avoid signing the strict new decree against justification by faith, which was counter to everything he had always believed (under pressure, he later changed his mind). In Rome, meanwhile, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had begun its work, and the mood in the city was decidedly gloomier than it had been since perhaps the Sack of Rome. Vittoria, for her part, had withdrawn to a new convent, and closed the doors on the world.

  13

  LAST RITES

  SOMETIME TOWARD THE END OF 1544, a rumor reached the ears of Marguerite de Navarre that Vittoria was dead. Although they had never met in person, Marguerite considered Vittoria a close friend—she even imagined them to be related—and she took the news very hard. After a few days of mourning, however, she was greatly relieved to receive a letter from Vittoria herself, written sometime after the date of her supposed death. Marguerite sent back this response:

  My cousin. It seemed to me that, having received your letter, I ought to say what Jacob said, who didn’t respond to his sons, when they told him that Joseph was alive and reigning in Egypt, thinking that they were just trying to cheer him up. But when he saw the wagons filled with gifts sent from Joseph, then he believed them, and he said: it is enough for me, simply that Joseph lives. So, my cousin, having wept over your death, not questioning, of course, your happiness [in heaven], but considering the unhappiness of those for whom your presence on earth is so necessary (among whom I count myself), for several days I was unable to believe that you were really recovered; but when I then saw your letter, in which I seemed to hear your voice and spirit speak to me, I needed to say: it is enough for me, and praised be to God that my cousin and dear friend lives.

  Marguerite’s fear that Vittoria might be dead was not entirely unfounded. Vittoria had become very ill in the spring of 1543, and it was not clear she would survive. The cause of her illness was unknown. It was not simply her usual ailment, catarrh, which had been plaguing her for many years, but something more serious. In June 1543, the humanist scholar Claudio Tolomei wrote to Giuseppe Cincio, a well-known physician who was taking care of Vittoria in Viterbo, to inquire after her health:

  I am exceedingly distressed about the illness of the Marchesa of Pescara of which you write to me, as she is one of the women who ought to be revered by all, because having collected within her so much virtue, and goodness, and worth, and above all, because in these corrupt times she has done so many good works in the service of Christ … I beg you, Messer Giuseppe, to do everything in your power for the health of so noble a lady.

  Less than two weeks later, the situation had improved, and Tolomei wrote to Cincio again to express his relief: “I am delighted to find from your letters that she is gradually recovering from her illness, for let me remind you, Messer Giuseppe, that in her life is bound up that of many others, who are continually sustained by her both in body and soul.”

  Vittoria was well enough to return to Rome sometime toward the end of that year, and in a letter that Bembo sent to Gualteruzzi in November, he described his great pleasure in hearing that “the Signora Marchesa has had a change of air, and vigorously ridden her horse [from Viterbo] to Rome, which,” he added, “I take as a sign that her condition has improved and [that] she has regained her strength.” By the summer of 1544, however, she was once again in a perilous state. At this point, one of the most celebrated doctors of the Renaissance, Girolamo Fracastoro, came from Verona to see her. Fracastoro became famous for proposing a theory of disease based on the spreading of germs—some three hundred years before Louis Pasteur—and for his groundbreaking study of syphilis, a disease that he himself named. When he examined Vittoria, however, he found no trace of contagious disease, or of any physical ailment.

  In an unusually frank letter that Fracastoro sent to her secretary Gualteruzzi upon returning to Verona, he declared that Vittoria’s problems were not strictly physical. “Concerning the state of the most illustrious Marchesa of Pescara,” he wrote,

  This, as you know, is my opinion, that as the body when it tyrannizes over the mind ruins and destroys all its soundness, so in the same way when the mind becomes the tyrant, and not merely the true lord, it wastes and destroys t
he soundness of the body first, and then their common bond of union … I have put forward this little discourse, my Lord, because I fancy that all of the Marchesa’s sufferings had their origin in this.

  “All of the Marchesa’s sufferings had their origin in this”: Vittoria’s illness, he declared, began in her mind. The circumstances of Vittoria’s life thankfully bore little resemblance to those of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, but Macbeth’s questions to the physician attending on his wife resonate powerfully with Fracastoro’s diagnosis:

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

  Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

  And with some sweet oblivious antidote

  Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

  Which weighs upon the heart?

  The physician’s response to Macbeth was a resounding no. “Therein,” he said, “the patient / Must minister to himself.”

  Fracastoro was more hopeful than the Macbeths’ physician about a cure for his patient, and he concluded his letter to Gualteruzzi with this recommendation:

  On which account, Signor Messer Carlo, I should wish for a physician of the mind to be found, who should minutely calculate and justly balance all the Marchesa’s actions, giving to the master what is his and to the servant what belongs to him. And this physician must be wise, and of so much authority that her Ladyship would believe and obey him, like the most illustrious and most reverend Cardinal of England.

  Whether he learned about her great attachment to the English cardinal from Vittoria directly or from other mutual friends, the time he spent with her had convinced him that Pole was the “physician of the mind” she most needed. Without him, or someone like him, he warned there was little chance of her surviving: “This beginning once put right, I do not doubt that all the rest will follow. Otherwise, I see that the most beautiful light of this world will in some strange way be extinguished and removed from our eyes, which may God avert of His goodness.” It is hard to imagine how Fracastoro reached these conclusions, and what his encounter with Vittoria must have been like. Did she sound to him as if she had lost her mind, or convey a lack of desire to live? Whatever the conversation was between them, Fracastoro felt there was little chance of her recovering without what we would today consider psychotherapy.

  There are no surviving letters between Pole and Vittoria from the summer or fall of 1544, so we cannot know whether it was he who brought about her recovery. But by the time she wrote to Marguerite, the crisis had passed. Vittoria was living in the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna dei Funari, also known as Sant’Anna dei Falegnami (the names honor, respectively, the rope-makers and the woodworkers who lived in the neighborhood), not far from the Campo dei Fiori in the very heart of the city. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she was not staying at San Silvestro in Capite, but whatever her reasons for switching convents, she was very happy in her new home. In a letter written to Ascanio sometime after she had settled in, she reported: “I get better every day, the place is dry and comfortable, and these most honorable and honest sisters have lived here for a long time.”

  Vittoria was in certain respects still living a life more suited to an aristocratic lady than a simple nun. She had a set of private rooms, where she was attended by her own maids, including her favorite, Prudenza Palma d’Arpino, who, according to Carnesecchi, shared Vittoria’s reformist beliefs. She also kept several secretaries and valets in her employment until her death. But although she did not adhere to the more austere conditions of the sisters, she seems to have organized her days more than ever around the rituals of monastic life. She was also involved in keeping the nuns engaged with religious learning from the larger world. There is a letter, for example, that Vittoria wrote to the famous Spanish priest Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, to request that he send one of his preachers to Sant’Anna for the nuns’ edification. A later report confirmed that the Jesuit scholar Alfonso Salmerón came to Rome, and obtained from Vittoria “muçha satisfaçión y contentamiento.”

  At the same time that Vittoria concerned herself with the nuns’ “edification,” she seems to have valued Sant’Anna less for its intellectual stimulation—she had presumably had enough of this in Viterbo—than for its tranquility and isolation. In May 1545, Vittoria described to Morone how comfortable she was at the new convent: “I am much pleased with the solitude of Rome, and with the company of these pure and sweet spouses of our Lord, who maintain the faith that he has instilled in them both outwardly and inwardly. And at the same time, my Lord, Christ has always shown me that I am not adapted to the affairs of the world, so that so much the more it seems to me that I am doing the best.” Nowhere else in her vast corpus of letters did she state her preference for “solitude” (“la solitudine”) so plainly, or her feeling ill-equipped for the “affairs of the world” (“negotii del mondo”). As we know, this was hardly an accurate description of her activities over the past few decades: she was one of the most politically engaged women of the period, from her interventions for the Capuchins to her role as family diplomat. But it is striking that at the end of her life, Vittoria wanted to imagine herself only as a woman of the spirit.

  Nearly everyone who saw Vittoria in person or communicated with her through letters during this period seems to have shared her perception. Sometime in 1545, Marguerite wrote to Georges d’Armagnac, who had recently been named a cardinal in Rome:

  My cousin, this letter will be only to ask you that you present and read to Madame the Marchesa of Pescara what I’m writing to her now, and since I recommend you to her in this way I pray that you please trust her and obey her as if it were myself … The life and conversation of Madame the Marchesa gives example both to you and to me of how to abandon all the transitory things in this world in order to live the life that will last eternally, and to learn to speak in the way they do in that great celestial court, where I believe that many of these great courtiers, who discuss things of the future and are eloquent in words, will find themselves more ignorant than beasts.

  To be with Vittoria was to learn “how to abandon all the transitory things in this world”; it was to glimpse the “life that will last eternally.” The idea that her language belonged to the “celestial court” was perhaps the greatest compliment that the poet and queen could give: even the finest courtiers, she remarked, were “more ignorant than beasts” compared with her eloquent friend.

  Similar themes arose in a letter from June 1546 written to a friend by a nobleman from Brescia, Fortunato Martinengo, who had recently seen Vittoria in Rome:

  Certainly, my Monsignor, she is a rare and singular woman, and, from what I gather, very passionate about her love for Christ, which she speaks about all the time no less with her heart than with her mouth … I visited her on multiple occasions, and if I hadn’t been afraid to bother her, I would never have agreed to leave her. She has such a power of speech that it almost seemed as if chains fall from her mouth, which capture the senses of her listeners.

  However weak Vittoria may have been physically, her voice had become formidable. Indeed, Martinengo’s impression of being entranced by both the intensity of Vittoria’s faith and her ability to convey her passion in words suggests she had entered a new phase of religious conviction. The angst she repeatedly described in Viterbo seems to have dissipated, and her focus shifted almost exclusively to the life that awaited her after death.

  Signs of this transformation surfaced in Vittoria’s letters to her dearest friends. To Marguerite, she wrote in May 1545 that “we never stop desiring divine things until we have reached the fruition of that which is real peace and the true end of every good desire.” “In the infirmity of my body,” she affirmed, “I feel the health of my inner being to be safe.” Later that year, on Christmas Day, Vittoria expressed similar feelings to Pole: “I desire nothing in this world that has to do with this world, and I lack nothing in my assurance of enjoying the worl
d to come.” Although even in this context she did not deny her continued attachment to him—“I lack only your reverend,” she confessed, “I desire only you”—she explained her desire for his company in terms much less desperate than before: “because you continually helped me (more than I could ever believe) to know myself, to humble myself, to reduce myself to nothing and live only in he who is our every good, consolation, joy, and happiness.”

  One of the surprising consequences of Vittoria’s newly gained spiritual confidence was that she seems to have stopped writing poems. She left behind no explanation for this decision—if, of course, it was a decision, and not simply an accident of the archive. But given her fame as a poet, it is unlikely that a later body of her poems has been lost. Indeed, Vittoria’s fame reached new heights in the last few years of her life. Not only were new editions of her sonnets regularly appearing, but a number of public lectures dedicated to individual poems from the Rime were also given at the prestigious Florentine Academy. In 1542, one member of the Academy spoke about the sonnet that opens, “D’ogni sua gloria fu largo al mio sole” (“God gave to my sun of every grace”); in 1545, another member gave a lecture on her sonnet “Perché dal tauro l’infiammato corno” (“When Apollo fills the fiery horn of the bull”). It is striking that both of these came from the early poems to Ferrante: for the literary scholars of the Florentine Academy, the more traditionally Petrarchan sonnets were of greater interest, it seems, than the spiritual sonnets circulating so widely among the public.