Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  Vittoria specified that Soranzo was to give the nine thousand scudi to the trustee named in the separate document in order that he or she would in turn distribute the money to be used in “pio opere,” or pious works. Neither Soranzo nor her heirs, she added, were to impede or disturb this gift in any way. Moreover, since she wanted the gift to remain secret, she also strictly prohibited Soranzo from showing the document that named the trustee to anyone. In case all of this was not protection enough—and never before have we seen Vittoria act with such paranoia—she concluded by saying that her heir (she used the singular noun) could not “pressure or force” Soranzo to show him the secret writ. She was, in short, determined to keep the information regarding the gift from Ascanio.

  These precautions, it turned out, were well founded. Anyone who read Vittoria’s will perceived immediately that her brother had been terribly slighted. In Bonorio’s letter to Ascanio dated February 27—two days after Vittoria’s death—he included a copy of the will, and expressed his own dismay about its terms:

  Included here is the testament of [Vittoria]. Because I know that you will not be able to read the details of the 9,000 scudi without being upset, as I myself could not, God knows how much it grieved me to think that that blessed soul in her last will could be accused by God of such ingratitude toward her most illustrious house [the Colonna], toward which she was always so courteous, and also toward the world, which having praised all of her actions in her life and in death, now sees the product of such an enlightened and Catholic spirit be so ungracious.

  How could Vittoria, who always seemed to love her family so dearly, have neglected them in this way? Did she not, he asked, feel loyalty toward her “illustrious house”? What happened to the person who had remarked only six years earlier that the “Casa Colonna sempre è la prima”?

  Bonorio made haste to reassure Ascanio that he had known nothing about Vittoria’s decision until that day, and that he would make sure the will was corrected—in other words, altered—in Ascanio’s favor. “Soon,” he promised, “you will see the Colonna house be consoled, and not left defrauded of that which it so reasonably expected to receive.” What happened next is hard to say, but however much Vittoria had tried to ensure that her money would be protected and the terms of the gift kept secret, word soon got out that the trustee—the person to whom the nine thousand scudi were to be given—was none other than Pole. This was, no doubt, confirmation of Ascanio’s worst suspicions. There are no traces of exactly what went on in the next few months—moments from The Godfather come readily to mind—but on May 29, a special meeting was convened at Pole’s residence in Bagnoregio. Present at the meeting were Priuli and Maggio (Pole’s inner circle) as well as several unnamed witnesses. The purpose of the gathering was, as Bonorio had promised, to amend Vittoria’s will.

  The document drawn up by the notary at this meeting is held today in the Secret Archive of the Vatican, and its contents, to my knowledge, have never before been examined. After finding an obscure reference to it, I got permission from the Vatican archivist to have the document photographed—it was a several-page, handwritten manuscript in Latin—and then arranged to have someone translate it from Latin into Italian before I translated it into English. Given that there was not even a printed copy of the letter available, it is not surprising that none of Vittoria’s earlier biographers seem to have known about this meeting; they report simply that she gave the money to Pole. But at Bagnoregio in May 1547, Pole legally declared that he would redirect the nine thousand scudi Vittoria had given him for charitable deeds to be used as payment for Ascanio’s daughter’s wedding dowry. Pole declared that he made this decision willingly—the pressure Ascanio and his allies must have put on him was no doubt immense—and that he did so in order to honor the illustrious Colonna family. The circumstances of the meeting were sufficiently suspicious that the notary himself made sure to rehearse his credentials at great length, and to confirm that he, too, was acting of his own free will.

  It is hard to imagine how Vittoria would have felt had she been present at this meeting. To be sure, she was fond of her niece, who was named after her; she had even helped to raise the young Vittoria during the years following the Sack of Rome when she lived in Ischia with her mother, Giovanna d’Aragona. But Vittoria did not die suddenly, nor had she lost her wits—according to Maggio, she was completely clearheaded even on her deathbed. Vittoria’s last will and testament, that is, reflected her actual will: had she wanted to give the nine thousand scudi to Ascanio to pay for his daughter’s dowry, there was absolutely nothing stopping her from doing so. Thus what happened at Bagnoregio, no doubt following a series of unrecorded conversations and exchanges in the intervening months, was a complete overturning of Vittoria’s authority. In the end, the men decided they knew better.

  In late 1551 or early 1552, the young Vittoria Colonna was married to Don García de Toledo, the son of Don Pedro Álvarez, viceroy of Naples. In a letter dated January 6 (the year is not given, but is most likely 1552), Pole wrote to Ascanio:

  I have gathered from the letters from Your most Illustrious Lordship and from your Majordomo who has written on your behalf that you wish the nine thousand scudi, which I had always intended to give to the signora Vittoria your daughter at her marriage, now be signed over to the most Illustrious Lord Viceroy of Naples along with the dowry promised to the Lord Don Garcia, his son … I am firm in that conviction I have always had, however little [Your Lordship] knew of it, that the most Illustrious Marchesa, your sister, was moved to leave these moneys in my hands so that I could aid the poor people of my country, who repair to me continuously, just as the abovementioned lady said with her own mouth to trustworthy people who can relate as much to Your most Illustrious Lordship. Despite all this, I resolved to do what I would have exhorted [Your Lordship’s] lady to do when she informed me of her intention, namely, to use those funds to help you marry off your daughter lady Vittoria …

  If she has no children, the money is to be returned and used for pious causes in Rome, which I will arrange according to the plan that I always had in such an event, and with this assuring and making certain every promise [made] to the Lord Viceroy and to Lord Don Garcia and to you, such that I will have never failed my promises, I send you my greetings.

  Much more than the document from Bagnoregio, which was drawn up by a notary and lacked in mood and tone, this letter captured Pole’s regret about the whole affair. This was not a letter sent between friends: it was strictly a business transaction. Pole may have promised to keep his word, but he made clear that he resented doing so. The only remaining piece of evidence concerning this ill-fated gift is a notarial record from May 4, 1552, confirming the transfer of the nine thousand scudi to Ascanio’s lawyer. Vittoria’s money for the poor became a dowry for the rich, or rather for the impoverished nobility.

  If Vittoria’s nine thousand scudi found a fate far from what she had intended, at least her corpse ultimately ended up where she wanted it to be. In the revised will that she drew up on February 15, she indicated her desire to be buried at Sant’Anna “in a manner to be chosen by the Mother Superior,” and added that her burial was to be treated “in the usual style and manner of that monastery.” This was yet another slight to the Colonna family, in keeping with the decision to leave her money to charity. Vittoria did not, in other words, want to lie in one of the exquisite Colonna chapels in the churches of Santi Apostoli or San Giovanni Laterano in Rome, nor did she want to lie near Ferrante in San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. Instead, she sought in death what had been denied her in life: a permanent home with the nuns.

  Bonorio reported to Ascanio that on the evening of Vittoria’s death, her body had been moved from Palazzo de’ Cesarini to Sant’Anna following her request, but added that he awaited word as to “what your Excellence wishes may be done with it.” He did not imagine, in other words, that Vittoria’s will would necessarily be honored, and anticipated that Ascanio might have other plans for her burial. Two
days later, in the letter of February 27 in which Bonorio shared the unpleasant details about the money, he also reminded Ascanio about Vittoria’s corpse: “The body is still here in a pitched coffin; it would be well if your Excellence would give your orders whether you wish it to remain here, and whether you wish to have a velvet cover made for it, as is usual.” Coffins were “pitched,” or sealed with tar, to keep water out and smells in—this was a practice dating back to the Egyptians. The velvet cover, by contrast, was simply ornamental.

  The very next day, on February 28, Bonorio wrote to Ascanio again to say that in the absence of any response, he had consulted Pole, who had advised that the coffin “be covered with velvet, as is usual, and placed where they shall think fit in the Church of Sant’Anna, so that it can be removed when it is desired to do so.” No doubt irking Ascanio even further, Bonorio mentioned that the seventy scudi for the velvet was to be paid out of Ascanio’s account, as was the sum of one hundred scudi owed to Vittoria’s doctors. Nearly three weeks later, Bonorio finally received a response from Ascanio. There is no explanation for why it took so long for him to answer. Perhaps he was so irate about the nine thousand scudi that he could not be bothered with worrying about the coffin. Ascanio’s letter has not survived, but Bonorio’s response made clear what Ascanio told him to do: “Your orders about the body have been carried out; it is in a pitched coffin; in three days’ time, it will be placed in the velvet case and deposited above ground, and, if your Excellence decides that it will be better to leave the body where it is, it will be left here.” This letter, which was sent on March 15, was the last word on the matter between them.

  The confirmation of Vittoria’s burial in Sant’Anna came only a century later, in Sant’Anna’s church annals for 1651. At that time, it was recorded that the body of the blessed Santuccia Carabotti—the late thirteenth-century nun who founded the convent—was moved from the high altar to the church’s burial ground. In passing, it was mentioned that Vittoria’s corpse was buried there as well. This small detail tells us that in 1547 her coffin was almost certainly placed “above ground” (“in alto”), as Ascanio had requested—it would have been in one of the walls of the church, as was common at the time for persons of great distinction—until new burial policies introduced by the church in the seventeenth century mandated that all corpses needed to be interred (literally, in + terra, put into the earth). More than a hundred years after her death, Vittoria was finally laid to rest among the nuns.

  There is, unfortunately, no way to visit Vittoria’s tomb today. In 1887, the church and convent of Sant’Anna were destroyed, along with much of the old neighborhood, to make way for the modern Viale Arenula, where a busy tram shuttles Romans crossing the Tiber from Trastevere. No one knows exactly what happened to Vitttoria’s coffin. One late nineteenth-century scholar, Bruto Amante, developed an elaborate theory that her remains were moved to Naples and lie next to Ferrante’s in a misidentified tomb, but this idea has been roundly dismissed, and it is likely that Vittoria’s coffin was left behind at the convent in the general debris. The only visible trace of her that remains in the warren of cobblestone streets surrounding the former convent is on the Via dell’Arco del Monte, where, sandwiched between an excellent Sicilian bakery and a reasonably good shoe store stands a scuola secondaria di secondo grado—a high school—proudly bearing her name.

  CONCLUSION: IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE INQUISITION

  A SHORT DISTANCE FROM SAINT PETER’S BASILICA is the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, headquarters for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was known as the Holy Office until the Second Vatican Council changed its name in the 1960s, is the branch of the Roman Church dedicated to the Inquisition. Of the three Inquisitions—Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman—only the Roman office has survived into the modern era, although its mandate has obviously changed since the prosecutorial frenzy of the sixteenth century. Originally founded in 1542 by Paul III to root out heresy, its mission now is to promote and defend Catholic doctrine. The Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio was admitted into the Holy See as an extraterritorial property in 1929, which means that although it physically lies in the city of Rome, it belongs to the Vatican.

  Visitors approaching the palace today have no way to know what lies within its massive wooden doors; even the buzzers alongside the entrance keep the building’s secrets. But if you ring for the doorman and ask for the Congregation’s archive, he will point you to the rear left corner of a grand internal courtyard. There, through a small door—also lacking a proper sign, but with a taped-over label on it that reads in a tiny font, Archivio Congregazione per la dottrina della fede—you will find the records of the Inquisition.

  In 1983, an Italian priest and scholar named Sergio Pagano was working in this archive when he came upon a mysterious file. Pagano had recently been appointed to the position of “Writer of the Secret Archives,” and was given permission to prepare a new publication of the documents related to the 1633 trial of Galileo. Galileo had been tried as a heretic due to his belief in heliocentrism, or Copernicanism—the idea that the earth moves around the sun, and not the other way around—which he famously supported with findings from his telescope. (Contrary to common opinion, Galileo did not invent the telescope: it was first patented in 1608 by a German-born Dutchman, Hans Lippershey, who was a maker of eyeglasses. Galileo was the first, however, to use it for purposes of astronomy.) In 1616, the church had issued an injunction forbidding Galileo to “hold, teach, or defend” his Copernican beliefs; according to the theologians appointed to investigate the matter, the idea that the sun was stationary was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” At the end of his trial, Galileo agreed to recant—the alternatives were not attractive—and he publicly declared that he “held, as most true and indisputable, the opinion of Ptolemy, that is to say, the stability of the Earth and the motion of the Sun.” In exchange, he was given a relatively light sentence: he was to live under house arrest for the rest of his life, and was required to recite the seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years. His book The Dialogue of Galileo Galilei was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, where it remained until 1835.

  In the early 1980s, Pagano was among a tiny number of scholars who had been given permission to use the inquisitorial archive. The lack of any public access to these materials changed shortly thereafter: in 1998, Pope John Paul II officially opened the archive to qualified readers as a gesture of goodwill in anticipation of the Jubilee in 2000. John Paul was responding to decades of requests and complaints from historians, whose scholarship of the Roman Inquisition was severely impaired by the Congregation’s refusal to allow its files to be seen. Surprisingly, the change in policy was thanks in part to a letter sent by the eminent Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg, which reportedly began with his announcing himself as a Jewish historian and an atheist who had been working for many years on inquisitorial papers. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was the head of the Congregation at the time, and later credited Ginzburg as having played a crucial role in the decision to let the barbarians, as it were, through the doors. There are still serious obstacles to using the archive: in addition to the sheer difficulty of finding the right building and ringing the appropriate bell, there is no clear set of instructions anywhere as to how to gain admission, the reading room seats only twelve scholars at a time, and the opening hours are hard to predict. But this is all a great improvement from the situation before 1998.

  Even before the archive was opened to the public, scholars knew that what they found within would be far from complete, as the files chronicling centuries of persecution had themselves been subjected to several episodes of violence and upheaval. First, following the death in 1559 of the loathed Paul IV, an unruly Roman mob had ransacked the Holy Office’s palace and set fire to whatever books and files they could get their hands on. Some two hund
red fifty years later, a victorious Napoleon ordered the transfer of the surviving archive to Paris following his occupation of Rome, and the files were duly packed up and shipped to France. The archive’s time in France was short-lived, however: after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Vatican was given permission to reclaim the precious archive, with the one stipulation that the delivery to Rome was to be at its own expense. The priest in charge of making the arrangements claimed the costs were so high that he needed either to sell or destroy a good share of the files in order to raise the necessary funds for shipping. He supposedly sold many original documents as scrap paper.

  The files that survived these various assaults were then put back in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, although certain volumes consisting of more miscellaneous materials were stored in the attic of a neighboring palace, where they remained until early in the twentieth century. At this point, they were moved to the so-called Stanza Storica, or Historic Room, of the Holy Office’s headquarters. Finally, during World War II, the entire archive was transported into the rooms of the palace’s ground floor and mezzanine. It was in one of these rooms in 1983 that Pagano’s hand fell upon an odd volume from the former Stanza Storica collection.

  There was nothing particularly impressive about the book that caught Pagano’s eye: it looked like many other old volumes that had been neglected over the centuries. Bound in ordinary parchment, and held together with two cloth ties, it bore on its spine the vague title Miscelanea Abusus contra Ritus Ecclesiae Altamurae. Diver. Proced. contra Episcopos, Prelatos et Abbat. Diversa Neg. Pisarum, or Miscellaneous Abuses against the Church of Altamura, Various Proceedings against Bishops, Prelates, and Abbots; Various Proceedings against Pescara. Something about it piqued his interest, however, and he looked inside.