Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  Falstaff’s description of the soldiers is from 1 Henry IV, act 4, scene 2, lines 59–60.

  On the patronage of the Medici popes, see Loren Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400–1600 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Abrams/Prentice Hall, 1996).

  Pietro Corsi’s account is found in Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1998). The critical edition of Corsi’s original Latin poem, the Romae Urbis excidium, is in Léon Dorez, “Le poème de Pietro Corsi sur le sac de Rome,” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Ecole Française de Rome 16 (1896). Alcionio’s Latin orations are in Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance.

  On the relations between the papacy and Orvieto, see Daniel Waley, Mediaeval Orvieto: The Political History of an Italian City-State, 1157–1334 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).

  For Clement’s time in Orvieto and his reference to it as “our city,” see Anne Reynolds, “The Papal Court in Exile: Clement VII in Orvieto, 1527–28,” in Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl Reiss, eds., The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). The comment comes from a 1525 letter addressed to the “hominibus Civitatis n[ost]r[ae].” Lippomano’s comments on the papal court in exile are in Reynolds, as is Gardiner’s letter.

  For Erasmus’s letter, see The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1926 to 2081 (1528), trans. Charles Fantazzi, ed. James Estes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Liliana Barroero, S. Maria dell’Orto (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1976).

  John Sherren Brewer, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London: Longman, 1862–1920).

  Franco Cardini, “Giovanni gentiluomo,” in Mario Scalini, ed., Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Florence: Banca Toscana, 2001).

  Pierluigi De Vecchi, Raphael (New York: Abbeville, 2002).

  John Edwards, Archbishop Pole (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).

  Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Benton Foundation/Encyclopedia Brittanica), http://www.brittanica.com.

  Sonia Gallico, Vaticano (ATS Italia, 2004).

  Giancarlo Malacarne, I Gonzaga di Mantova. Una stirpe per una capitale europea (Modena: Bulino, 2004–2008).

  Carlo Milanesi, ed., Il sacco di Roma del MDXXVII. Narrazioni di contemporanei (Florence: Barbèra, 1867).

  Angelo Nicosia, Museo della città e del territorio: Aquino (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2006).

  Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999).

  Ugo Onorati, La basilica collegiata di San Barnaba Apostolo. Il patrono di Marino nella storia e nella tradizione popolare locale (Marino: Associazione Senza Frontiere O.n.l.u.s./Biblioteca di Interesse Locale “Girolamo Torquati,” 2010).

  Nicola Ratti, Storia di Genzano, con note e documenti (Rome: Salomoni, 1797).

  Ingrid Rowland, “The Vatican Stanze,” in Marcia Hall, The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  Paolo Sarpi, Istoria del concilio tridentino (Florence: Barbèra, Bianchi & Co., 1858).

  André Thevet, Portraits from the French Renaissance and the Wars of Religion, trans. and ed. Roger Schlesinger (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2010).

  Giuseppe Tomassetti and Francesco Tomassetti, La compagna romana antica, medioevale e moderna (Rome: Maglione & Strinsi, 1926).

  6. LIFE AT COURT

  For a history of Urbino under Federico da Montefeltro, see June Osborne, Urbino: Story of a Renaissance City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

  For the life and works of Castiglione, see John Robert Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of The Courtier (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978). The characteristics of the courtier are discussed throughout the second book of The Courtier, while sprezzatura is presented in section 1.26. On the popularity of the Cortegiano in sixteenth-century Europe, see Amadeo Quondam, «Questo povero Cortegiano». Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000); see also Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

  William Butler Yeats’s poem “The People,” from the 1919 collection The Wild Swans at Coole, is republished in The Poems, rev. ed., ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989).

  For Roger Ascham’s description of the dialogue, see The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).

  Citations of Paolo Giovio’s Dialogus de viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus follow the first English translation, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Gouwens’s introduction has further detail about Giovio’s career and the composition of the dialogues.

  On Bembo and the debates over the proper literary language, known as the questione della lingua, see Peter Hainsworth, ed., The Languages of Literature in Renaissance Italy (Oxford/New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1988). On Bembo’s influence on sixteenth-century Italian literature, see Carol Kidwell, Pietro Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004); see also Ted Danforth, Pietro Bembo: “Foster Father” of the Modern Book (New York: Typophiles, 2003). Bembo’s letter to Giovio was translated by Troy Tower; for the Italian text, see Pietro Bembo, Lettere, ed. Ernesto Travi (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1992).

  Vittoria’s sonnet is included in an appendix to the 1535 edition of Pietro Bembo’s Delle rime printed by Giovan Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio in Venice. The Italian text of their exchange included here follows the edition in Virginia Cox’s Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Luciano Berti, gen. ed., Gli Uffizi. Catalogo generale (Florence: Centro Di, 1979).

  Caterina Caneva, Alessandro Cecchi, and Antonio Natali, eds., The Uffizi: Guide to the Collections and Catalogue of All Paintings, trans. Thekla Clark (Boston: Sandak, 1992).

  Vittorio Cian, Un illustre nunzio pontifio del Rinascimento: Baldessar Castiglione (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1951).

  Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  Salvatore di Costanzo, Ischia. Itinerario storico e fotografico dalle origini ai nostri giorni (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995).

  Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna,” in Miscellanea Augusto Campana, ed. Enzo Cecchini, Adriano Gattucci, Piergiorgio Parroni, and Piergiorgio Peruzzi (Padua: Antenore, 1981).

  Joanna Pitman, The Dragon’s Trail: The Biography of Raphael’s Masterpiece (New York: Touchstone, 2007).

  Guido Rebecchini, Private Collectors in Mantua, 1500–1630 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002).

  Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, “The Two Coronations of Charles V at Bologna, 1530,” in James Ronald Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring, eds., Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).

  Ileana Tozzi, “I Varano. I tempi, i luoghi, la storia: parte III,” Storiadelmondo 24 (2004).

  7. AMONG PREACHERS AND PILGRIMS

  A letter addressed to Isabella d’Este confirms that Vittoria was in the audience at Ochino’s Lenten sermon in 1535; see Deanna Shemek, trans. and ed., Isabella d’Este: Selected Letters (Toronto/Tempe, AZ: Iter Press/ACMRS, 2017). It is likely that Vittoria met Ochino soon after his arrival in Rome in 1534; see Emidio Campi, “Vittoria Colonna and Bernardino Ochino,” in Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Sapegno, eds., A Companion to Vittoria Colonna (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016).

  On reform movements within the Franciscan community, see Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Orde
r: From Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1987).

  On reform movements in sixteenth-century Italy, see Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, trans. Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999); see also Thomas M’Crie, History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy in the Sixteenth Century, Including a Sketch of the History of the Reformation in the Grisons, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas M’Crie, Jr. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1856; reissued, New York: AMS, 1974).

  For further detail on the life of Ochino, see Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena: A Contribution Towards the History of the Reformation, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: Nisbet, 1876); the translations of his sermon are from this book. On the career and execution of Savonarola, see Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  For further biography on Valdés and for further history of the alumbrados, see Daniel Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), which also translates Valdés’s letter about Giulia Gonzaga. On Valdés’s Christian Alphabet, which survives only in sixteenth-century Italian translations of the Spanish manuscript, see Benjamin Wiffen, ed., Alfabeto Christiano by Juan de Valdés: A Faithful Reprint of the Italian of 1546 with Two Modern Translations, in Spanish and in English (London: s.n., 1861).

  For the debate between Harding and John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, see the “Reply to M. Harding’s Answer,” in The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845–1850).

  For Longfellow’s incomplete Michael Angelo, see volume 6 of The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Samuel Longfellow (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886–1891).

  Charles’s reaction to Ochino’s oratory is described in Pietro Giannone, Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (Naples: Niccolò Naso, 1723); see the translation by James Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (London: Innys et al., 1729–1731).

  Clement’s letter summoning the Capuchins and his subsequent decree banning them are described in Zacharias Bovarius, ed., Annalium seu sacrarum historiarum Ordinis minorum S. Francisci qui Capucini nuncupantur [tomi] (Lyon: Claudius Landry, 1632); they are treated in Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, and the tenth volume of Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes, trans. and ed. Ralph Francis Kerr (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910).

  The hermit’s chant upon the Capuchins’ expulsion is in Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena.

  On the life and lifestyle of Alessandro Farnese, later Paul III, see Rodolfo Lanciani, The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome from the Pontificate of Julius II to That of Paul III (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906). The translations of Pope Paul’s Latin letters to Vittoria are slightly modified from those by Elizabeth Klaassen in the appendix to Och, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Religious Reform.”

  On the career of Gasparo Contarini, see Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  On the foundation of the Capuchin order and Vittoria’s role as “second protectoress” to the order, see Elisabeth Gleason, “The Capuchin Order in the Sixteenth Century,” in Richard DeMolen, ed., Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994). Documents testifying to Vittoria’s negotiations over Capuchin property are found in Marjorie Och’s 1993 dissertation from Bryn Mawr College, “Vittoria Colonna: Art Patronage and Religious Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome.”

  On the industry and culture of Holy Land pilgrimage, see Wes Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), which summarizes Regnaut’s recommendations for pilgrims. On the establishment of Compostela as a pilgrimage site, see Catherine Gasquoine Hartley Gallichan, The Story of Santiago de Compostela (London/New York: Dent/Dutton, 1912).

  Ludovico Ariosto’s description of Pietro Aretino is in the last canto of his Orlando furioso, stanza 14. Guido Waldman’s prose translation, Orlando Furioso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) is cited throughout.

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Marian Andrews, A Princess of the Italian Reformation, Giulia Gonzaga, 1513–1566, Her Family and Her Friends (New York: Scribner’s, 1912).

  Costanza Barbieri, Sebastiano del Piombo, i ritratti. Committenti, artisti e letterati nella Roma del Cinquecento, ed. Paul Joannides (Isola del Gran Sasso, Italy: Staurós, 2012).

  Giovanni Bardazzi, “Le rime spirituali di Vittoria Colonna e Bernardino Ochino,” Italique 4 (2001).

  Monica Bianco, “Per la datazione di un sonetto di Vittoria Colonna (e di un probabile ritratto della poetessa ad opera di Sebastiano del Piombo),” Italique 11 (2008).

  Josephie Brefeld, A Guidebook for the Jerusalem Pilgrimate in the Late Middle Ages: A Case for Computer-Aided Textual Criticism (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 1994).

  Costanzo Cargnoni, ed., I frati cappuccini. Documenti e testimonianze del primo secolo (Perugia: Edizioni Frate Indovino, 1988).

  Lawrence Anthony Hess Cuthbert, The Capuchins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter-Reformation (Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1929).

  William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  Henry Outram Evennett, “The New Orders,” in Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957–1979).

  Bernardino Feliciangeli, Notizie e documenti sulla vita di Caterina Cibo-Varano, duchessa di Camerino (Camerino, Italy: Favorino, 1891).

  Giulio Firpo, “L’Italia romana nell’Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli di Pietro Giannone,” Rivista storica italiana 118.2 (2005).

  Alexandra Gajewski, “The Abbey Church at Vézelay and the Cult of Mary Magdalene: Invitation to a Journey of Discovery,” in Zoë Opačić and Achim Timmermann, eds., Architecture, Liturgy and Identity: Liber Amicorum Paul Grossley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011).

  Mary Giles, “Francisca Hernández and the Sexuality of Religious Dissent,” in Mary Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).

  Lu Ann Homza, “How to Harass an Inquisitor-General: The Polyphonic Law of Friar Francisco Ortíz,” in John Marino and Thomas Kuehn, eds., A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (Toronto: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004).

  Romeo De Maio, Riforme e miti nella Chiesa del Cinquecento, 2nd ed. (Naples: Guida, 1992).

  Jose C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation (Geneva: Droz, 1970).

  Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984).

  Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

  Katharina Wilson, ed., Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

  8. HIDDEN HERETICS

  On the Este rule in Ferrara, see Edmund Gardner, Dukes & Poets in Ferrara: A Study in the Poetry, Religion and Politics of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (London: Constable, 1904). On the ducal palace, see Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este, 1471–1505, and the Invention of a Ducal Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see also Marco Borella, The Castello Estense in Ferrara, trans. Christopher Huw Evans (Milan: Electa, 1991).

  On the vast cultural production of ducal Ferrara, see Gardner, Dukes & Poets in Ferrara; Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek, eds., Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court
and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2005); and Patrick Matthiesen, From Borso to Cesare d’Este: The School of Ferrara 1450–1628; An Exhibition in Aid of the Courtauld Institute of Art Trust Appeal, June 1st–August 14th 1984 (London/New York: Matthiesen Fine Art/Stair Sainty Matthiesen, 1984). On the development of secular Italian-language theater in Ferrara, see Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

  For more on Lucrezia Borgia, see the notes to chapter 2 above; see also The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia (London: Phoenix, 2000), Bernard Wall and Barbara Wall’s abridged English translation of Maria Bellonci’s 1939 Lucrezia Borgia. La sua vita e i suoi tempi. For a history of the Borgia family, see Michael Mallett, The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (London: Bodley Head, 1969). On Lucrezia Borgia’s renovation of her apartments at the palace, see Allyson Burgess Williams, “Silk-Clad Walls and Sleeping Cupids: A Documentary Reconstruction of the Living Quarters of Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara,” in Erin Campbell, Stephanie Miller, and Elizabeth Carroll Consavari, eds., The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700: Objects, Spaces, Domesticities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).

  On the rediscovery of Nero’s palace, see Elisabetta Segala and Ida Sciortino, Domus Aurea, trans. Colin Swift (Rome: Electa, 1999). Suetonius’s description of the complex is in chapter 31 of his biography of Nero; see John Carew Rolfe’s translation, Lives of the Caesars, ed. Donna Hurley, in Suetonius, 3rd ed., gen. ed. George Patrick Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997–1998).

  On the Schifanoia palace, see Tuohy; for its frescoes, see Paolo d’Ancona, The Schifanoia Months at Ferrara, trans. Lucia Krasnik (Milan: Milione, 1954).