Vittoria colonna and the spiritual poetics of the italian reformation catholic christendom, 1300 1700

Thus while the focus of my study remains Colonna herself, the highly significant and wholly talented individual who occupied such a special and unprecedented position in the cultural are

Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the

Italian Reformation

For Dan Woodford

Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation

ABIGAIL BRUNDIN

University of Cambridge, UK

© Abigail Brundin 2008

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Abigail Brundin has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,

1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company

England

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7546-4049-3 (alk paper)

1 Colonna, Vittoria, 1492-1547–Criticism and interpretation 2 Italian poetry–15th century–History and criticism 3 Christian poetry, Italian–History and criticism I Title PQ4620.B78 2008

Introduction Petrarchism, Neo-Platonism and Reform 1

1 The Making of a Renaissance Publishing Phenomenon 15

2 The Influence of Reform 37

3 The Canzoniere Spirituale for Michelangelo Buonarroti 67

4 The Gift Manuscript for Marguerite de Navarre 101

5 Marian Prose Works 133

6 Colonna’s Readers: The Reception of Reformed Petrarchism 155

7 The Fate of the Canzoniere Spirituale 171

Conclusion 191

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Series Editor’s Preface

The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis

on radical discontinuities Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman

or local manifestations, has been left out of account In the last few years,

an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly

The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth

By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution

he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy

in Europe Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority The stage was set for the Enlightenment

Thomas F Mayer,Augustana College

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It is the particular fate of women writers of the Renaissance period across all the nations of Europe, as recent scholarship has cogently emphasised, to suffer from a ‘weak history’, that is the tendency to disappear almost completely from the canon of recognised writers after a relatively short period of fame and literary acclaim.1 No matter how great the literary status of the writer

in question during their brief flowering, few seem to have been immune to this frustrating phenomenon The reasons for the historical erasure of such writers are various and subtle, with at their heart the persistent tendency

to read women’s writing in a ruthlessly biographical vein which serves to dehistoricise it and undermine its literary status, alongside the consideration of such minority voices as ‘curiosities’ to be assembled in marvellous collections that are not considered serious or lasting.2

In setting out to write a book-length study in English of Vittoria Colonna, whose fame and literary standing in her own era were unquestioned, one is confronted with precisely this situation On the one hand, scholarly accounts of the period almost universally acknowledge Colonna’s importance as a literary figure, one of the primary means by which the linguistic and Petrarchan ideals concretised in the early decades of the sixteenth century by Pietro Bembo filtered further south, a political intermediary, a religious reformer, and also, more problematically, as a lone female voice in a male-dominated cultural arena On the other hand, such acknowledgement has failed to translate into a serious monograph about this highly interesting and important individual, but rather she has continually been assigned a subsidiary role in the account of the lives of the powerful men she knew.3 In relation to these men Colonna’s role

is a passive one: she is a muse, or else a pupil characterised as possessing an absorbent and receptive mind but little originality or intellectual acuity of her own Due presumably to her perceived mainstream status, she has remained relatively untouched by the wave of feminist-inspired literary criticism that has

in the past decades uncovered and re-appropriated so many forgotten female

1 The phrase is borrowed from the useful volume on this phenomenon, Strong

Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, ed by Pamela J Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor, MI: University of

Michigan Press, 2005)

2 On this latter tendency, see the essay by Deana Shemek, ‘The Collector’s Cabinet:

Lodovico Domenichi’s Gallery of Women’, in Benson and Kirkham, eds, Strong Voices,

Weak History, pp 239–62.

3 The most recent monograph in English devoted to Colonna is Maude Jerrold,

Vittoria Colonna, Her Friends and Her Times (New York: Freeport, 1906) The

persistency of this tendency into very recent history is exemplified by the title of the

1997 exhibition on Colonna that was held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna:

Vittoria Colonna, Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos The suggestion is that Colonna

would not have been an interesting enough subject in her own right without the reflected lustre conferred by her famous friend

VITTORIA COLONNA

x

voices from the Renaissance period Thus despite the clear recognition of her centrality as a role model for later women writers in Italy, Colonna’s history and contribution to the literary culture of her age have remained sadly under-appreciated and under-explored Perhaps it is a case of a mistaken impression, persisting even within the group of scholars with a direct interest in reshaping the canon to include important works by female authors, that Colonna somehow sacrificed something essential in order to be so popular among her contemporaries, that her work is, as a result, dry and unappealing.4

My aim in writing the present volume is therefore first and foremost to redirect attention to Colonna’s work itself, placed firmly in the context that informed it, in order to convey to a wider audience just how interesting and innovative a writer she really was In order to achieve this end her context, both literary and, crucially, religious, becomes a vital factor informing

a reading of the poetic and prose works and pointing us towards a new appreciation of the deeply serious intent behind Colonna’s literary production and its important ramifications for the future development of poetry-writing

in Italy after the Council of Trent It is a surprising fact that, while scholars have always acknowledged Colonna’s close involvement in a consideration

of some of the most pressing religious questions of her age, few have brought this knowledge to bear upon their reading of her work Only by taking into account the centrality of her increasingly ‘reformed’ religion in the composition

of Colonna’s literary works can we have any understanding of the aims and intentions underpinning her poetic production In addition, through such a contextualised study we may better grasp the true nature of the impact of her poetry on its many readers, both the close circle of sympathetic friends who received and responded to her poems and letters throughout her lifetime and the wider public who, through the numerous published editions of her verses produced in the sixteenth century, came to appreciate the beauty and the message of her spiritual Petrarchism Thus while the focus of my study remains Colonna herself, the highly significant and wholly talented individual who occupied such a special and unprecedented position in the cultural arena

of Renaissance Italy, through a consideration of her spiritual poetics I hope

to widen the focus of this book in order to contemplate the role of poetry in the Italian reform movement more generally, and thus re-write the history

of Renaissance Petrarchism as a more significant, applied and energetic phenomenon than has been allowed by previous centuries of criticism

A key element of this re-appraisal is precisely an appreciation of the outward-looking, engaged nature of Colonna’s poetic project that marks it out as particularly unusual and innovative in the context of lyric production of the period One of the most persistent characterisations that has accompanied

4 Fiora Bassanese’s guarded praise is typical: ‘Although essentially mainstream, Colonna is nevertheless a good Petrarchan emulator, given the limitations of the code,

and an astounding female voice in a male-oriented canon.’ See Italian Women Writers:

A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed by Rinaldina Russell (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 1994), p 87

PREFACE xithe poet through the centuries is that of a dogged Petrarchist of the most conventional kind, faithfully recording her devoted love for her (cad of a) husband in a private memoir that leans heavily on Petrarch, exemplifying

through its own limitations the limits of Renaissance literary imitatio when

deployed by the less ‘original’ minds of the period Of course Colonna herself asks us to collude with her in the propagation of this very image, joining in the denigration of the quality and value of her poetry:

Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia

ch’al cor mandar le luci al mondo sole,

e non per giunger lume al mio bel Sole,

al chiaro spirto e a l’onorata spoglia

Giusta cagion a lamentar m’invoglia;

ch’io scemi la sua Gloria assai mi dole;

per altra tromba e più sagge parole

convien ch’a morte il gran nome si toglia.5

What I hope to make clear in the following chapters is the mistake we make when we choose to take such claims at face value As becomes evident through an examination of Colonna’s involvement in the dissemination of her own work and the nature of her relationships with other writers, she was at all times intensely aware of the important connection between her religious beliefs and her poetic production, and took altogether seriously the duty that she had to ensure that the latter was a well-judged response to the former While she was always careful not to disrupt the public image of pious female humility that allowed her to maintain such a successful presence on the literary scene, she simultaneously worked quietly to ensure that her verses were read by those who could respond in an informed manner to their particular religious messages There are clear reasons why a pioneering woman writer in this period might choose to collude with the literary conventions and expectations

of her age, but that is certainly not all that Vittoria Colonna was doing, as I hope will become clear in the following chapters

A Brief Defence of Terms

When writing about religious developments in the early decades of the sixteenth century, some uncertainty arises concerning the terminology to be

5 ‘I write solely to relieve the inner anguish / which the only lights in the world send to my heart / and not to add glory to my radiant Sun, / to his splendid spirit and venerated remains / I have good reason to lament; / for it grieves me greatly that I might diminish his glory; / another trumpet, and far wiser words than these / would be suited

to deprive death of his great name’ (all translations my own unless otherwise stated)

For the full text of the sonnet, see Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed by Alan Bullock (Rome:

Laterza, 1982), p 3 Bullock divides the sonnets into three sections, amorous, spiritual and epistolary, more or less following the categorisation imposed on the poems by sixteenth-century editors

spirituals or the spirituali, the English and Italian terms are used interchangeably

I have avoided using the term ecclesia viterbiensis to refer to the evangelicals in

Pole’s household and others (including Colonna) in Viterbo in the early 1540s Thomas Mayer has provided a convincing case for the need to expand our understanding of the influence of evangelism in Italy beyond Viterbo and the close group of individuals who met there to other groups, cities and locations.8

It seems in any case clear that until the parameters of the phenomenon of Italian reform are better understood, including the presence and religious experiences

of a large number of reform minded individuals in Italy until the very end of the sixteenth century, one cannot begin to decide upon the most appropriate choice of terms.9 This book aims to be a small contribution to the ongoing reassessment of sixteenth-century Italian reform, and seeks to draw vernacular poetry into the heart of the debate by demonstrating its deep engagement with issues of personal and communal spirituality from the late 1530s until the end

of the century

6 For a very useful summary of recent scholarship on this issue, see Olimpia

Morata, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, ed and trans by Holt N Parker

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp 47–54 Parker’s analysis includes

a synthesis of the major contributions to scholarly debates about the nature of the Italian reform movement, including those by Firpo, Gleason, Jung, McNair, Schutte

et al See also, for a discussion of the problem in relation to Reginald Pole, Thomas F

Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp 8–11; and more generally, Mayer, ‘What to Call the Spirituali’, in Chiesa

cattolica e mondo moderno: Scritti in onore di Paolo Prodi, ed by Gianpaolo Brizzi,

Adriano Prosperi and Gabriella Zarri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), pp 11–26

7 The term ‘evangelism’ is intended in the sense in which it was first defined by Delio Cantimori, who used the expression to categorise the very particular, Augustinian and humanistic character of the pre-Tridentine reform movement in Italy, with its strong Savonarolan echoes See, for a concise overview of Cantimori’s definition, Paolo

Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento Questione religiosa e nicodemismo

politico (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979),

pp vii–xxxii; also Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, ed by

Adriano Prosperi (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp 565–604

8 Mayer, Reginald Pole, chapter 3, esp pp 103–4.

9 A number of scholars have argued for the existence of evangelism in Italy until the end of the sixteenth century and even into the seventeenth For a summary of some of the arguments, see Elisabeth G Gleason, ‘On the Nature of Sixteenth-Century

Italian Evangelism: Scholarship, 1953–1978’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), 3–26

(pp 22–4)

PREFACE xiii

I have provided translations (my own unless otherwise stated) of all Italian passages cited in the following chapters In the case of prose passages, the English translation is given in the main body of the text In the case of poetry, given the difficulties inherent in translation and the importance of the texts

in question for the development of my argument, it seemed more useful to retain the Italian originals in the main body of the text and provide prose translations in footnotes Poetic texts taken from manuscript sources have been re-punctuated in accordance with modern expectations and to aid comprehension Biblical citations are taken from the Douay-Rheims version

of the Catholic Bible, as a translation directly from Jerome’s Latin vulgate and therefore closer to Vittoria Colonna’s likely source than the King James Bible

Abigail Brundin

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During the too-many years that this book has been gestating in various forms, the list of individuals and institutions deserving my heartfelt thanks has grown ever longer First place on that list belongs rightly to Virginia Cox, who turned

me on to Vittoria Colonna all those years ago, and whose expertise, advice and unwavering support over the years helped me to think in new ways and bring new insights to my work that have improved it greatly A similar vote

of thanks must go to Letizia Panizza, always interested, full of knowledge, vocal and active in her support of a younger colleague, and a joyous lunch companion

Tom Mayer deserves special thanks, firstly for inviting me to contribute to his series, and secondly for his careful and exacting editorial eye He has helped

me to tighten up numerous sections of this book with a historian’s attention to detail, and it is a much better work as a result Warm thanks to Stephen Bowd for informed attention to drafts of my work, illuminating feedback and an ever-ready sense of humour; also to Barry Collett for his encouragement and insights Philip Ford and Judith Bryce were both positive and supportive when they encountered this work in its very earliest form Thanks also to all of the following: Zyg Baránski, Alan Bullock, Yasmin Haskell, Susan Haskins, Dilwyn Knox, Alex Nagel, John Palcewski, Patrick Preston, Brian Richardson, Diana Robin, Lisa Sampson, Olivia Santovetti, Cathy Shrank and Matthew Treherne

My colleagues in the Italian Department at Cambridge, and at St Catharine’s College, are always generous with their knowledge Raphael Lyne and Miranda Griffin generously helped with translations of Latin and French texts

I am grateful to a number of publications for permission to reproduce parts

of works already in print Thanks to the British Academy and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce sections of the Introduction, published as

‘Petrarch and the Italian Reformation’, in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters,

Imitators, and Translators over 700 years, edited by Peter Hainsworth, Martin

McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the

British Academy, 2007), pp 131–48 Thanks to Italian Studies and Maney

Publishing for permission to reproduce sections of Chapter 3, published as

‘Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform’, Italian Studies 57 (2002), 61–74 Thanks, finally, to the Modern Language Review and the Modern Humanities

Research Association for permission to reproduce sections of Chapter 4,

published as ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’, Modern Language

Review 96 (2001), 61–81.

Warm thanks to my editor, Tom Gray, and the staff at Ashgate

A final vote of thanks, for support of the most fundamental kind, must go

to my lovely family for their interest and encouragement Thanks to all the Brundins, who are never backward in offering their various forms of expertise, especially to my mother for her genuine interest Thanks to Jane and David Woodford for those numerous early morning trips down the A14 to provide

VITTORIA COLONNA

xvi

emergency childcare Special thanks to Dan Woodford He has been, as he always is, immensely patient and understanding, feeding me late at night, parenting my children in my frequent absences, a debt too great to describe Finally to Liddy and Saul, who make it all worthwhile, and are also the reason why it all took so long…

the period, the Beneficio di Cristo (first published in 1542 or 1543) which,

according to Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger’s no doubt biased testimony, sold forty thousand copies in Venice alone in the first six years of its circulation before it found itself on Della Casa’s 1549 Index.2 Further evidence of the close link between literature and reform in the period is furnished by Anne Schutte’s valuable work on Renaissance letter books, demonstrating the

evangelising potential of collections of lettere volgari which enjoyed wide

circulation and great popularity in the 1540s, and included letters on spiritual subjects by prominent Italian reformers.3 Evidently the evangelising power of such vernacular texts was sensed and feared by the religious authorities, as

is demonstrated most clearly by the vigorous suppression of the Beneficio di

Cristo when the dangerous potential of its poetically charged and uplifting call

to arms was quickly recognised.4

A further manifestation of the link between vernacular literature and reformed spirituality in Italy in the sixteenth century, and the potential evangelising role of the former, can be furnished by an examination of the genre

of Petrarchism, long considered a ‘closed’ and insular genre, impervious to the influence of the wide world beyond the courtly environment that spawned

1 Carlo Dionisotti, ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del concilio di Trento’, in

Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp 183–204.

2 Vergerio’s comments are cited in Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in

Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1972), p 74

3 Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘The Lettere Volgari and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975), 639–88.

4 For details of the suppression of the text, see Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio

di Cristo con le versioni del secolo XVI, documenti e testimonianze, ed by Salvatore

Caponetto (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), especially the ‘Nota critica’ (pp 469–98), and

the full text of Ambrogio Catharino’s response, the Compendio d’errori et inganni

Luterani… (pp 345–422).

VITTORIA COLONNA

2

it.5 How is it that this unlikely genre, famously dismissed by Arturo Graf in the nineteenth century as ‘a chronic illness of Italian literature’, dry, repetitive and wholly lacking in soul, could come to be directly and seemingly deeply engaged with some of the most significant theological and ideological debates

of the period?6 Most crucially, what particular features of the Petrarchan lyric

and the canzoniere format offer themselves to this engagement? Such questions

are important if we are to hope to arrive eventually at a more contextualised understanding of the poetry of Vittoria Colonna, and her role as the primary practitioner of such a reformed spiritual poetics

The fact that there were individuals in the sixteenth century who were simultaneously interested in both reform thought and the composition and critical appreciation of poetry has been noted by other scholars before now

As long ago as 1935, De Biase found intriguing currents of proto-Protestant thought in the commentaries on Dante by Trifone Gabriele (1470–1549) and his pupil Bernardino Daniello (c.1500–1565), providing a fascinating insight into the role played by the second of the ‘tre corone’ of vernacular literature

in shaping currents of sixteenth-century evangelism, a role that has been insufficiently explored to date.7 More recently Stephen Bowd, in his book on the Venetian patrician and reformer Vincenzo Querini (1478–1514), alludes

to the involvement in vernacular poetic production of a number of the early reformers in and around Padua and Venice, among them, crucially, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), chief promoter of Petrarchism in the first half of the sixteenth century Bowd questions the role played by lyric dabblings in the spiritual programme of such men.8 Thomas Mayer similarly observes the close marriage of lyricism and spirituality in his book on Reginald Pole, in referring

to what he terms ‘the unstable mix of poetry and piety’ characterising the

group of spirituali that formed around Pole in the late 1530s and early 1540s,

5 For a discussion of Petrarchism as a ‘closed’ genre, see Thomas M Greene, The

Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1982), pp 174–6 See in addition the comments by Lauro Martines, who sees the genre as creating ‘mini-utopias’ into which the courtier can escape from

problematic realities, in Power and Imagination City-States in Renaissance Italy, 3rd

edn (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp 323–8 (p 325)

6 Arturo Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin: Chiantore, 1926), vol 2, p 3

Cited in Klaus W Hempfer, ‘Per una definizione del Petrarchismo’, in Dynamique d’une

expansion culturelle Pétrarque en Europe XIV e –XX e siècle Actes du XXVIe congrès international du CEFI, Turin et Chambéry, 11–15 décembre 1995, ed by Pierre Blanc, Bibliothèque Franco Simone 30 (Paris: Champion, 2001), pp 23–52 (p 24)

7 A De Biase, ‘Dante e i protestanti nel secolo XVI’, Civiltà Cattolica 86 (1935),

35–46 See also Lino Pertile, ‘Apollonio Merenda, segretario del Bembo, e ventidue

lettere di Trifone Gabriele’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale 34 (1987), 9–48

(pp 35–7)

8 Stephen D Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and

the Religious Renaissance in Italy, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions:

History, Culture, Religion, Ideas 87 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp 32–45 See also Alessandro

Gnocchi, ‘Tommaso Giustiniani, Ludovico Ariosto e la Compagnia degli Amici’, Studi

di filologia italiana 57 (1999), 277–93.

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 3which included poets such as Vittoria Colonna and Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550) among its number.9 Mayer demonstrates the keen awareness that Pole himself shows of the potency of the literary gift if turned to the wrong ends, when he congratulates himself on ‘saving’ Marcantonio Flaminio from the heretics, ‘among whom he could have done much damage through the easy and beautiful style which he had of writing Latin and the vernacular’.10 It

is notable too that the Beneficio di Cristo, the primary evangelical vernacular

text of this era, is a highly lyrical work and that the poet Flaminio is now widely held to have been at least partially responsible for its authorship.11

Pietro Bembo is a significant figure in any discussion of the particular links between poetry and reform in sixteenth-century Italy He was of course instrumental in defining the linguistic and thematic goals of the Petrarchan

genre in the period and illustrated his theories on language and imitatio through

the example of his own lyrics, widely circulated scribally and published in a printed collection for the first time in 1530.12 In addition, Bembo was well known by many of the key reformers in Italy before Trent, and was frequently

referred to as an associate of a number of the spirituali, but also, from 1539

when he was made a cardinal, closely tied to the authorities in Rome.13 Bembo’s election as a cardinal after a less than pious secular life can be considered to represent on some level a move by Pope Paul III to embrace and absorb the new grandmasters of vernacular literature and culture, so that in the figure of Bembo we find a celebration of the vernacular language and indeed its lyric at the very heart of the religious establishment.14

The preceding brief summary seeks simply to restate and draw together what has already been amply illustrated by scholarship before now: that the movement for reform in Italy can be characterised as a vernacular movement, which seeks to harness the power of the new printing presses and the reach and appeal of vernacular literature in order to spread its message to the largest possible audience; and more crucially for my purposes, that poetry and

9 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p 123 On Flaminio, see Carol Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist and Reformer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965);

Alessandro Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio: fortune e sfortune di un chierico nell’Italia

del Cinquecento (Milan: Angeli, 1981).

10 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p 118.

11 On the hypothesis concerning Flaminio’s authorship of the Beneficio, see Fenlon,

Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy, pp 69–88 See also, on the involvement of

Reginald Pole and others in the text’s genesis, Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp 119–23.

12 Rime di M Pietro Bembo (Venice: Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio, 1530)

On the early publication history of Bembo’s lyric poetry, see Brian Richardson, ‘From

Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo’s Rime, 1529–1535’, Modern

Language Review 95 (2000), 684–95.

13 On Bembo’s links to Pole and his group, see Paolo Simoncelli, ‘Pietro Bembo

e l’evangelismo italiano’, Critica storica 15 (1978), 1–63; also Pertile, ‘Apollonio

Merenda, segretario del Bembo’, pp 33–5

14 On this phenomenon in relation to its influence on the literary and ecclesiastical

ambitions of the poet Giovanni Della Casa, see Giovanni Della Casa, Le Rime, ed by

Roberto Fedi, 2 vols (Rome: Salerno, 1978), vol 1, pp xvi–xviii

VITTORIA COLONNA

4

piety have an intimate relationship in this period All of which is significant when one considers the role played by the Petrarchan genre in the context of the Reformation in Italy Petrarchan anthologies and individually authored

collections of Rime, much like the books of lettere volgari examined by Anne

Schutte in her study, were among the vernacular bestsellers of the new printing industry in sixteenth-century Italy Small cheap editions of Petrarchan lyrics circulated widely across the peninsula to meet the reading public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the genre: particularly popular were the anthologies of poems by groups of authors brought together by geographical region or even

on occasion by sex.15 The great appeal of the genre during the Renaissance suggests that we need to re-address the fundamental disregard for the majority

of Petrarchists that was displayed by Graf and others in earlier periods and that still lingers today More specifically for the purposes of the present study, Petrarchism’s great popularity in a printed medium can clearly be seen to contribute to its potential effectiveness as a means of evangelising a message

of reformed spirituality to the largest possible audience reading vernacular literature in the period

It seems pertinent to now turn to a consideration of the formal properties

of Petrarchism: which of its particular features can be held to contribute to its suitability as a forum for the transmission of a reformed spirituality? As Roland Greene has pointed out, such formal analysis must precede any attempt

to understand the ideological properties of poetry: ‘reading for ideology in lyric without attending to the genre’s elementary modes of expression risks a fundamental incompleteness’.16 Two aspects of sixteenth-century Petrarchism require specific consideration here: the structure and properties of the individual sonnet, a poetic form that benefits already from a large body of criticism and

study; and the properties and qualities of the canzoniere, the unified collection

of sonnets into a coherent and, on occasion, authorially controlled whole, equally important as an intrinsic element of the Petrarchan project in this reformed spiritual context.17

15 An example would be the Rime diverse di alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime

donne (Lucca: Vincenzo Busdrago, 1559) More generally on the circulation of books

of lyric poems in the period see: Walter Ll Bullock, ‘Some Notes on the Circulation of

Lyric Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Essays and Studies in Honour of Carleton

Brown (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp 220–41; Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel rinascimento (Rome: Salerno,

1990); Marco Santagata and Amedeo Quondam, eds, Il libro di poesia dal copista al

tipografo (Modena: Panini, 1989).

16 Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western

Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p 6.

17 Brian Richardson has commented on the fact that the ordering of individual

sonnets into a unified canzoniere was not universally understood or appreciated as a

vital facet of Petrarchan production in the sixteenth century, a misunderstanding that led to some editors of Petrarch failing to respect the poet’s original, careful ordering of

his oeuvre: see ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, pp 687–8.

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 5

The sonnet has been aptly described as a prescribed form of poetry, that is to

say, before the poet ever begins to write, certain properties of his finished product have already been decided, its duration and structure are predetermined.18 But far from inhibiting the poet, these very limitations appear to act as a positive support, a formula by which he is able to order and express his experience during composition.19 Unable to stray beyond the tight, fourteen-line limits

of the sonnet and bound by its particular exigencies of rhyme and rhythm, the poet suffers the difficulties imposed by the form yet also benefits from its provision of a kind of security, a safe place from which to write One can see,

I believe, how these qualities of the sonnet, its limited space and controlled freedom, offer an ideal starting point from which to commence an exploration

of new and challenging ideas.20 In the context of the present study, of course, such new and challenging ideas would be the specific doctrines of a reformed faith and the ways in which they relate to the individual writer and her own faith The security and structure provided by the formal containment of the sonnet can fruitfully be compared to the structured nature of courtly society

in which Petrarchism first took root in the early modern period While such a context can be seen to give rise to carefully coded and stylised literary forms,

it is also possible to find scope within this arena for a more unexpected mode

of creativity We could in fact argue, in direct opposition to Lauro Martines’s contention that the court acted as an escapist ‘alternate world’, a kind of ‘buffer zone of ideal forms’ protecting the courtier from uncomfortable truths, that the carefully orchestrated and wholly predictable structure of courtly society allowed its members a particular kind of constrained freedom to push beyond boundaries and move towards new realisations and identities.21 The very fact that the case of Vittoria Colonna herself presents the example of an aristocrat and a woman who, despite the constraints of status and sex, appears able to move into entirely new literary territory in her own Petrarchan endeavours, amply illustrates the surprising freedoms that such a context seems to offer.The progress that is made towards understanding and illumination within the context of any individual sonnet is necessarily circumscribed by the poem’s

18 For an initial discussion of this poetic ‘prescriptiveness’, see Michael R G

Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992),

pp 1–10

19 See Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of

Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p 31.

20 An early example of the metre’s potential for experimentation would be the group of ‘comic-realist’ poets of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, who turned the sonnet to entirely new ends in both style and themes: see Christopher

Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella,

1986), pp 159–200

21 Martines, Power and Imagination, p 322, p 323 A parallel could be drawn

with the situation at the court of Frederick II in Sicily in the first half of the thirteenth century, where the particular courtly environment gave rise to new developments including the flourishing of the Sicilian School and the establishment of the sonnet as a

poetic form: see Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet, pp 10–16.

VITTORIA COLONNA

6

tight and unforgiving structure, and thus the poet’s forward motion is gradual

and cumulative, relying on the repetitive nature of the greater canzoniere into

which each individual sonnet is placed Roland Greene describes this repetitive quality, one that has frequently been compared to prayer or liturgy, as an aspect of the lyric’s ‘ritual dimension’, its status as script or performance

to be vocalised and adopted by the speaker in an act almost of coercion, or submission by the auditor to the poem’s expressive power.22 The involvement

of an audience in the act of repetition performs a unifying function, drawing together a congregation of auditors who are potentially changed by the lyric experience Once again, the clear possibility presents itself for an exploration

of new and challenging spiritual material in such a poetic context

As well as embodying a natural impulse towards repetition, the Petrarchan

canzoniere is by its nature both cyclical and intimate, beginning and ending

in the consciousness of the individual poet and a process of examining and lamenting the state of his soul The exclusively personal focus, the unremitting interiority and univocality of much Petrarchan production, have contributed

to its dismissal in the past by the critical establishment as a self-indulgent frivolity, and yet such a reading overlooks or underestimates a very important aspect of this self-reflexive tendency, especially in the context of reform While it is in any case reductive to claim that the genre does not also fulfil

a markedly social and public function that has often been ignored, through epistolary sonnet exchanges between contemporaries for example, even the seemingly personal focus of a sonnet sequence can disguise a more far-reaching project.23 By tying the process of questioning to the particular circumstances

of the individual poet, the path-breaking potential of any new understanding

is contained and disguised, and yet, as the comparison to liturgy makes clear, the poetry itself embodies the potential for a collective act of illumination and change This universalising of personal experience and understanding, which was the governing principle of Petrarch’s own corpus of poems, is of course at the heart of any act of evangelism

The circularity of the canzoniere, in the context of Petrarch’s own sequence

in particular, represents the poet’s frustrations and limitations as he does battle with the overpowering force of love that combats his reason and will, so that

as the cycle ends it threatens to begin again, and the poet can only plead with the Virgin Mary to release him from the bonds of love that he cannot undo

by himself.24 In the context of a reformed Petrarchism, however, this cyclical quality in particular takes on new meaning and can be turned to new and wholly positive ends The entrapment of the poet in the bonds of love becomes

22 Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p 6

23 Brian Richardson points out the social function of Petrarchan lyrics evident

in the common practice of scribally publishing single lyric poems rather than unified collections, in ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, pp 688–90

24 See the closing canzone, number 366, ‘Vergine bella, che di sol vestita’, in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996),

pp 1397–1416

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 7

a cause of celebration if that love is spiritual rather than earthly, and this is heightened further if one reads the cyclical quality of the sequence in the light

of the reformed doctrine of sola fide or justification by faith According to

this doctrine, the individual no longer seeks to control his fate but abandons himself to the action of God’s grace on his soul, so that his acceptance of his powerlessness to instigate change provides testament to the depth of his faith

in his status as one of the elect.25 The joyful embracing of a loss of autonomy

that the doctrine of sola fide confers upon the Petrarchan sequence can in fact

be linked to the notion of prescribed freedom that is inherent to the sonnet’s structure The doctrine appears to embody a paradox, as the individual Christian is handed responsibility for developing an active faith through study and contemplation of the word of God, yet at the same time is deprived of the efficacy of good works and instead accepts that his faith has been pre-ordained, his salvation already enacted before his birth By embracing this

paradox in the context of the Petrarchan canzoniere, the poet is offered the

freedom to seek for understanding and yet is simultaneously liberated from the responsibility for his actions Thus while his human limitations might frustrate the poet, they allow him at all times to point beyond his own frailties to the wonder of salvation by faith alone Where Petrarch’s weakness affords him anguish, the reformed Petrarchist should feel only joy

A consideration of the reformed doctrine of sola fide as it affects the

Petrarchan sequence leads on naturally to the next important subject for consideration, and that is the intimate marriage of Petrarchism with courtly neo-Platonism in the sixteenth century, more specifically neo-Platonism in

the Bemban model as expressed in a work such as Gli Asolani (1505), for example, or in Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (1528), specifically in the

monologue given to the character of Bembo in Book IV.26 There remains much work to be done on this important topic, but the clear indication is that the expressive qualities of the Ficinian neo-Platonism that developed in the courtly environment in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries shares numerous characteristics with the manner in which many of the key reformers expressed their spirituality As neo-Platonism is also a governing principle of Petrarchan production, it could be considered to constitute the

‘missing link’ between Petrarchism and reformed spirituality in this period, accounting for the development of proto-reformist sentiment in this particular genre of literary work

It is perhaps not surprising, as Roy Battenhouse argued back in 1948, that there is a consonance of language and terminology in the writings of a

25 On the doctrine of justification by faith and its implications for the individual

Christian, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development

of Doctrine, 5 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol 4, pp 128–55;

Alister E McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

26 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Gli Asolani, Rime, ed by Carlo Dionisotti (Milan: Tascabili Editori Associati, 1997); Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro

del cortegiano, ed by Ettore Bonora (Milan: Mursia, 1972).

VITTORIA COLONNA

8

reformer such as Calvin and Renaissance neo-Platonists Calvin, like many of his contemporaries including Luther, was well schooled in the pagan classics, and although he testifies to a conversion to true piety and a rejection of pagan philosophy that is ignorant of the true God, the flavour of his early learning cannot help but colour the manner in which he synthesises and expresses his new faith even as he seeks to move away from such philosophy.27 It is of course not in question that both Luther and Calvin held themselves apart from Platonic philosophy in their teaching and writing Indeed those reformers who were open to the employment of such pagan philosophy in expressing their views on salvation and individual illumination all too often found themselves in opposition to orthodoxy on both sides of the Reformation divide, exciting the condemnation of Protestants and Catholics alike.28 My intention is therefore

by no means to deny the distance between Luther and Calvin and Platonism, but to put forward an altogether simpler proposition, that the language and flavour of Platonic philosophy coloured their works by default because it was part of the intellectual air that they were breathing along with everyone else.29

Battenhouse’s reading of Calvin, while it requires cautious treatment, affords some illuminating examples of these cross currents of form and expression Despite the clear contrast between a neo-Platonic conception of the dignity of man and a Calvinist insistence on his irreversible depravity, there are points

at which the two systems speak with similar modulations, for example in relation to a belief in salvation through progress in knowledge (‘knowledge’

as synonymous with ‘faith’), a stress on the role of choice in directing the will towards God, and an over-riding concern with man’s formlessness and his gradual progression towards a restoration of his divine image by slow ascent towards God The gradual and slow nature of this regeneration is a feature that Calvin stresses in particular, and that can immediately be seen to ally

with the quality of the Petrarchan canzoniere already discussed above, that is

27 Roy W Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance

Platonism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948), 447–71 As testament to his Latin learning, Calvin wrote a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia in 1532: see Calvin’s

Commentary on Seneca’s ‘De Clementia’, ed and trans by Ford Lewis Battles and

André Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969)

28 The fate of Michael Servetus (1511–1553), the Spanish theologian and physician,

is symptomatic: condemned by the Inquisition, he was eventually put to death in Geneva

by the Protestant authorities with Calvin’s approval See Roland H Bainton, Hunted

Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1953); E F Hirsch, ‘Michael Servetus and the Neoplatonic Tradition: God,

Christ and Man’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 42 (1980), 561–75.

29 Meredith Gill has recently argued for the importance of St Augustine as a conduit for Platonic ideas and language in the Renaissance period: Meredith J Gill,

Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) See also, for an illuminating discussion

of the complex relationship between language and theology in the early sixteenth

century, Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and

Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 9the inch-by-inch progress towards knowledge that each sonnet in a sequence allows.30 Such stress on interiority and individual responsibility for nurturing

an active faith finds clear resonance in the Petrarchan programme

A more forceful argument for the strange harmony of expressive tools between two such opposing systems can be traced to Naples in the second decade of the sixteenth century, when Vittoria Colonna was passing the first years of her marriage to Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos (1490–1525), Marquis

of Pescara, at court on the island of Ischia As will be demonstrated more fully in Chapter 2, it was during this period that Colonna’s interest in reform thought began to take shape, yet not, as one might expect, through any direct contact with reformers and theologians at this stage, but rather via her links with the various members of the Accademia Pontaniana who frequented the Ischian court, bringing with them a culture of literary endeavour and Christian humanism strongly marked by neo-Platonism It was via these Augustinian and neo-Platonic routes, through the discussion of literature and more specifically poetry with Neapolitan academicians, that Vittoria Colonna’s thought began

to assume its ‘reformed’ flavour, in a fascinating sideways progression that indicates more clearly than anything else the manner in which reformed spirituality and neo-Platonic literary expression could feed one into the other and cross-fertilise Colonna’s experience in Naples clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of contemporary attempts to categorise and demarcate patterns

of dissemination of early Reformation thought in Italy: in practice, words and ideas flowed continually between groups who, in this period, were only hazily aware of the need for careful self-definitions and demarcations

Of course, it goes without saying that individuals like Colonna who over time came definitively to adopt neo-Platonic language as an effective means

of expressing a reformed spirituality were misunderstanding or muddying the theology of the northern reformers Such muddying was perhaps not surprising,

in a climate in which theological certainties evaded even those highest placed

in the church hierarchies.31 On a literary level, given that Platonic philosophy itself had been bastardised and adapted to suit the requirements of particular literary genres and social groupings, theological clarity becomes even more of

a remote possibility What is clear in Colonna’s case at least is that neo-Platonic modes of thought, in the particular manner in which they found literary expression in this period, could be well suited to the needs of a writer who

30 See Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man’, pp 457–8 The slow progress in knowledge is also a feature of Cassinese Benedictine spirituality: see Barry Collett,

Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina

of Padua (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

31 The uncertainty about the status of sola fide in Italy before the first convocation

of the Council of Trent is a clear illustration of the extent of this doctrinal ‘zona d’ombra’

in the early years of the sixteenth century The phrase belongs to Concetta Ranieri, applied to doctrinal uncertainty in the thought of Vittoria Colonna: Concetta Ranieri,

‘Vittoria Colonna e la riforma: alcune osservazioni critiche’, Studi latini e italiani, 6

(1992), 87–96 More generally on pre-Tridentine doctrinal ambiguity in Italy, see Delio

Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1939), pp 24–35

VITTORIA COLONNA

10

sought to express her understanding of the new faith, and furthermore, that the Petrarchan genre, built around an aspiration towards neo-Platonic ascent and illumination, would occupy a primary position in this endeavour.32

One final aspect of Petrarchan production must be brought briefly into play

in this consideration of the particular qualities of Renaissance Petrarchism that offer themselves to a reformed spiritual programme, and that is the practice

of literary imitatio, underpinning any Petrarchan endeavour but so little

understood by subsequent critics of the genre.33 It was of course Bembo who won the day in the sixteenth century in advocating a rigidly Ciceronian model

of imitatio, despite the criticism of worthy opponents such as Castiglione.34 In adopting this approach, in which a ‘divine’ precedent is chosen as the model for all subsequent literary production because it is unsurpassable in its beauty and integrity, Bembo is in line with Petrarch himself, who draws not only

on classical texts but also on the practice of imitatio Christi so successfully

disseminated by the Franciscans.35 Caroline Walker Bynum has discussed the

importance in twelfth-century religious practice of imitatio in the formation of

a group identity, as a means of shaping both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ man, and the manner in which this concern for groups and models of behaviour co-existed harmoniously, perhaps more during the twelfth century than

in any other historical period, with a growing awareness of selfhood and individuality.36

It is possible to turn Bynum’s analysis to the service of literary imitatio in a

useful way In the literary arena, as in the religious, the act of conforming to

a carefully selected model confers moral and ethical integrity upon the text, signals its inclusion within the group or canon, yet simultaneously allows space for and indeed encourages the development of the individual voice If we take into account the important presence of an ethical and religious dimension to

the practice of imitating literary models that is conferred by imitatio Christi,

then the genre of Petrarchism, so wholly faithful to the model of ‘perfect and divine’ vernacular poetic production, is afforded a gravitas that has completely eluded many modern readers It is notable that the quality of gravitas was one

32 Significantly, Petrarch himself was read as a proto-Protestant in sixteenth-century commentaries by Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli and Ludovico Castelvetro: see

William J Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University

Press, 1994), pp 67–81

33 See the useful synthesis of previous criticism, including some striking

misunderstandings of the practice of imitatio, in Hempfer, ‘Per una definizione del

Petrarchismo’, pp 23–52

34 Castiglione’s humorous mocking of Bembo’s position is given in Il libro del

cortegiano, Book I, xxvi, in which a fawning courtier imitates King Ferdinand II of

Naples’ facial tic without realising that it was caused by illness

35 See Dina de Rentiis, ‘Sul ruolo di Petrarca nella storia dell’imitatio auctorum’,

in Blanc, ed., Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle, pp 63–74.

36 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’,

in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1982), pp 82–109

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 11that Bembo sought in particular in the Petrarchism of his contemporaries as the key to the best and most beautiful lyrics, and found in abundance in the work of Vittoria Colonna.37

By tying the production of Petrarchan lyric poetry to the development of reformed currents of thought in Italy in the early decades of the sixteenth-century, as the preceding analysis has started to do, one can also begin to argue more forcefully that the Petrarchism of the Italian Renaissance was not,

as has been claimed in the past, a pointless and facile exercise in repetition and mimicry, but rather a medium that was perfectly in tune with the wider social and religious currents of the age and well adapted to capture and reflect them back to a vernacular reading public With a subtle force born of the slow accumulation of ideas, ennobled by the gravitas conferred by literary and religious models, harnessing the persuasive intimacy and liberating confinement of the sonnet structure, in the hands of its cleverest and most spirited practitioners Petrarchism is far from Graf’s chronic sickness of Italian literature Rather it is transformed into a gift to the reformers, capable of carrying an important spiritual message beyond the limits of the Italian

‘Reformation’ into the wider realm of literary endeavour

Summary of the Argument

It is the purpose of the following chapters to explore the manner in which Colonna’s poetry drew on the ideas set out above concerning the potential for Petrarchism to embody a reformed religious programme, and to endeavour

to assess how far she was successful in creating a spiritually engaged poetry that conveyed a message to a wide audience In the interests of careful contextualisation with a view to correcting the errors of the past, Chapter

1 reconstructs aspects of Colonna’s biography alongside the history of print production of her works in the sixteenth century, in order to illuminate the development and dissemination of a public image that protected the poet from malign attention and allowed her literary career to flourish It is this image,

so artfully constructed by the poet in collusion with her editors during her lifetime, that has proved so enduring and has in some ways impeded a clearer reassessment of the content and value of the poetry itself

Chapter 2 examines Colonna’s exposure to the Italian reform movement and its ideas, beginning with the years of her early married life in Naples

and progressing to her involvement with the spirituali in the early 1540s

This discussion seeks in particular to underline the organic and essentially undogmatic nature of the poet’s exposure to ideas about religion that would come to characterise her literary production In addition, Chapter 2 undertakes

a detailed reading of some of the reformed vernacular texts in circulation

37 On Bembo’s judgement of Colonna’s verses as suitably ‘grave’, see Carlo

Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna’, in Miscellanea Augusto

Campana, ed by R Avesani et al (Padua: Antenore, 1981), vol 1, pp 257–86

(pp 262–5)

VITTORIA COLONNA

12

during Colonna’s lifetime to which she would have had direct access, in order

to highlight the particularly lyric qualities of the evangelical language used in such texts and its relation to vernacular poetry writing Conclusions are drawn about the nature of exchanges between members of groups of reformers, as well as concerning the status of poetry as an integral component of the process

of communal religious exploration

Chapters 3 and 4 examine Colonna’s private gift manuscripts of sonnets, prepared with the author’s collusion and presented to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) in Rome and Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) in France, the only known examples of her voluntary dissemination of unpublished work.38 The gifting of these manuscripts to carefully selected individuals highlights the status of gift-giving as a reformed practice among evangelicals

in the period In addition, the particular content and organisation of each of these (very different) manuscript gifts sheds light on the shared concerns and ideas governing such important friendships Finally, the existence of these two manuscripts indicates Colonna’s active involvement in the exchange of ideas about religion and reform, in a poetic vein, within a community of like-minded men and women

In Chapter 5 I turn to an examination of Colonna’s prose writings, works that can be considered to have developed out of her close involvement with the

spirituali The Pianto sopra la passione di Christo, a meditation on Mary’s role

in the Passion drama, looks back towards earlier models of devotional writing whilst exploring Mary’s status and importance from a new and unexpected perspective The writer’s interest in the Virgin appears to be an attempt to develop Mary’s status as a role model for female spiritual life, not according

to the medieval model of a divine mediatrix far from mankind’s experience, but on a new human level that asserts her position as the primary example of the way to Christ through faith Colonna’s interest in the figure of Mary no doubt arose from her very particular position as a high-profile woman writer and public figure, and in addition as the only woman that is known to have

been present at the meetings of the spirituali in Viterbo Further prose works,

38 A third manuscript was in fact sent to Francesco della Torre in 1541, when

he was acting as secretary to Giovanni Matteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona and a close correspondent of Colonna’s Della Torre’s manuscript is thought to be MS II.IX.30 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence The sending of this third manuscript, however, appears

to have been agreed under different conditions from those relating to the manuscripts prepared for Michelangelo and Marguerite de Navarre, primarily because della Torre only asked to borrow a manuscript (one that was clearly already in existence), and promised to return it once he had finished copying out the sonnets See Alan Bullock, ‘A Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of 100 Poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca

Nazionale Centrale, Florence’, Italian Studies 21 (1966), 42–56; Colonna, Rime, ed

by Bullock, pp 325–7 Carlo Dionisotti disagrees with Bullock’s identification of the della Torre manuscript, believing that he would have been sent a collection of recently composed spiritual verse, rather than the sonnets dedicated to d’Avalos (the majority already published numerous times by the 1540s) contained in the manuscript examined

by Bullock in Florence See Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo’, pp 282–3

PETRARCHISM, NEO-PLATONISM AND REFORM 13including three letters to her cousin published in a sixteenth-century edition, confirm and further develop this significant Marian emphasis.

Chapter 6 considers the important question of Colonna’s other readers, those who did not frequent the close circle of like-minded aristocrats who met in Naples, Rome and Viterbo to exchange ideas about reform Through

a reading of a highly significant commentary on Colonna’s sonnets, published twice in the sixteenth century, I obtain access to the insights of one particularly informed evangelical reader of the texts, and ask important questions about the impact of his commentary on the wider reception of Colonna’s verses in print In addition, the reissuing of the commentary in the 1550s points towards conclusions about the durability of the phenomenon of evangelism in Italy that helps to correct earlier more limited periodisations

Chapter 7 considers the impact of Colonna’s poetic model of spiritually engaged Petrarchan production on other writers in Italy later in the century

As its principal aim is that of drawing this book to a close, the final chapter can only touch briefly on a number of salient points It is also, of course, indicative of a new beginning, the start of another, larger project that will allow for far stronger connections to be forged in the future between the literary production and religious engagement of the first half of the sixteenth century and that of the so-called Counter Reformation By insisting on these important connections, scholars will finally begin to chip away at the long-standing and generally unhelpful view of the later sixteenth century as a period of cultural diminishment and instead recognise its rich and illuminating continuities with earlier cultural and spiritual trends, established before Trent and surviving in modified and adapted forms well into the next century

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organised his poetic canzoniere into an apparently coherent and progressive unit

carrying him forward through the years, a temporal progression that worked against the thematically cyclical nature of the poems themselves, establishing

a fruitful lyric tension In the case of the woman writer of Petrarchan lyrics, the urge to read biographically seems to be stronger still One imagines, in fact, that the women who first chose Petrarchism as their means of access to the cultural arena did so knowingly, well aware of the genre’s propensity to

be allied with the life Through the wholly decorous and delicate deployment

of the properties and themes offered by the genre, the woman writer might

be able to present herself as an acceptable and unimpeachable addition to the literary world, in other words, could deploy the self-fashioning elements of the

poetic text to the ends of depicting herself as precisely the model virtuosa that

the public sought To imagine that this process was not in many ways one of careful manipulation and artfulness, however, would be nạve.1

The convergence of life and art in the lyric genre becomes particularly problematic when one turns to the sixteenth-century reception of Petrarch and Petrarchism, a period in which the desire to read Petrarch himself in a biographical vein became so dominant that scholars expended great amounts

of energy in arguing over the ‘facts’ relating to the poet’s love affair with

‘Madonna Laura’, herself indubitably a ‘real’ person whose place and date

of birth and rank, as well as her literary accomplishments, were all to be firmly established, despite the seemingly complete lack of concrete evidence.2

1 A fascinating example of the tendency to read Colonna’s poetic canzoniere as

a record of her life is an early monograph that analyses her Petrarchan production

in a psychoanalytical vein, in order to diagnose the poet’s various neurotic illnesses:

see Francesco Galdi, Vittoria Colonna dal lato della neuro-psicopatologia (Portici:

Spedalieri, 1898)

2 For a discussion of this tendency, see Virginia Cox, ‘Sixteenth-Century Women

Petrarchists and the Legacy of Laura’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

35 (2005), 583–606 (pp 585–6)

VITTORIA COLONNA

16

According to this biographical mode of reading, the imitators of Petrarch themselves were required by the genre to enact, as far as possible, the love story that their verses recounted That such passions were necessarily denied

or unrequited was no doubt helpful in this regard, as the male poet was free to choose any worthy lady (one with the necessary public reputation for beauty and honour) to whom he might direct his poetic yearnings And even if the muse was married to another man this did not generally prove problematic,

as the entirely sublimated longing expressed in the lyric was equally flattering

to the lady and her real-life consort.3 In the case of women Petrarchists negotiating such autobiographical terrain, the longed-for lover is necessarily

a husband, one who is absent or deceased, and thus, unusually, the poetry is based on a relationship that has been reciprocated at some time in the past, injecting perhaps a greater degree of pragmatism into the lyric yearnings.4 It

is tempting to wonder if the great popularity of printed Petrarchan collections and anthologies among the sixteenth-century reading public was to some extent related to the vicarious thrill of gaining insights into the supposedly

‘real’ amorous troubles of the rich and famous

In the interests of unpicking the deeply knotted strands of ‘life’ and ‘art’ that have co-existed for so many centuries in Vittoria Colonna’s case, it seems important initially to trace the salient facts of the poet’s biography, in order subsequently to highlight those areas of her experience that contributed to her own ability to ‘market’ herself (or be marketed by her editors) through her poetry in such a highly successful manner In arguing that we must seek to move away from the biographism of sixteenth-century readings, that life and art cannot be interrelated in an automatic and thoughtless way, I am forced

to confront the obvious fact that Colonna’s life did, quite conveniently and

no doubt necessarily, afford her the opportunities for literary self-fashioning

that were to prove so enduring and important If her husband had not been

famed for his courage and bravery in battle, allowing her to set him up as the

paragon of virtue and heroism to which she was inevitably drawn… If he had

not left home for long periods so that she was given the opportunity to miss

him and long for his return… If he had not expired early and tragically leaving

his wife with the banner of widowhood (as well as wealth and independence)

on which to pin her poetic colours… It is not necessary, or fruitful, to attempt

to explain away these consonances as matters of little importance: they are, of

3 A clear example of such practice is the poetry addressed to Vittoria Colonna by Girolamo Britonio, a younger nobleman who fought together with her husband in a

number of battles: his collection was published as Gelosia del sole (Naples: [no pub.],

1519) The poet continually stresses his lady’s fidelity to her husband, and thus flatters D’Avalos by default, perhaps in the hope of advancement or favours

4 The two female Petrarchists who enjoyed the greatest degree of fame in the first half of the sixteenth-century, Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), were both widowed, thus provided by circumstance with the necessary context of loss and longing that the genre demanded Far more problematic were those poets, such as Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), who located their lyric outside the necessary confines of legitimate marriage

THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE PUBLISHING PHENOMENON 17course, central to the development of Colonna as a poet and an individual, and served to create the circumstances in which she was able to write, quite simply,

in which she had the time and space to do so.5 Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that there is clearly more to the development of Colonna’s poetic persona than the mere accumulation of events, and the model that she created for literary production by a secular woman would not have proved to be so enduring and effective if it had come into being by mere chance

Turning to the examination of the biography itself, it is necessary to sound

a note of caution In piecing together the trajectory of Vittoria Colonna’s life from the sparse and scattered sixteenth-century sources, and the voluminous and sometimes rather questionable nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ones, it becomes apparent that, as a figure who knew and was known by some of the most famous men of her age and has consequently lingered in their shadows over the centuries, much has been claimed about Colonna over time with seemingly little evidence to substantiate such claims In particular, nineteenth-century biographers, who produced a great volume of studies dedicated to the poet (in a century in which a number of Renaissance women writers were reclaimed and reassessed in a manner that well reflected the anxieties of that particular age6), seemed more concerned with imagining her physical attributes and emotional upheavals than with conducting the necessary archival trawling in order to recover more concrete traces of the life as it was lived Some attention has been directed at this important work of recovery since

the first edition of Colonna’s Carteggio in 1889.7 Subsequently further letters have been unearthed, although the overall number remains small for such a well-connected and active individual and thus various biographical lacunae remain unfilled.8 To date, therefore, the picture of a life remains muddied and uncertain, the concrete facts few and far between

5 The link between freedom from marriage and domestic duties and literary production by women is well established: see in the first instance Virginia Cox, ‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice’,

Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), 513–81.

6 An interesting case is that of Gaspara Stampa Little is actually known about her life, yet during the nineteenth century much fictional ‘evidence’ was amassed that told of her suffering and eventual tragic demise due to unrequited love See Fiora A

Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1982).

7 Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara, ed by Ermanno Ferrero

and Giuseppe Müller (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1889) See also Supplemento al

carteggio di Vittoria Colonna, ed by Domenico Tordi (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1892)

(this latter volume contains a biography of Colonna by the pseudonymous Filonico Alicarnasseo)

8 Further letters were published in Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, Nuove lettere inedite di

Vittoria Colonna (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta, 1901), and Vittoria Colonna Fautrice della riforma cattolica secondo alcune sue lettere inedite (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta,

1901) See also, for more recent discoveries, Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Nuovi

Documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City: Archivio Vaticano,

1989)

VITTORIA COLONNA

18

Having said this, a number of studies produced in the twentieth century provide us with a more objective and considered account of the facts relating

to Colonna’s life The entry by Giorgio Patrizi in the Dizionario biografico

degli italiani is particularly useful for padding out the historical context,

providing details of her early life (although some claims, for example relating

to Colonna’s childhood education on Ischia, remain unsubstantiated) and avoiding many of the long-standing assumptions about the poet’s relations with the famous men of her age.9 Much more recently, the exhibition held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1997 and restaged in 2005 at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence produced two weighty catalogues that, although they fail to update or substantiate much of the received wisdom already extant concerning the poet’s biography, do present a wealth of new and important contextual material relating in particular to the courtly environment in Naples and on the island of Ischia.10 Together with the large body of recent work on the group of Italian reformers with which Colonna was closely involved, these sources have helped us to add detail and nuance to the picture of a life that emerges.11

Rather than re-rehearsing here in its entirety the somewhat spare account of

a life spent in almost continuous relocation from Naples to Rome and further afield, an account that can be found in other sources, it seems more useful in this context to concentrate instead only on the particular events in Colonna’s

life that proved to be definitive in shaping her poetic oeuvre and the persona

that the work served to promote.12 It is to be hoped that, through the process

of tracing the consonances between life and art, it will also be possible to come to some interesting conclusions about the extent to which the poet’s public image was shaped and manipulated, both by Colonna herself and at the hands of the editors and publishers who brought her work into the public realm These latter actors in the drama are of particular importance, as the agents of a quite phenomenal publishing success from which the poet herself was always careful to maintain her distance and of which she claimed to disapprove By looking in more detail at the role played by such third parties

in the promotion of the poet and her work, we will, I hope, be able to come to

a better understanding of the manner in which Colonna’s image was marketed

in the sixteenth century, and thus banish once and for all previous, unhelpfully

9 Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 53 vols (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia

Italiana, 1960–1999), vol 27 (1982), pp 448–57 (henceforth DBI).

10 Silvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos,

Catalogue to the exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 25 February – 25

May 1997 (Vienna: Skira, 1997); Pina Ragionieri, ed., Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo,

Catalogue to the exhibition at the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, 24 May – 12 September

2005 (Florence: Mandragora, 2005)

11 References to the major studies relating to Colonna’s involvement with the Italian reform movement are provided in Chapter 2

12 A brief biography of the poet is provided in Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for

Michelangelo, ed and trans by Abigail Brundin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 2005), pp 6–13, as well as a full bibliography of biographical sources

THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE PUBLISHING PHENOMENON 19over-zealous assumptions about the extent to which her poetry was limited to the recounting of the story of her life.

The Life as Lived

Perhaps unsurprisingly, privilege and wealth were often the necessary conditions for the participation of women in public and cultural life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance In this regard, the case of Vittoria Colonna is

pre-no exception The Colonna family had by the sixteenth century produced a long line of cardinals and one pope (Martin V, 1368–1431), and continued to play a central, if often problematic, role in the ever-shifting power alliances

of pope, emperor and foreign rulers that governed political and religious decision-making on the Italian peninsula The Colonna, whose family seat was

in Marino, uncomfortably close to Rome, had a long-standing reputation for seeking to ally themselves with the imperial powers in an attempt to maintain

a relationship of quasi-independence from the pontificate, and historically this bid for freedom had caused the family’s frequent excommunication and the confiscation by various popes of their lands and possessions.13 At the beginning

of the sixteenth century, however, peaceful relations were more or less restored

through the mediation of Julius II and the pax romana, and despite the Sack

of Rome and the later Salt Wars, the Colonna family’s standing in Rome remained relatively stable during the years of Vittoria Colonna’s lifetime.14 It is notable, too, that even during periods of tension Vittoria Colonna appears to have been able to maintain her good relations with the pope, a sign perhaps of her diplomacy and her usefulness as an intermediary who, precisely by virtue

of her political insignificance as a woman, was able to maintain a degree of autonomy from her family’s foreign policy.15

Vittoria was born in 1490 or possibly 1492, the second child of Fabrizio Colonna (d 1520) and Agnese da Montefeltro (1470–1506), at the family’s seat at Marino Fulfilling at a very young age her primary function as a female child, that is to act as a political pawn in the service of her family’s foreign policy, she was promised in around 1495 as future bride to Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos, Marchese di Pescara, the marriage taking place in December 1509

13 For a brief historical account of the Colonna family, see Agostino Attanasio, ‘Zur

Geschichte des Hauses Colonna’, in Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin

und Muse Michelangelo, pp 31–40.

14 On the Salt Wars of the early 1540s, see Domenico Tordi, ‘Vittoria Colonna

in Orvieto durante la guerra del sale’, Bolletino della Società Umbra di Storia Patria

1 (1895), 473–533 See also Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses,

and Religious Reform in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

2007) I am very grateful to the author for allowing me to read her manuscript prior to publication

15 Robin’s book provides useful detail on Colonna’s status as a political intermediary

VITTORIA COLONNA

20

on the island of Ischia.16 The union between the Colonna and the D’Avalos families was intended to concretise the loyalty of the former to the Spanish throne of Aragon, a move instigated by Fabrizio Colonna when, disillusioned with the lack of gratitude for his military prowess displayed by the French king, Charles VIII, in the wake of the conquest of Naples in 1494, he abandoned the French side the day after the victory and switched to the Aragonese camp.17

After her marriage, Colonna took up residence on Ischia, at the court of her new aunt by marriage, Costanza D’Avalos (1460–1541), where she benefited from the lively cultural life that flourished there under Costanza’s benign and erudite direction.18 Frequent visitors to Ischia included the Neapolitan poets Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), and il Cariteo (Benedetto Gareth, 1450–1514), among others, and the young bride’s exposure to some of the greatest lyric minds of the preceding generation may well have been influential

in awakening her own muse.19 Her husband, after a brief interlude of three years at home, absented himself from Ischia and his new wife’s side Together with his father-in-law, Fabrizio Colonna, he joined the imperial league against the French and in 1512 they departed for Ravenna to fight for the emperor’s cause.20

It is to the same year of 1512 that we can date the first extant poem by Vittoria Colonna Although there is some evidence of a body of works composed by her during her early married life that have never been traced, the date of 1512 was clearly decisive in marking the beginning of her public reputation as a poet, at least in Neapolitan circles, just as it also marked the beginning of her husband’s absence from home, an absence which was to endure more or less without interruption until his death in 1525.21 Without attempting to argue for

16 Fernando Calabrese, ed., Vittoria Colonna Corti e paese reale al tramonto del

Rinascimento Ricerca storico-bibliografica – Aggiornamenti di Fernando Calabrese in occasione del V o Centenario della nascita 1490–1990 (Comune di Marino: Biblioteca

civica “V Colonna”, 1990), p 15; see also Ippolita di Majo, ‘Vittoria Colonna, il

Castello d’Ischia e la cultura delle corti’, in Ragionieri, ed., Vittoria Colonna e

Ischia’, in Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos,

pp 67–76

19 A Latin poem by Sannazaro in honour of Francesco Ferrante D’Avalos, Vittoria Colonna’s consort, was published in his collected Latin works in 1536: see Majo,

‘Vittoria Colonna’, in Ragionieri, ed., Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo, p 26.

20 Francesco D’Avalos’s reputation during his lifetime as a courageous and heroic

soldier is commemorated in the biography by his contemporary, Paolo Giovio, Le vite

del gran Capitano e del Marchese di Pescara, trans by Ludovico Domenichi (Bari:

Laterza, 1931)

21 Bullock refers to seven early verses composed by Colonna during her husband’s

lifetime that have never been traced in manuscript or print: see Colonna, Rime, ed by

THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE PUBLISHING PHENOMENON 21

a direct relationship between the two events, one can nevertheless see clearly how a Petrarchan programme might begin to gain currency and impetus at the moment when the poet was effectively abandoned by her consort This

early work is an Epistola addressed to her husband after his imprisonment

by the French in Ravenna together with her father Fabrizio.22 The poem has been described as a ‘letter of recommendation’ from Colonna to Neapolitan society, primarily due to its clear use of canonical classical and early vernacular sources, almost as if as a means of advertising the poet’s erudition and the soundness of her literary qualifications as she made this early foray into the literary arena.23

It seems particularly significant that in this early poem, Colonna chooses

to long poetically for the presence and guidance not only of her husband, but also of her father:

del padre la pietà, di te l’amore,

come doi angui rabidi affamati

rodendo stavan sempre nel mio core.24

The dual male influence evoked in the poem reinforces the sense in which the poet encloses her voice and lyric within strictly defined limits, as a young woman still, married but unchaperoned, who calls upon the male authorities to which society demands that she submit This is a notably safe poetic position, yet one that also allows her an active plurality of roles as she simultaneously mourns her husband and father (as well as her ‘adopted son’, Alfonso D’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, who was imprisoned with the other men).25 Significantly, even from within the safe confines of paternal and husbandly control and overt reference to the influence of canonical works by male authors, she nonetheless goes on to lay claim to considerable influence of her own as guarantor of her husband’s victory:

Bullock, p 223 Tobia Toscano has identified one in vita sonnet from this early period

in a Sienese manuscript from the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, MS V.E.52: see Tobia

Toscano, Letterati corti accademie La letteratura a Napoli nella prima metà del 500

(Naples: Loffredo, 2000), pp 17–19

22 Reprinted in Colonna, Rime, ed by Bullock, pp 53–6 The Epistola was first published in Fabrizio Luna’s Vocabulario di cinq; Mila Vocabuli Toschi (Naples:

Giovanni Sultzbach, 1536)

23 This judgement was made by Johann Wyss in Vittoria Colonna und ihr

Kanzoniere (Frauenfeld: Verlag Huber, 1916), p 72.

24 ‘Pity for my father, and love for you, / like two rabid, famished serpents / were

ever gnawing at my heart’: Colonna, Rime, ed by Bullock, p 53, lines 10–12.

25 On the assertive use of this plurality of roles in Colonna’s poetry, see Abigail

Brundin, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’, Modern Language Review 96 (2001),

61–81 (p 65) This usage appears to have its roots in Petrarch’s highlighting of the

three roles adopted simultaneously by the Virgin Mary: see Petrarch’s Rime sparse 366, 46–7 (also Dante, Paradiso 33, 1).

VITTORIA COLONNA

22

se vittoria volevi io t’era a presso,

ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei.26

Frustratingly for the cause of literary history, this poetic beginning in 1512 does not generate further clear traces until much later, although Giorgio Patrizi states that Colonna met Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione in Rome

in 1520, an encounter which would indicate that her literary network was

by this date beginning to grow in important ways outside the Neapolitan context.27 Of a meeting with Bembo at this time no evidence remains, however, and while some correspondence with Castiglione exists beginning in 1524, including Colonna’s very flattering judgement of the linguistic and thematic

merits of the Cortegiano, which she has had the great privilege of reading in

manuscript, the few letters extant are primarily concerned with Castiglione’s pique at the ‘theft’ of his text by his correspondent.28 More concrete traces

of an active cultural life, if not of poetic output of any significance, exist in the many references to Colonna in works by her contemporaries in Naples from this period, which cite her as one of the most beautiful and illustrious noblewomen of Naples, as well as in some cases setting her up as the desired Petrarchan lady.29 This secondary presence is significant, although we should not necessarily take the proclamations at face value, as it indicates Colonna’s importance in the cultural life of her adopted city, as well as establishing at this very early stage a quality which would become central to her self-presentation

in later works As early as 1510 she is described under the name of ‘Dona

Porfida’ in a Spanish chivalric romance, the Dechado de amor by Vázquez,

in the company of her husband, the author stressing in particular the strength

of her wifely devotion, ‘que en estremo vos soys una.’30 It seems noteworthy that this important facet of her public persona appears so early, and is stressed

26 Lines 91–2 in Colonna, Rime, ed by Bullock, p 55: ‘if you wished for victory(a)

I was by your side, / but in leaving me you left her too’ The pun, of course, is entirely

reliant on the dual meaning of vittoria in Italian.

27 See DBI, vol 27, p 448 Patrizi fails to substantiate this claim, however, one

that seems to be based on the assumption that, as they were all in Rome in 1520, they

must have met Tobia Toscano surmises that Colonna must have destroyed her early in

vita verses, as their tone and content would not have fitted with the particular slant of

her later, mournful poetic voice: see Letterati corti accademie, p 20.

28 This famous quarrel is documented in Colonna, Carteggio, pp 23–7, as well as

in the preface to published editions of the Libro del cortegiano.

29 Full details of these references are given in Suzanne Therault, Un Cénacle

humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna châtelaine d’Ischia (Paris:

Didier; Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1968) Therault cites extensively from works

in Spanish and Italian The most famous example of Colonna’s role as the Petrarchan lady is in the poems of Girolamo Britonio, mentioned in note 3 See also Mirella Scala,

‘Encomi e dediche nelle prime relazioni culturali di Vittoria Colonna’, Periodico della

società storica comense 54 (1990), 95–112.

30 Cited in Therault, Un Cénacle humaniste, p 208 On the relationship between Spanish and Neapolitan cultural life in the Renaissance period, see Benedetto Croce, La

Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza (Bari: Laterza, 1922).

THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE PUBLISHING PHENOMENON 23time and again in the various works that mention her Although it is probably not unusual that a married noblewoman should be praised in this way, we can

see how the development of Colonna’s later public image as a univira, able to love only one man and devoted to his memory in eternis after his death, has

its roots in these very early beginnings, and how the praise that she garnered

as a young married woman fed into and qualified the subsequent development

of her lyric voice.31

Such allusions to wifely fidelity and devotion, intensified in the poetic

context of the 1512 Epistola by the fact that her husband was both absent

and in some danger, were taken in a new direction, one that was fundamental

to the future development of Colonna’s Petrarchism, by the next significant development in her life, the death of Francesco D’Avalos in December 1525, due to wounds received at the Battle of Pavia earlier in that year.32 Colonna, who was travelling northwards to reach him when she learned of her husband’s death, immediately retreated to the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome Her retreat into a nunnery and subsequent request to take her vows and remain there (a request that was roundly rejected by both Pope Clement VII and her brother Ascanio33) added a profound note of piety to her newly widowed status That her desire for a contemplative life within the walls of

a convent was thwarted by the more temporal ambitions of her brother and the pope, who no doubt hoped to remarry her and thus forge new political alliances, also served to increase the pathos of her image It is noteworthy that

in her poetry Colonna develops both these notes of piety and pathos, referring explicitly to her inability even to contemplate a new love (‘Né temo novo caldo, ché ’l vigore / del primo foco mio tutt’altri estinse’34), and carefully working and reworking the image of her dead husband until in her more mature verses

it is transformed entirely into the image of Christ

It is by no means unexpected that Colonna’s real and poetic worlds collide

at this juncture and one would not want to make unhelpful judgements about the ‘authenticity’, or lack thereof, of her poetic response to her husband’s death In fact it seems only fair to assume that her grief and desire for seclusion were entirely authentic More interesting than hypotheses about what she may

or may not have really felt is the realisation that this sequence of events and reactions, centring on the year 1525, was to become the deciding moment

31 Colonna’s devotion to the memory of D’Avalos and her refusal to remarry is highlighted in her poetry: see, most explicitly, ‘Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse’, in

Colonna, Rime, ed by Bullock, p 6.

32 Some biographical sources claim that D’Avalos was in fact poisoned by

conspirators acting on behalf of Pope Clement VII See Ferino-Pagden, ed., Vittoria

Colonna: Dichterin und Muse Michelangelos, pp 19–21.

33 On the pope’s letter to the nuns of San Silvestro, forbidding them from accepting

a request from Colonna to take her vows, see Alfredo Reumont, Vittoria Colonna

Vita, fede e poesia nel secolo decimosesto, trans by Giuseppe Müller and Ermanno

Ferrero (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1883), p 88

34 ‘Nor do I fear a new fire, for the heat / of my first flame extinguished all others’:

Colonna, Rime, ed by Bullock, p 6.