Renaissance Woman
Page 3
Ferrante was in the grip of his frustration with Charles when the Italian league approached him. Torn about what to do, he turned to Vittoria for advice. This is one of the only traces in the historical record of Vittoria and Ferrante actually consulting each other about a major decision: it hints at something like intimacy between them, which is otherwise not much in evidence. According to Giovio, who quoted a letter of Vittoria’s in Ferrante’s biography (the letter itself has not survived), she was very agitated about the league’s offer. However ambitious Vittoria was on Ferrante’s behalf, she did not want him to compromise his service to the emperor. And although she came from a Roman family, her father, as we have seen, spent the last decades of his career working directly for the Spanish kings of Naples. She wrote to her husband that “not with the grandeur of kingdoms and states and fine titles but with illustrious faith and renowned virtue is honor acquired,” and urged him to reject the offer. In conclusion, she declared that she did not want to be a queen, but preferred to be the wife of an honest captain whose virtue was so strong as to defeat the greatest of kings.
There is no way to know how close Ferrante came to accepting the Italians’ offer. Some historians think he was only playing along to curry favor with Charles by ultimately revealing the plot to him, and thereby proving the depth of his loyalty. Sometime during the fall of 1525, however, he turned down the possibility of becoming king of Naples, and reaffirmed his allegiance to the empire. His renewed pledge to Charles was not made quietly: it was the stuff of Renaissance theater. After betraying the Italians’ plans to Charles, Ferrante agreed to stage a conversation with Francesco II’s agent, Morone, during which one of Charles’s advisers was hidden, like Shakespeare’s Polonius, behind an arras. Morone was exposed, and subsequently arrested. He never forgave Ferrante. According to the sixteenth-century historian Francesco Guicciardini, Morone remarked that “there was not a man in Italy of greater Malignity, or of less Faith than the Marquis of Pescara.” Guicciardini’s own estimation of Ferrante was not so very different: he criticized him for “mak[ing] himself great out of the sins of others procured by his own deceits and subtleties.” Only a decade or so after Machiavelli’s composition of The Prince—and it is worth keeping in mind that Guicciardini knew Machiavelli well—Ferrante was recognized as a truly Machiavellian character.
In the weeks between the betrayal of Morone, who was arrested on October 15, and the dispatching of the letter to Vittoria in November, Ferrante had taken new military action against Milan. With an army of several thousand German soldiers and some five hundred Spaniards, his troops besieged the Sforza fortresses in both Milan and Cremona, and forced the Milanese citizens to swear their allegiance to the emperor. It was in the midst of these events that his health took a decisive turn for the worse. Given the number of people he had either deceived or disappointed, there were also rumors that he may have been poisoned.
Ferrante’s near-betrayal of Charles followed by his actual betrayal of the Italians, his lack of reward or compensation, the miserable state of his health—all of this would have been in Vittoria’s mind when she received the request to come to Milan. The journey before her was in itself a daunting one, and much longer than any other trip she had thus far taken in her life. It would start at the castle gates, from which she and her retinue—she was always accompanied by a number of personal maids as well as valets—would travel by horse, down the long tunnel to the base of the islet’s rock, and then cross the bridge to Ischia’s port. They would then take a small boat to Naples, where the long passage to the north, probably in a carriage, would begin.
The fastest route to Milan was by sea, and most travelers coming from the south sailed to the northern port of Genoa, whence they made only the final leg of the journey by land; the average time for this trip was around nine days. Perhaps due to stormy seas, or to the risk of encountering pirates, Vittoria’s journey was planned entirely on land, which would have taken close to two weeks to complete. Even to get from Naples to Rome, a distance of approximately 140 miles, took an average of two to three days; the distance Vittoria was to travel to Milan was roughly 400 miles. Given that the messenger who brought her the news had just made the same trip that she was taking, and allowing that he would have traveled much more quickly than a noblewoman accompanied by servants and making frequent stops along the way, the time between when Ferrante sent the news and when Vittoria was likely to reach him would have been at least three weeks. The chances of her finding him alive were slight.
There is no record of how Vittoria felt as she embarked on her journey. Our best sources for her private thoughts are her poems and letters, none of which has survived from the fall of 1525. What has survived, however, is a beautiful verse epistle—a letter written in the form of a poem—which she wrote to Ferrante at a similarly difficult moment in 1512, and the feelings she expressed on that occasion give us some sense of how she might have felt thirteen years later. In both cases, Ferrante was away at war and in a position of great danger. In 1512, Ferrante and her father were fighting on behalf of the Spanish in a series of campaigns against the French in the north of Italy; as in 1525, Vittoria had been left behind on Ischia with Costanza. In the verse epistle, she describes both waiting desperately for news—“Never did a pilgrim come from whom / I did not seek to learn news, thing by thing / to make my mind joyous and happy”—and feeling overwhelmed with premonitions from the island: “When, at one point, I saw the rock where I rest / (my body, as my spirit is already with you) / covered with a dark mist / and the air around seemed like a cave / of black fog.” “The sirens and dolphins were weeping,” she adds, “and the fishes, too.”*
Just as Vittoria comes to a point of total darkness both in her spirit and in her surroundings, a messenger arrives with news that her husband and her father have been taken captive at the Battle of Ravenna. She reacts, somewhat surprisingly, with more anger than fear. The poem ends with a series of accusations directed at Ferrante, which are far franker than anything we see in her later writings: “If you wanted Victory [vittoria], I would have been with you / but you, leaving me behind, also left Her”; “One should follow one’s husband both at home and abroad / if he suffers grief, let her suffer too; / if he is happy, so, too, is she, and if he dies, let her die with him”; “You live happily and feel no pain / since you think only of how you might acquire more fame; / you do not care that you leave me starving for your love.”* Her only comfort is the presence of “magnanimous” Costanza, who reassures her in the poem that the men will return from this defeat to glory. This turned out to be true in 1512: Ferrante and Fabrizio were both released, and went on to further triumphs. But it is hard to imagine comparable words of comfort being spoken in 1525.
However unhappy Vittoria may have been as she bid farewell to Costanza and set off on her journey, it is tempting to think that a part of her also felt some sense of liberation. Although she clearly loved the isolation and beauty of Ischia, the feelings she had already expressed in 1512 of being trapped by her position as a wife must have been all the stronger thirteen years later. Whether or not she suspected it, her descent from the castle through the dark tunnel out toward the open sea was also a new beginning.
2
DONNING WIDOW’S WEEDS
VITERBO IS A WALLED CITY, with many gates. There is no record of exactly where Vittoria arrived in early December 1525 when she and her entourage stopped in Viterbo, roughly fifty miles north of Rome, on their way to Milan—it was most likely Porta San Sisto, now known as Porta Romana, the most common entrance for visitors from the south—but it is certain that she traveled no farther. Awaiting her was a messenger bearing the tragic news that Ferrante had died (the date of his death is not certain but was sometime between November 25 and December 3, 1525). How it was known that she would be arriving at Viterbo that day, or whether the messenger had been waiting for her for some time, is not clear. Perhaps there was an available itinerary of sorts, or perhaps there were simply networks of
servants who knew the comings and goings of their masters. Legend has it that upon hearing the news, Vittoria promptly swooned and fell off her horse.
It’s hard to believe that Vittoria was actually making the journey from Naples to Milan on horseback. Women of her class did regularly ride horses—one of the grandest of all Renaissance women, Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, described many trips on horseback in her personal letters—but for a trip of this length, Vittoria was more likely to have been traveling either by mule or by carriage. Carriages had only recently come into vogue as a mode of transportation, and were specifically used by aristocratic women; they spread next to clergymen, and finally to noblemen in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The detail of Vittoria’s falling from her horse may simply have been invented to enhance the story: falling from a mule, or fainting inside a carriage, has a less dramatic ring. Legend also tells us that it took her two hours to revive.
Portrait of Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, by Titian (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
When Vittoria recovered from her state of shock, she found herself confronted with a set of difficult decisions. She was thirty-five years old, a widow, and childless. This last detail—her childlessness—was perhaps her greatest source of sadness. She wrote about her infertility on several occasions in her surviving letters and poems, and tried to cheer herself up with the idea that although she had not given birth to Ferrante’s child, she had at least borne his fame. In one sonnet, she declares:
Our bodies were sterile, our souls fecund,
and his valor combined with my name
makes me mother to his glorious offspring,
which lives immortal.*
It is difficult not to hear in these lines a note of self-justification: the principal aim of marriage within the Italian aristocracy was to produce an heir. Her match with Ferrante had been, in the most fundamental sense, a failure.
The terrible burden of having failed to provide her husband with children was compounded by Vittoria’s feelings of inadequacy, given Ferrante’s long history of infidelity. Already within the first year or two of their marriage, he fell in love with the beautiful Isabel de Requesens, the wife of Don Ramón de Cardona, viceroy of Naples, whose splendid portrait can be seen today at the Louvre (see color plate 4). Although Ferrante’s passion seems to have been unrequited, it was widely known in Neapolitan society and became a source of great embarrassment for Vittoria. At a grand party in Naples thrown by Isabella d’Aragona, the daughter of Alfonso II, king of Naples, and the widow of the would-be duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Sforza (whose title had been usurped by his uncle Ludovico), Ferrante had embarrassed himself with behavior worthy of a besotted teenager. According to a sixteenth-century chronicler known as Filonico Alicarnasso, whose source was Paolone, the music tutor for both Isabella d’Aragona and Isabel de Requesens, Ferrante stole a kiss from his beloved Isabel, and scribbled a short love poem to her—in the form of a Spanish song—on the surface of the tambourine that Paolone was playing. The chronicler also reported that Ferrante had been so bold as to give Isabel one of Vittoria’s necklaces, a beautiful string of pearls and precious gems. Isabel supposedly returned the necklace directly to Vittoria with a note advising her to keep better watch over her jewelry.
Several years later, Ferrante fell madly in love with a noblewoman from Mantua named Delia, one of the ladies-in-waiting to Isabella d’Este. (There is at least one account that she was also Vittoria’s damigella, or lady servant, at some point.) This time there seems to have been a full-blown affair. We know a little bit about it, or at least about Ferrante’s feelings, from the letters he exchanged with one of Isabella’s courtiers, the humanist Mario Equicola, who served as his go-between. Ferrante mentioned enclosing secret letters for Delia inside his letters to Equicola, and confessed to his friend that she was the source of “all my well-being, my every lofty thought and every grace.” In the last letter exchanged between the two men, Ferrante also expressed his fervent hope that he would see Delia again before he died.
There are no similar letters from Ferrante declaring his love or desire for Vittoria, and judging from everything we know about their marriage, they were not well suited. Ferrante was at heart a soldier, who thrived on military conquest. There are few signs of his having much of an intellectual life, and his moral compass was, at best, mutable. Vittoria was a quiet and strict young woman whose favorite activities seem to have been reading and praying. At the time of their marriage, Ferrante spoke mostly Spanish—according to his biographer Giovio, “his clothes were always in the Spanish manner, and he always took great delight in that language”—and Vittoria knew only Italian, although Giovio claimed the couple adopted Spanish habits, and that Ferrante spoke Spanish with her.
Ferrante was dashing and passionate: Giovio described him as “handsome to look at in the flower of his age, with a beard that stood out for its reddish tint, his aquiline nose, his eyes large and full of fire” (see color plate 5). Vittoria’s appearance was much less fiery, and by all accounts more severe. According to Giovio, she had raven black hair with gold highlights, arched brows, and a wide forehead. He praised her “mouth smoothed out in accordance with good manners, in a rather fleshy chin,” and her nose as having “a very slight bridge,” which, he conceded, “could convey a manly aspect, [but] does not deprive her of any of her feminine beauty, even though it gives her a stern look” (see color plate 6). Another contemporary described her more frankly as “not being a great beauty,” but distinguished instead by the virtues of her soul. The most striking portrait of her, by Sebastiano del Piombo and dated sometime around 1525, confirms these impressions (see color plate 7). Vittoria is depicted as a serious young woman, with a rather large frame that looks as if it was carved from a block of stone. Although she meets the viewer’s eye, she seems to do so with some reluctance, and there is nothing remotely seductive or coy about her.
As with other members of their class, the match between Ferrante and Vittoria had not been their choice. Indeed, to make a marriage between two noble families in sixteenth-century Italy was closer to negotiating a treaty between nations than to forging a domestic union. The engagement had initially been agreed upon sometime between 1495 and 1497, when Ferrante was between six and eight years old and Vittoria one year younger. The union formed part of the new alliance between the Colonna family and the kingdom of Naples, following Vittoria’s father, Fabrizio, and his cousin Prospero’s entering the service of Ferdinand II. The d’Avalos family, as we have seen, arrived in Italy with the first Spanish kings in the mid-fifteenth century, and rose to be one of the most powerful households in the reign.
Vittoria’s dowry of fourteen thousand ducats was an enormous sum at the time. In Renaissance Italy, dowries had actually become so extravagant that many cities imposed ceilings on their maximum value in order to prevent families’ expending their entire fortunes to marry off their daughters. In 1471, Rome passed a statute making it illegal for a dowry to exceed eight hundred florins—roughly the equivalent of eight hundred ducats—a sum that was raised to two thousand ducats in 1532. (In Florence, by contrast, the city actually created a public dowry fund for parents to invest in beginning around their daughter’s fifth birthday, a development that apparently led to further inflation in the average dowry’s value.) Vittoria’s dowry, then, was nearly twenty times the maximum amount set by Roman law in 1471. There is no record, however, of any penalties exacted for this violation, and the Colonna family may have been given an exemption, since the marriage was to a foreigner. Of the fourteen thousand ducats, twelve thousand were dispersed in separate cash distributions to be made during the first year of marriage; the remaining two thousand ducats were distributed as personal property listed in a separate document that has not survived.
In addition to the dowry, there were also expensive gifts given to Ferrante that were not to be returned to Vittoria if he predeceased her, but would remain with the groom’s family or heirs. This was a var
ied list, which was valued at approximately two thousand ducats and included: a French-style bed with curtains, bedding, three mattresses, and four pillows (all adorned with ornaments in gold thread and indigo taffeta stitching); a mule bridle of gold thread; precious stones; several gamurra gowns (a style of dress fashionable at the time) brocaded in rich silks as part of Vittoria’s trousseau; and sheets of damask, which, according to the contract, must be of the “brightest colors.” Ferrante’s family in turn made expensive gifts to Vittoria: a diamond cross on a gold chain; brocaded gowns adorned with velvet or silk fringes; bodices of crimson and indigo silk; a cape of yellow silk adorned with black velvet; a mantle of crimson velvet and another of white silk stitched with jacquard brocade; twelve gold bracelets with inlaid gems in three colors; and other precious jewelry (possibly including the necklace Ferrante subsequently gave to Isabel de Requesens). These gifts were valued at 4,666 ducats.
There is no way to know what Vittoria’s life was like between the announcement of her engagement in 1495 and the signing of the nuptial contract in 1507—no traces from this period survive. She may well have spent her entire childhood, however, from age five to seventeen, without ever meeting her future husband. The preliminary signing of the wedding contract took place on June 6, 1507, at the Colonna castle in Marino, although Ferrante was not present. The first known encounter between the engaged couple was one week later, on June 13, when the contract was officially executed by a notary in Naples, with all parties in attendance. Following the signing of the contract, Vittoria’s family held an extravagant party in their beautiful palace on Via Mezzocannone, a home that had belonged to their enemies the Orsini, until it was given to Fabrizio by Ferdinand II.