Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  San Silvestro in Capite was a beautiful church established in the eighth century, possibly on the ruins of a pagan temple dedicated to Sol Invictus, the god of the sun. Christians loved to build churches on the ruins of pagan temples—it was a gesture of aggression on the one hand, and superstition on the other. We might understand it as a version of Pascal’s wager—the idea put forward in Pascal’s Pensées that either God exists or he does not exist, so we’re best off to wager on God. “Let us weigh the gain and the loss,” Pascal writes, “in wagering that God exists. Let us estimate these two probabilities; if you win you win all; if you lose, you lost nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He does exist.” The convent’s name, “in capite,” literally “in (or with) the head,” most likely refers to the church’s most famous relic—a piece of a skull claimed to be St. John the Baptist’s, which is kept in a splendid shrine from the fourteenth century in the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows. Although the church still stands today, the convent is no longer there. Far from its original purpose of sheltering women from the world outside, the building was transformed in the late nineteenth century to house the Central Post Office, a bustling space overflowing with Romans sending letters and paying bills.

  The decision for Vittoria to go to San Silvestro in Capite—a decision that seems to have been made, as we shall see, by none other than Pope Clement VII—was not accidental. The church had been tied to the Colonna family since the late thirteenth century, when Vittoria’s celebrated ancestor known today as the Blessed Margherita was buried there (Margherita was beatified—hence the title “Blessed”—in the nineteenth century). By all accounts an extremely beautiful and intelligent girl, Margherita had angered her family by refusing to marry, and had instead become a nun, taking the veil at the Convent of Santa Chiara in Assisi.

  After her death in 1284 in the Colonna fief of Palestrina, Margherita’s tomb became a popular pilgrimage site. In 1285, Pope Honorius IV, who was a close friend of Margherita’s brother, Giacomo, decided to transfer her corpse to San Silvestro in Capite, and to honor her memory by bestowing the convent on the nuns of Santa Chiara, known in English as the Poor Clares. The order was founded in 1212 by a woman a few generations older than Margherita, Chiara di Favarone di Offreduccio, who was born in Assisi to noble parents but turned away from her family to follow the man known to history as Saint Francis, who had similarly rejected the wealth of his father, a cloth merchant named Pietro Bernardone, also from Assisi. Chiara made a vow to live a life of total poverty, refusing all personal possessions and inheritance. It is easy to imagine that Vittoria saw both Margherita and Chiara as models for the chaste and simple life she wanted to live.

  Vittoria’s decision to stay in a convent during her initial period of mourning was not uncommon—the nunnery was the Renaissance equivalent of a retreat—and there were at San Silvestro in Capite, as in nearly all monasteries, special quarters reserved for guests. She would have been welcome to pray with the nuns in their daily services, but also free to come and go as she pleased. The choice also meant that she avoided returning home with her brother Ascanio. Ascanio was a notoriously difficult man—many thought he was completely mad—and although Vittoria remained connected to him throughout her life, she saw his weaknesses very clearly. Ascanio’s marriage in 1518 to Giovanna d’Aragona, one of the most beautiful and accomplished women of the era, was notoriously unhappy. Despite their having six children together, Giovanna abandoned him in 1535 to live alone with the children on Ischia, and Vittoria quietly supported her sister-in-law’s decision. In a letter dated tentatively to 1536, Vittoria wrote to Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, Duchess of Urbino, that she was sure that “there has never from [Giovanna] been any defect whatsoever, in fact only the highest discretion and patience.”

  Ascanio, for his part, showed no resistance to leaving Vittoria at least for the time at the convent—who knows if he wanted to live with his pious sister any more than she wanted to live with him—and all would perhaps have been fine if Vittoria had not done something shocking. After she settled into her rooms at the convent, to the great astonishment of just about everyone, she evidently asked permission to remain there permanently. Vittoria wanted to become a nun.

  3

  LONGING FOR THE NUNNERY

  FEW WOMEN IN RENAISSANCE ITALY chose on their own to become nuns. The decision was usually made by parents, who either could not afford to pay for their daughter’s expensive dowry—they may have had older daughters whose marriages they had already arranged, or sons for whom they wanted to ensure an inheritance—or considered their daughter somehow ill-suited for marriage. Entering a convent was not free of charge: when the girl (or woman) took her vows, the family had to pay a “conventual dowry,” which was reserved, at least in theory, to pay for her individual needs over the years. In practice, the convent often used these dowries as loans to subsidize its expenses, and when the nun died, the sisters kept the capital. There were also additional fees known as vitilazi, which could be paid annually or in a single lump sum. Some nuns also had private servants accompany them to the convent, for whom families provided separate dowries. But all of these costs were relatively low compared with the exorbitant sums being paid for marriage dowries, weddings, and trousseaux. The convent remained the most affordable alternative to marrying off one’s daughter.

  For those who were forced to take the veil against their will, life in the convent often felt like a form of punishment. In the words of one very bitter nun from Venice, Arcangela Tarabotti, who wrote a treatise in the mid-seventeenth century entitled Tirannia paterna, or Paternal Tyranny: “Over the gate of Hell, Dante says, are inscribed the words, ‘Abandon every hope, who enter here.’ The same could be inscribed over the portals of convents.” Arcangela took her vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability in a Benedictine convent when she was sixteen. In her treatise, she lashed out against fathers like her own who “do not offer as brides of Jesus their most beautiful and virtuous daughters, but the most repulsive and deformed: lame, hunchbacked, crippled, or simple-minded. They are blamed for whatever natural defect they are born with and condemned to lifelong prison.” Such fathers were no better than murderous Cain, slaying their own kin: their long-suffering daughters, Arcangela railed, were “overwhelmed by despair at not finding some spiritual escape from the intricate labyrinth enclosing them.” Men like this were driven, she continued, solely by greed: “Ponder my words, judicious Reader, for I have undertaken to describe only in part the sacrilege of these inhumane men who mass together wealth, titles, and prestige for their male offspring … but who cast away as wretches their own flesh and blood that happen to be born female.”

  To someone like Arcangela, who had also authored a book with the uncompromising title Monastic Hell (L’Inferno monacale), Vittoria’s desire to become a nun would have been incomprehensible. No one had forced Vittoria to dedicate her life to serving God, and she had plenty of money to provide a dowry for a second marriage. She wanted not merely to become a nun, moreover, but also to join one of the traditionally strictest and poorest of orders. There were very fancy convents, usually either Dominican or Benedictine, with reputations for being filled with aristocratic nuns; their chapels were covered with jewels and gold, their dormitories adorned with the most sumptuous furnishings. Ferrante’s cousin Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini took up residence as a long-term guest in such a nunnery in Naples, where there were not only splendid decorations, but also social entertainments, and certainly such a choice was available to Vittoria. In fact, she would have been highly sought after by the nuns at the luxurious convents: her income would have helped to support annual costs, and her name would have added prestige.

  But Vittoria wanted to be a Poor Clare. The Poor Clares, as we have seen, were a branch of the Franciscans founded by the noblewoman Chiara di Offreduccio, to whom Francis gave permission to establish her own order, only three years after he himself established the Friars Minor, the first order of the Franciscans (the
Poor Clares were the second). Francis had been inspired by a sermon on the ninth and tenth verses of chapter ten in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Christ instructs his twelve apostles to go out with “neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, / Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.” After hearing this sermon, Francis made the decision to dedicate himself to a life of poverty and itinerant preaching. Clare fully embraced Francis’s commitment to poverty, but made certain adjustments appropriate for women’s monasticism. The Poor Clares did not share the Franciscan mission of preaching, but lived in enclosure, devoting their days to prayer and labor (thus their motto “ora et labora”). Once Vittoria had taken her vows, she would never have left the cloister.

  Daily life in a convent like San Silvestro in Capite began with the tolling of bells around 4:00 a.m. for morning chores—sweeping, dusting, opening windows, preparing for breakfast, and so on. The nuns then proceeded to the chapel for morning prayer, called Lauds, during which, as the sun began to rise, they praised God for creation. This was the first of eight liturgical hours, which consisted of reciting particular psalms and hymns, and made up the so-called Divine Office. Following Lauds, there was the office known as Prime, usually said at the first hour of full daylight, before the most important service of the day, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which was celebrated by a priest. This was the only service in which a priest was necessary, since, according to canon law, the nuns were not allowed to consecrate the Eucharist.

  After nourishing their souls, the nuns at San Silvestro in Capite had a very simple breakfast at around 8:30 a.m. The day continued in a combination of prayers and chores, with Terce, or midmorning prayers, at 9:00 a.m., and Sext at noon; this office was then followed by dinner, which was the only substantial meal of the day, served around 12:30. After the meal, there was a period of rest before returning again to the chapel for None, or midday prayers, at 3:00 p.m. Then there was more work either in the garden or in the cloisters until Vespers, or evening prayer, when it became dark. A light meal was served after this service, followed by one hour of daily recreation at around 6:30 p.m. The nuns returned to the chapel for Compline, or night prayer, sometime before 9:00 p.m., and then retired to their rooms for several hours of rest before being awakened at 12:30 a.m. for Matins, also known as Vigils.

  Meals in the convent were taken in silence, and officially complied with the rules of fasting. Fasting did not mean what it does today—a total abstinence from food—but instead referred to a diet in which very frugal fare was served at both breakfast and the evening meal. Sometimes this was “dry eating,” which consisted of bread, salt, and water; sometimes fruits and vegetables were also permitted, but there was permanent abstinence from meat. Saint Clare took the fasting one step further and urged the nuns to eat only once a day. She also practiced a special form of food deprivation during the forty days of Lent, in which she ate nothing at all on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  The extremity of this diet turned out, not surprisingly, to be harmful to Clare’s health, and Francis finally had to intervene to force her to take an ounce and a half of bread per day. (As we shall see, Vittoria found herself in a similar situation in the 1540s, when she was forced to eat against her will, for fear that she was starving.) There was a long history in medieval and Renaissance convents of what has been described as “holy anorexia,” where nuns believed the sustenance of the Eucharist wafer ought to provide sufficient nourishment for their bodies. As Jacques of Vitry, a thirteenth-century cardinal and historian, described it, some nuns “in receiving the bread of him who came down from heaven obtained not only refreshment in their hearts but a palpable consolation in their mouths sweeter than honey and the honeycomb … [They] languished with such desire for the sacrament that they could not be sustained … unless their souls were frequently refreshed by the sweetness of this food.”

  In addition to following this strict program of prayer and diet, Vittoria would also have adopted the dress of the nuns. Gone forever were the days of the crimson velvet gown and golden bonnet that she wore to Bona Sforza’s party; even her much more somber widow’s robes would have had no place in the convent. The Poor Clares wore loose-fitting gowns in gray, and tied a cord of thick rope around their waist. The belts had four knots, which represented the four vows of their order: poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. In addition to giving up her wardrobe, Vittoria would also not have been allowed to keep any personal property. The lands and estates, the jewelry and art—everything, in short, she had inherited from both her family and Ferrante—would have been given away. Outside of the nuns’ collective ownership of the convent and its gardens, their only possession was meant to be Jesus Christ himself.

  As a lay resident in San Silvestro in Capite, Vittoria would have had the freedom to come and go as she pleased, to dress as she liked, and to supplement the ordinary food of the nuns with delicacies of her own. She would have had the choice, in other words, to dedicate herself to religious devotion while also maintaining her independence. This made sense as something she might have chosen for herself. Indeed, it was common at the time for women to use convents, in effect, as residential hotels—it was not considered either safe or appropriate for women to lodge in public inns.

  It is much harder to believe that someone as sophisticated and wealthy as Vittoria, with so many friends and connections, wanted to turn away from it all and spend the rest of her days in the cloister. Perhaps her marriage to Ferrante had been even more traumatic than it seemed. Or perhaps her years spent in grand castles and palaces had not pleased her in the least. Above all, however, the desire must have reflected a religious vocation so strong that giving up everything in the secular world was not a renunciation, but a positive gain.

  Vittoria never got to find out whether life as a Poor Clare would have suited her, as the fates were against her fulfilling her dream. More accurately, the opposition came from the pope. When Clement found out that Vittoria wanted to take the veil—and the news apparently went straight to the pontiff himself—he explicitly forbade it. On December 7, 1525, less than two weeks after Ferrante’s death and presumably within days of Vittoria’s having heard the news, the pope sent a rather extraordinary brief to the nuns of San Silvestro. He began gently, declaring his profound sympathy for Vittoria’s loss and indicating his personal preference for her to recover in their convent:

  Knowing that the very honorable daughter in Christ, Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, recently deprived of her most illustrious husband, is struggling in her pain and in her tears, day after day, and that she desires to rest in a pious place, where she can serve God more freely and pray for the soul of her husband … to these ends we have chosen your monastery, which we know is also held in particular veneration by the entire Colonna family.

  Given the help and companionship Vittoria might require, he also kindly requested the nuns to allow her to bring three honest young ladies with her, and specified that “even if these women do not embrace your religion or enter into your order or change their worldly clothes,” they should be welcomed with true affection and given every form of comfort possible.

  So far, so good. At this point, however, the letter took a less friendly turn. Vittoria should be welcomed to the nunnery, of course, but under no circumstances should she be permitted to change her “widow’s costume to a monastic one.” Any desire she had to take holy vows, he wrote, owed more to an “impulsiveness in her grief than a mature conviction.” Therefore, he concluded, “we prohibit, under pain of immediate excommunication, that she be allowed admittance to your order without my express permission.”

  It may seem incredible that Clement took the time to worry about whether an individual woman, however prominent, should become a nun. Clement was a relatively new pope—he had been elected in late November 1523—and in 1525, his papacy was far from stable. First, there was the growing threat posed to the church by Protestantism. During the papacy of a predecessor—and
Clement’s cousin—Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), Martin Luther had posted his revolutionary Ninety-Five Theses. Despite Leo’s efforts to stop him, the German monk’s message of reform was spreading like wildfire throughout Europe, and Italy was not immune. Second, in the ongoing war between France and the Holy Roman Empire, Clement had switched his allegiance multiple times without ever choosing the winning side, and found himself in a political muddle. Most recently, he had participated enthusiastically in the Italian league’s efforts to fight Charles V—an effort that had failed, of course, due in part to Ferrante’s manipulations. Vittoria was therefore the widow of someone who had betrayed him, and the daughter of someone who had fought for decades on the side of the Spanish enemy. Given all of this, why would he not have been happy for her to be shut away behind the walls of San Silvestro in Capite?

  The only plausible answer to this question is that Pope Clement recognized Vittoria’s value to him as a sane and intelligent member of the Colonna family. To understand why this was so important, we need to remember that Vittoria’s brother Ascanio, who had inherited his father Fabrizio’s land and titles upon his death in 1520, was a volatile and difficult man. In addition to problems in his character, his loyalties were strongly with the emperor: he had served in Charles V’s army during the wars against the French in the north of Italy, and he had no sympathy for the pope. Indeed, there was no one Ascanio instinctively disliked more than Clement, and he challenged the pope’s authority over his lands at every step.