When Vittoria started to write her poems to Ferrante in the mid-1520s—in the end, she composed more than 130 sonnets—she broke entirely new ground for women’s poetry. There was a tradition in Italy of male poets writing sonnet cycles—long series of sonnets linked to one another to form a kind of narrative—which dated back to the thirteenth-century poet Guittone d’Arezzo, but was associated primarily with Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch). Petrarch’s Canzoniere, consisting of 366 poems, became the most imitated book of poetry ever written, and launched a sonnet vogue across all of Europe. Very little of this poetry was written by women, however, before Vittoria took up her pen, and no Italian woman had ever published a book of her own poems before Vittoria’s Rime appeared in 1538. Thus Vittoria was a pioneer both in reversing the usual gender roles of the sonnet series—for the first time, a woman was writing poems to her husband, and not a husband (or more often, a lover) to his wife or mistress—and in having her sonnets to Ferrante circulate in print.
One of the most striking features of Petrarch’s Canzoniere was that his beloved, Laura—whom he probably never spoke to at any length in real life and certainly did not know well—died two-thirds of the way through his series. Despite her death, Petrarch did not miss a beat: he talked to Laura’s spirit in heaven on a regular basis, and even received reassurances from her that she was waiting for him there. Laura’s death, in fact, turned out to be something of a vindication. After decades of loving her without any real contact between them—“Love held me,” Petrarch exclaims in one of the last poems in the series, for “twenty-one years gladly burning in the fire and full of hope amid sorrow,” and then for “ten more years of weeping”—the celestial Laura confides to him that she expects them to spend eternity together.* “Peace be with you,” she tells him, “here never again, no, but we shall meet again elsewhere.”†
Vittoria read the Canzoniere carefully—there are many echoes of Petrarch’s poems in her own—and the final sequence of 103 poems that many Renaissance editions labeled “in morte di Madonna Laura” (“upon the death of my lady Laura”) resonated powerfully with her feelings as a widow. Yet however much she both admired and imitated Petrarch, her own in morte poetry assumed a very different emotional tone. For Petrarch, the transition from loving Laura while she was alive to loving her when she was dead was relatively seamless (it helped, of course, that they did not have a real relationship). Vittoria’s poems, by contrast, reflect her active struggle to maintain a connection with her deceased husband. She was not nearly so gifted a poet—he was one of the greatest lyric poets ever to have lived—but her sonnets reveal much more of her lived experience than we ever glean about Petrarch from the Canzoniere. Vittoria’s sonnets are compelling less as poetic artifacts than as personal confessions.
The idea that writing sonnets liberated Vittoria to express her grief might at first seem counterintuitive. After all, the sonnet was a highly restricted and inflexible form: its rhyme scheme and meter had to follow certain patterns, its length of fourteen lines was nonnegotiable. But it is entirely possible that Vittoria was attracted to the sonnet because, not in spite, of its formal limits. For someone who had hoped to spend her life in a nunnery performing ritualized cycles of prayer and worship, the discipline of the sonnet may well have been its chief attraction. Like the cloister, it was a completely enclosed form. Indeed, Vittoria seems to have thrived on creative constraints, which heightened rather than hindered her self-expression. Within the confines of the sonnet, she found her poetic voice.
Vittoria had already written poetry before she began the posthumous sonnets to Ferrante. How much she had written is not clear, since only one poem from earlier in her life has survived: the long verse epistle she composed for Ferrante in 1512 after his capture at the Battle of Ravenna. But the fact that several of her contemporaries referred to her as a poet in the decade before Ferrante’s death confirms that she was both composing and sharing poems at the time. Some of the praise she received in that period was quite extravagant. The first time her name appeared in print was in a 1519 collection of poems, La gelosia del Sole (The Sun’s Jealousy), by the Neapolitan poet Girolamo Britonio, who met Vittoria at Costanza’s salon in Ischia in 1512 and became one of her great admirers; he dedicated the first book of his poems to her. Britonio writes that the god Apollo—patron of music and poetry—became jealous of Vittoria’s gifts after hearing her poetry, and grudgingly named her “this gentle new Phoenix in the world.” Sometime around 1520, a second Neapolitan poet, Iacopo Campanile (known as Capanio), also a member of Costanza’s literary circle, declared Vittoria “a new Apollo.”
In a similar spirit, an anonymous artist made a portrait medal of Vittoria, just under two inches in diameter, that seems to be modeled after the image of Sappho that Raphael had recently painted in his Parnassus fresco for the Stanza della Segnatura in the papal apartments of the Vatican Palace. It is not clear when the medal was struck, but the fact that there is an image of Ferrante on the reverse side suggests it was done during their marriage, and Vittoria is certainly not portrayed as a widow, as she is on other medals made later in her life. She is shown in profile wearing a draped classical garment, her hair loosely tied back and knotted on the top of her head; several locks drop onto her neck, and her left breast is bare. We do not know who commissioned the medal, but these portraits were a popular way for the Italian elite to share their images with friends and admirers, and they were steadily exchanged within Vittoria’s social circle. If she commissioned the medal, it is worth registering that she may have already been imagining herself—in the years before Ferrante’s death—as a poet.
Unattributed medal of Vittoria Colonna and Ferrante d’Avalos (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
There is no question that Vittoria wrote poems during her marriage, and she may even have come to identify herself as a Renaissance Sappho. But it was only after her widowhood that she embarked on a major poetic project. Whether she actually made the decision to write a series, modeling herself after Petrarch and the scores of male poets who had imitated him, or simply wrote the sonnets one at a time until they ultimately achieved a critical mass, remains unclear. But she left several clues about her purpose behind.
First, Vittoria never bothered to put the sonnets in any particular order, nor did she establish which of the multiple versions she wrote for many of the sonnets was her final version. This has made editing her poetry a complex task, and helps to explain why there is still no authoritative edition, even in Italian. Given the fact that the poems were published many times during her lifetime—we will discuss these publications later on—she could easily have made sure that they were printed in the order and form that she preferred. The fact that she never did so makes it difficult to believe that she was particularly concerned about how they would be read.
Second, on the few occasions when Vittoria commented on her reasons for writing the sonnets, she described something more like psychotherapy than literary ambition. The very first line that most readers would have seen when they opened one of the early printed editions of the sonnets was this: “I write only to vent my inward pain” (“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia”). This very personal sense of what she was doing is worlds away from how Petrarch, for example, begins the Canzoniere, which opens with a very self-conscious gesture toward his audience: “You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound / of those sighs with which I nourished my heart / in my first, youthful error.”* Vittoria is speaking to herself, Petrarch to his public.
The rest of Vittoria’s first sonnet intensifies this sense of privacy:
I write only to vent my inward pain
sent to my heart by his eyes without peer,
and not to add more light to my fair Sun,
to his distinguished spirit and honored flesh.
I have good reason to express my fear
that I reduce his glory through my rhymes,
he who merits greater voices, wiser words
to s
pare his name from the reach of death.
May the purity of my faith, the depth
of my passion serve to justify me
since neither time nor reason relieves my grief.
Tears born of bitterness, and not sweet song,
sighs draped in darkness, and not voice serene,
will redeem not my style, but my sorrow.*
Perhaps in her mourning she has forgotten or at least put aside all memories of Ferrante’s flaws—she refers to him not only here, but throughout the sonnets, as her “Sun,” and imagines his glory to have no equal. And yet, she understands her own task not as one of enhancing his fame—this she claims she would leave to “greater voices, wiser words”—but simply as expressing her sadness. This theme of her weakness as a poet surfaces repeatedly: she declares in a later sonnet, for example, that she resists using a file (lima) to polish her poems, and does not like to “adorn or erase my rough, unsophisticated verse.”† Perhaps this was a useful strategy for her to adopt as a woman working in a genre so entirely dominated by men, or perhaps she truly felt inadequate in the face of what she perceived as Ferrante’s great heroism.
The claim to substitute weeping for style is in tension, however, with the sonnets’ technical perfection. Vittoria does not usually deviate from the traditional Petrarchan model, in which the fourteen lines divide into an octave, made up of two groups of four lines each known as a quartina, or quatrain, with a rhyme scheme of abba abba, followed by a sestet, which introduces either two or three new rhyming words, forming two groups of three lines, known as terzine, or tercets (cdc cdc, cde cde, or a variant on this pattern). Not only does she follow this formula carefully, but she also tends to use a limited number of metaphors so that the images she introduces early in the poem are almost always carried through, without great variation, to the end. In this sense, Vittoria was not a great exploiter of the volta, or turn, at line 9, which is where the drama of the Italian sonnet occurs: in leaving behind the first set of rhymes, the poet often makes a significant change in position, so that both form and content shift. (In the Shakespearean sonnet, which features three quatrains, the most striking transition is usually in the final couplet.) Vittoria’s sonnets, by contrast, usually reflect a single mood, or explore a particular problem, without radical changes in positions. This somewhat static use of the genre, combined with her rigorous adherence to rhyme and meter, can make the poems feel less compelling; Michelangelo, for example, with whom she exchanged many poems later in her life, was a more idiosyncratic, and therefore often more original, sonneteer.
It is also the case that Vittoria’s declaration in the first sonnet that she is writing only for herself is belied by many subsequent poems in which she makes clear that she anticipates an audience, whom she is eager to impress. It is the intensity of her grief, however, and not the quality of her verse, that she wants to convey. These sonnets seem driven by two central motivations: to bestow more praise on Ferrante, and to receive more recognition for the gravity of her loss. So she begins one sonnet with a reference to her “great immortal wound that assures me / of fresh pain as the long years go by,” and then declares: “I take pleasure in making known to the world / what I have always known.”* This mention of “the world” (“il mondo”) suggests she had in mind a large and presumably anonymous group of readers who would come to appreciate Ferrante’s heroic virtue through her poems. It is for this reason, she declares, that she pursues her poetic project, even if the writing itself is a daily reminder of his glory, which prevents her from moving past her mourning. The recognition she brings to her husband, she concludes, transforms her sorrow into a soave offesa, an injury that nonetheless brings pleasure.
This is the most positive account that Vittoria gives of her poems, and it is by no means a position she maintains. On another occasion, she worries precisely that the quality of her verse is so poor as to intensify her pain, and annoy those around her:
My grief pushed me to write, and yet I found
no style worthy of my noble cause,
so that I carry hidden in me the pain
of my error, so much that it hurts my heart.
My sad song, which grows only sadder with time,
annoys others more than it comforts me;
I fear in truth it has so little merit
that it would be for the best to be quiet.
Perhaps, she concludes, she should simply keep her suffering to herself:
It helps neither me, nor my luminous saint;
since his valor and suffering surpass
even what Mount Helicon might express.
The time has come for me to hide the fire
that burns within, and dry my outward tears,
only those in my heart will live and die.*
On the one hand, she wanted to give voice to her grief as part of her private process of mourning. On the other hand, she wanted her mourning to be admired by others, and feared their disapproval so much that she claimed to consider putting an end to her poetry altogether. She was clearly torn.
Whatever Vittoria’s hopes for her readership, her poems succeeded in giving voice to her personal experience in a manner that surpassed all but a handful of her letters. In this respect, her aim of venting her pain—the verb sfogare, which she uses in the first line of the first sonnet, means literally to allow liquids or gases to flow openly—seems to have been achieved. To work through the full collection of her sonnets to Ferrante is to come to understand not only her sadness about her widowhood, but also her reluctance to remarry, her regret over not having children, her feelings of despair, her expectations for her afterlife. It is to glimpse Vittoria as intimately as possible.
What do we learn about Vittoria’s inner life from reading her sonnets? We already knew that she wanted to be a nun, and this meant that she was imagining a future without men. But in her sonnets, she explains her certainty that she is incapable of ever loving again. “Love wrapped me in so noble a flame,” she begins one poem,
that even once out it continues to burn.
Nor do I fear new fire, since the first
is so strong it extinguishes all others.
So rich a bond ties me to that fine yoke,
that my heart disdains all lesser chains.
It feels no longer either hope or fear,
Since one fire inflames it, one knot binds it tight.
“A single pungent arrow afflicts my breast,” she continues,
so that it keeps alive the immortal wound,
it shields all other love from entering.
Love consumed the passion where once he lit it,
he broke the bow with his enduring shot,
he melted his knots in tying this one.*
This is a good example of how Vittoria uses the sonnet to express a single idea. The metaphors may shift from fire to arrow to knot, but there is no volta at line 9, no rethinking or reversing her position. Instead, the accumulation of images is meant to strengthen her point: that her love for Ferrante, however unreciprocated, affected her so deeply that she considered herself finished with romantic love. As we shall see, this did not prevent her from forming profound attachments to several men over the next decades. But it was her strong conviction in the sonnets that Cupid “broke his bow,” and was done with her forever.
We knew that Vittoria was in deep mourning after Ferrante’s death. But only in her sonnets do we learn that she had contemplated taking her own life. Given how religious she was, this is truly surprising, and it shows that grief brought her to what might today be diagnosed as severe depression. What stopped her from taking her own life was not her awareness of the church’s prohibition against suicide, and her fear of the punishment that would follow. Her primary concern was more romantic, and less pious. In one of the only long poems—a canzone of seventy-six lines—that she wrote in her widowhood, she compares herself to Brutus’s wife, Portia, who killed herself in despair following her husband’s absence and change in fortune after
his murder of Julius Caesar. As the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch related in his Life of Marcus Brutus, a text Vittoria may well have known in its Latin translation (it did not appear in Italian until 1543), Portia “snatched some burning charcoal out of the fire, and shutting it close in her mouth, stifled herself, and died.”
For Vittoria, what differentiates her own situation from that of the Roman matron is that Portia did not have expectations for a better life after death: “with little hope / of another better life, she gave herself other wings.” As Vittoria imagines it, Portia thought her suicide would bring her to a complete, annihilating end—what Portia’s contemporary the great Roman poet Catullus famously described as an eternal sleep (“nox est perpetua una dormienda”) without any subsequent consequences. But in a Christian universe, death was followed by judgment, and Vittoria was concerned about the life to come:
In my heart a quick and mortal sorrow
grips me without end, and only the hope
of my serene soul for immortal life
restrains me from my burning desire.
Not only the fear of eternal pain
but the longing for my Sun holds me back.*
She worries, in short, that by committing suicide she will be sent to hell, and hence will never have the chance to meet Ferrante again. This is a fear she repeats in a second poem:
So heavy are the thoughts that afflict me,
and dominate my mind, my heart, my soul,
that life is to me pure bitterness,
and my body a tedious weight …
The time will come when either my sorrow
defeats me, or by his help I am called
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