Whatever their earlier interactions, it was only at the congress begun in late 1529 that Bembo came to know Vittoria as a poet. In January 1530, one month after his arrival in Bologna, he sent her a letter in which he exclaimed, “Among the women in this art form you are more excellent than it seems possible for nature to concede to your sex.” “I have taken infinite pleasure [in your poems],” he added, “mixed with great marvel.” That this was not merely a compliment paid to a lovely and important woman is proved by a letter Bembo sent to his friend Vettor Soranzo several months later, in which he affirmed that Vittoria’s poetry was “truly fine and ingenious and serious, more than one would expect from a woman.”
It would be easy today to respond to these comments with some annoyance—why was it so astonishing for a woman to be writing good poems? But in a culture in which women had very rarely been recognized as authors, Bembo’s words represented a radical shift. Indeed, he was so impressed with Vittoria’s poetry that he sought her opinion of his own poems, and was dazzled by the sensitivity and intelligence of her response. In a letter that Vittoria sent to Giovio, but that was immediately passed on to Bembo, she declared:
No sonnet I read by anyone, contemporaries or ancients alike, can equal his … It seems the endings of his rhymes arrive so often when necessitated by his well-arranged syntax that their beautiful and gentle harmony is heard sooner in the soul than in the ear, and the more they get reread and the more often they are considered, the more they provoke admiration—in fact, I would say [they provoke] envy, if it were not such that my intellect feels so out of proportion to that light … I end up feeling totally in love with him, a love beyond any sensual desire.
Bembo was thrilled with Vittoria’s words, and wrote to Giovio that “she seems to have far more solid and well-founded a judgment, and can do a more detailed and thorough treatment of my poems, than what I see these days held and executed by the better part of the most knowledgeable men and the greatest teachers of these very things.” He also told Giovio to let Vittoria know that he was very eager to meet her but thought he was too old to travel to Ischia (twenty years her senior, he was sixty at the time). This was the beginning of a long and warm friendship—without, as she made clear in this letter, “any sensual desire” (“ogni sensuale appetito”)—in which the two exchanged not only sonnets but also portraits of each other as tokens of their affection. He sent to Vittoria a medal; she seems to have sent him a small painting.
The most visible proof of Bembo’s admiration for Vittoria was his decision to include a sonnet that she had written to him in the appendix to the 1535 edition of his poems. In Vittoria’s sonnet, she bemoans the inadequacy of her verse to do justice to Ferrante, and suggests that if a poet of Bembo’s stature had praised him instead, both he and her husband would have increased their earthly fame:
Alas, how cruel Fate was to my dear Sun
that with the noble virtue of his rays
he did not find you sooner, so that for thousands of years
you would be more famous, and he more praised.
His name, adorned with your style, would fill
the ancient poets with shame, our own
with envy, and in spite of time would save him
forever from the grip of a second death.*
In Bembo’s response, he praises Vittoria’s poetry, and demands that Apollo bestow upon her the poet’s laurel:
Crown the temples of this woman with the plant
beloved by you when it bore a human face,
since in her rare and elevated verse
she soars above even your finest poets.†
The “plant”—or, more literally, “sapling” (“arboscello”)—that Bembo refers to was the maiden Daphne, who was transformed into a laurel tree as she ran from Apollo’s pursuit. In an elegant twist of this myth, Bembo celebrates Vittoria’s more triumphant run, as she “with great strides ascends to true glory.”
By the time Bembo published this sonnet exchange in 1535, Vittoria had left Ischia to live once again in Rome. Later in her life, she could look back at these years at the castle as having both launched her poetic career and brought her mourning to a close. The two developments were, in fact, entirely linked. Writing the poems to Ferrante was in the deepest sense, as we have seen, an act of working through her grief, and the island itself seems to have helped her to heal. In one of the sonnets she wrote at the castle, she movingly describes the way the Ischian landscape lightens her heart:
When I look out from my beloved rock
at the earth and sky in the rosy dawn,
whatever clouds were born in my heart are
chased away by the clearness of the day.
Then my own thoughts rise with the sun so that
I return to my Sun, whom God honors
with more light, and from this height my soul
seems to be recalled to its sweet home.*
Vittoria clearly loved the wildness of Ischia’s cliffs, the splendid colors of its sea, and the beautiful skies that surrounded her. And yet, by 1534, she was ready to move on. Being in the castle with so many learned and literary people had been very good for her as a poet, but it had not provided her with comparable nourishment for her spirit. She was far away, moreover, from the exciting new world of religious reform that was spreading on the mainland. Word almost certainly had reached her of a group of Spanish and Italian reformers known as the spirituali, whose central focus on the individual’s relationship to God—without the intervention of priests or even of the church—very much appealed to her own sensibility. After seven years of living more or less continually in the social and largely secular world of the castle, Vittoria left Ischia to pursue a life more fully focused on her faith. She never returned.
7
AMONG PREACHERS AND PILGRIMS
IN THE CHURCH OF SAN LORENZO in Damaso, adjacent to the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the very heart of Rome, Vittoria sat spellbound. It was Lent, 1535, and she was living once again in the guest quarters at San Silvestro in Capite. Perhaps her favorite outing from the convent was to hear sermons, and on the pulpit that day in San Lorenzo was her favorite new preacher: a charismatic friar from Siena named Bernardino Ochino, who had recently become a Capuchin monk. Named for the pointed hood, or cappuccino, they wore on their heads—the modern term cappuccino comes from the hood of frothy milk sitting on top of the coffee—the Capuchins were a new order, founded in the 1520s by a Franciscan friar who felt his fellow monks had strayed too far from the strict observance of Saint Francis. This kind of internal strife among the Franciscans had been going on already for several centuries: the absolute poverty that Francis demanded was very difficult to reconcile with the needs of a more established community. By the early 1500s, the Franciscan order had been formally divided between the more moderate Conventuals and the more extreme Observants.
The Capuchins were originally members of the Observants, but had decided that even this stricter way of life was not adequately severe. In 1525, they became an independent branch of the order—the equivalent, in effect, of Franciscan fundamentalists. The Capuchins’ monastic houses were not to contain any valuable possessions, and their supplies were not to exceed provisions for a few days. Everything they had to eat or drink was to be obtained through begging, although the friars could not ask for meat, eggs, or cheese—these could be accepted when offered spontaneously—and food was to be gathered each day (and not stored). They were not allowed to touch money. Fasts were to be frequent, and intense. At least two hours a day were to be spent in private prayer. Above all, the order was passionately committed to ministering and preaching to the poor.
When Ochino joined the Capuchins in 1534, he quickly emerged as their most powerful spokesman, delivering sermons that moved his listeners in ways they had never been moved before. Ochino was himself of very humble origins: he was born in 1487 in Siena, where his father, Domenico Tommasini, was a barber. It is not clear where Ochino got his name: some think he was
named for a district of Siena known as the Oca; others think the name was given to him due to his small eyes (occhio is the Italian for “eye,” occhino is the diminutive). In 1503 or 1504, he joined the Observant Franciscans, and he remained with them for a number of years before deciding to study medicine at the University of Perugia. He returned to the Franciscans sometime in the early 1520s. The move to the Capuchins a decade later required, as he described it, a very strong act of will: “When I beheld the severity of [the Capuchin] life, I put on their garb, yet not without a severe struggle with my carnal wisdom and my sensuousness. I now deemed to have found what I sought, and I well remember that I turned to Christ with ‘Lord, if I do not now save my soul, I know not what more I can do.’”
At the pulpit of San Lorenzo in 1535, Ochino conveyed all of his ambition to reform himself and his fellow Christians. Listeners old enough to have heard Giralomo Savonarola compared Ochino’s oratorical gifts to those of the famous late fifteenth-century Dominican, whose thundering sermons about the Apocalypse had drawn nearly all of Florence to hear him. Savonarola was on fire with the zeal to reform the church, and was prepared to risk everything to combat the wickedness he saw around him. It was he who famously burned thousands of objects—cosmetics, mirrors, clothes, books, manuscripts, paintings—in the event that came to be known as the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497 during Carnevale, or Carnival (in Latin, it means “a farewell to meat,” which is why it is celebrated just before the Lenten fast). It is even believed that Botticelli willingly destroyed several works of art that he had come, thanks to Savonarola, to regard as sinful. Needless to say, the fierce Dominican earned many enemies, including the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, against whom he had preached publicly on many occasions and even organized a council. Alexander excommunicated Savonarola in May 1497, and in 1498 ordered him to be hanged and burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria before a mob of Florentines.
Ochino’s sermons were of a different emotional order from Savonarola’s: his message was focused on love, not fear, and his words reached into the hearts of seemingly everyone who heard him. Bembo, who had invited Ochino to preach in Venice, sent Vittoria this assessment: “He expresses himself quite differently, and in a more Christian way, than any others who have climbed up to the pulpit in my days, and with vibrant compassion, about love and more elevating things.” In a second letter to Vittoria following another of Ochino’s sermons, Bembo’s enthusiasm was even greater: “Our brother Bernardino (from whom now on I want to call mine with you) is adored in this city these days. There is no man or woman who does not raise him to the heavens with their praise. O how worthy he is, o how he delights, o how much help he is!”
Ochino’s words may have been filled with “vibrant compassion” (“viva carità”), but his underlying message was in fact far from gentle. Like many of his Capuchin brethren, he was very critical of the Roman church—its extravagant riches, its lax discipline, its overwhelming hierarchy and distance from the common people—and wanted to see it reformed. At least at this point in his life, Ochino did not identify directly with Luther, whose reforming zeal had been menacing Rome since he posted his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517. But Protestantism was only one of a number of evangelical movements popular at this time, and by the early 1530s, groups across the continent were calling for serious ecclesiastical change. For many, the extravagant ambition and expenditure of the early sixteenth-century popes, Julius II and Leo X, both of whom behaved more like Roman emperors than like men of the cloth, had pushed their patience over the edge. For some in Spain, it was the horror of the Inquisition, which began in the 1470s and had developed into a veritable reign of terror. Whatever the reasons—and there were certainly many sources of discontent—the urge to reform was sweeping Europe, including the Italian peninsula. Even a pious Catholic such as Vittoria, who had wanted to be a nun, found herself powerfully drawn to a message of change.
Ochino’s evangelism was itself inspired by a charismatic reformer from Spain, Juan de Valdés, who had arrived in Italy sometime between December 1529 and August 1531 in flight from the Inquisition. Valdés was a brilliant theologian who came from a family descended in part from knights in La Mancha, the land of Don Quixote, and in part from conversos, or converted Jews, who may not have left their Judaism completely behind. In 1512, when Valdés was a small child, a witness for the Inquisition claimed he saw Valdés’s father praying in Hebrew with several of his older sons.
In Spain, Valdés had become involved with a religious group known as the alumbrados, or “enlightened ones.” The alumbrados, who often came from converso families, were frequently likened to the Lutherans, but their emphasis was less on changing the institution of the church, as Luther and his followers passionately wanted to do, than on fostering spirituality. These Spanish evangelicals believed the human soul was capable of seeing the divine and communicating directly with the Holy Spirit. Many of their preachers were women—this alone got the movement into plenty of trouble—and they encouraged their followers, both male and female, to pursue their relationships with Christ independent of priests and liturgy. Because they believed in personal forms of spiritual healing that were often conducted through private encounters, they also made themselves vulnerable to charges of sexual misconduct. Indeed, one of the women leaders, Francisca Hernández, claimed she had discovered a cure to prevent students of the clergy from masturbating; the cure may have involved some fondling of her own, although other reports suggest she merely lent a sash or scarf to the afflicted. The group also espoused the idea that human lovemaking was a valid means to achieve union with God.
Valdés’s troubles in Spain came less from his involvement with the alumbrados, however, than from his 1529 publication of the Diálogo de doctrina Cristiana, or Dialogue on Christian Doctrine, which was immediately censored by the Spanish Inquisition due to its harsh criticism of the church. In this short book of roughly one hundred pages, which included several long excerpts from Lutheran works, Valdés advocated for the primacy of the “glory of God” as opposed to the elevation of church officers, and challenged the idea that papal authority should extend beyond the function of the bishop of Rome. He believed, in other words, that the pope should not have a universal claim over the church. The core of his message, here and elsewhere in his works, was to stress the individual’s spiritual life as the foundation of his or her religious experience. He argued against what he regarded as the institutionalization of belief: the idea that people needed a priest to hear their confessions, help them with their prayers, and interpret for them the words of God. Although Valdés maintained the importance of two of the sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, he otherwise envisioned little need for the clergy. All of this spoke deeply to someone like Vittoria—it coincided, for example, with her request in 1526 to live in her own religious house where there would be a priest to conduct Mass, but where she and her female companions would otherwise be on their own. Religion, Valdés argued, could be practiced almost entirely in the home.
One implication of Valdés’s emphasis on the individual’s direct relationship to God was that everyone had the right to read the Bible in his or her mother tongue. (This was also a key tenet of Lutheranism.) Reading the Bible in Spanish—or Italian or German or Portuguese—might seem innocuous enough, but it was not encouraged by the church, and certain vernacular translations were expressly forbidden. Laypeople were taught to read Scripture ideally under the supervision of a priest, as ordinary individuals could not be trusted to understand the Bible properly. The same principle applied to the layperson’s access to liturgy, which the church insisted remain in Latin. In one of the religious debates between Catholics and Protestants raging in England during this period, the Catholic priest Thomas Harding, prebendary of Winchester, made the argument that it was better for the congregation not to understand the priest’s prayers: if the service is conducted in the vernacular, he declared, “the people will frame lewd and perverse meanings of their own lewd
senses.” He recommended instead that they perform simple and rote acts of prayer, enhanced by rosary beads or other devotional aids. It was not until Vatican II in the 1960s that the Catholic Church moved away from the Latin Mass, more than four hundred years after the Protestant Reformation.
All of the beliefs that Valdés espoused make it very surprising that when he arrived in Rome in flight from Spain, he was received by none other than Clement VII. Clement had given him a “safe-conduct”—an official document rather like a visa—not for his religious beliefs, but as a political favor to Charles V. This was a moment in which the pope was desperately trying to maintain peaceful relations with the emperor, who employed two of Valdés’s brothers. Valdés not only was admitted to Rome, but also became one of Charles’s secretaries, and served in this capacity at the papal court. It is worth fully registering how little collaboration there was at the time between the office of the Spanish Inquisition and the pope—the fact that Valdés was a wanted heretic in Madrid had no effect on his reception in Rome, as if there were two entirely different churches involved. Some twelve years later, when Pope Paul III reinstituted the office of the Inquisition in Rome and shortly thereafter called the Council of Trent, this would never have happened. But in the early 1530s, it was still possible for a man accused of heresy in Catholic Spain to find a warm welcome in the papal city.
After several years in Rome, Valdés settled in Naples, where he quickly attracted a group of religious followers around him. This was the group Vittoria had most likely heard about on Ischia: the so-called spirituali. The spirituali were more Lutheran in their orientation than the Spanish alumbrados. In particular, they had come to embrace Luther’s idea of sola fide: that faith alone—without good works—can save you. The nineteenth-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dramatized Valdés’s position on the subject in his unfinished poem Michael Angelo, in which his character Valdesso exchanges these words with his loyal disciple, Julia:
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