Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  More important than the biographical similarities was the fact that Vittoria and Marguerite were both poets who used their verse to express their newly reformed faith. Although Marguerite was not so radical as Renée, she had been drawn to Lutheranism since its very beginnings: she was reading Luther’s works already in the early 1520s, and even arranged to have his writings translated for her into French. She sympathized above all with Luther’s idea of humanity’s innate sinfulness, and his related belief that only our complete dependence on God’s grace (rather than a combination of faith and works) would lead to salvation. She also agreed with his understanding of the Bible as the only source of true learning about God, and his conviction that all people should be able to read the Bible in their own tongue. Luther remarked that “a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it.” Although Marguerite was no simple layman, she took comfort in this sentiment and pored over her French Bible.

  In 1524, when Vittoria was still living on Ischia waiting for Ferrante to come home, and certainly had little or no knowledge of Lutheranism, Marguerite was writing poetry with a strong Lutheran bent. In that year, following the death of her beloved niece Charlotte (the daughter of Francis I and Renée’s sister, Claude), Marguerite wrote the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (Dialogue in the Form of a Night Vision), a twelve-hundred-line poem in which she expounds a clear set of Lutheran ideas on salvation. She counsels her niece not to shed tears over her death, since tears would only offend God, who has liberated her soul in order that she might join Christ in heaven. She also assures Charlotte, who died at age seven, that she will be saved not on the merit of her good works, but through Christ’s grace alone.

  In 1531, Marguerite published a more polemical spiritual poem, Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), which quickly became her most famous, and most controversial, work. On the surface of things, The Mirror did not seem particularly radical: assuming the voice of a female soul, Marguerite held up a mirror to her readers in order to reveal their (and her own) inner sinfulness. The underlying message, however—that she was “trop moins que rien” (“so much less than nothing”), and that in spite of, or even because of, this complete abjection, Christ showered her soul with love—showed signs of Lutheranism, and the poem earned Marguerite the strong censure of the theological faculty at the Sorbonne. Francis ultimately came to her defense, but from this moment on, many French Catholics considered her a heretic.

  Confirming the Sorbonne’s worst suspicions, The Mirror found many enthusiastic readers in Protestant lands, including Henry VIII’s daughter the future Elizabeth I. Elizabeth translated the poem into English in 1545, when she was eleven years old, and gave a copy—written out in her own hand—as a gift to her new stepmother, Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth (and final) wife. This small, precious book is today one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library at Oxford; it still has its original binding of blue silk, and the gold and silver embroidery on its cover is credited to Elizabeth herself. Another small book in the Bodleian Library that the young princess also translated—this time from Italian into Latin—and copied out in her own hand is a sermon of Ochino’s. It is extraordinary to think of this circle of aristocratic women—Marguerite, Elizabeth, and Vittoria—who never met in person but were connected through their shared interests in both poetry and religious reform.

  There is no way to know when or how Marguerite’s poems first reached Vittoria. But we know that she was both deeply impressed by Marguerite’s skills as a poet, and struck by how much the French queen’s beliefs resonated with her own. To be sure, there were differences of degree in their reformist zeal—Marguerite was several crucial steps ahead. But Vittoria found in Marguerite the finest model for her own spiritual project. In what was probably the first letter Vittoria sent to her new friend, dated February 15, 1540, she explained that “in this long and difficult path of our lives we all need to have a guide,” and that for her, models from her own sex seemed more fitting than the examples of men. “I turned,” she therefore explained, “to the great ladies of Italy to learn from them and to imitate them,” but although they were certainly virtuous, she did not find anyone fully worthy of her adulation.

  And then, Vittoria recounted, she found Marguerite. “In only one woman,” she declared, “who was outside Italy, could I find the perfection of both the will and the intellect conjoined.” At first, Marguerite’s virtue and accomplishments left Vittoria only more desperate, more wanting: “and thus were generated in me,” she confessed, “that sadness and fear that the Hebrews had seeing the fire and the glory of God on the top of the mountain, where they, still too imperfect, did not dare to climb.” This was how she had felt until she received a letter from Marguerite, which, she declared, quenched her spiritual thirst and poured onto her manna from heaven. At a certain level, of course, Vittoria was simply crafting an elegant compliment, something she knew how to do well. But her words also revealed feelings of isolation or loneliness—as a woman, as an Italian, as a spiritual creature seeking guidance—which she did not often express.

  Vittoria may have already been actively imitating Marguerite in the year or so before she came to Ferrara, for in 1536 she had embarked on a new poetic path. In a letter written that summer to Cosimo Gheri, bishop of Fano, Vittoria’s secretary Carlo Gualteruzzi reported: “Her ladyship, the Marchesa di Pescara, has turned her pen to God and writes of nothing else, as you will see by the sonnet that I have included here. I send you this as an illustration of her newly changed style. I would very much like that you make sure Monsignor Bembo sees this, and that you write back to me with his opinion.” Having at this point finished her poems to Ferrante and put her mourning behind her, Vittoria had begun writing spiritual sonnets. As Gualteruzzi represented it, the decision to shift from secular to spiritual poetry was a conscious one, and it went along with Vittoria’s desire at this point in her life to present herself less as a widow than as a religious woman. In the poem that appears first in the only surviving manuscript dedicated to the spiritual sonnets, she explains her self-transformation:

  Since my chaste love long kept my soul inflamed

  with hope of fame, and nourished a serpent

  in my breast, so that now I turn in pain

  to our Lord, who is my only remedy,

  may the holy nails now be my quills,

  and may his precious blood now be my ink,

  may my paper be his lifeless sacred flesh

  so that I may record what he suffered.

  I will not call upon Parnassus or Delos

  since I aspire to cross other waters,

  and climb mountains, where human feet do not tread.

  That sun, which illuminates the earth and sky,

  I pray will open to me his source of light

  and give me a draught equal to my thirst.*

  I am replacing, she declares, my quills with the nails of the cross, my ink with Christ’s own blood, my paper with his corpse. And I am doing this, she continues, in order to make a spiritual, not earthly, journey, on which I will be guided by Christ alone. In this last detail, Vittoria seems to renounce not only the heights of Parnassus, the home of the Greek Muses, and the pagan sanctuary of Delos, known as the birthplace of Apollo, but also perhaps the earthly pilgrimage she herself had planned to the Holy Land. She was embarking on an inner pilgrimage.

  Vittoria’s religious sonnets alternate between personal poems describing her own experience of her faith and the challenges it posed, and more generic poems in which she speaks on behalf of Christians more broadly. The sonnets alternate, that is, between poems that resemble confessions and poems that resemble liturgy. For readers today, at least, the sonnets in the first category tend to be more interesting, in that they show us the challenges she personally faced. In the sonnet that begins, for example, “If with heavenly arms I had overcome / myself, my senses, and my human reason,” she describes her difficulty in arriving at the point of “tr
ue light”:

  Already have I fixed my eye toward

  the desired end, but I cannot yet fly

  with firm and steady wings on the right path;

  I see the rays of the sun, I glimpse the dawn,

  but I don’t yet enter into the true light

  that fills the divine rooms of the heavens.*

  Here we witness Vittoria actively struggling: she is near, but has not arrived at, her spiritual destination; she sees where she ought to be, but does not yet know how to get there.

  In a sonnet that opens with Vittoria’s longing to meet her new spouse, Christ, she describes her fear of falling short of what she should be:

  The time is near when I with my robes

  tightly wound, and my eyes and ears alert,

  with my torch held firm in my hand, burning,

  await my dear Spouse, joyful and ready

  to honor him chastely with reverence,

  all other desire in my heart quenched,

  and I long for his love, fear his anger,

  that he might find me at the vigil, ready.

  Not only for his infinite gifts

  nor even for his words sweet and divine,

  with which he offered immortal life,

  but so his holy hand may not point at me,

  “Here is the blind woman who failed to choose

  her true Sun despite his many bright rays.”†

  Vittoria burns with a spiritual desire—the Italian verb she uses in line seven, bramare, is much stronger than desiderare—that seems to surpass in its intensity the love she expressed for her husband. And yet she worries that she will not make the right choice, or that her devotion will somehow be found lacking. Conjuring up the Parable of the Ten Virgins as related in the Gospel of Matthew, Vittoria both imagines herself in the position of one of the wise virgins, ready with extra oil for her torch when the bridegroom, Christ, appears, and worries that she may find herself among the five false virgins, without redeeming faith.

  The other category of her spiritual sonnets—the ones I have termed “liturgical”—tends to rehearse basic tenets of the Christian faith, or to resemble hymns of praise or thanksgiving that we might imagine being sung in church. One such poem begins:

  The Lord on high, as he languished, burning

  for our love, saw how poor were our hopes

  if he did not descend and make himself

  a man, and give up his blood on the cross.*

  In a more joyful poem to the Virgin, she celebrates Mary’s feeding her son:

  I see the Son of God nursing at the breast

  of one both virgin and mother, and glimpse

  their mortal bodies shine together in heaven.†

  This celestial vision, she exclaims, fills Christ’s “faithful servant with precious hope” (“fedel servo qui la cara speme”).

  In her multiple sonnets to the Virgin, as well as in those celebrating particular saints, Vittoria seems to be working firmly within Catholic devotional norms (Protestants do not worship the Virgin, and they are forbidden from praying to saints). Taken as a whole, however, her hundred or so spiritual sonnets offer the strongest proof of her Protestant leanings. Consider, for instance, the sonnet that begins:

  Elect souls, for whom the ample, clear,

  crystalline, secret waves of heaven

  gather every hour to make a greater sea

  of God’s bounty, and give you eternal joy.

  “Elect souls” (“anime elette”) is an unambiguous reference to the Protestant idea of predestination—“election” was a buzzword for Protestants—and the sonnet concludes with a further allusion to the chosen few:

  Pray to him that with the same voice

  that it pleased him to call man to heaven

  he may now wake us from our deep inner sleep.*

  In the same spirit, in a sonnet that begins with an address to Christ’s presence in the Holy Eucharist, Vittoria seems nearly to take for granted her place among the elect:

  Holy food, through whose marvelous effect

  my soul perceives with its clear, inner eye

  your highest cause, and renews my faith

  in you, the true God, and my only object.

  Nourished by your warmth, with my humble breast

  almost certain of its undeserved grace,

  I aspire to make glorious conquests

  there above, armed with your love alone.

  The sonnet concludes, however, not in a tone of self-celebration, but rather in a declaration of our general helplessness, if not outright sinfulness. “You give yourself in a gracious pledge,” she declares to Christ,

  all this to ensure that we become yours,

  you do this, and even still we employ

  all our skill and power against ourselves.*

  The yoking of election and unworthiness that she expresses is the paradox at the very heart of Protestant theology: God’s creatures are completely undeserving, and yet they receive God’s grace. Christ’s sacrifice is so great, in other words, that it can never be compensated—from a Protestant perspective, to think otherwise is the fallacy, as well as the presumption, of Catholic works.

  In addition to those poems expressing her belief in the idea of election and the centrality of grace, Vittoria also wrote a number of sonnets in which she emphasizes her close and unmediated relationship to God. This, too, was a belief at the core of reformed theology—we have seen it in both Valdés and Luther—and it resonated powerfully for her. In this sonnet, for example, she stresses her direct access to the divine, without the intervention of a priest or the structure of the church to guide her:

  But when you gather my confused thoughts

  and open with force my stubborn heart

  and extinguish all my earthly passions

  so that my true desire goes to heaven,

  all this can I do through your grace alone.†

  The notion that there was nothing she could do herself to win God’s love, and that everything came from his direct intervention in her life—God breaks open her hardened heart; he calms her longing and directs it toward heaven—was a sure sign of her Protestant leanings. “Weak and infirm,” she similarly opens another sonnet,

  I run toward salvation …

  and however much my soul distrusts itself

  so much the more it trusts in Christ’s heavenly gift,

  whose great power can restore its richness

  and health, and make it burn with his loving heat.

  “Then no longer,” she concludes, “will my deeds and desires / be my own, but I will go with celestial wings / wherever his holy love takes me.”*

  The idea that Vittoria’s spiritual sonnets were filled with expressions of Protestant belief and doctrine was recognized by her contemporaries, and even got her into trouble. Already in 1540 Vittoria’s poems were being read by a suspicious Catholic official, Anne de Montmorency, Grand Constable of France. Montmorency, a fierce conservative and enemy of Marguerite de Navarre, had repeatedly warned Francis of his sister’s heretical beliefs and was keen to prove that she was in contact with Protestant allies abroad. In this instance, Montmorency intercepted a gift of Vittoria’s poems that Marguerite had personally requested. The manuscript was assembled not by Vittoria, but by someone working very closely with her (most likely, her secretary Gualteruzzi, although the letter is not signed). Hence the compiler of the poems explained in his cover letter to the queen:

  It has recently come to our attention in Rome that Your Excellency desired a copy of the spiritual sonnets of the illustrious Marchesa of Pescara, and to that end you have sent word to us that you wish that they should be found and dispatched to you as soon as possible. I find I have collected and kept them all, having copied them out one by one as she dictated them … and I have decided that it would be unchristian to [fail to send] the same to you.

  This description of the sonnets as needing to be gathered is intriguing: it suggests that Vittoria had not yet collect
ed the poems herself, and that Gualteruzzi (or whoever the letter’s author may have been) was forced to compile them. This might simply have been a gesture of courtliness on his part—he may have wanted to play the role of the obliging servant to the French queen—or it might have reflected some resistance on Vittoria’s part to sharing her sonnets at this time with Marguerite. Everything about the manuscript, however, which is today at the Laurentian Library in Florence, suggests a gift of state. The title is formal and impersonal: Sonetti de più et diverse materie della divina Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara con somma diligenza revisti et corretti nel anno MDXL (Sonnets on various subjects of the Divine Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, revised and corrected with great diligence in the year 1540). The “S” in “Sonnets” is illuminated in gold, as is the fleur-de-lis below the date. Opposite the title page is an elaborate illumination of Marguerite’s coat of arms, in gold, red, and royal blue. The sonnets that follow—one per page—have illuminated letters at the beginning of each group of lines (there are four golden letters per poem). This is not, in short, a manuscript that was prepared in haste, and Gualteruzzi must have commissioned the finest of scribes to prepare it.

  Whenever Vittoria learned about Gualteruzzi’s manuscript for Marguerite, she certainly would have been upset to know that the poems had fallen into enemy hands. After Montmorency read them, he steadfastly refused to send the gift along to Marguerite, and ultimately complied only under direct orders of the king. He apparently reported to Francis, however, that Vittoria’s sonnets contained “many things that ran counter to the faith of Jesus Christ,” and that he was shocked to see such ideas linked to the “good name of the Marchesa of Pescara.” It is interesting that the Grand Constable of France had a sense of Vittoria’s reputation in the first place—a sign of her fame extending far beyond the Italian peninsula. But it is also important to note that her “good name” was already tarnished by its association with Protestantism.