Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  Not only the relative informality of the manuscript’s presentation but also the actual selection of the poems suggests Vittoria’s own hand in its preparation. The sonnets are arranged with a meaningful beginning and end, and clustered around certain themes or topics in a manner very different from the Navarre and della Torre manuscripts. The selection was also restricted: by the end of 1540, when the manuscript is likely to have been compiled, only 26 of the manuscript’s 103 sonnets had appeared in any of the printed editions, so this meant that Michelangelo was largely receiving poems no one else had seen. The sonnet “I cannot say to you, my sweet comfort,” for example, was included in Michelangelo’s book—it was, after all, a response to one of his poems—but did not appear in print until the 1546 edition of the spiritual sonnets published in Venice.

  Perhaps the most subtle, but also most interesting, hint of Vittoria’s personal involvement in making the gift for Michelangelo can be perceived only by holding the book in your hands. Whereas the manuscript for Marguerite was made of ordinary parchment, the pages chosen for Michelangelo’s gift were of the finest sheep’s vellum. “Vellum” is used nowadays as a term to describe high-quality papers made of different materials, but in the sixteenth century it was treated animal hide, and extraordinarily smooth. The choice of the manuscript’s pages did not go unnoticed. In a letter Michelangelo wrote in 1550—three years after Vittoria’s death—to a friend who had asked to borrow some of her poetry, he responded that he had “a little book on parchment” (“un libretto in carta pecora”) with 103 of her poems. He mentioned as well a group of forty additional poems she had sent him from Viterbo, where she lived for roughly three years starting in 1541; those poems, he specified, were “in carta bambagia”—a special kind of paper made of cotton wool made famous in Amalfi. It is unlikely that his friend was interested in the quality of the paper on which the sonnets were written—he simply wanted to read the poems—but the fact that Michelangelo specified this in both cases is telling. For Michelangelo, reading Vittoria’s poetry was a tactile as well as an intellectual experience. Or rather—as she no doubt well understood—he drew no meaningful distinction between the two.

  In his biography of Michelangelo, Condivi summarized the bond between the two friends in this way:

  More particularly he greatly loved the [Marchesa] of Pescara, whose sublime spirit he was in love with, and she returned his love passionately. He still has many of her letters, filled with honest and most sweet love, and these letters sprang from her heart, just as he also wrote many many sonnets to her, full of intelligence and sweet desire. She often traveled to Rome from Viterbo and other places where she had gone for recreation and to spend the summer, prompted by no other reason than to see Michelangelo.

  Whether Vittoria ever returned to Rome with the sole purpose of seeing Michelangelo cannot be verified, but there is evidence that Michelangelo came to see her in Viterbo on at least one occasion, and that the two remained in close contact during these years. Two letters Vittoria wrote from Viterbo, one to Michelangelo and one to a mutual friend about the artist, convey their friendship in particularly vivid terms. In the first, Vittoria wrote to Michelangelo to voice her concern, expressed with great humor, that they were exchanging letters too frequently, and thereby distracting each other from what they ought to be doing. “Magnificent Messer Michel Angelo,” she begins,

  I have not answered your letter sooner, because it was, one might say, an answer to mine; for thinking that if you and I continue to write to one another so often, according to my obligation and your courtesy, I would need to neglect the Chapel of Santa Caterina here, and not be present at the ordained hours in the company of these sisters, and you would have to leave behind the Chapel of Saint Paul.

  Vittoria was living at the time in the convent of Santa Caterina in Viterbo, and although she was a lay resident, she followed as closely as possible the strict rules of the order. Michelangelo, meanwhile, was working on his final frescoes: The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Pope Paul had just completed a new chapel—the aptly named Pauline Chapel—as part of his reconstruction of the ceremonial rooms of his Vatican residence, and he had commissioned Michelangelo to adorn its walls.

  As Vittoria seems well aware, the consequences of their losing time in their respective “chapels” were not comparable: she risked missing some of the liturgical hours at the convent, and he risked not finishing two great works of art for the pope. But however much she appreciated the difference in their current activities—and her lighthearted, at times almost comical tone makes clear that she did—she also genuinely understood how important it was to both of them to remain fully engaged in their immediate worlds. “You would be absent,” she continued, “without finding yourself from early in the morning through the day in sweet conversation with your painted figures, which speak to you with their natural accents no less than real people [speak] to me when I am around them. Thus I would fail Christ’s brides, and you his Vicar [the pope].” Vittoria’s idea of Michelangelo’s figures speaking to him—of his conversing with Saul about his extraordinary experience when he was struck from his horse while riding to Damascus, or sympathizing with Peter as he was raised by the Roman soldiers onto the cross, head down—suggest her powerful sense of her friend’s inhabiting the art that he made. His paintings were alive for him, just as the nuns were for her. “Sweet conversation” (“dolce colloquio”) was also a good description of what passed between the two friends when they were together, which their letters could only approximate.

  Vittoria did not only try to imagine Michelangelo’s creative process and to make sure he had the time he needed to devote to the Pauline frescoes. She also worried, like a loving mother or wife, about the toll this commission was taking on his health. The second letter involving the two of them that has survived from this period was written to their mutual friend and fellow reformer Alvise Priuli. She wrote to Priuli to share her concern that Michelangelo, who had just come to Viterbo, was suffering from pain in his eyes due to the strenuous work he was doing in the chapel of Saint Paul. She asked Priuli if he might be able to lend the artist a monocle until the special glass, mounted with gilded silver, that she had ordered from Venice arrived, which she estimated would be sometime in the next fifteen days (we can therefore assume that Michelangelo would have been staying in Viterbo for at least this long). This careful attention to Michelangelo’s well-being—her concern that he was struggling with his vision, or complaining of fatigue to his eyes—gives us a rare glimpse of Vittoria’s nurturing side.

  We will never know if Vittoria got to visit the Pauline Chapel when she returned to Rome in 1544. She was ill at the time, and may not have made even the short trip from the center of the city across the Tiber to the Vatican. If she did, she would no doubt have found Michelangelo working hard on his frescoes, his gilded monocle in hand. We might add this precious object—the only one not made of paper—to the virtual archive of letters and poems and drawings, both lost and found, which made up the fabric of their friendship. But the extraordinary quality of their bond was best captured in their words. “I’m sending you … verses I wrote for the Marchesa di Pescara,” Michelangelo wrote to a friend after Vittoria’s death; she was “devoted to me, and I no less to her.” For her part, Vittoria reserved for him the most beautiful of titles. He was, she declared, “mio singularissimo amico,” “my most singular friend.”

  11

  SALT WAR

  ON APRIL 9, 1541, the governor of Orvieto, Brunamonte de’ Rossi di Assisi, witnessed something outside the gates of the monastery of San Paolo in his city that he deemed worthy of reporting to the highest authorities in Rome. In a letter to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul III who had been appointed to the curia in 1534 at the age of fourteen, de’ Rossi described what he had seen:

  As I was going to the citadel, passing in front of the monastery of San Paolo where the said Signora is staying, I found a gentleman with sword a
nd spurs on, who had just arrived, and who was speaking with the said above-mentioned Signora at the grating. I asked him cleverly, and under pretense of being anxious to pick up any news, who he was and whence he came … And I saw when he gave her a packet which he put through the grating, about as high as two little boxes one on top of the other, and sewn up in some sort of linen. What was inside I know not, because one could not see, and he put it through the grating as soon as I arrived there.

  The Signora in question was Vittoria Colonna; the gentleman, one Berardino de Lassis of Loreto who had been dispatched from Naples with news for Vittoria from Giovanna d’Aragona, Ascanio’s estranged wife, who was living in Ischia. Why the governor of Orvieto was interested in the conversation Vittoria was having with this unknown gentleman; why he had sent the news of the meeting to Cardinal Farnese in order, as he put it, “to execute and satisfy your wish”; and why Vittoria was in Orvieto and under surveillance in the first place bring us to a very tense moment in her life.

  By 1540, Vittoria seems finally to have created a world for herself that fulfilled her deepest desires. She spent a great deal of time with her beloved Michelangelo; she attended inspiring sermons and became ever more involved with the project of religious reform; she completed the hundred or so spiritual sonnets that would be included in the new editions of her Rime; she dwelt with her favorite nuns in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite. With her days full of religion, art, poetry, and friendship, she had finally managed to integrate the pieces of her life in a way that gave her great satisfaction. All of this came to an abrupt halt, however, in the early months of 1541, when a major crisis struck the Colonna family and Vittoria was once again involved in political turmoil.

  As in the past, the trouble had to do with relations between Ascanio and the pope. Several years earlier, Pope Paul had introduced new taxes on salt from all of his subjects in the Papal States. It is odd to think that the pope was involved in selling salt, but in addition to running the church, he was in effect the ruler of a small kingdom. Salt had for centuries been one of the most lucrative products to buy and sell throughout all of Europe—everyone, rich or poor, ate food flavored or preserved with salt—and regulating its trade generated an enormous income. In the north, the salt trade was dominated by Venice, which developed an entire administration around this single commodity. The Venetian salt office not only issued licenses to merchants dictating how much salt they could export and the price at which they could sell it, but also maintained Venice’s amazingly complex water system and public buildings. In the Papal States, the pope himself enjoyed the monopoly over salt until 1862, when the privilege was given to the newly unified Italian state.

  Paul’s official reason for raising the taxes on salt was that he needed money to fight against the two central threats menacing the church: the Turks and the Protestants. The less official reason was that, like most of his recent predecessors on the papal throne, he had extravagant tastes and habits and had run into deep debt—it was Paul, we will recall, who had as a cardinal purchased a very grand palazzo for his family residence, and he was still in the midst of transforming it into one of the most splendid homes in Rome.

  Whatever Paul’s justification for introducing the new tax, it met with immediate and fierce resistance. The first stage of the conflict that came to be known as the Salt War was waged between the pope and the ruling families of Perugia. Perugia was one of the most powerful cities among the Papal States, and had for several centuries managed to operate as if it were independent. But Perugia’s freedom came to an absolute end with the events of 1540. When the city’s rulers refused to pay what they regarded as the exorbitant new tax, the pope’s armies attacked. In the bloody war that followed, the papal troops destroyed much of the city and brought the oligarchic rulers to their knees. According to local legend, the Salt War also had the disastrous culinary consequence of introducing the idea of baking bread without salt. This began as a protest against the new taxes—it was Perugia’s equivalent of the Boston Tea Party—but the tasteless habit unfortunately not only stuck with the city, but also spread throughout much of Italy.

  Ascanio was certainly familiar with what had happened in Perugia, but he could not be swayed from his determination to fight Paul himself. He asserted his right to a papal exemption from the tax based on an arrangement that his ancestor Oddone Colonna had made on behalf of the family when he assumed the papacy as Martin V in 1417. In truth, Ascanio’s anger against the pope was not limited to the new salt tax. He also had a serious personal grievance. This was a complicated domestic drama, but given the importance of everyone involved, it became a matter of real consequence. Indeed, very little that affected families such as the Colonna was contained to their household alone: the stakes were consistently high.

  In 1539, Marzio Colonna, the son of the celebrated condottiere Ottaviano, who had fought with Ascanio and Vittoria’s father, Fabrizio, on behalf of the kings of Naples, asked Ascanio for permission to marry their cousin Livia. Livia was the daughter of the Colonna condottiere Marcantonio I; following his death during the Spanish siege of Milan in 1522, she had become Ascanio’s ward. Famously stingy and reluctant to provide dowries even for his own three daughters, let alone for Livia, Ascanio refused to give his consent. Frustrated by this refusal and determined to make the marriage, Marzio took matters into his own hands. He obtained the help of Pier Luigi Farnese, the illegitimate son of Paul III and captain general of his army. The idea that the pope had children seems shocking today, but this was a more or less ordinary and accepted occurrence in the Renaissance. The papal offspring, who were referred to by the wonderfully capacious term nipoti, which can usefully mean either nieces and nephews or grandchildren, were often treated as if they were legitimate, and enjoyed all of the benefits of their father’s power. This is in fact the origin of the English term “nepotism”: the favoring of “nephews” or other relatives on the part of the pope.

  Marzio and Pier Luigi succeeded in abducting Livia, and entrusted her for safekeeping to Isabella Colonna, princess of Sulmona, with whom Ascanio was on bad terms due to a property dispute a decade earlier. Isabella was the daughter of Ascanio and Vittoria’s second cousin Vespasiano, who had married Giulia Gonzaga after the death of Isabella’s mother, Beatrice Appiani. As Vespasiano had no male heir, his lands were bequeathed to Isabella, but Ascanio had tried to assert his rights, as head of the Colonna family, over those of his female cousin. Fighting between Ascanio and Pope Clement had ensued, and the fortress of Paliano, which was one of Isabella’s valuable holdings, ultimately was given to Ascanio. Shortly after Livia’s abduction, she and Marzio Colonna were married. Ascanio rightly perceived that Pope Paul had done nothing to stop the marriage, and hence was already in high dudgeon when the conflict over the salt tax began.

  Pope Paul, for his part, was eager to bring the Colonna down. As we have seen, his family was new to the Roman elite, and he was ambitious to expand their power. Paul resented above all the independence of the old noble families within the Papal States, and wanted to reduce feudal lords such as Ascanio to subservient vassals who would render him more profit. Invoking a particularly resonant passage from the Hebrew Bible, he referred to the Colonna as “pricks in my eyes.” The phrase comes from the Book of Numbers, when God instructs Moses to “drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you.” “But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you,” God warns, “then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.” The Colonna family’s extensive lands and armies in such close proximity to Rome were a constant strain on Paul’s sense of dominion, and they represented to him precisely those whom his predecessors had foolishly “let remain.” Ascanio’s refusal to pay the salt tax, in short, gave him the perfect opportunity to pounce.

  Things got started on a very small, even petty, scale. Ascanio declared his opposition to the taxes
, and blocked the pope’s importation of corn seed into Rome. Paul retaliated by incarcerating several of Ascanio’s vassals who had, following Ascanio’s orders, denied the tax collectors their fees. Ascanio responded by incarcerating some pilgrims, who had passed through his territories on their way to Rome, in the dungeons of the Colonna castles. He also seized thirty of the pope’s cows, which had been grazing on his lands. At this point, Paul summoned Ascanio to Rome—he issued a pontifical brief demanding his presence within three days—but Ascanio refused to comply. The pope’s next move was to declare war. Vittoria’s reaction to this was rather wry. “For many serious things,” she wrote to Ascanio, “such as the slaughter of captains, governors, and cardinals, retaliation is taken, but there was no reason to have such a war over thirty cows.” She was well aware, of course, that the conflict went beyond the cows, or even the tax. This was a war between two competing powers to control the region.

  The war began with Paul’s ordering his son Pier Luigi Farnese to besiege the Colonna castle at Genazzano, thirty miles east of Rome. Genazzano, as we have already observed, was built on a narrow slice of volcanic tufa some twelve hundred feet high; like many of the Colonna properties in the region, it was not easy to penetrate. Ascanio was holed up within the walls of the town’s fortifications with two thousand soldiers. Pier Luigi’s army was much larger: he came with close to ten thousand men, most of whom were mercenaries from Germany and Switzerland. Already in this first encounter between the two sides, the scale of the conflict was alarming, and word of the pope’s aggression spread throughout the peninsula. According to a report given to the Venetian senate by Francesco Contarini, a member of Charles V’s imperial court who had recently returned from Germany, “It is impossible to put into words how much His Holiness is talked about by everyone because of the war he is waging in Italy. It is generally thought that [the pope] does not care if he ruins the church if he succeeds in aggrandizing his own family … The majority [of the princes] said that the Lord Ascanio should come here, and if the emperor does not want to help him, he will be assisted by others.”