Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  At the same time, however, that Vittoria’s poetry became more and more celebrated, she herself retreated from the literary world. It is possible that as she became more confident about her spiritual life, even composing religious poems lost its appeal. Poetry had always been a means for her to work through uncertainty and doubt: it was a medium of change and transformation, not conviction. This was already clear in the poems for Ferrante, which helped her through mourning, and ultimately led her to exchange her earthly love for that of the divine. Once she felt more settled in her faith, she may have been less drawn to poetry as a vehicle for speaking to God. This is something she suggests in the last sonnet of the Michelangelo manuscript, which begins with a vocational cri de coeur:

  I fear the knot, which I have used for years

  to bind up my soul, now makes my poems

  through habit alone, and not for that first cause,

  when they were truly turned toward God and inspired.

  I fear that the knots are tied so tightly

  by one who works poorly, with a dull file,

  and fueled with false esteem, I think the days

  well spent, when perhaps they are all in vain.

  Poetry has become a habit (the word she uses is usanza) and not the sincere and spontaneous expression of her faith that she wants it to be. She is ready, she declares, to put an end to her art:

  I see small reason for my poems’ use, but much

  for their harm, whereby I pray the fire

  that comes in silence will ignite my heart.

  Broken up by cries painful and hoarse

  is the true song that God hears from above,

  He who looks to my heart, and not to my style.*

  This was an extraordinary gesture: to conclude the collection of poems prepared for the great artist with a renunciation of art. Although there is evidence that she continued to revise the sonnets over the following years—hence the multiple versions we have for many of them—this sonnet may well have been her farewell to poetry.

  If Vittoria gave up on the idea of communicating with God through her poems, she did not give up on religious writing altogether. In the final years of her life, she composed what was officially a series of letters, but was in fact more like a spiritual meditation on the subject of female piety. The letters were addressed to Costanza d’Avalos Piccolomini, Duchess of Amalfi and the sister of Alfonso, who had also been raised in Ischia by their aunt Costanza d’Avalos when Vittoria was living at the castle. The younger Costanza shared with Vittoria a passion for both poetry and religious reform: she was involved in the spirituali movement in Naples, and became herself an accomplished writer of devotional verse. Costanza also resembled Vittoria in her desire to escape from the demands of her social world. Toward the end of her life, although her husband, Alfonso Piccolomini, was still living, she withdrew from his company to reside in the convent of Santa Chiara in Naples.

  In the first of the three letters, Vittoria addressed Costanza as someone who enjoyed a rare and privileged relationship to Christ. She imagined Costanza’s spirit as having traveled to the heavens, where she communed with the divine, while Vittoria remained in a passive, vicarious role, awaiting her return to earth. “If you understand yourself,” she wrote, “as I believe you do, as being that young beloved, who understands divine secrets in his most holy heart, by that dear delight that ties us into one desire, I pray that upon your expected return you allow me to share, as you always do, in the grace you have received.” For the first time in her life, Vittoria was seeking spiritual enlightenment from another woman.

  By the second letter, Vittoria dropped Costanza’s role as her intermediary and described her own mystical visions of Mary. Upon awaking that morning, she wrote, “my dearest thought saw with my inner eye Our Lady of the heavens embrace her Son with great affection and overabundant joy, and in the purest light I seemed to see a thousand strands, which tied them together with knots of the most burning compassion.” Vittoria saw in her “inner eye” Mary’s flight above the celestial choir, the archangels, the cherubs, and the seraphim until Mary reached the Holy Trinity. Through this experience, Vittoria related, Christ’s mother became a divine teacher herself: “Think … what wise words flowed from her saintly mouth, what pious and clear rays shone from those divine lights, what most righteous advice gave law to those who heard her without ever deviating from the laws, like a real master made by the first master of all.”

  After seeing Mary’s heavenly journey, Vittoria turned her inner gaze in her third letter to two other female figures in heaven: Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria. “I see the converted woman who passionately loved [Christ],” she declared, “every day more on fire with new and humble affection following him to the cross … I see the bold and intrepid virgin with her most solid and wise faith expose herself to every torment, desiring with pure and strong affection to give her life to her redeemer.” Vittoria had long admired Mary Magdalene—we will remember the beautiful paintings she commissioned from Titian and Michelangelo—but Catherine of Alexandria was perhaps an even more important role model for her at this stage in her life. Indeed, the story of the fourth-century Egyptian girl of noble birth and great learning who refused to abandon her Christian faith despite the personal efforts of the emperor Maxentius to win her back to paganism was a powerful example of resilient faith in the face of adversity. Catherine famously broke the spiked wheel that was supposed to be the instrument of her death, and was subsequently beheaded. But what Vittoria wanted to celebrate was the fate of Catherine’s soul: after her martyrdom, she was joined to Christ in a mystical marriage.

  At the end of the third letter, Vittoria reflected on the wisdom of these two female figures, Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria, and then applied the lessons to be learned from their examples: “Now let us take as our own mirror the works of their most beautiful bodies, and imitating the thoughts of their holy and pure minds, may we truly worship in the manner most appropriate to our Lord, at the divine feet of which the one [Magdalene], I believe, rests in eternal peace and joy, and the other [Catherine], stands on his side, to the right of Christ’s heavenly spouse.” Although she was putatively writing to Costanza, the conclusions she reached seemed aimed at a much wider audience. Under the guise of writing to her friend, Vittoria had composed a mystical text of her own.

  This fact did not escape the attention of the publishing world, which was quick to capitalize on Vittoria’s fame and print the letters as a small book. In 1544, the Venetian printer Alessandro Viani published a volume with the title Litere della divina Vetoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara a la Duchessa de Amalfi sopra la vita contemplativa di santa Caterina e sopra de la attiva santa Maddalena non più viste in luce (Letters of the Divine Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara to the Duchess of Amalfi, on the contemplative life of Saint Catherine, and on the active Saint Magdalene, never before seen in print). Although there was no discussion of this publication in any of Vittoria’s surviving correspondence, the letters could never have been printed so quickly without either her cooperation or Costanza’s—one of the two women must have agreed to give the printer the text. These were Vittoria’s last new writings to appear during her lifetime, and they consolidated her status as one of the most prominent religious authors in the period. The fact that the letters were written from one woman to another on the topic of heavenly women also specifically strengthened Vittoria’s role as a leader in the world of female spirituality.

  By the mid-1540s, Vittoria seems both to have found the spiritual peace she had so long craved, and to have cultivated a voice that enabled her to share her wisdom with others. Her physical health, however, enjoyed no comparable moment of triumph. By early 1547, it was clear to all that she was dying. Sometime in late January or early February, she moved out of the convent of Sant’Anna to be in the home of her cousin Giulia Colonna Cesarini. The Cesarini palace was presumably chosen for its proximity to the convent: it was located just a few min
utes away on Largo di Torre Argentina, which once housed the Theater of Pompey, where Julius Caesar was long believed to have been assassinated (most historians now think he died in the Curia of Pompey, a meeting hall some six hundred feet away). It is not clear if Vittoria chose to leave Sant’Anna or if she left at her relatives’ insistence, but the pattern of being forced out of a convent to return to her family was certainly familiar.

  Before leaving Sant’Anna, Vittoria drew up her last will and testament. The papers were signed by a notary on January 27, but lacked Vittoria’s signature. On February 15, at Palazzo de’ Cesarini, she drew up a second will almost identical to the first, but now including instructions about her wishes for her burial. This document ended with the Latin phrase “Ita testavi ego Vittoria Colonna,” “I, Vittoria Colonna, have hereby exercised my will.” Scribbled in her own hand, these were probably the final words she wrote.

  Vittoria died at her cousin’s palace on February 25, 1547. Her death was recorded as having occurred at the “hour of None,” the liturgical service held in the middle of the afternoon. Depending on her exact birthday, she was either fifty-six or fifty-seven years old. Her personal confessor, Don Tomasso Maggio, was with her when she died, and sent a letter describing the circumstances to Ascanio. “I will not duplicate the information you already have received,” Maggio wrote, “so as not to open the wound once again.” But he wanted to make sure Ascanio knew how peaceful Vittoria’s death had been:

  You should rest assured that she went quickly to embrace her creator whom she desired so much to meet, and it was a sure sign of this that the night before the day she died, at the hour of None, she said to me: “Tomorrow morning at Mass I would like to confess and take Communion.” I responded to her, “and extreme unction,” to which she replied, “Yes, please.” And thus it was that she received the Holy Sacraments each with great devotion, attention, and reverence, not missing one word, and having finished, she breathed her last breath.

  As Maggio related it, on the morning of Vittoria’s death, both Priuli and Flaminio came to see her. They spoke, he reported, “with great meaning about the matters of God, the Evangelist, and Saint Paul.” Vittoria was completely engaged in the conversation, even, he claimed, “explaining certain passages herself in a way that seemed she did not have any infirmity nor would have led one to think she would die so soon.” And yet, the fact that she requested her last rites suggests she knew very well she was dying. Maggio concluded by reassuring Ascanio: “Now that it has pleased Our God to free her from such long suffering, it cannot but be great consolation on this count and for the strong hope that we all have that she has gone exactly where she so much desired to go.”

  Pole was not mentioned among those present on the day of Vittoria’s death, and there is no record of when their last meeting may have been. We know only that he returned to Rome from Padua in November 1546, and, based on his correspondence from the following months, he was almost certainly in the city when she died. His only explicit mention of her death came in a letter dated March 6 to Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, who had just lost his brother. Pole confided in Madruzzo that he was “already oppressed by pain from the death of the Most Illustrious Lady Vittoria Colonna, whom I worshipped as a mother, and was barely holding myself together when a letter arrived from the Reverend from Rano, which told me of the death of your brother Aliprando.” Given everything that had passed between them, it seems hard to believe he was still holding on to the idea of Vittoria as his mother. But for someone who claimed to have recovered from his real mother’s death within a space of a few hours, the idea that he was “barely holding [himself] together” following Vittoria’s death suggests an unusually intense emotional response.

  The most touching report of Vittoria’s death came from Michelangelo. According to his biographer Condivi, Michelangelo was at Vittoria’s bedside as she was dying (it is not clear whether she was still alive when he arrived), and was seized by an unusual bout of resistance or fear in the face of death. As Condivi related it, “I remembered him saying that his only regret was that, when he went to see her as she was departing this life, he did not kiss her forehead or her face as he kissed her hand.” We can imagine the scene before us: Vittoria lay either dying or newly dead in her chamber in the Palazzo de’ Cesarini while the greatest living artist of the human form stood beside her, somehow made timid by the lifelessness of her body. He leaned over to kiss her face—the face he said he loved more than any other face in the world—but at the last second pulled away, instead kissing only her hand. The experience of seeing the woman with whom he had shared so much passing from one state to the next was so unsettling that “he remained a long time in despair and as if out of his mind.” In a letter Michelangelo wrote several weeks later to his friend Giovan Francesco Fattucci, the priest of Santa Maria in Florence, he declared himself “overwhelmed with grief.” Looking back at his loss even three years later, he wrote to Fattucci: “Death deprived me of a very great friend.” (In keeping with his poem that complimented Vittoria as a “man within a woman,” Michelangelo used the masculine amico to describe her here.)

  In the immediate aftermath of Vittoria’s death, there was great confusion about both her burial and her estate. Ascanio was designated her “universal heir,” which meant that he was to inherit all property that was not otherwise assigned, and was authorized to make whatever decisions had to be made. But Ascanio was in exile far from Rome, and thus unable to take care of things personally. He therefore delegated to his agent Lorenzo Bonorio, who was also one of Vittoria’s executors, the responsibility of gathering her personal property and arranging for her tomb.

  Neither of these tasks went smoothly. Of her personal property, Bonorio sent a letter to Ascanio on February 27 complaining that he had trouble making sense of anything in Vittoria’s rooms at Sant’Anna due to the interference of the mourners he found there. “Yesterday Messer Bartolomeo and I had the notary come by to do the inventory,” he wrote, but “there happened to be so much weeping among the ladies that we were forced to let it be.” It is not clear if he was referring to some of the nuns, or to friends and maidservants of Vittoria’s, but he was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tears that he could not conduct his business.

  The next day, Bonorio gathered his strength and returned to Sant’Anna. This time he was able to compile an itemized list of what he found:

  A few tables

  Dishes

  Several mattresses of extremely little value

  A water jug and washbasin

  A pair of candlesticks

  Six silver spoons

  Four silver forks

  One gold spoon

  A box with all of her papers, that is, contracts, agreements, and privileges

  In addition, Vittoria had left behind at Sant’Anna two ronzini (small horses) of little value: one large, and one very small. The small one, Bonorio proposed, should be left behind for one of the servants, “the little Giovan Nello” (possibly a little person); he made no suggestions for the other.

  This is a very modest inventory for a woman of Vittoria’s grandeur, and it leaves many questions unanswered. Where were the jewels and precious gifts she had been given over the years? Where were her personal letters, and the manuscripts of her poems? Where were the Titian and Pontormo paintings, and the Michelangelo drawings? Presumably some of these things she had taken with her to the Palazzo de’ Cesarini, or had otherwise disposed of in the preceding weeks. On February 24, for example, the day before she died, Maggio reported that Vittoria had given him a good number of books to be brought directly to Pole; this gift was later confirmed in one of the letters from Bonorio to Ascanio, in which he wrote that he had not seen her books but knew that there were many, and noted that all of them had been put in the house of the “English cardinal.”

  The paucity of valuable items on the inventory—only the golden spoon perhaps had any real worth—was a very minor blow for Ascanio compared with the other news that Bonorio
had to share. This had to do with the terms of Vittoria’s will. For the most part, Vittoria’s bequests were small enough as to make little difference to Ascanio’s inheritance. She gave three hundred scudi to three of the convents where she had lived for long stretches—Santa Caterina in Viterbo, and San Silvestro al Quirinale and Sant’Anna in Rome—and one hundred scudi to San Paolo in Orvieto, where she had stayed for several months (the convent of Santa Caterina in Ferrara, which she spoke about so warmly, was somehow overlooked). She gave gifts ranging between fifty and five hundred scudi to individual servants who had worked for her over the years: three hundred fifty scudi went to her maid Prudenza. To one Margherita Rucellai, she gave a velvet cloak “in gratitude for her affection and her kindness.”

  The shocking part of the will, however, involved its largest gift. This was a bequest of nine thousand scudi—an enormous sum of money, and much larger than the total of all of the other bequests. Vittoria was obviously well aware of the controversy that this large bequest might produce, and hence chose not to reveal in the will itself where the money was to go. Instead, she indicated that instructions had been given in a separate document. In Vittoria’s first will, this document was to be entrusted to Priuli—however much she may have disliked him personally, she must have trusted him enough to name him for this job. She obviously had second thoughts, however: in her revised will, she replaced Priuli with Vettor Soranzo, bishop of Bergamo and a fellow reformer. Vittoria and Soranzo’s friendship dated back to the early 1530s, when he was the go-between for her exchange of sonnets with Bembo (it was to Soranzo, as we saw earlier, that Bembo had written in 1531 to praise Vittoria’s poems as “more than one would expect from a woman”). During her stay in Viterbo, she seems to have spent time with Soranzo, something we learn about in a letter from Bembo. “I am very envious of my friend Vettor Soranzo,” he wrote to Vittoria in November 1541, “who is able to be with you so frequently, something I am not able to do.”