Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  For the extensive correspondence of Isabella d’Este translated into English, see Deanna Shemek, trans. and ed., Isabella d’Este: Selected Letters (Toronto/Tempe, AZ: Iter Press/ACMRS, 2017).

  Ferrante’s letters to Mario Equicola discussing Delia—or Delya, in his spelling—are published in Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista storica mantovana 1 (1884). They are treated in English in Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna. Luzio also transcribes a letter from Francesco Gonzaga, the Mantuan ambassador in Rome, written one week after Ferrante’s death, which described Vittoria’s reaction to the news of Ferrante’s death (the letter is kept in the Archivio Gonzaga in Mantua).

  The identification of Isabel de Requesens as the figure in the Louvre portrait, which was executed by Giulio Romano with the collaboration of his mentor Raphael, is Michael Fritz’s; see Giulio Romano et Raphaël: la vice-reine de Naples, ou, La Renaissance d’une beauté mythique, trans. Claire Nydegger (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997).

  For details on the daily life and personal effects of Vittoria and Ferrante, see Alfred von Reumont, Vittoria Colonna, marchesa di Pescara: vita, fede e poesia nel secolo decimosesto, trans. Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller (Turin: Loescher, 1892); Maud Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times (London: Dent, 1906); Amalia Giordano, La dimora di Vittoria Colonna a Napoli (Naples: Melfi & Joele, 1906); and Amy Bernardy, La vita e l’opera di Vittoria Colonna (Florence: Le Monnier, 1928). These modern biographers each draw from two sixteenth-century chroniclers still lacking critical editions, Giuliano Passero (or Passaro) and Filonico Alicarnasso, pseudonym of Costantino Castriota. The manuscript of Alicarnasso’s Vita di Vittoria Colonna, ms. XB67 at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, is compiled alongside a biography of Ferrante; it is published as an appendix to Ferrero and Müller’s Carteggio. The manuscript copy of Passero was published by Vincenzo Maria Altobelli under the title Storie in forma di giornali (Naples: Orsini, 1785).

  Giovio’s description of Ferrante is at the end of the second chapter of volume 1 of his biography; see Le vite del Gran Capitano e del marchese di Pescara. Vittoria is described as lacking “gran beltà” by Alicarnasso in Ferrero and Müller’s Carteggio.

  Figures pertaining to Vittoria’s dowry can be found in the original marriage contract between Fabrizio Colonna and Ferrante d’Avalos in the Colonna archive in Subiaco. The wedding gifts specified in the wedding contract are printed as an appendix to Pier Ercole Visconti’s 1840 edition of Vittoria’s Rime (Rome: Salviucci).

  On Roman dowry caps, see Irene Fosi and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, “Marriage and Politics at the Papal Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the Florentine dowry market, see Julius Kirshner and Anthony Molho, “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,” Journal of Modern History 50.3 (1978). On the intersection of marriage practices and the Catholic Church before and after the Council of Trent, see Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London: Routledge, 2000). Vittoria’s wedding celebration is described in Reumont, Vittoria Colonna; her guests’ description is given in Bernardy, La vita e l’opera di Vittoria Colonna.

  For details on the luxurious wedding celebrations typical of early modern Italy, see Jane Bridgeman and Alan Griffiths, eds., A Renaissance Wedding: The Celebrations at Pesaro for the Marriage of Costanzo Sforza & Camilla Marzano d’Aragona, 26–30 May 1475 (London: Harvey Miller, 2013); the wedding song and menu are translated by Bridgeman, with my slight emendations. On dowry limits and marriage ceremonies in Italy, see Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650, and Anthony Mohlo, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). See also Anthony D’Elia, The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), who translates Bruni’s complaint about the expense of his wedding.

  Passero’s description of Bona Sforza’s party and its menu is given in Giordano, La dimora di Vittoria Colonna a Napoli; Vittoria’s Hungarian dance is described by Giovio in the third dialogue of his Notable Men and Women of Our Time, trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  Among the many biographies of Lucrezia Borgia, see in particular Sarah Bradford’s Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (New York: Penguin, 2005), published in Italian as Lucrezia Borgia: la vera storia (Mondadori, 2005). Also noteworthy is La figlia del papa (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2014), the only historical novel by the late playwright Dario Fo, which was translated into English as The Pope’s Daughter (New York: Europa, 2015). The death of Alfonso d’Aragona is discussed in Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia.

  The exchange between Beatrice and her uncle Leonato is in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, act 2, scene 1, lines 48–49; see The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). All references to Shakespeare are from this edition.

  For Pascal’s wager, see Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1932).

  For the life and death of Margherita Colonna, see Giulia Barone, “Margherita Colonna: A Portrait,” trans. Larry Field, Magistra 21.2 (2015). For a recent biography of Clare of Assisi, see Joan Mueller, The Privilege of Poverty: Clare of Assisi, Agnes of Prague, and the Struggle for a Franciscan Rule for Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Vittoria’s plans to join a convent cannot definitively be established, but the documentary evidence (both Clement’s letter to the nuns and his subsequent permissions to Vittoria) overwhelmingly suggests this to be the case. For a treatment of these materials, see Veronica Copello, “«La signora marchesa a casa»: tre aspetti della biografia di Vittoria Colonna con una tavola cronologica,” Testo 73 (2017).

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  María Teresa Cacho, “Fuentes impresas de poesía española en cancionerillos musicales italianos del siglo XVI,” in Pedro Cátedra, ed., La literatura popular impresa en España y en la América colonial. Formas & temas, géneros, funciones, difusión, historia e teoría (Salamanca, Spain: SEMYR, 2006).

  Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

  Gerardo Cioffardi, Bona Sforza. Donna del Rinascimento tra Italia e Polonia (Bari, Italy: Levante, 2000).

  Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, trans. Christopher Woodall, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993).

  Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1917).

  Victoria Finlay, Color: A History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2002).

  Katie Fiorentino, La chiesa di Sant’Erasmo a Castel Sant’Elmo. Un patrimonio ritrovato (Naples: Artem, 2013).

  Juan-Santos Gaynor and Ilaria Toesca, S. Silvestro in Capite (Rome: Marietti, 1963).

  David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

  David Jenkins, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  3. LONGING FOR THE NUNNERY

  On the economic and social motivations for monastic life in early modern Italy and on the financial practices of Italian convents, see Helen Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); see also Sharon Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  On Arcangela Tarabotti, see Letizia Panizza’s introduction to her translation of Tirannia paterna, Paternal Tyra
nny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), which is quoted here. All citations of the Christian Bible follow the King James Version; see the 2000 edition published by the American Bible Society.

  On the Divine Offices and daily life in an Italian convent, see Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries; see also Kate Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture: Women and History-Writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the relative comforts of certain conventual orders, see Hills, Invisible City; see also Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On monastic dietary practices and Jaques de Vitry’s comments on the nuns, see Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

  A history of Clare’s life and the establishment of the Poor Clares is in Hills, Invisible City. For an early history of the Friars Minor, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order: From Its Origins to the Year 1517 (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1988).

  Pope Clement’s brief to the nuns at San Silvestro in Capite is printed in an appendix to Pietro Ercole Visconti’s edition of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime (Rome: Salviucci, 1840). The letter was translated from Latin to Italian by Francesco Caruso; the translation from Italian to English is my own.

  Giovio’s description of Ferrante’s funeral is in book 7, chapter 4, of his Vita. The funeral procession is described by Passero and recorded in Amalia Giordano, La dimora di Vittoria Colonna a Napoli (Naples: Melfi & Joele, 1906), which also includes Ariosto’s Latin epitaph. For further details on the Aragonese mausoleum, see Bruto Amante, La tomba di Vittoria Colonna e i testamenti finora inediti della poetessa (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1896).

  On regulating women’s grief in early modern Italy, see Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). For a statistically informed survey of legislation concerning funeral attendance and behavior in early modern Italy, see Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Clement’s letter to Vittoria was first published by Bartolommeo Fontana in “Nuovi documenti vaticani intorno a Vittoria Colonna,” Archivio della [Reale] Società Romana di Storia Patria 10.4 (1887). The translation of this letter from Latin to English was done by Dr. Thomas Hendrickson and emended by Dr. Robert W. Ulery.

  On ecclesiastical anxieties concerning the host, see, among others, Stephen Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Peter Paludanus is cited here.

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Gino Fornaciari, “Le mummie aragonesi in San Domenico Maggiore di Napoli,” Medicina nei secoli 18.3 (2006).

  Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (New York: Morrow, 1974).

  Lawrence Landini, The Causes of the Clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor, 1209–1260, in the Light of Early Franciscan Sources, dissertation, Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1968.

  Allison Mary Levy, Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).

  Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo. Saggio di ricerche sulla trasmissione ereditaria dei caratteri biologici (Florence: Nardini, 1986).

  Paul Strathern, The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Pegasus, 2016).

  Ottavio Mazzoni Toselli, Racconti storici estratti dall’archivio criminale di Bologna (Bologna: Chierici, 1870).

  4. BECOMING A POET

  Paolo Giovio’s description of Vittoria’s grief is in Notable Men and Women of Our Time, trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the regulations on women’s behavior and attire in mourning in early modern Italy, see Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Cesare Vecellio’s description is from his 1590 encyclopedia Degli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo, published in Venice by Damian Zenaro, in the section of the first book entitled “Habiti delle nobili venetiane, & altre qualità della Città”; the English translation, by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, The Americas: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008), is of the second 1598 edition, which also includes examples from the Americas.

  For the Italian texts of Petrarch, see Marco Santagata’s updated edition of the Canzoniere (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). On the historical relationship between Petrarch and Laura de Noves, the woman traditionally believed to be the subject of his poetry, see Frederic Jones, “Further Evidence of the Identity of Petrarch’s Laura,” Italian Studies 39.1 (1984). Other scholars insist on a largely symbolic construction where Laura represents poetic glory, based on the likeness of her name to the laurel tree (lauro, in Italian) that crowns poetic genius; see John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1973).

  The bibliography on Petrarchism is vast, but see, among others, Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On the responses to Petrarchism by early modern Italian women writers besides Vittoria, see Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); see also Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). For a history of the sonnet before and after Petrarch, see Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992).

  Britonio and Capanio’s elegies of Vittoria are translated in Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  On the medal of Vittoria and its possible echoes of Raphael’s Sappho, see Marjorie Och, “Portrait Medals of Vittoria Colonna: Representing the Learned Woman,” in Susan Shifrin, ed., Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002); see also Walter Cupperi, “«Il nome fatale di Vittoria»: note su due medaglie della marchesa di Pescara,” in Francesco De Angelis, ed., Lo sguardo archeologico: i normalisti per Paul Zanker (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007).

  For Plutarch’s account of Portia, see his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, ed. and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 2:609. Catullus’s description of the “eternal sleep” is from his fifth ode; see Catullus, trans. and ed. Francis Warre Cornish, in Catullus · Tibullus · Pervigilium Veneris, 2nd ed., ed. George Patrick Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

  The translation of Plato’s Symposium is Margaret Howatson’s in the edition of Margaret Howatson and Frisbee Sheffield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a synthesis of Neoplatonic thought from antiquity onward, see Dominic O’Meara, ed., Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). On the repopularization of Platonic ideas in early modern Italy, especially by Marsilio Ficino, see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990); see also Nesca Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935).

  The standard English translation of The Courtier is Charles Singleton’s The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, An Authoritative Text Criticism, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). All citations of Castiglione follow this edition.

  Bernardo Tasso’s fourth ode is dedicated to Vittoria Colonna; see Vercingetorige Martignone’s edition of Tasso’s Rime (Turin: RES, 1995).

  Gener
al Reference and Further Bibliography

  Virgilio Costa, “Sulle prime traduzioni italiane a stampa delle opere di Plutarco (secc. XV–XVI),” in Maria Accame, Volgarizzare e tradurre dall’Umanesimo all’Età contemporanea. Atti della Giornata di Studi, 7 dicembre 2011, Università di Roma «Sapienza» (Rome: Tivoli, 2012).

  Eugenio Garin, “From Petrarch to Salutati,” in History of Italian Philosophy, trans. and ed. Giorgio Pinton (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).

  Vojtěch Hladký, The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon: Platonism in Late Byzantium, Between Hellenism and Orthodoxy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2014).

  Teodoro Katinis, Medicina e filosofia in Marsilio Ficino: il Consilio contro la pestilenza (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007).

  Gianvito Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco nel Quattrocento (Padua: Antenore, 1962).

  Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  John Trappes-Lomax, Catullus: A Textual Reappraisal (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007).

  Edward Zalta, gen. ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1997–), http://www.plato.stanford.edu.

  5. THE SACK OF ROME

  For a history of relations between the Colonna family and the papacy, see Christine Shaw, The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus IV to Clement VII: Barons and Factions in the Papal States (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2007).

  For further detail on the Sack of Rome, see Michael Edward Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2014); see also Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome, 1527 (London: MacMillan, 1972). For the cultural legacy of the siege, see André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1977, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). On the involvement of Charles III of Bourbon, see Vincent Pitts, The Man Who Sacked Rome: Charles de Bourbon, Constable of France (1490–1527) (New York: Lang, 1993); see also Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. James McGregor (New York: Italica, 1993), the second book of which gives Bourbon’s speech on the fateful day of May 6, 1527.