Renaissance Woman

by Ramie Targoff

  For further biography on Galileo, see, among others, William Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the inquisitorial trials of Galileo and their impact, see Maurice Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For the translated text of the church’s injunction against Galileo, see Maurice Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  On the Vatican Secret Archives, see Terzo Natalini, The Vatican Secret Archives, trans. Dieter Schlenker, ed. Sergio Pagano (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2000).

  For a history of the Vatican’s inquisition archive, see William Monter, “The Inquisition,” in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Thomas Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Ann Jacobson Schutte, “Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio: The Opening of the Roman Inquisition’s Central Archive,” Perspectives on History 37.5 (1999). On Carlo Ginzburg’s appeal to the archive, see among others Cullen Murphy, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), which reconstructs the opening of Ginzburg’s otherwise unpublished and possibly lost letter.

  The fruits of Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri’s collaboration are in Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole (Vatican City: Archivio Vaticano, 1989).

  On Pole’s candidacy for pope, see Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Carnesecchi’s execution is described in Delio Cantimori, “Italy and the Papacy,” in Geoffrey Rudolf Elton, ed., The Reformation: 1520–1559, 2nd ed., vol. 2 of The New Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957–1979). The inquisition transcriptions are printed in Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, eds., I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567) (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998–2000). For the transcriptions of Morone’s interrogations, see Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone (Rome: Instituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 1981–1995).

  On Marcantonio Colonna at the Battle of Lepanto, see Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (London: Cassell, 2003); see also Nicoletta Bazzano, Marco Antonio Colonna (Rome: Salerno, 2003). For depictions of Marcantonio in the literature produced in the wake of the victory at Lepanto, see Elizabeth Wright, Sarah Spence, and Andrew Lemons, eds., The Battle of Lepanto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2014).

  General Reference and Further Bibliography

  Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

  Bernhard Kerber, “Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari,” trans. Renate Franciscono, Art Bulletin 50.1 (1968).

  Adriano Prosperi, L’Inquisizione romana: letture e ricerche (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003).

  Michael Roberts and Ebenezer Rees Thomas, Newton and the Origin of Colours: A Study of One of the Earliest Examples of Scientific Method (London: Bell, 1934).

  Christina Strunck, “The Barbarous and Noble Enemy: Pictorial Representations of the Battle of Lepanto,” in James Harper, ed., The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery Before Orientalism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).

  Jane Wickersham, Rituals of Prosecution: The Roman Inquisition and the Prosecution of Philo-Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could never have been written without the incredible generosity of friends, colleagues, students, and even strangers; what follows is an inevitably incomplete list of the many people to whom I am grateful.

  I owe my introduction to Vittoria Colonna to Gerhard Regn at the University of Munich, who first suggested I read her poems when I was finishing my book Posthumous Love (I had never heard of her before). My agent, Jill Kneerim, encouraged me to write Vittoria’s biography, and guided me with terrific devotion through the early steps of imagining and launching the book. Jonathan Galassi has been the finest editor I could have, and has made the book infinitely better. I owe thanks to Carolina Baizan at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for making the editorial process run smoothly, and to Judy Kiviat and Karen Ninnis for their outstanding work proofreading the book.

  This book represented a new field for my own writing, and I am indebted to Abigail Brundin, Virginia Cox, Julia Hairston, Serena Sapegno, and Deanna Shemek for welcoming me so warmly into the scholarly world of Renaissance women’s writing; Julia was especially kind in sharing her library with me during my sabbatical in Rome. Kenneth Gouwens has been remarkably generous in helping me navigate the complex world of sixteenth-century Italian history; on the rare occasions when he has not had answers to my questions, he has tracked them down for me himself. Albert Ascoli, P. Renée Baernstein, Leonard Barkan, Shaul Bassi, Ann Blair, Patrizia Cavazzini, Gigliola Fragnito, Marjorie Och, Jonathan Unglaub, Nick Wilding, and the late John Marino have all answered specific questions that I could never have resolved without their help.

  Angelo de Gennaro has been my devoted Italian tutor for the past five years, working patiently with me in weekly sessions to decipher Vittoria’s complex letters and poems. Francesco Caruso was an excellent translator of the most obscure Latin letters and documents. Troy Tower has been the finest research assistant imaginable, locating the most difficult texts, reviewing all of my translations and doing additional translations of his own, fact-checking every possible date, name, and event in this book, and working tirelessly over the past year to help bring this project to completion (any mistakes that remain, needless to say, are my own). I also owe thanks to the staff of the Eisenhower and Peabody Libraries at Johns Hopkins for helping Troy in his extensive research.

  I am grateful to the directors of the American Academy in Rome, Christopher Celenza and Kimberly Bowes, for sponsoring the conference I organized with Serena Sapegno in the fall of 2014 on Vittoria and her world, and to Andrea Fossà for putting together a magical concert for the opening of that conference at the Palazzo Colonna. I want to thank Jeffrey Knapp at the University of California, Berkeley; Alina Payne at Villa I Tatti in Florence; Yoav Rinon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer at the University of Chicago; and Christina Nielsen at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, for inviting me to present parts of this book as lectures.

  Most of the research for this book was done in Italy, and I am indebted to the librarians and archivists at the manuscript room of the Vatican Apostolic Library; the Secret Archive of the Vatican; the Archive of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith; the American Academy in Rome; the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence; and, above all, the Colonna archive in Subiaco, where I have worked in the most peaceful conditions, interrupted only by the espresso personally delivered to me by one of the monks sometime in the midafternoon. I want to thank the Trappist nuns in Vitorchiano who opened their convent to me for a visit of a few days in the summer of 2015, and especially Suora Gabriella, who made time to have two private conversations with me about monastic life, and Suora Fiat and Suora Maria Panagia, who kindly arranged for my visit. I am also grateful to Brandeis University for supporting my research.

  One of the great pleasures of writing this book has been discovering the thick circle of friends that sustained Vittoria throughout her life; this has made me appreciate all the more the wonderful friends who enrich my own. I want to thank Sara Antonelli, Mary Bing, Jeffrey Blanchard, Glenda Carpio, Judith Clark, Sarah Cole, Ophelia Dahl, Barry Fifield, Carmela Vircilio Franklin, Deborah Greenman, Stefanie Heraeus, Bernhard Jussen, Joseph Koerner, Meg Koerner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Blyth Lord, Louis Menand, Paul Morrison, Ashley Pettus, Adam Philips, Rick Rambuss, Kellie Robe
rtson, Catherine Robson, Michal Safdie, Moshe Safdie, Alison Simmons, and Sara St. Antoine, for their precious gift of friendship. I also want to thank my siblings, Hannah Saujet, Jason Targoff, and Joshua Targoff, and my father, Michael Targoff, for their abiding love and support.

  My last and greatest debt is to my immediate family. My husband, Stephen Greenblatt, has shown me what it means to speak to the larger world about the past, and to make that past matter. He has been my best interlocutor, and my most loving companion. My son, Harry, keeps me engaged in the present, and fills my daily life with joy. I am deeply grateful to them both (along with our beloved dog, Marcus) for making our home such a happy one.

  I dedicate this book to my mother, Cheri Kamen Targoff, who is my real-life example of an extraordinary woman. She has been by my side from the very beginning, and has inspired me in ways far too numerous to list here.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abruzzo

  Accolti, Benedetto

  Aguilar, Marquis of (Don Juan Fernandez Manrique II de Lara)

  Alcionio, Pietro

  Alessandro, Lord of Pesaro

  Alexander VI, Pope

  Alfonso II, King of Naples

  Alicarnasso, Filonico

  Amante, Bruto

  Anne of Brittany

  Appiani, Beatrice

  Aquinas, Thomas

  Aquino

  Aretino, Pietro

  Ariosto, Ludovico; Orlando furioso

  Arthur, Prince of Wales

  Ascham, Roger, The Schoolmaster

  Assisi

  Astuna

  Attendolo, Muzio

  Bagni di Lucca

  Barbarossa, il (Khair ad-dīn)

  baroni

  Becket, Thomas

  Bellini, Giovanni

  Bembo, Pietro; Discussions of the Vernacular Language; Vittoria and

  Benedetto of Mantua

  Benedict, Saint

  Benedictine order

  Benedict XVI, Pope

  Beneficio di Cristo

  Benevento

  Bible; Hebrew; vernacular

  Biblioteca Estense, Modena

  Black Bands (Bande Nere)

  blason

  Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Boleyn, Anne

  Bonfire of the Vanities

  Bonorio, Lorenzo

  Borgia, Cesare

  Borgia, Lucrezia

  Borgia, Rodrigo, see Alexander VI, Pope

  Botticelli, Sandro

  Bourbon, Duke of (Charles III)

  Brisegna, Isabella

  Britonio, Girolamo; The Sun’s Jealousy

  Brucioli, Antonio

  Bruni, Leonardo

  Brutus, Marcus

  Bucer, Martin

  Bullinger, Heinrich

  Burckhardt, Jacob

  Caetani family

  Calvin, John; The Institutes of the Christian Religion

  Campagna

  Campiglia, Maddalena; Fiori

  Canossa, Count Lodovico

  Capanio

  Capuchins

  Carabotti, Santuccia

  Caracalla, Emperor

  Carafa, Carlo

  Carafa, Gian Pietro, see Paul IV, Pope

  Carmelites

  Carnesecchi, Pietro

  Carpi

  Cassino

  Castel Capuano

  Castelli Romani

  Castello d’Ischia (Aragonese Castle)

  Castel Sant’Angelo

  Castiglione, Baldassare; The Courtier

  Catarino, Ambrogio; Speculum haereticorum

  Catherine of Alexandria

  Catherine of Aragon

  Catherine of Siena, Saint; The Book of Divine Doctrine

  Catholicism; Inquisition

  Catullus

  Cavalieri, Tommaso de’

  Cervini, Marcello

  Cesarini, Giulia Colonna

  Charles, Duke d’Alencon

  Charles I, King of Spain

  Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor; Sack of Rome

  Charles VIII, King of France

  Chaucer, Geoffrey

  Chiara di Favarone de Offreduccio

  Chiari, Giuseppe Bartolomeo

  Cibo, Caterina

  Cincio, Giuseppe

  Clare, Saint

  Clement VII, Pope; Sack of Rome and; Vittoria and

  clothing; of nuns; wedding; of widows

  Clouet, Jean, portrait of Renée of France

  Colonna, Ascanio; in exile; Salt War and; Vittoria’s death and

  Colonna, Cardinal Giacomo

  Colonna, Cardinal Girolamo I

  Colonna, Caterina

  Colonna, Fabrizio (father of Vittoria)

  Colonna, Fabrizio (son of Ascanio, nephew of Vittoria)

  Colonna, Federico

  Colonna, Isabella

  Colonna, Livia

  Colonna, Marcantonio

  Colonna, Marcantonio II

  Colonna, Marzio

  Colonna, Oddone, see Martin V, Pope

  Colonna, Ottaviano

  Colonna, Pompeo

  Colonna, Prospero

  Colonna, Vespasiano

  Colonna, Vittoria; birth of; burial of; childhood of; childlessness of; death of; dowry of; fame of; in Ferrara; health problems of; inquisitorial file on; last writings; letters to Ascanio; letters to Michelangelo; life at Ischia castle; Magdalene paintings and drawings owned by; marriage to Ferrante; medal of; Michelangelo and; Michelangelo’s drawings for; paintings of; physical appearance of; pilgrimage to Holy Land desired by; as a poet; Pole and; Protestant leanings of; religious views of; reluctance to remarry; Salt War and; at Sant’Anna in Rome; in Viterbo; wealth of; wedding of; wedding contract of; widowhood; will and estate of; see also poetry by Vittoria Colonna

  Colonna, Vittoria (niece of Vittoria)

  Colonna archive

  Colonna family; Salt War and

  Condivi, Ascanio

  condottieri

  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

  Constantine, Emperor

  Contarini, Francesco

  Contarini, Gasparo

  convents; clothing; daily life in; dowry; food and fasting; prayers; see also specific convents

  Cornillau, Jean

  Corsi, Pietro

  Corso, Rinaldo

  Council of Ten

  Council of Trent

  Counter-Reformation

  courts, Renaissance; entertainment; Ferrara; life at; servants at; Urbino

  Cromwell, Thomas

  da Ceri, Renzi

  damnatio memoriae

  dance

  Dante

  d’Aquino, Antonella

  d’Aragona, Alfonso

  d’Aragona, Camillo Marzano

  d’Aragona, Giovanna

  d’Aragona, Isabella

  d’Aragona, Tullia

  d’Arezzo, Guittone

  d’Armagnac, Georges

  da Salerno, Girolamo Ramarino

  d’Avalos, Alfonso

  d’Avalos, Costanza

  d’Avalos, Ferrante I; death of; funeral and tomb of; infidelity of; Machiavellian character of; marriage to Vittoria; medal of; military service; Vittoria’s sonnets to; wedding of

  d’Avalos, Iñigo II

  d’Avalos family

  de Cardona, Don Ramón

  dell’Abate, Nicolò, portrait of Ercole II d’Este

  dell’Altissimo, Cristofano, portrait of Giulia Gonzaga

  della Rovere, Francesco

  della Torre, Francesco

  della Valle, Cardinal Andrea

  del Piombo, Sebastiano

  de Requesens, Isabel

  de’ Rossi, Brunamonte

  Diet of Regensburg

  Diotima

  Domenichi, Lodovico


  Dominicans

  Domus Aurea

  Donne, John

  dowries; conventual

  du Bellay, Jean

  Ecclesia Viterbiensis

  Edward IV, King of England

  Elizabeth I, Queen of England

  England; literacy; publishing

  Equicola, Mario

  Erasmus, Desiderius

  Ercolani, Iacopo

  Este, Alberto V d’

  Este, Alfonso I d’

  Este, Anna d’

  Este, Borso d’

  Este, Ercole I d’

  Este, Ercole II d’

  Este, Ippolito d’

  Este, Isabella d’

  Este, Niccolò III d’

  Este family

  Eucharist

  Exeter Conspiracy

  Farnese, Alessandro, see Paul III, Pope

  Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro

  Farnese, Giulia

  Farnese, Ottavio

  Farnese, Pier Luigi

  Farnese, Vittoria

  Farnese family

  Fascism

  fasting

  Fattucci, Giovan Francesco

  Ferdinand I, King of Naples

  Ferdinand II, King of Naples

  Ferdinand IV, King of Naples

  Ferrara; Vittoria in

  feudalism

  Ficino, Marsilio

  Flaminio, Marcantonio

  Florence

  Florentine Academy

  Fondi

  food; in convents; of friars; Salt War and; on ships; wedding

  Fracastoro, Girolamo

  France; poetry; Protestantism; wars with Italy

  Francis, Saint

  Franciscans; Conventual; Observant

  Francis I, King of France

  Frangipane family

  Fregoso, Federico

  Fregoso, Ottaviano

  Galileo

  Gambara, Veronica

  Gardiner, Stephen