Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  For Clement, having someone in the Colonna family to serve as an intermediary between him and Ascanio was no small matter, and he had the utmost respect for Vittoria. Vittoria had shown herself to be a canny diplomat in the months before Ferrante’s death—she had been in regular contact with both Charles V and Pope Clement—and had managed to retain her loyalty to the church despite her ties to the emperor. It is altogether possible that the pope simply could not afford to let her disappear from the scene.

  From our perspective today, Clement’s interference in Vittoria’s life turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Had she become a nun, she may never have written her rich and complex body of poetry, which in turn paved the way for hundreds of other women to publish their own verse. She would not have met Michelangelo, and therefore would not have inspired him to make the magnificent works of art and poetry that he gave as gifts to her. She would not have become so involved with the Italian reform movement, or played so important a role in efforts to reconcile crucial tenets of Lutheranism with Catholic doctrine before the irreparable break of the Counter-Reformation. She would not, in short, have led such a rich and fascinating life that touched so many of those around her, and made her, to recall Jacob Burckhardt’s phrase, “the most famous woman of Italy.” We should be grateful to Pope Clement for forcing her back into the world.

  For Vittoria, however, Clement’s refusal to allow her to consider life as a nun seems to have come as a horrible blow. It threw her into an even deeper state of despair over Ferrante’s death, and left her without hope for her future. She stayed in the convent’s guest quarters for several more months before a new political crisis emerged involving her family, and Ascanio insisted that she take refuge at the Colonna castle in Marino. The crisis returned Vittoria to the nightmare that had swept Ferrante up in its midst the previous summer. For in spite of the treaty signed in January 1526 between Charles V and Francis I, who was still pining away in a gloomy tower in Madrid, the peace did not last. Francis was freed from prison in March, but only after surrendering a great deal of property and handing over two of his sons to Charles as hostages. By late May, he was ready to return to combat, and entered into a new agreement with his Italian allies, known as the League of Cognac, which included Pope Clement and Francesco II Sforza, the beleaguered duke of Milan. As loyal supporters of Charles V, the Colonna men found themselves once again preparing for war, this time much closer to home.

  Vittoria moved from San Silvestro in Capite to Marino sometime in the spring of 1526. While she was there, she missed the very grand funeral held for Ferrante in Naples that May. As we may recall, Ferrante’s corpse had first been entombed in a ceremony in Milan, but this was only a temporary step before its transfer to its final resting place. The coffin was transported from Milan in a formal procession that included a large number of friends, family members, and servants, all dressed in mourning clothes. When the group reached the outskirts of Naples—a trip that would have taken nine or ten days—they were met by an additional twenty soldiers and gentlemen, along with two bishops, who entered the city by Porta Capuana; this large entourage was joined by forty horse-drawn wagons, forty Carmelite monks, and nearly all the members of Ferrante’s confraternity, who were carrying torches. The coffin was then enclosed in a second coffin richly decorated in gold, and covered in black velvet. Directly behind the funeral litter, which was drawn by two mules, a group of Neapolitan barons and members of the royal court also wearing mourning clothes accompanied the cortege as it made its way to the cathedral church of San Domenico Maggiore. There, a very short distance from the Colonna palace on Via Mezzocannone, Ferrante was laid to rest alongside the sarcophagi of the Aragonese kings Alfonso, Ferdinand I, and Ferdinand II, as well as other members of the Spanish ruling class. A monument for Ferrante was planned, for which the great poet Ludovico Ariosto wrote an epitaph in Latin, praising Ferrante for having conquered Mars, mortality, and envy (“Mortem et Martem vincit et Invidiam”) with his glorious fame.

  Neither monument nor epitaph was ever erected, however, and in the eighteenth century the Spanish tombs were relocated within San Domenico Maggiore from the main chapel to the new sacristy, where they still can be seen today. The sacristy is a haunting space, largely empty save for the walnut benches and cabinets along the walls to keep the clerical vestments. But the gallery above, which can be accessed only by a small staircase at the far end of the room, is densely packed with Aragonese tombs. There are forty-two coffins in all, each of which is covered in beautiful velvets and silks, in hues of red, pink, and gold. The coffins lie side by side on two different levels of the gallery, with small but dignified gaps between them, so that no two touch. Gracing almost all of the tombs are framed portraits of the dead, which meet your eye as you gaze upward from the stone floors of the sacristy below. Ferrante’s tomb not only bears his portrait, which was done in profile (his eyes are therefore harder to meet), but also a painted epitaph and a sword nailed at a diagonal. The sword is not the original—this is kept in Naples’s Capodimonte Museum—but its presence serves as a reminder of Ferrante’s fame as a soldier.

  In the very detailed description of the funeral that has survived, there is no mention of Vittoria’s presence. Her absence was not surprising: starting in the thirteenth century, women were prohibited from attending funerals in many Italian cities. This came about in response to the perception, which had developed over the course of the Middle Ages, that women were too loud and wild in their grieving. They were said to wail, tear their clothes and hair, and make an enormous racket, all of which violated basic funerary decorum. In Bologna, a law was passed in 1276 decreeing that female mourners were not allowed to leave the house until the corpse was actually buried, and similar statutes were passed in a number of other cities. Women’s grieving, the church ruled, should be conducted within the home, where the corpse was typically brought to rest in the days preceding the funeral. Outside the public gaze, widows, mothers, and daughters could touch, kiss, and weep over their dead as much as they liked.

  It is certainly possible that Vittoria would have been permitted to attend Ferrante’s funeral—aristocrats routinely broke all sorts of rules—but it seems she remained in Marino. Indeed, at just about the same time that Ferrante was being buried in Naples, Vittoria was planning her own move back to that city. Sometime in the spring of 1526, she sent a letter to Pope Clement with a very unusual request. Her letter has not survived, but his response—written on May 5, just three weeks before he signed the new treaty with France and became once again the Colonna’s enemy—was found in the late nineteenth century inside the Secret Archive of the Vatican (Archivio Segreto Vaticano). The term “Secret” officially means that this is the personal archive of matters related to the pope, as opposed to other departments of the Roman Curia, and does not carry the connotation it does in English of something hidden. But in this case it may just as well mean secret, since the letter was unknown to the world until its discovery in the late 1880s.

  To the best of my knowledge, the translation I am providing here marks the first time Clement’s letter to Vittoria, which was written in a very formal and difficult Latin, has ever been published in either Italian or English. Although it is quite long, I am reproducing it in its entirety in order fully to convey just how peculiar the circumstances it describes actually were:

  Beloved daughter in Christ, our greetings and our apostolic blessing.

  You have informed us that, being bereft of your husband (a man of distinguished memory), in order to give rest and recovery to your mind and for a retreat free from human concerns, you intend to inhabit a certain house in the city of Naples, which was left to you by said husband, together with four or six honorable women of chaste life and there to serve God the highest more in mind and heart than with the profession of any Rule; and that you would like to be able to have Mass and the Divine Office celebrated, in accordance with the inward fervor of your devotion, in a certain shrine or chapel, which you intend to have
built in said house, and to be able, for the sake of your devotion, to keep the Sacrament of the Eucharist in a marble tabernacle gilded and under lock and key, with lamps burning day and night, something which you are not permitted to do without the special permission of the Apostolic See, and for this reason you humbly implored us to deign to assent, out of apostolic kindness, to your pious and honorable desire of this sort.

  What your Nobility seeks from us is something we have so far granted to no other, and something that has customarily been granted by the Holy See only rarely, since the home of the Sacrament (which wisdom has built for itself) ought to be the church alone. Nevertheless, in our opinion, since your devotion and piety and manifold virtues (which you, surpassing your womanly sex, have added to the nobility of your family) are as formidable as our own fatherly benevolence toward you and all your people would demand, we have judged that we should not deny this very thing [i.e., your request] for your spiritual consolation, since we hope (and hold as certain) that you, mindful of the dignity and glory of your heavenly Bridegroom and Lord (whom you will be hosting), will take care of and venerate such a great sacrament with that purity of spirit and feeling of devotion that is proper for you, being born from such a family and being distinguished by so many virtues.

  Therefore giving assent to your humble and devoted prayers, [we grant and allow] you so long as you can and are able to: have in said tabernacle, adorned as is fitting, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, kept by a suitable priest to be chosen by you with due honor and reverence, in your domestic shrine or chapel of this kind, which you will have blessed by some bishop who has the favor and fellowship of the Apostolic See, in such manner that it never hereafter be turned to any profane use, due to this kind of placement of the Sacrament; keep it there continuously in due veneration; and retain it there with the lamps continually lit; and have Mass and other Divine Offices celebrated as often as you shall wish; and receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, for yourself as well as the aforesaid women, from the same priest, even on Easter Day (without the prior clearance of a parish priest); that you can and are able to [do these things] without anyone’s permission being required, we grant and allow by Apostolic authority, by the intent and meaning of the matters contained here, with no opposing Apostolic or synodal or provincial dispositions or regulations or any other contrary issue whatsoever.

  The letter was signed at Saint Peter’s at Rome “under the ring of the fisherman”—this was the signet ring that the pope used until the mid-nineteenth century to seal official documents—on “the fifth day of May, 1526, in the third year of our pontificate.”

  Clement’s letter is dense and theologically fussy, but it sheds important light both on Vittoria’s plans for her widowhood and on her status in the world. Above all, it reveals that she had absolutely no intention of giving up on her desire to live like a nun. The pope may have forbidden her from taking the veil in December, but she had come back to him the following spring with a bold new proposal to create, in effect, a nunnery of her own.

  At its core, Vittoria’s request can be reduced to three central points: she wanted to live alone with a small group of women in Naples; to build a private chapel within her house; and to have her own priest at her disposal so that she could celebrate Communion whenever she liked. This last detail was certainly the most radical of the three. Because Catholic doctrine holds that once consecrated, the Host, or Eucharist, is the real body of Christ, keeping it from contamination or harm was an absolutely central concern of the church. Indeed, there was great anxiety among theologians as to what might happen to the crumbs that could fall from the priest’s hands after breaking a piece of the bread or wafer to give to the celebrant. Priests were instructed to keep their fingers close, and the celebrant, for his or her part, was not supposed to cough or spit immediately after receiving Communion. If any crumbs escaped and were picked up by a mouse, for example, the consequences were very unpleasant. According to Peter Paludanus (Pierre de la Palu), a Dominican monk active in the early fourteenth century, the priest was required to reserve and sort through the mouse’s entrails, in order to recover the portion of the wafer that the mouse had eaten. This remainder of the wafer, whatever its condition, “must reverently be laid up in the tabernacle, until it may naturally be consumed.”

  Given this level of anxiety and precaution, for Clement to give a laywoman the right to keep the Host within her own home—requiring her, of course, to secure it “in a marble tabernacle gilded and under lock and key, with lamps burning day and night”—was truly exceptional. Was he feeling guilty for having prevented her from taking the veil at San Silvestro? Or did he think this might be a way of keeping her as his ally while tensions with her brother were escalating? Why Vittoria would have asked for these arrangements, by contrast, is much easier to understand. She wanted to live a completely religious life, worship whenever she pleased, and have no need to leave her home even on Easter Day. She also wanted the exclusive company of women. Far from accepting the fate that had been dealt her, she was fighting to control her own future. In Clement’s response to her lost letter, Vittoria’s innermost hopes and desires were laid bare.

  There is no trace of this exchange anywhere in Vittoria’s surviving correspondence, and therefore no way of knowing why her plan never came to fruition. Without Clement’s letter, the whole episode would have been absent from the historical record, and it would have seemed that Vittoria had simply accepted her fate to live with Ascanio and his family. Most likely, however, her desire to create her own religious house in Naples was thwarted by the unfortunate timing of events later in May. Within several weeks of having granted her permission, Clement had signed the treaty with France, and therefore had committed himself to going to war against the Colonna and their allies. The idea that Vittoria would at that very moment set up the equivalent of a private convent with his blessing must have been out of the question. She was stuck, for the time, in Marino.

  Glancing back in June 1526 at the events of the previous year, Vittoria had reason to be overwhelmed with despair. Not only had she lost her husband, but she had also been refused the right to become a nun, forced to move home with her brother, and then prevented from embarking on a new religious life designed to suit her every need. She was back where her life had begun, in the family castle, with Ascanio waging war against the pope. What was she to do? Having run out of options for formally withdrawing from the world, she found a new medium for her grief. Following in the footsteps of the great fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarca, Vittoria transformed her sorrows into verse.

  4

  BECOMING A POET

  IT IS TEMPTING TO THINK that Vittoria felt liberated by her widowhood, but all the evidence suggests this was not the case. Whatever her disappointments with Ferrante may have been during their marriage—and they certainly were very real—they seem to have disappeared with his death. When Giovio spent time with Vittoria on Ischia in the fall of 1527, he described her as having finally “tempered and assuaged her incredible anguish.” “Although the abiding reason for her bitter lamentation lies heavily on her mind,” Giovio wrote, “it seems to have been limited and brought under control, as if her tears had been dried.” Whether Vittoria genuinely missed Ferrante, or felt overwhelmed with regret for all the things that had not gone well between them, or was simply struggling to imagine her future as a widow, it was clear to Giovio that she had spent several years consumed by grief.

  None of this was necessarily surprising. Italian widows were expected to mourn their husbands, and pray on behalf of their souls, for most of their waking hours. Being a widow was considered, in effect, a full-time job. Everything about the widow’s personal appearance was supposed to communicate her new status: she was to wear all black, eschew any ornaments or jewels, and cover her hair with a long veil. The use of the veil was a relatively recent innovation in Vittoria’s period: before the fifteenth century, widows let their hair fall wildly about their bodies as a symbol of their
own undoing after the priest had administered their husbands’ last rites, and then began their often very loud lamentations. We might think of the many paintings done of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, for example, in which she is weeping extravagantly, with her hair loosely falling onto her dress or the legs of Christ himself.

  The idea of taming the female mourner’s hair was part of the general trend in the Renaissance to quiet women down, if not to repress their grief altogether. This is consistent with the laws that prohibited women from attending funerals: the widow’s mourning was officially moved, as we have seen, from the public to the private sphere. When widows did appear in public, they were supposed to keep a very low profile. According to the Venetian author and engraver Cesare Vecellio, who wrote a book in the late sixteenth century on habits of dress that included several hundred woodcuts modeling female costume, if widows need to appear in public, they “wear their cappa [mantle] low on their foreheads, and go through the streets sadly, and with lowered heads.” “As long as they want to remain widowed,” Vecellio added—using the verb vedovare, from the noun for “widow,” vedova—“they wear a train and put on no colored clothing.” The fact that Italian has a special verb for the state of being a widow suggests how important a role this was, and how carefully the widow’s boundaries were patrolled.

  On the whole, Vittoria seems to have adhered to the standard widow’s protocol. As Giovio and others attested, she dressed in black, covered her hair with a veil, stayed largely indoors, and prayed regularly for her husband’s soul. But in other respects Vittoria was unconventional, or at least her mourning did not take the standard form of lamentation. For unlike any of the recommended behavior described in Renaissance advice manuals for women, she chose not simply to pray, but also to write. In poetry, Vittoria found a more complex outlet for her grief than anything the prayer books had in mind.