Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

After several years in Rome, Valdés settled in Naples, where he quickly attracted a group of religious followers around him. This was the group Vittoria had most likely heard about on Ischia: the so-called spirituali. The spirituali were more Lutheran in their orientation than the Spanish alumbrados. In particular, they had come to embrace Luther’s idea of sola fide: that faith alone—without good works—can save you. The nineteenth-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dramatized Valdés’s position on the subject in his unfinished poem Michael Angelo, in which his character Valdesso exchanges these words with his loyal disciple, Julia:

  Valdesso:… With the human soul

  There is no compromise. By faith alone

  Can man be justified.

  Julia: Hush, dear Valdesso:

  That is a heresy. Do not, I pray you,

  Proclaim it from the house-top, but preserve it

  As something precious, hidden in your heart,

  As I, who half believe and tremble at it.

  Julia’s assessment was correct: the Catholic Church hated the idea of sola fide, which not only removed the most obvious incentive to perform charitable deeds, but also threatened to take away an immensely profitable revenue flow (the pope was still trying to raise funds to complete the massive building project of Saint Peter’s Basilica).

  Longfellow’s Julia was none other than the famously beautiful Giulia Gonzaga, Countess of Fondi, the widow of Vittoria’s cousin Vespasiano. Vespasiano was the son of the famous condottiere Prospero Colonna, who had fought alongside Vittoria’s father on many occasions and had amassed a great deal of wealth. Vespasiano married Giulia in 1526 when she was only thirteen and he was forty; he died less than two years later. Although Vespasiano’s will stipulated that Giulia would inherit all of his lands and titles only under the condition that she did not remarry, she was nonetheless courted by many powerful figures in the years to come, including Ippolito de’ Medici, a cousin of Pope Clement. Ippolito was in fact supposed to marry Giulia’s stepdaughter, Isabella, but instead became a cardinal—and, almost certainly, Giulia’s lover. Ippolito commissioned the painter Sebastiano del Piombo to paint Giulia’s portrait for him in 1532, several copies of which have survived. One of these is a small painting in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua that appears to have been a portable version for Ippolito to carry before the final portrait was completed. In 1535, Ippolito died under mysterious circumstances; many believed he was poisoned by members of his own family, who were deeply opposed to his love affair with Giulia.

  Portrait of Giulia Gonzaga, Vittoria’s cousin by marriage, after Sebastiano del Piombo and attributed to the sixteenth-century painter known as Cristofano dell’Altissimo (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence)

  Giulia’s great beauty had also reached the ears of the African corsair Khair ad-dīn, known as il Barbarossa, who tried to kidnap her in 1534 from the Colonna fortress in Fondi in order to offer her as a gift to the Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. The castle was sacked, but Giulia managed to escape in the night, thanks to the quickness of one of her servants. It was after both the attempted kidnapping and the death of Ippolito that she met Valdés, who clearly represented a purer, simpler life. Following a visit he made to Fondi in 1535, Giulia decided to move to Naples in order to dedicate herself to his religious teaching, and took up residence in the monastery of San Francesco alle Monache, where she lived on and off for the rest of her days. Not only did Valdés become her spiritual guide, but he also became completely devoted to her. It was, he wrote, “the greatest sin that she is not lord over the whole world.”

  The relationship between Valdés and Giulia was recorded for posterity in a dialogue Valdés wrote, entitled The Christian Alphabet, in which Giulia served—as was in fact the case—as the hostess of his religious circle. The occasion for the conversation that Valdés chronicled was a sermon that he and Giulia heard Ochino preach at San Giovanni Maggiore in Naples during Lent in 1536. By that time, Ochino himself had become a devoted follower of Valdés—it was said that the Spaniard even prepared the topics and outlines for some of Ochino’s sermons. The Lenten sermons in Naples were an extraordinary success, and counted among their listeners none other than Charles V, who had stopped in the city as part of his official “triumph” following his military victory in Tunisia the previous year (the emperor’s ceremonious procession, modeled on the triumphs of ancient Roman commanders, began in Sicily and progressed up the peninsula to Rome). Charles was reported to have said that Ochino “preached with such Spirit, and so much Devotion, that he made the very stones weep.”

  Let us return now to Vittoria’s experience of Ochino’s preaching at San Lorenzo in Damaso during Lent in 1535. There is no record of what he preached that day, but a typical sermon might have addressed one of his favorite topics, the practice of confession. Ochino’s message was, as always, a simple one. Confession, he preached, was not fulfilled either by going through the motions—by responding to the priest’s questions and uttering formulas given to you in a book—or by pretending to be anything but what you were. A true confession was an act of serious self-inquiry, which required digging deep into the heart. To convey these ideas, Ochino did not expound the relevant doctrines in the way a theologian might do. Instead, he told a story.

  There was once a nun, Ochino began, who wanted to impress her confessor with her humility. “Oh Father Confessor,” this nun declared, “I acknowledge that of all others in the convent I am the most haughty, the most careless, and most ungodly.” The priest responded: “My daughter, I knew that before; they have told me that thou wast the haughtiest, most careless, ungodly of all in the convent, and therefore surely thou art not worthy to bear the dress of thy order.” The nun was shocked, and turned to the priest in anger: “Father, you are too credulous, it is not so bad.” And yet, Ochino remarked, “she had just told him the same thing in her confession.” “That was wrong,” he continued, “for we should tell the truth, neither more nor less.” When you come to confess, he concluded, “act like the woman that lost a penny and sought through the whole house until she found it. If thou dost ransack thy conscience well, so wilt thou find all therein that accuses thee.”

  Hearing Ochino preach sermons like this stirred Vittoria’s soul in a way that no one had ever done before. The ruthless interrogation that he advocated was not altogether different from the scrutiny she applied to herself in her prayers and poems, but she had never before heard anyone articulate so vividly the ideas that lay behind her beliefs. Vittoria’s commitment to Ochino was not limited to him personally, but extended to the Capuchins as a whole, who were struggling for their very survival. The much more powerful Franciscans, from whom they had broken away less than a decade earlier, were determined to bring them to their ruin—they obviously did not like to be cast in the position of corrupted monks—and already in 1534 one of their generals had sent a letter to Clement begging him to bring the Capuchins to a quick end. “It would be better to dissolve this petty and barely newborn congregation,” he warned the pope, “than permit it to threaten the tranquility of the greater, time-honored Order.”

  The pope, for his part, had become concerned about both the Capuchins’ anti-ecclesiastical message and their enormous popularity, which was principally centered on the figure of Ochino. In early April 1534, Clement decided to take matters into his own hands and summoned all of the Capuchins—there were roughly seven hundred of them at the time—to Rome. The monks came to the papal city, where, at daybreak, they visited the seven churches considered sacred to pilgrims, but this show of piety did nothing to soften the pope’s resolve. It is recorded that on April 25, Clement issued a decree ordering the Capuchins to depart from the city before a single candle that he kindled had burned down.

  The papal message reached the monks while they were gathered together for a meal. They left their house immediately, taking with them only their prayer books, and proceeded two by two to Porta Tiburtina, later known as Porta San Lorenzo, on the eastern side of the cit
y. Something about this spectacle—the long procession of hooded monks being forced out of the ancient Aurelian walls—won the hearts of the Romans, and protests against the monks’ expulsion broke out in the streets. Leading the large crowd was an old hermit with a long gray beard, who shouted with all his might: “Woe for thee, O Rome! You love to harbor harlots and drunkards, you nourished dogs, and you would banish the Capuchins.”

  Vittoria may well have seen the monks proceeding through the city, and heard the hermit’s chant denouncing the church’s hypocrisy. Whether she witnessed this or not, she certainly knew about the pope’s decision to expel the Capuchins from Rome, and was determined to fight it as forcefully as she could. Joining forces with another noblewoman, Caterina Cibo, Duchess of Camerino, who had been the Capuchins’ earliest benefactor—she had given them a house on her land in the Marches, and also helped them acquire their first settlement in Rome, at the hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili—Vittoria began a fierce letter-writing campaign to put pressure on Clement to reverse his decision. Thanks in no small degree to the tenacity of the two women, Clement ultimately relented and agreed to readmit the monks to Rome, although he specified that they could not return to the city as they had exited, in procession (he must have feared the sympathy they would garner once again from the Roman citizens). This was one of Clement’s final acts. He died on September 25, 1534, exactly five months after his original decree expelling the monks.

  For Vittoria, however, the fight for the Capuchins was far from over. Ochino and his fellow monks were still actively struggling to maintain their independence from the Franciscans, and were facing a range of new accusations that they were espousing Protestant beliefs. They also desperately needed a larger home in Rome. Defending Ochino and his order was the first significant cause outside the domain of her family that Vittoria had embraced, and it is striking how far she was willing to go in drawing upon her circle of friends and relations to help her to convince the new pope, Paul III, to come to the Capuchins’ aid.

  Paul III, born Alessandro Farnese, was a member of a wealthy family of obscure origins, with lands in the area around Orvieto (see color plate 11). The Farnese rose to power in the late fifteenth century when Alessandro’s sister Giulia, a famously beautiful woman—she was known as Giulia la Bella—became the lover of Pope Alexander VI. It was thanks to her that Alexander named her brother Alessandro a cardinal in 1493, but it was Alessandro’s own political skill and intelligence that explained his subsequent success. Before becoming pope, Alessandro oversaw the building of a splendid palazzo, now known as Palazzo Farnese, a short distance from the banks of the Tiber in the very heart of the city. Originally in the hands of the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, the project passed upon Sangallo’s death in 1546 to Michelangelo. A man of great culture and taste, Alessandro kept some three hundred servants in his palazzo, including an organist, carpenter, butler, gamekeeper, barber, upholsterer, embroiderer, saddler, silk weaver, apothecary, stable-master, bookkeeper, chief cook, under-cook, pastry cook, amanuensis, master of page boys, master of contrabasso, master mason, and soprano.

  Alessandro’s election to the papacy in 1534 was celebrated with great pomp throughout the city. Vittoria’s brother Ascanio led the group of noblemen who carried the pope on their shoulders through the streets; he also served as one of the hosts of a tournament held in Piazza di San Pietro, in which fifty young gentlemen hurled balls of baked clay at one another while protecting themselves with shields. Paul generated enthusiasm not only among the Roman aristocrats, but also among the religious reformers, who were encouraged by his decision to admit a number of reform-minded men to the cardinalship during the first years of his papacy. This group included Bembo; the Englishman Reginald Pole, to whom we shall return at length later on; and the Venetian diplomat Gasparo Contarini, with whom Vittoria had become friendly since she returned to Rome. Before becoming a cardinal, Contarini had served as ambassador to Charles V both in Germany and in Spain. Paul relied upon Contarini for his cautious but sympathetic attitude toward the reform movement, and put him at the helm of the Reform Commission he created in the curia in 1536.

  Vittoria seems to have understood Contarini’s influence with Paul almost immediately, and hence when she set out to write a defense of the Capuchins, she addressed it to Contarini directly. Her letter is the longest of all her surviving missives—at more than three thousand words, it was, in effect, a short treatise—and she used the opportunity not only to lay out her arguments in favor of the Capuchins, but also to defend her right as a woman to speak on their behalf. “However much my feminine ignorance and excessive ardor might seem to detract from my credibility,” she began, “so much more my reason and the exclusively Christian interests that drive me lend me as much authority.”

  On page after page Vittoria answered the charges leveled against the monks, sometimes revealing her own exasperation. “Only if Saint Francis himself was a heretic are his followers Lutherans,” she quipped, “and only if preaching the freedom of the spirit over vice but subjection to every order of the Holy Church can be called an error would it also be an error to follow the Gospel, which in many places says ‘It is the spirit that quickeneth.’” Throughout the letter, she never wavered from her strong conviction that the Capuchins should be allowed to live according to their own rules, choose their own habit, and exercise their spiritual freedom. She closed with a combination of plea and threat: “May the cardinal protectors leave these poor people in peace, and [may] you as well, you who know best that it will not be pardoned before God if human concerns intimidate you, given that Christ had no concern over dying for us.”

  There is no way of knowing for certain to what extent Vittoria’s letter to Contarini played a role in Paul’s decision later that year to issue a bull protecting the Capuchin order. She was without doubt instrumental, however, in Paul’s appointing Ochino as one of the four generals of the order, and she thanked Contarini later that year for having “held the rudder of Peter’s little ship that is safe from shipwreck” (“Peter’s little ship,” or “la navicella di Pietro,” is a common metaphor for the Roman church). Vittoria also saw to it that Ochino was invited to preach in important places—it was through her recommendation, for example, that Bembo brought him to Venice—and she also worked to obtain better property for the Capuchins within the city of Rome. In a letter dated November 8, 1536, to the clerk of Saint Peter’s, Iacopo Ercolani, Vittoria pledged to do everything necessary to help the monks restore their church of San Nicola, and also to assist with their building a new convent on land attached to the gardens of the Palazzo Colonna. This was made possible by Ascanio, over whom she had great influence, and who had come to embrace the Capuchin cause himself. The following year, she convinced her friend Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, to create a home in his city for the Capuchins. He was, it seems, easily persuaded, and obtained land and a house along the Po River for Ochino to establish a new monastery.

  Portrait of Ercole II d’Este by the sixteenth-century artist Nicolò dell’Abate (Private collection)

  At the same time that Vittoria was occupied with Ochino and the Capuchin cause, she was also pursuing two different projects of her own. The first was yet another attempt to live a more monastic life and establish a private house in which she could worship exactly as she pleased. She had made such a proposal in 1526, after Clement forbade the nuns at San Silvestro to allow Vittoria to take holy vows as a Poor Clare. Several months later, we will recall, she had asked his permission to form her own religious house in Naples, with a number of chaste women as her companions, a request that he granted. In 1536, Vittoria made a similar request, which we know about from two surviving letters of Paul III granting her a new set of extraordinary privileges.

  In the first of the two letters, which spelled things out in great detail, Paul declared that he was giving Vittoria permission to live in a home with a portable altar to be used in “places suitable and decent although not sacred”; to
hear “Masses and other Divine Offices celebrated or sung” by a suitable priest; to keep the Eucharist in a tabernacle “observed continuously with lamps and other kindled lights”; to choose her own confessor, even a member of the mendicant orders; and finally (and most mysteriously) to enter freely, with “ten other honest women chosen by you to visit any monastery of any order of monks, even Saint Clare’s, with the consent of the people presiding there, and converse with these same monks, provided that you not lodge there overnight.” There is no trace of this last request elsewhere, and we are left simply to guess at what it could possibly mean. It seems she was hoping to enter into the cloistered space of the monasteries, where visitors and lay residents were not typically allowed. Nothing further about her plans in this case can be verified, but it is striking that the pope sent two letters conveying the same message, one in April 1536, and another simply reaffirming his position in December of the same year. Nothing, he repeated in the second epistle, should stand in her way. We have no way of knowing if her wish was ever fulfilled, but it is clear she had not lost her determination.

  Vittoria’s other project during this time pulled in a very different direction: she wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Her plan was to travel to Jerusalem, where she would, according to the itinerary of most pilgrims, have been led by friars down the Via Dolorosa; visited the Stations of the Cross; spent three days and nights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christ was crucified, buried, and resurrected; and sung Mass with the monks and other pilgrims before his tomb. She most likely would also have visited Bethlehem and seen the place of Christ’s birth. Nowhere in her letters did she explain her desire to do any of this, but the plan corresponded to her deep religiosity and her special interest at this time of her life in developing an ever more personal relationship to Christ. It also reminds us of how absolutely unencumbered she was: without husband or children, and with money of her own, she was free to pursue her own interests, whether to follow her favorite preacher or to take a long journey across the seas.