Gaspara Stampa, the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance, was born in Padua, probably in 1524. Her father, a jeweler, died while she was still a girl, and her family moved to Venice, where she spent the remainder of her short life. In both her life and her work she provides a dramatic contrast with another prominent woman poet of the time—Vittoria Colonna, great aristocrat and Platonic beloved of Michelangelo. Vittoria was noble; Gaspara bourgeoise. Vittoria was Roman; Gaspara, Venetian. Vittoria was a wife and chatelaine; Gaspara, a courtesan. Vittoria's poems embody the highest ideals of Christian Platonism; Gaspara's poems—except for the relatively small number of poems of Christian repentance with which her canzoniere closes—are devoted exclusively to obsessive sexual love, particularly to the torments of its frustration.¹

In calling Gaspara Stampa a courtesan, I do not imply that she was in any sense an ordinary prostitute. She was, rather, a cortigiana onesta, or “respectable courtesan,” and as such she enjoyed a social status of some dignity. The cortigiana onesta of Renaissance Italy—particularly of Venice, where the institution flourished especially—was a figure in some respects like the hetaira of classical Greece. Endowed not only with physical beauty but also with poetic and musical skills as well as a high degree of cultivation, such a woman did not bestow her favors thoughtlessly or promiscuously; she had dealings only with males from the privileged levels of society, and normally only with one—at least only with one during the period of the liaison. Marriage was not for such women, but in Venice they were admired, indeed respected, and their “protectors” often included great nobles, princes of the Church, and famous writers, painters, and intellectuals.

The institution of the cortigiana onesta was perhaps a response to a social situation in which marriage choices were normally determined by commercial or familial considerations rather than by mutual attraction or shared intellectual interest. The relation between cortigiana and protector was in some limited respects one of equality: the patron sought in the cortigiana intellectual and artistic qualities he would not demand in a wife. It is perhaps for this reason that, during the centuries of the Renaissance and the Baroque, so many distinguished women poets came from the class of the cortigiane oneste: it was an identity which, like that of the grande dame or the nun, at least made poetic creativity possible.²

Gaspara's status as an honest courtesan is not established beyond question. Her twentieth-century editor, Abdelkader Salza, is persuaded of it, but the contention has been hotly disputed by others. Justin Vitiello assumes the truth of the identification, and Fiora A. Bassanese, the author of a recent excellent study of the poet, regards it as possible but not certain beyond any doubt. We know little about Gaspara Stampa's life, and most of what we know comes from her poetry.³

We hear of her as a young woman in Venice, where she was, together with her brother Baldassare and her sister Cassandra, an artistic ornament of Venetian society. Baldassare was a poet (some of his work survives), Cassandra was a singer, and Gaspara was both poet and singer. We ought not, however, to picture these activities in twentieth-century terms. Cassandra would not be in a position to get an audition at the Met or a tryout for a Broadway musical, and Baldassare would not likely be offered a job as poet-in-residence at a university. They belonged to the brilliant Venetian demimonde, one populated by aristocrats, by high dignitaries of church and state. Music and poetry were not the only interests of that world.

Venice in the sixteenth century was a city remarkable for its prosperity, its sophistication, its love of luxury and pleasure, and its notable indifference to the more rigorous moral prescriptions of Christianity. It was a city of art and sensuality, and the links between the two were close. Sexuality was one of the pleasures most strenuously pursued by the Venetian upper classes (even the common prostitutes of Venice were famous throughout Europe for their beauty), but the more refined among them sought an ambience where sexuality was fused with art. The fusion of art and sexuality probably explains the presence of the bourgeois Stampa trio in a privileged social milieu.

Gaspara's position as a cortigiana onesta, far from subjecting her to opprobrium, assured for her a certain degree of esteem. The complimentary poems praising her beauty and her artistic gifts seem full of sincere admiration—even if they do betray at times a faintly leering quality (and Abdelkader Salza, in his edition, reprints a scurrilous contemporaneous epitaph taxing her with sexual vice).⁴ It might well occur that a young Venetian nobleman, powerful and respected, would establish a liaison with such a woman—not marriage, to be sure, but nevertheless a liaison of some solidity, duration, and mutual respect.

Count Collaltino di Collalto was the lover and protector of Gaspara Stampa. On the evidence of her poems, he found her attractive enough to be worth his time, and attractive—or importunate—enough to elicit from him vows of eternal love and fidelity. On the same evidence, he was the transfiguring love of Gaspara's life—not her first lover, it would seem, nor her last, and yet her only true love. However obsessive love may have been for Gaspara, it was not so for Collaltino. For him, apparently, sex was fine in its place, but it was not nearly as interesting as war. He entered the service of Henry II of France, who was at that time engaged in a series of campaigns, and departed, promising to write. He didn't write.

          Hast du der Gaspara Stampa
denn genügend gedacht, dass irgend ein Mädchen,
dem der Geliebte entging, am gesteigerten Beispiel
dieser Liebenden fühlt: dass ich würde wie sie?
Sollen nicht endlich uns diese ältesten Schmerzen
fruchtbarer werden? Ist est nicht Zeit, dass wir liebend
uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn:
wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung
mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.(5)
Have you thought of her enough,
Of Gaspara Stampa, and that any girl
Whose lover has left her might feel the exalted example
Of that loving woman, and might feel: “May I be like her?”
Isn't it finally time for these oldest of sorrows
To become more fruitful for us? Isn't it time
That we, loving, free ourselves from the beloved,
And endure it, trembling, as the arrow endures the bow,
That, collected in its leaping, it may be
More than itself. For staying is no place.(6)

So wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in the first of his Duino Elegies (1912/1922). The figure of Gaspara Stampa, like those of Louise Labé, Heloise, the Comtesse de Die, Clara d'Anduze, and other women writers, was of enormous importance for the great German poet. Elsewhere, in his Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910), Rilke discusses these figures again. Particularly interesting is the passage in which he draws a distinction between the Geliebte and the Liebende—between the “beloved” and the “loving one”: the Geliebte “lives poorly, and always in danger”; the Liebende is surrounded by “the most complete certainty.” The loving ones “fling themselves after the lost one, but with the first step they overtake him, and in front of them is only God.”⁷

The woman love poet is for Rilke, then, a crucial figure of the love that, transcending itself and any ego, becomes divine. To what extent is this a valid perception, and to what extent Rilke's projection of his own creation? With Gaspara Stampa, at least, it seems that Rilke has commented on what is truly in the text. For Gaspara has learned what Socrates taught to Phaedrus, what Thomas Mann's Aschenbach thinks “perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought”—that the lover is nearer the divine than is the beloved.⁸ Even in the early part of her canzoniere, before the abandonment, Gaspara's hyperbolic praises of Collaltino's superiority (for example, “Le doti preclare di lui forono le sue dolci catene”) are interspersed with poems that, as Vitiello notes, assert the moral superiority conferred upon her by her pure love.⁹

There is much Petrarch in Gaspara, as in nearly all sixteenth-century love lyricists. The first of her sonnets, for example, is a pastiche of the first of Petrarch's Rime, and the second tells how she first saw Collaltino near Christmas, as Petrarch first saw Laura on Good Friday.¹⁰ Given her gender, she is obliged often to modify the conventions of Petrarchanism, and one of the most important of her modifications is her insistence on the motif of the love that elevates the lover above the beloved. The following sonnet makes the point as well as any other:

Se, cosí come sono abietta e vile
donna, posso portar si alto foco,
perché non debbo aver almeno un poco
di ritraggerlo al mondo e vena e stile?
S'Amor con nove, insolite focile,
ov'io non potea gir, m'alzò a tal loco,
perché non puonon con usate gioco
far la pena e la penna in me simile?
E, se non può per forza di natura,
puollo almen per miracolo, che spesso
vince, trapassa e rompe ogni misura.
Come ciò sia non posso dir espresso;
io provo ben che per mia gran ventura
mi sento il cor di novo stile impresso.
If, being a woman so abject and vile,
I nonetheless can bear so high a flame,
Why should I not give to the world the same,
At least in part, in proper wealth and style?
If Love, with a new, unprecedented spark,
Could raise me to a place I could not reach,
Why cannot pain and pen combine to teach
Such arts as, never known, shall find their mark?
And if this does not lie in Nature's art,
Then let it be by miracle, whose power
Can conquer, transcend, and every limit break.
How this may be I cannot say for sure,
But well I know the fortune I partake,
And through it a new style engraves my heart.

It is not Collaltino who has made of Gaspara a poet; it is, rather, her “flame,” the surpassing love she bears for him. Gaspara is her own Muse as, according to Robert Graves, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and other women poets were theirs.¹¹ The specific presence of art as theme in this sonnet is suggested by a possible allusion in the last line: the novo stile may refer to the dolce stil novo formulated by the Italian male poets of the later thirteenth century. The dolce stil novo, or “sweet new style,” was distinguished by its elegance of diction and versification and by its concentration on the themes of the glorification of the beloved woman, her elevation to the role of spiritual guide, and the consequent ennobling of the spirit of the male lover-poet. Gaspara, in choosing the role of worshiper over that of object of worship, is staking a claim on the domains of art.

Art is, however, only one of her themes, and it would give a false impression of her lyric achievement if one were to imply that the entire canzoniere is dominated by that theme. Indeed, the very variety, inconsistency, and contradiction in the sequence bestow upon it its quality as a singularly accurate account of the turmoil of sexual love. In “She Will Be One Day Free; He, Too Late, Repentant,” she shifts focus inexplicably, referring to her absent lover in the third person in the initial quatrain, then shifting to a direct address in which she predicts with sadistic glee the sorrows he will one day feel when he repents his cruelty. In “Holy Angels, I Don't Envy You,” she compares her joy in seeing Collaltino with the joy felt by the angels on beholding the face of God. The consciously blasphemous identification of the love of God with the love of a human being is a recurrent feature of Gaspara's lyric work; the implied analogy between the speaker and Dante's Francesca is suggested later in the penitential sonnets.

In “She Does Not Fear Amorous Pain, But Rather Its End,” the poet expresses her fear, not of the pains of love, but rather of the possibility of their cessation. In “O Great Exploit of Gentle Cavalier,” she rages at her absent lover in a bitterly ironic manner, reminding him that his royal master, Henry II of France, does not scorn to follow Venus as well as Mars.

Another sonnet, “Send Back My Heart to Me, Relentless One,” is interesting not only as an amorous complaint but also for its identification of Collaltino as her one-time source of “defense”—a term that may imply Gaspara's identity as a cortigiana onesta:

Rimandatemi il cor, empio tiranno,
ch'a sí gran torto avete ed istraziate,
e di lui e di me quel proprio fate,
che le tigri e i leon di cerva fanno.
Son pasati otto giorni, a me un anno,
ch'io non ho vostre lettre ed imbasciate,
contra le fé che voi m'avete date,
o fonte di valor, conte, e d'inganno.
Credete ch'io sia Ercol o Sansone
a poter sostener tanto dolore,
giovane e donna e fuor d'ogni ragione,
massimo essendo qui senza 'il mio core
e senza voi a mia difensione,
onde mi suol venir forza e vigore?

Venice plays a specific role in Gaspara's poetry, both as theme and as setting. Her “Elegiac Lament” in terza rima locates the poet specifically in that city on “the rich and blessed Adriatic shores” which is the “nest of love and nest of courtesy,” and the sonnet “By Now This Waiting So Has Wearied Me” draws a vivid contrast between the waves of the maritime city—the element, as it were, of the female lover—and the inland hills on which the unfaithful Collaltino enjoys his martial sport. Here, as on several other occasions in the Rime, Gaspara utilizes a pun on her lover's name, which means literally “high hill.”

Io son da l'aspettar omai sí stanca,
sí vinta dal dolor e dal disio,
per la sí poca fede e molto oblio
di chi del suo tornar, lassa, mi manca.
Che lei, che'l monde impalidisce e 'mbianca
con la sua falce e dá l'ultimo fio,
chiamo talor per refrigerio mio,
si'l dolor nel mio petto si rinfranca.
Ed ella si fa sorda al mio chiamare,
schernendo i miei pensier fallaci e folli,
come sta sordo anch'egli al suo tornare.
Cosí col pianto, ond'ho gli occhi miei molli,
fo pietose quest'onde e questo mare;
ed ei si vive lieto ne'suoi colli.
By now this waiting so has wearied me,
So vanquished am I by desire and grief
For him who, absent, grants me no relief,
So faithless, so forgetful, still is he.
That I turn and beg that she will give me ease,
Who with her sickle makes the world turn white
And gives to all the final blow; my plight
Such sorrow wrings from me, such anguished pleas.
But she is deaf to this my wretched crying,
And scorns my scattered thoughts disturbed and vain,
Like him who, deaf to me, grants no replying.
Thus with lament that from my eyes distills
I wake the pity of these waves, this main,
While he, lighthearted, lives among his hills.

In this complex poem the female deity evoked in the second quatrain is clearly the moon, but she is equally clearly Death (“death” in Italian—la morte—is a feminine noun). The double identity is explained further if we consider the mythological reverberations of the moon image. In classical myth the moon is identified with Diana (Artemis), the huntress, a goddess dedicated to chastity. A version of the female archetype, she has, like the moon, three aspects—as maiden, nymph, and crone. In her aspect as crone she also bears the name of Hecate, goddess of the underworld and hence of death (as so frequently in mythic discourse, one deity merges with another—the triune Diana merges, as the crone Hecate, with the maiden Persephone, ravished by Hades, and Persephone in turn tends to merge with her mother Demeter, the goddess of fertility). The deity appealed to in Gaspara's sonnet is simultaneously the moon, the female archetype, Diana, Hecate, and death. As the goddess of chastity, Diana may be interpreted as spurning the poet's plea in punishment for her betrayal in having given herself to love. Gaspara Stampa's poems often have this kind of complexity of resonance.

Finally Gaspara got tired of waiting and took another lover, who is addressed in a number of later poems (he has been identified as Bartolomeo Zen).¹² Perhaps there was more than one. In any case, later experience did not trigger the intense emotion that the Collaltino affair did; artistic expression comparable to that of the Collaltino poems appears only in the poems of repentance with which the canzoniere concludes.

Of Gaspara Stampa's poems, only three sonnets were published during her lifetime—in an anthology published in Venice in 1553.¹³ Immediately after her death her sister, Cassandra, saw to the publication of the entire Rime, as a memorial to Gaspara and at the urging of the members of her artistic circle. The volume did not gain much recognition, and the poet was largely forgotten until 1738, when Antonio Rambaldo reissued the poetic works in a handsome volume. Rambaldo was, curiously enough, a descendant of the family of Collaltino di Collalto and seems to have undertaken the publication out of a kind of family pride.

Rambaldo introduced the volume with an unauthenticated and probably fanciful biographical account of the poet, in which he identifies her as a descendant of a noble Milanese family and suggests that she died as the result of poison, administered either by herself or by an enemy. This is, as Bassanese notes, the stuff of legend, and before the eighteenth century was over, the figure of Gaspara Stampa was enshrined in Italian literary history as a kind of heroine of a Romantic tragedy.¹⁴ In 1851 an epistolary novel purporting to be the actual letters of Gaspara to a female friend was published, and later in the century a number of plays were written with Gaspara as protagonist. New editions of her Rime were also published.

The sentimental legend was sharply challenged in 1913 by the scholar Abdelkader Salza, who, in his edition of her works, contended that Gaspara Stampa had been not an innocent young noblewoman but rather a member of the class of honest courtesans. The contention elicited considerable controversy, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the question of the poet's sexual virtue or lack of it seemed to be an issue of greater moment than the artistic quality of her work. New fictionalized biographies appeared, some of which, according to Bassanese, turned her into a kind of Violetta without Verdi's music.¹⁵

The issue remains unsettled, and perhaps it will always remain so. But more recent writing on Gaspara Stampa—such as the work of Bassanese, Guernelli, and Vitiello—focuses far more on the literary artist than on the human being, and the critical consensus is that she is a lyric poet of considerable stature, capable of speaking to us today with greater immediacy than many other lyric poets of the Renaissance. The heiress of a great, complex, and highly sophisticated poetic tradition, she was capable of modifying that tradition in such a way as to make it expressive of a female situation and sensibility. In so doing, she brought it once more to life, for she stands out like a beacon among the masses of Petrarchan lyricists of the cinquecento. Dealing with well-worn conventions, she imbued them with dramatic vitality and sincerity—or with the illusion of those qualities, which is, in art, the same thing. Among her immediate contemporaries, only Michelangelo was able to do more; among her immediate successors, only Tasso. And, in the sixteenth century, perhaps only these three lyricists are fully worthy of their master, Petrarch.

Notes

1. My use of first names in referring to these poets in no way implies the condescension involved in referring to Jane Austen as “Jane” or Emily Dickinson as “Emily.” The usage is in accordance with Renaissance custom—as we refer to Buonarotti as “Michelangelo” and Da Vinci as “Leonardo.”

2. See Frank J. Warnke, Introduction to Three Women Poets, for a fuller discussion of this point.

3. Justin Vitiello, “Gaspara Stampa: The Ambiguities of Martyrdom.” Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa.

4. Gaspara Stampa/Veronica Franco, Rime, ed. Salza, p. 196.

5. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, ed. Allemann, vol. 1, pp. 442-43.

6. This selection has been translated by me. The complete Duino Elegies have been translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York, 1963).

7. Rilke, vol. 3, p. 324.

8. Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice,” in Death in Venice and Other Stories, pp. 45-46.

9. Vitiello, “Gaspara Stampa: The Ambiguities of Martyrdom.”

10. See Bassanese, pp. 57-59, 75-77.

11. Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege, p. 166.

12. See Bassanese, p. 19.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., pp. 24-32.

15. Ibid. Much of the material in this introduction was originally written for my volume Three Women Poets: Renaissance and Baroque (Lewisburg, Pa., forthcoming). The following translations also originally appeared in that volume: “The First Day of Her Love,” “His Excellent Qualities Have Been Her Sweet Chains,” “Love, Having Elevated Her to Him, Inspires Her Verses,” “She Will Be One Day Free; He, Too Late, Repentant,” “Holy Angels, I Don't Envy You,” “She Does Not Fear Amorous Pain, But Rather Its End,” “By Now This Waiting So Has Wearied Me,” “With You My Heart Would Rove,” “O Great Exploit of Gentle Cavalier,” “Send Back My Heart to Me, Relentless One,” “On Every Christmas Her First Love Returns to Her Mind,” “Elegiac Lament, Her Love Being Far Away,” “She Hopes for Divine Aid,” and “Sweetest Lord, O Do Not Let Me Die.” The critical material is used, and the poems are reprinted, with the kind permission of Bucknell University Press.