SOURCE: McAuliffe, Dennis J. “Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna's Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine.” In Ficino and Renaissance Platonism, pp. 101-12. Ottawa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1986.

[In the following essay, McAuliffe examines the cultural, intellectual, and emotional environment in which Colonna wrote her poetry, maintaining that Colonna's Neoplatonic theological and philosophical preoccupations were the media through which she filtered her experiences.]

In this discussion of Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna's poetry I describe, first of all, the cultural, intellectual, and emotional circumstances in which these influences first manifest themselves. I then discuss some of the sonnets from her early Canzoniere¹ (I prefer this designation, taken in its strict sense, to the more commonly used one, ‘secular sonnets’), along with an example from a contemporary (1540s) commentary which makes explicit reference to Vittoria's Neoplatonism. Finally, I discuss the change that takes place later in Vittoria's life and in her writing as well as in her Neoplatonism, a change so radical that one must talk of a second canzoniere. The terms secular and spiritual must be used with caution since they are likely to give, as they have done in the past, a false impression of what Vittoria Colonna's poetry is about. It is an intensely spiritual poetry from the earliest sonnets and the ‘secular’ elements of the earlier canzoniere are finely filtered through a Neoplatonic screen.

Paolo Giovio tells the story of how the Marchese of Pescara, Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, summoned his wife, Vittoria, to his side when he realized his death was near in November, 1525.² The wounds he had received in the battle of Pavia the previous February were proving fatal. He was in Milan and Vittoria was on Ischia. As soon as she received his summons she set out in all haste, travelling day and night; but when she was only as far as Viterbo she was met by a second messenger bringing news of Ferrante's death on November 25th. Giovio says that when Vittoria heard the news, she fell from her horse as if struck dead; and she had to be nursed for several days in a nearby monastery. When she was well enough to travel she returned to Rome and immediately petitioned to be allowed to enter the convent of the Poor Clares, San Silvestro in Capite, which had been founded in the thirteenth century in honour of her ancestor, Margherita Colonna. But Vittoria's brother, Ascanio, probably in hopes that she could be convinced to marry again, sought the aid of Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras and papal secretary, to persuade Clement VII to forbid Vittoria to become a nun.³ A papal brief which was written and signed by Sadoleto on December 7, 1525 allowed Vittoria to enter San Silvestro as a guest in order to receive spiritual and temporal consolation for her loss (‘omnibus spiritualibus et temporalibus consolationibus’), but forbade the sisters to allow Vittoria, driven rather by her sorrow than by mature judgement (‘impetu potius sui doloris quam maturo consilio’), to take the veil without specific papal authorization.⁴

The sonnets written in memory of Ferrante are the product of the grief that the poet felt during those first years of her widowhood. Ferrante's death caused profound changes in Vittoria's way of life. She withdrew from the pleasure-seeking activities of secular life and passed most of her time behind convent walls. We know both from reading her poetry and from the testimony of those who knew her that she spent long hours in prayer and in contemplation of the state in which Ferrante's death had left her. On the other hand, the fact that she no longer was obliged to carry out the Neapolitan court duties of an Imperial Commander's wife left her free to spend more time in Rome and consequently brought her in close touch with important events of her time. She witnessed the ruinous and demoralizing attack on Rome in 1526 carried out by her own family, led by Prospero Colonna, the warrior-cardinal, who allowed his mercenaries to imprison the Pope in Castel Sant'Angelo and wreak havoc on the city's wealthy citizenry. She witnessed the even more terrible Sack of Rome in 1527, when the Imperial troops raped the city with unprecedented savagery. And she responded with tireless acts of charity to the need to rehabilitate the devastated Roman populace.

The apparent contradiction between these two lifestyles to which she was drawn after her husband's death was to preoccupy her for the rest of her life. It is the conflict, to which she refers repeatedly in her poetry, between the contemplative life of prayer and the active life of good works. It is the same conflict that the Protestant reform movement of Northern Europe was turning into an intellectual and spiritual debate which would touch the lives of all educated society. Vittoria Colonna was perceived by everyone around her as the person who was best able to reconcile these opposing attitudes. She showed this ability not only through her poetry, but also through her conversation, as we know from contemporary sources,⁵ and through her participation in the burgeoning Catholic reform movement which involved many of the principal intellectual figures of pre-tridentine Roman society. When Pietro Carnesecchi was asked by his inquisitors, during the trial of 1566 that led to his condemnation as a heretic, to explain Vittoria Colonna's stand on the question de sola fide, he replied that she followed the advice of Cardinal Pole who told her during the early 1540s to believe as if it were faith alone that brought salvation but to act as if that salvation had to be achieved by good works. We may take it on Carnesecchi's word that Vittoria suffered a crisis of doubt on this issue, as did so many of her spiritually active friends; but the advice she received from Pole was, in essence, to act no differently than she had been doing since she first retired to convent life.

The first sign of the poetic talent for which the Marchesa di Pescara was so enthusiastically and sincerely praised by her contemporaries (Ariosto and Bembo among others) was the Epistola a Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, Suo Consorte, nella Rotta di Ravenna in which the author describes her pitiful state of abandonment after Ferrante left her, a bride of only two years, to join the Aragonese forces fighting in the north of Italy against the French. Benedetto Croce describes this Epistola as ‘tender, sorrowful, trembling, and impassioned’ and he likes it best of all of her compositions because of its spontaneity and freshness of sentiment.⁶

Despite this appearance of spontaneity, however, the young poet betrays her dependence on the scholastic models studied during her humanistic education, especially Ovid from the Latin and Dante and Petrarch from the Tuscan classics. The Epistola provides the background for the Neoplatonic influences which characterize her later poetry. It shows the beginning of the process of mythicizing her husband as hero and also—ironically, since she could not have foretold his premature death in 1525—it determines her choice of literary mode, the colloquy with the absent lover.

Whether Vittoria began writing sonnets in Marino soon after Ferrante's death or whether she began them later in the, perhaps, calmer environment of Ischia, we have no way of knowing. There is no direct testimony concerning these sonnets until Bembo praises them in a letter to her in 1532.⁷ The poet must have kept them mostly to herself in the beginning because only her most intimate friends remark on her ability as a poet before that time.

In the sonnet ‘Scrivo sol per sfogar l'interna doglia’ (A1:1 [A refers to the rime amorose portion of Rime; A1 designates the portion of the rime amorose which was collected in 1540]) which appears to have been written as an introduction to her earlier canzoniere, Vittoria sets forth her reasons for writing. We can immediately sense the sincerity of commitment both intellectual and emotional which sets her poetry apart from the slavish imitators of Petrarch who abounded in Italy throughout the sixteenth century and who are so roundly condemned by modern critics of the aesthetic schools.⁸ Vittoria is not writing about her real or imagined past-life's experience filtered through her literary models but rather about one all-important, devastating event which determined the course of her emotional development: the death of Ferrante. She does not ask for pity, pardon, and understanding or brag about her ‘vario stile,’ nor does she invoke the muses with prayers for lasting fame, as Petrarch and Bembo do in their introductory sonnets. She is writing for the intensely personal reason of relieving the terrible grief that Ferrante's death has caused her. The sincere humility of her poetic stance and her profound feelings of pain and sorrow are manifest in the sonnets of her earlier canzoniere, in her lifestyle, and in her constant refusal either to have her poems published or to show them to any but her closest friends. The fact that they became widely known in the 1530s and were eventually published against her will in 1538 reminds us of the custom of the day for friends to pass on to other friends even the most intimate forms of private correspondence.

Platonism and its Christian development, Neoplatonism, were at the basis of Vittoria Colonna's humanistic education. Many examples of Neoplatonic language occur in both her earlier and her later canzonieri. There are continual oppositions of body and spirit, light and dark, fire and ice, fervour and aridity. From her earliest poetry Vittoria showed her acceptance of one of the basic tenets of Platonism, that poetry is intended as a propaedeutic device to create admiration and subsequent emulation of supernatural beings and noble heroes. The heroization of Ferrante in the Epistola and in the early canzoniere reveals the poet's desire to take part in this traditional exercise of the literary profession. For Vittoria and her contemporaries poetry is also imitation and its mimetic effort is, in Platonic terms, to bypass the imperfect, created world and imitate the divine archetype.

Vittoria's adoption of both these Platonic tenets is based on her inner conviction, following the Platonic world-view, that it is the soul's desire and necessary end to break away from the prison of this present life. Her soul longs to attain the true world of the spirit where she can live in happy harmony with her beloved, whether it be Ferrante (as in these early sonnets) or Christ (as in the later ones). The sonnet ‘Se per salire a l'alta e vera luce’ (A2:34 [A2 designates the portion of the rime amorose which was not collected in 1540]) explains Vittoria's Neoplatonic conception of reality. Vittoria's ascent from a world of false impressions and shadows toward the true light by means of love shows her adherence to the traditional Platonic concept. The key word in the second quatrain is ‘chiostri,’ which may be understood to mean an enclosed space (as a convent): the prison of life on earth. Vittoria uses the word ‘carcere’ (‘prison’) many times in these sonnets, more often and in a more firmly dualistic sense than Petrarch does. Love has captured her in his ‘carcer soave’ (A1:45); this life is a ‘carcere’ in which living becomes a ‘viva morte’ (A1:54); she has tried in vain to leave the ‘carcer cieco’ of this life (A1:64); her soul is trying to free itself from the ‘carcer tetro’ (her body) which keeps her bound to this shadowy, bitter, and base reality (A1:56).

It is left to those with special grace, the ‘cari eletti’ of line 10 in the above-cited sonnet (A2:34), among whom Ferrante is numbered, to find everlasting glory. This appellative which echoes the Neoplatonic notion of the elite is repeated several times. Vittoria speaks of ‘anime gloriose e i spirti eletti’ (A1:16); ‘anima eletta, ch'anzi tempo spinta’ (A1:50); and so forth. Of particular significance are the following lines where the use of ‘eletti’ in rhyme with ‘concetti’ demonstrates the poet's intentional use of Neoplatonic vocabulary.

… voi, spirti eletti,
ch'adornate sì rari alti concetti,
onorate di lui le vostre carte.

(A2:23)

The most common Neoplatonic theme found in the early sonnets is that of the winged soul which longs to return to the source of its joy. This theme is present in twenty-six out of the total of one hundred and forty sonnets.⁹ In ‘Mentr'io qui vissi in voi, lume beato’ (A2:44) it joins the motifs of prayer, mysticism, and death to form a revealing statement of Vittoria's intellectual, spiritual, and emotional state of being. In the first quatrain Vittoria echoes the Platonic definition of love whereby the lover dies a voluntary death in order to relive in the beloved.¹⁰ In the second quatrain she prays that her beloved will come to her aid against the world which is their enemy. In the first tercet she envisions her soul as having wings with which to fly to her beloved. And in the final tercet she repeats her belief that the mortal world and its pleasures are but a false reflection of the true and eternal world that awaits her after death.

The poet's imagination turns to the image of the winged flight from this world for herself (A1:52, 76, 79; A2:14, 15, 17), and for her beloved (A1:10, 45, 50, 57; A2:18, 43; E25 [E refers to the rime epistolari portion of Rime]).

          Anima eletta, ch'anzi tempo spinta
dal proprio merto lieta al Ciel volasti,
se conforme al valor luce portasti
ogn'altra stella fu adombrata e vinta.

(A1:50)

And it is not only her soul, but also her spirit, her reason, her thought, her desire, that must take flight from this darkness and be reunited with her ‘Bel Sole’.

          Ristretta in loco oscuro, orrido e solo,
ascosa, e cinta dal proprio martire,
legati i sensi tutti al bel pensero,
          con veloce expedito altero volo
unir la mente al mio sommo desire
oggi è quanto di ben nel mondo spero.

(A1:13)

Yet she despairs of realizing her desire.

          L'alma rinchiusa in questo carcer rio
come nimico l'odia, onde smarrita
né vive qua né vola ov'io desio.

(A1:29)

Thus, torn between hope and despair, the poet rejects the possibility of ending her torment by suicide (‘por fine al duol per vie più corte?’ A1:64) and resolves her internal struggle with an act of pure Neoplatonic faith in ‘Pensier, ne l'alto volo ove tu stendi’ (S2:35 [S refers to the rime spirituali portion of Rime; S2 designates the portion of the rime spirituali which was not collected in 1540]). The first quatrain of this sonnet sets forth the proposition that her ‘valor’ is unable to measure up to the heights which her thoughts reach and that because of this she must put an end to the endeavour even before it progresses beyond its beginning. There are a number of levels at which this sonnet may be interpreted. At least two of these are pertinent to the present discussion. First, the lover constantly imagines herself as able to join her beloved in a better world, but her physical attachment to this world will not allow her to reach him. She is, therefore, immediately defeated. At another level Vittoria is talking about her poetic inspiration which is so far beyond her technical ability to do it justice that the attempt itself (this very sonnet) is evidence of its failure. The word ‘penne’ is to be understood literally (pens) as well as figuratively (wings). The word ‘intendi’ is to be taken literally in both cases. In the second quatrain the poet elaborates these ideas by stressing such Neoplatonic vocabulary as the ‘bel lume immortale’ and the use of the inner eye which must focus on the higher world both of forms (to which Ferrante has been graduated) and of inspiration.

At least one third of Vittoria's early sonnets contain mention of, or allusion to, death. Out of her sorrow over losing Ferrante come references to her own death.

          Come non deposi io la mortal salma
al miglior tempo? Da chi fu impedita,
per non volar in quella eterna vita,
l'alma, al partir de l'altra mia vera alma?

(A1:44)

Her thoughts of death are always intimately connected with her Neoplatonist belief, as expressed in the last line, that Ferrante had captured and taken with him her ‘true soul.’ And she crowns this contemplation with the prayer that she be delivered of her sorrow through death.

          ma, non trovando alfin ragion che giove
a l'alma nel suo duol sempre proterva,
prego che 'l pianto mio finisca morte.

(A1:51)

Vittoria sees death not only as the end of her sorrow, and of the gnawing necessity of lamenting her separation from Ferrante through poetry, but also as her salvation.

Along with her contemplation of death goes Vittoria's need to renounce the world, its pleasures, and its attractions. Because Love gave her Ferrante, even though he was afterward taken from her, she has renounced all other earthly love.

          Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse
ch'essendo morta in me vive l'ardore;
né temo novo caldo, ché 'l vigore
del primo foco mio tutt'altri estinse.

(A1:7)

This renunciation, coupled with that of other worldly pleasures, is reflected in Vittoria's life as well as in her poetry. Her request to enter a religious order, denied by Pope Clement VII, her constant refusal, in opposition to her brother Ascanio's insistence, to consider remarrying, and her withdrawal to the contemplative life of the convent speak eloquently of the sincerity of the content of her poetry.

          Così lo spirto mio s'asconde e copre
qui dal piacer uman; non già per fama,
o van grido, o prezzar troppo se stesso;
          ma sente il lume suo ch'ognor lo chiama,
e vede il volto ovunque mira impresso
che li misura i passi e scorge l'opre.

(A1:72)

Her various attitudes toward death lend it the same predominance in her poetry that it had for her in daily life.

She is afraid of death:

          Ma se timor del crudo pianto eterno
tronca l'audaci penne al bel desire …

(A1:56)

She is envious of the dead:

          Quant'invidia al mio cor, felici e rare
anime, porge il vostro ardente e forte
nodo …

(A1:88)

Death took away her hope:

          Nudriva il cor d'una speranza viva
fondata e colta in sì nobil terreno
che 'l frutto promettea giocondo e ameno;
morte la svelse alor ch'ella fioriva.

(A1:3)

But by far the dominant attitude is her strong desire to die in order to become free and be reunited with Ferrante. This desire is voiced again and again in various ways throughout the early canzoniere. In A1:26 Vittoria complains that death took Ferrante but refused her who would happily die. In A1:66 she prays to be made free, body and soul, from this life. In A2:8 she says that she seeks death as a tiger seeks her young. In A1:53 she says that she is afraid lest she live too long. For Vittoria life without Ferrante is a living death and the only true life is to close her eyes forever to this world and bask for eternity in the light of the sun.

          Oh viver mio noioso, oh aversa sorte!
cerco l'oscurità, fuggo la luce,
odio la vita, ognor bramo la morte.
          Quel ch'agli altri occhi offende ai miei riluce,
perché chiudendo lor s'apron le porte
a la cagion ch'al mio Sol mi conduce.

(A1:68)

It is her contemplation of renunciation and death as she continually reworks the myth of Ferrante that leads Vittoria to the mysticism which eventually replaces her Neoplatonic view of reality in her later sonnets. An outstanding example of this mysticism is found in the imagery of ‘Qual ricca oblazion, qual voler pio’ (A1:55). This sacrificial offering of the naked, burning heart, described in patently sensual imagery, is a commonplace which has been called the epitome of baroque conceits. It was destined to become an icon of the Counter-Reformation through the efforts of Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, and others. As Robert J. Clements points out it was also a commonplace in the poetry of Michelangelo.¹¹ This image finds itself unforgettably enshrined in Bernini's ‘Saint Teresa in Ecstasy’ in Rome's church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.

Up to this point the verses cited from the earlier canzoniere show the heavy charge of emotion lying behind the intellectualization of the poet's suffering, fear, and hope. Examples such as these clearly refute the accusation made by a great number of critics that Vittoria Colonna's poetry lacks warmth or depth of feeling. It is with this caveat in mind that the reader should peruse commentaries on Vittoria Colonna's Rime, such as that printed by G.B. and M. Sessa in Venice in 1558. In it Rinaldo Corso, Vittoria's contemporary, explores, among other things, the Neoplatonic content of one of Vittoria's verses. A good example is his commentary on ‘D'ogni sua gloria fu largo al mio Sole’ (Bullock's edition, A2:20, has ‘grazia’ for ‘gloria’), which is one of Vittoria's more detached statements of her situation. This sonnet is a frank self-assessment in which the poet declares that she has always lived in the world detached from sensual pleasures, having learned to accept in her personal life the Neoplatonic dualism which portrays pleasure of the senses as something to be avoided and intellectual pleasures through and beyond the senses as the only kind to be sought. It is evident from Corso's commentary that what her contemporaries admired in Vittoria was that she lived as she wrote. There was no dichotomy between the self-image she presented in her poetry and that which she presented in everyday social intercourse. It seems ironic that it is this very fact which causes many modern readers to reject her poetry as artificial and lacking in depth of sincerity and personal inspiration.

Vittoria's Neoplatonism underwent dramatic change from the earlier to the later canzoniere as a result of a personal spiritual conversion which she experienced at about the time that Juan de Valdés, the Spanish evangelical leader, established himself in Naples in 1534. Neoplatonic vocabulary is still evident in her later poetry—the dichotomies of light and dark, the despised false world of the senses and the real world of the spirit, the winged soul taking flight upward, away from the body—but Vittoria's acceptance of the evangelical message meant accepting the immanence of the Son along with the transcendence of the Father. The struggle between these two conflicting elements in Vittoria's perception of reality resolves itself in the complete transformation of the lover (Vittoria) into the beloved (Jesus) as she makes the difficult but imminently realizable flight to the Cross in imitation of her Saviour:

          Spogliando i gran tiranni a campo aperto
prese di terra in croce un picciol volo;
ivi l'affisse e lo dannò col sangue.

(S1:40 [S1 designates the portion of the rime spirituali which was collected in 1540])

This realizable flight stands in contrast to the impossible flight toward Ferrante depicted in the earlier canzoniere. In recognition of this new approach to salvation Vittoria goes so far as to build her own ladder of ascent: in ‘Tira su l'alma al Ciel col Suo d'amore’ (S1:73) the four steps of the ladder are constituted by the three cardinal virtues (faith, hope, and charity), and the Christian virtue of humility. In the first quatrain Vittoria shows that the knots which bind the soul to the transcendent Father are tightened by the immanent hand of the Son. The poet feels an immediate sense of satisfaction in the cry that signifies at once the separation and the reuniting of the Father and his children—the cry that Jesus sent out from the Cross; ‘Father, Father, why have you forsaken me.’ It is worth noting, also, in the second quatrain that the poet is foreshadowing the use of the word onore which, as Dionisotti states, is to take the place of amore in the second half of the sixteenth century as the predominant preoccupation of the poets.

It is important to the question of Vittoria Colonna's Neoplatonism to note that nowhere in the later canzoniere does the concept of the beautiful receive attention. It seems that the poet was no longer concerned with the Neoplatonic perception of the good through the beautiful that was present in ‘D'ogni sua grazia fu largo al mio Sole’ (A2:20) now that she has abandoned her contemplation of Ferrante, her ‘Bel Sole’, and ‘Bell'Oggetto.’ Vittoria's theology has changed from the Renaissance Neoplatonic to the Pauline tradition which distrusts even this symbolic use of the senses. In ‘Felice il cieco nato a cui s'aperse’ (S2:28), distrust of the eyes calls forth the longing to have the inner sight of the blind. The poet also recants her belief in the reliability of the external sense of hearing, a belief repeated throughout the earlier canzoniere. She substitutes for it the concept from Neoplatonic mythology of the harmony of sound in the universe signifying Divine order, a concept made popular by Dante in his Divine Comedy as the music of the spheres. In ‘Vorrei l'orecchia aver qui chiusa e sorda’ (S1:28) Vittoria's distrust of the senses fits in with the traditional way of perceiving harmonious sound through an inner capacity, an intuition of the soul.

In conclusion I would like to underscore the insight that a close and sympathetic reading of the Marchesa di Pescara's poetry gives the reader. Vittoria Colonna, in the intellectualization of her every emotion, was drawing upon a life experience of total commitment and unity of vision and it can be demonstrated, as I have tried to do in this study, that her philosophical and theological preoccupations were the media through which she filtered those experiences in her poetry. Furthermore, an examination of the small body of evidence concerning Vittoria's intentions for the publication of her verses indicates that she wished them to circulate only among her immediate friends. She was writing for her own edification and that of her circle of spirituali (including, for example, Michelangelo), rather than for a general reading public. If modern readers take these considerations into account, they will avoid many of the pitfalls incurred by critics who have placed Vittoria Colonna's poetry in the context of competitive Petrarchism and they will recognize in Vittoria a poet who is bringing a new sincerity of commitment to the salvific properties of literature.

Notes

1. All references are to Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982).

2. Le vite del Gran Capitano e del Marchese di Pescara (Bari: Laterza, 1931); written in the 1540s.

3. The Medici pope and the Colonna family, leading military allies of the Emperor, were fighting bitterly over the Imperial presence in Italy, and so an intermediary had to be used in this transaction.

4. This brief is cited in its entirety by Pietro Ercole Visconti in Le Rime di Vittoria Colonna (Rome: Salviucci, 1840) pp. cxliv-cxlv.

5. Among the many contemporary references to the formative influence of Vittoria Colonna's conversation are the letters of Reginald Pole; the testimony of Pietro Carnesecchi before the Roman Inquisition; the historical accounts of Paolo Giovio (La vita del Marchese di Pescara, 1549), Ascanio Condivi (La vita di Michelagnolo Buonaroti, 1553), and the Portuguese artist, Francisco d'Olanda (Da pintura antiga, written in 1548 but not adequately edited for publication until the nineteenth century. There is a modern Italian edition by Antonietta Maria Bessone Aurelli: Dialoghi Michelangioleschi di Francisco d'Olanda. Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1953).

6. Benedetto Croce, Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte (Bari: Laterza, 1933) p. 430.

7. Vittoria Colonna, Carteggio raccolto e pubblicato da Ermanno Ferrero e Giuseppe Müller, seconda edizione … da Domenico Tordi (Turin: Loescher, 1892) pp. 79-81.

8. Arturo Pompeati in Storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: UTET, 1957), II, 516-18 characterizes these Petrarchists as performing ‘scimmiottatura meccanica ed esteriore, velleità di ricreare il segreto di una grande poesia col riprodurne le parole e i suoni; deserto di ispirazione personale; insincerità; … uniformità desolante degli infiniti imitatori.’

9. Pietro Ercole Visconti (Le Rime di Vittoria Colonna, Rome: Salviucci, 1840) puts 117 sonnets in the first group, adding two sonnets that were left out of preceding editions, and fifteen sonnets and a madrigal that he claims were previously unpublished. Althea Lawley (Vittoria Colonna, London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1888), Domenico Tordi (Sonetti inediti, Pistoia: G. Flori, 1900), Alan Bullock (in several articles culminating in Rime, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982), and others increase this number to 140 sonnets.

10. J.C. Nelson in Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 51 cites Lorenzo de' Medici on this point.

11. R.J. Clements, The Poetry of Michelangelo (New York: New York University Press, 1966), p. 45.