SOURCE: Jung, Eva-Maria. “Vittoria Colonna: Between Reformation and Counter-Reformation.” The Review of Religion 15, Numbers 3-4 (March, 1851): 144-59.

[In the following essay, Jung argues that Colonna's importance lies in her religious personality and moral perfection, rather than by her skill as a writer or her connections to important figures in art and literature.]

Vittoria Colonna was called “divine” already during her own lifetime. Michelangelo said of her that she was “a man—nay, a god in a woman.”¹ This idealization of her was handed down uncritically by succeeding centuries, like an old ikon bequeathed by one generation to another, and hung in a corner of the house for pious veneration where nobody ever dusts it for fear that it will fall. But if it were dusted—what would be discovered? The features of a noble and pious princess, doubtless, but not those of the saint or genius which the flattering courtiers of the sixteenth century and the Italian patriots of the nineteenth century saw in her.

As daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, Gran-Conestabile of Naples, and as wife of the Marchese di Pescara, Vittoria owes her reputation primarily to her illustrious name, and to her connections with the most famous personalities of her age, especially Michelangelo. Her success as a poetess is linked with the taste of her age, because she mastered perfectly the Platonic-Petrarchan style then in fashion. A perusal of her numerous love-sonnets, however, leads one to doubt the sincerity of her admiration for her husband and of her mourning for a lost happiness. The suspicion is bound to arise that she tried deliberately to deceive the world in order to hold up to her lax contemporaries the model of a happy marriage (which, in reality, was far from being so) and to glorify as a hero her dead husband whose shortcomings she knew all too well. As Ariosto said of her:

She not only makes herself immortal
Through the grace of her style, the equal of which I have never heard,
But she also lifts from the grave and immortalizes
Every man of whom she speaks and writes.(2)

In almost every respect, however, Vittoria was surpassed by other women: Veronica Gambara was a greater artist, Giulia Gonzaga exceeded her in beauty, Caterina Cibó, in knowledge—to name only Italian women of her time. Her first biographer, Filonico Alicarnasseo, who had known her personally, said of her: “The Marchesa, not being of great beauty, endeavored to display the gifts of her mind.”³ Nevertheless, her knowledge was less than is generally assumed; at any rate, it was intuitive rather than systematic. At best she knew some Latin, and she read much, mostly religious literature, until even this was forbidden her by her spiritual director, Cardinal Pole, with the injunction, “not to be too curious but to remain within the limits convenient to her sex.”⁴ The style of her letters is poor, either too bombastic or too clumsy. Her only prose work, Il Pianto sopra la passione di Cristo,⁵ was composed only to a small extent by herself, and even here she shows no genuine thought.

This is not meant to deny her intelligence, but it should be emphasized that, in her personal life, the emotional element held sway over the rational one, since “it is suitable for women to have a heart more ardent.”⁶ The singularity and attractiveness of Vittoria were not due to this or that particular quality or talent, but to her rich harmonious personality. She combined everything in herself, blending perfectly a noble character, a profound soul, and a sensitive heart. In her love and her mourning—“although God dislikes love without measure”⁷—she was as excessive as she was later to be in works of penance. The serene tranquillity which radiated from her was often only a deception, for she had mastered the conventions of her society to perfection. But she confessed once to Cardinal Morone that she had kept “continuously her body in motion in order to find tranquillity and her mind in agitation in order to find peace.”⁸

This inner restlessness betrays itself also in her traveling around far more than was conventional for women in those times. Basically, she was not at all this self-reliant personality, this “column, high and firm in the tempest” who “hath conquered the world and herself,” as Pietro Bembo and Annibale Caro sing of her.⁹ On the contrary, she was easily influenced and had a strong desire for spiritual guidance. Not finding this support in her husband, she looked for it later in Fra Ochino and Cardinal Pole, and her nature led her spontaneously to the Christian ideals of humility and obedience. Her conscience and convictions always conformed to the opinions of her spiritual directors. This lack of critical judgment and independent action contrasts strangely with the admiration she received everywhere as model and leader, an admiration, however, which might be compared with the cult of a beautiful picture of the Madonna, a cult referred more to an ideal than to an individual. Those excessive ovations were quite in line with the fashion of her age and the aristocratic Renaissance society which celebrated her as the “uncrowned queen of Italy” and basked complacently in her verses.

Vittoria Colonna was outstanding neither in actions nor in sufferings. She distinguished herself not at all by an especially tragic or heroic life. The compassion which she received for the “untimely” loss of her husband (after sixteen years of marriage), for her childlessness, for the collapse of the old predominance of her house (caused by the “War of the Salt”)—this exaggerated pity has faded away in our day when the conception and the limits of human suffering and tragedy have been shifted and enlarged to an unprecedented degree. The Marchesa never experienced humiliations, persecutions, poverty and hunger, though it seemed to her that she had passed her entire life shedding many bitter tears, and only a few sweet ones. It was easy for her to gain admiration and gratitude for her works of charity, because she simply had to give from her abundance, without lacking anything herself. It is true, however, that she experienced the bitter grief of loving without response, and all her life and art were molded by this suffering. But what she lacked in love of husband and children was abundantly compensated for by the friendship she found with all the great personalities of her age.

But we need no longer concern ourselves with the external history of the Marchesa. Man is the only creature who has a double history: besides the history of his life, there is that of his soul. It is only the history of her soul which interests us in Vittoria Colonna, because it is precisely here that her historical importance lies; it is here only that she surpasses all the other women mentioned before. They represent only one or the other aspect of their age; Vittoria Colonna stands between two ages, and embodies a whole historical evolution.

At first she was a true offspring of the Renaissance. She represented this age in one of its most beautiful aspects: she was the ideal incarnation of the nobildonna, the lady of her feudalistic society. She combined nobility of birth with nobility of mind, noble dignity and serene grace with artistic taste and a humanistic background. She was introverted, and yet open to everything great, sublime, and beautiful. She loved the world with its splendor and its honors. Even though this world could not satisfy her fundamentally, she loved it, nevertheless, for the sake of her husband, this splendid and ambitious condottiere, on whom all her thinking and feeling were centered.

Then, with the historical development from the Renaissance to the Reformation, the Marchesa di Pescara felt increasingly the importance of the unum necessarium of the Gospel. The haughtiness of man detached from God collapsed, and the cult of beauty suddenly disappeared. In reaction to the optimism which characterized the Renaissance spirit, a return to the pessimistic side, the more ascetic tenor, of Christianity, began. This melancholy and pessimistic trait became manifest also in Vittoria Colonna when she closed one of her sonnets with the apodictic declaration: “All human hope is of glass.”¹⁰ The body suddenly became a burden to her:

The soul felt this heavy and black
Earthly prison in which it saw itself enclosed. …(11)

The world now seemed a deluge to her: “So that I, Sisters, who am lonely and deprived of all support, and living in a town which seems surrounded by a deluge deserve your compassion.”¹² And yearning for death permeates her poems:

Tender is dying …
Sweet the change of these varying times
To the stable condition! O, when may be the dawn
Of so bright and adventurous a day!(13)

The passionate appeal of the Reformers for a reform in capite et in membris struck Vittoria like an admonition to herself. It stirred up in her the hidden religious power of her soul and the desire for more perfect imitation of Christ:

With the cross I would like to walk behind the Lord
With long steps through the narrow and steep path.(14)
                    With the cross, the blood and the sweat,
                    With the spirit still more ardent in danger,
                    And not with a lazy will and slow action,
                    Must man serve his true Lord.(15)

This did not mean, however, a sudden conversion; there was no “Damascus experience” in her life. It was rather the logical development of a natural disposition than a heroic self-conquest after trying religious struggles. She had always been a believing Christian, like all women of her society, because faith was self-evident to her. But this faith was not a living, only an “educated” faith. She never had to search and struggle for the true religion; any doubt in the revelation of Christ was far from her. At most, she discussed the problems of Justification or Grace, and of the Holy Scripture. Nor did she ever show in her writings any trace of dogmatic skepticism. Vittoria was by nature essentially religious. Religiousness, however, is a natural disposition, like musical talent. Devotion, on the other hand, is a human achievement, a virtue. It may happen, therefore, that a religious person is not always devout, and a devout one not always fundamentally religious. Vittoria was both. She developed her religious disposition, gradually, into devotion. The more she overcame that world in which her love for her husband had imprisoned her, and the more her mourning waned, the more grew her genuine inclination to the contemplative and ascetic life, stimulated by the example of great saintly Christians and by the monastic life, which she shared with nuns in several convents. She developed her religious powers, even to the renunciation of all others, including the artistic, to the point even of reaching mystical ecstasy.¹⁶ Claudio Tolomei said of her: “Being enraptured of Christ for so many years, she lived in the spirit rather than in the flesh.”¹⁷ But this did not prevent her from returning again and again to the reality of things when it was necessary to defend the Capuchin Order with daring energy before the Pope, to urge the Emperor to undertake a crusade, to prevent a military campaign against her brother, to resolve marital conflicts, or even to convert courtesans.

The biographers of past centuries saw the Marchesa only in her role of the greatest Italian poetess. Therefore, it was a notable step forward when her latest Italian biographer, Amy Bernardy, wrote: “The masterpiece of the Colonna is not her writing but her life.”¹⁸ But even this is not quite exact, as we have shown above. And it is still less justifiable to consider Vittoria's religious zeal simply as an “ambition to play a part in the controversies of ideology and ecclesiastical policy,” to quote Alfons Nobel, in the most recent German biography of her.¹⁹ Such a judgment shows the superficiality of his work, which completely neglects to treat her religious development or the old debated problem of her dogmatic position.

The greatness of Vittoria Colonna lies solely in her religious personality, in her moral perfection. She was surely not a great poetess, and probably not a real mystic, but she was a great Christian, one who, in spite of the splendor of her social position, possessed “This humility which makes men sublime,”²⁰ and proved with her life “How much a human heart is able to do through grace.”²¹

Yet one question remains open. It is as if “the veil, which covers the heart of the poetess, woven of perfectly mastered convention,”²² is on closer inspection drawn also over her soul. Why did she who strove for the Absolute, who intensified her devotion to mystic vision, who was deeply permeated with the ideals of monastic life, who felt herself attracted by the charm of monastic solitude and of the vita communis with the “pure and sweet brides of Our Lord, who guard their troth, which God has given to them, internally as well as externally”²³—why did she not follow her natural dispositions through to their logical conclusion and become a nun herself?

In the first days after the death of her husband, in 1525, she intended, indeed, to take the veil at once. At that time, a breve of Clemens VII prevented this unconsidered step, most probably upon the urging of Ascanio Colonna, who hoped to profit by marrying his sister again to his advantage.²⁴ So she left the convent after some weeks and returned to her castle on the island of Ischia. Ten years later, it was again rumored that the Marchesa wanted to retire to a convent in Naples which had been founded by an acquaintance of hers, Maria Lorenza Longa.²⁵ But, instead, she left Naples for good. In her last ten years she led an almost monastic life in the convents of Rome, Orvieto, Ferrara, Florence, and Viterbo. Even there, however, she maintained her princely way of life, surrounded by a real court of ladies-in-waiting and a suite of secretaries and assorted servants. She received visits and went out as often as she liked. It almost seemed as if the habit of the aristocratic ladies of that time to retire temporarily to a convent served her as a means of honorable escape from the molestations of social etiquette, with its rigor and monotony. Perhaps it was due to this worldly behavior that finally the nuns in Viterbo wished the Marchesa to depart from them and denounced her to the Inquisition.²⁶

There is in Vittoria's behavior something of a compromise, an imperfection, almost a contradiction: she lived in convents, but she did not take the veil; she loved poverty, but maintained a princely household; she practiced obedience but did not bind herself by the vows. The breve of Pope Clement VII was not so irrevocable a prohibition that it could not have been circumvented by a woman of the house of Colonna. The entry of so famous a woman into a convent would have been a gain for the Church. Her friends, however, were glad to keep her among them: “This noble lady serves the world more by her example than many others by preaching and studying,”²⁷ wrote Claudio Tolomei to the physician of the Marchesa. And Cardinal Bembo implored her in a sonnet not to abandon her friends entirely: “… without you / Who would be there to show us the path which leads to heaven?”²⁸

But such a reasoning should not have restrained her from choosing the monastic life if she considered it to be the most perfect; neither does it seem probable that Vittoria would have lacked the strength to renounce her independence, had she been convinced of the necessity of such a sacrifice. Perhaps here, more than anywhere else in the life of the Marchesa, the new spirit of the Reformation can be observed—the desire to emancipate the ideal of Christian perfection from the monastery and to carry it into everyday civic life. Perhaps it is due to Fra Ochino that Vittoria chose that way of life which he had described in a conversation with Caterina Cibò as

… so perfect that it is completely divine. There you do not need to change the place but the manners, the life but not the clothes; there you yourself cut off your bad desires and thoughts instead of your hair; you pray to God with the heart, not with the mouth; you obey God, not man; there you have to be chaste in heart and spirit without dependence upon things. In return, you have all virtues as your companions.²⁹

The same ambiguity can be observed in the theological attitude of Vittoria Colonna—so it seems, as least, to the superficial observer. The Inquisitors thought her a bad Catholic, the Reformers considered her an inconsistent Protestant (like her friends Giulia Gonzaga and Renée de France), because, at the beginning, she took a stand neither in favor of nor against the Reformation. And even if she had been convinced of the truth of Protestantism, she hardly would have imitated the example of Isabella Bresegna or Olimpia Morata, who left Italy for the sake of their faith, for,

She lacked the courage to face the last consequence. She did not even think about the possibility of such a repudiation of the Church. She belonged to the world from which not even men like Contarini wanted to part. The tradition of her noble family and her intellectual formation bound her to the sphere of a culture to which the mere word “heresy” meant horror and the annihilation of all ideals.³⁰

But is it true that the fatal year of 1542—thrice fatal for the death of Cardinal Contarini, the flight of Ochino, and the foundation of the Roman Inquisition—“broke Vittoria Colonna's heart,” and that she made in this year the sacrificium intellectus, as is the opinion of her latest Protestant biographer, Wyss?³¹ Such a sacrifice should be preceded, after all, by a conflict in the conscience, by an internal struggle, but there is no trace of this in her life or in her writings. There was, also, at that time, no rupture in her thought and no hypocrisy in her belief.

However, a critical investigation of the religious poetry of Vittoria Colonna leads to the discovery of some sentences with heretical overtones, those, for example, concerning the complete corruption of human nature,³² the sola fide doctrine,³³ and the theory of the iustitia imputata.³⁴ In six famous sonnets she also complained vehemently about the Pope.³⁵ But even if some of her verses can be interpreted in a Protestant sense, they do not have any schismatic character. The Church always remained for her the “Bride of Christ” and “our true mother,”³⁶ the Pope “our earthly father,”³⁷ and “your good successor whom high reason elected directly.”³⁸ Her sonnets in honor of the Eucharist as the Real Presence of the Flesh and Blood of Christ are inspired by a deep Catholic devotion.³⁹ This is proved, too, by her prayers for the intercession of the saints,⁴⁰ and especially in her two sonnets on the Immaculate Conception,⁴¹ which had not yet been declared dogma and had always been repudiated by the Protestants. And though Vittoria liked to emphasize the vanity of all works,⁴² she did so out of Christian humility and not in order to approve the Protestant thesis. In other verses she spoke with the same fervor of the necessity of good works⁴³ and of their merit.⁴⁴ Her words arose spontaneously out of her religious experience and not out of dogmatic speculation. She really felt and lived the paradoxes of Christianity. It should be remembered, moreover, that there was a far-reaching dogmatic confusion in her age, since many dogmas of the Catholic Church had not yet been defined before the Council of Trent.

Not even the fact that the Marchesa prohibited a new printing of her poems in 1546, shortly before her death, supplies evidence for the thesis of Wyss.⁴⁵ For in these years the new age of the Counter-Reformation began, and Vittoria Colonna could not help feeling that a new spirit had arisen, alien to that of her poetry. Her lyrics on the Cross, her undogmatic devotion, the over-emphasis on Grace and Justification by Faith—these were principles so close to those of the Reformation that they were no longer suited to the new age. She grew silent, not so much from opportunism as because she clearly understood it would be in vain for her to oppose the new, dominant spirit. Therefore, a further publication was of no use.

But perhaps this sudden silence had a still deeper meaning? It may be that the poetess had reached, in her religious life, that degree of perfection in which speech and writing are dissolved into the silence of adoration and beatific vision: Silentium meum loquitur tibi.⁴⁶

There is, however, still another argument which speaks in favor of Wyss's thesis, namely, Vittoria's connections with famous Protestants, above all with Bernardino Ochino. Not only did many Protestants, consider her a secret fellow believer, but the Roman Inquisition came to regard her as such—fortunately too late to burn her alive. In the index of their registers her name is mentioned several times in connection with the trials against Morone, Pole, and Carnesecchi. This does not prove anything, since even men like these three were not free from denunciations, calumniations, and suspicions. However, even the supercritical Inquisition did not dare to declare the Colonna princess a heretic, but merely “an accomplice of heretics … imbued with the false doctrine of the cardinal and therefore his admirer (amator). … The Marchesa gave money from her revenues to Pole for the heretics as well as for the subversion of the faithful.”⁴⁷

How far, then, was she “an accomplice of heretics”? As a matter of fact, the Marchesa had been the most efficient protector of Fra Ochino, for he it was who, by the holiness of his monastic life and the power of his preaching, had drawn the Marchesa out of her widow's mourning and introduced her to the problems of the Reformation. Under his influence she might have lost her Catholic faith, had not Cardinal Pole saved her, as she confessed in a letter to Cardinal Morone: “If Your most reverend Lordship would have seen the chaos of ignorance in which I was, and the labyrinth of errors, wherein I promenaded securely. … But God willed that through him (sc., Pole) He should say fiat lux and show me to be nothing myself and to find everything in Christ.”⁴⁸ These and many other words of the poetess (cf. also Carnesecchi's statement, p. 157) refute Nicolini's assertion that “the early stages of the above mentioned spiritual relations to Ochino were a most happy period of peace for Vittoria,” and that, in her relations to Pole, “she did not find any more this serene peace. … Never had she felt so peaceful as when she adhered to the doctrine of Justification by Faith.”⁴⁹ And, when Ochino left his order, Church, and country, Vittoria broke all connection with him and handed his letters over to Cardinal Cervini, a member of the Inquisition, with the famous words: “It hurts me much that the more he thinks to excuse himself the more he accuses himself, and the more he thinks to save others from the ship-wreck, the more he exposes them to the deluge, because he is outside the ark, which saves and makes secure.”⁵⁰

Not only Vittoria's spiritual director, but also his secretary, Giuseppe Jova di Lucca, fled from Italy to Protestant countries. But this happened long after Vittoria's death. The only one of her circle who was actually executed as a heretic was Pietro Carnesecchi, former protonotarius at the Papal court. In the course of his process before the Inquisition in 1566, he was repeatedly questioned about the Marchesa. His statements are, apart from her own writings, the most detailed source on Vittoria's religious position, although one cannot expect absolute objectivity in face of the Inquisition. Carnesecchi boasted of his high connection with the Princess Colonna and appealed to her as a companion in faith, especially in regard to the article of Justification by Faith. Through him we learn, also, that she read at least one of the writings of Martin Luther, his commentary on the psalm Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum. She was deeply impressed by it, but did not know that Luther was the author.⁵¹

There is no proof that Vittoria met Juan Valdès personally, but, from a letter to Giulia Gonzaga, his most devout disciple, we know that she did read his Espositione sopra San Paolo. The fact that the writings of the poetess express the same thoughts and reveal the same attitude does not prove, however, that she was a follower of Valdès. It proves, rather, that Valdès' thoughts were common to that time, that his aspirations for a reformed Christianity were shared by all Christians of the intellectual aristocracy in Italy. Simultaneously, but independent of each other, the same movement of reform rose in many different places, in private circles around outstanding prelates such as the Cardinals Contarini, Pole, Morone, and also in the studies of erudite laymen like Valdès and Flaminio, and in the salons of noble ladies like Renée de France, Giulia Gonzaga, and Vittoria Colonna. Only in this present century have these various attempts at reform been recognized as a whole movement with a character in its own right. Imbart de La Tour named it “Evangelism”⁵² to distinguish it from the contemporary Protestantism of the Reformation, as well as from the succeeding Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. As the name implies, the aspiration of Evangelism was the return to the simple spirit of the Gospel. It was not a theological system, but a religious attitude. It was by no means a “heresy,” but the last Catholic movement of reform before the Council of Trent. It was partly provoked by the Reformation but had its roots deep in the Italian tradition of Christian Humanism. Doubtless it had certain features in common with Protestantism: the passionate search for justification, the desire for a complete reform of the Church, for a simplification of theology, and for a Christocentric individualistic devotion. Both placed the “pure word of God” (i.e., the Bible) above the teaching mission of the Church and preferred to rely on private inspiration rather than on the mediation of priests. Evangelism differed from Protestantism, however, in its anti-revolutionary, undogmatic, temporary, and aristocratic character. This indefinite nature of Evangelism is most strikingly expressed by its theory of “justification through faith without the omission of good works,” as we find it in the advice given by Cardinal Pole to Vittoria Colonna: she must believe as if she could be saved only by faith but, on the other hand, she must keep acting as if the salvation of her soul depends entirely upon her good works.⁵³ Evangelism did not protest against the Catholic Church, but simply spiritualized it, or even ignored it.⁵⁴

This indifference is obvious also in some of the Marchesa's writings, especially in her mystical-allegorical letter to Priuli about the voyage of the soul to the heavenly harbor. Here she describes man as reaching his celestial destination independently of the Church, its priests, and sacraments: “Christ is our only polar star, whom the pilot ought to follow. … It is enough to look at Him, in order to sail directly, following His beams.”⁵⁵ Characteristic also is the fact that, even on the very day of her death, the Marchesa still discussed with Flaminio and Priuli the Epistles of St. Paul. Here the very spirit of Evangelism is manifest once more.⁵⁶ In daily life, however, the Marchesa observed all the prescriptions and regulations of the Church: Mass, rosary, breviary, cult of the saints, penance. Carnesecchi reported this to the Court of the Inquisition:

The Marchesa … had tormented herself so much with lashing and hair shirts and other mortifications of the flesh, that she was little more than skin and bones. … But then, admonished by the Cardinal (Pole), she withdrew gradually from her rigid life to a reasonable and honorable moderation.⁵⁷

In her final days, she confessed and communicated almost daily. She died as an orthodox Catholic, “with so much serenity of spirit and so much faith that we should honor her death with no other tears than those born of sweetness and pure, holy rejoicing.”⁵⁸ In accordance with her last will, she was buried in the convent of the Benedictines of St. Anna dei Funari, in Rome, in the manner of a nun.

Thus, Vittoria Colonna stood not at all “firmly on the ground of the Reformation” as Wyss states.⁵⁹ And Nobel, also, is completely wrong when he says: “Vittoria went so far as to participate in an agitation against the contemporary leadership of the Church.”⁶⁰

However, it would be equally wrong to call Vittoria Colonna a “characteristic phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation,”⁶¹ as Henry Thode considered her, or even “a pillar of the Counter-Reformation,”⁶² as Walter Rothes has asserted. On the contrary, her death has a most symbolic meaning. It marks the end of an epoch, for with her died not only one of the most famous but also one of the last representatives of Evangelism. She had foreseen the rise of a new age which was not only different but even opposite to hers, an age characterized by militant faith, official devotion, and intolerance. She had felt a new wind blowing so tempestuously that it swept away, after hardly fifteen years of existence, the individualism of private circles, the noble reserve and resigned pessimism, so characteristic of Evangelism. The spirit of Evangelism was to be choked off for centuries. This bitter presentiment stifled the pen of the poetess and brought about her untimely death, for it seems that she did not die of any organic disease but simply of a will to die.⁶³

Nevertheless, in Vittoria Colonna the new style of the baroque age was subconsciously present, for that indulgence in emotion and ecstasy which used up the last years of her life is not in line either with the moderate tranquillity of the Renaissance nor with the powerful spiritual struggle of the Reformation. Her mysticism is not harsh and dramatic like the real mysticism of the great saints, but sweet and sentimental. In this overflow of moods and emotions in the mystical writings of the Marchesa, a new taste—the baroque taste—becomes apparent. The lay spirit, which had been pushed out of theological studies, took refuge in religious emotion.

In studying the problem of the religious personality of Vittoria Colonna, it soon becomes apparent that it is definitely not so easily solved as Luzio thought when he said: “The talk about the so-called Protestantism of Vittoria Colonna is absurd.”⁶⁴ And one cannot dispose of the question as simply as Nobel did, declaring her religious zeal to be mere ambition. For Vittoria's religious attitude can be understood only in the light of Evangelism. The peculiar qualities of this movement, however, have been recognized by none of her biographers up to now. Only in our present time has there come about, even among Catholics, a better comprehension of the nature of Evangelism. Now it is finally possible to see Vittoria Colonna in her true place: she was neither Protestant in the sense of the Reformers nor Catholic in the sense of the Counter-Reformers; she was a true representative of Evangelism. Therefore, we must not ask whether she was Catholic or Protestant, whether she belongs to the age of the Reformation or of the Counter-Reformation. Her true orientation is implied in the title of this essay: Vittoria Colonna stands between Reformation and Counter-Reformation; she is not to be identified with either of them. But she is Catholic according to her own conscience, and from the point of view of Evangelism and of contemporary Catholicism as well.

The Marchesa had even achieved, although a woman, quite a unique position within the Catholic Church. She was not only a friend of all the leading prelates, but, in some cases, as in that of Pietro Bembo, she herself procured for them the Cardinal's hat.⁶⁵ She liberated Bishop Giberti, the head of the Pontifical Secretariat of State, from captivity.⁶⁶ She even dared to imprison Ludovico Fossombrone, general of the Capuchins,⁶⁷ and to address admonitory and critical letters to the head of the Church, Paul III,⁶⁸ who, nevertheless, asked for her opinion on the matter of designating his successor.⁶⁹

We may conclude that the religious development of Vittoria Colonna reflects faithfully the evolution of her age, of that period of transition which led from the Renaissance through the Reformation to the Counter-Reformation. In the beginning, she was a true child of the Renaissance, but, later, under the influence of the Reformation, she became a typical representative of Evangelism. Her death coincided with the decline of this movement. The age which followed, the Counter-Reformation, was entirely alien to her character.

It must be admitted also that Vittoria Colonna owes her permanent reputation more to the charm of her rich and profound personality than to her genius and her art. This charm, united with a princely name and a corresponding wealth, gained for her the friendship of the outstanding men of her age, and a unique position in society and in the Church of the sixteenth century.

Notes

1. Carl Frey, Die Dichtungen Michelangelos (Berlin, 1897), Sonnet cxxxv.

2. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, c. xxxvii, st. 16, vv. 5-8.

3. Carteggio di Vittoria Colonna, ed. by E. Ferrero and G. Mueller (Turin, 1892), 2d ed., appendix, p. 317.

4. Ibid., p. 340.

5. Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Cristo (1st ed. by Aldus, Venice, 1556).

6. Rime di Vittoria Colonna, ed. by Ercole Visconti (Rome, 1840), p. 317. All quotations from her poetry are taken from this, the only critical edition of which all later editions are only reprints.

7. Ibid., p. 133.

8. Carteggio, p. 273.

9. Also in: Rime, pp. 400, 410.

10. Ibid., p. 165.

11. Ibid., p. 292.

12. Tre lettere inedite di Vittoria Colonna, ed. by Abdelcader Salza (Florence, 1898), p. 5.

13. Rime, p. 350.

14. Ibid., p. 165.

15. Ibid., p. 212.

16. Cf. her sonnets, in Rime, pp. 182, 229 and Ms. Casanatense, No. 897, fol. 109 v.

17. Vittoria Colonna, Italia Francescana editrice (Rome, 1947), p. 38.

18. Amy Bernardy, Vittoria Colonna (Florence, 1927), p. 111.

19. Alfons Nobel, Vittoria Colonna (Recklinghausen, 1947), p. 159.

20. Rime, p. 203.

21. Ibid., p. 280.

22. Henry Thode, Michelangelo und das Ende der Renaissance (Berlin, 1903), v. ii, p. 361.

23. Carteggio, p. 307.

24. Published by Ercole Visconti, p. cxlv.

25. Cf. letter of Agostino Gonzaga to the Marchesa di Mantova, in Alessandro Luzio, “Vittoria Colonna,” Rivista Storica Mantovana, 1 (1885), p. 26.

26. Cf. Compendium processuum Sancti Officii Romae, in Carteggio, pp. 344-45.

27. Alfons Reumont, Vittoria Colonna (Turin, 1883), p. 252.

28. Rime, p. 419.

29. Bernardino Ochino, Dialoghi sette, in Roland Bainton, Bernardino Ochino (Florence, 1940), p. 46.

30. Henry Thode, op. cit., 11, 378.

31. Johannes Wyss, Vittoria Colonna (Frauenfeld, 1916), pp. 119, 208.

32. Rime, pp. 193, 207, 266, 316, 333.

33. Ibid., pp. 191, 318.

34. Ibid., p. 318.

35. Ibid., pp. 296-301.

36. Ibid., p. 296.

37. Ibid., p. 301.

38. Ibid., p. 296.

39. Ibid., pp. 223, 353, 354.

40. Ibid., pp. 274, 277, 279, 347.

41. Ibid., pp. 243-44.

42. Ibid., pp. 229, 235, 302, 305.

43. Ibid., pp. 170, 212, 303.

44. Ibid., pp. 183, 228.

45. Cf. letter of Donato Rullo to Ascanio Colonna in Domenico Tordi, II codice appartenuto a Margherita d'Angoulême, regina di Navarra (Pistoia, 1900), p. 4.

46. Imitatio Christi, III, 21, 4.

47. Compendium processuum Sancti Offici Romae, in Carteggio, p. 344.

48. Carteggio, p. 273.

49. Benedetto Nicolini, “Sulla religiosità di Vittoria Colonna,” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni, xxii (1950), pp. 103, 106. Nicolini's article appeared a year and a half after my essay on this subject in Convivium (Turin, Jan. 1949), a coincidence which proves the timeliness of the topic. Without knowledge of each other's work, we have arrived at substantially the same conclusion, diverging basically, however, in our interpretation of the influence exerted by Ochino and Pole on the spiritual life of the Marchesa.

50. Carteggio, p. 257.

51. Cf. Dal processo di Pietro Carnesecchi dinanzi al Sant'Uffizio, in Carteggio, pp. 331-41.

52. Pierre Imbart de la Tour, Les Origines de la Réforme, vol. III: L'Evangélisme (Paris, 1914).

53. Carteggio, p. 333.

54. I have treated the subject of Italian Evangelism more extensively in a separate essay, to be published soon.

55. Bartolomeo Fontana, Nuovi documenti Vaticani sulla fede e sulla pietà di Vittoria Colonna (Roma, 1888), p. 21.

56. Cf. letter of Father Maggio, her confessor, to Ascanio Colonna, in Johannes Wyss, op. cit., p. 122. In view of this striking fact, it is hard to believe Nicolini's unproved statement that the Apostle Paul “stirred in her a feeling of dismay” (op. cit., p. 99).

57. Carteggio, p. 337.

58. Fontana, op. cit., p. 13.

59. Wyss, op. cit., p. 114.

60. Nobel, op. cit., p. 157.

61. Thode, op. cit., p. 360.

62. Walter Rothes, “Vittoria Colonna als Säule der Gegenreformation,” in Festschrift für Sebastian Merkle (Düsseldorf, 1922), pp. 265-81.

63. Cf. letter of her physician, Francastoro, to her secretary, Carlo Gualteruzzi, in Alfred Reumont, op. cit., p. 251.

64. Luzio, op. cit., p. 50.

65. Cf. Bembo's letter to Vittoria Colonna, in Carteggio, p. 174.

66. Cf. Giberti's letter to Vittoria Colonna, in Carteggio, p. 51.

67. Cf. Father Cuthbert, The Capuchins (New York, 1929), p. 100.

68. Cf. Tacchi Venturi, Vittoria Colonna, fautrice della Riforma Cattolica (Rome, 1901), p. 32.

69. Luzio, op. cit., p. 29.