SOURCE: Gibaldi, Joseph. “Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, and Poet.” In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 22-46. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Gibaldi presents an overview of Colonna's life and career, discussing her relationship with other famous figures or her time, the reaction to her poetry by her contemporaries, and the general subjects, themes, and imagery found in her poetry.]

Ludovico Ariosto devotes one of his most famous digressions in Orlando Furioso to the many excellent women writers of his age—those who abandoned the needle and cloth and joined the Muses on Mount Helicon to quench their thirst at the sacred fountain (37.14). So numerous are these women, writes Ariosto, that to render a proper account of each would fill up an entire canto. He wonders if he should select only five or six to praise (and possibly offend the others), if he should be silent about them all, or if he should single out one from the many.

I will choose only one, but will so choose
that envy will be entirely confounded,
for none of the others will be troubled
if I pass over them and praise this one alone.
This woman has not only made herself immortal
with a sweet style that has not been surpassed;
but whomever she speaks or writes about
she can draw from the tomb and give eternal life.
Just as Phoebus adorns his white sister
with more brightness and gazes on her more
than on Venus or Mercury or any other star
that moves with the heavens or on its own:
so he breathes into this woman more fluency
and more sweetness than into any of the others;
and he gives such power to her lofty words
that in our time another sun ornaments the sky.
Vittoria is her name, appropriate for one born
amid victories; and no matter where she goes,
embellished with trophies and with triumphs,
Victory is with her, preceding and following.

(37.16-18)

Vittoria Colonna, as Maud F. Jerrold has noted, was truly a “child of the Renaissance.”¹ Born of illustrious parentage and witness to and participant in major historical events, Colonna was an influential political and intellectual leader, a friend and adviser to many of the greatest personalities of her age, and an outstanding poet admired and respected by her contemporaries.

The Colonnas were a noble Roman family that played an important military and political role in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Fabrizio (d. 1520), Vittoria's father, was a celebrated general and, in his later years, grand constable of Naples. Significantly, he figures among the renowned interlocutors in Niccolò Machiavelli's The Art of War. Colonna's mother, Agnese di Montefeltro (d. 1523), was the daughter of Duke Federigo of Urbino and Battista Sforza, and sister to Guidobaldo, at whose court Baldesarre Castiglione set his Book of the Courtier.

Vittoria was born in 1492 in the Colonna castle at Marino, south of Rome. Although little is known of her upbringing, it is clear that she received a comprehensive humanistic education. But her life was shaped by not only the intellectual but also the political forces of the age. In 1495 Ferdinand II (1469-1496), king of Naples, wishing to solidify his alliance with the Colonna family, induced Fabrizio to betroth his daughter to Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, marquis of Pescara, a descendant of noble Spanish and Neapolitan families. Vittoria was three years old, Ferrante five. The wedding contract was signed in 1507; the marriage itself took place at Ischia, near Naples, two years later.

Though Colonna later protested to the contrary, the marriage seems not to have been a happy one. Pescara, like his father-in-law, was a military man. In 1510, one year after the wedding, he left Naples to join Fabrizio in fighting on the side of Pope Julius II and Spain against the French in northern Italy. Thereafter Colonna spent very little time with her husband, as he fought in one battle after another until his early death.

In 1512 Fabrizio and Pescara were both taken prisoner at the battle of Ravenna but were shortly released. The following year Pescara was fighting again in Lombardy. In 1521, after a brief truce, the war resumed, this time with Pope Leo X allied with Charles V of Spain against France, and with Pescara in command of the imperial infantry. Considerable military success followed. Pescara was victorious at Bicoca, near Milan, in 1522 and successfully held Cremona and Milan against the French in 1523. Then, after a defeat at Marseilles in 1524, the imperial forces defeated François I at Pavia in 1525, taking the French king himself as prisoner. At the height of his success, however, Pescara was gravely wounded and retired to Milan. He died there on November 25, 1525, at the age of thirty-five, leaving Vittoria Colonna a widow for the remaining twenty-two years of her life.

During her marriage Colonna resided chiefly at her home in the south. With no children of her own, she undertook the upbringing of her husband's orphaned cousin Alfonso d'Avalos, marquis of Vasto, who was to have a distinguished military and political career of his own. In Naples Colonna enjoyed the companionship of, among others, the famous poet Iacopo Sannazaro (d. 1530). At this time, too, her earliest poems apparently began to attract attention. In August 1515, Andrea di Asola dedicated to her his edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, alluding in his dedication to her beauty, her virtue, and her eloquence.² In 1519 the poet Girolamo Britonio similarly dedicated to Colonna his book of poems Gelosia del Sole, which included a sonnet (“Quando odo il vostro stile”) praising her poetic style.³

There is little to document the details of Colonna's life during these years, but scholars are certain that she often traveled, with and without Pescara, to her parents' home in Marino and to nearby Rome. It was doubtless in the Rome of Leo X (r. 1513-1521) that she first met and formed lifelong friendships with three of the pope's secretaries: Giovan Matteo Giberti (d. 1543), later papal datary to Clement VII and bishop of Verona; Iacopo Sadoleto (1477-1547), the poet and subsequent bishop of Carpentras and cardinal; and, most important, Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), the famous poet and humanist who, in 1539, also became cardinal. Bembo served as a kind of mentor to Colonna the poet. He admired and encouraged her verse, and she in turn devoted a sonnet to him (“Spirto felice”).⁴ It was during this period, too, that Colonna may have met Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), who made frequent diplomatic missions to the court of Leo X on behalf of the Este family.

Bembo, a major figure in The Book of the Courtier, may also have introduced Colonna to Baldesarre Castiglione (1478-1529), who so respected the marchesa's literary taste that he sent her the manuscript of his famous work in 1524 for her opinion. Indeed, Colonna was the indirect cause of the book's publication, for she soon began to circulate the work with great enthusiasm—albeit without the author's permission—to Castiglione's considerable discomfiture. Fearful of the publication of a corrupt edition, Castiglione had the book printed himself in Venice in 1528.⁵

Immediately following her husband's death in 1525, the young widow went to live in the Convent of San Silvestro in Rome. Although she was to live in many convents during the remaining years of her life, Colonna never took the veil. She also did not marry again. Instead, she chose to live a full and independent “Renaissance life,” combining secular interests and achievements together with the deepest piety.

Throughout her long widowhood, Colonna traveled considerably—Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, Lucca, Orvieto, and Viterbo, always returning for lengthy stays in Rome and Marino as well as Naples and Ischia—and everywhere she went, she attracted admiring and devoted friends.

In the early 1530s her cousin Cardinal Pompeo Colonna dedicated his book Apologia mulierum to Vittoria and also included her in it as a modern counterpart to the virtuous women of antiquity.⁶ It was around 1530, too, that Ariosto added to canto 37 of the Orlando Furioso the glowing passage, quoted above, on Colonna's illustrious reputation as woman and poet. In addition, several Renaissance artists, including Sebastiano del Piombo and Girolamo Muziano (Palazzo Colonna, Rome), painted portraits of the marchesa. Some believe that Paolo Veronese depicted her as the Virgin in his Marriage at Cana, now at the Louvre in Paris.⁷

Colonna's literary circle in Naples at this time included the poets Galeazzo di Tarsia, Angelo di Costanzo, and Bernardino Rota. Tarsia (1520-1553) devoted a poem (“Io benedico il dì”) to Colonna's beauty.⁸ Many other literary figures, while traveling in southern Italy, also enjoyed her company: the Latin lyricist and subsequent reformer Marcantonio Flaminio, the historian Paolo Giovio, the literary theorist Antonio Minturno, and the poet Bernardo Tasso, father of Torquato. Bernardo (1483-1569) wrote many sonnets, canzoni, and letters in praise of Colonna.⁹ Her Roman friends in later years included such poets and men of letters as Giovanni Guidiccioni (who addressed three sonnets to the marchesa), Francesco Maria Molza, Claudio Tolomei, Luigi Alamanni, Annibale Caro, and Benedetto Varchi. Colonna also exchanged letters with the notorious Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) and the revered Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549).¹⁰ Among her later spiritual advisers were the powerful and influential cardinals Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542), Giovanni Morone (1509-1580), and Reginald Pole (1500-1558). It was not for nothing that Jacob Burckhardt called Vittoria Colonna “the most famous woman of Italy” during the Renaissance.¹¹

Yet of all her many famous acquaintances, Colonna's most celebrated and doubtless her closest friend was none other than Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Their shared interests in art and poetry, their profound religious sense, their Neoplatonic proclivities, and, obviously, their complementary personalities made Colonna and Michelangelo the most intimate of spiritual friends. Although they probably met earlier, their friendship blossomed sometime during the 1530s and continued to flourish until Colonna's death in 1547. During that decade or so, the two wrote letters and poems to each other, with Michelangelo offering drawings and sketches to his friend, and they often saw each other. The Portuguese painter Francisco de Holanda has left a record of the friendship, recounting in his Diálogos de Roma the visits he enjoyed with Colonna and Michelangelo in the convent garden of San Silvestro in 1538.

Among the drawings that Michelangelo sent to Colonna around 1540 were a Pietà with Angels (Fenway Court, Boston) and a particularly striking Christ on the Cross (British Museum, London), in which the crucified Christ is depicted alive, looking up toward heaven, “triumphant over death.”¹² Of the deposition, Colonna wrote to the artist: “I found it so wonderful that it surpassed my expectations in all ways; … it reaches the highest perfection in every point. … And I tell you that I am delighted that the angel on the right is so beautiful, because on the last day Michael will place you, Michelangelo, at the right hand of God. Meanwhile, I do not know how to serve you other than by praying for you to this sweet Christ, whom you have drawn so perfectly” (Carteggio, p. 209). The crucifixion pleased her even more: “It is impossible to find a figure more beautifully made, more lifelike, and more perfectly finished; I certainly can never express how subtly and marvelously it is done. … If it is truly yours, you must have patience, for I will never send it back to you. I have looked at it under the light and with a lens and with a mirror—I have never seen a more perfect thing” (Carteggio, p. 208).

For his part, Michelangelo wrote to Colonna, “I desire to do more for you than for anyone else I have ever known on earth” (Lettere, p. 275), while she speaks to him of “our secure friendship and most steadfast affection bound in a Christian knot” (Carteggio, p. 268). In his many verses devoted to Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo poetically chronicles his attachment to her:

A man within a woman—no, rather a god
speaks through her mouth;
and I, having heard her,
am no longer my own master.
Oh lady who leads souls
through fire and water to bliss,
make me never return to what I was.

(Rime, p. 268, no. 235)

As much as I flee and even hate myself,
so much, lady, with truest hope,
I turn to you; and my soul is
the less afraid, the nearer I am to you.
In your face and in your beautiful eyes,
full of every salvation,
I aspire to all that heaven promises.

(Rime, p. 224, no. 163)

One of Michelangelo's drawings of a woman is thought to be of Colonna (British Museum, London), and some art historians contend that Michelangelo included the marchesa in his Last Judgment—significantly, at the feet of the Virgin Mary.¹³

Like Michelangelo, Colonna was also deeply interested in church reform, and throughout her mature life she closely allied herself with counterreformational forces. Indeed, several of her closest ecclesiastical friends (Giberti, Sadoleto, Contarini, Pole) were members of that early reform group, founded before 1520, the Oratory of Divine Love. In subsequent years, her interest in the movement intensified. Among other activities, she became a staunch defender of the Capuchins, an order of reformed Franciscans established by Matteo da Bascio and approved in 1528 by Clement VII. When the Capuchins were opposed by other orders, such as the Observants, Colonna used all her influence to defend the group until Paul III confirmed its privileges in 1536, allowing the order to grow and flourish during the decades and centuries ahead.¹⁴

To her later dismay, Colonna particularly fell under the influence of Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), the most celebrated Capuchin and, by all accounts, the greatest preacher of his time. Every Italian city clamored to hear him, and whenever he was nearby, Colonna went to listen to his sermons. In 1537, apparently at his request, she traveled to Ferrara to seek permission of Ercole II d'Este for Ochino to found a Capuchin convent in that city. The following year, doubtless due in large part to Colonna's efforts, the illustrious preacher was elected vicar-general of his order.

During the next few years, however, Ochino and his followers were increasingly suspected of having Lutheran tendencies. Accusations of heresy soon followed. In 1542, as the Roman Inquisition was being established, Ochino was summoned to Rome. Fearful of impending imprisonment and possibly even death, he fled Italy to Geneva and spent the remaining years of his life unhappily in the north. He was driven out of England during the reign of Mary Tudor and was exiled from Switzerland as well as Poland before meeting his death in Moravia in 1564.

Before leaving Italy, Ochino wrote to Colonna to explain his decision to flee.¹⁵ He wrote again when he arrived in Geneva, but, on the advice of Cardinal Pole, the marchesa did not open this second letter, immediately forwarding it instead to the Vatican. Although she now disavowed Ochino and broke off all communication with him, the Roman Inquisition nonetheless continued to investigate Colonna's beliefs and kept a watchful eye on her until her death a few years later. In fact, more than one historian has speculated that death saved Colonna from a perilous confrontation with the Inquisition. Roland H. Bainton writes, “Had she lived, she would almost certainly have been suspected of heresy,” and, G. K. Brown adds, “There can be little doubt that … ecclesiastical authority would have treated her severely.”¹⁶

In the spring and summer of 1543, while staying at the Convent of Santa Caterina in Viterbo, Colonna suffered a long and serious illness. But she slowly recovered enough to return the following year to Rome, taking up residence in the Convent of Sant' Anna de' Funari. She became ill again at the beginning of 1547 and was moved to the Cesarini palace. On February 15 she made out her will; she died ten days later. Michelangelo was at her deathbed. In a sonnet on her death, he wrote,

Heaven has taken from me the splendor
of the great fire that burned and nourished me;
I remain a coal, smoldering under the ash.

(Rime, p. 302, no. 266)

In a subsequent letter to Giovan Francesco Fattucci, dated August 1, 1550, Michelangelo spoke feelingly of the marchesa, “who was devoted to me, and I no less to her. Death has deprived me of a great friend” (Lettere, p. 259). But Michelangelo did find one consolation.

Although her body is dead,
we cannot forget
her sweet, graceful, sacred verses.

(Rime, p. 301, no. 265)

Vittoria Colonna's contemporaries almost universally acclaimed her poetry. In addition to the previously cited comments of Andrea di Asola, Girolamo Britonio, and Ariosto, are many other notable words of praise from some of the chief figures of the age. Bembo, for example, in a letter to Colonna dated January 20, 1530, remarks that she has “more excellence in the art” than any other woman poet (Carteggio, p. 61). A decade later the poet Giovanni Guidiccioni writes to the marchesa of her verse: “You have arrived at the truest perfection of style and thought that one can imagine” (Carteggio, p. 212). Likewise, Aretino, writing on February 28, 1540, to Paolo Interiano Genovese about the major women poets of the day, speaks of the “famous” Veronica Gambara but the “eternal” Vittoria Colonna (Lettere, p. 643). Although demand for copies of her verses was great, Colonna's modesty prevented their publication for many years. Nonetheless, the poems freely circulated in manuscript, as Colonna often sent individual efforts to friends and, in fact, sent manuscripts of her collected poems to at least three persons: Francesco della Torre (secretary to her close friend Bishop Giberti), Marguerite of Navarre, and Michelangelo.¹⁷

In 1535 Colonna's first poem appeared in print: her sonnet “Ahi quanto fu al mio sol contrario il fato” (Rime, p. 38) was published in a book of Bembo's poetry. The following year three of her poems, including the epistle to her husband at war (excerpts translated below), were printed in the collection Vocabulario di cinquemila Vocabuli Toschi. Finally, in 1538 an entire book of Colonna's poetry was published in Parma, and another twenty or so editions of her verse were to appear during the remainder of the century. Her claim to the title “literary queen” of the Italian Renaissance seems thoroughly justified.¹⁸

The most recent edition of Colonna's poetry by Alan Bullock (1982) contains 390 poems divided into three sections: love poems (141), spiritual poems (217), and epistolary poems (32). Her earliest known poem—and the only one definitely written before her husband's death—is the extraordinary “Epistle to Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, Her Husband, After the Battle of Ravenna,” composed in 1512, following the famous battle in which Ferrante not only first won fame as a soldier but was also briefly taken prisoner along with Fabrizio Colonna, Vittoria's father. The epistle is at once a humanistic exercise and a passionate cri de coeur. On the one hand, the poem—written in terza rima (a b a, b c b, and so forth) and replete with classical allusions (Hector and Achilles in the excerpts given below; Typhoeus, Aeolus, Pompey, Cato, and Mithridates, among others, in the omitted passages)—is a conscious imitation of Ovid's Heroides, a set of imaginary verse epistles by famous women of antiquity, such as Dido, Medea, and Penelope, addressed to their absent husbands and lovers. On the other hand, in marked contrast to the noble and dignified tone of the poems written after Pescara's death, the epistle is unique in the youthful sense of anger and self-pity that pervades it. The young Colonna complains about her lonely life, her separation from her husband, and her fears about his safety. She contrasts his single-minded, insensitive quest for fame on the battlefield with her distress at home, and this leads her to bemoan the plight of all women helplessly awaiting the return of their men from war.

Colonna's Love Poems, written in her middle years, and her later Spiritual Poems are less personal than the epistle and more reflective of both the artistic and intellectual currents of the age. Natalia Costa-Zalessow has written of the perfect balance in Colonna's verse between humanistic Neoplatonism and Christianity, within the framework of sixteenth-century Petrarchism.¹⁹ Although Petrarchan and Neoplatonic elements suffuse all of Colonna's mature work, the former is more evident in the Love Poems, the latter in the Spiritual Poems.²⁰

The Love Poems were written during the years immediately after Pescara's death, the late 1520s and possibly the very early 1530s. As in the subsequent Spiritual Poems, the sonnet predominates. Faithfully adhering to the Petrarchan form, each poem contains an octave, composed of two quatrains with the same fixed rhyme scheme (a b b a a b b a), and a sestet, comprised of two tercets with varying rhyming patterns (often c d e c d e, but sometimes such arrangements as c d c d c d, c d e c e d, c d e d c e, and so forth).

Despite superficial similarities, the Love Poems, in imagery as well as in theme, are much closer to the Petrarchan model than the later sonnets. Love Poems 4 and 5 below, for example, clearly illustrate Colonna's indebtedness to the tradition: the fourth with its apostrophe to Love, ever armed with his fierce arrows, and its typically Petrarchan conceits (for example, Love's “sweet yoke” and “gentle prison”); the fifth with its extended nautical metaphor very obviously recalling Petrarch's famous sonnet 189 (“Full of oblivion, my ship passes through a harsh sea”).

Moreover, just as Petrarch devoted his sonnets to celebrating his beloved, so in Colonna's love poems Pescara—by all accounts no more than a mere mortal, morally and spiritually—is transformed into something of a male Laura. As John Addington Symonds wrote, “Death consecrates her husband for Vittoria, as death canonised Laura for Petrarch. He has become divine, and her sole desire is to rejoin him in a world where parting is impossible.”²¹

Hence the Colonna of this middle period incessantly refers to her deceased husband as “my beautiful sun” and “my eternal light.” In her memory now, he was not only a great warrior who possessed an “invincible heart,” “prudent foresight,” and “godly judgment,” but also an ideal lover whose merest glance chased away her sorrows and made her tears sweet and her sighs pleasant. At the same time, Colonna speaks painfully of her own psychological and physical distress at his loss. She complains of the “bitter weeping” and “melancholy sighs” of her widowhood; she believes that with his death she was “forever cut off from any happiness.”

The final three sonnets in this group indicate her desire to remain devoted to his memory, for her only relief in life is in directing her thoughts to him. Indeed, she hopes that his memory will inspire her to reject the vanities of this world and embrace the true joys of the spiritual life.

Written during the 1530s and 1540s, the ten or fifteen years prior to Colonna's death, the Spiritual Poems reflect, as Dennis J. McAuliffe cogently suggests, a profound religious conversion within the poet.²² (This was, after all, the period of her friendships with Michelangelo and Ochino.) Whereas in the Love Poems she devoted her life and her verse to Pescara, her “beautiful sun,” who was admittedly but “a part of the perfect good,” in the Spiritual Poems she now devotes her verse and her soul to the “true Sun.”

The keynote to these later works is appropriately struck in the very first sonnet in the group. Although her “chaste love” for Pescara and her desire to keep his name alive on earth dominated her earlier poems, Colonna will now write only in praise of the Lord. Her new inspiration will be the example of Jesus Christ. Writing, which for Colonna originally was a cathartic experience (Love Poem 1: “I write only to unbosom my inner sorrow”), is now a celebratory act, a religious experience.

In other poems, following her contemplative “light,” Colonna exhibits affinities with Ignatian meditation (sonnet 7: “I see the Lord on the cross, stretched naked”) and post-Tridentine mysticism, thus anticipating such meditative and mystical poets of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as San Juan de la Cruz, Jean de La Ceppède, Robert Southwell, John Donne, Friedrich von Spee, George Herbert, Jan Luyken, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.²³ Similarly, Neoplatonism, present in some of the Love Poems (7 and 8), is a dominant element in the Spiritual Poems, perhaps most evidently in the sixth sonnet, which speaks of the “ladder” that leads the soul to heaven.

Indeed, it is possible to view the entire corpus of Colonna's poetry as embodying the Neoplatonic ladder of love, progressing as the poems do from the early declarations of passionate earthly love in the epistle to her husband at war through the Petrarchan delineation of idealized human love in her middle years to the final religious poems that culminate, poetically if perhaps not chronologically, in her Triumph of Christ's Cross. Influenced, typically, by Petrarch's Triumphs as well as by The Triumph of the Cross (1497) by the famous early church reformer Girolamo Savonarola, Colonna's glorious work, written in terza rima (like the Petrarchan Triumphs), presents a mystical vision of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Saint Mary Magdalene.

It is significant that the Magdalene concludes Colonna's vision, for throughout her life the poet felt a strong attachment to the saint, which was demonstrated in numerous ways. In March of 1531, for instance, the marchesa asked Federigo II, duke of Mantua, if he could arrange for her to have a “beautiful picture of Saint Magdalene, from the hand of an excellent painter.” The duke turned for such a painting to no less an artist than Titian, whom he called “the most excellent painter of our time.” Titian executed the painting at once and sent it to Colonna the following month.²⁴ In addition to including the Magdalene in the Triumph of Christ's Cross, Colonna devoted Spiritual Poem 8 to her and toward the end of her life (c. 1545) wrote at great length on the saint in a letter to her husband's aunt Costanza d'Avalos.

I see the fervent Magdalene listening at the feet of our Lord. … I think of how that beloved disciple merited the privilege of being the first of all to see the glorious resurrected Lord, Who, thankful, thus rewarded her ardor, her perseverance, and her dear and faithful love. And to prove further that she was his apostle, He commanded that she be the messenger to bring the disciples the news of His resurrection. … I see the converted woman from the moment she so ardently began to love Him, then everyday growing more passionate, until with new and humble emotions she followed Him to the cross; and when others lost faith at His death, her love burned even more, as she ever followed and served the holy mother, being at one with both the Queen of Heaven and the Holy Spirit. She became the most perfect herald of the Divine Word, and on the high mountain of her penitence she was often visited by her resplendent Sun.

(Carteggio, pp. 300-301)

Just as Colonna looks ahead to later meditative and mystical poets, so, in her copious writings on the saint, she clearly anticipates the widespread Baroque tradition of lyric poems devoted to the Magdalene, a tradition that included such diverse poets as Giambattista Marino, Robert Southwell, Philippe Desportes, John Donne, Lope de Vega, George Herbert, Joost van den Vondel, Richard Crashaw, Andreas Gryphius, and Andrew Marvell.²⁵

Colonna seems to have identified with the saint on many different levels—personal, philosophical, theological. The Magdalene represented for Christian theology the contemplative path to salvation, while her sister Martha symbolized the active path. On the choice between these two “lights,” contemplatives like Colonna were fond of quoting Luke 10, verse 42: Christ's judgment that Mary had chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her. Moreover, like Colonna in the artistic and political worlds of her day, the Magdalene also moved in a world dominated by men, and yet she was able through her great devotion to become the only woman (excluding the Virgin Mary, of course) to achieve in Christ's eyes status equal to the apostles. Finally, the saint's remarkable “life”—from flagrant prostitute to passionate convert to faithful disciple of Jesus to hermit blessed with mystical visions in a deserted cave—was yet another manifestation, and a powerfully dramatic one, of the Neoplatonic progression from earthly love to divine love.

In the Magdalene legend, Colonna obviously found a spiritual model for life. She doubtless would have wished that her own exemplary existence and poetic art might play a similar role for her readers, no matter how distant in place or time. …

Notes

1. Maud F. Jerrold, Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times, p. 3.

2. Vittoria Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 399-400.

3. Ibid., pp. 400-403.

4. Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. Bullock, p. 152.

5. On this episode, see Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 23-26 and 47-51, as well as the dedicatory epistle to The Book of the Courtier.

6. Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 411-13.

7. For example, see Robert J. Clements, ed., The Poetry of Michelangelo, p. 197.

8. Galeazzo di Tarsia, Rime, p. 14.

9. Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 317-21, 432-34.

10. For correspondence with Pietro Aretino, see his Lettere, pp. 272-74, 446-47, 449-50, 525-26; and Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 89, 150-51, 163. For correspondence with Marguerite of Navarre, see Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 185-88, 200-206, 289-92.

11. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 274.

12. Roland Bainton, “Vittoria Colonna,” in Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy, p. 212.

13. For example, see Maria Luisa Rizzatti, The Life and Times of Michelangelo, p. 56.

14. See “The Capuchin Constitutions of 1536,” in The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola, ed. Olin, pp. 149-81.

15. Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 247-49.

16. Bainton, “Vittoria Colonna,” p. 214; G. K. Brown, “Vittoria Colonna,” in Italy and the Reformation to 1550, pp. 235-39. On Vittoria Colonna and the Counter-Reformation, see especially Bainton and Brown as well as, among others, A. G. Dickens, The Counter-Reformation; B. J. Kidd, The Counter-Reformation; and A. D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World.

17. For an exhaustive account of the diffusion and publication of Colonna's poems, see Alan Bullock's edition of the Rime, pp. 223-323.

18. James Cleugh, The Divine Aretino, p. 67.

19. Natalia Costa-Zalessow, ed., Scrittici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo, p. 64.

20. For background discussions of Petrarchanism and Neoplatonism in Cinquecento poetry, see, respectively, Giorgio Santangelo and Nesca A. Robb; on Colonna and the poetics of her age, see Mila Mazzetti as well as Dennis J. McAuliffe's dissertation. All in the Bibliography.

21. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature, vol. 2, p. 256.

22. McAuliffe, “Vittoria Colonna: Her Formative Years,” pp. 92-98.

23. On the meditative tradition and late Renaissance poetry, see Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation; for examples of these trends, see the anthologies of Harold B. Segel and Frank J. Warnke listed in the Bibliography.

24. Colonna, Carteggio, pp. 64-67, 70-72.

25. Joseph Gibaldi, “Petrarch and the Baroque Magdalene Tradition,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature 3 (1975): 1-19.

Bibliography

Primary Works

Aretino, Pietro. Lettere. Ed. Francesco Flora. Milan, 1960.

———. Letters. Trans. Thomas C. Chubb. Hamden, Conn., 1967.

Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso. Ed. Cesare Segre. Milan, 1976.

———. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York, 1974.

Baldacci, Luigi, ed. Lirici del Cinquecento. Milan, 1975.

Bembo, Pietro. Prose e rime. Ed. Carlo Dionisotti. 2d ed. Turin, 1978.

Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles Singleton. Garden City, N.Y., 1959.

———. Il libro del cortegiano. Ed. Bruno Maier. Turin, 1964.

Clements, Robert J., ed. Michelangelo: Self-Portrait. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963.

Colonna, Vittoria. Carteggio. Ed. Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Müller. 2d ed. Turin, 1892.

———. Rime. Ed. Alan Bullock. Rome, 1982.

———. Rime. Florence, 1910.

———. Rime. Ed. Pietro Ercole Visconti. Rome, 1840.

Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, ed. Scrittici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Ravenna, 1982.

Guidiccioni, Giovanni. Opere. Ed. Carlo Minutoli. Florence, 1867.

Holanda, Francisco de. Diálogos de Roma. Ed. Manuel Mendes. Lisbon, 1955.

———. “Three Dialogues.” Trans. Charles Holroyd and A. J. Clift. In Michael Angelo Buonarroti, by Holroyd. 2d ed., pp. 229-79. London, 1911.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Art of War. Trans. Ellis Farneworth. Ed. Neal Wood. Indianapolis, 1965.

———. Opere. Ed. Alessandro Montevecchi. Turin, 1971.

Michelangelo Buonarroti. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Trans. Creighton Gilbert. Ed. Robert N. Linscott. 1963. Reprint. New York, 1965.

———. Lettere. Ed. Enzo Noè Girardi. Arezzo, 1976.

———. Rime. Ed. Ettore Barelli. Milan, 1975.

Olin, John C., ed. The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola. New York, 1969.

Ovid. Heroides and Amores. Trans. Grant Showerman. Ed. G. P. Goold. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1977.

Petrarch, Francesco. Canzoniere, Trionfi, Rime varie, e una scelta di versi latini. Ed. Carlo Muscetta and Daniele Ponchiroli. 4th ed. Turin, 1958.

———. Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge, Mass., 1976.

———. The Triumphs. Trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins. Chicago, 1962.

Savonarola, Girolamo. The Triumph of the Cross. Trans. J. Procter. London, 1901.

———. Triumphus crucis. Ed. Mario Ferrara. Rome, 1961.

Segel, Harold B., ed. The Baroque Poem. New York, 1974.

Tarsia, Galeazzo di. Rime. Ed. Cesare Bozzetti. Milan, 1980.

Tasso, Bernardo. Lettere. Venice, 1597.

———. La lirica. Ed. Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi. Urbino, 1966.

Warnke, Frank J., ed. European Metaphysical Poetry. 1961. Reprint. New Haven, Conn., 1974.

Related Works

Bainton, Roland. “Vittoria Colonna.” In Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy, pp. 201-18. Minneapolis, 1971.

Brown, G. K. “Vittoria Colonna.” In Italy and the Reformation to 1550, pp. 235-39. Oxford, 1933.

Bullock, Alan. “Domenico Tordi and Vittoria Colonna: Forty Years On.” Italica 55 (1978): 20-35.

———. “Four Unpublished Autographs by Vittoria Colonna in American and European Libraries, Together with New Data for a Critical Edition of Her Correspondence.” Italica 49 (1972): 202-17.

———. “Four Unpublished Writings by Vittoria Colonna in Italian and American Libraries.” Italian Studies 27 (1972): 44-59.

———. “A Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of One Hundred Poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.” Italian Studies 21 (1966): 42-56.

———. “Un sonetto inedito di Vittoria Colonna.” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 2 (1971): 229-35.

———. “Three New Poems by Vittoria Colonna.” Italian Studies 24 (1969): 44-54.

———. “Vittoria Colonna and Francesco Maria Molza: Conflict in Communication.” Italian Studies 32 (1977): 41-51.

Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. 2d ed. 1868. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. 1878. Ed. Irene Gordon. New York, 1961.

Clements, Robert J., ed. The Poetry of Michelangelo. New York, 1966.

Cleugh, James. The Divine Aretino. New York, 1966.

De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura italiana. 1870-71. History of Italian Literature, trans. Joan Redfern. 2 vols. 1931. Reprint. New York, 1968.

Dickens, A. G. The Counter-Reformation. New York, 1969.

Gibaldi, Joseph. “Petrarch and the Baroque Magdalene Tradition.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature 3 (1975): 1-19.

Jerrold, Maud F. Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times. 1906. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y., 1969.

Kidd, B. J. The Counter-Reformation. 1933. Reprint. Westport, Conn., 1980.

McAuliffe, Dennis J. “Vittoria Colonna and Renaissance Poetics, Convention, and Society.” In Il Rinascimento: Aspetti e problemi attuali, ed. Vittore Branca et al., pp. 531-41. Florence, 1982.

———. “Vittoria Colonna: Her Formative Years, 1492-1525, as a Basis for an Analysis of Her Poetry.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978.

Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn., 1962.

Mazzetti, Mila. “La poesia come vocazione morale: Vittoria Colonna.” Rassegna della letteratura italiana 77 (1973): 58-99.

Rizzatti, Maria Luisa. The Life and Times of Michelangelo. Trans. C. J. Richards. Philadelphia, 1967.

Robb, Nesca A. Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance. 1935. Reprint. New York, 1968.

Santangelo, Giorgio. Il petrarchismo del Bembo e di altri poeti del '500. Rome, 1967.

Symonds, John Addington. Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature. 2 vols. 1881. Reprint. New York, 1964.

Thérault, Suzanne. Un cénacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna, châtelaine d'Ischia. Florence and Paris, 1968.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge, Mass., 1962.

Wright, A. D. The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World. London, 1982.