Born: Colonna Castle, Marino (near Rome), Papal States, 25 February 1492. Family: Married Ferrante Francesco D’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, in 1509 (died in battle, 1525). Career: Lived in the convents of Santa Caterina, Viterbo, and San Silvestro, Rome, after her husband’s death (although she did not become a nun), and began to write poetry; became a leading literary figure to whom many significant humanist writers dedicated their works: had notable friendships with Pietro Bembo, q.v., Baldassarre Castiglione, q.v., and, particularly, Michelangelo (who painted her, and to whom she dedicated poetry). Died: 1547.
Publications
Collection
Rime e lettere, edited by E. Saltini. 1860.
Verse
Rime. 1538; revised edition, 1539; edited by Pietro Ercole Visconti, 1840, and by Alan Bullock, 1982; selections translated by Alethea J. Lawley, in Vittoria Colonna, 1888, anonymously, in The ”In Memoriam” of Italy: A Century of Sonnets from the Poems of Vittoria Colonna, 1894, and by Joseph Tusiani, in Italian Poets of the Renaissance, 1971.
Other
Lettere inedite, edited by Giuseppe Piccioni. 1875.
Carteggio (correspondence), edited by Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe
Muller. 1889; annotated by Domenico Tordi, 1892.
Critical Studies:
Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems by Maria Roscoe, 1868; Vittoria Colonna by Alethea J. Lawley, 1888; The Romance of Woman’s Influence by Alice Corkran, 1906; Vittoria Colonna and Some Account of Her Friends and Her Times by Maud F. Jerrold, 1906: La vita e l’opera di Vittoria Colonna by A.A. Bernardy, 1927; Vittoria Colonna by Thomas Pawsey, 1953; ”A Hitherto Unexplored Manuscript of One Hundred Poems by Vittoria Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale” by Alan Bullock, in Italian Studies, 21, 1966; Un cenacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna chatelaine d’Ischia by Suzanne Therault, 1968; ”Vittoria Colonna” by Roland Bainton, in Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy, 1971; ”Vittoria Colonna’s Friendship with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole” by Diane Dyer, in Riscontri, 7(1-2), 1985; ”Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna’s Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine” by Dennis J. McAuliffe, in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism edited by Olga Zorzi Pugliese, 1986; ”Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman and Poet” by Joseph Gibaldi, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation edited by Katharina M. Wilson, 1987.
Renaissance Italy produced an extraordinary number of talented women writers, most of whom remain forgotten. Despite the advances in feminist scholarship that have brought the work of many earlier women writers back into focus, the Italian poets of the 15 th and 16th centuries remain, for the most part, in obscurity. Vittoria Colonna is probably the best known of these poets, and was described by Buckhardt as the ”most famous woman in Italy.” Born into a noble family and married young, she was widowed at the age of 35 and never remarried. She moved to the Convent of San Silvestro in Rome, though did not actually join a religious order, using it as a base from which to travel extensively throughout Italy. She enjoyed close friendships with a number of leading contemporary intellectuals and artists, including Pietro Bembo, the cardinal-poet who encouraged her to write her own poetry, Castiglione, and Michelangelo. Her friendship with Michelangelo, in particular, led to an exchange of poems and letters that continued until her death in 1547, when Michelangelo wrote a series of moving poems about his loss, describing her as his ”sun of suns,” the woman whose strength in life lifted him closer to God.
Though Colonna was a Beatrice figure to Michelangelo, her own poetry was not written for any single person. Unlike Gaspara Stampa or Veronica Franco, two other important women poets of her day, her poetry does not deal with the delights of physical passion or with disappointment and unrequited love. Her love poems, written after her husband’s death on the battlefield, are full of sadness, and although she uses the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition, her imagery is particularly powerful, and she writes of the illuminating force of her memories with great energy and power. Curiously, however, her first known poem, written when her husband was still alive, is completely different in tone. Her ”Epistle to Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, Her Husband, After the Battle of Ravenna” (written 1512) is an angry poem protesting about his preference for war over staying at home with his young wife:
You live happily and have no cares: thinking only of your new won fame, you care not if I go hungry for your love; but I, with anger and sadness in my face, lie in your bed, abandoned and alone.
Reluctant to publish her poems, Colonna finally allowed a collection to appear in 1538, and it is clear that she saw poetry as an essentially private activity, even after the poems had come out and she had begun to be acclaimed as a major poet. (Some 20 editions appeared in the 16th century). Her ”love poems” were written in the years immediately after her husband’s death, and she then began to write what came to be called her ”spiritual poems.” Her long poem, ”Poi ch’il mio sol, d’eterni raggi cinto” (”The Triumph of Christ’s Cross”) praises the glories of divine love over worldly passions:
Blessed is she who scorned worldly fruit, root and all, for now from her Lord she receives other, everlasting sweetness.
Divine love for Colonna is not a source of anguish or torment, it is a fount of perfection, a healing, consoling beauty. She appeals to Christ to tear off the veils, to unfasten the chains that have bound her in darkness. The imagery of her ”spiritual poems” depicts a gentle Christ, bringing nourishment and consolation, a figure of healing, redemption, and liberation. Significantly, she writes movingly of Mary, whose suffering as Christ’s mother provides a model for women, and of Mary Magdalene. In a sonnet on Mary Magdalene, ”La bella donna, a cui dolente preme” [The Beautiful Woman Oppressed by Sorrows], she depicts Mary’s loneliness and desperation at being abandoned by man and God, and contrasts that anguish with the security offered by the vision of the risen Christ in the garden:
And those strong men, privileged
by grace, huddled together in fear;
the true Light seemed to them merely a shadow.
So that, if truth is not overwhelmed by falsehood we must grant to women all the prize of having more loving and more constant hearts.
In Colonna’s exquisitely crafted Petrarchan sonnets, through her Neoplatonic idealism, there is a clear portrait of a world of binary oppositions, a world in which women are forced to submit passively to whatever society decreed, while men go out into that world to try and change it through their actions. Yet, while she recognizes the inevitability of this pattern of behaviour, Colonna also protests against the injustice of it. From her early poem angrily chiding her military husband for leaving her at home uncared-for, to her later poetry extolling the joys that illuminate the heart of Mary Magdalene, she seems to be consistently demanding to be heard and speaking out for other women in similar positions. Her poetry is full of references to other women’s pain; ”Mentre la nave mia, lungi dal porto,” one of her longer ”love poems,” compares her own suffering and wifely resignation to that of women from classical mythology—to Penelope and Laodmia, Ariadne and Medea, or Portia, wife of Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all—while ”Poi ch’l mio sol, d’eterni raggi cinto” depicts the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene as examples of supreme womanhood.
Colonna’s language has a clarity and precision that testify to her great poetic talent. In an age of many superbly gifted poets (and even more derivative, second-rate ones) her voice comes through powerfully and directly. She deserves to be more widely read and translated, because her poetry speaks to women (and men) of all times.
