SHADOWY AFTERLIFE
RESEARCH

VITTORIA COLONNA
Shadowy Afterlife
of the Spirited, Complex Renaissance Poetess
Deficient Empirical Research

Penso, un marmo breve

 chiuda il corpo meo con nome insieme 

Vittoria Colonna

From Cinquecento to the 20ieth Century
The damnation of the heretical Poetess and her Rime by the Inquisition spawned long-term consequences. Biographical Studies of Vittoria Colonna are rare. In the few biographies, strange absence of the poetess is striking. Susanne Thérault (Un cénacle humaniste de laRenaissance autour Vittoria Colonna. 1968) focuses the circle of celebrities gathering round absent Vittoria Colonna due to flagrant deficits of empirical research. The Spiritual Sonnets (heretical!) have only sporadically been translated so far. 

The Risorgimentoseized possession of Vittoria Colonna as figurehead, but only in Michelangelo’s slipstream. She also remained in the shadow of the male giant in the two exhibitions dedicated to both befriended artists in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1997 and in Casa Buonarroti in Florence in 2005.

Recent Research
Late 20ieth Century until now
On the one hand idealisation of her genius, on the other hand minimizing Vittoria Colonna and grouping her together with average “women writers” from a socialising  (“intertextual”) point of view or eclecticism of partial aspects of her poetry, abstraction from her complexity, labelling her as a Petrarchan poetess to bypass laborious empirical research and text-centred interpretation of her sonnets according to classical rules in order to do justice to the authenticity of an outstanding Renaissance Poetess, who, as a glorious female role model, shares her humanism with us.

Hubert Jedin idealises her problematical relationship to Reginald Pole as “sublime friendship of two great souls”. The label of a “Platonist,” attached to her in spite of her critique of Platonism from her authentic female point of view, still adheres to the philosophising poetess. So does the label of a “Saint” (Jacob Burckhardt), even though, recently”, she mutated into a “secularized nun” of the Italian Reformation.

VITTORIA COLONNA
PARADIGMA of FEMALE PETRARCHISM 
La Divina nothing else but an average “Woman Writer”?

Questionable Construction of a Female Petrarchan Canzoniere on the basis of the first Print of her RIME (Parma 1538)

Ideological knocking into shape of the Poetess for the “System Petrarca”?

Ulrike Schneider. Der weibliche Petrarchismus im Cinquecento. 2007

Lumping together Vittoria Colonna, praised as La Divinaby her contemporaries, who had been the initiator of female love sonnets, together with her followers into the group phenomenon of Female Petrarchismof the Cinquecentocontradicts epistemological principles, more so, because the real existence of a group organisation of female Petrarchan poets has not been proved by empirical research.  It may also be a mere construction of socialising philologists
Moreover, this grouping of female poets of Renaissance-Humanism ignores Vittoria Colonna’s striving for authenticity, a characteristic of Renaissance-Humanism, which is pushed aside by Ulrike Schneider as “anachronistic.” However, in the intellectual culture of the Italian Renaissance, in which Vittoria Colonna excelled as La Divina, Individualism and Authenticity were the primum mobileof the Renaissance Personality. (See Ernst Cassirer. Individuum and Kosmos der Renaissance. 1994)
The Individualism of the female Aristocrat, mostly a well-educated Humanist, was already accentuated by Jacob Burckhardt. Rinaldo Corso, the first commentator of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime, precisely distinguishes the Poet’s striving for authenticity within the limits set to her Petrarchan poetising. Vittoria, he says, disposed of the extraordinary capability “ad esprimere con le paroled’altrui il suo concetto”. She was able to express her own concept by means of the words of another person (Petrarch). How right he was!
Similar coercive restriction, done to Vittoria Colonna’s striving for authenticity and individualism as a Renaissance personality, occurred, again, when a female Canzoniere (“The model Vittoria Colonna”) was constructed by inter-textual ideologists as the female pendant of Petrarch’s male Canzoniere on the basis of the first print of her Rime(Parma 1538), although Vittoria Colonna did not authorize this edition and Pietro Bembo, called this substandard production a villainy.
Ulrike Schneider justified the print of Parma as model for the construction of a female Canzoniere with its broad reception. Inferior quality of the print and the defective rendition of the Rime,which drove Vittoria Colonna to despair, were tolerated by the socialising philologist.
Bembo wrote to Gualteruzzi:” Her Majesty, in a letter to me, complained about the injustice done to her by somebody, who printed her verses in a faulty way and on shabby paper. She confessed, she did not deserve better, because she had spoilt her time with vain things.” 

Construction of a Canzoniere “Vittoria Colonna”

Fictional and again imposed on the Poetess against her will 
by Rinaldo Corso and Ulrike Schneider
Transfer of Vittoria Colonna, the Poetess of Renaissance- Humanism and of Reformation, 
onto the medieval Iter Spirituale  

Ulrike Schneider followed the example of Rinaldo Corso, the sixteen-year old, premature, first commentator of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry in her life time, when she imposed the iter spirituale,the medieval way of personal sanctification, on the poetess, in spite of Rinaldo Corso’s questionable philological methods, because he filtered adequate sonnets out of the Parma Print, and, with much finger-wagging, rejected other verses, which did not fit into the concept of an iter spirituale,offering the intertextual philologist a historic model of a kind of female Canzoniere, even though unauthorized by Vittoria Colonna, instead fabricated by orthodox Rinaldo Corso from provincial Correggio. In conformity with Petrarca was completed by personal conversion, although Vittoria Colonna expressis verbisdeclined this obsolete inner way of self-sanctification as “too steep for my foot”. Above all, the “Iter spirituale” to self -sanctification was incompatible with her adherence to the Italian Reformation, which, according to Martin Luther, replaced self-sanctification by inner faith in God’s mercy with the repentant sinner, internalised and poetised by Vittoria Colonna in her Rime Spirituali.
Vittoria Colonna: Io per me sono un’ ombra indegna e vile // sol’ per virtù de l’alme piaghe sante // del mio signor non per mio merto viva.
See Maria Musiol (Vittoria Colonna. Authenticity of a Petrarchist Poet. Berlin 2020) 372-380:Sola Fide 

Epilogue

Striving of the poetess for authenticity, which instigated her stupendous intellectual productivity and can also be traced back to Petrarch, the “Genius of Individualism” (Ernst Cassirer), falls through the cracks of Inter - Textualism, the socializing literary ideology, which, nowadays, en vogue, casts a network of speculative theories over the phenomenon of Petrarchan poetising of “Women Writers” of the Cinquecento.

Of course, Vittoria Colonna is a Petrarchan Poetess. She prefers the Petrarchan sonnet in her poetry. The language of her sonnets is the Toscana of the 14^thcentury, the language of Petrarch.

But with effortless elegance, so it seems, the poetess brings her mimetic Petrarchan poetising into line with her striving for authenticity and her subjective wording, above all with her concetti. Both, her individualised Petrarchan style and her authenticity generate the fascinating complexity of her poetry.

Petrarch’s Canzoniereserved the poetess as springboard for her Individualism. Vittoria Colonna did not copy literary models. She individualised all literary models without any exception, as can be proved by careful empirical interpretation of single sonnets.

COMPANION TO VITTORIA COLONNA
Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, Maria Serena Sapegno. (eds)

The Renaissance Society of America
Texts and Studies Series
Leiden-Boston 2016 

REVIEW
by
Maria Musiol
in
Renaissance Quarterly. Volume LXX. No 3

The Auspicious Companion does not keep its promises.

Judging from an epistemological point of view, it is a collection of random, partly meritorious, essays, about Vittoria Colonna’s Correspondences (Chemello), about musical versions of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime (Piéjus), about Vittoria Colonna’s relations to Ochino (Campi), and most substantially, about Vittoria Colonna’s Religious Prose. (Carinci)

However, the copious book (561 pages) is not a classical companion to the personality of Vittoria Colonna nor to her Oeuvre. Compared to the Blackwell-Wiley Companion (2011) to T.S. Eliot and his Oeuvre, this Companion to Vittoria does not deserve its demanding title.

In Part One, entitled LIFE AND LETTERS, facts of Vittoria Colonna’s fascinating life are first squeezed into a timeline and then some more facts are offered by the three editors together in one coherent text, on two-and-a half pages, without doing justice to the demanding title Who was Vittoria Colonna? becauseone third of the short text is used up by information about parents and husband, followed by some commonplaces about widowhood and reform theology, to which Vittoria Colonna adhered.

The conditioning of the Renaissance Princess by rational Renaissance -Humanism was not thematised in this Companion but should have been the main part, while her contemporaries were fascinated by Vittoria Colonna’s self-stylisation as a novel female Renaissance-Humanist. 

Michelangelo about Vittoria Colonna:
Un uomo in una donna, anzi uno dio!
and Paolo Giovio:

In this unique, divine woman, on whom such privileges have been bestowed, education and spirit shine in such lucid light that they resemble those huge fires that were enkindled on the spires of the Egyptian pyramids by the pharaohs on the occasion of great celebrations. These huge fires were blazing in such heights that they could be watched by the natives in remote regions of Africa. They were seen from the delta of the Nile and from the straits of the sea.”

Virginia Cox The Exemplary Vittoria Colonna
Companion to Vittoria Colonna:467-502
An essay, which ended, where it should have begun

Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa de Pescara, who, for instance, as trustee of her absent, war-faring husband, was assigned the administration of Benevent by Pope Clement VII, a rebellious papal town, she forced to see reason, is not thematised in her extraordinary, self-made historicity in this Companion, which is solely touched upon by Virginia Cox, but only in her exemplariness “as a warrior’s wife” and not in her self-stylisation as a female Renaissance Personality. Cox chose her image on medals à la antica as a most eclectic subject for a Companion to her personality. Cox selected a medal, presenting Vittoria Colonna as “ideal military wife” together with the pendant of her husband Ferrante d’Avalos in full dress uniform of the triumphant victor of the battle at Pavia as general of the Emperor Charles V. However, this medal was in no case “exemplary”. Who should have been the imitators? Serving, as a status symbol, the medal pictures the most glamorous, inimitable, married couple of Italy in those days.
By the way, these medals were already regarded as obsolete, when Titian painted portraits of Charles V or of Del Vasto, the successor of Vittoria’s husband as Commander of the imperial armies. 

Bembo sent Vittoria his medal, begging her pardon for the poor rendering of his face.
Vittoria Colonna, instead, commissioned Michelangelo with official drawings of her husband and of herself, which, in the year 1613, served Antonio Tempesta as models for copper engravings of the famous married couple (Now Albertina, Vienna). 

While Virginia Cox discovers Vittoria Colonna’s flowing hair as tiny individualised detail of rigid Vittoria on the medal, Michelangelo, in the official drawing, did not only render Vittoria’s physiognomy, which was precisely described by Giovio, who knew her personally: no Greek profile! Arsacid nose with a tiny, masculine hill over the root of the nose, etc. 

The drawing genius even put a lovely hood on her artistic coiffure which bridled her gorgeous hair (Giovio: the hair of Leda”) in braids. Both, hood and coiffure, were created by Vittoria herself:
Giovio: “What beautiful accessories are there in female dresses, which had not been introduced by her? She created attractive coiffures and put daisies and jewels into her hair.” 

However, Michelangelo did not like her desire to adorn herself with borrowed plumes. He poetised: “ Lezzi, vezzi, or, feste, chi potria ma vederle con atti suo divin lavoro? Jewels necklaces, gold, feasts and pearls, who looks at that gewgaw, when she creates work divine?
Only towards the end of her essay, Virginia Cox accentuates – the self-construction of her own exemplarity – quoting the metaphor Vittoria selected for herself: the image of the phoenix, by virtue of his own strength, rising - new born from the ashes.

NEGATIVE REPORTS of this COMPANION
to VITTORIA COLONNA

While in Blackwell Companion to TS Eliot fifteen works are analysed in single interpretations, even a thematic overview of the Oeuvre of Vittoria Colonna is missing.

NOT THEMATISED: Vittoria Colonna’s daring venture of FEMALE LOVEPOETRYas first poetess, neither in the variety of Platonic Love Sonnets, into which the philosophising poetess, by means of versifying finesse, integrated her critique of male Neoplatonism, nor her sensual love sonnets to God Amor, by which the poetess triggered off an orgy of imitation among poetising female aristocrats. 

NOT THEMATISED: Vittoria Colonna’s WIDOW SONNETS, a literary novelty, poetising the female individual in extremis,
in which the poetessanticipatedthe literary instruments of modern Expressionism.
..
NOT MENTIONED:Vittoria Colonna’s PROTOFEMINISM, which takes effect in sonnets evoking female sovereignty, above all in the Poet’s HUMANIST REMAKE of the HOLY VIRGIN: “Only little inferior to her Divine Son is his Eternal Mother.”

A RARITY: Un-Prepossessed Empirical Interpretation of Single Sonnets according to classical rules, clarifying intention, content, poetology. Only text-centred interpretation of the single sonnet gives access to the substance of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry, because the poetess suggests her authenticity on the meta-level of her poems by poetological means.

NOT THEMATISED. Vittoria Colonna’s Complex Relationship to Petrarch. Vittoria Colonna does not only owe her poetology to her Poet Father, “the Genius of Individuality” but also her courage to Self- Reference in her poetry.

IGNORED: VITTORIA COLONNA’S ADVANCEMENT of the PETRARCHAN SONNET

DRAMATIZATION of the SONNET
EXTERNALISATION of her INNER DILEMMA by means of SELF-STAGING in Sonnets, for instance in the sonnet on the occasion of her father’s death, when she in her mourning gown seems to sit down at her scrivaniato bring to paper the obligatory panegyric in honour of Great Fabrizio Colonna. But she lets her hand sink: Writer’s Block! On the one hand, she desires to honour her beloved father. But awe of his super-greatness intimidates her. Moreover, she is overwhelmed by grief. It is her inner dilemma she poetises in her sonnet instead of composing a panegyric to her father.

NOT THEMATISED: Self-Staging in her sonnets:
For instance,asSibyl (Michelangelo) butindividualized by the poetess as God Seeker, peering out into the night for God, with blazing torches in both hands. 

Or the elegiac self-staging as a young poetess with a touch of self-irony, straying around the foot of Helicon in search of foot tracks to the summit!

IGNORED: Vittoria Colonna’s introducing dialogues into the Sonnet by means of DIALOGUE SUBSTRATES, for instance in her artistic, sophisticated CORRESPONDENCE SONNET to REGINALD POLE.

COMPANION TO VITTORIA COLONNA

Maria Serena Sapegno
THE RIME A TEXTUAL CONUNDRUM

Honestly speaking, the title is more enigmatic for me than Vittoria’s Rime.
And it is a confusing and frustrating experience for a hopeful reader of a Companion to Vittoria Colonna, meant to clarify the approach to the Poetess, to get her poetry offered as a conundrum and even as a “textual” conundrum without any further explanation! Signora Sapegno, what exactly is a “TEXTUAL CONUNDRUM”?

Perhaps, Sapegno just wishes to suggest her capitulation? Her surrendering to the Conundrum, posed by the textual condition of her work, which may be due to lacking empirical research of Vittoria Colonna’s RIME???? 

One thing is clarified by the enigmatic title:
A systematic presentation of her poetical work is not to be expected.
In fact, Sapegno, the Vittoria-Colonna- Expert, dispenses with an epistemologically grounded, objectifying structure of her text. Instead, the reviewer reflects “themes and figures” of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry in a casual way, just as they cross her mind. Sapegno’s essay reads like an inner monologue or, due to its associative jumpiness, like a stream-of consciousness Soliloquy, which is difficult to decipher, because the author eclectically takes instances out of the context of the sonnets.

Subsumed under the enigmatic title “The object and the Marriage Relationship”, passages are selected from Colonna’s Neo-Platonical Love- Sonnets to contrast the different states of being of the widow on earth and of her immortalised husband in Heaven. However, this contrast is only a static abstraction from Vittoria Colonna’s dynamical Platonical Sonnets, in which the poet’s I-Speaker starts illusionary attempts to overcome the definitive separation by Platonic elevation of the spirit heavenwards. Of course, the attempts fail.

In Per cagion d’un profondo alto pensiero(Bullock. A1:2), partly quoted by Sapegno, the widow transfers the platonic upswing of the soul into a flight to the dead Beloved at light speed, accompanied by a ray of light, only to abruptly find herself, in the tercets of the sonnet, in the reality of death again.  

Therefore, the reasonable I-Speaker, in the second tercet, draws the consequence to reduce the beautiful light, “ascending to Heaven,” to a mere symbol (segno) stimulating her spirit beyond sensual perception: sovra I sensi mia ragione sospinse.

GENDER DIFFERENCE / GENDER CONFLICT
Ragione/Pensiero (male) and Sensi/ Desio (female)
in Vittoria Colonna’s Love Sonnets
and in Maria Serena Sapegno’s Interpretation

Addressing the issue of male-female genderized difference in love, Sapegno touches on a topic, whose frequency in Vittoria Colonna’s love sonnets reveals her inner commitment to this subject. Vittoria’s charming Rime Amorose to God Amor seem to emphasize female desire, which is reined in by male reason with God Amor functioning as ambivalent double-agent: On the one hand he arouses female desire in the I-Speaker. On the other hand, Amor, also being a God, cares for her spiritual relationship to her dead husband.

Vittoria Colonna compares female Desire with male Reason in differentiated contrasts, which are likely to evoke a gender conflict, the poetess apostrophizes as GUERRA (last weighty word of the sonnet), which is won by MALE REASON!
(Bullock. A1:38)

In another sonnet (Bullock A1:31) the female I-Speaker has overcome her female desire in a State of Inner Calm praised as being happy by her: Amor does not produce false images in her heart anymore. She is fearless, because neither his golden nor his leaden arrow spurs her on now and retains her then. Internally strengthened, she is open to beautiful thoughts sent to her by her husband (il mio lume) dal the Beyond above the Stars, Fortuna and Fate.

On the meta-level of the sonnetthe philosophically and ontologically stylized Poetess devalues her inner calmas being immobile, stable, and firm to suggest that, by overcoming her sensual desire, she has lost her vivacity, spontaneity, liveliness. 

Maria Serena Sapegno evaluates the achieved state of inner calm as positive:

“The entire sonnet is pervaded by a blissful immobility, which has subdued every impetus of passion.”

OBJECTION

The ontological dimension of the sonnet, the sophisticated devaluation of inner calm as rigidity, the INTELLECTUAL CAPACITIES of the HUMANIST Vittoria COLONNA, which are brought to the fore by this refined poetology, cannot be recognized, if the interpretation of the sonnets abstracts themes and figures, instead of taking the sonnets as whole entities into careful, openminded consideration. by means of empirical approach.

VITTORIA COLONNA
LIFE-SOUL UNITY – LIFE-SOUL-DUALISM

Maria Serena Sapegno again selected an essential theme of
Vittoria Colonna’s RIME.

In the sonnet CARA UNION (Bullock A1:80) quoted by Sapegno in full length,
the philosophizing poet deals with the contrast of Life-Soul-Unity (Christian) and Life-Soul Dualism (Platonic) from the point of view of a young widow.

Christian -Platonic dichotomy in this sonnet

The Caesura between quatrains and tercets is used by the poetess for a mood swing. The calmly meditating tenor abruptly changes into an eruption of hatred against her body, she calls her prison.Paradoxically she finds the reason for her longing to spiritual amalgamation with her immortalized husband in this Earthly World. Her Husband brightened her course of life. It is the Cara Unionwith him in her married life she wants to continue in Heaven, the reason being:poi sol nel viver connobivita. Only by living I recognized what life is like. 

Maria Serena Sapegno:
PRISON, KNOT, VEIL

Using these images for the body in contrast to the spirit, Sapegno eliminates the Body-Soul Dualism in Vittoria Colonna’s poetry. It is true, she quotes the entire sonnet, however without retracing the line of argumentation of the philosophically meditating poet. Sapegno makes do with eliciting references of the poet to Petrarch and Dante.

The hatred of the philosophizing widow against her body rooted in Platonic Body-Soul Dualism, one of the most fatal but most effective philosophies of mankind is paraphrased as “UNCHRISTIAN FEELING OF HATE”, meant as a moralising verdict against Vittoria Colonna?

VITTORIA COLONNA

PROEM
TO HER
RIME SPIRITUALI
Poi che’l mio casto amor
TWO DIVERSE APPROACHES

Maria Serena Sapegno
follows Abigail Brundin(Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation. 2008), who postulates a spiritual motivation not only in Colonna’s Rime Spiritualibut already in her Rime Amorose:
(Sapegno):” From the beginnings Colonna’s poetry encompassed a spiritual and religious component.”

While Maria Serena Sapegno quotes Vittoria Colonna’s Proem to her love sonnets in full – Scrivo sol per sfogare l’interna doglia  - the programmatical sonnet, in which Vittoria Colonna, in an awe-inspiring act of self-constituting, distances herself from her poet fathers Petrarca and Dante – di stil no, ma di duol - to cry out her widow pain in expressive poetising without resorting to God or to any religious comfort, the classical Colonna Expert, with inner consequence, renounces any interpretation to dedicate a more detailing analysis to Poi che il mio casto amor, the introitus to Colonna’s so-called Rime Spirituali:

Euphorically Sapegno states:
“The new poetry is born here“(in this proem!), feeling confirmed by 
“powerful images of crucifixion, which run through many of her compositions.”

Summa summarum, Sapegno arrives at the conclusion:

“A continuous journey unquestionably exists, then watched over and held together by a vigilant “I”, which feels the need to give its own interpretation of the process; but it is arguable to be interpreted as a journey of ascent, as an Itinerarium Victoriae in Deo.”

Commentary: The existence of an individualized Iter Spirituale Victoriae in Deois highly questionable. Vittoria Colonna declined this medieval iter to personal perfection “as much too steep for my foot”, being an adherent of Sola Fideas the only justification of man before God. Gasparo Contarini had Bembo hand over to Vittoria Colonna his Epistola de Giustificazione, whose introductory sentence reads: “The faithful soul relies on God’s justification and is not dependent on human efforts.”

EMPIRICAL (line for line) INTERPRETATION of the PROEM, which does not stop at the second tercet, as Maria Serena Sapegno does, brings to the fore: 

VITTORIA COLONNA
as
RENAISSANCE PERSONALITY
Swaying between
Painful Theologia Crucis and Painless Apollonian Divinity 

Michelangelo’s Crucified for Vittoria Colonna

In his gift-drawing for Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo represents a living Jesus Christ on the cross without the crown of thorns, without the stigmata of wounds, and with the ideal body of a Greek God, who removes the impression, unbearable to the proud Italian Renaissance Aristocrat, of a Masochist God on the cross. 

Over-joyed, Vittoria Colonna wrote the following letter of thanks to Michelangelo:

Unico Maestro Michelangelo
et mio singularissimo amico 

I have received your letter and I have looked at the Crucified, who, for certain, has crucified all other images I had ever viewed. I cannot imagine a better drawn, a livelier, a more perfect picture and, for certain, I could never explain, how subtly and miraculously it has been made.
I had a careful look at it by light and with a mirror. Never have I seen anything more perfect.
Al vostro commando
La Marchesa de Pescara

In shocking contradiction to her joy about Michelangelo’s emphasis of the intact divinity of the Crucified, Vittoria Colonna, in the Proem, quasi with a magnifying glass in her hand, focusses the stigmata of the wounds, on which she seems determined to fixate her poetising from now on: The nails, with which Jesus was fastened on the cross, are to be her pens, the blood spilt by the redeemer is her ink, the bloodless corpse is her precious paper to versify on it the physical pains of the Godson.

Maria Serena Sapegno interprets these lines, repulsive in their obtrusiveness, diametrically contradictory to the sensitivity of Vittoria Colonna’s letter to Michelangelo, as proof for Vittoria Colonna’s determined turn to Theologia crucis:
The new poetry is born precisely here.” The interpreter continues: “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this text in reconstructing the poet’s journey.” 

In Maria Serena Sapegno’s interpretation the tercets of the Proem have confirmative function:
“Moreover, the tercets manifest a clear shift in Colonna’s relationship with poetic tradition. The measure is no longer taken from classical tradition (Parnassus and Delos) but from references to Dante’s Purgatorio (referred to by Petrarch as well). A penitential journey is undertaken here, itself impossible without the gift of faith (“per se non sale”) and ends with a prayer of salvation”. (in the second tercet?) 

A more carefully detailing interpretation of the tercets, suggests a different impression conveyed by the poetess on the meta level of her sonnet:

First Tercet:
Chiamar qui non convien Parnasso o Delo,
ch’ ad altra aqua s’aspira, ad altro monte
SI poggia u’ piede uman sé non sale 

Sapegno fails to notice that the poetess, which is a habit with her, uses the caesura between the quatrains and the tercets for a change of the auto-diegetic Speaker, who, in this sonnet is certainly identical with Vittoria Colonna’s empirical personality, but who is now replaced by the impersonal “SI” (they),“qui”(here) in Viterbo??

What regards Parnasso o Delo, both sacred to Apollo, it is NOT the poetess, who distances herself personally from the Apollonian cult, but IT IS IMPROPER HERE (in Viterbo?) to mention Delos or Parnassos. 

“Chiamar qui non convien Parnasso o Delo!”

Second Tercet:
The poetess resumes the role of the I-Speaker again, and abruptly, her unsatisfied longing for the divine is forging ahead:
What is most surprising about this second tercet, and difficult to explain, is the fact that she does not turn to a personalized God, neither to the crucified Jesus Christ nor to Apollo, but to God as il Grande Sol, her symbol for the divine as fountain of light and of warmth, which is tangible on earth, to pray for sufficient liquid to quench her great thirst for DIVINITY:

Quel sol, che aluma gli elementi e’l cielo,
Prego ch’aprendo il suo lucido fonte,
Mi porga umor a la gran sete eguale.

Vittoria already amalgamated the divinity of Jesus Christ and of Apollo, when she made Michelangelo draw the Crucified with the body of a Greek God. The poetess even prays to Jesus Christ in a sonnet: (Bullock S1:2): 
“I ask you, be my Apollo, and bathe my eyes and breast in your heavenly fountain.”
Prego che sia il mio Apollo, e gli ochi mi bagni omai del Suo Celeste Fonte.                        Vittoria Colonna

For Maria Serena Sapegno, the Second Tercet just contains “a prayer for salvation” without delivering any further interpretation.  

EPILOGUE

What regards, the pushy repulsive lines in the second quatrain 

I santi chiodi omai sieno mie penne
E puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue
Vergata carta il sacro corpo exangue
Si chìo scriva per me quell, ch’ei sostenne.

are remindful of a preacher’s penetrating, (obtrusively) exemplifying style, which is alien to Vittoria Colonna’s elegant fluency of versifying and above all, which is alien to the writer of this sensitive letter to Michelangelo, which documents that she went out of her way to save the Divinity of the Crucified.

The suspicion that these lines could have been enforced on the female poet is confirmed by Vittoria Colonna, who, in her sonnet Temo, che ´l laccio (Bullock S1:179), complains about a corrector’s taking influence on her rime: “Colui che opra mal con sorda lima.”Her feelings of inner insecurity are suggested in the anaphoras of the quatrains: Temo…..Temo….. 

The complexity of her personal image of God and the intensity of this God Seeker, given such intrinsic expression in this proem to her Rime Spiritualiare only accessible to an interpreter, who, dispensing with projections and preconceptions, in open- mindedness concentrates the mind on careful, empirical interpretation of the sonnet as an entity in itself.

HOPEFUL RENAISSANCE of
EMPIRICAL, TEXT-CENTRED RESEARCH
in this COMPANION to VITTORIA COLONNA

Ideological Streamlining of the complex Renaissance Poetess, adored by Baldassare Castiglione as “DIVINE” ,to an average Woman Writerof the Cinquecentoor to a Lily Saint of the Italian Reformation must be replaced by empirical research of primary texts about her personality and to empirical interpretation of her sonnets, embarrassingly rare so far, to bring Vittoria Colonna to the fore as the impressive Renaissance Personality in her Female Authenticity, in her Complexity, and in her Liveliness. 

Only then A Companion to Vittoria Colonna can do justice to her personality and to her poetical work.
A PROMISING NEW START to determined Empirical Colonna Research is already made in this forerunner to a genuine companion.

The author of this text wrote in her review
of this Companion to Vittoria Colonna
in Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXX. No 3:

“Excellent textual scholarship, laying the groundwork for the imperative critical edition of Colonna’s Poetic Corpus, has been joined by studies of the dissemination of manuscripts (Abigail Brundin), of print publication (Tatiana Crivelli), and of the over-due linguistic analysis of Colonna’s Italian (Helen Sanson). This combined textual scholarship will guarantee this Companion to Vittoria Colonna a place on the reference shelf, more so as Colonna’s Sonnets were itemized by Diana Robin in the ten Gioliti anthologies. 

Hoping in boldness that, through empirical research, Vittoria Colonna, after rising new-born from the ashes like Phoenix, a figure she loved, in the lively complexity of her Renaissance Mentality, will arouse astonishment in her readers, which, according to Plato’s thaumazein ,is the beginning of philosophizing. Maria Musiol