SYNOPSIS

 

VITTORIA COLONNA 

HISTORICITY

AUTHENTICITY

INDIVIDUALISED PETRARCHISM

REVIVAL OF THE PETRARCHAN SONNET
DIALOGUE – DRAMATISING – SELF-STAGING

THE SONNET TO REGINALD POLE
PARADIGMA OF HER ART 

 

HISTORICITY
No adequate approach to Vittoria Colonna
without the historicity of her
FEMALE RENAISSANCE PERSONALITY
and without Elucidation of the
HISTORIC GENESIS of her SONNETS

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
RENAISSANCE MENTALITY

 

The Definition of the Individual of the Renaissance by Ernst Cassirer (Individual und Cosmos of the Renaissance) embodied by Vittoria Colonna in a female variety, clarifies that it is the encouragement to Individualism and to Self-Reference, which Vittoria Colonna owes to her poet father as well as the mimetic aspect of her sonnets.
Her Striving for Authenticity poetised by Vittoria Colonna in her sonnets, exemplifies: the impact of the dramatic social change in the Age of Renaissance on the individual existence of the well-educated Female Humanist.
Vittoria Colonna’s radical striving for authenticity is also a personal reaction to the “moral-intellectual tension of the Individual between This-Worldliness and the Beyond in the Age of Renaissance.” (Cassirer)
Wolfgang Clemen about Shakespeare:
“The Valid Worth System is drawn into doubt by Shakespeare with the intention to make people choose their own personal way, which often turns out to be an ordeal: Inspirations, faith, scepticism balance each other out. Concepts of order are qualified by doubts, disillusion, pessimism.
When war threatens, the doctrines of the Reform-Theologians do not provide support. Therefore, Vittoria resorts to Jesus, the Son of Man, whom she takes out of his Biblical Context to transfer him to Ischia. She hurries to the shore and buries herself in the arms of her personal Jesus, whom she created for herself, who is available to her so that she can love him and believe in him.
Metaphorizing the original meaning of religion as re-connection to God, the poetess, with a loop of love bound in faith” fastens her life-boat to the living Rock Jesus. She relies on him for the moment to find inner calm. In case the ropes should tear, she could cast off to sea again and continue her search for God! (Bullock.S1:80)

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
AUTHENTIC VARIATION
of
LTERARY and THEOLOGICAL MODELS

 

Already the young poetess takes the quill out of Ovid’s hand to replace his male-imagined femininity in the letters of classical Heroines by her authentic letter-poem to her war-absent husband in her Epistola. In the same poem, she perverts the Island of Ischia, transformed into an bucolic idyl by Sannazaro in his popular novel Arcadia into a threatening natural setting and, by means of a messenger report, she switches the battle raging at Ravello simultaneously in which her husband received a heavy defeat. (Bullock A2:1)

After the death of her husband, she lets her platonically inspired love sonnets end in the stronger reality of Death on earth and not in Heaven. In her theological sonnets she thematizes Theologia Crucis, which conjured up a painful dilemma in the proud Renaissance Aristocrat. On the one hand she tried to internalize the death of the Godson on the cross in a number of sonnets. On the other hand, she poetised the glory of the painless Greek God Apollo, who conveyed to the Humanist a magnificent image of a God:  Be my Apollo”, she addresses Jesus Christ in a sonnet, and bathe my eyes in your eternal fountain.
Among her enthusiastic sonnets about SOLA FIDE (Justification of man by faithful trust in God’s Mercy) there is one sonnet, in which Vittoria Colonna qualifies faithfulness by scepticism. With giant strides, she would follow the Lord on his way of grief along narrow steep Via Dolorosa, because also she and not only Saint Peter could perceive the true light with her own eyes. “Woe me, wretched soul”, she exclaims: “I cannot perceive, if this human hope is not of glass”. 

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
LONGING FOR GOD’S PRESENCE ON EARTH 

 

A Godseeker sans pareil, Vittoria Colonna is longing for a God, who reveals his divinity here and now in this world. In her sonnet Quando mercé il ciel (Bullock S1:50) she integrates her Longing for the Divine as anagram into the sonnet: QUANDO, QUANDO, DIO, IL VERO?

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
AUTHENTICITY IN HER POETRY

 

Refusing the Panegyric
As the Humanist Aristocrat internalised AUTHENTICIY as human genuineness and originality, her family sonnets mirror her alert sensitivity for narcissism in this occasional poetry.
In her congratulatory sonnet to her brother on the occasion of the birth of his first son, she suggests her aversion against the narcissism of the proud aristocratic family by poetological means on the meta level of her sonnet. In a concetto, she compares the baby with a noble plant, which,“still enclosed in a tiny shell,” contains thousand buds” and arouses glowing hopes in the souls of the family.” (Bullock E 7). While the conventional Poet in his panegyric positions his hero on a pedestal and subjugates him to conventionality in his verses, Vittoria Colonna portrays her husband realistically in the thick of his restless existence as a warrior and a tireless actionist as a general, who was only granted short life-time. How much she cared for his authentic representation, becomes evident in the second quatrain, which seems to be the quintessence of the great biography of Pescara by Paolo Giovio, commissioned by Vittoria Colonna. Bullock a1.6 Alle vittorie tue.

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
GYNOCENTRIC AUTHENTICITY

AMARO LAGRIMAR

Radically AUTHENTIC WIDOW SONNETS 

AVERSION to
MALE STANDARDIZATION OF THE WIDOW

 

As a young widow, Vittoria Colonna breaks he taboo of silent mourning imposed on widows in her patriarchal society. In an outrageous way, she revolts against her destiny. She cries out her female pain and resists empty promises of heavenly comfort. By claiming Dante’s Amaro lagrimar for herself as a widow, she appropriates the male privilege of grieving and revolting instead of bowing to the inevitable in humility as behoves women. Poetising, Vittoria Colonna gives voice to her widow’s pain, articulating her desperation, her suicidal impulses, her outbursts of rage, her utter powerless against death, her frustrated joy of life, her homelessness, her isolation, loneliness, without a shimmer of hope, without a prayer, without faithful trust in God.

LIKE SHAKESPEARE in his tragedies, Vittoria Colonna penetrates into the Abysses of the female soul, driven by an irresistible impulse to poetise the woman IN EXTREMIS

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
INITIATOR OF FEMALE LOVE POETRY

in an act of gender crossing
the male subject is perverted into a female object
in female love sonnets
with lots of female imitators

 

Undoubtedly, it was bold to appropriate the position of the poetising subject to degrade her husband, even though dead, therefore wax in her hands, to the object of her female poetising and even to imitate Dante’s Innamoramento. Poetising love at first glance – “the longing of the first glance remains until my very last hour”provoked the patriarchs of the Renaissance Society, who subjugated women to their male -imagined image of women and subjected their conduct to a strict behavioural code. The Church and the Patriarchs imposed silence on women in male company.

Vittoria Colonna’s poetising was an act of self-authorization. She disregarded male-imposed female virtues of shamefulness, modesty, and taciturnity.

  

VITTORIA COLONNA –FEMINA LUDENS

Social Lioness

 

In contrast to her radically authenticity as rebellious widow, the accomplished Renaissance Princess and Society Lioness, according to Giovio, equipped with the rare talent never to produce boredom or indifference, offered her self-authorized love-poetry playfully as Femina Ludens: For instance, she stages herself as a young ambitious Poetess, who, straying about at the foot of Helicon, is searching for a path to the summit in vain, where the clique of established male poets rest on their laurels, without lending their ears to her imploring calls, let alone reaching a hand to her, who is also striving up to the summit.

As she was able to calculate the horizon of male expectation, her sonnets in homage to her husband as War Hero she poetised from the point of view of the loving spouse excited her male readers, above all Ariost. In Qui fece il mio lume a noi ritorno the poetess stages the glorious homecoming of her husband as a victor from the point of view of his enamoured spouse in an erotically charged scene, in which she beseeches him to reveal his beautiful scars for her. Ariost enthused:” She can tear somebody out of his grave by writing or talking about him.”

 

VITTORIA COLONNA

 INCANTATION of FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY

 

Vittoria Colonna also demonstrates efficiency in male spheres, comparable to modern SHE-Males, for instance, when Pope Clement commissioned her as Governor of Benevent as and she forced the rebellious town to see reason.

Self-Authorized, the Proto-Feminist initiated a mental renewal of women on the basis of Renaissance-Humanism. As she overcame conventions, broke taboos, without male authorisation, the Humanist, looking for a role model, to legitimize her bold initiatives, found Catherine of Alexandria.
Gasparo Contarini, the second man of the Official Church, wrote for Vittoria Colonna, who was beseeching him, a treatise of thirteen pages about the freedom of will as a personal letter to her, which he saw only granted with simultaneous submission under the will of God.

In confrontation with superior male powers, male striving for dominance, against the power of fate, she conjures up female VIRTÚ, which does not prove itself by struggle for existence like male VIRTÚ but by inner resistance. A sonnet to her sister in law  Giovanna d’Aragona  is entitled by Vittoria Colonna:  “ A Woman stronger than Fate”.  The poet also discovers role-models for female strength in Nature: Her beloved Rock in Ischia – mio caro scoglio -which transfers onto her its steadfastness against the roaring sea, a juniper tree in a storm, which collects its crown and squeezes itself firmly together.
” Alta Colonna, steadfast against the storms of the clouded sky”, begins Bembo his panegyric to Vittoria Colonna and Giovio selects as her Impresa the Rock of Ischia.
Withdrawal into Inner Emigration instead of surrendering to conversion allows her to maintain her personal sovereignty against the infamous persecutions by the Inquisition. Psychologically adept, she is aware of threatening inner rigidity. Subtly, carefully, the mind is to be steered in order that the inner ardour of the soul is not extinguished by the persecutions.
Michelangelo portrays Vittoria Colonna in the years of her persecution by the Inquisition (1540-47) with the pencil. He directs her scouting eyes past the beholder into the distance, while her impressive mouth expresses defiant resistance.

©TRUSTEE: Collezione Grafica dell’Accademia di Venezia - Mit schriftlicher Genehmigung des Museums

 

 

VITTORIA COLONNA

REMAKE OF THE HOLY VIRGIN
Self-creative – Literary- Authentic-Proto-Feminist- Heretical 

Only little inferior to her divine son is the eternal mother
Vittoria Colonna

As God chose a human mother for his son, he, according to Vittoria Colonna, elevated her above mankind and the whole male hierarchy of angels to give her a place in his vicinity. Such an elevation of a woman by God filled the feminist with greatest satisfaction: “And as he bestowed on her the might of a mother, the love of a bride, the security of a daughter, he enabled her to rise on the wings of her great virtues above all heavenly choirs,” she wrote to her friend Costanza Piccolomini, the Duchess of Amalfi, address by her as “Sublime Spirit”
With inner consistency, in his opus magnum, the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo gave novel Maria, who was her creation, the features of his beloved Marchesa. He fashioned the transfigured beauty of Madonna in an anatomically inimitable demeanour of unearthly grace, at the same time suggesting in her gestures distance of the Humanist from the Godson, judging mankind in wrath!
Vittoria Colonna’s arrogation to propagate the superiority of the Godmother over male heavenly powers, may have attracted the attention of the Inquisition.
Therefore, Vittoria Colonna only spread her novel image of the Holy Virgin among female friends. She calmed frightened Costanza, in her meditation of the godmother “ soavemente nel’ usata dell’ chiesa mi rappresenti.”but in the same breath, she also assures herself of the loyalty of the Duchess “ essendo con voi sicura di calonnia e d’ogni iniquo morsodi maligna intenzione.”

God’s idea to choose a human woman as Mother of his godson, is for Vittoria Colonna sufficient reason for the Godmother, after the death of her son, the to make his mother the trustee of his inheritance on earth and even to postulate her superiority to the apostles:

Vittoria’s Godmother is the most gifted woman, whose intelligence is only a little inferior to her son, who surpasses the Cherubs in judgement. In contrast, the Church propagates Maria as the handmaid of the Lord. A maid serves. She performs her duty without understanding the will of her master. She must repress her intelligence and her emotionality. Above all, she is faithful. Privileged by God, the godmother, in Vittoria Colonna’s view, was also entitled to demand acknowledgment from the Apostles. In Vittoria Colonna’s vivid imagination, the godmother did not sit mute and dumbfounded among the Apostles, only tolerated by them as the mother of their eternalised master. She taught the new law of her divine son and the apostles listened fascinated. In her letter to Costanza she enthuses about the Godmother as representative for her son on earth:
“Just imagine the beacon of hope inflamed by her, the fiery words coming out of her mouth, the divine enlightenment she radiated. Bring to your mind, how her adequate suggestions, not following laws, set new justice for those, who listened to her, their teacher, installed by the greatest master to maintain the order of the world founded by him with his own blood.”

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
IMAGINES THE INFLUENCE of TEOTOKOS on DIVINITY
in COSMIC IMAGES and HYMNAL SONNETS

 

 

Self-Reliant Theotokos

Vittoria Colonna, in her cosmic images, creates Holy Virgin as the mediator between God and mankind, however she has Mary take the initiative as Theotokos. She transfigures the divine woman into LUNA, the moon goddess, who, between the true sun (God) and our eyes, has spread her humanity like a protective coat:” Eterna Luna, alor che fra il Sol vero e gli ochi nostrl il tuo mortal ponesti.”
The invocation of Maria as Stella Maris, datable back to the church-father Hieronymus, to the Litany of Loreto, and to the Liturgy of the Hours, symbolizes the elevation of the Mother of God as the secure star, which shows the sailor the way on the sea, and, in a figurative sense, gives orientation to the single human being in his life. The poetess of the Renaissance selects the time-honoured symbol of Stella Maris but varies it individually She changes the cosmic image into a complex concetto. Mary as Stella Maris is related to God, the Sun of Paradise. At the same time, she accentuates the initiative of a self-reliant, independent Holy Virgin.
Adorning God with her mortal coat, by giving birth to his son, SHE is setting God’s Incarnation in motion, because the male God was in need of a human mother to realize the incarnation of his son, which Godfather, astonishingly, conditioned on the voluntary consent of the Holy Virgin, who was personally selected by God for this singular task.

The Humanist poet has the human woman take influence on God, because he did not exert pressure on her, but let the Holy Virgin decide herself if she wanted to become Mother of his divine son.

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
UNMASKING of MALE FABRICATED FEMININITY

The sweetened madonnas of the Renaissance

Silvia Bovenschen, the researcher of male-imagined femininity had a forerunner in Vittoria Colonna, who missed authenticity in the sweetened icon of Saint Luke. Although he knew the godmother personally, he hid her liveliness in his picture, she poetised. Quel vivo no ‘l mostrò, because he banned the dark shadows -la fiera ombra – from his art.

Michelangelo drew the mother of Jesus as a natural woman and a humanist, who challenged Godfather to justify himself for the crucifixion of her child.

Michelangelo thematises the life-likeness of the Holy Virgin provokingly. Not at all Madonna-like are the outward appearance and posture of the Godmother, to whom Michelangelo gave the features of his beloved Marchesa. She wears a plain dress and her habitual turban. The holy virgin has crossed her legs. On one leg, the head of young Jesus is resting, who with angled legs, half hanging, half lying on the narrow bench, cannot stretch himself for wholesome sleep. The boy’s lifelessness, his cramped posture ANTICIPATE the boy’s premature death on the cross, which will be the boy’s destiny. Sands running through the hourglass are also remindful of the boy’s brevity of life. Michelangelo, in his habitual hood, has placed himself as Joseph beside the godmother/ alias Vittoria, who is holding an empty sheet of paper in her right hand extended backwards towards Heaven, in direction of the reticent godfather. The paper will remain empty. Godfather has owed his answer until this day.

Michelangelo s drawing is in unknown private property in England. The author pays thanks to Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, for the copy of a photograph in the catalogue to the Exhibition: Vittoria Colonna. Poetess and Muse of Michelangelo. (Written Licence)

 

 

VITTORIA COLONNA

INDIVIUALISATION of PETRARCHAN POETOLOGY 

SONNET to REGINALD POLE 

REVIVAL of the PETRARCHAN SONNET

DRAMATISATION – SELF-STAGING –DIALOGUE SUBSTRATES

COMMUNICATION

  

VITTORIA COLONNA
PETRARCHAN MENTAL INFLUENCES

SELF-OBSERVATION

Deep empathy into Petrarch’ s spirituality is a conditio sine qua non for Vittoria Colonna’s poetising. Never would she, a woman, without his paragon, have gathered the courage to send self-referential sonnets to Bembo and Reginald Pole. She was encouraged by Petrarch, “who, in his letters, treatises, in his poetry used any opportunity of self-observation to gain consciousness of his inner nature, to x-ray mental and psychic complexities in order to convey them to others.” (Hugo Friedrich) 

OTHERNESS of Vittoria Colonna
OBJECTIVITY instead of PETRARCH’S SUBJECTIVISM

About Vittoria Colonna, objective self-observation is astonishing. For instance, she states the speed of her stream of consciousness in comparison with physical time, a discovery, of which Virginia Woolf and James Joyce prided themselves. Or she discovers (by self-observation) the phenomenon of Flash-Back, when the memory of the messenger, who informed her about the defeat of her husband in the battle of Ravenna, made her blood boil after several years. “ che la memoria il petto ognor mi coce”
In no case was her self-reference ego-centric, let alone ego-maniac. Just compare with her capricious poetesses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries!
Her Objective Self-Observation was gynocentric and served her as an instrument to gain new recognitions about female authenticity. Vittoria Colonna initiated female love poetry and swarms of “Women Writers” followed in her slipstream.
What she praised about her friend Marguerite d’Angouleme, is true for herself:” “Only by accomplishing yourself you can be a role model for other women,” a sentence, which reveals her commitment to a female Renaissance.

 

INDULGING Herself
in her own
CONTROVERSIAL EMOTIONS
(CONTRARI AFFETT)
and
AMBIVALENCES

Ernst Cassirer writes about Petrarch that he again and again penetrates into his own soul to describe the emotionality of his EGO, also to admire it in its great diversity and even to enjoy its dichotomies, as a consequence of her inner struggle between this world and the Beyond

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
Swaying between dichotomies
as a feature her Rime Spirituali,

 

While the poetess, in high spirits, chose images of cosmic dimensions, for instance Stella Maris, for Theotokos, she, in in a less euphoric mood, contents herself with the oscillating play of sun rays on a shadowy wall as an earth-bound image of the heavenly light radiating the godmother as a mandorla.

 

VITTORIA COLONNA
DIVERSITY FROM HER POETFATHER
PETRARCH

PETRARCH
Few basic motifs in his CANZONIERE 

VITTORIA COLONNA
MULTIPERSPECTIVITY of her OEUVRE

 

Although Petrarch, temporarily in the diplomatic service of the Visconti in Milan, went on journeys together with Giovanni Colonna, he often withdrew to his Vita Solitaria at Vaucluse (1337) and at the end of his life to Arqua.
Ingeniously gifted with self-observation, he indulges in his wealthy inner life, the only subject of his Canzoniere, while roaming the lovely landscape: Solo e pensoroso i più deserti campi io mesurando a passi tardi e lenti.

In contrast to Petrarch, who came from the educated Bourgeoisie, Vittoria Colonna, idolized by the Literates as Divina, the Renaissance Princess, Alta Colonna, Marchesa de Pescara, consort of the Victor of Pavia, is integrated in the Italian as well as in the Spanish Aristocracy.

Adhering to the Italian Reformation, she entered into discourse with the renowned reformed Theologians and is inducted as the only woman into the exclusively clerical circle of Ecclesiae Viterbiensis. Cardinal Reginald Pole, who chaired this noble spiritual community, became her personal spiritual director.
In the different phases of her life, she invents herself and her poetry anew, because as a woman, she finds the stimulus for authentic poetising in the context of her personal life. When, after only five years of married life, her husband went to war and left her in the custody of his aunt Costanza d’Avalos as her chaperon, she immersed herself in Ovid’s Heroides, then took the quill out of Ovid’s hand to poetise a personal authentic letter-poem to her war-absent husband. Even in this early poetical work, which was also intended for the public, she does not stylize herself but, following her poet-father Petrarch, analyses her offended female Self unsparingly.
However, as a young widow, Vittoria Colonna positions herself in radical contrast to Petrarch. Instead of his Cantando il duol disacerba she cries out her widow pain in revolutionary expressionist poetising. Petrarch’s Dolce Stil is opposed by the rebellious widow’s Di stil no ma di duol!
Silent mourning was enforced on widows by the patriarchs. Vittoria Colonna demands the right of Amaro Lagrimar, which was a male privilege! The widow had to be silent.
Even though Petrarch immerses himself in hopelessness, melancholy is softened by harmony in his poetry to delight the reader. Vittoria, as a woman, exposes herself to her feelings. Overwhelmed by her emotions, she ignores the reader’s demand of harmony. But as a keen Self-Observer, she is aware of it.” I fear my dreary song redounds more to the surfeit of others, instead of bringing solace to me.
In contrast to Petrarch’s varying few unpretentious fundamental motifs, Vittoria Colonna’s sonnets, often philosophical or theological thought poetry, are complex and yet female-authentic.  
For instance, in Quando io dal caro scoglio guardo intorno (Bullock A2:13), the poetess at first describes her position, her Here and Now, and whereabouts. At dawn, she is standing on her beloved rock in Ischia, looking around at land and sea. In the second quatrain, her soul is rising heavenwards towards the sun in Platonic manner. Then the poetess uses the caesura between quatrains and tercets for a surprising turn: Following the example of Elia, however not in his burning barrow but in a guilded bridal carriage her enamoured soul imagines her ascension to Heaven in her natural beauty to her immortalised husband.
Astonishing is Vittoria Colonna’s sense of time. A keen observer of nature and psychic phenomena, she realized that the vision of her physical ascension into Heaven to her beloved husband is to be owed to the physiological effect of blissful warmth of the first sun rays: In quell momento sente lo spirto un raggio de’l ardor beato