Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547)

Ø Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547)

Life and Works:-

          Born into the powerful Roman Colonna clan in 1490 (some sources say 1492), second child of Fabrizio Colonna and Agnese di Montefeltro, Colonna was betrothed at a very young age to Francesco Ferrante D'Avalos, the Marquis of Pescara, in a political manoeuvre that established an alliance between the Colonna and the Spanish throne of King Ferdinand D'Aragona. The marriage was celebrated in 1509 on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, and the couple briefly resided together in the Neapolitan countryside before D'Avalos left on the first of the many military campaigns against the French that

were to occupy him for the rest of his life. Colonna herself returned to Ischia, to the court presided over by her aunt by marriage, Costanza D'Avalos, where the well-stocked library and lively court environment probably helped to encourage her own literary aspirations.

v successful woman writer; Colonna, Vittoria

          Vittoria Colonna, certainly the most renowned and successful woman writer of her age in Italy, was widely admired by her peers for her impeccable Petrarchan verses and her public image of unimpeachable chastity and piety. Her work went through numerous sixteenth-century editions, but these tailed off after the 1560s and subsequent editorial neglect belies her status at the forefront of literary production by secular women in the Renaissance.

v A single poetic ‘Epistle to her Husband

          A single poetic ‘Epistle to her Husband” written during his captivity by the French in 1512. It is all that survives of Colonna poetry from this early period. However she is cited with enough regularity by contemporary Neapolitan writers to advocate that her work was already enjoying some significant scribal publication in and around Naples, if not further.

v A religious poet woman

          Among the women religious poets, Vittoria Colonna is remarkable for the literary labour. Vittora Colonna was truly ‘a child of the Renaissance’. She was born at the house of illustrious parentage. She witnessed and participated in major historical events. She was an influential political and intellectual leader, a friend and advised to many of the greatest personality of her age. She was an outstanding poet admired and respected by almost all the contemporaries. The Colonna family members were a noble Roman family that played an important military and political role in the medieval and Renaissance Europe.

v Her Love Poems:-

          Colonna’s modest prevented the publication of her verses for many year, yet in 1535 Colonna’s first work appeared in print. It was a sonnet I live Upon This Fearful Lonely Rock. It is considered one of the best of her love poems, intense in faith and love. She speaks,

 “I live upon this fearful lonely rock

Like a sad bird that shuns the green branch

And the water I withdraw from those

I love on earth and from my self as well.”

          This is the moving and passionate expression of love, devoted for her husband. When she departed from her husband, she became the lonely lad. In the Epistle to Fernando Francisco de Avalos, her husband after the battle of wound in 1525 she writes,

My most noble lord, I write you this

To recount to you how sad and amid so

Uncertain desires and harsh torments I live.

Further she again state….

“I id not expect pain and sorrow from you

She feels frustration

Love of my father and love of you

Like two famished and furious snakes

Colonna in anger addressee her husband

“You live happily and know no sorrow

Thinking only of our newly acquired fame

You carelessly keep me hungry for your love

But I with anger and sadness in my face

Lie in your bend abandoned and lone

Feeling hope intends to mingle with pain”

v Literary Queen of the Italian Renaissance

          In 1538, an entire book of Colonna poetry was published Poetry and Letters. It earned her a title Literary Queen of the Italian Renaissance. She wrote 390 poems into three sections (1) Love poems (2) Spiritual poems (3) Epistolary poem.

v longing required by the Petrarchan format

          Her husband's almost constant absence from home, as well as his reputation for valour and heroism in battle, appear to have provided Colonna with the necessary contexts of loss and longing required by the Petrarchan format. This was reinforced in 1525, when D'Avalos died from injuries sustained at the battle of Pavia, and it is no accident that Colonna's activity and fame as a poet grew exponentially from this date. Widowed, independently wealthy, and childless, she retreated into a convent in Rome as a secular guest and resisted all attempts by her family and the pope to arrange a second marriage. The emphasis in her work on spirituality and the contemplative life was reinforced by the chaste and pious persona she promoted publicly, and aided no doubt by her wealth and aristocratic status, she was able to formulate a literary voice which commanded considerable respect whilst preserving the necessary gender decorum.

v Petrarchan linguistic and imitative models

          Colonna's poetry is stylistically impeccable, drawing on the Petrarchan linguistic and imitative models recommended by Pietro Bembo and others in the period, but also, particularly in the more mature work, rich, sensuous and innovative in ways that may surprise the uninitiated reader. Although the earlier, so-called 'amorous' poems are more traditionally Petrarchan in their emphasis on loss and longing for the deceased consort, later 'spiritual' sonnets embrace instead a far more positive celebration of divine love for Christ which is flavoured significantly by the poet's personal interest in the ideas and doctrines of reform.

No any desire for personal fame

          A first edition of Colonna's Rime was published in 1538, and was followed by twelve further published editions before the poet's death in 1547. A particular feature of this publication history is Colonna's personal distance from all editions of her work that appeared during her lifetime, so that she was able to maintain that her writing was in no way related to any desire for personal fame or acclaim (although this claim is perhaps undermined by the large number of manuscript collections of the sonnets that were also in circulation during the period). A further nine editions of the Rime were published before the end of the sixteenth century, when interest in the genre and its practitioners waned. Since then, attention to the poetry has been sporadic, and serious critical consideration has often been undermined by the tendency towards overly biographical readings of these highly stylised and complex verses.

v religious themes

          Colonna's published work is not limited to poetry. She also composed prose works on religious themes, initially as letters, but which were later published in collections of prose meditations and in separate editions. These prose writings demonstrate clearly her interest in religious reform, as well as a concerted attempt to define a role for the secular literary female that draws on the examples of the female 'apostles' who appear in the New Testament and in traditional hagiographies, most significantly the examples of Mary Magdalene, Catherine of Alexandria and the Virgin Mar.