{"id":7937,"date":"2019-05-08T07:18:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T11:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7937"},"modified":"2019-06-05T07:06:31","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T11:06:31","slug":"vittoria-colonna-a-renaissance-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7937","title":{"rendered":"Vittoria Colonna: A Renaissance Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Never heard of her, you say? Well, she was born a long time\nago, in 1490, engaged at the age of three to a Spaniard, Fernando Francesco d\u2019\u00c1valos,\nand married to him at age 15. They had no children and she saw little of him\nduring their marriage, as he was off fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor. He died\nwhen she was 35.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now a widow, with her parents also dead, Vittoria was her\nown boss, and she became the first woman poet published in Italy. At first she wrote\nlove sonnets to her husband. It seems she adored him\u2014who conspicuously did not\nlove her\u2014more after his death than during life. She wanted to become a nun, but\nPope Clement refused\u2014needing her to control the whims of her troublesome\nbrother. Because of her wealthy background, she knew all the important people\nof her age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vittoria was a friend of the intellectual Marguerite de\nNavarre, became perhaps the closest\nfriend of Michelangelo<\/a> and fell into platonic love with Cardinal Pole,\nanother neglected Renaissance character. Reginald Pole was an Englishman, exiled\nby Henry VIII because he opposed The Divorce. Pole was only two votes away from\nbecoming Pope  in the mid-1500s and\nbecame the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury after Henry\u2019s death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vittoria\u2019s later poems were devotional, not romantic, and it\u2019s\nironic that Michelangelo, also a skilled poet, wrote love poems to her, while\nshe did not write them to him. She died in 1547.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her story was especially interesting because of a course I took last winter about the importance of the few highly educated women in the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the cultural lives of Italy and France, despite the strength of those patriarchical societies. They may not have had many rights, but they figured out a way to have influence. Vittoria herself inspired many women poets, who credited her with paving the way for them. The result was that, by 1599, Italy had 200 published women poets, compared to, say, England, with 12. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is based on a presentation by Brandeis professor Ramie\nTargoff in Princeton last night. She\u2019s the author of Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna<\/em>. Writing in the New\nYork Times, author Sarah Dunant said, \u201cWhat could have been the story of a\nreligious good girl becomes instead the study of a passionate, complex woman\nwith formidable poetic talents: someone who, while embedded in her own age,\nemerges as a thinker and seeker in tune with a modern audience.\u201d Certainly the\naudience that heard her story last night in Princeton would agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Never heard of her, you say? Well, she was born a long time ago, in 1490, engaged at the age of three to a Spaniard, Fernando Francesco d\u2019\u00c1valos, and married to him at age 15. They had no children and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Vittoria Colonna: A Renaissance Woman - Friend to Michelangelo, admirer of Cardinal Pole, confidant of popes, inspiration to women poets--a fascinating character.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[265,266,513,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-history","category-poetry","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Vittoria-Colonna.jpg?fit=225%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-241","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7939,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions\/7939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}