Author’s Note

Penso, un marmo breve
Chiuda il corpo meo con nome insieme
Vittoria Colonna

The author’s interest in Vittoria Colonna was sparked off by the fact that her damnation by the Inquisition was still effective in the eighties of the last century, for instance, in the absence of an adequate biography in the bookshops at Naples, but also by her shadowy existence in the biography of Alfred von Reumont about the welcome Italian heretic in the days (1893) of the kulturkampf waged by Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Reich, against Pope Pius IX.     

Deficient empirical research of the “greatest poetess of Italy” plus utter astonishment at Vittoria Colonna’s beautiful, but also enigmatic sonnet Quando io dal caro scoglio, motivated the author to go ad fontes for more thorough research.

After a decade of studying Vittoria Colonna’s sonnets edited by Alan Bullock in 1982, and her letters, awe-inspiring in intellectual and stylistic respects, edited with care by Ermanno Ferrero und Giuseppe Müller in Torino in 1892, and Paolo Giovio‘s Dialogi de Viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus with  the great finale dedicated to Vittoria Colonna, moreover, after reading Paolo Giovio’s voluminous biography about her husband Ferrante d’Avalos, also written in Latin, the author, in 2013, published the first biograph about Vittoria Colonna, exclusively grounded on primary texts in German and edited in English a year later, with the copy of a drawing of Vittoria Colonna by Michelangelo on the cover. 

As recently as in 2006, in the Exhibition Michelangelo Drawings- Closer to the Master in the British Museum, London, the drawing was still defined as the “Head of a Young Man”, even though followed by a question mark. 

However, owing to the detailing description of her features by Paolo Giovio in his Dialogi, who knew her well, accommodated as he was by the Marchesa on the castle of Ischia during the Sacco di Romain 1527, the head of a young man can be assigned to Vittoria Colonna with great probability, the more so, because both: Michelangelo (“a man in a woman”) and Giovio (“slight masculine details in her face do not disturb her femininity”) confirm her masculine details in Vittoria Colonna’s appearance. The author pays thanks to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as the trustee, for the generous permission to render the drawing on the cover of her biography.

Vittoria Colonna was the outstanding female Humanist of the first generation of Humanists. The eighty-two old authoress belongs to the last German generation - now dying out -, which still enjoyed an exquisite education at a Humanistisches Gymnasium in the Adenauer Era in Germany, learning ancient Greek so thoroughly during six school years that reading Plato’s dialogues in the original was possible. After nine years as the main subject at these schools in Germany, the author’s command of Latin was so consolidated that she now, six decades later, could still read Giovio’s dialogues in the Latin original.  

The German University in the sixties of the 20ieth Century also laid the foundation for the author’s research of Vittoria Colonna, because she had to pass an examination at philosophy (Philosophicum), although she had chosen Anglistik (English language, linguistics and literature) as her main subject. Familiarity with the main works of Shakespeare, another Renaissance Poet, was self-evident. Before being admitted to the state exam, one had to hand in a written paper about a special literary subject, the author’s being a comparison between the original of Sir Philip Sidney’s voluminous Arcadia and its equally voluminous second version, again Renaissance. Moreover, the author had to learn how to intrinsically interpret poems according to the classical rules, which facilitated her approach to Vittoria Colonna’s sonnets.

Equipped with such fundamental requirements, the author felt a kind of moral obligation to leave behind an unpretentious systematizing presentation of Vittoria Colonna’s Rime, which did not exist in order to prove that the chaotic state of her lyrical work, exaggerated as Conundrum in secondary literature, can be put in order. While reading the single sonnets of her Rime Spirituali, the independent researcher found out that they thematize different theological macro themes, which inflamed the spirituality of the poetess, but also aroused her dissent with the theological pundits. As it did not behove her, as a woman, to give utterance to her criticism in discourses, she poetised her differing authentic thoughts and feelings in sonnets. Therefore, it is necessary to read all her sonnets about a macro theme to get to know the Renaissance poetess in her ambivalences and dichotomies, scepticism and doubts, a cast of mind she shares with us.

The author offers to her readers the original texts and translations of single sonnets with explicatory annotations according to the classical rules of interpretation, hoping in boldness that Vittoria Colonna, rising new born from the ashes like Phoenix, a figure she loved, in the lively complexity of her Renaissance mentality, arouses astonishment in her readers, which, according to Plato’s thaumazein, is the beginning of philosophizing.

Maria Musiol