MACROTHEMES AND SONNETS
OVERVIEW

THEOLOGIA CRUCIS catapulted the Renaissance Princess into a painful dilemma. On the one hand, she tried to internalize the atoning death of Jesus on the cross as “Lamb of God”. On the other hand, the Renaissance Princess could not bring the ignoble death of Jesus Christ on the cross into line, neither with her Renaissance Humanism nor with her self-definition as a feudal mistress, who ruled with an iron hand over the serfs on her feuds, holding on to the image of a punishing God, as it was realized by Michelangelo in his opus magnum of the Last Judgement, the genesis of which she experienced as the only eyewitness in the Sistine Chapel.

Vittoria Colonna got entangled in logical inconsistencies and in ambivalences, when, in the drawing of the Crucified, a present by Michelangelo, she, on the one hand, made the artist draw the Crucified without the crown of thorns and without any visible wounds in order to maintain the divine dignity of Jesus as intact as possible on the cross. However, on the other hand she vowed in the proem to her Rime Spirituali: “I santi chiodi omai sian le mie penne// e puro chiostro il prezioso sangue // vergata carta il sacro corpo exsangue // si ch´ ío scriva ad altrui quell ch´ ei sostenne.” Perhaps it was her dilemma with Theologia Crucis, which spawned off her creativity for three impressive sonnets: In DIMMI LUCE, the Renaissance Poetess discards erudite theology and creates a dialogue between the Crucified and a common woman as a fictional I-Speaker, who witnessed the Crucifixion. The cheeky woman dares to enquire Jesus about the motivation of his death on the cross, striking a sneering note:” I only see you martyred, from all sides offended and hanging down heavily from the three nails.” In his answer, Jesus, in the meantime transfigured in Heaven, pleads his love for mankind and his obedience to his divine father, However, in contrast to the Crucified of Juan de Valdés as “Lamb of God”, who sacrificed himself for sinners as well as for the Justified, the Crucified of Vittoria Colonna condemns hardened hearts. Forcefully, the poetess paints a phonetically accentuated genre picture of the false world in VEGGIO DI MILLE VELI AVOLTI, illustrating the necessity of a punishing Jesus Christ, created by Michelangelo as the wrathful judge of the Last Judgement in Sistine Chapel.

In her sonnet LA BRACCIA APRENDO IN CROCE, the Renaissance Poetess, in spite of her genuinely ambivalent attitude, succeeds in poetising Theologia Crucis in substantial as well as in poetical perfection: As a Humanist overcoming the common view of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross as an act of obedience towards Godfather, Vittoria Colonna interprets the death on the cross exclusively as a Jesus Christ´s voluntary act of love for humanity, whose lot on earth the Son of Man voluntarily shared with them. With this interpretation, won in internal struggling against the impression of a masochist God as man of sorrows and against the humiliation of Jesus Christ on the cross as “Lamb of God”, the Renaissance Princess also maintains the divine dignity of Jesus Christ on the cross by emphasizing his free will instead of his obedience to his Father, thus inserting in Jesus on the cross the proud self-conception of the Renaissance Individual. Hurrying ahead of her time, Vittoria Colonna shared this view with the leading Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD), who, like Vittoria Colonna, sees Christ’s motivation for his voluntary death on the cross in his love for mankind. At the beginning of this sonnet, in dante-esque idiom, the living Crucified frees his arms from the horizontal bars of the cross for an affectionate embrace of the world and of mankind, reaching out into universal dimensions and also back into the depths of history to be completed in the blessed atmosphere of Ecclesia Viterbiensis of Chosen Souls. 

Although Vittoria Colonna is taken by the reform-theologian doctrine of SOLA FIDE as only justification of man before God, she painfully misses the response of God to her own Inner Faith. In DEH POTESS´IO, the naïve I-Speaker is longing for the intervention of Jesus as Son of Man. It is here on earth that she wants to experience God as Creator, as a benevolent Father, who distributes presents, but also as the punishing God instead of being confronted with God’s reticence in her soul. In SE CON L´ARMI CELESTI, the poetess gives faith wings of hope: “Veggio I segni di sol, scorgo l´Aurora; ma per gli sacri giri alle divine stanze non entro in quella luce vera.” The intellectual Humanist complements lively faith with scepticism: In CON LA CROCE A GRAN PASSI the poetess mirrors her scepticism by one lengthy sentence-structure, consisting of unreal conditionals, a consecutive clause, indirect interrogations, thus suggesting subversively that her faith does not always help her to get over her doubts.

Vittoria Colonna’s enthusiasm about the Spirituality of Ecclesia Viterbiensis of Chosen Souls, invoking immediate enlightenment by the Holy Ghost, which was withdrawn from the will of man and in need of imputed grace, induced Vittoria Colonna to move to Viterbo as the only female member of this exclusively clerical circle, and to change her life-style, now based on utopian ideas. The Renaissance poetess claimed divine enlightenment by the holy Spirit as the source of her inspiration for her Rime Spirituali with such intensity that she saw herself as passive medium for the Holy Ghost, reducing her own participating activity to the mechanical performance of writing on paper what had been dictated to her from above. “From the divine fire that inflames my intellect, these sparks spring up.”

In QUEL DIGIGIUNO AUGELLIN the poetess contrived an ingenious concetto for her hoped-for relationship to the Holy Ghost, likening his inspiration to the warm, motherly, intensively vivid feelings and tender care of a mother bird, while feeding her fledgling. Spurred on by her missionary zeal to introduce motherly feeling into primarily male religiousness, she attributes female qualities to the Holy Ghost, the third person of the threefold male God.

After all, Juan de Valdés proclaims, believers are like children, who know nothing themselves, but rely on divine afflatus. While de Valdés, with voluble facility, slurs over the state of inner emptiness as the emotional downside of euphoric religiousness based on feeling, Vittoria Colonna brings to mind the failure of  the Mystic’s doctrine of salvation, above all the absence of inner enlightenment in angst, panic and depression in: NON SI PUO AVER SPEME VIVACE In admirable authenticity, Vittoria Colonna poetises the drought of her soul as her more permanent inner state. In great truthfulness, the poetess never renders inner faith as her personal experience, but always as doctrine of the Spirituali or as wishful thinking. In CON VOMER D´UMILITÀ, the poetess with a plough in her hands seams the soil of her soul in futile hope for irrigation from Heaven so that the vines of divine love produce fruit. In VORREI CHE ´L VERO SOL, the poetess is staging herself as HOMO FABER, who dares to recommend to God a technical expedient for better inner enlightenment. She orders HIM to send into her soul an eternal lamp, which collects the faint sparks of divine illumination in a focus, because, in her current state, she is only exhilarated by her intensive longing for God.

Turning away from the spirituality of Viterbo, the Renaissance Poetess also poetises common religiousness of the Cinquecento: As contemplative spirituality is useless in the moment of Death or in Armageddon, Vittoria Colonna, as many of her contemporaries, resorts to magical practices. InVORREI CHE SEMPRE UN GRIDO ALTO E POSSENTE, she poetises her lifelong habit of practicing the name of GESU so that the invocation will succeed in Armageddon. In QUANDO Il TURBATO MAR, in contrast to the spirituality of Viterbo, the poetess returns to religion in the original sense of reconnection to God. Jesus is her living rock, to whom she fastens her bark by a bond of love tied in faith, visualizing religio as the primordial urge of man to reconnect himself to Jesus, the protective Son of Man, whom the poetess transferred to the shores of Ischia to have him at her disposal in her vicinity and to feel safe and secure in his arms, at least temporarily.

In QUANDO, MERCÉ DEL CIEL the poetess returns to her proposal to God to bundle his little graces, granted to her from time to time, in one focus to give her the necessary impetus for a flight into heavenly heights. She dreams of being drawn upward so that the moon remains below her, but also death, world, and fate disappear out of her sight. Joyful and serene, this beautiful sonnet seems to be composed by a playfully speculating poetess. In the tercets, the poetess finds herself on the earth again, while her serenity seems to keep on. However, the impression is illusive. In anagrams imposed on the sonnet, the poetess is shouting towards God: QUANDO, DIO QUANDO DISPARIR L’OMBRE E DEMONSTRARSI il VERO

In TEMPO É PUR CH’IO the passionate God Seeker is staging herself in a belted

gown, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, wide-awake and on the alert like the prudent virgins of the New Testament. Yet instead of the flickering oil lamps in their hands, the poetess, also resembling a Roman Vestal Virgin, is holding flaring torches in both hands, greedily peering for God into the eternal night: IN VAIN. Abruptly, in a U-Turn, she returns into real life, because the idea occurred to her that Jesus might have wished to meet her in this world and she failed him. “There she is, the blind woman” he may welcome her. Perhaps she would be assigned an earthly mission by the Lord to help him to install his divine empire in this world, a mission, which, at the moment would be more attractive to the Renaissance Lady than the remote present of eternal life.

Résumé

Instead of finding absolute truth or rest in God or achieving mystical union with the Divine, or reaching the state of holiness after completing Iter Spirituale, Vittoria Colonna preferred remaining on the way as a desperate God-Seeker, entangled in her inner chaos, always denying the primrose way for herself. Her restless, imbalanced mind, tending to ambivalence, volatility, swings of mood, bi-polar swaying between euphoria and dejection, was the incentive for the complexity of her religious life documented in her Rime Spirituali. The Petrarchan Sonnet, owing to its dialectical structure (two quatrains and two tercets) served as the ideal seismograph for her oscillating religiousness. 

It is true, Vittoria Colonna made inner faith, as it was taught by the reform theologians, the essential objective of her spiritual poetry. However, at the same time, the intellectual Humanist measured faith in God by the rational principles of her human intellect, exceptionally high developed due to her excellent Humanist Education. Honestly, she confessed that faith in God did not fulfil her, because she also regarded faith as an expedient for lacking recognition. With intellectual curiosity beyond comparison, she desired to perceive God with her senses, and to recognize him with her intellect. But perception and recognition of God were withheld from her, as they are withheld from us and from any human being.