Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Department of Italian Studies, University of Reading & Department of Italian, University of Cambridge
The Italianist, 33. 3, 345–360, October 2013
RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA:
GENDER AND DESIRE IN THE RIME
AMOROSE
SHANNON MCHUGH
New York University, USA
Though the rime spirituali of Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) have benefited in
recent years from increased critical examination, her rime amorose have gone
largely unstudied. This lack of attention is due at least in part to a lack of
excitement, as modern scholarship has come to consider her early secular verse to
be competent but conventional, a brand of Petrarchism that is at once passively
receptive and abstractly decorporealizing. This essay aims to show that Colonna’s
is a reputation unjustly earned and that her rime amorose are not as ‘traditional’ or
frigid as has typically been posited. On the contrary, her verse can be wonderfully
bizarre and experimental, especially in terms of gender and sexuality.
KEYWORDS: Vittoria Colonna, rime amorose, Petrarchism, women writers, gender,
sexuality
Although Vittoria Colonna’s spiritual poems have benefited in recent years from
critical examination, her amorous verse has gone largely unstudied.1 This
inattention, despite the recent decades’ wave of feminist criticism in early modern
studies, may be due to the fact that Colonna (1490–1547) has always been
considered mainstream and therefore not in need of the same sort of recuperation
as other, lesser-known women writers of the period.2 Another reason for the lack
of study, however, may be a simple lack of enthusiasm. Though Colonna is
frequently praised for her technical adroitness as a Petrarchan imitator, the
implication (or sometimes the outright assertion) that follows is that she is
unoriginal, conventional, and passively receptive. Such modern preconceptions
about her poetry can be traced at least as far back as Benedetto Croce, who
declared Colonna a learned versifier, but one who lacked an imaginative and
poetic spirit, as well as one who composed in a style he classified as
‘conventional’.3 Colonna seems to fare especially poorly when compared with
fellow poets Gaspara Stampa (c. 1523–54) and Veronica Franco (1546–91).
Purportedly lacking their untameable fire, Colonna is held to be cold all over,
perpetually distant from her ‘bel Sole’ (deceased husband Ferrante Francesco
D’Avalos [1490–1525]) and forever refusing to admit the blaze of a new flame.4
When modern critics have recognized a talent for poetic innovation, it has
typically been within the bounds of her later spiritual verse. This religious poetry,
# Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds
and Reading 2013
DOI: 10.1179/0261434013Z.00000000050
Published by Maney Publishing (c) The Department of Italian Studies, University of Reading & Department of Italian, University of Cambridge
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SHANNON MCHUGH
by its very Reformist nature, rubbed against the grain of the Catholic Church with
its unorthodox theology and against Petrarchan poetics with its contribution to the
formation of a new type of poetry. By contrast, her earlier amorous verse has
incited less fervour, perceived as it is to be abstractly decorporealizing and icily
chaste, the work of an overly perfect wife and a timorous Petrarchist. Scholars
have always excused Colonna these shortcomings because they were essential
concessions to the world in which she lived and wrote: she was constrained to
present herself as safely feminine in order to enter male-dominated literary circles.
Yet the end result remains the same: though her rime amorose have been a fixture
of the Italian canon effectively since the first printed edition of her Rime in 1538,
they inspire little ardour today.5
The principal aim of this essay is to demonstrate that Colonna’s is a reputation
unjustly earned and that her rime amorose are not as ‘traditional’ (i.e., dull) as has
typically been posited — that, in fact, if readers look more closely beneath the
widow’s veil, they will find that Colonna’s verse can be wonderfully bizarre and
experimental. Gender and sexuality will form the framework in this examination
of how Colonna translates the traditionally female Petrarchan love object to a
male form, and how this presentation of masculinity inevitably reflects on the
female poet. Because we have been conditioned to read Colonna’s love as a chaste
and spiritual devotion to a bodiless light in the sky, it has been easy to miss the
language that gives the object of her desire a body and places him upon this earth.
Even though almost all of Colonna’s known verse was penned after her husband’s
death, this poetry for a missing man is still capable of conveying a powerfully
erotic poetics for an absent body. Moreover, Colonna’s Petrarchan imitation
enacts much more than a straightforward exchange of the sexes and a virtuous
overlay of married continence over the template of frenzied and illicit passion.
Though Colonna ostensibly renders D’Avalos and herself in highly conventional
roles — he the departed martial hero and she the chaste widow — gender is in
reality frequently in flux, with the male-female binary being rejected in favour of a
more fluid spectrum that allows for innovative relations between the two sexes.
Colonna’s rime amorose, though precise in their Bembist-Petrarchan stylistics, are
unconventional in ways that merit further attention. Indeed, it bears remembering
that Colonna’s contemporaries did not find her love lyric boring at all. Thus does
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) effuse over the beauty of her poetry and delight in her
singular style, describing her verse as ‘bello e ingenioso e grave’.6 Her Rime were
reprinted twelve times before the poet’s death in 1547 alone. Nearly a century after
her death, we find Francesco Agostino Della Chiesa (1593–1662) in his Theatro
delle donne letterate praising her as the greatest of any poet in the Tuscan language
for the grandness and beauty of her poetic concetti.7 His use of this critical term
within the baroque lexicon implies a particular admiration of striking and
unconventional imagery — quite the opposite of the conservative reputation
Colonna has since come to acquire.8 Turning a fresh and attentive eye to
Colonna’s amorous poems reveals that, as she deftly employs the language of the
Petrarchan paradigm, she is also subtly reworking it. She presents a male body that
is concrete yet adaptable and a female body that experiences desire. In so doing she
rejects traditional gender dichotomies, redeveloping the unstable male-female
spectrum she already finds present in Petrarch into an idealized and novel union of
feminine and masculine virility. The result is an articulated lover-beloved
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
347
relationship that is both mutually beneficial and self-perpetuating. Re-examining
Colonna’s Petrarchan renegotiation can only increase our understanding of what it
meant for one of the earliest of early modern women writers to enter the literary
scene.
It is true that in the rime amorose Colonna is less apt to provide physical
descriptions of her husband than Petrarch is of his beloved. Petrarch obsesses over
the minute pieces of Laura’s body: golden locks, bright eyes, flashes of pale skin.
Colonna paints a vaguer physical portrait of D’Avalos, and when she does provide
details about his appearance, they are often references to his strength (‘la forte
[sua] vittrice mano’ [A1:5.2]) or his weaponry (‘la spada’ [A1:6.3]), metonymic
representations of his bellicose virtues and triumphs.9 Colonna reinterprets
Petrarch’s admiration of Laura’s internal qualities — her honour, her prudence —
as praise of D’Avalos’s martial virility, presenting in morte recollections of his
‘valore’ and ‘virtù’, of traits and feats coded as decidedly masculine. The praise
vocabulary is distinctly different from the love lexicon of the Rerum vulgarium
fragmenta. If anything Colonna’s reflections on D’Avalos feats in the Italian Wars
seem to draw from Petrarch’s political poems. In a representative example such
as the sonnet ‘A le vittorie tue, mio lume eterno’ (A1:6), even the Petrarchan
landscape undergoes a virile metamorphosis whereby Petrarch’s traditional
Arcadian setting transforms into the rivers, mountains and cities specific to
D’Avalos’s wartime victories (‘larghi fiumi, erti monti, alme cittadi | da l’ardir tuo
fur debellate e vinte’ [A1:6.10–11]). The setting aptly foregrounds Colonna’s
eulogies of her beloved’s courage (‘l’invitto core’ [A1:6.3]), prudence (‘Prudente
antiveder, divin governo’ [A1:6.5]), deeds (‘l’alte imprese’ [A1:6.7), and spirit (‘bel
animo interno’ [A1:6.8]). In another sonnet, ‘Quel fior d’ogni virtute in un bel
prato’ (A1:58), Colonna echoes sonnet 186 of Petrarch’s canzoniere, ‘Se Virgilio et
Homero avessin visto’. There Petrarch praises two ‘flowers’: Scipio Africanus,
‘Quel fior anticho di vertuti et d’arme’ (Rvf. 186.9), and Laura, whom he identifies
as a worthy ‘novo fior d’onestate et di bellezze’ (Rvf. 186.11).10 Colonna’s ‘Quel
fior’, however, takes Petrarch’s twin blooms — the ‘ancient’ Scipio and the ‘new’
Laura — and conflates them into one who embodies the qualities of both, the
ancient and the new, the epic champion and the lyric beloved, blending Petrarch’s
political verse with the amorous to describe a love object who is not
metaphorically but literally heroic.11
If Colonna is sparing in her description of the male beloved’s physical form, it is
worth noting that this is characteristic of Italian women’s verse throughout the
early modern period. Yet just because Colonna does not devote so many lines to
fetishizing D’Avalos’s fine forehead or strong arms does not mean that she never
acknowledges his body. One of her most vivid and unusual descriptions of it can
be found in the sonnet ‘Qui fece il mio bel lume a noi ritorno’, in which she
employs a martial vocabulary to recall her husband’s return from battle:
Qui fece il mio bel lume a noi ritorno,
di regie spoglie carco e ricche prede;
ahi, con quanto dolor l’occhio rivede
quei lochi ove mi fea già chiaro il giorno.
Di mille glorie alor cinto d’intorno
e d’onor vero, in la più alta sede
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SHANNON MCHUGH
facean de l’opre udite intera fede
l’ardito volto e ’l parlar saggio e adorno.
Vinto dai prieghi miei poi ne mostrava
le belle cicatrici, e ’l tempo e ’l modo
de le vittorie sue tante e sı̀ chiare;
quanta pena or mi dà gioia mi dava,
e ’n questo e ’n quel pensier piangendo godo
tra poche dolci e assai lacrime amare. (A1:61)
Colonna is purposeful in making D’Avalos’s identity specific, a characterization
distinctly different from the sort of historically anonymous and felicitously named
love object that we find in Petrarch’s poetry. This is a beloved who is more than a
mere lock of hair or gust of wind, neither disembodied myth nor ethereal
idealization. This is no immutable lauro, but rather a man of flesh and blood, his
corporeality reinforced by mention of his ‘beautiful scars’. The body’s very
imperfections are what tellingly marks it as belonging to her husband. Contrast
this specificity with Petrarch’s scattered descriptions of Laura, which were
sufficiently vague and generalized as to make them appropriable by generations of
future Petrarchists, all of whom could praise the yellow hair and red lips of their
respective love objects. Colonna, on the other hand, manages to maintain the
position of active Petrarchan lover and viewer while preserving her beloved from
poetic anonymity. His distinctiveness is further delineated by the fact that he
speaks, narrating his great adventures. Colonna is purposeful in describing her
husband’s verbal expression as wise and eloquent, ‘adorno’ in its rhetorical
exemplarity. The reader gets a sense of D’Avalos as a real man, as a human being
who moves and speaks and who bears a flawed and therefore recognizable body.
Indeed, for Colonna this body is all the more pleasing because it is neither perfect
nor invulnerable. The masculine form she drafts is martial and virile, yet
simultaneously complicated and compromised, and it does not lose its appeal or its
prowess for this, but rather becomes more praiseworthy.
If her love object’s male body is not invincible, that may explain in part why it
can allow for shared agency with the female lover, as the tercets of ‘Qui fece’
reveal. Colonna presents herself as existing in partnership with her husband:
D’Avalos, seemingly indomitable in battle, is ‘vinto’ only by his wife, who begs
him to share the signs, both scars and words, that record and recount his tale.
Colonna ties herself to his martial ‘victories’ with the pun on her name, ‘vittorie’,
in line 11, reinforcing her own singular triumph over him with her ‘prieghi’. This
partnership is supplemented by her use of ‘chiare’ in the same line, denoting the
‘illustrious’ or ‘renowned’ nature of his deeds, and an echo of the ‘chiaro’ in line 4
that refers to the ‘bright’ quality of her beloved sun. The fact that his deeds are
described as such reveals at the same time their limitations. The beloved’s feats and
aforementioned locution can only go so far; actions and speech are ephemeral
unless committed to writing. His words and his scars form the centre of the
narrative, but also become the marks that Colonna subsequently translates into
her own poetry. Indeed, his actions within the fiction of the poem mimic Colonna’s
own process of preserving them in writing in that the signs of his virtù tend from
the visual to the verbal: both of his ‘proofs’, his scars and his words narrating when
and how they were obtained (‘le belle cicatrici, e ’l tempo e ’l modo’), are governed
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
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by the same verb, ‘mostrava’. D’Avalos ‘revealed’ the physical signs of his story,
and then he ‘revealed’ the verbal ones. The process parallels Colonna’s own
employment of enargeia or evidentia as she translates the visual into the verbal,
‘seeing again’ (‘l’occhie rivede’) as she pens her own vivid and pathetic narration.
And because his deeds become more ‘chiare’ as she writes of them, her production
celebrates the enhanced effect of both participants’ combined virtues. One might
here recall Ariosto’s famous praise of Colonna in the proem to canto 37 of the
Orlando furioso, in which he eulogizes Colonna as a moon brightly reflecting
the sun’s light. As Virginia Cox has suggested, the compliment may be a
backhanded one, a suggestion that Colonna is a poet who is merely receptive,
reflecting the glory of her bel sole without producing her own luminosity.12 In
Colonna’s poem, however, we understand rather that her husband’s achievements
only obtain their ‘bright’ quality as she writes of them.
With D’Avalos’s conquests making up the substance of her poetry, Colonna
places herself in the same praise cycle created by Petrarch, in which the poetlover’s words bring fame to the love object, the ‘laura’, which in exchange earns
poetic fame, the lauro, for the poet herself. Where Colonna’s poetry differs most
significantly from the Petrarchan cycle, however, is in its portrayal of partnership.
Her verse lacks the fetishism of self-reflexivity, of signifier without signified, that
John Freccero has described as the hallmark of Petrarch’s idolatrous poetics.13
Rather, Colonna envisions a different paradigm in which both members form an
alliance and each produces something worthy, establishing a relationship between
martial and literary accomplishments. Unlike the narrative provided by Ariosto’s
lyric, in Colonna’s own telling, her literary triumphs are mutually and equally
elevated with the beloved’s military exploits — if not given the advantage.
Of particular interest in this regard is one of the poet’s earliest surviving poems,
‘Excelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo’ (A2:1), a poem that reveals a Colonna
markedly different from her typecasting. Otherwise known as the Pistola, the
poem recounts the capture and imprisonment of D’Avalos and Colonna’s father,
also a military officer, at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512. It dates ostensibly to that
year, its composition thus preceding the first 1538 publication of Colonna’s Rime
by a considerable amount of time.14 The poem exhibits clear disparities with her
Petrarchan canzoniere. It is one of the few remnants from the early period of
Colonna’s writing in vita before the death of her husband in 1525. The metre, a
capitolo in terza rima demonstrating her formation within the poesia cortigiana
tradition, contrasts with Colonna’s almost exclusive use of the sonnet later on. It
takes the form of a verse epistle, and, as one addressed from an abandoned woman
to her lover, it finds its origins not in the canzonieri of Petrarch or Bembo, but
rather the Heroides of Ovid. Its ostensible bizarreness has caused some critics to
set it apart, even to go so far as postulating the mature Colonna’s rejection of the
poem.15 However, its Ovidian themes, rhetoric of self-promotion, and gender
dynamics reverberate throughout her later poetry, connecting this verse epistle to
her broader body of work and making it a rich site for excavation.
The poem’s 112 lines can be divided into three main sections: a discursive
opening lament; a narration of dark auguries that appear to the poet on Easter
Sunday, portending the arrival of an actual messenger bearing the devastating
news; and a concluding invective for her husband’s abandonment. Of all of Ovid’s
heroines, Penelope, faithful consort to the wandering Ulysses, is the figure with
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whom Colonna aligns herself most strongly. She chooses the figure who is arguably
presented as the most virtuous within the ancient collection, one of the few women
writing from within the sanctioned bonds of marriage, and therefore one of the
sole figures whose passion would be justified from a sixteenth-century point of
view. Patricia Phillippy has highlighted the importance of understanding how the
letter-writing figures of Ovid’s collection were read by the Renaissance
community, and could be particularly useful to women writers, as various female
exempla of virtue and vice.16 Accordingly, we find Colonna casting herself in a
positive ethical light through the insertion of her narrative self among the ancient
cast of women worthies. At the same time, however, she is endowing her text with
an enviable authorial pedigree by means of her act of imitating Ovid. Colonna’s
lament falls within a microgenre of Heroides imitations that had come into vogue
in this period of the Renaissance; however, all of the other writers behind these
deserted women were, in fact, men.17 She is the only woman writer in a tradition
that, dating back to Ovid, had previously consisted only of men writing women.
Her poetry presents the novel unification of the figures of author and heroine. Her
letter is simultaneously artefactual and artificial, an epistle that is both ‘authentic’
given her female sex and real-life tragedy, and yet also a highly stylized
interpretation of a well-known poetic forerunner.
And, like Ovid’s letter-writing ladies, Colonna takes what was originally the
hero’s story — here, D’Avalos’s tale of battle and apprehension — and makes it her
own. Carlo Vecce points out that the only part of the poem in which objective
historical events are recounted is the delivery of the message relating the men’s
imprisonment, a moment that is theatrically delayed, coming only at the end of a
series of dark portents.18 The entire poem is narrated from her point of view; it is
her story alone. The extreme subjectivity of her opening lines makes this clear, as
the emphasis is on her writing, her narration, her pain:
Excelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo
per te narrar fra quante dubbie voglie,
fra quanti aspri martir dogliosa io vivo. (A2:1.1–3)
She declares to D’Avalos that his deeds are known far and wide (‘benché li fatti
tuoi al Ciel sian noti’ [A2:1.22]), but as in ‘Qui fece’, the reader comprehends that
those feats will not live on in perpetuity if Colonna does not capture them with
that very act of writing described in the opening line. The memory of him exists
only as she narrates it. It is her field that has the market on perpetuities. Colonna’s
rhetoric of praise and blame, standard fare for the Heroides, has been carefully
orchestrated to the benefit of her own authorial ethos. This is clear when Colonna
declares that D’Avalos has already shown himself to be a Hector or an Achilles:
la vostra gran virtù s’è dimostrata
d’un Ettor, d’un Achille; ma che fia
questo per me, dolente, abbandonata? (A2:1.28–30)
Colonna names men who achieved great things, but also about whom great things
were written. These heroes — like D’Avalos — needed poets. Petrarch had
expressed this very sentiment in Rvf. 187, thematic companion to Rvf. 186,
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
351
mentioned above as being influential on Colonna’s poetics of praise. Ultimately,
even as Colonna continuously associates her husband with glory and virtù, she
ceaselessly devalues the epic impulse to victory: your feats are heroic, she says, but
what are they to me? Rather, by forcing the heroic story from the realm of Trojan
and Greek warriors to that of the wife Penelope, from epic to female-authored
epistle, she creates a text in which his deeds are subjugated to her emotions, her
point of view, her voice, and her writing. The tension between Colonna’s two
worlds, fabricated and historical, enables the poet to develop from her project of
self-fictionalizing a very real act of author-making that commences with the first
articulation of the poetic ‘I’ in the opening ‘questa ti scrivo’.
Though to this point in the poem it may seem as if Colonna presents the two
sexes as divided and combative, she undermines this antagonism in the third and
final portion of the capitolo. This new turn commences with a pun on her name,
the climax of her construction of authorial ethos, as she asserts that her husband’s
success is literally contingent upon her:
Se vittoria volevi io t’era a presso,
ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei,
e cerca ognun seguir chi fugge d’esso.
Nocque a Pompeo, come saper tu dei,
lasciar Cornelia, ed a Catone ancora
nocque lasciando Marzia in pianti rei.
Seguir si deve il sposo dentro e fora,
e s’egli pate affanno ella patisca,
e lieto lieta, e se vi more mora;
a quel che arrisca l’un l’altro s’arrisca;
equali in vita equali siano in morte,
e ciò che avien a lui a lei sortisca.
Felice Mitridate e tua consorte,
che faceste equalmente di fortuna
i fausti giorni e le disgrazie torte! (A2:1.91–105; emphasis mine)
D’Avalos cannot achieve one ‘vittoria’ without the other. Indeed, the one is the
other. Colonna reinforces her gesture of auto-advancement with her explicit selfcomparison to wifely exempla from antiquity, reminding her husband that Pompey
and Cato lived to regret deserting their wives. Then, in a markedly unorthodox
move, she transitions from the abstract parity that has been suggested by the
equation of vittoria and Vittoria into a more concrete proposal in the form of a
marriage of equal partnership. Her linguistic play in this passage emphasizes the
equivalency of the roles she envisions, demonstrated in the way that she assigns
husband and wife morphological variations of the same words: if he suffers
(‘pate’), she should suffer (‘patisca’); she should be happy (‘lieta’) when he is happy
(‘lieto’); and if he dies (‘more’), she ought to die as well (‘mora’). In the next tercet
she goes so far as to declare outright that they ought to be equals, and in this case
she assigns them verbs and adjectives that are finally exactly identical: ‘a quel che
arrisca l’un l’altro s’arrisca; | equali in vita equali siano in morte’. In the next line,
she places man and woman side by side, figuratively and semantically: ‘e ciò che
avien a lui a lei sortisca’. Then, having provided Pompey and Cato as two negative
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examples of conjugal partnership, Colonna introduces a final paragon of marital
collaboration: Mithridates, whom Colonna describes as a ‘felice’ husband, and his
wife Hypiscratea, with whom, the poet marvels, the king lived ‘equalmente’. It is
significant that Colonna concludes this portion of the poem by celebrating a
consort who accompanied her husband into battle, a feat accomplished when the
queen cross-dressed as a servant. Hypiscratea is not rigidly but rather fluidly
gendered. She is a woman able to negotiate feminine duty on a masculine field,
dressed in various levels of sex and fiction — not at all unlike a female poet
imitating male authors penning fictional women writers. Colonna pushes beyond
what appears at first glance to be a battle of the sexes — female poet versus epic
hero, fighting on the well-trod Ovidian ground where men are for war and women
for peace — to the poetic innovation of suggesting a mutually beneficial equality
between husband and wife, lover and beloved. Colonna presents their relationship
as a cooperation in which his virile actions and words give rise to her writing,
charting a path of alternative masculinities and femininities.
Just because Colonna is engaged in the sober task of defining new male-female
relations, however, does not mean that her interests never veer into the carnal.
Despite her frequently Neoplatonic poetics and her vows of perpetual widowhood,
Colonna still experiments with the erotic. In ‘Se in oro, in cigno, in tauro il sommo
Giove’, her desire to reunite with D’Avalos is represented in highly sexualized
terms, belying her typical characterization as prim widow:
Se in oro, in cigno, in tauro il sommo Giove
converso fu da cieco error sospinto,
dal divin soglio al terren labirinto
si mosse quel che gli altri ferma e move,
Amor, s’apprezzi sol mirabil prove,
da gloria vana e stran desir convinto
portami ov’or dal proprio valor spinto
rifulge il mio bel Sol con luci nove.
Maggior miracol fia, più altera impresa
di trasportarmi al Ciel con mortal velo
ch’indur con umil forma in terra i dei.
Ma se d’alto desir la mente accesa
vaneggia, astretta d’amoroso zelo,
porgi tua forza ardir ai pensier miei. (A1:25)
Colonna aligns her own yearning for her husband with the erotic exploits of
Jupiter on earth, alluding to his amorous trysts with Danaë (as the shower of gold),
Leda (the swan), and Europa (the bull). These myths were often given a safely
Neoplatonic translation in the Renaissance, read as spiritual rather than physical
unions, an interpretation to which Colonna alludes with her request to see her
beloved with ‘new [i.e., transcendent] eyes’. Yet the erotic force of the tales in
Colonna’s rendering is undeniable. The relationship between Colonna and her
deceased husband is likened to the wanton god seducing mortal women, an
association that edges the poet’s depiction of her love into realms notably
corporeal. This lustier intimation is underpinned by Colonna’s ominous
description of both Jupiter’s descents and Love’s contributions to the escapades.
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
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Jupiter’s desire is described as a ‘blind error’ and the earth as a ‘labyrinth’, both
metaphors carrying valances of darkness and confusion. Love is portrayed as
scornful and irrational, almost depraved, compelled by ‘vain glory’ and ‘strange
desire’, a divinity overturning the natural order by changing gods into animals.
Moreover, in this poem, Colonna refuses to reject the bodily in favour of the
spiritual. Though much of her other verse features her longing for death, this
seeming the most efficacious means to reuniting with her husband, here she
expresses an alternative desire, specifically asking that Love transport her ‘in
mortal veil’. This time, when Colonna re-joins her husband, she wants her body to
play a role in that reunion.
The intensity of the sonnet’s sexually charged tone is complemented by the
vigorousness of Colonna’s challenge to Love. She audaciously dares him to
transport her to heaven, belittling his feats of divine metamorphosis by declaring
that it would be ‘greater miracle’ and ‘more impressive endeavour’ to overcome
her earthly and seemingly insurmountable distance from her beloved. Reinforcing
the virility of Colonna’s provocation is the masculine role that she obtains within
the parameters of her divine analogy. Though one reading would have Colonna
playing the Danaë to her husband’s Jupiter, the more straightforward interpretation
aligns her narrative voice with the active desire of the male god. Like Jupiter, it is
Colonna who is driven by ‘blind error’ to be ‘converted’, her passion and her agency
that would mobilize any potential transformation and union. The purposefulness
behind this gesture is underscored by the utter lack of repentance that Colonna
exhibits in the final tercet, where her mind is ‘aflame with desire’ and ‘amorous zeal’.
Though she recognizes that her mind may be ‘raving’ (‘vaneggia’), she cannot find it
within herself to beg pardon or convert her will, rather begging that Love
supplement her daring with his own ‘forza’. The verb vaneggiare appears in two
celebrated penitential sonnets in Petrarch’s canzoniere, both cases in which the poet
expresses remorse for his amatory ardour. ‘Et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto,
| e ’l pentérsi’, he laments in his proemial sonnet (Rvf. 1.12–13; emphasis mine). In
another sonnet, he begs God’s forgiveness and guidance ‘dopo le notti vaneggiando
spese, | con quel fero desio ch’al cor s’accese’ (Rvf. 62.2–3). Importantly, Colonna’s
verse by contrast has no room for shame or piety, any ‘alto desir’ (1. 12) giving way
to a burning raving that seems to draw her rather nearer to Love’s ‘stran desir’ (1. 6)
as Colonna embraces her passion with both of her wholly corporeal arms. Such
unrepentant female desire is typically considered to be the province of Colonna’s
near-contemporary Stampa. Indeed, much attention has been devoted to the
unabashed ardour of Stampa’s poetry, where it takes concrete shape in the form of
the salamander or the phoenix; Jane Tylus has recently described Stampa as ‘the
animal who thrives on flame and rises again from the ashes’.19 By way of contrast,
Tylus posits Colonna as the ‘antisalamander’ or ‘antiphoenix’: the poet who will
know but a single lover and will never again burn with the flame of desire.20
Colonna herself asserts that she will never again burn for another man (‘’l vigour |
del primo foco mio tutt’altri estinse’ [A1:7.3–4]). However, my reading argues for an
increased appreciation of the fervour of the first flame, which continues to blaze
within the poet after her husband’s death (‘Imaginata luce arde e consuma | sostiene
e pasce l’alma, e ’l foco antico | con vigor novo soffia, aviva e ’ncende’ [A1:27.9–
11]). Colonna is no icy widow, as she demonstrates in ‘Se in oro’, where gender is all
flux and fluidity, and her depiction there of both her virile challenge and her
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SHANNON MCHUGH
masculine desire undermines any reductive understanding of Colonna as the safely
and chastely feminine wife of a heroically masculine husband.
The themes of masculine lust and desire’s ‘blind error’ feature again in ‘Occhi,
piangiamo tanto’. This poem is another outlier of sorts, its anomalies stemming
from both its metrical and thematic distinction, in that it is one of Colonna’s few
extant madrigals, as well as the surprising site of the poet’s engagement with the
highly sexualized myth of Actaeon:
Occhi, piangiamo tanto
che voi perdiate il lume ed io il timore
di non veder più mai luce minore,
che se basta mio ardir, vostro vigore,
a penetrar il Cielo,
sdegnar debbiamo ogni altra vista in terra,
e con l’imagin bella sculta al core,
scarca d’ogni altro zelo,
contempliamo il valor ch’ivi si serra,
e avrem per breve guerra
eterna pace; a lei debito onore
darem fuggendo d’Atteon l’errore. (A2:52)
Though the poem does imply a Neoplatonic reading of the poet’s desire, featuring
as it does her single-minded devotion to her husband and a will to raise her eyes to
his light in heaven, it is at the same time indisputably erotic. Once again, we find
Colonna extraordinarily applying a masculine, and explicitly sexual, mythical
identity to her desire, this time the mortal Actaeon, whose forbidden sight fell
upon the naked goddess Diana in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and who by her divine
punishment was transformed into a stag to be torn apart by his own hunting dogs.
Subtending Colonna’s poetic transvestism is a description of the hoped-for ascent
to heaven that is itself presented in particularly virile terms, a ‘penetration’ of the
celestial realm enabled by ‘daring’ and ‘vigour’ after a ‘war’ down on the earthly
plain. Thus even if Colonna’s romantic ardour for her beloved is sanctioned by the
heteronormativity of marriage, her presentation of it here is sexually complicated
and even troubling, represented by a myth rife with the dangers of transgressive
seeing and corporeal undoing, as she expresses simultaneous fear of and longing
for both temptation and redemption. Actaeon’s story represents bodily peril by
both bestial metamorphosis and fatal dismemberment. Colonna further exacerbates this state of corporeal uncertainty by layering the human-to-animal
metamorphosis with her own feminine-to-masculine shapeshifting as she experiments with the contradictions and obscurities of gender and sexuality.
Colonna’s unconventional and unexpected treatment of male and female bodies
contradicts the critical tradition of reading a distinct gender dichotomy in
Petrarchan lyric, a tendency which several studies in recent years have called into
question. Catherine Bates, for one, encourages debunking the myth of the hypermasculine and masterful Petrarchan poet in favour of appreciating the ‘alternative
masculinities’ expressed by male versifiers who wilfully place themselves in
disempowered positions in order to demonstrate their authentic abjection.21
Particularly of interest regarding Colonna is how Bates questions the relationship
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
355
between Petrarch and his love object in the Canzoniere. Bates identifies two
antithetical hermeneutical practices. The first is to read ‘intersubjectively: that is,
between a poetic subject on the one hand (autonomous, monumental, masterly,
lauro), and a poetic object, on the other (scattered, fragmented, in parts, laura): a
dialectic which (as the grammatical differentiation in the Italian neatly demonstrates) rests on and perpetuates the gender binary’.22 The alternative is to read
‘intrasubjectively — that is, not between the poet and his lady, but rather, within the
poet himself: a move which takes as its point of departure a certain scepticism
toward the gender binary and the model of ‘‘consolidated’’ masculinity to which it
so often seems to give rise’.23 The upshot of all of this is a new reading of the poetsubject, in which Petrarch’s primary activity can be seen not as dismembering the
beloved so much as dismembering himself — that is, not a male subject who enacts
violence upon the female sex so much as one who disrupts and destabilizes his own
being.24 I would argue that Colonna both continues and reinterprets Petrarch’s
destabilizing gesture, translating his poetic expression and all of its gender
complexities onto her own female poet-subject and her male poet-object. In
breaking down the sexual complexities of this scene, any reading is obliged to
consider the various and ‘perverse’ relations that these layers of gender allow for: she
gives herself eyes both female (Colonna the poet) and male (Actaeon, Petrarch) at
risk of committing the erotic ‘errore’ of gazing upon a beloved whose body is also
both male (her husband D’Avalos) and female (Diana, Laura).25
Elements of Petrarch’s destabilization of gender have been recognized before
Bates by such scholars as Robert Durling and Giuseppe Mazzotta, both of whom
have pointed out that the major emblems that Petrarch utilizes for Laura also stand
for the poet himself at various times.26 Depending on the poem, one or the other
may be the deer or stag (compare Rvf. 23 and 323). Petrarch may even take the
shape of the laurel, that symbol most associated with Laura; in Rvf. 23, it is the poet
who is transformed into the plant, ‘facendomi d’uom vivo un lauro verde’ (and by
extension playing the Daphne to her Apollo). Colonna’s rehearsal of Petrarch’s
sexual adaptability is paralleled by her imitation of his treatment of the absent body
in his ‘Non al suo amante piú Dı̈ana piacque’ (Rvf. 52). Like Colonna’s ‘Occhi,
piangiamo tanto’, ‘Non al suo amante’ is a madrigal alluding to the Actaeon myth
and featuring a sexualized sight, a ‘vista in terra’, that fails to fall upon a body:
Non al suo amante piú Dı̈ana piacque,
quando per tal ventura tutta ignuda
la vide in mezzo de le gelide acque,
ch’a me la pastorella alpestra et cruda
posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo,
ch’a l’aura il vago et biondo capel chiuda,
tal che mi fece, or quand’egli arde ’l cielo,
tutto tremar d’un amoroso gielo. (52)
Here, instead of praising Laura’s figure, he eulogizes her veil as it is laundered in a
stream, fetishizing it to the point of declaring it more pleasing to him than the sight
of Diana’s body to Actaeon. Margaret Brose has used this poem as an example of
how, for Petrarch, no literal body is necessary to ensure that the verse ‘trembles
with erotic voyeurism’: ‘The veil, diaphanous and seductively thin (note its
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356
SHANNON MCHUGH
diminutive form), does not cover or separate the body but has supplanted it; that
is, it has transvalued the body’.27 Similarly, Colonna’s ‘Occhi, piangiamo tanto’
lacks a body at the end of the gaze. Her husband is dead, rendering an ‘earthly
sight’ of him impossible. Through Petrarch she has learned how much eroticism is
possible in the poetic voyeurism of the absent body. Colonna’s madrigal vibrates
with anxiety over a desire that should have disappeared with the beloved’s death
but has not, and in the end the absence of his body is as sexually perilous as its
presence might have been.
This erotic poetics of absence is reinforced by a verbal lack. In both Ovid’s tale
and another of Petrarch’s poems, ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’ (Rvf. 23),
the famous canzone of the metamorphoses, the fear of being ripped apart or
‘scattered’ is always accompanied by an explicit horror of the loss of the voice. In
Ovid, Diana dares Actaeon to speak — literally, narrare — if he can. His death
then follows upon multiple vain attempts to enunciate his true identity: ‘Actaeon
ego sum’ (Ovid 3.230). In his canzone, Petrarch exhibits an obsession with
rehearsing his own story (the first stanza alone features multiple words of telling:
cantando, canterò, scripto) and with the way in which each Ovidian transformation causes him to lose his power of speech. Colonna’s interpretation of Actaeon
differs in that she expresses no explicit unease over the potential loss of voice.
Nevertheless, fearfulness as well as eroticism emerge from the not-saying.
Petrarch’s language in the aforementioned poems is unambiguously carnal: in
‘Nel dolce tempo’, he comes across his Laura-Diana ‘fera bella et cruda | in una
fonte ignuda’ (Rvf. 23.149–50). In ‘Non al suo amante’, he conjures up Diana
‘tutta ignuda’ among ‘gelide acque’ (Rvf. 52.2–3), and the scene ‘pleases’ him,
causing him to ‘tremar d’un amoroso gielo’. Additionally, we find Petrarch
veritably relishing his transformations, prolonging the moment with his usage of a
never-ending present tense: ‘mi trasformo’, he narrates (Rvf. 23.159), and he
describes his final metamorphosis into Actaeon’s stag as an on-going state, saying,
‘et anchor de’ miei can’ fuggo lo stormo’ (Rvf. 23.160; emphasis mine).28 By
comparison, Colonna’s very silence on the sexual is what cries out for attention.
The reader receives no narration of a moment of sight, and the madrigal ends
suddenly and forebodingly on the short phrase, ‘fuggendo d’Atteon l’errore’. The
last line is a negative space in which words and even physical presence are denied
because Colonna is fleeing both physically and verbally. The entire poem pivots
around what does not happen, what is not said. It is a metamorphosis poem in
which there is no metamorphosis. Colonna, like Petrarch, makes use of a
progressive present. However, the activity is a negative one, her use of ‘fuggendo’
serving to avoid rather than to prolong the transformation, ever placing her a
moment ahead of the change. Whereas Petrarch’s whole canzoniere is poised in
stasis between the moments of Actaeon’s sight and his loss of speech — the poet
has glimpsed Diana and been transformed, yet his very act of writing demonstrates
that he can still verbalize — Colonna checks herself before the transgressive vision
has occurred. The form of the poem, the metrically slight madrigal, further
exacerbates the negative space that it describes, almost giving the impression that
Colonna is losing her capacity to speak by the end of the poem. Brose has shown
how Petrarch employs verbal plenitude to mask his fear of absence; Colonna’s tool
instead is a verbal deficiency.29 Like Petrarch’s trembling at the gaze of the veil, it
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
357
is the very state of absence in Colonna’s poem — both corporeal and verbal — that
flames the imagination and creates its darkly erotic poetics.
Given that Colonna was so purposeful in shaping her public image, it is not
surprising that a poem this far off the map of her lyric territory would be a private
one. ‘Occhi, piangiamo tanto’ went entirely unpublished and is to be found in but a
single manuscript.30 When the madrigal’s highly sexualized nature and unusual
format are considered in conjunction with its public unavailability, it would appear
that Colonna conceived of it as an experimentation in ideas on desire and poetry that
did not fit the ‘myth’ of her virtuous Petrarchist persona. This is an image, of course,
that she herself fostered, as she cannily perceived that the new voice of a female poet
would be less unnerving to readers if her love lyric were paired with an austere
authorial persona, one both safely feminine and sufficiently masculine.31 Not for
nothing did her poetic correspondent and spiritual intimate Michelangelo praise her
as ‘un uomo in una donna’.32 If Colonna’s public authorial ethos was soundly
rendered as femininely virile, then ‘Occhi, piangiamo tanto’ can be seen as a private
space in which the poet worked through the themes of gender and sexuality in more
unorthodox ways. In the end, it is the very anomalous and ‘unofficial’ nature of this
madrigal that demands that it be read and reflected upon for insight into Colonna’s
poetic exploration. Interestingly, in the manuscript in question, ‘Occhi, piangiamo
tanto’ is surrounded on either side by two poems that were themselves both
metrically unusual for the poet and infrequently circulated: the madrigal ‘Non più
timor omai’ (A2:10) and the strambotto ‘Il sommo Re del Ciel godea in Se stesso’
(E31). Like the Actaeon madrigal, both went unpublished, and their existence is
known solely through this manuscript. This curious node of experimental poetry, at
odds with the conventional image of Colonna as formulaic Petrarchist, is a fitting
concluding illustration of my contention that her secular poetry is not quite as we
have come to know it and merits further exploration. As ‘Occhi, piangiamo tanto’
and the other poems in this essay demonstrate, Colonna refused to adhere to strict
binaries of female/male, abject/empowered, and lover/beloved within the bounds of
her poetry, a move which allowed her to surpass simple subversion of the gender
paradigm in favour of an entirely different template, one in which feminine and
masculine can form a productive partnership. In this system, the body has a role to
play, one that can be quite earthly and erotic. Acknowledging the fleshly and genderadaptable bodies that inhabit the rime amorose in all of those poems’ experimental
artistry allows for new approaches to appreciating not only Colonna’s corpus, but
also the unheralded variety of the broader Petrarchan tradition.
NOTES
1
My warmest thanks are due to Virginia
Cox, Jane Tylus, Jessica Goethals,
Melissa Swain, and Anna Wainwright
for their help with and suggestions on
this essay, as well as to an anonymous
reviewer for The Italianist for providing comprehensive comments.
See primarily the significant work done
by Abigail Brundin on Colonna’s reli-
gious poetry: Vittoria Colonna and the
Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008);
‘Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of
Reform’, Italian Studies, 57 (2002),
61–74; ‘Vittoria Colonna and the
Virgin Mary’, Modern Language
Review, 96 (2001), 61–81; as well as
Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A
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358
2
3
4
SHANNON MCHUGH
Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. by
Abigail Brundin (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005). For a full
bibliography on Colonna’s ‘spiritual’
verse, see Brundin, Spiritual Poetics.
There has been no comparable body of
work produced on the ‘amorous’ poetry.
Notable contributions include Colonna,
Sonetti in morte di Francesco Ferrante
d’Avalos marchese di Pescara, ed. by
Tobia R. Toscano (Milan: Mondadori,
1998); and Carlo Vecce, ‘Vittoria
Colonna: il codice epistolare della poesia femminile’, Critica letteraria, 78
(1993), 3–34. See also Virginia Cox,
‘Women Writers & the Canon in
Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of
Vittoria Colonna’, in Strong Voices,
Weak History: Early Modern Women
Writers and Canons in England, France,
and Italy, ed. by Pamela Benson and
Victoria
Kirkham
(Ann
Arbor:
University of Michigan, 2005), pp. 14–
31; this article includes a useful general
bibliography as well. For bibliography
prior to 1990, see Fiora A. Bassanese,
‘Vittoria Colonna’, in Italian Women
Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. by Rinaldina Russell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994),
pp. 85–94.
Brundin puts forth this hypothesis in
Spiritual Poetics, pp. ix–x.
Benedetto Croce, Poesia popolare e
poesia d’arte: studi sulla poesia italiana
dal Tre al Cinquecento, ed. by Piero
Cudini (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991),
pp. 379, 381.
For a recent example, see Marina
Zancan, who in describing Colonna
and Stampa’s canzonieri in relation to
the Petrarchan tradition labels them,
respectively, ‘l’una tendenzialmente consonante, l’altra dissonante’. She goes on
to position Colonna as the straitlaced
foil to the uninhibited Stampa. Marina Zancan, ‘Quadri rinascimentali.
Interferenze delle prospettive di genere
nella tradizione storico-letteraria’, in
Verso una storia di genere della letteratura italiana. Percorsi critici e gender
studies, ed. by Virginia Cox and Chiara
5
Ferrari (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), pp.
103–19 (p.111). A more mitigated position is that of Brundin, who has rejected
the claims of some scholars that the later
‘spiritual’ Colonna repudiated her earlier amorous lyric (see for example
‘Virgin Mary’, p. 64), but still describes
the rime amorose less in terms of their
own merit per se and more in relation to
their place within Colonna’s overall
poetic trajectory: ‘The amorous and
sorrowful context established by her
verses in memory of D’Avalos, however,
was only the very beginning of
Colonna’s poetic journey, and it is in
her later, mature spiritual sonnets that
the originality and startling beauty of
her lyric voice become clearly apparent’
(Brundin, Introduction to Colonna,
Sonnets for Michelangelo, p. 4; emphasis mine).
The term rime amorose is taken from
Alan Bullock’s edition of Colonna’s
poems, in which they are classified
under three categories: A 5 rime
amorose; S 5 rime spirituali; E 5
rime epistolari. See Colonna, Rime,
ed. by Alan Bullock (Roma: Laterza,
1982). For the present article, the
designation of rime amorose serves as
a convenient shorthand for poems in
which the subject matter is the poet’s
deceased husband, as contrasted with
her later poetry on religious themes.
However, as some critics have pointed
out, this strict division was not the
work of the poet, but rather editors of
sixteenth-century print editions. As
such, the categorization is an artificial
one and apparently not representative
of how Colonna regarded her own
work. See Tobia R. Toscano, Letterati
corti accademie. La letteratura a Napoli
nella prima metà del Cinquecento
(Naples: Loffredo, 2000), pp. 35–36.
Indeed, some scholars have striven to
read the two poetic ‘categories’
together, positing that this more closely
reflects Colonna’s own understanding
of her work; see, for example, Brundin,
‘Virgin Mary’, pp. 63–64; and
Rinaldina Russell, ‘The Mind’s Pursuit
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RETHINKING VITTORIA COLONNA
6
7
8
9
10
of the Divine. A Survey of Secular and
Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s
Sonnets’, Forum Italicum, 26 (1992),
14–27.
For the text of the letter, which was
addressed to Vettore Soranzo on 9
April 1530, see Pietro Bembo, Lettere,
ed. by Ernesto Travi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987–93),
4 vols, 3, p. 126 (no. 1078). For the
context of the letter, see Carlo
Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo e su
Vittoria Colonna’, in Carlo Dionisotti:
Scritti sul Bembo, ed. by Claudio Vela
(Torino: Einaudi, 2002), pp. 115–40
(pp. 119–21); and Giovanna Rabitti,
‘Vittoria Colonna, Bembo e Firenze: Un
caso di ricezione e qualche postilla’,
Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 44
(April 1992), 127–55 (pp. 147–48).
Francesco Agostino della Chiesa,
Theatro delle donne letterate con un
breve discorso della preminenza e perfettione del sesso donnesco (Mondavi:
Giovanni Gissandi & Giovanni Tommaso
Rossi, 1620), p. 298.
Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Mose:
Women’s Workig in Camre–Reformation
Italy (Bathmate Johns Hopkins University
Prss, 2011), p.57.
The numbering of the poems is derived
from Bullock’s edition, in which the
rime amorose are further ordered into
groups A1 and A2. The former is
applied to poems contained within the
manuscript that Bullock identifies as
the ‘definitive’ version of the poet’s
work, while the latter indicates her
additional ‘dispersed’ poems. For more
on this manuscript, see Colonna, Rime,
pp. 325–28; and ‘A Hitherto Unexplored
Manuscript of 100 poems by Vittoria
Colonna in the Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, Florence’, Italian Studies, 21
(1966), 42–56. For a disputation with
Bullock’s identification, see Dionisotti,
pp. 137–39; and Toscano, Letterati corti
accademie, pp. 37–43.
All citations of Petrarch’s poetry are
from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere,
ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan:
Mondadori, 1996).
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
359
Cox has discussed Colonna’s conscious
fashioning of a heroic beloved via redeployment of Rvf. 187, in ‘Sixteenth–
Century Women Petrarchists and the
legacy of Laura, Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005),
583–606 (p.599).
Cox, ‘The Case of Vittoria Colonna’,
p. 19.
John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the
Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, in Literary
Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. by
Patricia Parker and David Quint
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986), pp. 20–32.
The Pistola was first printed in Fabrizio
Luna’s Vocabulario di cinquemila vocabuli toschi (Naples: Giovanni Sultzbach,
1536).
Vecce hypothesized that it displeased
Colonna to see these youthful verses
printed 1536, positing that, by the time
the poem was printed, it was to
Colonna’s mind ‘datato’ stylistically,
metrically, and linguistically, and that
it fell far afield of what she was trying
to accomplish at that time (Vecce, p.
12). Toscano has proposed that
Colonna destroyed the other in vita
poems for similar reasons (Letterati
corti accademie, p. 20).
Patricia Phillippy, ‘‘‘Altera Dido’’: The
Model of Ovid’s Heroides in the Poems
of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica
Franco’, Italica, 69.1 (1992), 1–18.
The succession of late fourteenth-century of Heroides imitations is discussed
in Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy,
1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008), pp. 49–50.
Vecce, p. 16.
Jane Tylus, Introduction to Gaspara
Stampa, The Complete Poems: The
1554 Edition of the Rime, ed. by Troy
Tower and Jane Tylus, trans. by Jane
Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010), p. 23.
Tylus, p. 23.
Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender
and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007). For Bates, this
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360
22
23
24
25
26
SHANNON MCHUGH
virilising practice is emblematized by
the writings of Thomas Greene and
Stephen Greenblatt (pp. 9–12).
Bates, p. 95.
Bates, p. 95.
Nancy J. Vickers’s influential article is
the definitive text about Laura’s voiceless, dismembered body, as well as its
effect on early modern women writers:
‘If the speaker’s ‘‘self’’ (his text, his
‘‘corpus’’: ) is to be unified,’ she asserts,
‘it would seem to require the repetition of her dismembered image’.
‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman
and Scattered Rhyme’, in Feminism
and Renaissance Studies, ed. by
Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 233–48
(p.239).
For an analogous reading, see Bates,
pp. 89–135, on the transvestism and
the Actaeon/Diana setting that play
into the blazon, ‘What tongue can her
perfections tell?’, in Philip Sydney’s
New Arcadia.
Robert Durling, Introduction to Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems:
The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics,
ed. and trans. by Robert Durling
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1976), pp. 31–32; and Giuseppe
Mazzotta, ‘The Canzoniere and the
Language of the Self’, Studies in
Philology, 75.3 (1978), 271–96
(pp. 280–82).
27
28
29
30
31
32
Margaret Brose, ‘Fetishizing the Veil:
Petrarch’s Poetics of Rematerialization’, in The Body in Early Modern
Italy, ed. by Julia L. Hairston and
Walter Stephens (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010),
pp. 3–23 (p. 18). On this madrigal,
see also Freccero, pp. 30–31.
Thomas Greene, for one, emphasises
Petrarch’s ‘iterative present tense:
Greene, The Light in Troy: Limitation
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1982), p.119.
Brose, p. 11.
Biblioteca Universitaria, Cod. 828
(1250) Raccolta di Rime di varii
Rimatori del 1500 — fra le quali molte
inedite, f. 35v. The manuscript contains
71 poems attributed to Colonna (two
of them mistakenly so) along with verse
by other Cinquecento poets. For further
description of the manuscript, see
Colonna, Rime, pp. 237–38; and, for
a fuller account, Toscano, Letterati
corti accademie, pp. 71–72.
On the ‘myth’ of Colonna and her
successful balancing of feminine and
masculine gendering, see Cox, ‘Women
Writers & the Canon’, pp. 15–19.
James M. Saslow, in The Poetry of
Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, ed. and trans. by James M. Saslow
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991), pp. 50–51, 398.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Shannon McHugh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at New York
University. She is a author of ‘A Guided Tour of Heaven and Hell: The Afterlife Journey in
Chiara Matraini and Lucrezia Marinella’, Early Modern Women Journal (forthcoming
2014). She is co-author with Danielle Callegari of ‘‘‘Se fossimo tante meretrici’’: The
Rhetoric of Resistance in Diodata Malvasia’s Convent Narrative’, Italian Studies, 66
(2011), 21–39. Together they have translated and edited Diodata Malvasia, Writings on the
Sisters of San Luca and their Miraculous Madonna, for The Other Voice in Early Modern
Europe series (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming
2014). For the same series, with Melissa Swain and Francesca Maria Gabrielli, she is cotranslator of three Croatian-Italian authors in Renaissance Women’s Writing between the
Two Adriatic Shores (forthcoming 2014). Her dissertation examines constructions of
masculinity and femininity in early modern Italian lyric.
Correspondence to: Shannon McHugh. Email: [email protected]