VITTORIA COLONNA AND MICHELANGELO
SEVEN OCCASIONAL, UNDATED, LETTERS
DISCARDED AS NEGLIGIBLE
by scholarly academics
and yet
THE ONLY AUTHENTIC DOCUMENTS,
REGISTERING THE INNER DYNAMICS
of THEIR INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP
from 1541-1543
A TREASURE GROVE
for EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Michelangelo’s two letters to Vittoria Colonna
and four of
Vittoria Colonna’s five letters to Michelangelo
accompanying
VITTORIA COLONNA’S
VISITS
1538-1541
in
CAPPELLA SISTINA,
while MICHELANGELO was creating
THE LAST JUDGEMENT
1542-1543
in
CAPPELLA PAOLINA,
while MICHELANGELO
was painting
THE CONVERSION of SAINT PAUL
VITTORIA COLONNA’S
HERETICAL SELF-MADE GODMOTHER,
a creation of her BRILLIANT HUMANISM (Giovio)
in the LAST JUDGEMENT
and
MICHELANGELO’S ACCOMPANYING LETTER
to VITTORIA COLONNA
with a MADRIGAL
scribbled on the backside
of the letter,
asking Vittoria Colonna
idealized and adored by the artist in his poetry,
for spiritual mentorship
in his psychic crisis
Michelangelo’s seeking close contact with Vittoria Colonna during the creative process of the LAST JUDGEMENT is not casual. The creation of the monumental painting was wearing the artist out. In the midst of the damned, the beholder discovers an empty human skin with Michelangelo’s features.
What was especially getting under the artist’s skin was the many-voiced storm of indignation at the shameless nakedness of his figures. Biaggio da Cesena, the papal minister of ceremonies found them mor adequate for a public bath or a tavern than a papal sanctuary. Though placing Cesena among a group of devils with a choking serpent round his belly, Michelangelo was tormented by metaphysical fears.
Anthony Blunt: “The monumental fresco is the work of a man, who is shaken out of his self-assurance, who does not feel at home anymore in the material world, but is longing for spirituality”, which Michelangelo hoped to find with the help of Vittoria Colonna as his spiritual mentor.
On the back of his accompanying letter to her, Michelangelo poetized a madrigal to Vittoria Colonna, handing her an empty sheet of white paper to note down her helpful advice for his desperate quest for salvation:
MICHELANGELO
MADRIGAL TO VITTORIA COLONNA
scribbled on the backside of a letter to her.
Staggering from the right foot to the left
I am searching salvation.
Swaying between virtue and vice,
I am tormented by my confused heart
Like one, who has lost the sight of Heaven
and goes astray on any path,
I am handing the white sheet of paper
to your holy ink for love to free me
and for pity to write down the truth,
so that my soul, free in itself,
does not submit to error
in the short rest of my life
and I live less blindly.
From you, illustrious, Divine Signora,
I want to know,
if in Heaven a humble sinner
will be graded lower than
a haughty do-gooder.
MICHELANGELO IDEALIZING VITTORIA COLONNA
A Man in a Woman,
Even a God speaks out of her mouth!
Listening to her, I will be transfigured.
I won’t be myself again!
I do believe
That drawn by her out of myself
I can feel pity with Myself.
Beyond vain desire,
Her beautiful face spurs me on,
so that I envisage death
In Every Other Beauty.
O, Donna, who is striding through water and fire
to a serene day,
Do not let me return to myself.
VITTORIA is the spiritualized woman, who enthused and enthusing, purified
by water and fire of her corporeality is soaring into the lucid day of a purely spiritual existence. So ethereal she is that Michelangelo wonders rather naively:
“How can it be, Signora, that you, albeit of divine beauty, eat and sleep, and speak like any mortal creature among us?”
Vittoria is akin to the sibyls Michelangelo had added to the male prophets in the Sistine Chapel a decade ago. However, she is not meant to be Michelangelo’s Sibyl on his pilgrimage to Heaven. She does not compare to Beatrice, because unlike Dante, Michelangelo is not looking for a travel companion in the Beyond.
He desires the promise of Heaven to be fulfilled here and now and at once in Vittoria’s presence, into which he almost forces his way to immerse himself into her face, into her eyes. He must see her!
VITTORIA COLONNA and MICHELANGELO
WIN-WIN FRIENDSHIP
In CAPELLA SISTINA:
COLONNA’S NOVEL HUMANIST MADONNA
beside her DIVINE SON
in
MICHELANGELO’S FRESCO of THE LAST JUDGEMENT
In the
SISTINE CHAPEL.
EVER-LASTING PUBLICITY
In DEFIANCE OF THE INQUISITION
Fully aware that the propagation in print of her Revolutionary Heretical Remake of the Holy Virgin would scandalize the Inquisition, Vittoria confided her new Mariology only to trustworthy female friends. Costanza, the Duchess of Amalfi, addressed by her as Elevated Spirit, was assured by Vittoria (against her better knowledge?): “Soavemente nel usata chiesa mi rappresenti.” But in the same breath she made certain that she could rely on Costanza’s loyalty: “Essendo con voi sicura di calonnia ed maligna intenzione.”
Little Inferior to the Infinite son is the Eternal Mother
Synopsis of Vittoria Colonna’s Mariology
Vittoria’s precaution was necessary. Shaping the image of the Godmother has always been a privilege of the Church. Vittoria Colonna was the first woman to step out of multitudes of women to create her personal remake of Maria, instilling into the rigid icon a fullness of life, which knows no parallel. While the Official Church reduced Maria to the maidservant of the Lord and Vittoria’s reformed friends (Ochino) made her a plain woman, Vittoria privileged the godmother with the intelligence and the ethos of a Humanist, and, of course, she regarded her corporal ascension into the glory of Heaven as proof of her divinity.
Above all, the female philosopher, well versed at ontology, enthused about the singular woman endowed with human and divine entities and consequently she selected the godmother as trustee for her divine son’s heritage on earth.
In her letter to the Duchess of Amalfi, Vittoria Colonna, in sweeping rhetoric, sets forth her feminist remake of Maria. As this singular woman participates in human and divine nature, she embodies life in fullness, which is denied to the male sex, she argues, speculatively expanding the abundance of liveliness lavished by God’s cornucopia to the mother of his son to ultimate peaks.
MICHELANGELO’S REPRESENTATION
of VITTORIA COLONNA’S REVOLUTIONARY GODMOTHER
IN HIS LAST JUDGEMENT
with the difficulty of
her integration
solved by
VITTORIA COLONNA’S
INGENIOUS NARRATIVE SUBSTRATE
While in medieval paintings of the Last Judgement, the humble Godmother, a rigid icon, is kneeling at the side of Jesus Christ, the World Judge, Michelangelo
placed Vittoria’s Humanist Godmother beside her son and surrounded Mother and Son with a mandorla, hitherto reserved to Jesus Christ alone, the Pankrator, in medieval frescoes.
In contrast to the rigid timelessness of medieval images, Michelangelo selects a momentary situation of the Last Judgement, of course choosing the most thrilling moment, when Jesus Christ, stretching his right arm in a threatening gesture, is just jumping up from the bench to pass his judgement on all mankind, while Maria, granted a seat next to her Son by Michelangelo, remained seated, even though in a floating posture, suggesting her beatified state.
Virtually functionless, the Holy Virgin would be a disturbing factor in Michelangelo’s world drama, had Vittoria Colonna not made the artist integrate an obviously critical attitude against the wrath of the world judge, who is her son, in the body language of the Humanist Godmother, who was Vittoria´s creation. In a self-protective gesture, this Novel Godmother, given Vittoria Colonna’s features by the artist, crosses her hands on her breast, demonstrating SELF DEFINED HUMANISM against her raging son, from whom she has turned away to pity the frightened souls of human beings at her side.
This NOVEL MADONNA, placed by Michelangelo beside the DIVINE JUDGE, who is her SON, does not only wear Vittoria Colonna’s features. She EMBODIES VITTORIA COLONNA’S REMAKE of the HOLY VIRGIN as a SELF DEFINED HUMANIST, who dared to oppose her DIVINE SON, when he judged MANKIND in WRATH.
Michelangelo hoped for her female compassion in return.
UPSET MICHELANGELO’S
ANGRY LETTER to VITTORIA COLONNA
UNDATED, EMAIL-LIKE,
written someday between 1536/38 and 1541
during his strenuous work at the LAST JUDGEMENT
mentioned by him in his letter.
HOWEVER,
their ACQUAINTANCE
can be dated back to 1516
proved by
HIS TENDER, MOVING, DRAWINGS OF HER FACE
even though magnified à la
HIS TESTE DIVINE,
with her physiognomy
verified by Paolo Giovio.
It is not true that Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna got to know each other during the creation of The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, although their acquaintance deepened into friendship during his intensive work at the monumental fresco from 1536/8 to 1541/2, when Vittoria Colonna primarily lived in Rome and visited the artist at work in the Sistine Chapel to make him integrate her revolutionary, heretical godmother in his fresco.
Michelangelo’s earliest drawing of Vittoria Colonna dates back to 1516, when she was 24 years old. In this touching drawing, by courtesy of the TRUSTEE, the ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM in Oxford, now the cover image of all my publications about Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo emphasizes the androgenous features of Vittoria Colonna, but at the same time tones them down in the arrangement of fine lines in her face, the rendition of which reveal the physical and psychic fragility of the young woman, but also conveys the tender feelings, the artist is cherishing for her:” From near and afar , my eyes can see, where your beautiful face turns up.”
The approximate date of Michelangelo’s drawing of Vittoria Colonna as MARCHESA DE PESCARA is sometime between 1509-1525. The counterpart drawing of her husband Ferrante d’Avalos, Marchese de Pescara, got lost. About 1613, the engraver Antonio Tempesta still disposed of the two drawings, he reproduced as engravings, today, in Albertina, Vienna, Graphic Collections.
The identity of Vittoria Colonna is proved thanks to the meticulous description by Paolo Giovio, who befriended her: The great biographer of Italian Renaissance focused her striking nose, her full lips, her gorgeous hair and her sophisticated coiffure. He compared her striking nose (not Greek!) to the noses of Arsacid rulers, and her “ebony black hair interwoven with gold” to the hair of Leda, also an eye-catcher in the little-known painting of Vittoria Colonna in the townhall of Forio d’Ischia. In unison, Michelangelo and Giovio, emphasize her faible for fancy hairstyles and pompous appearances:
La Marchesa herself: I moved my admired plumage with a wide beat of my wings on secure ways.
Michelangelo versified:
Lezzi, vezzi, carezze, or feste,perle, chi potria ma vederle?
Jewellery, necklaces, flattery, gold, feasts, and pearls! Who attends to this gewgaw, when she creates poetry divine?
Trustee British Museum, London, AN20016800. By courtesy of the museum.
THE SEVEN UNDATED LETTERS
REGISTERING
THE INNER DYNAMICS
of MICHELANGELO’S and VITTORIA COLONNA’S
FRIENDSHIP,
while MICHELANGELO
was creating the
LAST JUDGEMENT in
Sistine Chapel
1536/8 – 1541
and,
while he was creating the
CONVERSION of SAINT PAUL in
CAPPELLA PAOLINA
1542-1543
S Y N O P S I S
Whereas Michelangelo sensitively brought out Vittoria Colonna’s authenticity in his drawings, and reprimanded her misconduct in his spontaneous letters to her, he idealized her in his poetry.
It is this idealization of Vittoria Colonna that casts an illuminating light on the deep reaching mentorship he expected and accepted from her and was willingly granted to him by his Over-Zealous Muse.
However, her narrative substrates may have interfered with his artistic creativity, a negative consequence, especially true of her intervention in his creative process of SAINT PAUL’S CONVERSION in Cappella Paolina.
The question remains, whether Michelangelo did not overburden this fresco with his mentor’s Complex Thought.
UPSET MICHELANGELO’S LETTER
to
VITTORIA COLONNA
written someday during the final phase of
THE LAST JUDGEMENT
in 1541?
It is not fair, when I am here in Rome, that it has occurred to you to leave the Crucified to Master Tommaso and to make him the mediator between your Signoria and myself, your servant, so that I will be at your service.
At the utmost I have wished to do more for you than for any other human being I have ever known in this world; but the great occupation, which has kept me busy and is still keeping me busy, has not let this be known to Your Signoria.
And as I know that you know that amore non vuol maestro and that the one, who loves, does not sleep, less, less has been adequate, but certainly no means. And though it seemed that I did not remember, I have accomplished what I did not talk about in order to take you by surprise. Now, my intention has been thwarted. The one, who forgets such faithfulness, does not act fair!
Your Majesty’s Servant
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Notes: “The Crucified”: the gift drawing of the LIVING CRUCIFIED
“The great occupation”: The Last Judgement
The reproachful tone of the letter reveals Michelangelo’s anger about Vittoria Colonna. He is not afraid of raking Marchesa over the coals. To get faster into the possession of the highly coveted drawing, she had involved Tommaso de Cavalieri, his favorite disciple, as her mediator, knowing very well, how close he was to Michelangelo.
Having fallen in love with Vittoria at the age of sixty, as if he were only twenty, Michelangelo had been looking forward to the moment of handing his gift-drawing of the Living Crucified over to her:
A miracle occurs to me, who, in his misery, has grown desperate of ever winning your grace, when you turn your beautiful eyes to me, with your truthful sympathy, to make me so late yet happy, me born to suffer.
Not very much impressed by Michelangelo’s lecture, Vittoria Colonna asked him again to lend her the drawing of the Living Crucified, even though he had not yet completed it, because she wanted to show off about his gift drawing to the retinue of Ercole Gonzaga, the Cardinal and Bishop of Mantua.
Patronizingly, she invited Michelangelo for a convenient talk in her house, granting him a present in return, which was most highly coveted by him.
My dearest Signor Michelangelo,
I ask you to leave the crucifix to me only for a little while, even though you have not finished it yet, because I want to show it to the noblemen of the most Reverend Cardinal of Mantua.
In case, you are not busy today, you may drop in and talk to me at your convenience.
Cordialissimo Michelangelo
Ve prego me mandiate un poco il Crucifixo, se ben non è fornito,
perché il vorria mostrare a’ gentilhomini del reverendissimo cardinal de Mantua; et se voi non seti in lavoro, potresti venir a parlarmi con vostra comodità.
Al commando vostro
La marchesa de Pescara
Trustee: Casa Buonarroti, Firenze AB IX 507.tif. Rendition by courtesy of the museum.
VITTORIA COLONNA’S ENTHUSING LETTERS
to
MICHELANGELO
about
the LIVING CRUCIFIED
HIS GIFT-DRAWING for her
UNICO MAESTRO MICHELANGELO
et MIO SINGULARISSIMO AMICO
I have received your letter and I have seen the drawing of the Crucified, which has crucified in my mind all other images I have ever looked at. One cannot imagine a livelier, a more accomplished drawing. Certainly, I could never explain the subtlety of its elaboration. Therefore, I am determined not to have it copied by another hand. Tell me point-blank:
If the drawing belongs to someone else, I am practicing patience. But if it belongs to you, I contrive a way of abducting it. But if the drawing does not belong to you and you intend to have it reproduced by a helpmate, please, let us talk it over first.
As it is very difficult to copy, I’ll decide to let him make something else but not this drawing. However, when it belongs to you, please be indulgent, because I am totally against returning it to you.
I have been looking at it in the light and through a magnifying glass and in a mirror, and I have never seen anything more accomplished.
At your command!
La Marchesa de Pescara
Vittoria Colonna about Michelangelo’s Crucified:
I have been looking at it in the light
and through a magnifying glass
and in a mirror
and I have never seen anything more
accomplished
Vittoria Colonna praises Michelangelo’s Crucified as a superlative, which has crucified all other images of Jesus Christ on the cross in her memory. What a daring pun! What an offence of medieval devotional images of the Man of Sorrows, she declined for their masochism.
Moreover, she only mentions the liveliness of the Crucified without immersing herself in Michelangelo’s revolutionary representation of Jesus Christ on the cross with the ideal body of a Greek God.
At the moment, she seems too impatient to deepen her impressions. Perhaps Michelangelo lent her the drawing to show it to the retinue of Cardinal Gonzaga of Mantua without handing it over to her as a present in order to put her on the rack, because she had spoilt his joyful anticipation of taking her by surprise with his singular gift-drawing in her house.
Rather unsettled by Michelangelo, she is playing through contingencies:
If the drawing already belongs to someone else, she must practice patience.
Energetically, she refutes a copy done by an adjunct. However, if it still belongs to Michelangelo, she is totally against returning the drawing to him and will certainly contrive means to appropriate the drawing for herself!
While, in this letter, she creates the impression of an acquisitive aristocratic socialite, in her next letter, which seems to have followed swiftly, one is amazed at her awe-inspiring definition of Michelangelo’s genius from an exalted philosophical point of view, which puts her on a par with Arthur Schopenhauer’s consistent definition:
VITTORIA COLONNA’S ASTONISHING ATTEMPT
at DEFINING MICHELANGELO’S GENIUS
IN ASTOUNDING CONSONANCE
with Arthur Schopenhauer
in the first part of
her next
SPONTANEOUS LETTER,
while
in the second part of the letter,
she is making fun of Michelangelo,
who added weeping angels
to his
REVOLUTIONIZING REPRESENTATION
of the
LIVING CRUCIFIED
with the
IDEAL BODY of a GREEK GOD
VITTORIA COLONNA to MICHELANGELO:
Your creations enforce improve the judgement of the beholder. To clarify my point, I spoke of the improvement of perfect things. Having seen omnia possibilia sunt credenti, I put my trust in God that he should give you the supernatural grace to make this Crucified and he appeared to me so miraculous that your work surpassed my expectations by far.
Encouraged by your miracles, I requested what I see accomplished now in a most astonishing manner, namely what shows highest accomplishment in all parts, so that nothing remains to be desired.
In truth; it is a work of such perfection that my desire cannot reach it at all.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
DEFINITION of a GENIUS
He is a Human Being, in whose head the world as an objective of imagination has reached more brightness and a more perfect shape.
A genius, among other people, is like a carbuncle among jewels, which radiates its own light, while the others only reflect the light they have received. The artist makes us look at the world through his eyes. It is a special gift of a genius that he has got these eyes, recognizing the essence of things beyond all relations.
THE FINAL PART OF THIS LETTER
Completely in contrast to the elated philosophical tenor of the first part of the letter, Vittoria Colonna seems to strike an affectionately humorous tone concerning the two weeping angels Michelangelo added to the Living Crucified at the right and left side of his perfect muscular body of a Greek God created by him according to her personal idea of God, uniting Jesus Christ with the painless divinity of Apollo:
VITTORIA COLONNA
High Lord, who in your strength,
unites two different natures
in one subject
I ask you, be my Apollo and
bathe my eyes and breast in your heavenly fountain,
so that true faith may show
my low intellect other muses
and another mountain.
Vittoria continues her letter to Michelangelo:
I am rejoicing at the greater beauty of the angel on the right side, because Holy Michael will place you Michelangelo on the right side of the Lord on Judgement Day. In the meantime, I can serve you best by asking this sweet Jesus and You to dispose of me as your property in everything.
Al vostro commando
La Marchesa de Pescara
MICHELANGELO’S DISCREET WAYS
of REMINDING the ONLOOKER
of the GODSON’S SUFFERING
ON THE CROSS
ESCAPING VITTORIA’S ATTENTION
Though Michelangelo banished any masochism from his drawing of the Living Crucified, the anatomically correct rendition of the contorted torso of the Crucified due to the hanging position on the cross, the two weeping angioletti, exactly placed on either side of the torso, indicate the suffering of Jesus Christ, and while Vittoria enthused of “another mountain” in her sonnet, referring to magnificent Parnass, the mountain of Apollo, the god she adored, Michelangelo placed the skull at the foot of the cross, symbolizing Golgotha!
VITTORIA COLONNA AND MICHELANGELO
Mutual FRUSTRATIONS
EXPRESSIVE LETTERS
1542 - 1543
PHOTOGRAPHICAL RENDITION of the Drawing in Private Property
By KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM WIEN
MICHELANGELO’S LETTER to VITTORIA COLONNA
In JULY 1543
Michelangelo wrote:
Before accepting the things, which our Magnificence wanted to give me several times, I wanted to make something for you with my own hand to be less undignified for such presents. But after seeing that one cannot buy God’s Grace and that it is worst sin to think little of it, I accept these things, mentioned above, empty-handed.
I know for certain that I, possessing them, will feel like in paradise, not for having these things in my house, but for the opportunity of staying with you, feeling deeply indebted to you for outgrowing myself in your presence, Signora, to whom I recommend myself.
The bearer of this letter will be Urbino, who lives with me. Your Magnificence may tell him, when you expect me to have a look at the head of Christ that Your Grace promised that you will show me.
Servitore di Vostra Signoria
Michelagniolo Buonarroti at Macello de´Covi
VITTORIA COLONNA REBUFFS MICHELANGELO
HER LETTER IN RESPONSE
20TH JULY 1543
WRITTEN IN COLD BLODD
THE ONLY DATED LETTER
Condescendingly, Vittoria is rebuffing Michelangelo in a sophisticated, highly stylized letter from Viterbo, where she temporarily lived in the Convent of Saint Catherine as the only female member of Reginald Pole’s exclusive spiritual community of so-called Spirituali, while Michelangelo was painting the fresco of the Conversion of Saint Paul in Cappella Paolina in the Vatican, an assignment by Pope Paul III.
VITTORIA COLONNA TO MICHELANGELO
MAGNIFICO MESSER MICHELANGELO,
Not earlier have I responded to your letter, being an answer to mine, because I thought, did you and I continue writing to each other, I, feeling obliged to do so , and you wanting to be polite, I would neglect my visits to the Chapel of Saint Catherine, since I could not join the nuns at the customary hour and you would give up the visits of the Chapel of Saint Paul instead of dialoguing with your paintings already in the early morning, from dawn to dusk, the painted figures talking to you quite in the same manner as the living persons talk to me, with the consequence that I fail to perform my duty to the brides of Christ and you fail to perform your duty to the representative of Christ on earth (PAUL III)
Knowing the endurance of our friendship and the security of our affection tied to the Christian knot I find it superfluous to procure evidence by exchanging letters with you.
Instead, I rather wait for a real opportunity to serve you, asking the Lord, of whom you have spoken with such a glowing, humble heart at my departure from Rome, he may let me find you at my return, his image renewed in your soul and you animated by the same faith the Samaritan woman had shown in the drawing for me.
I recommend myself to you and equally to your Urbino.
From the Convent at Viterbo, on 20th July, 1543
At your command
La Marchesa de Pescara
Trustee: Casa Buonarroti, Firenze. AB XI. No 510. By courtesy of the museum.
In spite of her polite disguising and well-thought-out motivating, Vittoria rebuffed Michelangelo, restricting their correspondence, claiming that it distracted him and her from more essential duties.
In brilliant rhetoric, she points out that the perspectives of their lives, instead of interfering, should run parallel towards more important objectives. Instead of seeking personal contact with her, he had better converse with his paintings in Cappella Paolina.
Obviously, Vittoria Colonna wanted to refashion the friendship with Michelangelo, precious as it was to her, from a certain personal distance.
Permanently grounded on Christian faith, it did not require a bombardment of letters. Rather, they should wait for an extraordinary opportunity to meet.
Vittoria, though sugarcoating her fateful letter to Michelangelo, warded off burdening intimacy and emotional entanglement.
HOW DID MICHELANGELO REACT?
His poems, cutting his innermost being in words, as if they were stones, make his deep-felt suffering of rejected love evident.
Even worse is his affliction by the mood swings of his beloved marchesa due to her bipolar emotional disorder, which worsened in her serious psychic crisis during her stay at Viterbo. Vittoria in a letter to Cardinal Giovanni Morone:
Your Magnificence have experienced my chaos of ignorance, the errors, the labyrinth, in which I moved, dressing in gold that glitters, with my body in constant motion, without coming to inner rest, with my mind in uproar.
With astonishing sensitivity, Michelangelo responded to Vittoria’s bipolarity, poetizing, how affectionate care, shown now and then, arouses intense feelings in him, widening his heart, which narrows again, painfully, by her abrupt rebuffing him.
Affection, followed by aversion, benevolence followed by denial, this emotional roller coaster paralyses his artistic creativity:
MICHELANGELO TO VITTORIA COLONNA
The evil I flee and the good I promise for myself
are hidden in you, Gracious, Sublime, Divine, Signora,
and, as I am no longer alive, my art resists
the desired effect.
Neither love nor your beauty, neither hardship nor
fortune, nor great disdain nor fate, nor my destiny nor
lot are to be blamed for my evil,
if you inside bear death and grace
at the same time
and my low ingenuity, burning up,
contracts nothing
else than
Death from it.
Rendition by courtesy of KHM Wien.
MICHELANGELO
NOVEL DRAWINGS OF COUPLES
IN
DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
In the drawings of couples, dating back to the forties, characterized by Michael Hirst as “exploratory drawings”, Michelangelo, by means of body language, visualizes emotionally dense relationships of couples, suggesting insensitivity, ambivalence, shrinking back from the other’s approach, even rejection, initiated embraces, remaining unperformed due to palpable resistance, inhibited affection, words spoken into the void.
While, in conventional representations Magdalene is on her knees in adoration of the Risen Lord, Michelangelo, in his drawing for Vittoria Colonna, represents Magdalene’s approach to Jesus and HIS NOLI ME TANGERE. Magdalene addresses the gardener and at once recognizes the Lord in him. She spreads her arms and rushes forward to hug Jesus, but is stopped by an ambivalent gesture of his right hand, greeting and rejecting her at the same time.
As a gift-drawing for Vittoria, Michelangelo drew Jesus meeting the woman from Samaria at the well. In her letter from Viterbo, Vittoria wrote to him:
On my return, God may let me find you with his image renewed in your soul by a lively and true faith, as you have drawn it in my Samaritan woman.
In case she referred to the same drawing, Vittoria failed the deeper message. Michelangelo’s woman from Samaria is (at best) pricking up her ears, but she does not reveal a deeply felt faith. The artist is staging her, when, after drawing water, she is about parting. The motions of her hands emphasize her turning away from the Lord. She does not respond to his gestures. Only a last turn of the head, as a cool bidding farewell, prevents his lively gestures coming to nothing.
One should not forget that the urgent motivation for demand of greater personal distance may have been due to her delicate state of health concealed from Michelangelo but complained about in her letters she wrote to Giulia Gonzaga from Viterbo:
VITTORIA COLONNA TO GIULIA GONZAGA
Si, Signora, I am indebted to His Magnificence (Reginald Pole, her spiritual mentor), who restored the health of my soul endangered by manias.
CANZONIERE MICHELANGELO
VITTORIA COLONNA’S
GIFT for
MICHELANGELO
cut no ice with him.
Codex Vaticanus 11539 contains one hundred and three sonnets collected by Vittoria Colonna personally. She had them written in calligraphy for Michelangelo, Her Singolarissimo Amico. Of course, she only selected Rime Spirituali, because she was spurred on by her endeavor of spiritualizing his art, encouraged, as she was, by Michelangelo himself, who expressed his need of being formed by her, as he was lacking strength and power of will, telling her, his spiritual mentor, to follow his example of cutting a stone to create a living figure.
MICHELANGELO’S RESPONSE
“The little book in vellum binding”
In a letter to his nephew Leonardo, Michelangelo mentioned Vittoria’s present:
She gave me a little book in vellum binding for a present ten years ago. The book contains 103 sonnets without the forty poems she sent to me from Viterbo in carta bambagina. I had them bound in the same little book. In those days, I showed the book to a lot of persons. All sonnets have been printed now.
However, when people wanted to borrow the book, Michelangelo refused to deliver his treasure. The memory of his beloved marchesa was holy to him.
In contrast to Pietro Bembo, who, as the literary pundit of Renaissance Italy, interpreted single sonnets of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo paid thanks to her by means of a conventional sonnet, as was the custom in Humanist circles: He would have liked to give the poetess an adequate sonnet as a counter gift. Of course, he could not compete with her.
VITTORIA COLONNA
HERETICAL SPIRITUALITY from VITERBO INTO THE VATICAN !
HER INTENSE INFLUENCE
on MICHELANGELO’S CREATING PROCESS
of the Fresco
CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL
in
CAPPELLA PAOLINA
1542-1543
GIORGIO VASARI
From VITERBO, VITTORIA COLONNA
often visited MICHELANGELO
in ROME.
And many times, she visited him from Viterbo and Michelangelo drew for her a Pietà with two dearest puttos and a Living Christ on the cross, who, with his head held high, recommends his spirit to the father, a divine drawing, and a Christ with the woman from Samaria at the well.
VITTORIA COLONNA
in
VITERBO
1541 to 1543
From October 1541 to November 1543, Vittoria Colonna lived in the Convent of Santa Caterina, as the only female member of the spiritual circle round the charismatic personality of Reginald Pole, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and the most prospective candidate for the Holy See in the Conclave of 1549. Vittoria Colonna had chosen him for her Spiritus Rector. Within Reginald Pole’s exclusive clerical circle at Viterbo, the definition of “Spirituali” was given to the followers of Juan de Valdes, the well-bred Spanish courtier and mystic, who lived at Naples, and collected his adherents among the members of the high Italian Aristocracy, Vittoria Colonna included.
After the death of Valdès, in 1541, Marcantonius Flaminio, poet and intimate friend of Reginald Pole, who, at Naples, had belonged to the coterie of Juan de Valdés, continued to cultivate his aristocratic vein of mysticism for selected souls, predestined by the Holy Spirit, at Viterbo.
According to Valdés, lively faith evades the will of man. Faith is a present of the Holy Ghost: “The spirit blows wherever he pleases.” Not all human beings are among the chosen ones.
Valdés: “God likes directing human beings without laws and rules, only by support of the Holy Ghost, who remains hidden from the senses and remains incomprehensible to the human intellect. The ones, belonging to God’s Empire rather feel than perceive his divine presence.
As Poetess of Rime Spirituali, Vittoria Colonna identified this divine spiritual selection of the Holy Ghost with her poetical inspiration:
MA DAL FOCO DIVINE,
CHE ‘L MIO INTELLETTO, SUA MERCÉ, INFIAMMA,
CONVIEN CH’ESCAN QUESTE FAVILLE.
FROM THE DIVINE FIRE
WHICH – HIS GRACE- INFLAMES MY INTELLECT,
THESE SPARKS SPRING UP.
VITTORIA’S MASSIVE INFLUENCE ON MICHELANGELO
during HIS CREATION of
THE CONVERSION of SAINT PAUL
In CAPPELLA PAOLINA in the VATICAN
The intensity of Vittoria Colonna’s influence on Michelangelo during his creation of the CONVERSION of SAINT PAUL is comprehensible, because of a certain parallel between the mysticism of Valdés, who insisted on the immediate selection of human souls by the Holy Ghost, and the comparable, also immediate, selection of Saul by the intervention of God in Saul’s life on the road to Damascus.
Influenced by Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo represents his Saint Paul as Self-Defined Individual of Renaissance- Humanism, who experiences his selection as an inner process and performs his own self-constituting as a follower of the Christian God.
Eagerly and resourcefully, as is proved by her letter to Alvise Priuli, the companion of Reginald Pole, Vittoria Colonna tried to facilitate the working conditions for Michelangelo, who in his late sixties, overstrained himself with painting the sizable fresco in Cappella Paolina.
VITTORIA COLONNA to ALVISE PRIULI
What regards Michelangelo, it is only a tiny matter I request from you, the green-black glass from Venice, which I want to furnish with a gilded pedestal to improve his sight in painting, because he is exhausting himself in Cappella Paolina.
According to Vasari, it was often that Vittoria Colonna, from Viterbo, visited Michelangelo in Rome in Cappella Paolina, as only a year ago, she had visited him in the Sistine Chapel, while he was creating his other opus magnum, the Last Judgement, in which he had placed her heretically divinized godmother beside her godson, while he was judging mankind, to do his beloved marchesa a favor.
VITTORIA COLONNA’S INFILTRATION
of MICHELANGELO’S
CONVERSION of SAINT PAUL
with THE SPIRITUALITY OF VITERBO
The infiltration of Michelangelo’s Fresco about Saint Paul’s Conversion with the spirituality of Viterbo bears the signature of Vittoria Colonna, because the artist represented Saul’s conversion as an inner experience and as a personal decision of the later apostle of Jesus Christ, who is not sitting enthroned high above in the glory of his almightiness, as he does in conventional paintings. The Lord is bowing deep downward to Saul, as if he wanted to approach him on a human level and Saul is still lying stretched out on the earth keeping his eyes shut, after the beam of divine light has dissolved into diffused light. Although the upper part of his body has been lifted by someone from the earth, Saul is persevering in his absentmindedness, as if his conversion is still going on or as if Saul is still meditating his awe-inspiring contact with God, or as if he has not yet arrived at his life-defining decision to serve to Christian God.
ARTISTIC CONSQUENCES of
VITTORIA COLONNA’S INTERVENTION
In MICHELANGELO’S CREATIVE PROCESS
BEAUTY and DRAMATIZATION
ARE MISSING
IN MICHELANGELO’S SAINT PAUL’S CONVERSION
According to Sidney Freedburg, the frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, Michelangelo’s last paintings, “show a style away from aesthetic effect to an exclusive concern with illustrating the narrative with no regard to beauty.”
The magnificent fresco of divine indoctrination of Saul by an almighty God clad in flaming red, who is hurling his beam of light at Saul, was begun but not finished Michelangelo-esque.
Michelangelo’s fresco is missing the dramatization of the scene by Caravaggio (in 1601), who captures the moment of Saul’s religious ecstasy in visible rapture, immediately after he had been flung off his horse, which is still standing over him, at the instant of being hit by the divine flash of lightning, whereas Michelangelo, according to his over-zealous muse’s mentoring, dissolved the dramatical beam of light into diffused brightness and captured Saul sometime after the inspiring divine flash had reached him, already during his immersion in afterthought, with the horse led aside by companions some time ago.
Another difference is worth mentioning, Caravaggio’s depopulation of the scene and his artistic concentration on Paul, the dramatis main persona, immediately after the divine lightning has hit him, while Paul and the horse are still agitated, whereas Michelangelo crowded the scene with people, angels , and select souls above and Saul’s Roman companions below, who only show moderate signs of being under shock, because Vittoria Colonna ordered the artist to focus the aftermath delayed by Paul’s prolonged process of decision-making. Michelangelo’s Over-Zealous Muse pushed aside one of the most awe-inspiring divine spectacles of the Bible.
The question remains, whether Vittoria Colonna ‘s narrative substrate did not overburden the fresco with a complex, mental process, which cannot be visualized.
The frescoes in the Pauline Chapel were the last paintings of Michelangelo, in spite of his singular reputation as a painter and creator of divine drawings.
The ingenious artist gave up painting, drawing, and sculpturing, and as an old man, he changed his life, performing a U-Turn, which shocked the whole of Italy:
MICHELANGELO’S
SPECTACULAR RETURN INTO ACTIVE LIFE
At the age of 72:
HE TOOK OVER
THE CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT
of SAINT PETER’S BASILICA in Rome.
VITTORIA COLONNA’S
ROLE-REVERSAL
with MICHELANGELO
Instead of mentoring him,
She takes a leaf from Michelangelo’s Book
Unlike her other letters to Michelangelo, the last has no concrete reason. It imposes no narrative substrate on him, which he has to draw or to paint. Her letter arises from deep admiration for his extraordinary fame granted to him by his VIRTÙ in the Machiavellian sense. Virtù does not refer to his competence or his virtuousness in the first place, but to extraordinary self-assertion, willpower and stamina for necessary endurance to realize his individual artistic designs, as if he could give his creations eternal life in this world.
Even though Vittoria holds out spirituality, which invaded his heart, as a counterweight towards Michelangelo to maintain the inner balance of the genius through awareness of the mortality of mundane glory, she , between the lines of her letter (second paragraph!) is revealing that she envies him his self-defined active life in Rome, whereas, Vittoria, in Viterbo, where she is still living in the community of the Spirituali, is forced to linger on in passivity: She cannot realize herself there, because SALVATION, in Viterbo, is regarded as a present of the Holy Ghost for chosen souls and is not regarded as a reward for self-achievement.
VITTORIA COLONNA’S LAST LETTER
to
MICHELANGELO
Trustee Casa Buonarroti, Firenze. AB IX No 509, autograph.
By courtesy of Casa Buonarroti.
Magnifico Messer Michelangelo
So great is he fame granted to you by your virtù that you may not have believed that it will pass away due to time or another cause, had not that divine light invaded your heart, showing you that mundane glory, though it may last long, will find its second death.
If you recognize in your sculptures the kindness of Him, who has made you the unique maestro, then you will understand that I owe my dead writings to the Lord alone, because I offended him less, when I composed them than now, when, in idleness, I do nothing.
So, I ask you to take this self-will as a pledge for future works.
At your command
La Marchesa de Pescara
MICHELANGELO’S
SPECTACULAR RETURN INTO ACTIVE LIFE
SPURS
VITTORIA COLONNA ON
to free herself
from SENSELESS WAITING for the HOLY GHOST
in a PASSIVE LIFESTYLE
catapulting her into psychoses
in the spiritual community
in Viterbo
No wonder that the vivacious woman, yearning for activity, has fallen into a state of soul drought, the more so, as the Holy Ghost, in her own soul, has only been conspicuous through absence.
Never does Vittoria Colonna, adamantly standing by the authenticity of her emotional being, poetize the revelation of God in the human soul, augured by the Spirituali as experience, but, by Vittoria, always defined as doctrine or desire, whose fulfilment she never experienced.
It seems, as if her last letter to Michelangelo has sprung from a presentiment that SEEKING THE DIVINE is not fulfilled by the intervention of the Holy Ghost, but can only be externalized as desire by a genius like Michelangelo in his works, thanks to his extraordinary virtù, which he, however does not owe to himself but to the kindness of God, “who has made him the unique maestro.”
Furthermore, the recognition is now dawning upon her that she also owes her “dead sonnets” to the Lord alone and that she offended him less, when she composed them, than now in her idleness and senseless wait for motivation through the Holy Ghost, in a passive lifestyle which catapulted her into psychoses and despair at Viterbo.
Though Michelangelo’s self-mythologizing may have induced his former mentor to deprive him of the illusion of creating eternal works of art by emphasizing that fame granted to him by his VIRTÙ will pass away “due to time or another cause” without divine enlightenment, and that mundane glory, though it may last long, will find its second death.
Nevertheless, she attaches greatest value to VIRTÙ, the self-will of the genius, in her last sentence she may have ever written to Michelangelo:
Et ve prego vogliate aceptar questa voluntà
per arra de l’opere future.
So, I ask you to take this self-will as a pledge
for furure works.
In a playful mood, the poetess, in a sonnet, proposes to the Holy Ghost to send her an eternal lamp into her heart, which is modelled on the lamps fabricated by Homo Faber, so that divine light would be focused in the lamp, illuminating each part of her soul to be inflamed, while the soul is now only reached by idle,scarce sparks, by tepid embers, which do not inflame but depress the spirit. The Spirituali did not offer her a remedy for the “servile, cold fear” besetting her in Viterbo, the more she became aware of her utopian life-style there.
Michelangelo gave her spectacular counter example:
RETURN INTO ACTIVE LIFE
In defiance of Old Age
VITTORIA COLONNA
POETIZING HER RENAISSANCE-U-TURN
from SPIRITUAL SECLUSIOM
to THIS-WORLD-ACTIVISM
VITTORIA COLONNA
TEMPO É PUR CH’IO
Time has come
that I, in a belted gown,
with my avid ears attentive,
and with my eyes wide open,
with flaring torches in both hands,
expect the dear bridegroom
joyfully and soon
to honor him reverently, honestly
the other desires extinguished in my heart,
and I long for his love and fear his wrath,
so that he finds me awake
at great necessity.
Not that I only appreciate his infinite presents
and his suave, sublime words,
offering me immortal, joyful life,
but that He, with his holy hand,
could not assign me, saying:
“There, she is, the blind woman,
who among such clear rays,
does not discover
Her Beautiful Sun.
VITTORIA COLONNA
U-TURN
From ETERNITY BACK to THIS-WORLDACTIVISM
IT IS TIME
Even the title Tempo é is announcing Vittoria Colonna’s U-Turn away from eternity and back into active life. In Tempo é , one of her great sonnets, because it thematizes her own existential change in a U-Turn away from her spiritualized life in Reginald Pole’s secluded circle at Viterbo, which denied her the hoped -for enlightenment by the Holy Ghost , instead offering crippling fatigue, and idleness in a closed community.
Following Michelangelo’s encouraging example, and completing a similar U-Turn, as he did, she, in November 1543, returned into her habitual life in Rome.
TEMPO È PUR CHÍO
The poetess, in the belted gown of Michelangelo’s Sibyl, is on her own, as it behooves a Renaissance Individualist, but wide- awake like the nine wise virgins of the New Testament, yet not as patiently, but with great impatience, expecting the heavenly bridegroom. Instead of flickering oil lamps, the poetess is holding torches in both hands, while she is desirously peering out into the eternal night for the appearance of the bridegroom. Yet his arrival is delayed.
All of a sudden, abruptly, the poetess returns into reality, her U-Turn being the consequence of a mood swing, because a new idea has just occurred to her mind, she had never thought of before, although the intellectualized Female Aristocrat of the Renaissance, in her early life, had researched all thinkable ways of recognizing God:
Is it not possible that Jesus may cross her way in this life and she could overlook him? “Here, she is the blind woman” he would welcome her, “who, among such clear rays did not recognize her beautiful sun?”
For the Renaissance Poetess, in her new zest for action after lengthy seclusion, an encounter with Jesus in this world, may even seem more fascinating than her futile x-raying the eternal night for HIM with her torches and even more attractive than his promise of eternal life, because, overjoyed, she would accept the Lord’s earthly missional for establishing His Spiritual Empire here and now in This World.
VITTORIA COLONNA
ACTIVISM IN THE LAST FEW YEARS OF HER LIFE
In November 1543 Vittoria Colonna returned to Rome and had still three years to live. She passed them in the poverty of Saint Anna Convent, where she was accommodated together with her loyal servant Prudentia. Strikingly, Vittoria Colonna, having despised reality in her zealous aspiration to Heaven so far, set greater value by reality in the last phase of her life than ever before.
VITTORIA COLONNA’S COMPETENT SUPPORT
for her NEPHEW FABRIZIO COLONNA
Vittoria Colonna competently assisted her nephew Fabrizio in his inheritance dispute with Isabella, the daughter of Vespasian Colonna, getting testamentary contracts out of the family archives, imparting to Fabrizio her knowledge about the rules of succession and distribution in the House of Colonna, giving him tactical advice, how to deal with the influential Principe Sulmona, Isabella’s husband.
VITTORIA COLONNA
REHABILITATION of the HOUSE of COLONNA
after the disastrous defeat of her family
in the so-called SALT WAR
With her last remaining energy, she took great efforts on behalf of the House of Colonna. Emperor Charles V, always ready to do her a personal favor, sent his ambassador Juan de Vega to her. During his visit at Saint Anna’s Convent, de Vega spoke to her- amorevolissimamente, as she told her brother in one of her last letters. His Holiness was not at best health, de Vega said. The rehabilitation of the House of Colonna took on concrete shape. Vittoria did experience it. She died before Pope Paul III, who also paid her a visit at poor Saint Anna Convent.
Pope Paul III, who had ruined the power of her House of Colonna, but loved Vittoria, sought a familiar talk with her, especially about Reginald Paul, to whom she reported on 28thJuly, 1546:
VITTORIA COLONNA:
His Holiness had a long talk with me about his ill health, showing paralysis and distortion of his mouth. He hugged me, affirming his affection to me that had been firmly established for grave reasons. I also declared that my servitù had not changed through greater obligations.
Vittoria Colonna knew how to give her words a double meaning! The Pope’s infatuation with her, shown on several occasions, may have been heartfelt, whereas her behavior had rather been an ambiguous lip service to remind the Pope of his moral obligation to restore the House of Colonna damaged severely by him in the Salt War.
VITTORIA COLONNA
ANOTHER ILLUSTRIOUS GUEST
AT SAINT ANNA’S CONVENT
Never had the Convent of Saint Anna seen as many honorable guests within its poverty-stricken walls as when Vittoria Colonna had been accommodated there. A frequent guest of hers was the glamorous CONTE FORTUNATO MARTINENGO CESARESCO, whose elegant appearance in his ermine-lined coat can be admired in his portrait at National Gallery London. The count enthused about Vittoria in a letter (7th June, 1546):
Oh, the humility, the kindness! I often visited her and did I not fear to inconvenience her, I’d never say good-bye to her.
AND MICHELANGELO?
He lived in the vicinity of Saint Anna’s Convent. But there is no evidence of his visit there, while she stayed in the nunnery. He hurried to her, when she was dying, at least according to Ascanio Condivi:
I remember him saying that the thought of not kissing her brow or her face, only her hand tormented him. He was consternated by her death.
Three years later, Michelangelo wrote to a befriended priest at Florence:
I am sending you some poems of mine -novelle-which I composed for Marchesa de Pescara. She liked me very, very much – mi voleva grandissimo bene- and I liked her no less.
Death took a great friend from me.
Morte me tolse un grande amico.
VITTORIA COLONNA
DAMNATION after HER DEATH
In her testament, Vittoria Colonna asked the Abbess of Saint Anna’s Convent
to have her buried in a collective grave of her nuns she had praised in her letter to Cardinal Morone:
In my loneliness at Rome, I feel comforted in the company of these chaste brides of the Lord.
After Vittoria Colonna’s death, the same nuns were interrogated by the Inquisitors. They charged Vittoria Colonna with sinful relations to the Cardinals Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone.
The coffin with Vittoria Colonna’s mortal remains, the inside lined with velvet and the outside caulked with pitch, was taken to the Convent of Saint Anna for a funeral, but remained in the vestibule, the heretic being denied a Christian funeral. The Abbess got out of the affair by leaving the right to bury Vittoria Colonna to her brother Ascanio, who was in a position to have her buried in the crypt of the Colonna in the church SS Apostoli in Rome or beside her beloved father in S.Andrea at Paliano or beside her husband in S.Domenico Maggiore at Naples. Her name was not engraved in any of these monuments.
Obviously, the Inquisition took utmost efforts to extinguish her memory for ever. Where she had been finally buried, could not be found in spite of the painstaking research by Domenico Tordi. Vittoria’s vision of her own nameless tombstone came true.
VITTORIA COLONNA:
Penso un marmo breve
Chiuda il corpo meo
Con nome insieme.
I think, a short block of marble
Will cover my body together with my name.