Travelogue 1220 – 19 November
Weak Cognac

The sack of Rome in 1527 stands in history as unique and tragic in its scale. It left tens of thousands dead, maimed, or in flight. Churches were desecrated, historic treasures were plundered, monuments and ancient buildings were damaged or destroyed. The impact on society, church and history were deep and irreversible. The era of the great nation states was dawning, and this event only confirmed the inexorable fate of city-states, like the misstep of a giant that crushed a cherished old temple.

But it would be a mistake to see the event as an anomaly, as something that stands alone in kind (vs degree). It would be a mistake to see the Romans or the Italians in general, as only victims. In this regard, it is easy for sympathetic readers to forget that the Vatican was sacked only one year earlier, and it wasn’t by the Germans. It was by Romans.

The Orsini and the Colonna were rival Roman lines of nobility that had connived against each other and fought for centuries. The history of the Orsini reached even further than that of the Colonna. There were Orsini popes as early as the eighth century. And by the late Middle Ages, the two families had settled into the division found in many Italian communities, known as Guelph and Ghibelline. The Orsini supported the papacy and the Colonna the Holy Roman Emperors. In the sixteenth century, this became bitingly relevant, as Emperor Charles V inserted himself into the Italian conflicts.

The pressures building on the Medici pope, Clement VII, elected in 1523, were enormous. The French and Spanish began lobbying him relentlessly for support: alliance, money, and troops. The Spanish were juggernauts, and King Francis I – the French king captured by the armies of Vittoria’s husband in 1525 – managed to cobble together a fragile alliance against them in 1526, the League of Cognac. Clement VII joined this group, with Venice, Florence, and Milan. It might have been a good concept, but, with a typical flourish of self-interest, Florence took this occasion to attack Sienna. They failed to take it, and their loss rose like a signal over the land that it was open season on the papacy.

Travelogue 1219 – 15 November
La Doglia

I heard recently that widows are happier after the death of their mate than before, just speaking statistically. Vittoria Colonna never remarried, despite the hopes of all the scheming noble families. She made her position in life and society very clear. She spent nearly a year among the nuns of San Silvestro in Capite after the death of Fernando. And she began to write, and she wrote copiously, about her dear departed husband in sonnet after sonnet. Fernando appeared over and over as her "bel sole", her sun, her "lume eterno", her everlasting light.

“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia,” she wrote in one famous sonnet. I write to vent the internal pain.

It's hard to say whether her pain was real or performative. The case is strong for the latter – it lasted an awfully long time, and generated quite a few poems, poems that were shared far and wide, - but generally, I think that “both-things-are-true” arguments get short shrift in modern thinking. We would rather not admit that human psychology is hypocritical by nature, or to put it more gently, that we condemn complex emotion by calling it hypocritical.

After living nearly a year among the nuns in Rome, Vittoria was forced to leave. Her brother Ascanio fetched to take her to safety in their palace outside Rome, in Marino. The Colonna family was quarrelling with the Medici Pope, and their properties and lives were in peril again. Disgusted by Roman politics, she returned to Ischia early in 1527.

“Oh! Che tranquillo mar, oh che chiare onde …”, she wrote upon her return to Ischia. What a tranquil sea, what clear waves! Fortune had smiled on her this once. Only a few months later, Rome was entered by imperial troops, mostly German, and subjected to atrocities that printed themselves on the history of Europe indelibly, locked in the code of violence and hatred that would guide the Reformation for a century and a half. In a year, Rome’s population was reduced by some 80%. Only a wave of plague drove the pillaging army away in February 1528.

Travelogue 1218 – 11 November
Troubles

The gaiety of youth passes. Life has changes in store. It is hard to estimate, when one is young, how much change a decade can effect. One full decade has not passed, even yet, since Trump was elected for the first time. It was 2016, and we had an idea that history was a huge ship that was nearly imperturbable. No storm could rock it. Momentum would carry it on. Changing course on the high seas would require more effort than a small group of zealots had the stamina for. We could afford to wait out one errant administration, this one storm.

In 1516, one of Vittoria’s brothers died. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the church in Wittenberg. In context, these were tragedies on a scale that seemed manageable. But these were first links in a chain. Challenges of a different order were awaiting in the next decade, as Vittoria entered her thirties.

In 1520 and 1522, she lost her parents. In 1522, Fernando took on the Emperor’s commission, and it was the last time she saw him. In 1525, after the battle with the French, in which the French king was captured, Fernando was something of a hero. The forces looking to unite Italians against the emperor momentarily saw in him an opportunity. They approached him to change allegiance. Vittoria, when she caught wind of the conspiracy, urged her husband in letters to be loyal. Ultimately, he did, capturing the messenger of the conspirators, torturing him and prosecuting him.

I have read that Vittoria fell ill that summer. The cause is not known, but she was bedridden. Maladies drifted back then, lifted by breezes, touching down here and then, nameless and dry, robbing people of vitality. It appears in biographies without cause. No one is quite sure what took Fernando away at the moment it did, almost a year after the battle that left wounds on him. They say Vittoria battled illness the rest of her life.

It was December when Fernando died. She was on her way to his bedside; she had made it as far as Viterbo, just north of Rome. There she received news of his passing. She returned to Rome, and she retreated into the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. She entered only days after Fernando passed, and she stayed until the autumn of the next year. Friends high in the church appealed to the Pope to forbid the nuns of the convent to allow Vittoria to join them by taking orders. This gives us an idea how esteemed she was, both as a dazzling member of the nobility and of the litterati, but also as a marriageable commodity.

Travelogue 1217 – 4 November

Sposata 

 

Vittoria and Fernando were married in 1509, when she was 17, and they lived together in Ischia together for two years before Fernando went off to war. In 1512, he joined the Spanish armies in the north of Italy, and almost immediately he was captured by the French, which provides the first of a neat set of bookends in his career. He wasn’t detained in Milan long by the French, thanks in large part to connections with the Colonna family, and he was kept comfortably.

Imprisoned by the French in Milan, Fernando wrote a ‘Dialogo d’Amore’ to his wife. It hasn’t survived. Vittoria responded with 112 lines in terza rima, which did survive, the oldest sample of her poetry that we have. She wrote:

 

“Se Vittoria volevi, io t’era appresso;

Ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei.”

 

If you wanted Victory, I was right next to you. But, in leaving me, you left her. Her letter was a piece too pretty, full of classical allegory and puns, as was the custom.

 

Fernando was returned to the family, but he stayed only briefly. He was off to war again the next year, and he fought for the Spanish with honour, almost without respite, for nine years.

 

Life carried on at Ischia. Vittoria and her aunt, Costanza, gathered their literary luminaries, writers with names like Musefilo, Filocalo, Giovio, Minturno, Cariteo, Rota, Sanazzaro, and Tasso, and the island enjoyed something of a reputation for culture. “Superbo scoglio,” Bernardo Tasso wrote in a later sonnet about Ischia, “altero e bel ricetto / Di tanti chiari eroi, d’imperadori!” Proud rock, high and beautiful retreat, for such heroes, such conquerors!

 

Naples was the nearest major court, where the aggressive Spanish kingdom was based. Here, the d’Avalos family from Ischia could consort with the nobility of the realm. According to contemporary accounts, Vittoria and her aunt were dazzling.

 

The year was spent in celebrations and ceremony, pageants, parties, and religious observations. Gaiety and extravagance were the order of the day, gold and silk, sumptuous dress and sumptuous food. I just read about a wedding banquet in Naples that ran to 27 courses and only finished at five in the morning.

Travelogue 1216 – 27 October
Fernando

Vittoria Colonna was engaged when she was three. The boy was also from a noble family, of course, a family originally of Spanish descent. Fernando’s grandfather, Íñigo, came to Italy with Alfonso V, King of Aragon, who was also King of Sicily. Alfonso had a claim to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples, and he spent much of his reign pursuing that claim. His rivals included the Sforzas and the Anjous, and, during the early years of the wars, his rivals enjoyed the favour of the Colonna pope Martin V, whom we have met in Florence during the days of Brunelleschi.

In an interesting side-note, this same Íñigo, Vittoria Colonna’s grandfather by marriage, is a candidate to be author of “Curial and Güelfa”, a chivalric romance written in Castilian, which survives in only one manuscript. It’s written in Spanish, but is Italian and French in its sentiment and devices.

Curial is a poor knight, and Güelfa is a noblewoman and widow. She takes him under her wing and tutors him, until rumour drives him away from her. He travels and engages in great tournaments and deeds of knight errantry all over Europe, always coming back to Güelfa, who more or less spurns him. He ranges farther afield, captured as a slave in Africa, finding his fortune, raising an army against the Turks. But eventually, he comes home, a fully realised warrior and gentleman, and he and Güelfa wed.

So Íñigo d’Avalos fought for Naples. So did his son. So did his grandson. It was this ongoing dispute over Naples that eventually drew the French into Italy in 1494. This was the invasion that toppled the Medici (temporarily) and brought Savonarola into power in Florence. This was the beginning of the destructive Italian Wars that kept the peninsula in turmoil for the next sixty years or so. In this context, King Alfonso and his successors needed warriors.

Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos d'Aquino was nobility, and so he was trained to fight. Fight he did, all his short adult life. He was good at it. For ten years, he led troops for the Spanish interests in the Italian Wars. By 1522, he had attracted the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Fernando agreed, rather reluctantly, to lead Catholic imperial troops in Italy, though they were chronically underpaid and discontented. And he helped lead them to victory in Pavia, where, in a battle to break a siege of the city, imperial soldiers took the French king, Francis I, captive.

Unfortunately, Fernando didn’t live long to advance any further. He died in the same year, aged 36, his body, if not his spirit, broken by the years of tough military life. He left Vittoria Colonna widowed at the young age of 33.

Travelogue 1215 – 19 October
Finger On the Page

The most familiar portrait of Vittoria Colonna is by Sebastiano del Piombo. It was executed in the year 1520, (the year Vincenzo, the great lutenist was born; the year Pope Leo X had Michelangelo start on the Medici funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence,) and it portrayed the 28 year-old with the finger of one hand on the page of an open book and the other hand to her heart. (Interestingly, this portrait of the very Roman Colonna by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo is housed in Spain, the homeland of her husband’s family.) If Vittoria’s gesture seems familiar, it is because it echoes the pose of Mary in many Renaissance versions of the Annunciation. Mary’s piety is notated by her studiousness.

Vittoria was raised by her fiancé’s family on the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples. She was educated by her fiancé’s aunt, Costanza, Duchess of Francavilla and defender of Ischia against the French. Costanza was a serious patron of the literary arts. She gathered a circle of poets and philosophers around her, several who were famous at the time, though Vittoria’s would become the most enduring name. Aside, perhaps, for Costanza herself, who some have theorized was the real “Gioconda”!

Travelogue 1214 – 14 October

Weird Cultures

Maybe there’s something virtuous about weirdness. I mean “virtuous” in a sense inherent in the word’s Latin roots, something robust, something strong.

I think that two things can safely be said about Florence in the 1400s. The society, the culture, the polity were robust and they were weird. I was reminded of the latter in reading a sample of Pico della Mirandola’s “900 Conclusions”.

In 1486 (the new Sistine Chapel was consecrated in 1483, complete with wall frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino,) the young philosopher proposed to defend his 900 Conclusions against “any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy”. He proposed to do this in Rome, but on his way there, he could not help but get himself in trouble. He tried to run off with the wife of a Medici in Arezzo and ended up (albeit briefly) in prison. He was 23 years old.

 

A few samples from the “900 Conclusions”:

·       The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul.

·       No angel that has six wings ever changes.

·       Every soul sharing in Vulcan’s intellect is sown in the moon.

 

It should be remembered that Pico and Ficino (one of Florence’s premier humanist scholars) both were enthusiastic about magic and esoteric studies. Pico revived a study of the Kabbalah. And both were sincerely pious Christians, too. Pico was largely responsible for the rise of Savonarola, a fundamentalist monk who took over the city for four years during the crisis of the French invasion of Italy. Pico was committed to becoming a monk himself, when suddenly he died, age 31, the same year that the city drove out Piero de’ Medici.

 

All this to say, it’s easy to forget, as we lionize our Renaissance heroes, how idiosyncratic they could be, and how idiosyncratic also the culture that they nurtured and that nurtured them.

 

This I report as the American culture enthusiastically explores its own weirdest corners under the stewardship of the Grand Wizard of Weird, the (alleged) star of the Epstein files and the creepy don of the deal. Is all this, in the unsettling way of this world, a sign of a healthy culture reasserting itself, doubling down on its weirdness? It could be argued, I suppose, that the more lopsided the belief system, the more its people will fight to protect it: a perversion of Keirkegaard’s “leap of faith”. Reasonable people, by this logic, are inherently weaker in their social structures because there is just less passion aroused in the defence of transparently rational systems.

 

It should be held in mind, though, that Late Renaissance culture, robust and fertile as it was, developed before a backdrop of crisis and turmoil. Italy was becoming a battleground for the superpowers of the age, and there were plenty of relatively sober people who were convinced that the end was coming, that the year 1500 would bring the Last Judgement.