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.

Travelogue 1213 – 10 October
Colonna

Vittoria Colonna was born in the fateful year of 1492, the year Lorenzo the Magnificent died, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the year young Michelangelo completed his marble relief sculpture, “Batte of the Centaurs”. She was born into the famous Roman noble family in a villa outside of Rome.

The Colonnas were an ancient family. They claimed their ancestry could be traced back to Julius Caesar’s own clan. They appeared in recorded history in the eleventh century, among the extended family of the Counts of Tuscany. This heritage, emerging from the Lombard era, is obscure, but they were already installed at the Castle called Columna outside Rome.

Medieval Rome – and the papacy - was a battleground for aristocratic families throughout the first centuries of the second millennium, and the Colonna family were nearly always in the mix. This required of them that they suffer exile from time to time. They suffered it in the fourteenth century, when a family squabble precipitated the Avignon papacy. For nearly a hundred years, the papacy was captive in France. Poetically, it was a Colonna pope, Martin V, who brought the papacy permanently home to Rome in 1420, during Brunelleschi’s time.

The family suffered exile again as the sixteenth century dawned, when Vittoria Colonna was only nine, because of a conflict with the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Alexander used the French wars in Italy to consolidate his power over the city and the Papal States.

Noble families always had options. The Colonna family had married into so many noble families over the centuries that they had refuge ready. Fabrizio, Vittoria’s father was grand constable to the King of Naples. They moved to the island of Ischia. Already, at the age of three, Vittoria had been engaged to marry the son of a general in the king’s service, a boy who would become the Marquis of Pescara. The boy was Spanish by blood, and born in Naples, but he was heir to lands on the other side of Italy, a place I’m not sure he ever visited.

Travelogue 1212 – 2 October
Conscience

It’s sure that Brunelleschi’s dome was immediately famous. I imagine it took only a generation for the building to become an established symbol of the city. For Florentines, for Tuscans, and perhaps farther. Certainly, the popes cast a jealous eye on Florence’s architectural achievements.

By the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s waning years, when he wrote his essay on sonnets, when young Michelangelo was getting started, impressing patrons with his first productions, the Duomo was half a century old, still exciting, while also slipping into the background, an unchanging component of scenery on a stage set for great things.

By the time a century had passed since the Duomo was consecrated, Lorenzo’s great grandson, Cosimo, was ruling as the Duke of Florence. Duke was a title created by the Medici pope, Clement VII, for his illegitimate son, Alessandro. Alessandro did not last long; he was murdered by a jealous cousin. Duke Cosimo ruled then for more than thirty years. Perhaps the young lutenist, Vincenzo, played for Cosimo in his first years as duke. Cosimo was a great patron of the arts, after all.

The world was different than in Brunelleschi’s day. The republican past seemed a romance. But the Duomo still stood, one hundred years old, gathering soot from hearth fires, tall symbol of the city of art and influence, and still a source of pride. To give some perspective, the Empire State Building is just approaching the completion of its first century now. And the Eiffel Tower is approaching 140 years.

Michelangelo, son of Florence, was in Rome. He felt nervous in Medici Florence. A Medici was also in charge of Rome, but the second Medici pope, Clement VII, was a liberal-minded and a generous man, having less need than the Medici in Florence for continuous consolidation of power. The Florentine republican instinct died hard. One of Clement’s last acts of patronage before he passed away in 1534 was to commission the “Last Judgement” in the Sistine Chapel from Michelangelo. The artist carried on with the huge fresco, through the rest of the decade, under the reign of Paul III.

Paul III was a Farnese, a friend of the Medici. The sculptor and the pope may have known each other from Lorenzo’s days in Florence, when Farnese studied under the Florentine humanist, Giulio Pomponio Leto. The new pope was an old man, but he was alert, ambitious, and tireless. He was a reformer. The Protestant rebellion was in full swing in northern Europe. In the year of Paul’s accession, Luther completed his German translation of the Bible. In response to the rebellion, the pope launched a stern reform movement, the first sincere response to Protestant accusations of corruption. He called the Council of Trent. He oversaw sincere efforts to root out abuses among the Curia.

He also oversaw an aggressive reaffirmation of church doctrine along conservative lines. He approved the founding of the Jesuit order. And, in history, his pontificate became known as the starting point of the Counter-Reformation, a force of some magnitude over the next few centuries.

However, history is messier than the colourful maps that divide Europe into solid blocks of territory. People wrestled with their conscience in every country. Even in Rome. Even Michelangelo, artist for the popes, struggled with his conscience.

Travelogue 1211 – 30 September
One Sunset

The sky was a geometry. It was a blue field for play. There were lines crossing. The shapes formed were dreams of Euclid. There were white lines arcing in straight lines across the curving space of our sky. The lines were evaporating, erasing themselves. The sky was more than blue. There were shades darkening. There were gradients of colour. They were settling near the bottom, like syrup in a glass of tonic. There were wisps of the irrational, clouds that were not geometric. They soaked in the sweet colours, the red tones, the raspberry and the pomegranate. They glowed.

There are so many planes in Holland’s skies. They multiply, chasing each other like fuzzy white rabbits across the field. They play in their big, blue field where there are no fences, no furrows, no hills, and just space to run. And can draw there, abrasive scratches against their unearthly ground. They can bring impossible ideas to brief life, those straight lines, straight lines that curve, that might have inspired Newton and then Euclid, if the skies had existed back then, the skies in which the sun set, the skies in which metal rabbits played.

The fools who find contrails sinister, who read them like verses left by Nostradamus’s left hand, those poor minds, cheated out of adult thought, they might find the sight terrifying. Or offensive. Or worthy of righteous action. They find themselves incapable of aesthetics. They are made indignant by the proofs of geometry. They are confused by the purity of lines. They might become bewildered at the entrance of Newton, the peacemaker. May they find breath again.

For now, the night is gaining on the lines, and they are turning red with fright.