LETTERS
VITTORIA COLONNA
WARRIOR’S WIFE
Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos
Marchese de Pescara
Unknown painter, 16th century. Image ID: HKTJ2E ALAMY Images
VITTORIA COLONNA’S LETTERS
To Diverse Leaders of Warfare
1511 -1530
LETTERS
Diverse Addressees:
Ferrante d’Avalos,
Vittoria’s War-Absent Husband
Emperor Charles V
Filiberto de Chalon, Prince d’Orange
COMMANDER OF THE IMPERIAL ARMY
SYNOPSIS
Vittoria Colonna
Rhymed Letter to her War-Absent Husband
La Pistola
Excelso Mio Signor questa ti scrivo.
Vittoria, as a warrior’s wife, deserted by a war-waging husband, is seeking literary solace in Ovid’s Epistolae Heroidum, fictional letters of warriors’ wives to their husbands, waging war far away from their homes. For instance, the Roman poet makes Penelope write a letter to her husband Odysseus in Troy.
Vittoria, as a real warrior’s wife, deeply affected by the absence of her war- faring husband, wrests the quill from the male Roman Ghost Writer’s hand to write the letter to her war-absent husband herself, displaying the genuine emotional complexity of a deserted warrior’s wife in Renaissance Italy in 1511. Versifying in Terza Rima, she meant her letter for the public, where her revelation lyrics, offered in a personal letter, were a novelty, triggering off a sensation, whereas her husband presumably never read it.
As a mythological figure with a clear profile, Penelope is robust, tough, unshaken. The psyche of the young Renaissance lady is complicated. She is staging herself in boundless pain.
There is no temple, whose stones are not wet with my tears.”
The idea of the letter as well as the reproachful tone have been adopted from Ovid. Otherwise, however, the poetess emancipates herself from Penelope, her model, opening up new ways of subjective literary ways of representation. Vittoria articulates the intensity of her pain, describing her complex emotions in subtle nuances, even revealing the ambivalence of her feelings towards her war-faring husband and father:
Never had she thought it possible that the one her father, the other her husband could so unfeelingly, so mercilessly inflict pain on her. Vittoria takes astonishing insight into her own psyche. She is aware that, by this bitter experience her respect of her father and her love for her husband have undergone an ambivalent change. They mutated to painfully complex feelings affected by poisonous ingredients:
Deference of my father and love for you, like two
greedy snakes, are incessantly festering at my heart.
Flying into a rage at her war-mongering husband, Vittoria envisages him engaged in fighting, at the very moment of attacking, regardless of deadly danger, throwing himself into the thick of the battle for the sake of honor, a moment that means for him the highest possible intensity of life. She exposes him, as an adrenaline junkie, caricatures him in his aggressive lust, uttering abhorrent war cries.
Pescara’s unbridled aggression contrasts to Vittoria’s feminine profession of love. She joins the wives, mothers, worrying about their beloved ones at war.
Ovid’s Penelope mentions the scarce news arriving from the Trojan war. Vittoria Colonna employs an express messenger, arriving immediately at the spot to report the defeat and captivation of her father and husband in the battle at Ravenna, thus making the war break into the bucolic idyll of lovely Ischia, adding drama to her letter, placing Vittoria in a position of expressing the immediacy of her response to the shocking news.
However, she is not taken by surprise, pensive and tormented by foreboding, as she has been for some time, her soul darkened by gloom, projected by the poetess into the gorgeous backdrop of Ischia. A sudden turmoil in nature is in accord with the somberness of her soul. Approaching calamity has also been announced by the screech owl, already hoarse with croaking:
No stranger arrived from whom I did not try to get the latest news, piece by piece to put me into happy, airy spirits,
When, at a certain point of time, I perceived the rock my body rested on -my mind stayed with you – enfold in dark fog;
The whole air seemed to me a huge cave filled with black fume. The evil screech owl was croaking on that murky blind day.
The lake towards which Tifeo, the horrid monster, is stretching his limbs, was boiling – and all that happened at Easter, the blissful season!
Together with the winds of Eolus blowing towards our shores, the sirens, the dolphins, even the fish were weeping. The sea seemed black like ink.
All around, the gods of the sea were wailing. I heard them call to Ischia: “Today, Vittoria, you will be burdened with disaster,
Even though your pain will turn into salvation and eternal glory. Your father and husband are unscathed, though detained in honorable detention.
Released from his imprisonment in Milan, Pescara, Vittoria’s husband, did not return home, but stayed at Mantua for some time, where he fell in love with. Delia, who became his mistress for some years. In the Gonzaga Archives at Mantua, pescara’s letters were found, one of them praising Delia, presumably a courtesan, as a “ damigelle di famigerata libidine.
EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
between
EMPEROR CHARLES V and VITTORIA COLONNA
after the BATTLE OF PAVIA
24th February 1525
Synopsis
Bone of Contention
In Vittoria Colonna’s showdown with Charles V:
The emperor’s notorious Shortage of money,
which did not only force his generals to let the mercenaries of the imperial army plunder Italian towns. Charles V even postponed the compensation for Pescara, who due to ingenious tactics did not only win the decisive battle at Pavia, but even took the French King Francis I prisoner, thus catapulting Charles V and Spain into the temporary leadership of Europe.
Charles V initiates
the exchange of letters with Vittoria Colonna
on 26th March 1525
It was one month (!) after the Victory of Pavia that Emperor Charles V wrote a thank-you letter to Vittoria Colonna instead of her husband, motivating it rather circumstantially:
“We will regard your name as the most auspicious –more so, because you are married to a husband, who by his strength, military expertise, personal commitment and good luck had no minor share in this great victory. Nothing is too much for the marchese to expect from our thankfulness and generosity.”
Vittoria Colonna answered Charles on
1st May in Ischia:
Caesarea e Cattolica Maestà
25th May 1525
In the first part of her letter, parodying the emperor’s circumstantial grandiloquence, the poetess satirizes his shameful demeanor towards her husband, satirically generalizing his outrageous exploitation of his most committed general as “Habitus” of the imperial autocrat, still avoiding a personal attack against Charles V, but then turning breathtakingly personal in the second part of her letter.
Abruptly, Vittoria Colonna starts her frontal attack against Charles V, driving the incomparable services of her husband as well as the services of the House of Colonna home to thick-skinned Charles V, however, without mentioning Pescara’s secular victory in the decisive battle at Pavia.
In admirable female self-assertion, she does demand the promised commodity for her husband’s achievement, but she desires it as a testimony for her husband’s priceless services he has rendered for Spain and his King, and not from cupidity.
After talking straight, and even business-like, she changes into daring, sarcastic irony, completing her arguing with the following bon mot:
“Although Majesty’s thankfulness and generosity anticipate each justified question, I do not know what to estimate more: Receiving the reward of such a great Lord or the glory of having him as a debtor.”
Tearing the patronizing mask from Charles V’ face, who, in his letter to her, offered to her a hollow, self-complacent wordplay with her name Vittoria, as if it were synonymous with his victory at Pavia, she wrathfully confronts the emperor with her subjective, authentic, interpretation of her name Vittoria as self-conquest enforced on her by His Imperial Majesty, forcing her to renounce marital bliss as a sacrifice of the warrior’s wife for the emperor’s spectacular victory over his enemies:
“My name is held by myself in the highest esteem, because I was given it on account of the victories of Your House in the past. Now, Your Majesty regards my name as a good omen for the future. Yet I have only used it to defeat myself. While Marchese served you under such great, diverse dangers, I have been longing for him to come to me and to rest with me.”
xxxxxx
VITTORIA COLONNA
LETTERS
to SPANISH Potentates
against injustice
committed to
HER ITALIAN COMPATRIOTS:
Appealing to EMPEROR CHARLES V
in person
supporting MADAMMA PORCARA
WARRIOR’S WIDOW
Payment of her WIDOW PENSION SUSPENDED
Using her personal relationship to the ruling Spanish Caste in Southern Italy, especially to the emperor, Vittoria Colonna did her utmost to help her Italian Compatriots against injustice committed by the Spanish Rulers.
It is to the emperor Charles V in person that she wrote a letter in support of Madamma Porcara, whose husband was killed in action. The widow had been paid her documented pension only for two months. Then the payment was suspended.
Vittoria Colonna finished her letter to Charles V, using the familiar pronoun “you”, “recommending to “you” the pious Francesca and her son Aurelio, who have deserved the support of Your Majesty, whose hands I kiss as his most loyal servant and vassal.”
July 1528
Vittoria Colonna
Appealing to FILIBERTO DI CHALON,
PRINCIPE D’ORANGE,
COMMANDER OF THE IMPERIAL ARMY
to achieve annulment of the death sentence
inflicted on FABRIZIO MARAMALDO,
Imperial Officer,
who had fallen a victim to French Intrigue.
As an outsider, who was not personally related to the delinquent, Vittoria begins her letter, anticipating the addressee’s objections to her lacking authorization for her daring letter, demanding from Chalon the withdrawal of a death sentence, that he himself had inflicted on the officer.
Then, with emotional intelligence, Vittoria plays the obstinacy of the Prince of Orange down to a slight, only hypothetical suspicion, thus allowing Chalon to give in with less loss of face.
At last, from a morally superior point of view, she suggested a proper mode of conduct to Filiberto di Chalon, the commander of the Imperial army:
Expel any doubts from your heart, and with that clarity, magnanimity, and benevolence, which befits a great commander like you, take a justifiable decision and rehabilitate Maramaldo, with the positive effect: That the Spanish nation, setting great store by the esteem of their noblemen, will praise you, and the Italian nation can have confidence of being held in greater esteem by Your Magnificence than they have experienced so far, and all of the opportunity of regarding your decision as a singular act of mercy. God may save you.
La Marchesa de Pescara
Fotografie und Digital Image: KHM:Museumsverband. Reproduction.
Rendition by courtesy of Kunstistorisches Museum Wien
Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos
Victor of Pavia