Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna by Ramie Targoff (review)

There is no lack of biographies in the vast bibliography on the Renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara. Besides the works by Filonico Alicarnasseo, a contemporary of the poet, and by Giambattista Rota in the eighteenth century, eight biographies of varying scope were produced in the nineteenth century (Teotochi Albrizzi, 1815; Ranalli, 1838; Volpicella, 1844; Visconti, 1851; Paladini, 1855; Trollope, 1859; Bustelli, 1867; Roscoe, 1868). The century closed with the definitive biography by Alfred von Reumont (1881), enriched with poems by Colonna. The twentieth century failed to do better, and the attempts by Maud Jerrold (1906), Johann H. Wyss (1916), Amy Bernardy (1927), Settimia Cicinnati (1929), Giorgio Patrizi (1982), Silvia La Padula (1998), Restituta Carbone (2009), Maria Musiol (2013), and Raffaella Martini (2014) have not added much to our knowledge of Colonna. With the only partial exception of Patrizi, they often uncritically referred to Reumont's text without a direct and thorough investigation of the sources. Ramie Targoff's book is therefore a tremendously welcome contribution, which reevaluates known and previously unknown documents to reconstruct one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance. This is, in short, the first reliable biography of Colonna since Reumont's.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters, which provide the reader with almost everything that is known about the marchioness's biography and the context in which she lived: clear language and an unaffected style make the book extremely rewarding for nonspecialist readers, and of fundamental importance for scholars.

The narration begins in Ischia in 1525, and many flashbacks describe Colonna's life (chapter 1) until the death of her husband on 3 December 1525, which completely changed her life (chapter 2). Failure to fulfil her desire to become a nun (chapter 3) led Vittoria to poetry. Chapter 4 is in essence an essay on Colonna's love poems, with less space dedicated to her spiritual verses. We do need such readings of Colonna's poems, since what made Victoria the "remarkable" person she was is not only that "she has the obvious distinction of being the first woman ever to see a book of her own poems in print" (289); especially in the spiritual poems, she was a great poet, and this is the main reason for reading her poems even today. Chapter 5 narrates the controversies between the pope and the Colonna family, which, along with the Sack of Rome, forced the marchioness to leave the eternal city. Thus, she returned to Ischia, where a large group of writers and intellectuals gathered around her (chapter 6). After leaving the island, Vittoria engaged more and more in the life of the Capuchins and in particular of Bernardino Ochino (chapter 7). The long stay in Ferrara then brought her into closer contact with the ideas of the Reformation (chapter 8), which she later shared with the Spirituali who had gathered in Viterbo. In the late 1530s, her friendship with Michelangelo intensified (chapter 10); in the same years her poems began to be published without permission (chapter 9). The Salt War between her brother Ascanio and Pope Paul III forced her to move away from Rome again (chapter 11), but, as a result, she had the opportunity to visit more frequently her new spiritual guide, the English cardinal Reginald Pole (chapter 12). Chapter 13 presents unpublished documents and an unprecedented perspective: here, Targoff takes into consideration Vittoria's last will and testament and the intriguing story of the enormous sum of money she left to Pole.

A great difficulty in the study of Vittoria Colonna is the lacuna in the documentation about many periods in her life, particularly her youth. Targoff does not lie: she does not write a historical novel filling the gaps of our ignorance with the fruits of her imagination. Rather, she fills these gaps by judiciously referencing similar and chronologically proximate events. Thus, one frequently finds locutions such as "There is no record of […] but […]" (34...