Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact ed. by Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact ed. by Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh William V. Hudon Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact. Edited by Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2022. Pp. 406. €115,00. ISBN: 9789463723947.) Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh appropriately dedicated this beautifully illustrated volume to Giovanna Rabitti, the late editor and translator of works by Chiara Matraini (1515–1604), an author of both spiritual texts and Petrarchanstyle love poetry, just like Vittoria Colonna. They have presented fifteen different contributions grouped into six parts, adding a masterful introduction by Cox. The argument of Cox, and the thesis of the book overall, is straightforward. The negative image of Colonna—like that of her counterparts Marguerite de [End Page 406] Navarre and Veronica Gambara—nursed over most of the twentieth century must be rejected. Critics honing in on the apparent participation of these women in a patriarchal literary culture they chose not to threaten, according to Cox, McHugh, and their collaborators, missed an important part of the story. Colonna, they persuasively demonstrate, was a prototype and inspiration for Italian women who wrote from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Much is revealed in the demonstration. In part 1 on social relationships in the literary circles Colonna frequented, there's no prosopography, but contributors identified links between the Neapolitan Accademia Pontaniana and the circle that Colonna gathered on the island of Ischia, and analyzed the attachment of Colonna to Reginald Pole through their correspondence between 1541 and 1545. Part 2 turns on role models from Colonna's widowhood, and the way she became a model for others. Colonna emulated not just conventional models like the Virgin Mary, but also Birgitta of Sweden, a reform-minded aristocratic widow in fourteenth-century Rome. Colonna in turn became a model author for female poets in the second half of the sixteenth century, like Laura Battiferri, Matraini, and Francesca Turina, who used her reputation to legitimate their own voices. The editors organized part 3 around Colonna's poetry, especially where she expressed religious desire, but also included a contribution making claims about Colonna's network of epistolary relationships that seems out of place. Part 4, on the other hand, is wholly focused on art, including Colonna's relationship with Michelangelo, and her use of art to promote devotion. One essay considers possible Colonna patronage of Titian for a Mary Magdalene painting that suggested presentation of female nudity was not always seen as deleterious to devotion in this era. Another explained that Colonna was the original recipient of Pontormo's Noli me tangere (1531), and discussed the implications of the unorthodox depiction of Jesus and Mary Magdalene it contains. Parts 5 and 6 include essays on the readership of Colonna's works and the long-term impact of that literature. Her poetry, these scholars assert, not only became a dominant tradition in the late Renaissance, but also quickly established Colonna as an author who surpassed the accomplishments of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarcha. These findings, and the overall argument, are surely consistent with the results of my investigations into the literary production of Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524). The deeper implication of it all, as Cox rightly indicated in the introduction, is to further delineate the limits of any pernicious literary effects wreaked by the Counter-Reformation. Benedetto Croce, who—with Francesco de Sanctis—helped enshrine the polemical view of those effects, gets some critical attention here. But among Anglo-American scholars, Eric Cochrane began questioning such oversimplifications fully fifty years ago, in works now far-too-infrequently cited, such as Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973), Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (1981), and Italy 1530–1630 (1988). He was right. And he would have loved this book. William V. Hudon Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania [End Page 407] William V. Hudon Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press