Out of the foam of the Renaissance waves, as beautiful as the Venus painted by Botticelli, naked and innocent, a modern woman emerged, ready to enter a world that had been out of her reach. The Renaissance is placed by many in 1492, when Lorenzo de’ Medici died and Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope. It was then that America was discovered, the great thinker Erasmus of Rotterdam was ordained a priest and the Moors were expelled from Granada. But even more important is the event that preceded it. In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg started printing books, giving women an education to rival that of men. Now, for the first time, they were able to deal with intellectual issues, they were able to debate and to argue.
The flame of these changes began in Tuscany in the mid-15th century, spread to almost all of Italy, lost strength during the Counter-Reformation, then spread to France around 1530 and, fifty years later, to England and the Netherlands. The Renaissance was characterised by observation, exploration, learning and analysis, and an unwillingness to accept the thinking of the past. This was the period when Copernicus announced in 1543 that the Earth revolved around the Sun and Leonardo da Vinci advised artists to study mathematics too, to understand visual perspective and to respect physiology. The human mind was allowed to think for itself and disregard old conventions.
With the discovery of ancient aesthetics, the woman became a muse, portrayed as a positive person, a symbol of spring, Venus, truth and justice. This was followed by a change in her physical form, which now contrasted with the former medieval abundant image of the mother of fertility. The woman as she appears in frescoes and paintings of the Renaissance is slimmer, more youthful and nourished. The Renaissance was also a time – at least for a while – when people wanted to have fun and the medieval ‘memento mori’ (don’t forget that you are going to die) was replaced by the ‘memento vivere’ (don’t forget to live). Education enabled women to write letters, verses and stories, not only to their friends but also to their husbands, and at that time, writing was as much a thing of art as painting.
We will meet some of these Renaissance women who, although they did not have much in common, their lives were intertwined because they lived in the same period and because there were still very few educated people in Europe at that time. They often followed the same paths as men, questioning and raising doubts. They were also present in politics; Catherine de’ Medici was Queen of France, Jeanne d’Albert was Queen of Navarre and led her Protestant troops to fight the Pope. Women’s participation in active daily life gave the Renaissance a strong imprint, as can be seen most clearly in the Netherlands.
Some of the most famous women of the Renaissance lived in Ferrara for various reasons. Despite the Este princely family that ruled it killing each other and throwing each other into dungeons, Ferrara, a modern city with straight and wide streets and a population of 40,000, was one of the largest cities in Italy. The princely estates extended into the Po valley, controlling navigation on the river, and the Este family also owned the cities of Modena and Piacenza. Most of their income came from duties and taxes.
When the cost of governing exceeded the income – as was often the case – the sons of the princes served as commanders of the mercenary troops of each Italian city. They became condottieri, commanders of mercenary troops. When Vittoria Colonna arrived in Ferrara on 8 April 1357, she was already a well-known poet and at the height of her fame. Some of her poems had already been published a few years earlier and were recognised by all the famous poets, and she herself encouraged people to imitate what she wrote. She was not only famous, but also belonged to one of Italy’s oldest noble families. At forty-seven, she had already lost some of her physical attractiveness, her hair was greying and her health was not the best, but this did not diminish her fame.
In 1523, thirty-five years before Vittoria arrived in Ferrara, her father Fabrizio Colonna was a prisoner at the Ferrara manor. Being a prisoner in Ferrara was a bit like being a guest and Fabrizio was often the centre of attention at banquets held by Lucrezia Borgia. Lucrezia, daughter of the Pope and sister of Cesare Borgia, already had two husbands, as well as many lovers, among them a cardinal. Her wedding journey from Rome to Ferrara in January 1502 surpassed in luxury and extravagance anything the human eye had ever seen.
The fair-haired Lucrezia brought something exotic to the city, and her husband’s entourage didn’t like her. Surrounded by her Spanish and Roman ladies, she was alone in the great castle of the Este family. Many pregnancies, many miscarriages, ill health and the flat landscape did her no good. Sometimes she took refuge in a convent in her depression, other times she threw boisterous parties and in 1537, when Vittoria Colonna arrived in Ferrara, she was already dead.
Her son Ercole was delighted to welcome the famous poet Vittoria under his roof. Pope Paul III was convinced that something stank at the court in Ferrara, because some people – the Pope could always name them – were gathering there to advocate reforms in the Church. John Calvin, who had undertaken church reform in France, Switzerland and Italy, was staying there. Lucrezia Borgia’s son Ercole married Reneé de’ Valois, daughter of the King of France. Reneé was – or so they say – unspeakably ugly and gathered around her a group of people whom the Pope was convinced were heretics.
Among them, of course, was Vittoria Colonna. Ever since her husband died, she had felt an incredible energy inside her. In what could be called a happy marriage, she spent most of her time in isolation, as her husband was constantly on the war marches or in the company of other women, and it was only in her mature years that she began to make close friendships with men. Her main goal in Ferrara was to help the monk Bernardino Ochino to have his own monastery here.
Ochino was no ordinary monk. He belonged to the Reformed Franciscans, which later became the Capuchin Order. His fiery sermons, which castigated the corruption of the Church, gathered crowds of the faithful around him who listened with open mouths. It was a time when, at the same time as the Renaissance was breaking out, sackcloth-clad priests were cruising the town squares and streets, promising damnation to those who violated the principles of piety and honesty.
Like Savonarola, Ochino was a reformist and knew that he was protected by some powerful women, not only Reneé and Vittoria, but also Giulia Gonzaga, Vittoria’s beautiful cousin, and Catherine Cybo, niece of the former Pope. Vittoria managed to convince the Prince, who in turn put pressure on the nobility of the town to cede a larger building in which Ochino was to have his convent. She attended all the parties at court, reciting her poems and telling those present that she also exchanged letters with the poet Pietro Aretino.
Rome, city of courtesans
Another important woman, also a poet, Tullia d’Aragona, lived in Ferrara. She could not have been more different from Vittoria, whose reputation was based on the oldest craft in the world. She was the most famous courtesan of her time. She is said to have amassed such a fortune that the townspeople were convinced she would never be able to spend it. The poets knew each other, as they had both come to Ferrara from Rome. On the surface, they were quite different. Vittoria was of noble birth and older, and Tullia was a successful courtesan, accompanied everywhere by envy and pursuit, both of them demanding for themselves to be independent persons with their own rights. A contemporary poet wrote that “Vittoria is the moon and Tullia the sun” of the Italian Renaissance.
Rome was a symbol of the rediscovery of antiquity. Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello worked together to discover forgotten and buried ancient statues. But Rome was also a dangerous city, unsafe to walk its streets at night, and extremely dirty, with litter everywhere, and beggars, pedlars and criminals rummaging through it. Those who were rich did not walk around Rome, they rode mules. Before 1490, Rome had 100,000 inhabitants, including 6,800 registered prostitutes and pimps.
The reason Tullia had to flee Rome at the height of her fame was a rich German man she had bedded. This humiliated her, according to her rich clients, and she had to try her luck in Ferrari. Rome did not mourn her, because there were more than too many courtesans. The city was then a magnet, attracting beautiful girls from all over Italy and beyond. It was full of rich bachelors; priests, cardinals, diplomats and pilgrims.
There was a lot of competition and only those girls who could offer their lovers something more than just sexual pleasures – pleasant conversation, singing, book-reading and elegant behaviour – succeeded. Girls had to be dressed exquisitely, and successful courtesans moved freely in the company of their choice and were an oasis of peace for men in a time of corruption, crime and dishonesty that reigned in Rome. In their salons, literature and music, and sometimes even philosophy, were discussed in the language of their choice. The courtesans often knew Petrarch by heart and quoted him.
But Tullia has always been something special in Rome. Whenever she left the house, in a stretcher or on a mule, people left their apartments and gathered in the street to watch the elegant courtesan, her dresses and jewellery. She was always accompanied by servants and often by friends who guarded her. Cardinals and bishops greeted and chatted with her on the way, showing that they enjoyed her company. She was what film stars are today.
At that time, churches were also the centre of social gatherings and courtesans frequented them. They always sat near the altar with the ladies of noble birth. Their houses were not open to everyone and whoever Tullia welcomed knew that he had a great privilege. Tullia was the daughter of a prostitute, her father was Cardinal Ludovico d’Aragon, a man of royal blood. She had a privileged childhood, she could read and write and speak Latin.
At the height of her fame, she was the biggest star of the Imperium in Rome. Her beauty was legendary. She was clever and intelligent and a friend of Raphael, who often painted her. She was rich, had a palace and a vineyard near Rome, everything a courtesan could wish for. Her lover, and the father of her daughter, was Agostino Chigi, a fabulously wealthy Florentine banker, a friend of architects, painters and gardeners, whose house was furnished by Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Sodoma, and whose printing press printed books.
But Imperia poisoned herself in 1511 to avoid age spoiling her beauty. Tullia thus became once again the first star among courtesans. Agostino Chigi gave Imperia a funeral unlike any Rome had ever seen, burying her in Rome’s most elegant church, San Gregorio al Celio.
Raphael depicted her as a muse in the Vatican rooms, with her golden hair braided into classic curls and her delicate neck exposed to merge the images of muse and courtesan. Tullia, whose songs guaranteed her immortality, wanted to be a muse forever and tried to look younger and younger, like film stars whose faces are numbed by surgical scalpels. But she belonged to another era of courtesans, when times were not so favourable for independent women and when society repented of allowing women to think for themselves.
Vittoria Colonna
Who was Vittoria Colonna? In those turbulent times, when King Charles VIII of France sacked Rome with his army, she was betrothed as a five-year-old girl and left to her fiancé’s aunt to raise her. She was thus given the best upbringing in those days. At the age of 19, she was married to Ferrnando d’Avalos. The marriage of two of Italy’s noblest families was the event of the year and was talked about for years to come.
The young couple lived near Naples and their villa was open to the literary world. But the three happy years soon passed and her husband went into the army, was captured and sent to the north of the country. A ransom had to be paid for him and Vittoria spent the last of her money on him. In those days, illegitimacy was widespread in the upper classes and Ferrnando took full advantage of it while he was away. Vittoria knew about his fence-jumping and forgave him for it.
Finally, the couple moved to Rome, where Vittoria met men with whom she remained friends for the rest of her life. Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto were well-known writers, Baldassarre Castiglione wanted her advice because he was writing a book. She also met Michelangelo and Ludovico Ariosto.
It was in Rome, which at that time was already experiencing the decline of the splendour of the early Renaissance, that Vittoria had her great personal success. While her husband was almost always away at war or on diplomatic missions, princes and cardinals held lavish banquets in her honour and asked her to recite their poems. But by then the city was already losing the spiritual elegance that had characterised the first period of the Renaissance, and the Church was already deep in the mire of lies and pretence.
Almost anyone with wealth and power could become a cardinal, and not all cardinals – there were about 30 – had to be priests. They lived like princes, maintaining their own mansions and a bunch of outhouses. Vittoria’s husband had hoped to be richly rewarded for his services and his many wounds with feudal estates, but this was not to be. Vittoria was about to join him on his war march when she heard of his death. There were rumours that the Pope had him poisoned, and Vittoria wrote at his death: “If ever a man lived, mistreated and in pain, and covered with a black cloak, it is I who live by tears alone.”
She took refuge in the Convent of San Silvestro. The new Pope was no friend of the Colonna family and, in 1525, forbade the nuns of the convent to allow Vittoria to become a nun, threatening her with excommunication.
Her brother advised her to leave Rome and take refuge in Marina. He was right. In 1526 and 1527, when the mercenary army sacked the Vatican because they were not paid, the Vatican was a ruined city and the Pope had to take refuge in Castel d’Angelo. Priests were beheaded, nuns were raped and the Black Plague struck the town. Tullia also suffered a bad fate, as all her possessions were stolen.
Vittoria, still grieving, but of a clear mind, took refuge in Naples and Ischia. Now she was alone with little money and she still had her grown-up son to look after. But a wave of regret followed a period of overindulgence, and even Vittoria could not avoid it. Protestantism and Martin Luther then became a source of political trouble and around 10,000 pages of the New Testament were printed every day in Germany. By 1522, 3,000 books had been printed, despite the ban and the Pope’s order to burn them.
But Rome has slowly recovered. Tullia was once again throwing parties, where people danced and sang and talked about Plato and Plutarch. The Renaissance invented fashion, and dresses suggested the curves of the body, unlike the billowing garments of the Middle Ages. Quite unlike today, when people want to buy similar dresses, women in the Renaissance strived for individuality. Even stockings were different colours. The dress reflected the social status, culture and personality of the wearer.
Tullia wore silk dresses with velvet inserts and embroidered silver or gold threads with ruffled sleeves, silk shoes decorated with lace or semi-precious stones, and very high heels. The dress reflected so much more than it does today. She enjoyed the company of admirers young and old and disappointed many by not offering her body to them in the end. Her rivals said that she used magic words to seduce and completely charmed her fans.
Meanwhile, Vittoria Colonna could not find peace. She travelled constantly between Ischia, Napoli, Rome and Orvieto and befriended Guilia Gonzaga, 23 years her junior and actually a relative, since she was married to Vespasian Colonna, Count of Fondi. She married him when she was only 14 and was widowed at the age of 18.
She lived in Fondi, on the border between the Papal States and the Napolitan Kingdom. She turned her palace into a centre of culture, attracting contemporaries and welcoming poets and writers. She and Vittorio had a similar circle of acquaintances. She was renowned as an extraordinary beauty. Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici adored her and commissioned Michelangelo’s best pupil to paint her portrait. The latter wrote that the portrait was of a “heavenly beautiful woman”. Although Guilio was painted in many portraits, many of them were burned towards the end of her life.
Giulia Gonzaga was famous for her beauty and many people wanted her hand in marriage. But her youthful marital experience told her not to risk any more physical contact with men. Although it was rumoured that she was still a virgin at the time of her husband’s death, such claims were exaggerated, but her marriage at the age of 14 to a man 26 years older than her left consequences. Her husband left her a stepdaughter, a large estate in Fondi, money and a title of nobility. Ippolito de’ Medici, a young and distinguished cardinal, was persistent and did not give up until they became lovers.
Giulia was so renowned for her beauty that even Suleiman the Magnificent heard of her and wanted her in his harem. He ordered his admiral, Khair el-Din, to kidnap her. So Dino landed in Sperlonga at night in August 1534 and surrounded the manor of Fondi with 2 000 men. Giulia managed to escape on horseback, but the Admiral, furious at not finding her, robbed the manor, took the inhabitants into slavery and burned down the nearby convent. His men raped the nuns and then killed them. Giulia managed to find refuge in the early hours of the morning on one of her nearby estates.
People continued to tell stories about this event for years, and Ludovico Ariosto and Bernardo Tasso described it in their poems. A year later, on a hike, Ippolito suddenly developed a high fever. Before he died, he wanted to see his beloved Giulia once more. She came to him and he died in her arms.
Giulia saw Vittoria Colonna as a spiritual leader and authority, and together they discussed religion and reform. Both were interested in the mysticism and sermons of Juan de Valdes in the churches of Napolitano. The latter was a follower of Erasmus of Rotterdam and in his sermons he scourged corruption and simony (trading in spiritual things), but he also denounced Luther for breaking away from the Roman Church. His sermons were also heard by other learned women, mostly widows, such as the Duchess of Amalfi, Princess Catherine of Cybo and even the sister of the Spanish Inquisitor.
Vittoria and her group were inspired by the need for a spiritual religion and a return to the source, rather than by dissatisfaction with the Roman Church. They followed the teachings of de Valdes and then Ochino. Meanwhile, Tullia had once again accumulated enough money to buy a large estate in Campania, which was every courtesan’s dream. She was not interested in religious problems, because she had slept with so many priests that she felt nothing but contempt for the Church.
Michelangelo in love
But times were also changing in Rome, and they were no longer so favourable to courtesans. Tullia felt this keenly. She moved to Adria, also because she was pregnant. Who the father was is not known, and probably neither did she. She then thought of little Penelope as her sister, even though her father d’Aragon had been dead for 16 years.
She continued her career as a courtesan in Venice, where the influence of the Church and the Pope was relatively small. She became well-known but not popular, because her intellectualism annoyed some people. He attracted Bernando Tasso, father of the much more famous poet Torquato Tasso. He fell in love with her and she took advantage of him. She was no longer young and needed him to elevate her poetry in his poems. Particularly famous are the ‘dialogues’, so popular at the time, in which they discussed the essence of love, which for Tullio was a mixture of physical passion and intellectual communion.
Although Venice was the only place in Italy at the time that managed to escape the influence of Spain and the Pope, the city was always ready to accept foreign influences. Florentine artists brought painting, sculpture and architecture, all mixed with Byzantine heritage and Arab culture. Through Venice, a new way of painting on canvas with oil spread throughout Italy. With Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Giorgione and Titian, the Venetian school of painting became known throughout Europe. The Venetian women who appeared on the large canvases, with their luxuriant hair entwined with pearls, were more sensual than the Florentines, whether they represented the Virgin Mary, a courtesan or a peasant girl.
But since Rome could not live up to Venice, he turned to Tullia. In written dialogues between a stranger and a local who knew all the women in Venice, he savagely attacked her. The dialogues were entitled Tariffs of Venetian prostitutes and in them the native called Tullia “the most rejected of all prostitutes”. She was humiliated and her protector Bernardo Tasso left her and went to Salerno. In 1537 she decided to leave Venice and settle in Ferrara.
While Tasso was working in Salerno, he found a new muse nearby. He regularly visited Giulia Gonzaga in Fondi and described its beauty. He lusted after her and wrote poems about her beauty. But Giulia Gonzaga had other things on her mind and was seriously considering going into a convent for good. Tullia was now abandoned, she had to leave Ferrara because of the fierce attacks of Rome, so she went to the north of Italy for a while.
Vittoria Colonna moved back to Rome and met Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1538. It was a fateful meeting. Michelangelo was a mature man of sixty-three, Vittoria was forty-eight. Those were the years in those days when contemporaries were already saying goodbye to life. This was the second time they had met, and it was a wonder that the first meeting, so many years ago, had made no particular impression on anyone. Now Vittoria was a famous poet and friend of great men, and Michelangelo the most famous painter, architect and sculptor of the time, who painted the Creation of the World and other scenes from Genesis, as well as the priceless artwork in the Sistine Chapel.
After years of being tossed to and fro by fate, they met again and immediately felt attracted to each other. They fell passionately in love. Their love affair was public and attracted a lot of attention, as Michelangelo was homosexual and Vittoria was overly virginal and shy. It was a platonic love, but a passionate love nonetheless. They wrote heated letters to each other, and you can feel the adoration they felt for each other in them.
Both avoided publicity and both were already a bit weird. Vittoria dressed like a Franciscan monk in the poorest dark-coloured clothes, and Michelangelo also abandoned himself. He had a messy grey beard and often behaved in a manic-depressive manner. In fact, he was the first lay person in Vittoria’s life, as she was always surrounded by bishops and religious.
But he has also suffered in his life. His father and brother had recently died and Florence was a dead city for him. He was a republican and opposed the Medici rule in Florence. He knew he had to leave Tuscany. “I have no friends, I don’t need any and I don’t want any.” He returned to Rome in 1534 and stayed there for another thirty years. He was commissioned to paint the great wall behind the altar with frescoes from the Last Judgement. He met almost no one in Rome and frightened people with his gloom and bad temper. Even the Pope himself was afraid of him.
These were difficult times for both of us. Michelangelo had lost all illusions and was attracted by the intellectual side of Vittoria’s character. She was a pleasure to talk to, she chose her words and the things she spoke about carefully, and he, in the sonnets he dedicated to her, spoke of her immortal soul that had come to earth straight from heaven. They both thought it was possible to have a pure and direct contact with God, as the Catholic Church offers.
When the Last Judgement was shown to the public, it was a sensation. Its style and message were so different from the frescoes Michelangelo had painted years earlier. The crowd of saints was awe-inspiring because the maturity of the young Christ was so different from the pitiful crowd of confused and smelly people around him. He discussed it with Vittoria, explaining to her that he wanted to show in it the wretchedness, fragility and sinfulness of human life. He even allowed her to look at the fresco while he painted it, and she lent him her face for the image of the Virgin Mary.
Her friendship with Michelangelo did not distract Vittoria from her many responsibilities; she managed her estates, corresponded with friends and supported the reform of the Church. Then, quickly, everything went wrong. Her brother Ascanio quarrelled with the Pope over salt, which he refused to buy at an extortionate price and instead bought elsewhere. Unable to reach an agreement, the guns came out and Ascanio lost. Estates were burned, castles looted and Vittoria took refuge in Viterbo, a day’s drive from Rome, where the “English” Cardinal Reginald Pole was in charge.
She stayed for three years. Everywhere in Europe, the nobility and women were enthusiastic about Protestantism. The conciliatory meeting in Regensburg, Germany, which ended in June 1541 and which was supposed to reconcile the two sides – Catholic and Protestant – did not bring any result. At that time, Vittoria was going through a spiritual crisis. Like many of her circle of friends, she was convinced that salvation could be achieved not by works but by faith, and she was reading texts that the Church considered “dangerous”. Cardinal Pole recommended that she should not read books that would only distract her and that she should give up excessive fasting.
Vittoria wrote to Giulia Gonzaga: “I owe the health of my soul and body to Cardinal Polo.” But she also wrote some “Protestant” sonnets and this did not go unnoticed. Because of her views, her friend Bernardino Ochino now had to flee from Ferrara to Calvinist Geneva. Before fleeing, he sent her his pamphlet-book. Cardinal Pole advised her to send it immediately to the Pontifical Commission in Rome to avoid any suspicion.
But it was too late, because she and her circle were already considered heretics. The Church knew that the real enemy of her doctrine was the thinking woman, literate and independent, and that her kind had to be eradicated. And Vittoria was a most provocative example.
Rules of conduct and dress
Not that prostitution was as dangerous to the Church as culture, but courtesans were rich and the Church needed a new source of income. So the hand of the Inquisition was not only on religion, but also on morals. Courtesans and prostitutes, once members of a socially recognised stratum of society, became outcasts. In 1543, under pressure from the Pope, a decree in Venice confiscated their property and forbade them to wear jewellery, to have rich furniture and no tapestries. In some cities, they could only go to church at certain times. Literary salons were viewed with suspicion by the church, and intellectuals like Vittoria were tolerated because she came from the nobility and was shy. There was no tolerance for women like the courtesan Tullia.
Most of Italy was under papal or imperial rule. In 1545, a letter arrived in Ferrara from Rome, demanding that the authorities thoroughly investigate all suspicious people, write and send reports to Rome, and torture those who did not obey the Pope’s orders. Spies were everywhere and the Protestant Duchess Reneé of Ferrara was a prisoner in her own palace, separated from her family. She was then asked to renounce Protestantism, which she did, but only in appearance. Later, under unbearable pressure, she fled to France. In 1560, the Reformed Church in Ferrara was dissolved, one preacher was executed and others were thrown into prison.
In 1546, Tullia tried to avoid the new laws and married an older and poor man. But even this was not enough, as even those who were married but did not live with their husbands were considered courtesans. The following year, she was denounced for prostitution and for not living in the part of Siena reserved for prostitutes, and for not dressing in accordance with the new legislation. She also had to be careful when writing her poems, as the printed word was now being scrutinised for the first time. Although there was no index of banned books, some books were confiscated and burned, and printers who printed “guides” for visiting prostitutes found themselves in court.
Outside the walls of Siena, the bodies of those tortured and killed were slowly piling up. Tullia lost much of her property and her house was repeatedly ransacked. She fled to Florence without her husband, but arrived there as a refugee, not as a lady. She was penniless, had to support her mother and two children, and was no longer young. She needed a new clientele and someone, preferably a well-known poet, to forge her gifts into stars.
Florence had not yet enacted its infamous law against courtesans. So Tullia remembered someone she had met in Rome and Venice. Benedetto Varchi was a well-known literary man, accused of paedophilia and ten years her senior. She wrote letters to him and extolled his literary abilities. She wanted to open a salon in Florence like the one she used to have, except that it would be a place for famous men of letters to debate. And Varchi wrote letters and poems and sang of her beauty.
Tullia managed to open her own salon and to hold literary evenings in which such things as the purity of the Italian language or ancient poetry were discussed. Everything went her way until, in October 1546, the winds of change swept through Florence to enforce the regulations on courtesans. They were no longer allowed to wear jewels and gold ornaments, but had to wear a cloth as big as a handkerchief on their heads with a yellow ribbon woven in to tell everyone what they were.
Meanwhile, Vittoria returns to Rome from Viterbo. She was no longer in the best of health, and she had aged. She found it difficult to write and concentrate. Michelangelo visited her, and he too looked much older and sickly. In February 1547, Vittoria made her will. Michelangelo was not mentioned in it. This was the agreement between them, as he had no descendants and was already wealthy.
A week later, Michelangelo was awakened in the middle of the night by Vittoria’s servant. In the early hours of the morning, he watched over her as her life faded away. “Say a prayer for me. I no longer remember the words.” He kissed her hands and she died in his arms, aged 75. She wanted to be buried in the church of the Roman monastery where she had last lived. But the nuns did not want the heretic’s body in the church, so they buried her in the common grotto. Nevertheless, her mystical face, depicted by Michelangelo in The Last Judgement, lives on and can be seen by thousands who visit the Sistine Chapel.
Counter Reformation
While the Renaissance allowed some women to enter the world, the Counter-Reformation deliberately pushed them out of the world and back to where they came from, because ignorance is supposed to be a gift from God and a safeguard against temptation. Gutenberg’s invention of the printed word made possible a mass popular literature dealing with women, telling them how to dress, what kind of education to have, how to look after their bodies and what cosmetics to use, what kind of behaviour was appropriate, and so on.
All these books, according to the Church, discouraged women from going home, giving birth and praying. Both the Counter-Reformation and Calvinism condemned them, just as they condemned other literature aimed at women and intended to entertain, such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The music that every girl of the middle and upper classes was taught was now to be such as to discourage dancing and flirtation. Painting was also not for girls, as they had to mix paints, climb ladders and grease their hands. Only those who had no other choice were to paint.
Such was Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652/53), who was raped at the age of 16. She was tortured at her trial to see if she was telling the truth, so she could no longer live as a normal woman, marry and have children. She became a painter, but in northern Europe, where no one knew her story. But painting was also changing, so that “sexy” paintings were given clothes or turned into images of saints and martyrs.
Women’s dress was determined by decrees, and these did not only apply to women of questionable morals; now they all had to dress “decently”. Thus the Renaissance individuality of women was finally suppressed. Tuscan bankers soon realised that it was only possible to do good business outside Italy, because under repressive regimes this was an illusion. Many were leaving a country where the atmosphere had become claustrophobic, the Renaissance waves were leaving the shores of Italy and splashing ashore in the northern lands.
Florence, once the very heart of the Renaissance, has become a shell devoid of freedom and ideas. In April 1547, Tullio d’ Aragon was once again asked to adhere to the new dress code, as she refused to wear a yellow veil on her head and still dressed in silk. She used all her connections, of which there were not a few, and succeeded. “Taking into account the rare talent for poetry and philosophy with which she is endowed, Tullia d’Aragon is exempt from the dress code and can wear the dresses and ornaments she wishes.”
What a triumph for a courtesan who also fell in love for the first time in her life. She was almost 40 years old, and her handsome suitor Pietro Mannelli was only 24. In love, she began to write poems again and decided to publish two books in 1547. The first, entitled Dialogues, is a long treatise on love that shows her stylistic skill, while the second, which she gave the simple title Rhymes, contained poems she had written herself and poems written about her by others. This book was reprinted four times in that century.
But neither book improved her social situation. In early 1549, she had to leave Florence because the city fathers did not approve of her scandalous presence in the city. She went to Rome, but this time she no longer lived in a house with a garden and servants, but had to rent an apartment. Her daughter had already died, and she had no money to educate her son properly. She was too old and too tired to sell her body. In fact, everything in her life was going wrong. Now it was Rome that had changed dramatically during her absence.
The situation in this city has always depended on the current Pope. Pope Paul IV set up a ghetto, where he imprisoned Jews every night, who had to wear yellow hats. Booksellers had to draw up lists of the books they had for sale, and ‘unworthy’ books were burned. The Inquisition had wide powers, and almost every day, pyres of heretics were burned in the public squares. Prostitution was also on the rise.In 1562, the Pope expelled all prostitutes from Rome and, a few days later, from all papal territories with a bull.
But this was a huge financial loss for Rome, and the merchants of Rome sent a delegation to the Pope to ask him to allow prostitutes to stay in Rome. The Pope relented, but they had to stay in a certain area of the city. Tullia had to move again. Fate was not kind to her, she was rejected by men because of her age, so she clung to her faith and devoted all her time to good works and the poor. She still wrote poems, but the rhymes no longer flowed from her tired soul. In the end, destitute, she had to move into a small room in a tavern. She fell ill and wrote her will. She could hardly speak and died ten days later.
A few years later, in 1566, Giulia Gonzaga, who had lived in a convent near Naples since the age of twenty-two, passed away. She took refuge there because she could not find inner peace in the outside world. However, she did not live in a life of detached piety, but was ever more closely associated with Vittorio Colonna and his circle, which was striving for a radical renewal of the Catholic Church and its return to the evangelical principles of the first centuries. But now she was important above all as a publisher. She published a book, Tractatus fratra Beneficia di Crista, whose ideas undermined the very foundations of the Catholic Church and were based on the teachings of the ancient saints. It was a huge success and was read by everyone, with 40,000 copies printed. It was vigorously attacked by the Church and the Inquisition did everything to confiscate as many books as possible.
Giulia Gonzaga was 53 years old when she died. She was lucky, because at the end of that year, the Inquisition took an interest in her correspondence. The Pope read her letters and declared that he would burn her at the stake if he had read them before her death.
At the beautiful string
While in Italy those who thought differently were burned at the stake, in France a certain amount of freedom and economic prosperity could be felt. Lyon was the first French city to be touched by the Renaissance. At that time, as much as 15% of the French population were Calvinists, or Huguenots as they were called, and the Reformation gave women a realistic view of their usefulness in society. It also believed that a woman enjoyed the full confidence of a man. After all, at this time in Western Europe, it was mainly women who sat on thrones.
With 60,000 inhabitants, Lyon was a privileged city as an important trading centre, as it was the gateway to northern Italy, Switzerland and Savoy. Louise Labé was born here in 1522, the daughter of a simple rope-maker, but figuratively the daughter of the French Renaissance. Her father gave her a proper education, thus enabling her to enter the middle class. She was skilled in the language of law and in 1552 wrote the famous Debate, a legal treatise among the ancient gods. She was particularly gifted as a poet and her poems were well known abroad. She wrote about the pain and happiness of love, even physical love, something that even men dared not write about.
She had lovers before and after her marriage, and the scandals came one after another. Her parents did not approve and her father even disinherited her. When she was young, she saw violence in the streets of Lyon and saw “heretics” burning at the stake. She liked men’s sports and was not particularly interested in the problems of the Reformation. She fully believed in the early philosophy of the Renaissance; she lived life to the full, because youth and beauty last only a short time. She accepted gifts, including expensive necklaces, but did not wear them in public, as the lower classes were forbidden to imitate the nobility in dress.
In 1542, when the French army besieged Perpignan, her father, who supplied the army with ropes, took her with him. She dressed as a man, rode and carried weapons and took part in the siege. When she returned, she was being pursued in the town and her father wanted the lively young woman to marry. She was 20 years old, and those were the years when an unmarried woman was considered an old maid. So she married a well-to-do bourgeois twenty years her senior. But unlike Tullio and Imperia, she was not a courtesan, she did not have to be, because she had money before and after the wedding.
At that time, Lyon already had 40 printing houses and the city soon discovered its Renaissance mania for Petrarch. Contemporaries considered Lyon the “Florence of France”. When the King of France visited Lyon in 1548, he was accompanied by his wife Catherine de’ Medici and his famous mistress, Diane de Poctiers. Diane, whose greatest fame came from her taste and her famous conversation, was then a symbol of the triumph of the intellect. She was never a real beauty, but when she met the then 7-year-old Prince Henri, she was already 27 years old.
It was she who later introduced the timid Henri to the mysteries of physical love. And not only that. She also made him aware of his own power and dignity. Strangely enough, she was not only the confidante of the King, but also the confidante of his wife Catherine de’ Medici. While she was insanely jealous of her and her world was one of magic, sorcerers, poisons, talismans and spells, Diane represented love of life, omics and the embodiment of the Renaissance.
Louise enjoyed her royal visit, meeting the entire French court and being visited by many of the courtiers at her famous salon, The Beautiful Cord. She entertained them, dancing, singing and reciting songs in several languages, and many of them ended up in her bed.
In 1554, the city allowed her to print her works, including a Debate, three elegies and 24 sonnets. But dark times came. Anyone could be accused of heresy and she could not even think of reopening her salon. Intolerant Catholics and Huguenots looked at each other with hatred, every intellectual gathering was suspect. In Lyon alone, 700 families were suspected of heresy. Killing and looting swept across France. Then the Black Plague decimated the population, her husband died, her lover left her, she had no friends, she was alone and she was afraid of dying. In April 1565, very ill and burnt, she dictated her will, but it was another year before she breathed her last. The Catholic funeral was held secretly in the early hours of the morning so as not to attract the attention of the Huguenots.
The Spanish Netherlands was actually lucky to be ruled by three women, three regents and all Habsburg princesses, for 77 years, from 1506 to 1583. They believed in tolerance and were intelligent politicians. Not only did they love to dance and play several instruments, they also wrote poems. At that time, the new architecture was also flourishing in the Netherlands, the most beautiful expression of which is the City Hall in Ghent.
Of course, the Netherlands could not avoid religious tensions. The Inquisition was still active and all efforts to abolish it were in vain. Calvinism had a strong foothold in Antwerp, but a less militant Protestantism was spreading rapidly in other regions. The struggle for national liberation and the Declaration of Independence in 1581 only further emphasised the important role played by women in the country, and Europe spoke of “free” Dutch women.
Women worked alongside men, running charities and orphanages. They could marry men of their own free will rather than their parents’, and widows successfully took over family businesses. Unmarried mothers could sue the fathers of their children, and divorce and remarriage were not just a matter for men. Instructions on sex were printed, with descriptions of how to prolong the sexual act and how to avoid venereal diseases. Women could raise their voices in society, read scriptures and comment on them.
The boom of the early capitalist economy gave rise to a strong middle class in the Netherlands and, as men were often on the warpath, women had to take care of the economy. This is why women are often depicted in paintings, always doing something. They became painters themselves. They did not paint large canvases, but miniatures, and they sold these paintings.
Landscape painting was also gaining ground. Women became important for the economy in the Netherlands and the figure of a woman working hard was at the forefront, with the beauty of her body relegated to the background. The idealisation of female beauty was not important to the Dutch middle classes and this was in stark contrast to the development of the Renaissance in Italy. Here there were no Botticelli’s curves and the oval faces of Mantegna and Raphael. The Renaissance in the Netherlands therefore took a different path, the path of capitalism, the path of enrichment. Literacy was encouraged, but more in the sense of the ability to do maths quickly than in the sense of reading poetry.
The Renaissance in Europe thus had a double face to the Roman god Janus, god of gates and passages, and later of beginnings and endings. On the one hand, the face of a man, on the other, the face of a woman. Sometimes the face of the woman seems to predominate, seeking something new, something that she was not allowed to do before. Raphael explained to the Pope that his search for perfection in the Renaissance was a search for the female face and that he must therefore meet as many beautiful women as possible.
The modern woman of the Renaissance was able to manage her own time and determine her own path in life. She was no longer a chattel to be freely disposed of by her father, brother or husband, but had her own will and the ability to make her own decisions. This was the triumph of the Renaissance woman. She lives, she loves and she is loved.
The sonnets of Tullie and, above all, Vittoria Colonna have survived the centuries, only a remarkable woman like Giulia Gonzaga could have been loved by a cardinal and painted by Sebastiano del Piombo. If Tullia or Imperia had been ordinary women, no one would have visited their salons, where the intellectual and artistic world of that era gathered. Although Catherine de’ Medici accused Diane de Poictiers of being a prostitute even when she was no longer the King’s mistress, everyone respected her for her knowledge and taste. But Catherine de’ Medici was also a great figure in the Renaissance world, even if she made great mistakes by listening to her enemies.
The real triumph of feminism over machismo was the victory of Elizabeth of England’s fleet over the Spanish Armada. Had she not been a highly educated woman who spoke several languages and knew what was happening elsewhere in the world, she would not have been able to play the part that made England great. But all these powerful feminine phenomena were only paving the way for a mass of individual middle-class women, as was the case in the Netherlands. Here women became respected members of the community in which they lived.
Educated women were not believed by many and were often the object of hostility because their sexuality was not limited to procreation, but sex could also mean love and spiritual partnership. The Renaissance was too revolutionary for many not to fear and the emancipation of women was at odds with the social order as imagined by autocratic rulers. But women in the Renaissance were decisive in the development of new philosophies, a new quality of life and intellectual wealth, and the initiators of what could be called the beginning of the modern age.
