In that poetic sail along the Italian coast between Naples and Genoa the voyager feels that it is

that his bark is floating; that

as he flits along this coast when violet waves dash against a brilliant background of sky. Ischia reveals herself through the blue, transparent air, gleaming with opalescent lights, quivering, fading and flaming again as the afterglow in the east rivals in its coloring the sunset splendors of the west. Is there in the air a faint, lingering echo of the chant d’amour of sirens on the rocky shores? Is Parthenope still to be descried? Gazing upon Ischia there is a rush of romantic impressions as if one were transported into ideal regions of song, before this impression begins to resolve itself into definite remembrance of fact and incident. Surely some exquisite associations in the past had enchanted this island in memory and invested it with the magic light that never was on sea or land. Traditions of beauty; of the lives of scholar and savant and princes of the church; of a court of nobility enriched and adorned by prelate and by poet; traditions, too, of a woman’s consecration to an immortal love and the solace of grief by poetic genius and exalted friendships,—all these seem to cling about Ischia in a vague, atmospheric way till memory, still groping backward in the twilight of the richly historic past, suddenly crystallized into recognition that it was Ischia which was the home of Vittoria Colonna, the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance. Lines, long since read, arose like an incantation; and like bars of music, each note of which vibrated in the air, came this fragment of one of her songs:—

Vittoria Colonna was called the most beautiful and gifted woman of her time in all Italy. Her life of nearly sixty years (1490-1547) lay entirely in that period when the apathy of ten centuries was broken, when the darkness fled before the dawning of a glorious day. New methods of thought, revised taste in poetry, new discoveries of science, a nobler progress in criticism, great discoveries, and a lofty and unprecedented freedom of conviction marked the century between 1450 and 1550, stamping it as the marvellous time which we know as the Renaissance, “that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound Æsthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.”

It was peculiarly fitting that Italy should take the initiative in inaugurating this vita nuova. Italy had a language and literature and art. Dante had delivered his solemn message and Petrarca his impassioned song. Boccaccio had taught the gospel of gladness. Who shall analyze the secret springs of their inspiration and reveal to what degree Ovid and Horace and Virgil influenced the later literature? A new solar system was established by Copernicus. America was discovered. Science entered on her definite and ceaseless progress, and religion and art became significant forces in human life. Printing had been invented and the compass discovered.

Into this time of new forces, when everything was throbbing and pulsating with life, was Vittoria Colonna born into social prestige and splendor. Her father, Fabrizio Colonna, and her mother, Agnesina di Montefeltro, a daughter of the Duke of Urbino, were then domiciled in the castle of Marino, on the Lago d’Albano, a magnificent palace some twelve miles from Rome, in which the Duke d’Amalfi (the father of Fabrizio Colonna) lived, and which is still standing, filled with memorials and relics of historic interest. Urbino, the seat of the Montefeltro, is renowned as having been the birthplace of Raphael, who

but who

The Colonna date back to the eleventh century, and they gave many princes and cardinals to the country. At the close of the thirteenth century they were arrayed against Boniface VIII, the Pope, who accused them of crime, while they disputed the validity of his election to the holy office. In retaliation, the Pope excommunicated the entire family, anathematized them as heretics and declared their estates forfeited to the church. The Colonna, far from being intimidated, commanded three hundred armed horsemen, attacked the papal palace, which they plundered, and made him a prisoner,—an incident referred to by Dante in the “Inferno.” The Colonna and the Orsini were also at warfare, and when a member of the former family was elevated to the papacy under the name of Martin V, they despoiled property of the Orsini.

Gay excursionists to-day, who fly over the Campagna in their twentieth-century touring cars to the lovely towns of the Alban hills, may look down from Castel Gandolfo on the gloomy, mediÆval little town of Marino, part way up a steep hillside, whose summit is crowned by the castle once belonging to the Colonna and in which Vittoria passed her early childhood. “Nothing,” in his “Roba di Roma,” says Story, “can be more rich and varied than this magnificent amphitheatre of the Campagna of Rome, ... sometimes drear, mysterious, and melancholy in desolate stretches; sometimes rolling like an inland sea whose waves have suddenly become green with grass, golden with grain, and gracious with myriads of wild flowers, where scarlet poppies blaze and pink daisies cover vast meadows and vines shroud the picturesque ruins of antique villas, aqueducts, and tombs, or drop from mediÆval towers and fortresses.”

Flying in the swift motor-car of the time toward the Alban hills, Marino may be easily reached in less than an hour from the Porta San Giovanni, and in the near distance Monte Albani, rising into the cone of Monte Cavi, is a picture before the eye, while on the lower slopes gleam the white villages of Albani, Marino, Castel Gandolfo, and Frascati, with the campanile of a cathedral, a fortress-like ruin, or gardens and olive orchards clambering up the heights. The Papal town of Rocca di Papa crowns one summit where once Tarquin’s temple to Jupiter stood and on whose ruins now gleam afar in the Italian sunshine the white walls of the Passionist convent of Monte Cavi, built by Cardinal York. From this height Juno gazed upon the great conflict of contending armies, if Virgil’s topography be entitled to authority. And here, through a defile in the hills, one may look toward Naples, “and then rising abruptly with sheer limestone cliffs and crevasses, where transparent purple shadows sleep all day long, towers the grand range of the Sabine mountains, whose lofty peaks surround the Campagna to the east and north like a curved amphitheatre.... Again, skirting the Pontine Marshes on the east, are the Volscian mountains, closing up the Campagna at Terracina, where they overhang the road and affront the sea with their great barrier. Following along the Sabine hills, you will see at intervals the towns of Palestrina and Tivoli, where the Anio tumbles in foam, and other little mountain towns nestled here and there among the soft airy hollows, or perched on the cliffs.”

In this landscape there are three ruined villages—Colonna, Gallicano, and Zagarda—perched on their respective hills. The castle of the Colonna family is now restored and modernized to a degree that leaves little trace of that former stately grandeur which is transmuted into modern convenience and comfort.

In this scene of romantic beauty, with the vista of beauty almost incomparable in any inland view in Italy, Vittoria passed her infancy, until, at the age of four, her childhood was transplanted to fairy Ischia. In all this chain of Alban towns, including Marino, Viterbo, Ariccia, and Rocca di Papa, the great family of the Colonna owned extensive estates, each crowning some height, while the defiles between were filled, then as now, with the foam and blossom of riotous greenery. Then, as now, across the mystic Campagna, the dome of St. Peter’s silhouetted itself against a golden background of western sky.

One needs not to have had privileged access to the sibylline leaves of the CumÆan soothsayer to recognize that Vittoria Colonna was born under the star of destiny. Her horoscope seemed to be inextricably entwined with that of Italy; and the events which created and determined the conditions of her life and its panoramic series of circumstances were the events of Italy and of Europe as well—in political aspects and in the influence on general progress, brought to bear by strong and prominent individualities whose gifts, genius, or force dominated the movements of the day.

To her father’s change of political allegiance, from the French to the Spanish side, in the war raging between those countries in 1494, Vittoria owed all her life in Ischia; and her marriage, and all that resulted from her becoming a member of the d’Avalos family, was due to this espousal of a new political faith on the part of Fabrizio Colonna. To the fact that in 1425 the war with France again broke out was due the loss of her husband and the conditions that consecrated her life to poetry, to learning, and that made possible the beautiful and sympathetic friendship between herself and Michael Angelo. Her life presents the most forcible illustration of the overruling power on human life and destiny.

It was the political change of faith on the part of Fabrizio Colonna that initiated an unforeseen and undreamed-of drama of life for his infant daughter, the first act of which included the command of the King of Naples that the little Vittoria should be betrothed to Francesco d’Avalos, the son of Alphonso, Marchese di Pescara, of Ischia, one of the nobles who stood nearest to the king in those troubled days. Francesco was born in the castle on Ischia in 1489, and was one year older than Vittoria. Fabrizio exchanged his castle at Marino for one in Naples, which city made him the Grand Constable. The d’Avalos castle in Ischia had at this time for its chatelaine the Duchessa di Francavilla, who is said by some authorities to have been the elder sister and by others to have been the aunt of Francesco. Donna Constanza d’Avalos, later the Duchessa di Francavilla, had been made the Castellana of the island for her courage in refusing to capitulate to the French troops when, after the death of her father, she was left in sole charge of the d’Avalos estates, and Emperor Charles V elevated her rank to that of Principessa. The Duchessa was one of the most remarkable women of the day. She was a classical scholar, and herself a writer, the author of a book entitled “Degli Infortuni e Travagli del Mondo.” To the care of this learned and brilliant woman, a great lady in the social life of the time, the care of the little Vittoria was committed, and she studied and played and grew up with Francesco, her future husband. The d’Avalos family ranked among the highest nobility of the Court of Naples, and the Principessa reigned as a queen of letters and society in her island kingdom. It was under her care that the two children, Francesco and Vittoria, pursued their studies together and acquired every grace of scholarship and accomplishment of society. The circles which the Duchessa drew around her included many gentlewomen from Sicily and from Naples; and “the life at Castel d’Ischia was synonymous with everything glorious and elegant,” recorded Visconti, “and its fame has been immortalized.” Although Francesco (the future Marchese di Pescara) was born in Italian dominions, yet the d’Avalos family were of Spanish ancestry and traditions. The musical Castilian was the language of the household. The race ideals of Spain—the poetic, the impassioned, the joy in color and movement—pervaded the very atmosphere of Castel d’Ischia. Vittoria’s earliest girlhood revealed her exceptional beauty and charm, and gave evidence that the gods loved her and had dowered her with their immortal gifts and genius, which flowered, under the sympathetic guidance and stimulus of such a woman as the Principessa (the Duchessa di Francavilla) and the society she drew around her, as the orange and the myrtle flower under the southern sunshine.

The literature of biography presents no chapter that can rival this in the idyllic beauty of the lives of those two children on the lovely island in the violet sea. The perpetual conflicts that were waged in both Rome and Naples awakened no echoes in this romantic and isolated spot, whose atmosphere was that of the peace of scholarly pursuits and lofty thought that is found where the arts and the muses hold their sway.

But in 1496 came the tragedy of the death of the young king and queen of Naples; four years later Rome celebrated a jubilee in which Naples took part, sending a splendid procession as escort to the famous Madonna that was carried from Naples to Rome and back, working miracles, it is said, on both journeys, as a Madonna should. A year later Frederick of Naples and the queen, and two of the king’s sisters,—ladies of high nobility,—came as guests to the castle in Ischia,—royal exiles seeking shelter. Five years later the new king and queen were welcomed with gorgeous parade and acclamation. A pier was thrown out over one hundred feet into the sea; on this a tent of gold was erected, and all the nobility of Naples, in the richest costumes of velvet and jewels, thronged to meet the royal guests. Over the sunlit Bay of Naples resounded the thunder of the guns in military salute and the cheers of the people. Among the distinguished nobility present, Costanza, Duchessa and Principessa di Francavilla, was a marked figure with her young charge, Vittoria Colonna, at her side. She made a deep reverence and kissed the hand of the king as he passed, as did many of the ladies of highest rank, and at the fÊte of that evening Vittoria’s beauty charmed all eyes. Although it was well understood that she had been betrothed since childhood to Francesco d’Avalos, yet many princes and nobles sued for her hand and were refused by her father, who was at this time established magnificently in Naples. Pope Julius II refused the pleadings of two dukes, both of whom wished to seek Vittoria in marriage, as he considered the love of the young girl for her betrothed a matter to be held sacred. Three years later, when Vittoria was nineteen and Francesco twenty, their marriage was celebrated in Castel d’Ischia with the richest state and beauty of ceremonial observance. A few months previous to this time she had returned to her father’s country home in the family castle at Marino, whither both Fabrizio and Agnese Colonna accompanied their daughter. When the time appointed for her bridal came, Vittoria was escorted to Ischia by princes, and dukes, and ladies of honor, and the marriage gifts to the bride included a chain of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, linked with gold; a writing desk of solid gold; wonderful bracelets; costumes of velvets, and brocades and rich embroideries, and a portion of fourteen thousand ducats.

“The noted pair had not their equals in Italy at this time,” writes a contemporary historian. “Their life in Naples was all magnificence and festivity, and when they desired to exchange it for the country they left Naples for Pietralba on Monte Emo, where they assembled pleasant parties of ladies and gentlemen. Much time was passed in their beloved Ischia, where the Duchessa, as Castellana, was obliged to receive much company. And here were found the flower of chivalry and the men most noted in letters.... They listened to the poets Sanazzaro, il Rota, and Bernardo Tasso; or they heard the admirable discourses on letters of Musefico, il Giovio, and il Minturno. It was an agreeable school for the youthful minds of Vittoria and Pescara. Thus passed in great happiness the first three years of their married life.”

It is not strange that to the young Marchesa di Pescara, Ischia had become an enchanted island. The scene of her happy childhood, of her studies, of her first efforts in lyric art, of her stately and resplendent bridal; the home, too, of her early married life,—it is little wonder that in after years she translated into song its scenic loveliness and the thoughts and visions it had inspired.

Again, the ever-recurring war came on, and in the spring of 1512 the King of Naples conferred the doubtful privilege on the Marchesa di Pescara of serving as the royal representative. It is said that Vittoria personally superintended her young husband’s outfit,—in horses, attendants, armor, and other details belonging to a gentleman of rank. Her father and her uncle, Prospero Colonna, were also among the military who led Italian troops. In the terrible battle of Ravenna (which was fought on the Easter Sunday, April 11, of 1512), Pescara was wounded, taken prisoner, and carried to the fortress of Porta Gobbia. A messenger was sent to Ischia, where Vittoria lived between her books and the orange groves; and the twentieth-century cynic of 1907 will smile at the form in which she expressed her sorrow,—that of a poem of some forty stanzas, which began:—

A translation of this lyric epistle, made in prose, gives it more fully as follows:—

In this letter Vittoria tells him that when the messenger reached her, she was lying on a point of the island (“I, in the body, my mind always with thee,” she says), and that the whole atmosphere had been to her that day “like a cavern of black fog,” and that “the marine gods seemed to say to Ischia, ‘To-day, Vittoria, thou shalt hear of disgrace from the confines: thou now in health and honor, thou shalt be turned to grief; but thy father and husband are saved, though taken prisoners.’”

This presentiment she related to her husband’s aunt, the Duchessa Francavilla, the Castellana of Ischia, who begged her not to think of it and said, “It would be strange for such a force to be conquered.”

Just after this conversation between the youthful Marchesa and the Duchessa, the messenger arrived. The psychic science of to-day would see in this occurrence a striking instance of telepathy. In her poetic epistle to her husband, Vittoria also says:—

These letters—in keeping with the times—were, on both sides, expressed in literary rather than in personal form. Pescara, from his captivity, wrote to her a “Dialogue on Love,”—a manuscript for which Visconti notes that he has searched in vain.

The Marchesa di Pescara went from Ischia to Naples, after learning of the misfortunes that had overtaken her husband, in order that she might be able constantly to receive direct communication regarding his fate. A few months later the Marchese returned, making the day “brilliant with joy” to Vittoria, but after a year of happiness he was again called to service, and the Marchesa returned to her beloved Ischia. She gave herself to the study of the ancient classics; she wrote poems, and “considered no time of value but so spent,” says Rota. The age was one of a general revival of learning. Royalty, the Pope, the princes and nobility were all giving themselves with ardor to this higher culture. Under Dante the Italian language assumed new perfection. This period was to Vittoria one of intense stimulus, and it must have had a formative influence on her gifts and her mental power. Having no children, she adopted a young cousin of her husband, the Marchese del Vasto, to educate and to be the heir of their estates. In 1515, Pescara again returned and the entire island of Ischia was “aflame with bonfires, and the borders of the beautiful shore bright and warm with lights,” in honor of the event. Of this event, Vittoria wrote:—

At a magnificent wedding festival in the d’Avalos family about this time, it is recorded that the Marchesa di Pescara “wore a robe of brocaded crimson velvet, with large branches of beaten gold wrought on it, with a headdress of wrought gold and a girdle of beaten gold around her waist.”

When the coronation of Charles V was to be celebrated at Aix-la-Chapelle the Marchese di Pescara was appointed ambassador to represent the House of Aragon on this brilliant occasion, when the new emperor was to be invested with the crown and the sceptre of Charlemagne. Charles had decided to journey by sea and to visit Henry VIII on the way, an arrangement of which Cardinal Wolsey was aware, although he had kept Henry in ignorance of it, according to those curious mental processes of his mind where his young monarch was concerned. Shakespeare, in the play of “King Henry VIII,” describes the meeting of the two kings, which occurred at Canterbury, “at a grand jubilee in honor of the shrine of Thomas À Becket.” One historian thus describes this scene:—

On the return to Naples of the Marchese di Pescara he told the story of his regal journey to an assemblage of nobles in the Church of Santa Maria di Monte Oliveto, and he then joined the Marchesa in Rome, where she had gone to visit her family and to pay her devotions to Leo X, who had just created Pompeo Colonna a cardinal.

Pope Leo aspired to draw around him a court distinguished for its culture and brilliancy in both art and literature. In this court the Marchesa di Pescara shone resplendent. “She was at the height of her beauty, and her charms were sung by the poets of the day,” says a contemporary.

A year later Leo X died, succeeded by Adrian (who had been tutor to Charles V), to the intense and bitter disappointment of Cardinal Wolsey, who had made the widest—and wiliest—efforts to gratify his own ambition of reigning in the Papal chair. Again the war between France and Italy, that which seemed to be a perpetually smouldering feud, and the Marchese di Pescara, again summoned to battle, was wounded at Pavia. For some time he lay between life and death at Milan, and a messenger was sent to beg Vittoria to come to him. She set out on this journey, leaving Naples in great haste; but on reaching Viterbo another messenger met her with the tidings of the death of the Marchese, which had occurred on Nov. 25, 1525. Overcome with grief, Vittoria was carried back to Rome and for the solace of entire seclusion she sought the cloistered silence of the convent of San Silvestre, which lay at the foot of the Monte Cavallo in Rome, almost adjoining the gardens of the Colonna palace. To the Marchese di Pescara, who had the military rank of general, was given a funeral of great pomp and splendor in Milan, and his body was brought to the famous Naples church of Santa Domenica Maggiore, where it was entombed with the princes and nobles of his house.

Before the death of the Marchese there had been a political plot to join the Papal, Venetian, and Milanese forces and rescue Italy from the Emperor’s rule, and the Pope himself had sent a messenger to Pescara asking him to unite with the league. The Marchese, Spanish by ancestry and by sympathies, used this knowledge to frustrate the Italian designs and to warn Spain. The Italian historians have execrated him for this act, which they regard as that of a traitor. Vittoria, however, did not take this view apparently, as in a letter to her husband she wrote:—

The inducement of the throne of Naples had been held out to Marchese di Pescara. He evidently regarded this in the nature of a dishonorable bribe, and it is this view which the Marchesa plainly shared.

After his death her first impulse was to take the vows of a cloistered nun. The Pope himself intervened to dissuade her, and she consented to enter, only temporarily, the convent of San Silvestre on the Monte Cavallo.

In the will of the Marchese di Pescara there was a clause directing that anything in his estate unlawfully acquired should be restored to the owner; and under this, Vittoria gave back to the monastery of Monte Cassino the Monte San Magno that had formerly been its property.

From the cloistered shades of the convent Vittoria removed to the family castle of the Colonna at Marino, where, on the shore of this beautiful lake (which was the scenery of Virgil’s Æneid), she passed some months, engaged in writing sonnets. Of one of these a translation runs in part:—

In another, perhaps her most perfect sonnet, she beseeches the winds to convey to her beloved the message she sends:—

Again, a year later, Vittoria returned to lovely Ischia, which, as one writer has described, “rises out of the blue billows of the Mediterranean like giant towers. The immense blocks of stone are heaped one upon another, in such a supernatural manner as to give a coloring to the legend, that beneath them, in those vast volcanic caverns, dwells the giant Tifeo.” The castle where the Duchessa Francavilla and the Marchesa Pescara lived is built on a towering mass of rock joined to the island by a causeway. The castle includes the palace, a church, and other buildings for the family and their guests and dependants.

For some three years the Marchesa did not again leave Ischia. In the mean time volumes of her poems were published. She received the acclamation of all the writers of her time. The crown of immortelles, often laid but on a tomb, was continually pressed upon her brow. She was the most famous woman of her time. Her beauty, her genius, her noble majesty of character impressed the contemporary world. Her days were filled with correspondence with the most distinguished men of the day. Ariosto, Castiglione, Ludovico Dolce, Cardinal Bembo, Cardinal Contarini, and Paolo Giovio were among her nearer circle of friends.

Stormy times fell upon Italy, in all of which the Colonna family bore prominent part, and all of which affected the life of Vittoria Colonna in many ways. Her biography, if written with fulness and accuracy, would be largely a history of the Italy of that time, for her life seemed always inseparably united with great events.

In the year 1530 (Clement VII being the Pope) a full Papal pardon had been extended to all the Colonna, and their castles and estates had also been restored to them. For years past Rome had been in a state of conflict. Benvenuto Cellini, who had watched the terrible scenes from Castel San Angelo where he was immured, has described the terrors. The Eternal City, whose population under Leo X had been 90,000, was now—in 1530—reduced to half that number. Palaces and temples had been the scenes of riot and destruction, yet to this very lawlessness of the time the Roman galleries of the present owe their ancient statues, which were uncovered by these assaults. The Coliseum was left in the ruined state in which it is now seen, and by the sale of the stones taken from it the Palazzo Barberini was erected.

Vittoria, coming again to Rome and revisiting its classic greatness, exclaimed that happy were they who lived in times so full of grandeur; to which the poet Molza gallantly replied that they were less happy, as they had not known her! Everywhere was she received with the highest honors. She made a tour, visiting Bagni di Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara, where she was the guest of the Duca and Duchessa Ercole in the ducal palace. The Duchessa was the Princesse RenÉe, the daughter of Louis XII of France, and an ardent friend of Calvin, who visited her in Ferrara. It was to this visit that Longfellow refers in his poem entitled “Michael Angelo,” when he pictures Vittoria as sitting for her portrait to the artist and conversing with her friend Giulia, the Duchess of Trajetto, Michael Angelo begs them to resume the conversation interrupted by his entrance, and Vittoria says:—

To which the Duchessa replies:—

The Duca and Duchessa of Ferrara invited the most distinguished persons in Venice and Bologna and Lombardy to meet their honored guest. Bishop Ghiberto of Verona besought her to visit that city. Vittoria accepted and was for some time the Bishop’s guest in his palace, and she took great interest in the historic city. With the Bishop she visited the ancient Duomo, which in 1160 had been restored by Pope Urban II, and reconsecrated. It was a strong desire of the Marchesa at this time to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; but the journey was then so perilous and so long—none too easy, indeed, at the present time—that she was dissuaded from the attempt.

Verona, to do her honor, had a medal struck bearing her portrait. The group of great artists—Titian, Tintoretto, and Giorgione in Venice; Fra Angelico, Bartolommeo, and others of that day—were creating their wonderful works which Vittoria must have seen and enjoyed during this tour. Raphael, whose death had occurred in 1520, Vittoria had, doubtless, known; but whether it was she who was the original of the Muse in his great picture of “Parnassus,” as is alleged, is not fully established.

DETAIL FROM “PARNASSUS,”
RAPHAEL STANZE, PALAZZO VATICANO, ROME
Raphael Sanzio