Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

No doubt much of this poetry was mediocre. Indeed, men, aside from the greatest, wrote very little that one now cares to read. It is a truism that “poets are born, not made,” and they are not born very often. But the work of women which was not even of the best received high consideration. Tarquinia Molza, a maid of honor at Ferrara,—who held public discussions with Tasso, wrote sonnets and epigrams, and translated the dialogues of Plato,—was so celebrated for her learning and poetic gifts that the Senate of Rome conferred upon her the title of Roman Citizen. Laura Battiferri, one of the ornaments of the court of Urbino, was spoken of as a rival of Sappho in genius and her superior in modesty and decorum. She was an honored member of the Academy of the Intronati at Siena. There were no women’s clubs in those days. They were not needed when women were admitted to many of the academies on equal terms with men. The number may have been small, but evidently the way was clear. They were barred, if at all, by incapacity, not by sex.

One of the most celebrated of these numerous poets was Veronica Gambara, Countess of Correggio, a woman of fine gifts, many virtues, and great personal charm, who was left a widow after nine happy years of marriage. Like her friend Vittoria Colonna, she spent the rest of her life in mourning her husband, draping herself, her apartments, and everything she had in black, and refusing all offers of a second marriage. But this sable grief did not prevent her from managing her affairs, her little state, and her two sons, both of whom reached high positions, with great judgment and ability. Her husband had trusted her implicitly, and left her in full control at his death. It was largely to his memory that she devoted her poetic gifts. She did not write a great deal, but her verses were simple and showed masculine vigor. Many of them were tender, though by no means sentimental. She wrote on the vanity of earthly things, a subject on which women have always been specially eloquent, as they have so often written out of their own sad experience. Her home at Bologna was a sort of academy, where the most distinguished men of the age met, and it was noted as a center of brilliant conversation. One of its chief attractions was Cardinal Bembo, a lifelong friend, to whom she addressed a sonnet at ten. Philosopher, high priest of Platonism, critic, poet, and man of the world, this famous cardinal paid the highest tributes to the distinguished women of his time. Intellectually he lived in an air that was somewhat tenuous, but he sought the society of those who loved things of the spirit—especially princesses. It was a convenient fashion among these diplomats and churchmen to have two lives—one poetic, Platonic, with ecstatic glimpses of the celestial, the other running through various grades of the terrestrial. The versatile Bembo was no exception. Veronica Gambara, who combined grace and delicacy with a distinctly mundane vigor, sat metaphorically at his feet, and was an ardent disciple of the new Platonic philosophy. She had natural eloquence, and gave a charm to the serious discussions at her house. Among her noted visitors was Charles V, who was fascinated by her talents and gracious manners. She reproached him and Francis I with the quarrels that had flooded Europe with tears, and wrote him a poem fired with patriotic ardor, in which she asks peace for Italy and protection against the infidel. In her poetry and her letters she followed Petrarch. Without commanding genius, and less mystical than Vittoria Colonna, but with possibly more strength in a limited range, she was greatly considered for her learning, her poetry, her social graces, her practical ability, and her spotless character.

These are a few out of a multitude of poets and savantes who are of little interest to-day, except as showing the notable attainments of women in a new field and the drift of public sentiment regarding them.

VI

There is one, however, who calls for more attention, not only because of her enduring fame, but because she stood in a light so strong as to make her, even at this distance, a living personality to us; also because she represents the best phases of the Renaissance, its learning, its intelligence, its enthusiasm, its subtle Platonism, combined with a profound religious faith and a trace of the mysticism of a simpler age. We are apt to recall Vittoria Colonna as half poet, half saint. Her spiritual face looks out of a century of vice and license, crowned with the delicate halo of a Madonna brooding tenderly over the sins of the world in which she lives with an air of apartness, as if she were in it but not of it. Whether we see her under the soft skies of Ischia, happy and a bride, or seeking solace among its orange-scented groves for the lost joys of her youth; at Naples, holding a lettered court with the beautiful and accomplished Giulia Gonzaga; at Rome, talking on high themes with a group of serious and thoughtful men in the cool shadows of the Colonna gardens; at Ferrara, discussing the new thought, receiving the homage of a distinguished circle, and generously using her great name to shield the persecuted and unhappy; or kneeling at prayers and chanting Misereres in the cloisters where, at intervals, she hid a sorrowful heart—there is always the same flavor of purity and saintliness in her character and personality as in her genius.

The romance of her life is well known. She was born in 1490,—just before Lorenzo de’ Medici died and Savonarola expiated the crime of being too good for his time,—in a gloomy old Colonna castle that towers picturesquely above the rambling, medieval town of Marino among the Alban hills. But she did not stay there long, as she was betrothed at four to the Marquis of Pescara, and, for some inexplicable reason, sent away to the sunny island of Ischia to be educated with him by his sister Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Francavilla, a woman so noted for wisdom, ability, and virtue that she was made governor, or châtelaine, of the island at her husband’s death. For once, this commercial arrangement proved a fortunate one, as the brilliant duchess was as famous for her culture and the lettered society gathered about her as for her practical talent in ruling. The gifted child grew up among poets and men of learning, with her future lord as her playmate and a woman of intellect as her guide. Add to this the changing splendors of sea and sky, the haunting memories of the beautiful shore that curves away from the headlands of Misenum to the Isles of the Sirens, the repose broken only by the cool dripping of fountains, the plashing of the indolent waves on the beach, and the plaintive songs of the boatmen floating at evening across the tranquil water to find a sweet refrain in the music of the vesper bell—and we have the milieu of the poet. There were royal festivities when the king came to break the monotony of the days, occasional glimpses of the magnificent court pageants at Naples, and rare visits to the somber ancestral home on the Alban Lake. But the mind of the thoughtful maiden was more in harmony with the quiet scenes among which most of her days were passed, and had taken its permanent tone when the youthful lovers were married at about eighteen, or possibly nineteen.

Two or three years of unclouded happiness, and this idyllic life came to an end. The marquis was called to the army, and the devoted wife saw him only at long intervals during his brilliant career, which he closed some fifteen years later with a tarnished name. The blow that shattered the hopes of Vittoria came near costing her life. In the first agony of her grief she fled to a convent, and wished to take the veil of a nun; but she was too valuable in her own sphere to be lost to the world, and Clement VII forbade it. Her only resource was to consecrate herself to the memory of one she never ceased to call mio bel sole, to religion, and to matters of the intellect.

How she reconciled her undying love with the faithless and treacherous character of her Spanish husband, who was willing to sell his loyalty for a kingdom, we do not know. That she was ignorant of his disgrace is not probable. She had given him high counsel, putting honor and virtue above titles and worldly grandeur, and saying that she had no wish to be the wife of a king, since she is already the wife of a captain who has vanquished kings, not only by his bravery, but by his magnanimity. But she had, to a marked degree, the fine idealism that gives vitality to a sentiment. It is shown in the poise of the shapely head, in the broad, high, speculative forehead that hid a wealth of imagination and exalted feeling, in the large, soft, penetrating dark eyes, lighted with sensibility, which relieved the delicately chiseled features and firm but beautiful mouth from a tinge of asceticism. She was tall, stately, and graceful, with a fair, variable face of pure outlines, and hair of Titian gold. Her picture is one of a rare woman, capable of high thought, great generosity, great sacrifice, and great devotion. This love of her youth was interwoven with every fiber of her being. The child with whom she had wandered hand in hand by the sea; the youth who had responded to her every taste and thought, poetic like herself, proud, accomplished, handsome, and knightly; the man who had whiled away the hours of his captivity in writing for her a rather stilted Dialogue of Love, were alike transfigured in her memory. If she heard that he was a traitor, probably she did not believe it, and the very fact of unmerited disgrace would have been an added claim upon her affection. She was young, and naturally slow to think that an act which Pope and cardinals had assured him was quite consistent with the finest honor could be treasonable at all, though she had a keen moral sense that led her straight to the heart of things. Then the harshness and cruelty for which he was noted belonged to the exigencies of war, which is never merciful. It was easy to malign him there. At all events, it is certain that the faults of this brilliant cavalier of very flexible honor were swept away in a flood of happy memories and imperishable love. Many were the suitors who presented themselves to the gifted, rich, and beautiful princess, who was scarcely past thirty-five; but she had gathered the wealth of her affections in a vase that was broken, and for her there was no second gathering. The spirit that held captive her own still shone in the heavens as a sun that lighted the inner temple of her soul and made its hidden treasures luminous.

When she rallied a little from the first stunning blow, she began to write. This had been one of the diversions of her youth, and she had often sent tender verses to her husband. Now it offered an outlet to her sorrows, and, at the same time, a tribute to his memory. Never was such a monument dedicated to a man as this series of more than a hundred sonnets. Her love colored all her thoughts, and gave to her clear, strong intellect a living touch that comes only from the heart. If one misses in these verses the fire of Sappho, one is conscious of coming in contact with a pure and lofty soul in which earthly passion has been transformed into a glow of divine tenderness. But the note of longing and loneliness is always there. Laura was no more idealized by her poet lover than was this unworthy man by his desolate wife. For seven years her poems were a series of variations on the same theme. The sun shone no longer for her; there was no more beauty in tree, or flower, or sparkling waves; the birds were mute, and nature was draped in gloom. In death only there was hope; but even here was the dreadful possibility that she might not be perfect enough to meet this paragon of all noble qualities in heaven. So Mrs. Browning might have written. She had the same tendency to transfigure her idols in the light of the imagination, the same meditative quality, the same fine idealism. But she lived and died a happy wife, while her sister poet spent lonely years in the companionship of a memory.

Time, however, which tempers all things, if it does not change them, brought a new element into her thoughts, and her elegiac songs rose to cathedral hymns. In her religious sonnets she reveals the intrinsic quality of her mind and its firm grasp of spiritual things. Some of them touch on forbidden questions, and wander among the dangerous heresies of the new age. Theology and poetry are not quite in accord, and these are of value mainly as showing the liberal drift of her opinions. Others are the spontaneous outpouring of a full and ardent soul. Rich in thought, alive with feeling, and lighted with hope, they soar on the wings of an exalted faith far above the heavy and sin-laden air of her time.