The Accadémia des Arcades of Rome, founded in the seventeenth century to do honor to lyric art, celebrated the placing of a bust of Vittoria Colonna in a gallery of the Capitoline, in May of 1865, by a resplendent poetic festa. According to the gentle, leisurely customs of the land, where it is always afternoon and time has no value, thirty-two poets read their songs, written in Latin or in Italian, for this occasion, which were published in a sumptuous volume to be preserved in the archives of the Arcadians, who take themselves more seriously than the world outside quite realizes. This bust of Vittoria Colonna was the gift of the Duca and Duchessa of Torlonia of that period. It was crowned with laurel, as that of Petrarca had been, and the government took official recognition of the event.
Goethe was made a member of this Accadémia that regarded itself as reflecting the glories of the Golden Age of Greece, and which was a century old at the time of his visit to Italy. “No stranger of any consequence was readily permitted to leave Rome without being invited to join this body,” he recorded, and he wrote a humorous description of the formalities of his initiation.
Mrs. Horatio Greenough was honored by being made a member of this Accadémia in recognition of her musical accomplishments, and the record of it is placed on the memorial marble over her grave in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Every year, on Tasso’s birthday (April 25), the Accadémia holds a festa in a little amphitheatre near “Tasso’s oak,” on the Janiculum, at which his bust is crowned with laurel. The gardens in which the seventeenth-century Arcadians disported themselves are now known among the Romans as il Bosco Parrasio degli Arcadi.
Throughout Italy the fame of Vittoria Colonna only deepens with every succeeding century. Her nobility of character, her lofty spirituality of life, fitly crowned and perfected her intellectual force and brilliant gifts. Although from the customs of the time the Marchesa lived much in convents, she never, in any sense, save that of her fervent piety, lived the conventual life. Her noble gifts linked her always to the larger activities, and her gifts and rank invested her with certain demands and responsibilities that she could not evade. She was one of the messengers of life, and her place as a brilliant and distinguished figure in the contemporary world was one that the line of destiny, which pervades all circumstances and which, in her case, was so marked, absolutely constrained her to fill. She had that supreme gift of the lofty nature, the power of personal influence. Her exquisite courtesy and graciousness of manner, her simple dignity and unaffected sincerity, her delicacy of divination and her power of tender sympathy and liberal comprehension all combined to make her the ideal companion, counsellor, and friend, as well as the celebrity of letters and lyric art.
No poet has more exquisitely touched the friendship between Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo than has Margaret J. Preston, in a poem supposed to be addressed to the sculptor by Vittoria, in which occur the lines:—
“We twain—one lingering on the violet verge,
And one with eyes raised to the twilight peaks—
Shall meet in the morn again.
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. . . Supremest truth I gave;
Quick comprehension of thine unsaid thought,
Reverence, whose crystal sheen was never blurred
By faintest film of over-breathing doubt;
. . . helpfulness
Such as thou hadst not known of womanly hands;
And sympathies so urgent, they made bold
To press their way where never mortal yet
Entrance had gained,—even to thy soul.”
This is the Page de Conti that one reads in the air as he sails past Ischia on the violet sea; and the chant d’amour of the sirens catches the echo of lines far down the centuries:—
“I understood not, when the angel stooped,
Whispering, ‘Live on! for yet one joyless soul,
Void of true faith in human happiness,
Waits to be won by thee, from unbelief.’