CHAPTER IV
VITTORIA COLONNA
(1535-1547)
Michelangelo, worn out and discouraged, returned definitely to Rome on September 23, 1534, and there he remained until his death. He was in a condition of great mental unrest, his heart hungry for love. This was the period of those strange violent and mystical passions for beautiful young men like Gherardo Perini, Febo di Poggio and, most loved of all and most worthily so, Tommaso dei Cavalieri. These attachments, about which most historians have preferred to be silent, were an almost religious delirium of love for the divinity of beauty and hold an important place in the work of Michelangelo. It is to their inspiration that most of his love-poems are due. For a long time this was either not known or a stupid and unfortunate attempt was made to conceal it. Even in 1623 Michelangelo's grandnephew in his first edition of the "Rime" did not dare publish the poems to[{81}] Tommaso dei Cavalieri with their real titles, but dedicated them to a woman. This error persisted until Cæsare Guasti, in his edition of 1863, re-established the exact text, but nevertheless did not dare admit that Tommaso dei Cavalieri was a real person and forced himself to believe that Vittoria Colonna was concealed under the fictitious name. Mezières in his "L'Œuvre et la Vie de Michelange," published in 1876, repeated this same mistake, which was only finally denounced and corrected by Scheffler and Symonds in 1878.
Tommaso dei Cavalieri, according to Vasari and Varchi, was "a young Roman gentleman, devoted to art and of incomparable personal beauty," whom Michelangelo met in the autumn of 1532. It is in 1533-1534 that this friendship reached its height and inspired his most ardent poems and letters. Cavalieri remained a faithful friend to Michelangelo to his very last hour, at which indeed he was present. He made use of this friendship only for the good of his friend. Not only did he take devoted care of the old man in his last years, but he saw to the carrying out of his wishes while he was alive and after his death. It was he who persuaded him to complete the wooden model of the dome of St. Peter's and who preserved his plans for the construction of the Capitol. Their names would always be associated[{82}] together even if his beauty had not inspired some of Michelangelo's most perfect sonnets.[51]
All these attachments, however, were to be eclipsed by his friendship with Vittoria Colonna. She was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, Lord of Paliano, Prince of Tagliacozzo, and of Agnesena di Montefeltro, daughter of the great Federigo, Duke of Urbino. She had married Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, Marquis di Pescara, the victor of Pavia, who treated her badly, but whom she loved. A widow since 1525, she had turned for consolation to religion and poetry. Her sonnets, in which she sang her idealised love, had been well known throughout Italy since 1530 and had won for her a fame unique among the women of her day. She was a friend of all the great poets and great writers: Bembo, Castiglione who entrusted to her the manuscript of his "Cortegiano," Ariosto who celebrated[{83}] her in his Orlando, Paul Jove, Bernardo Tasso and Ludovico Dolce. But after 1534 religion absorbed her and she was carried away by the movement for the reform and regeneration of the Catholic Church. Although she was a friend of all the men who personified in Italy this spirit of religious freedom, Cardinal Contarini and Cardinal Pole, Giberti, Sadolet, Bernadino Ochino, Pietro Carnesecchi, and in touch with Renée of Ferrara and Marguerite of Navarre, yet she could not, like many of her friends, break away from the church of Rome, and later she sacrificed her sympathies to her faith.
Michelangelo knew her about 1535, but their friendship did not really begin until the end of 1538. She was then forty-six years old and he was sixty-three.
It was a serious and devout friendship. They met on Sundays in the church of S. Silvestro at Monte Cavallo, and there they had those noble discussions which the Portuguese painter, Francis of Holland, has preserved for us in his four "Dialogues sur la Peinture," which took place in Rome in 1538-1539 and were written in 1548.
Then Vittoria, driven by her religious doubts, left Rome in 1541, to retire first to Orvieto to the cloister of S. Paolo and later to Viterbo to the cloister of S. Caterina near Cardinal Pole, her friend and[{84}] spiritual guide. She returned to Rome from time to time to see Michelangelo and she wrote to him. We have only a very few of these letters which Michelangelo sacredly preserved. They are affectionate, but cold, and we feel that she was much more detached from him than he was from her. He often complains that she does not answer him. She wrote him:
"Magnificent Messer Michelangelo—I did not reply earlier to your letter because it was, as one might say, an answer to my last; for I thought that if you and I were to go on writing without intermission according to my obligation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the appointed hours for company with my sisterhood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul, and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not speak to you less clearly than the living persons around me speak to me. Thus we should both of us fail in our duty, I to the brides, you to the vicar of Christ. For these reasons, inasmuch as I am well assured of our steadfast friendship and affection, bound by knots of Christian kindness, I do not think it necessary to obtain the proof of your good-will in letters by writing on[{85}] my side, but rather to await with well-prepared mind some substantial occasion for serving you. Meanwhile I address my prayers to that Lord of whom you spoke to me with so fervent and humble a heart when I left Rome, that when I return thither I may find you with His image renewed and enlivened by true faith in your soul, in like measure as you have painted it with perfect art in my Samaritan.[52] Believe me to remain always yours and your Urbino's."
