Futurity Looks Back at Vittoria Colonna's Life

Tessa Venell-Brandeis introduces Ramie Targoff's new book about the 16th-century poet Vittoria Colonna at Futurity. According to Venell-Brandeis, she was the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy. Targoff's Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna (Macmillan, 2018), Venell-Brandeis explains, "chronicles Colonna’s development as a writer, her grief over the death of her husband, and her friendship with Michelangelo, with whom she carried on a long and moving correspondence." From there: 

The following is a sample of her writing, a poem titled “Di così nobil fiamma Amor mi cinse” (which Targoff translated):

Love wrapped me in so noble a flame
That even once spent it continues to burn.
Nor do I fear new fire, since the first
Is so strong it extinguishes all others.
So rich a bond ties me to that fine yoke,
That my heart disdains all lesser chains.
It feels no longer either hope or fear,
Since one fire inflames it, one knot binds it tight.
A single pungent arrow afflicts my breast
So that it keeps alive the immortal wound,
It shields all other love from entering.
Love consumed the passion where once he lit it,
He broke the bow with his enduring shot,
melted all other knots in tying this one.

The New Yorker called Targoff’s book a “richly realized biography.” A reviewer in the New York Times wrote, “Vittoria Colonna has always deserved to be better known. Ramie Targoff’s fine book will surely make that happen.”

Here, Targoff answers questions about the book, her work, and Colonna:

Q

What motivated you to write this book?

A

I think this is a moment in which a lot of people are asking what role women played in our past. There are so many stories that haven’t been told. My book allows you to glimpse history through a female lens. Colonna was quietly involved, but absolutely central, to all the things happening in this period. But she’s never mentioned in any of the textbooks. I think that’s interesting by itself, but it also makes people wonder what women were doing during different periods in history—women were always there and we just don’t know about them.

Q

Why do you find her poetry so engaging?

A

Colonna wrote two books of sonnets, one mourning her husband after he passed away, about dealing with her grief. She wrote another set of 103 poems, which she gave to Michelangelo, and those were spiritual sonnets about her relationship to her faith. Sometimes they were written directly to God, sometimes to Mary, or to particular saints. They were about her religious anguish.

In both cases, I see the sonnet as a kind of therapeutic, confessional form, a way to figure yourself out. I love the weird tension between the tightness of the form and how much you can express of your deepest self and also express changes of mood and temperament inside the poem.

The poems are intimate, she never meant for them to be public. Someone collected all of them and published them to make some money. She was not happy about it. The first line of her first poem is “I write only to vent my inward pain.” She says that she’s writing as a therapeutic process.

Read more of their Q&A at Futurity.