Introduction

Paolo Giovio’s (1486–1552) unfinished book, Notable Men and Women of Our Time, provides abundant and often-surprising evidence regarding the image, condition, and accomplishments of early Cinquecento Italian noblewomen.Footnote ¹ Commissioned in 1527 by Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), it comprises three dialogues, the last of which includes a catalogue of over 100 women.Footnote ² While some of the vignettes call attention to shortcomings, collectively the sketches celebrate their subjects and show how integral they are both to the cultures of particular cities and to the interconnections among courts throughout the peninsula. Giovio frequently voices concern that war and the foreign occupation of Italy may be bringing an end to the social world he commemorates. Moreover, his account of noblewomen in the dialogue is fraught with ambivalence and internal contradictions that threaten to undercut the ideals it celebrates so eloquently. Against this backdrop, the word portrait of Vittoria Colonna stands out vividly. While Giovio’s graphic delineation of her body may have pushed the bounds of decorum, his encomium of Colonna also shows with precision and prescience the intellectual, personal, and spiritual qualities that would enable her to become so influential in promoting cultural change.

Setting, Dramatis Personae, and Composition

Notable Men and Women is set on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, where Giovio had sought refuge in midsummer of 1527. On 6 May, when troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, Giovio had fled with his patron Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici; r. 1523–34) into the papal fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo. A month later Clement capitulated, and an Imperial garrison took control of the stronghold, effectively holding the pope for ransom.Footnote ³ When plague struck in July and Clement’s captors required that he reduce the number of his retainers so as to slow its spread, Giovio was among those cast out. After staying briefly at a friend’s house in Rome, on 17 July he obtained from the pope a safe conduct that enabled him to travel to Ischia.Footnote ⁴ As he wrote to his sometime patron, the papal datary Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543), rather than “dying here to no purpose,” he expected soon to be able to write in tranquility on the island about “this singular catastrophe of Rome.”Footnote ⁵

On Ischia, Giovio found himself in a court superintended by women. Other refugees included Giovanna d’Aragona (1502–75), the wife of Ascanio Colonna (Vittoria’s brother);Footnote ⁶ Giovanna’s sister Maria, who was married to Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis del Vasto (1502–46);Footnote ⁷ and Costanza d’Avalos the Younger (ca. early 1500s–1575), the Duchess of Amalfi.Footnote ⁸ The foremost authority on the island was the châtelaine of its citadel, Costanza d’Avalos the Elder (ca. 1490–1541), who had presided over its court for decades and had for a while served as Vittoria Colonna’s guardian.Footnote ⁹ This gynecocentric context provides a key to interpreting a dialogue that might otherwise be mistaken as entirely the province of men.Footnote ¹⁰

To be sure, the work presents itself as a gift from one man to another. Giovio addresses it to Giberti with the goal of comforting him as he and others were being held hostage by the Imperial troops.Footnote ¹¹ All three interlocutors are male: Davalus, named for Alfonso d’Avalos; Muscettola, representing the Neapolitan orator and statesman Giovanni Antonio Muscettola; and Iovius, the figure of the author. Giovio claims to write “with that honesty and candor of speech with which d’Avalos and Muscettola and I talked among ourselves,” and so the reader is invited into what is portrayed as a private, intimate conversation among men.Footnote ¹² The first two dialogues survey male leaders in politics and the military and in the republic of letters, respectively: spheres to which Italian women still had limited entrée.

Above all, however, this work serves to bolster Giovio’s position as a creature of the court of Ischia and especially as a client of Vittoria Colonna. In the first place, he makes it clear that he is writing at her behest.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, while the initial draft emphasizes the reciprocal affection of his two patrons, it also acknowledges how circumstances have placed Colonna in a dominant position: “You also, Giberti, appear beyond all others to have cultivated her friendship… . And now, especially, in this personal calamity of yours, you feel the benefit of her affection toward you and are finding out her marvelous generosity.”Footnote ¹⁴ Giovio portrays himself, too, as a privileged client of Colonna: she has welcomed him to Ischia, he says, “with such love and generosity that the others in the household supposed that I had arrived, not just as a friend or an invaluable dependent, but as some longed-for close relation.”Footnote ¹⁵

While the survey of military commanders in dialogue 1 moves the subject away from Vittoria herself, it praises her obliquely by lauding the prowess of her father, Fabrizio I Colonna (ca. 1450/60–1520), and especially her late husband, Ferdinando Francesco d’Avalos (1489–1525), Marquis of Pescara.Footnote ¹⁶ In its final sentence, the dialogue explicitly returns the focus to her: still in mourning over the loss of her husband, she has not only kept herself shut away in the citadel, but has “allowed nothing into her grief-stricken mind except for solemn readings and holy sermons.”Footnote ¹⁷ In dialogue 2, which concerns the questione della lingua and evaluates the talents of over 150 men of letters, women appear only in passing, and Colonna herself is mentioned but twice in its surviving pages.Footnote ¹⁸

Dialogue 3, in contrast, places women at the center. The interlocutors recount ancient views on their status and whether they can equal men; they survey over 100 outstanding women of their time; and, as a closing flourish, celebrate Vittoria Colonna as the ideal noblewoman. Each of these components merits separate treatment. While the case for female equality contains elements distinct to Giovio, it adds little to that discussion, which was already highly elaborated in previous decades, as, for example, in the De Mulieribus (ca. 1501) of Mario Equicola (ca. 1470–1525).Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, many of the arguments regarding the dignity of women that appear in the present work are identical to those put forth in Pompeo Colonna’s Defense of Women, written only a few years before it.Footnote ²⁰ Giovio’s assertions do not approach the claims for women’s superiority over men put forward with varying levels of seriousness by Bartolomeo Goggio, Galeazzo Flavio Capella (“Capra”), or Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.Footnote ²¹ His chief contribution to the discussion is that, without listing women over the centuries as Boccaccio and others had done, he traces the influence of ancient ideas and practices upon subsequent legislation and cultural norms regarding the female sex.

Giovio’s extended geographical survey of present-day illustrious women is more original and significant. Insofar as it itemizes particular subjects’ blemishes, it breaks free of the bombastic, uncritical adulation that typifies listings of contemporary noblewomen.Footnote ²² Moreover, Giovio differentiates not only among individuals, but also among their places of residence: using synecdoche, he draws parallels between the distinguishing characteristics of major Italian cities and the qualities of their women. Collectively, these sketches yield an ambiguous image of the condition of female nobility in the early Cinquecento. While the interlocutors take turns advocating for regions with which they identify, their praises are undercut by expressions of concern that the noble houses appear to be losing vitality; some are even nearing extinction. A number of the women celebrated have already died, and others are described as past their prime. Claims for the exceptionality of the noblewomen on Ischia thus sit uneasily alongside the lamentations of decline that recur throughout the dialogue.

A second tension arises with respect to the itemization of parts of women’s bodies, a practice long established in a tradition of literary description that Petrarch had influentially adopted. Both when singling out bodily flaws and when praising attractive features, the interlocutors risk taking the part for the whole in a way that could dehumanize, a problem all the more poignant in that they name many of the women they describe. Yet here, the foremost of women are not abandoned as isolated fragments. Instead there follows a reintegration displayed first of all in graceful movement, above all in dance. That outward beauty, in turn, is but one aspect of a harmonic whole that comprises not only physical attractiveness and chastity, but also inborn ability, proper training, good character, and musical and literary accomplishment.

The final six folios of the dialogue return the focus to Vittoria Colonna. Combining the finest qualities that the speakers have attributed to others, she models an ideal femininity for their emulation. This triumphal conclusion, however, fails to provide a way out of the predicament of noblewomen that the dialogue has so eloquently described. Despite Colonna’s brilliance, her potential for arresting cultural decline remains at best unclear. Giovio gestures only weakly toward resolution of the problems that plagued Italy in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome and would remain, thwarting his later attempts to bring the work to harmonious completion.

Naples before the Fall

Like several prominent compositions of the 1520s and 1530s — for example, Castiglione’s Courtier, Guicciardini’s History of Italy, and Valeriano’s On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men — Giovio’s Notable Men and Women offers an idealized portrait of a cultural moment that has passed. Once the interlocutors have settled upon a shaded stretch of beach that looks out upon a chain of islets called the queen’s rocks, Davalus reminisces about how, around three decades before, Queen Giovanna IV of Naples (1478/79–1518; r. 1495–96) would escape the summer heat by going to Ischia, taking with her a retinue of young noblewomen, including Sancia d’Aragona, Costanza d’Avalos the Elder, Costanza’s sister Isabella, and Angela Castriota.Footnote ²³ Queen Giovanna had assigned each woman a rock to sculpt and cultivate. They spared no expense in creating elaborate stone sculptures and topiaries, remaking the islets into forms such as an Indian turtle (Sancia), Mount Etna erupting (Costanza), and the Cretan labyrinth (Angela). Under the queen’s supervision they had built up the topsoil and imported fruit trees. The orderliness and desirability of this tended fertility was exemplified in trellises that “propped the leaning roses upright so neatly and gracefully that with the leaves of the bushes held back in a straight line, the highest heads of the flowers stuck out so far from each lattice opening that they seemed to be begging to be admired and to be plucked off by the delicate fingers of girls.”Footnote ²⁴ Here the noblewomen enjoyed security from any threat to chastity. On the largest rock, spiraling steps led to a garden on high, “which had been both protected by a wall and fortified by a solid doorway to safeguard the modesty of the maidens.”Footnote ²⁵ Below, where the islets set off a stretch of water, they could swim in private: “elderly women and matrons, who were the girls’ chaperones, were posted upon those lookout points of the hills which you see, while serving-men in small boats likewise guarded the side toward the open sea lest insolent eyes espy [the girls] from some vantage point.”Footnote ²⁶

According to Davalus, however, both the topiaries and the house of Aragon have gone into steep decline, leaving virtually no trace of their former cultivation. After the collapse of Aragonese rule, expending money on the landscaping was deemed an unnecessary luxury. Correspondingly, the ruling family itself “has withered away to the very root with no surviving royal progeny to revive it, while many young women, now made destitute by misfortune, have been passing their lives in obscurity.”Footnote ²⁷ Here he mentions three widows prominent in the lineage: Isabella del Balzo (1465–1533), the second wife of Federico I of Naples (d. 1504); Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508), widowed by Matthias I of Hungary (d. 1490); and Isabella d’Aragona (1470–1524), who had been married to Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan (d. 1494).Footnote ²⁸ After Naples was lost to the French, they had fled to Ischia where, “in deep mourning, they not only lost the desire to see [the rocks]; they didn’t even set foot outside the citadel.”Footnote ²⁹

Davalus avers that these women, along with their predecessors, were so illustrious in beauty, parentage, and character “that now we are bound to feel the absence of their like throughout all Italy.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet all three interlocutors defend the women of their own time against any accusation of inferiority vis-à-vis their predecessors. Some elderly men, Davalus notes, believe that the younger generations of women do not measure up, but they err because their aged eyes unfairly compare memories of youthful sights with what their dim vision now can perceive. Iovius advances the view that present-day women in fact surpass earlier ones and points in particular to those on the island: for, what virtues, he asks obligingly, “could be found in any part of Italy either nobler in distinction of lineage, more beautiful in appearance, more polished in the graciousness of erudite thought, or purer in morals and religion, than these heroines of ours, guarded by the fortress high above us?”Footnote ³¹ This prompts Muscettola to propose that they spend the day discussing the excellence of women, surveying all the cities of Italy. But before the itinerary begins, Giovio has his eponymous interlocutor provide historical and cultural context.

The Status and Capabilities of Women

In advocating for women’s equality to men, Iovius finds a philosophical foundation in Socrates, who taught that women should be regarded with kindness and honor. He believed that they would be equal to men in military training and responsibilities once their weaker natures had been fortified by vigorous exercise and inspired by manly examples.Footnote ³² Ultimately Athens condemned him, but because he was immortalized in literature he was able to instruct not only the Greek, but other nations, with the result that “the laws both of his contemporaries and of subsequent generations have been marvelously enriched, and their city-states ennobled.”Footnote ³³

Iovius claims that Socrates’s recommendations concerning women are now regarded more favorably in the East than in the Western successors to ancient Greece and Rome. Among the Ottoman Turks, female equestrians and archers fight alongside the men, shouldering heavy armor and sharing equally in the dangers of combat. He points to the account, in his Histories, of the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, following which the victorious sultan Selim I (1470–1520) delivered a eulogy over the slain women and had them buried, an honor not accorded to the corpses of the men.Footnote ³⁴ Thus recent evidence, albeit from outside Europe, has borne out Socrates’s positive evaluation of women’s capacity for military prowess. Giovio conveniently attributes only to Plato, not to Socrates, those parts of The Republic in which women are treated contemptuously, being prostituted “to the lustfulness of all men, like lowly slaves who were designed by nature only for the sole purpose of bearing children and for satisfying men’s sexual appetite and for serving them.”Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, he holds Aristotle accountable for advocating that women be banned from public life and confined to child rearing and to provisioning the household. Socrates has survived, however, through the writings of both Plato and Aristotle and, as represented by Giovio’s interlocutors, provides underpinnings for advocating the equality of the sexes.

The ancient Romans treated women no better than had the Greeks, preventing them from holding public office on the grounds of their feeble disposition and reasoning. Muscettola focuses upon affronts to women’s honor. The Senate had passed severe censorial laws that “diminished and frustrated even their moderate desires.”Footnote ³⁶ Far worse, however, was a decree regarding divorce that “wrenched away the dignity of the entire sex.”Footnote ³⁷ Even a wife who was upright and fecund could be driven out of the household on the basis of distrust, a feeling of satiety, or her husband’s desire for a new object of lust. On occasion, this could redound to the husband’s dishonor, as for example happened to Cicero when his discarded wife Terentia savaged his reputation. Overwhelmingly, however, women were humiliated by men.Footnote ³⁸

This account of the denigration of ancient Roman women differs markedly from Agrippa von Nettesheim’s celebration of their achievements in his Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex.Footnote ³⁹ In addition, Giovio passes over in silence the extensive biblical and theological evidence regarding women’s status that Agrippa interpreted so provocatively. In one key respect, however, their arguments correspond closely: women have lacked not men’s native abilities, but instead their opportunities. Giovio’s interlocutors agree that women’s lowly condition has resulted not from a lack of talent or strength but instead from being scorned, oppressed, and constrained to devote themselves to humble responsibilities. If elevated to the status of men, they would at once aspire to manly glory. While men would rather hold power over them than make them equal sharers in a life of dignity, women have the same sinews, entrails, and consciousness that they do, the same tools for understanding, and their souls are no less divinely infused. They are therefore capable of the full exercise of reason — “if, that is, they should be educated from the cradle not for the production of woven fabrics or of embroidery colored by the needle, but with a view to their acquiring the best arts and extraordinary virtues.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Muscettola names six contemporary European women who have demonstrated precisely the aptitude for governing and military leadership that the female sex was supposed to lack. Isabella of Castile (1451–1504) shared with her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516), the difficulties, dangers, and victories of the war over Granada. For two decades Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) effectively governed and pacified the seditious peoples of the Low Countries on behalf of the Habsburgs.Footnote ⁴¹ Following the French loss in the Battle of Pavia (1525), in which troops under the command of the Marquis of Pescara captured King Francis I (r. 1515–47), Louise of Savoy (1480–1530) maintained and protected the realm while she set about ransoming her son.Footnote ⁴² Her daughter, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), undertook a dangerous mission to the emperor in Spain to petition for Francis’s release. María Pacheco of Toledo, the wife of Juan Lopez de Padilla, a leader in the revolt of the Comuneros against Charles V, also demonstrated virtue and ferocity.Footnote ⁴³ After her husband’s execution, she led the Toledan resistance, delivering inspiring speeches and performing brave deeds. Finally, Muscettola invokes Vittoria Colonna, to whom Pope Clement had entrusted the seditious city of Benevento while her husband was away. So effective was she that “the entire populace, deeply moved by the moderation of her highly authoritative and absolutely incorruptible character, gave thanks to the pontiff through ambassadors because at the most critical moment, through this woman, better than any male governor, he had saved the city just as it was collapsing.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Even in these exceptional cases, however, men have held primary authority, the women acting either on their behalf or in their stead. Nor is that subordination likely to change anytime soon: in Italy’s lowly condition, says Davalus, attempts to improve women’s status would cause destructive confusion, inasmuch as “the general fortune of this age has so crushed the laws and battered down morals that all things human and divine, damaged and now plainly going to ruin, appear about to collapse in a short space of time.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Instead of considering strategies for change, then, the interlocutors will praise women for the virtues that ennoble them despite their oppression. Beyond standing out in beauty and in refinement of intellect and character, notable women must stem from a venerable line. Cultivation of literature can render them admirable. If they are also chaste, “their majesty transcends their human form and they are completely divine.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The current political situation has taken a heavy toll upon the condition of noblewomen in Milan, which has been occupied in turn by France and by Spain. The French led the way toward unsustainable expenditure on sumptuary excesses, introducing extravagance in food, drink, and especially clothing: “They added silk and purple at intervals to the hems of dresses, cut up gold and silver fabric for the sake of elegance, and finally taught them to regard all precious materials as mere playthings.”Footnote ⁴⁷ More seriously, at late-night dances by torchlight, they dared to kiss the ladies, a practice routine in French culture, whereas “we Italians esteem kisses in such a way that when someone has kissed a lady, even on the very tips of the lips, we judge her to be halfway ruined and her resistance overcome.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The Spaniards in turn made the French look tame. Among other indulgences, they lined their clothes with sable and scented their gloves with Indian perfumes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Salacious and skilled in seduction, they made their way into many women’s beds. Of course, not all of these women were blameless. Depravity, lasciviousness, or large sums of cash won over some. Others fell because they envied the favor enjoyed by their peers. Most poignantly, still others had to tender sexual favors in order to avoid financial ruin: should a lady resist, troops would be sent to destroy her estate. Some Italian men, worn out by oppression, “ransomed their plundered possessions with the nocturnal activities of their wives. And no home was safe from the greed of foreign soldiers unless a matron, by friendship with some well-known prefect or tribune, depended on his lust as surety.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Here Iovius intervenes to suggest that, in order to forget their miseries, they should proceed to their survey.

Although Giovio does not significantly advance the arguments of other humanists on behalf of women’s equality, he does offer a fresh perspective by focusing upon the dynamics by which women have been subjugated, situating that oppression in cultural context and noting its chronological and geographical relativity. His analysis does not approach the radical (if paradoxical) assertion of women’s superiority in Agrippa’s Declamation. Nonetheless, it does show a nuanced grasp of the historical contingencies that are keeping women down.Footnote ⁵¹ He is most original in analyzing why women’s status is unlikely to improve in the present political environment: a pessimistic view that recurs frequently in the survey of Italian noblewomen and that threatens to erode the foundations of the encomium of Vittoria Colonna with which the dialogue ends.

Paolo Giovio’S Cities of Ladies

The epic catalogue of women flourishing over the past few decades begins inauspiciously with Milan: grief over losses suffered by the city’s nobility casts a pall over the discussion. Iovius recalls wistfully the women he had met when he was studying there over thirty years earlier, including Damigella Trivulzio, Ippolita Sforza, Daria Pusterla, and Chiara Visconti.Footnote ⁵² Trivulzio, he says, had stood out for her exceptional beauty, noble lineage, and tested chastity, which in turn were complemented by her learning in Latin and Greek literature. By now, Iovius surmises, they must all have gone into decline. At this point Davalus, on the verge of tears, interjects to report that Visconti has just died.

Of those who live on unscathed, Davalus singles out two: Ippolita Castiglioni, notable for her beauty, lineage, and natural talent; and Isabella Sforza, famed for both beauty and her cultivated mind.Footnote ⁵³ These are, however, exceptions. He alludes to two beautiful, well-born, brilliant women who “would need to be celebrated at this point with their actual names, had they not by a loose lifestyle utterly exceeded the bounds of ladylike modesty.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Another who remains unnamed conceals her sexual indiscretions under the veil of a feigned decency. As for the rest, many who are perfectly fine do not merit inclusion in the current catalogue: “We don’t admire beauties unless they are extremely rare; we recognize no nobility unless it derives from a high, ancient origin; nor do we venerate a reputation for incorruptible chastity unless it is supported by invariable public report. Moreover, we don’t admire talents at all unless certain unusual and constant charms shine forth in them.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Such exceptional qualities have minimal scope for development or expression in the impoverished, foreign-dominated city.

Venice, by contrast, combines physical beauty, architectural grandeur, wealth, and civic harmony with a salutary remoteness from most of the fighting on the peninsula. Venetian noblewomen, likewise, are beautiful, imposing, rich, harmonious, and sheltered, their honor being safeguarded within the home. Even when taking part in dances at weddings, they do not speak with men who are masked or unknown to them, and they “don’t have the enticements that come from sophisticated conversation.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In general, according to Iovius, refined literature does not interest them. Instead, they delight in elaborate coiffures and in their bodies, which feature charming faces, tender breasts, and milk-white necks. Strikingly, the only Venetian women the interlocutors praise for their minds are the victims of forced monachization. Accomplished in letters and urbane in wit, they grow indignant at their confinement and rebel. Eager to experience sensual pleasures they have been denied, they use their musical skills to arouse the passions of men who have insinuated their way into their friendship, and receive lovers in their lavish cells.Footnote ⁵⁷

Iovius focuses on the physical charms of four exceptionally beautiful women he saw in Venice around the end of 1522, when he had accompanied Girolamo Adorno there on a diplomatic mission.Footnote ⁵⁸ The occasion was a wedding banquet in a palazzo of the Trevisan family at which over sixty noblewomen danced. Adorno obtained permission for himself, Giovio, and the other visiting diplomats to adjudicate a beauty pageant of sorts. First, they picked ten women to join them in a further, more elaborate banquet. Then, from those finalists, they selected the top four: Isabella Giustinian, Lucrezia Zorzi, Lucia Barbarigo, and Benedetta Gritti.Footnote ⁵⁹ Giustinian, who garnered first prize, performed a graceful yet lively dance that displayed her decorous, contained sensuality. A small garland of pearls adorned her swelling, milky-white breasts, and her hair was gathered in a golden net in such a way that some of it slipped teasingly through the wider gaps in the mesh.Footnote ⁶⁰ Zorzi, whose protruding breasts were “made modest by a broad ribbon of Phrygian workmanship,” showed unsurpassed agility in spinning, turning, and moving in time to the melody of flutes.Footnote ⁶¹ Barbarigo and Gritti receive only passing attention: the former, for her bright white complexion; the latter, for her dignified bearing and pretty smile. Other Venetian women have charms that appeal to the elite few: Elisabetta Diedo, who is stout and has a thick-set nose, lacks sensuality but has impressive gravity; and Ariadne Pisani, whose looks are indifferent, not only is exceptionally fertile, but also displays an urbane cheerfulness and has a lofty and gentle mind.Footnote ⁶²

Although Iovius mentions several other women of the Po River valley, including Ippolita Fioramonte of Pavia, Veronica and Isotta Gambara of Brescia, and Isabella d’Este in Mantua, the next city treated in detail is Genoa. Here the women are proficient in sarcasm and repartee. Their smooth, youthful-looking faces require little makeup. They dress elegantly and wear perfume. The freedoms that they enjoy, however, have led to moral laxity: even married women are openly ogled and courted, and “out of a certain special sense of ‘fair play’ and indulgence on the part of spouses and kin, they often engage in lovemaking with different partners in a kind of random coupling.”Footnote ⁶³ Carnal indulgence in Genoa spans the social scale. In winter, women of lesser rank “take up position in open doorways (being occupied ostensibly in stitching together pieces of linen by lamplight), and there they await lovers and suitors.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Even the slave girls devote holidays to lovemaking. The greatest opportunity for lascivious behavior comes in summer, when ladies sail along the shores and into the open sea to fish: “Then, even the lowest fellows can accuse them of fornication, reproach them for their lusts, and tempt their modesty with obscene proposals — just as in those grape harvests of Naples we see that the wine porters dare to behave in such rude ways, even toward illustrious women — and indeed by a license, so to speak, bought by their tax revenue.”Footnote ⁶⁵

When Iovius acknowledges the beauty of particular Ligurian noblewomen, he focuses upon moral uprightness, a move perhaps necessitated by what has come before. Thus Caterina Spinola stands out not only in physical attractiveness, but also in modesty, character, tastefulness, and knowledge of Tuscan poetry; and Tomasina Spinola, who was famed for her beauty, is here described only as “dear to her husband and to all on account of a certain unsoiled and uniform purity of body and mind, and on account of her outstanding modesty.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Even here, however, Giovio sees decline: Teodora Spinola has lost her beautiful physique through bearing many children, and Pellota Grimaldi has died.Footnote ⁶⁷

Florence fares better: Iovius wistfully recalls his sojourn there nearly a decade before, when attending his patron, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici.Footnote ⁶⁸ Back then, he says, more Florentine noblewomen were distinguished in beauty, lineage, and intellect. Through the agency of the cardinal and other notable men, he had been able to meet them at parties and wedding banquets, including in the Rucellai Gardens and at country villas.Footnote ⁶⁹ The women enjoy moderate freedom, not only being entrusted with managing domestic finances, but also having the opportunity to develop their intellects. Meanwhile, they dress tastefully and decorously. They have razor-sharp minds and speak both eloquently and shrewdly. He cites four who are in their prime: Nera Pucci, Giovanna Tornabuoni, Costanza Alberti, and Caterina di Galeotto de’ Medici.Footnote ⁷⁰ As in the cases of Milan and Genoa, however, those flourishing are counterbalanced by exempla of loss: Clarice de’ Medici is seriously ill; and Cassandra Salimbeni, a certain Ludovica Tornabuoni, and Costanza de’ Bardi have recently passed away.Footnote ⁷¹ Iovius laments that Florence now has fewer women of illustrious beauty, family, and intellect than it used to have.

Muscettola advocates for Neapolitan women who, he says, far surpass the Venetians, Ligurians, and Tuscans, constrained as those women are by narrow-minded civic laws that prevent them from developing their talents and intellects. Noblewomen in Naples have been sustained by ample wealth and an illustrious life. Commerce with the distinguished trains their moral virtues, and constant study of literature elevates their minds. Upon hearing Muscettola lavish unspecific praises upon Giovanna d’Aragona, Davalus proposes that they focus upon particular talents, such as dancing elegantly, performing music, and taking part in witty dinner conversations. Iovius, however, wants them to highlight qualities that not only delight minds, but also inflame them: “D’Aragona’s sparkling eyes serve to give majestic grandeur to her countenance rather than to entice wantonness. Those coral-red lips, that blond hair streaked with silvery splendor and blown over her ivory neck and snow-white shoulders by the breeze, those quivering breasts never displayed enough for the eyes’ satiety, that regal tallness, and finally that bearing, combining beauty with authority: all these things seize hold of those who watch her, take their breath away and, once fixed in their memory, torture the wretches forever.”Footnote ⁷² Even those who only see her ungroomed, with hair disheveled, fall for her. She understands that excessive makeup or elaborate attire would only detract from her natural beauty. Iovius compares her to the opal, which looks best when surrounded only by a very simple setting.

Muscettola continues the survey of women then present on Ischia, making clear, however, that he proceeds not in order of excellence, but as they occur to him. Costanza d’Avalos the Younger has a wide and serene brow, twinkling eyes, rosy lips, a milk-white neck, pulsating breasts, and a modest bearing. Gifted with a fine memory and high intelligence, she recites others’ poems verbatim and presents her own. Like Giovanna d’Aragona, she is fertile, and her children are attractive and naturally virtuous. Even though her husband, to whom she is devoted, pursues mistresses, she remains steadfastly pure: when courted by love-struck suitors, she deftly parries their attentions, showing a constancy befitting her name.

Iovius essays the awkward task of passing judgment on Maria d’Aragona in the presence of her husband (Davalus). The “entire demeanor and vitality of her body,” he says, “exudes a singular refinement suited to tormenting men.”Footnote ⁷³ He describes how she looked when she and her maidservants, dressed as nymphs, danced to the lute in celebration of the Lupercalia. Attired in a purple cloak with a golden strap drawn diagonally across her chest, she became the focus of everyone’s attention when, “with graceful movement of the neck and shoulders, a gentle bending of the body, and an expert leaping from one leg to the other, she performed the dance with varied circling and weaving, in harmony with the most pleasant Moorish music.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Iovius makes clear that this performance was a private one: in public, by contrast, she maintains a decorous seriousness.Footnote ⁷⁵

In all, Giovio devotes several pages to Neapolitan women and correspondingly to the city’s and region’s impressive buildings and natural beauty.Footnote ⁷⁶ In addition to the women on Ischia, he mentions Lucrezia Scaglione, Isabella Gualandi, Isabel de Requesens, and Cassandra Marchese. The last of these, despite being “in the stooped-over condition of old age,” remains sufficiently charming that she inspires the poetic talents of her brother, Baldassarre, and of Sannazaro.Footnote ⁷⁷ Although Giovanna d’Aragona and Costanza d’Avalos the Younger have since surpassed her, says Muscettola, Isabel de Requesens was for a while the most beautiful — a judgment that Giulio Romano and Raphael’s sumptuous portrait of her may be seen to corroborate (fig. 1).Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 1. Giulio Romano and Raphael. Dona Isabel de Requesens i Enríquez, ca. 1518. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

When turning to Rome, the interlocutors must confront the Sack. Davalus asks Iovius to speak about “the Roman women who are worthy of the eminence and majesty of that venerable city — if there remain safe and sound any of those women who, before the most grievous of calamities, shone forth with dignity and wealth, as well as with beauty and an unblemished reputation for modesty.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Iovius laments that many, following ancient precedent, did in fact commit suicide so as to preserve their chastity. When Davalus impugns the honor of the surviving noblewomen, Iovius staunchly defends them.Footnote ⁸⁰ He gives precedence to six households: the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Conti, Cesarini, and Farnese. A second class comprises the lesser nobility, whom Iovius terms “patricians” (“sunt patriciae familiae”). Those in a third group are of either humble origin, foreign blood, or both.

He proceeds in reverse order: “The third class is composed not only of those ancient dregs of Romulus, but also of the foul sewage of Goths and of the foreign peoples which have taken up residence” in the city; “all the excrement of all nations and especially of the cities of Italy have drained into Rome as into a single hull, filled with bilgewater.”Footnote ⁸¹ Next, and evidently still in the third class, are the prostitutes, some of whom put on a show of nobility. He mocks the pretensions to distinguished lineage, eloquence, and, most risibly, chastity on the part of the famed courtesan Lucrezia da Clarice: upon losing all her possessions in the Sack of Rome, she claimed not to be upset “since she had managed to escape from the hands of the brigands with her female honor intact.”Footnote ⁸²

Rome’s patrician women lack the opportunities available to those of their rank elsewhere because their men, as mistrustful as they are boorish, allow them neither to study music nor to read amorous literature, and severely punish any moral lapses.Footnote ⁸³ Iovius mentions fifteen patricians, but only cursorily, on the grounds that their morals and refinement are as nondescript as they are uniform. Next, he names twenty noblewomen, pausing to linger briefly on three: Laura Orsini, whose beauty is now waning; Felice della Rovere, who has also declined in beauty, but who combines skill in governing with uprightness and a refined intellect; and Ortensia Colonna, who excels in singing.Footnote ⁸⁴ Then he turns to a final notable woman of Roman origin: Vittoria Colonna, upon whom the remainder of the dialogue focuses. She possesses in fully realized form the virtues that other women acquire only partially and combine only imperfectly.

Woman at Her Best

Davalus and Iovius take turns in elaborating the encomium of Colonna.Footnote ⁸⁵ She exemplifies perfect balance and harmony among the four chief virtues in terms of which other women have been evaluated: physical beauty and grace, nobility of lineage, civic responsibility, and chastity. Like the four elements in nature, “even if [these virtues] are entirely opposed to one another on account of their disparate capacities, they are nonetheless bound together among themselves admirably well in accordance with the mathematical structure of divine reason.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Whereas Davalus focuses on Colonna’s physical beauty, Iovius explains how she exemplifies the other three virtues, and he attends as well to a fifth quality: her ingenium (brilliance), a natural capacity that has been nurtured so that she excels in both learning and writing.

Playing on her Roman origins, he compares her preeminence to the ancient city’s role as Caput Mundi: “This one woman prevails over all the others — just as Rome herself, which advanced to such great glory, surpassed in august renown all the individual states of the world.”Footnote ⁸⁷ He quotes Giberti as having said that all women other than Colonna resemble mosaics: “To those looking from a distance, the figures and human faces of this work of art seem admirable and beautiful; but if you approach the work more closely and examine it more minutely and with focused attention, immediately seams appear to view, and both the enormous gaps and the crowded awkwardness, the almost haphazard workmanship, of the crudely inserted pebbles — all discerned clearly by the eye — shatter one’s entire opinion of the work. So it happens when we observe women more closely.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Those of noble lineage, Iovius says, often have a haughtiness that makes them look obnoxious and ridiculous. Also, possessing exceptional natural endowments can give rise to insurmountable desires and to an unsound moral character that deforms physical beauty. On the other hand, excessively austere morals can disfigure chastity itself, and inordinate fastidiousness makes chastity not only less illustrious, but even quite despicable. Colonna is far from either extreme. She combines beauty, renown, and brilliance with a decorous modesty.

Having thus established how Colonna’s attributes combine to form a seamless whole, Davalus isolates specific parts. He emphasizes the eyes, hands, and breasts, sites where, “as the poets relate, shameless desires have become accustomed to dwell while they lie in ambush for unfortunate mortals, and from there they let loose the arrows and flames of love.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Colonna’s eyes are like those of Venus herself. While not playful, they charm like glittering lights and are embellished by thick, feathery lashes. The eyebrows arch slightly and taper gradually. Her hair, which verges on ebony, is daubed with gold, and it flows over her temples so as to adorn her wide forehead. Her cheeks gleam with a modest blush. She has small, perfect ears and a long, regal nose. Her hands are in perfect proportion to her upper arms, and “when she chances to take off her gloves and show them naked,” one sees that they are whiter than marble, smoother than ivory, and softer than ermine.Footnote ⁹⁰ Her fingers, too, carry an erotic charge: they are “so slender and regular in shape that she can slip off her rings whenever she wants to.”Footnote ⁹¹

Davalus describes Colonna’s breasts with particular vividness. These white orbs “spring back softly and becomingly from their sternly chastising little bindings in time with the musical beat of her breathing and, like little turtledoves sleeping, they swell at sweet intervals. Nature has firmly affixed her breasts to her chest, broad at her shoulders and narrowing to her waist, in such a way that they seem to be framed within it, not made to droop down, and the most delicate cleavage is visible between them. So it will be no wonder if we have depicted as perfectly formed those parts of the body which modesty has hidden; nor has any mortal man ever viewed or caressed them other than her husband, a man extremely deserving of such an extraordinary gift of nature.”Footnote ⁹² Davalus then sets the breasts in context as one of the three chief physical assets that stir men’s desire: “After her eyes with their widely vibrating rays touch lightly on everyone else’s, then her hands, whether touched or seen, arouse all men to their marrow, and her breasts, swelling now not with milk but with a certain heavenly nectar, soften their hearts.”Footnote ⁹³

By treating Colonna’s physical attributes at greater length than her other virtues combined, Giovio risks destabilizing the ostensible balance among them, and the inventory of body parts could potentially effect a dehumanizing objectification. The vignette of her bosom, if taken alone, might seem to anticipate moves that Clément Marot (1496?–1544) and his followers would soon make in their blasons anatomiques, a series of poems describing particular parts of the female body.Footnote ⁹⁴ Marot’s first blason, known today as Le beau tétin (1535), portrays in seventeen couplets a breast that, like Colonna’s in Giovio’s description, is spectacular in its whiteness and swells within the containment of clothing.Footnote ⁹⁵ Unlike Giovio, however, who mentions but does not dwell upon the dynamics of male desire, Marot makes them his chief focus:

Thus Le beau tétin becomes a site for the poet to vaunt his virtuosity and masculinity.Footnote ⁹⁷ Giovio’s account of Colonna’s breasts lacks Marot’s prurience and mockery.Footnote ⁹⁸

That said, Giovio’s interlocutors do fix their gaze upon breasts with remarkable frequency. Genoese women, says Iovius, had until recently covered their breasts and upper chests inelegantly, with high shifts, but now the nobler sort, sporting long gowns trimmed in the back with purple velvet, wear jeweled necklaces that rest upon naked flesh. Most Florentine women incline toward concealment: they “cover their breasts with linen undergarments that go up to the neck, either on account of modesty or in order to hide their scrawniness by artifice and deception — for those who have the most attractive torsos and breasts are quick and eager to put all that on display, laid bare.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The Romans have found the mean: their greatest attraction lies in their “half-naked breasts” and in their faces, which “they arrange to give a pleasant mien, neither lustful nor excessively modest but somewhere in between.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The breasts of particular women, however, like those of Colonna, appear exclusively in the context of other physical features. Thus the Roman patrician Porzia Brancia delights by her “radiant hair, well-proportioned breasts, and the exquisite movement of her body in the calmer dances.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Giovanna d’Aragona’s perky breasts (“exsultantes papillae”) and Costanza the Younger’s quivering ones (“palpitantibus papillis”), like Colonna’s, are mentioned amid physical inventories of them.Footnote ¹⁰²

Giovio’s graphic depiction of Colonna’s body resonates with a nearly contemporaneous image of her on a portrait medal. Most likely struck in commemoration of her husband’s victory at Pavia in 1525, on its reverse it shows Ferdinando Francesco in Renaissance parade armor, while on its obverse it features a half-length portrait of Vittoria (figs. 2, 3).Footnote ¹⁰³ Colonna’s realistic face has an almost masculine profile, and the nose, in particular, resembles Giovio’s description of it in his dialogue: its length, he says, shows probity and regal dignity, and its slight bridge, while not depriving her of femininity, could convey a manly aspect (“virilem speciem”).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Also like Giovio’s description of Colonna, the medal draws attention to her bosom: while Colonna’s shift veils her right breast, the left is bare. Such exposure was highly unusual in sixteenth-century portrait medals, a rarity perhaps in part occasioned by the fact that they were designed to be held in the hand.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, whereas Giovio’s readers might revel in the haptic imagery in his description of Colonna, the privileged few who had access to this medal could literally touch her likeness.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Figure 2. Anon. Medal of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos and Vittoria Colonna, 1525?, reverse, with portrait of D’Avalos. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett, 6922bß. © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Figure 3. Anon. Medal of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos and Vittoria Colonna, 1525?, obverse, with image of Colonna. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett, 6922bß. © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Artistic and literary portrayals of the marchesa dating from later in her life are less revealing: medals struck after she was widowed show her in modest attire, with little sense of the body underneath (fig. 4), and subsequent word pictures of her physique do not approach the detail of Giovio’s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In their conceptual vocabularies, both artifacts from the 1520s befit the time of their creation. Just a few years before, Raphael had displayed Justice in asymmetrical drapery that fell from the left shoulder, leaving the right breast exposed — a model that others would imitate in depicting female allegorical figures (fig. 5).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Notably, a second medal of Pescara, also probably cast after the Battle of Pavia, has on its reverse an allegorical image of Victory holding laurel wreaths in both hands (figs. 6, 7).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Like Raphael’s Justice, this anonymous Victory is draped diagonally from the shoulder in such a way that one breast is exposed. This may provide a key to the meaning of the partially clad image of Colonna in the first medal: playing on her name (Vittoria/Victoria/Victory), that portrait transfers the imagery of the allegorical figure onto her.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Giovio’s description of her, too, exemplifies an established mode of delineating the female body, one that in fact proliferated in early Cinquecento literature. It is in that context that one can best appreciate what makes his word picture of Colonna distinctive.

Figure 4. Anon. Medal of Vittoria Colonna, post-1525. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett, Wurzbach, 42871 / 1914B. © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Figure 5. Raphael. Justice, 1519–20. Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Sala di Costantino. © Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 6. Anon. Medal of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos, 1525?, obverse. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett, 474bß. © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Figure 7. Anon. Medal of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos, 1525?, reverse, with allegory of Victory. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Münzkabinett, 474bß. © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Descending Catalogues of Female Beauty

The systematic itemization of a woman’s physical charms had been established in literature for centuries before Giovio wrote.Footnote ¹¹¹ A typical descending catalogue might include golden hair, a smooth forehead, arched eyebrows, resplendent eyes, a straight nose, white cheeks tinged with rose, a small mouth with coral-red lips and evenly spaced white teeth, a long neck, small and firm breasts, long arms, tapering fingers, slender legs, and delicate feet.Footnote ¹¹² A detailed pattern of this sort appears, for example, in Petrarch’s description of Sophonisba in his Africa: her exposed breasts throb as she breathes, and her elongated hands lead to fingers that taper down to ivory nails.Footnote ¹¹³ Giovio’s Colonna exemplifies this mode of description, which enjoyed special prominence in the early Cinquecento.Footnote ¹¹⁴

He surely knew his friend Pietro Bembo’s vernacular dialogue Gli Asolani (1505).Footnote ¹¹⁵ In discussing the pleasures a man takes in seeing his beloved, Bembo’s Gismondo surveys the ideal female form, from the top of the head down to the chest. The imagined woman’s hair, like Colonna’s, is parted in the middle and falls alongside the temples. The “glad expanse” of the beloved’s calm forehead “reveals unerring honesty,” and large black eyes “mingle gravity with native charm,” shining “like two lovely stars on their ecstatic course.” Her cheeks are milky white, “save that in their more vivid coloring they sometimes vie with morning roses.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ A small mouth and reddish lips inspire an urge to kiss them. Finally, not only do her breasts elicit desire, but their partial covering stimulates the male viewer to imagine what lies concealed: “while he commends that portion of her snowy bosom which he sees, the unseen part wins even warmer praise; for his sharp eye discerns and measures it, thanks to the courteous dress whose subtle cloth, in spite of custom, does not always hide the beauty of those breasts, but often yielding to their shape, reveals it.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ At this moment the other interlocutors gaze at Sabinetta, the youngest of the three women, whose bosom they think he is describing, “since that lovely girl, who for her youth as well as for the heat was clothed in the lightest of materials, revealed two round, firm, unripe little breasts beneath her clinging robe.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Agnolo Firenzuola’s (1493–1543) On the Beauty of Women, completed in 1541, offers a similar anatomization of female attractiveness.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The second of its two books consists largely of the interlocutor Celso’s praise of the perfect physique of Selvaggia. Amid his head-to-toe survey, he describes how her “fresh and lively breasts, heaving as though ill at ease at being constantly oppressed and confined by the garments, showing they want to escape from their prison, rise up so resolutely and vigorously that they force the viewer’s eyes to rest firmly upon them, and thereby thwart their escape.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Firenzuola’s inventory of this idealized woman’s attributes is far more detailed than Giovio’s effictio of Colonna and focuses exclusively upon her outward appearance. Celso leaves to the other interlocutors, and only on another, unspecified occasion, the task of giving Selvaggia “that fine air which emanates from the well-proportioned union of [her] members,” a “deliberate gait,” and the grace of “cheerful, witty, honest, and elegant speech.”Footnote ¹²¹ “Intelligence and the other gifts and virtues of the soul are not our business,” he says, “because I have tried to paint the beauty of the body, not that of the soul.”Footnote ¹²² Inasmuch as the interlocutor Selvaggia is based on a particular woman, Selvaggia Rocchi of Prato, a twenty-first-century reader might suppose that this physical description violated decorum. Yet Firenzuola appears not to have seen it that way: he dedicated the dialogue to Vanozzo Rocchi, father of the real-life Selvaggia. What is more, he even wrote a madrigal that celebrates her breasts.Footnote ¹²³

Nor were such inventories always limited to works of fiction, however thinly veiled. Soon after Giovio wrote his dialogue on women, the Aristotelian philosopher Agostino Nifo (ca. 1470–1538), who also took part in the Ischian literary sodality, described Giovanna d’Aragona in similarly graphic terms. His Latin treatise On Beauty and Love, completed in 1529 and dedicated to d’Aragona herself, makes her the paragon of beauty.Footnote ¹²⁴ Although his style and vocabulary differ from Giovio’s, the descending catalogue of a woman’s beauties is in the same tradition.Footnote ¹²⁵ Thus, after attending to her long, white neck, Nifo lowers his gaze to the chest, where her “round breasts, harmonious in their fitting dimensions, smelling most sweet, give off a scent very like peaches.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Her hands, the backs of which are white as snow, have a tint of ivory on the palms, and her plump, rounded fingers are elongated, ending in delicate nails. Nifo observes that his subject’s belly, like her chest, is becoming (“decens”), as are the parts of her sides that correspond to the “concealed places” (“secretoria”). She also has ample and well-rounded hips, perfectly proportioned legs, and small feet with flawless toes. D’Aragona’s beauty and symmetry, he says, are such that it is not too much to say that she merits a place among the goddesses.Footnote ¹²⁷

Some later writers have taken this passage as utterly indecorous. In 1604, for example, Louis Guyon went so far as to speculate that Nifo, being a doctor, was here violating professional ethics in describing the naked body of a patient with whom he had become enamored.Footnote ¹²⁸ Jean-Pierre Nicéron (1685–1738) criticized the license that Nifo had taken, and Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–94) commented upon the work’s eccentricities (“stranezze”).Footnote ¹²⁹ Regarding Nifo’s assertion that d’Aragona physically embodies beauty itself, the historian Benedetto Croce wrote dismissively that the philosopher had “sustained in the most crass and unequivocal way that beauty is nothing other than that which in our times is usually called ‘sex-appeal.’”Footnote ¹³⁰ Yet like Giovio’s top-down description of Colonna’s body, so too Nifo’s of d’Aragona admits to being read not as bizarre but as integral to a portrait of female perfection. Like Giovio, Nifo treats forma (physical beauty) as but part of what constitutes the ideal.Footnote ¹³¹

In his penultimate chapter, dedicated to celebrating those women who have been most highly praised for surpassing beauty, Nifo emphasizes that such beauty must be complemented by chastity.Footnote ¹³² Starting with Ariadne, he lists dozens of ancient figures both imagined and historical, and then skips forward chronologically to name but two of his contemporaries: Giovanna d’Aragona and Vittoria Colonna.Footnote ¹³³ He notes that the latter maintains a decorous chastity, safeguarding her body from all who are desperately burning with love for her.Footnote ¹³⁴ The chapter closes with praise of d’Aragona as most fortunate (“felicissima”), inasmuch as there can be nothing more blessed than to strive fiercely against enemies and to triumph over them.Footnote ¹³⁵

D’Aragona’s reaction to Nifo’s portrayal of her has remained elusive.Footnote ¹³⁶ Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, at least, approved: in his prefatory letter to the text he lauds the author as an illustrious interpreter of beauty whose tract displays a nearly divine wisdom.Footnote ¹³⁷ In his view, Nifo’s description of d’Aragona’s perfect human beauty guides the reader to contemplate the transcendent: “There is that serenity of forehead and mouth, that whiteness, that brilliance of her eyes and blushing radiance, and finally the pleasing appearance of her entire body, of such charm that even the dead themselves are attracted and enticed toward love, and are drawn toward the contemplation of divine beauty. And what is more, she surpasses others with such great purity and sweetness of character, graciousness, and eloquence that she is rightly judged by all to have been born for displaying virtue and integrity, just as a mirror and the most resplendent star.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Theorizing a positive relationship between earthly and divine beauty was not in itself an innovation: that move had been made in both classical and Judeo-Christian antiquity, for example in Plato’s Symposium and in interpretations of the Song of Songs.Footnote ¹³⁹ In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium had provided philosophical underpinnings for the manner in which love of physical beauty, when not a fixation, could prepare the way for contemplating inner beauty and, thereupon, the divine — a position that Castiglione detailed in book 4 of The Courtier (1528). Drawing upon the language and imagery of secular love that Petrarch had used, poets contemporary to Castiglione and Giovio deployed it to illustrate sacred themes.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A similar appropriation of canons of female beauty for religious ends was taking place in painting. For example, in his Madonna of the Rose (1530–35) and Madonna of the Long Neck (ca. 1534–40), Parmigianino portrayed the Virgin as “the ideally perfect figure of panegyric description and enumeration, with her fine golden hair, dark, arched eyebrows, her pink and ivory face, sweet smile, slender ringed neck, her thrusting breasts, and her long delicate fingers, gently tapering” (figs. 8, 9).Footnote ¹⁴¹ These images are, in Elizabeth Cropper’s words, the “embodiments of that grace, charm, and desire whose virtue could excite a man’s soul to love God.”Footnote ¹⁴² Thus for some artists, as for some literati, desire for an idealized female body could serve the very highest of ends.Footnote ¹⁴³

Figure 8. Parmigianino. Madonna of the Rose, 1530–35. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. © bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister / Hans-Peter Klut / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 9. Parmigianino. Madonna of the Long Neck, ca. 1534–40. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. © Scala / Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

Christian Petrarchists’ conflation of earthly erotic desire and sacred love in portrayals of the Virgin and of saints was in fact commonplace in the early Cinquecento.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Vittoria Colonna and another poet who promoted religious reform, Veronica Gambara, each owned an attractive painting of the Magdalene: Colonna by Titian, and Gambara by Correggio. Colonna’s letters and poems about Mary Magdalene explicitly compare earthly love to spiritual passion: in part on account of her bodily beauty, the saint appears to have symbolized for Colonna a direct experience of the divine.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Not everyone was convinced that earthly beauty in the service of spiritual passion was chaste. Thus Pietro Aretino, himself no stranger to subjects either erotic or spiritual, teased Colonna by likening her religious intensity to others’ earthly lusts.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Yet he himself freely blended secular and sacred love imagery in flamboyant, arguably blasphemous formulations that tested the limits of the decorous.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Within a few decades, sensuality in religious art would become more controversial: for the “new elements of beauty and of its perception were precisely the targets of Counter-Reformation censorship.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ For much the same reasons, in 1559 Aretino’s sacred works would earn a place on the Index of Prohibited Books.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Earlier in the Cinquecento, however, the blending of secular and sacred love imagery had a prominent place in learned discourse. Interestingly, Colonna herself at one point wrote to Aretino praising his religious writings and chastising him for not turning out more of them.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Giovio’s and Nifo’s discussions of beauty intervened in different ways in conversations about the decorum of physical beauty. Whereas Nifo drew in part upon Aristotle to articulate a more positive evaluation of female flesh and desirability than that of Ficino, Giovio did not ground his effictiones with philosophical precision.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Meanwhile, by describing so graphically the physical attributes of nonfictional noblewomen in works written in praise of them, both authors gave new concreteness to conceptions that surely were less troubling in the abstract.Footnote ¹⁵²

In so doing, they were also exceptional. Gian Giorgio Trissino’s influential dialogue on beauty, I ritratti (1524), provides a useful counterpoint.Footnote ¹⁵³ Following the example of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, Trissino’s interlocutors formulate ideal beauty by combining features from several actual women. A certain Erycina of Vicenza is the model for the composite’s hair, forehead, eyelashes, arms, and hands whose fingers taper down to beautiful nails.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The chest, appropriated from Clemenzia de’ Pazzi of Florence, is mentioned only in passing, in the context of the squared-off shoulders upon which her neck reposes. The lengthy portrait of Isabella d’Este that is central to the dialogue is still more circumspect in its physical detail. Her hair glistens, barely contained in an elaborately worked silken net, and when she smiles one can see between her roseate lips perfectly matched teeth that are white as snow. Trissino does not, however, describe her breasts: he gets no closer than mentioning the pearl necklace that descends on both sides of her chest down to the waist.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The discussion then turns quickly to her inner beauties, which include humility, magnanimity, temperance, and erudition.

To date, no evidence has come to light of what Colonna thought of Giovio’s effictio of her. Since she eagerly solicited drafts of others’ work, one may suppose that she had already read some version of his manuscript while he was on Ischia in 1527–28.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He invokes her familiarity with it in a letter of 1534/35 to the Neapolitan humanist Girolamo Scannapeco, in which he recalls her having conversed with Muscettola about how Giovio had portrayed him.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Certainly Giovio’s graphic description of Colonna’s body had a playful subtext. As a discerning reader, she could scarcely have failed to notice how Davalus’s male gaze verges on a leer when he rhapsodizes over her breasts. There is no evidence, however, that such passages turned her against Giovio.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Already in 1528, she enlisted him to write the biography of her late husband. In a sonnet penned at some point between then and 1533, she would express deep gratitude to Giovio for that promised commemoration of Pescara.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In 1530, Giovio would play the crucial role of intermediary in her initial literary exchanges with Pietro Bembo.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Although evidence of their interactions thereafter is scanty, it appears that to the end their friendship remained intact.Footnote ¹⁶¹

In sum, while in places Giovio’s effictio of Colonna has a ludic quality, it is securely embedded in a long tradition of such descriptions and similar to those in texts written by some of his contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁶² Along with Nifo, he is evidently exceptional in presenting a descending catalogue of the physical features of a living woman from whose patronage he hoped to benefit. In both cases, the objectification of bodily fragments might threaten to undercut the celebration of the subject. Moreover, in pausing to describe Vittoria’s breasts in such detail, Giovio nearly fixates upon them — something that does not happen in Nifo’s briefer scan of Giovanna’s body. It is all the more essential, then, that Giovio does not present fragmentation as an end in itself, as Marot would.Footnote ¹⁶³ Instead, he emphasizes that Colonna’s bodily parts comprise a concordant whole, and he frames the encomium with comprehensive images of her. At its outset, he contrasts her wholeness with other women’s mosaic-like incompleteness. And, crucially, after scanning her physical attributes, he does not leave them in pieces. Instead, he turns to the dignity and gracefulness of her entire body that one can enjoy when she sets it in motion.

The Eloquence of Harmonious Movement

With her exceptional flexibility and the majesty of her bearing, says Davalus, Colonna stands out from other illustrious women. Nowhere has she displayed bodily eloquence more compellingly than in 1517 in Naples, at the celebration of Bona Sforza’s departure for Poland to marry King Sigismund I.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In a large yet crowded room, all formed a circle to watch Colonna perform a Hungarian dance, “a type of solo ritual dance accompanied by foreign-style music,” which left the other women dumbstruck.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Thus Giovio describes her virtuoso performance: “Nothing was more attractive than when, with the most pleasing gestures, she matched all her movements to the rhythms of the dance, whether she was pretending to wave her feathery fan to stir the air or was gathering up her long, flowing sleeves, or when she swept the floor with her wide skirts tracing delicate circles. And step by step, in tune with the rhythms of the flute-player, sometimes raised on tiptoe for a harmonic rest, at other times following a circular path by taking little sideways leaps, and at still other times with whirling motions in curving paths, she was borne along perilously with gliding steps.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Colonna’s body, now reassembled, displays control and harmony even in the performance of highly challenging and seemingly precarious moves.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Such a display of virtuosity does not square with the stately formality enjoined by dance masters such as Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Intended in part to elevate the status of dancing in courtly culture, Ebreo’s manual stressed the discipline that ought to govern one’s movements.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Elite women, in particular, had to demonstrate a moderation and self-control that betokened the prudence that is owed to proper education and lineage.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Castiglione in The Courtier similarly points to the constraints upon female decorum: when beginning to dance a woman should appear shyly reluctant to do so and then, throughout the dance, she should avoid movements that are “too vigorous and strained.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Especially in the presence of perceived inferiors, nobles needed to display a circumscribed decorousness befitting the dancer’s social status.Footnote ¹⁷² Thus, although in public Castiglione’s ideal male courtier should “maintain a certain dignity,” not attempting “quick movements of foot” or double steps, “in a chamber, as we are now, I think he could be allowed to try this, and [moresche] and branles as well.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Court ladies needed to be yet more careful about maintaining decorum. By the Cinquecento, however, the appropriate display of one’s body in elite settings came to center less on restraint than on virtuosity.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ That such virtuosity was acceptable by Giovio’s time may be inferred from Bembo’s Gli Asolani, in which Gismondo describes the joy of seeing one’s lady dancing in time to instrumental music, “now winning admiration with her stately steps, now charming everyone with her enchanting turns and lithe delays, now with her quicker motions striking the beholder’s eye like some onrushing sun.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Considerable scope for display was surely available at the feast within the Trevisan palace where Giustinian danced with “flexible, smooth, and lively movements of her limbs” and Zorzi showed “great agility” in her “spins, turns, and rhythmic movements,” as well as at the celebration of Sforza’s nuptials where Colonna danced: both events were held indoors and for an audience drawn from the elite.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

In Giovio’s account, Vittoria Colonna’s dancing is as decorous as it is beautiful. Moreover, not only does he reassemble her body in this scene, he also clothes her in lavish attire that displays magnificence. Her shimmering gown, of cloth of gold woven in a moiré pattern, includes a depiction of a balsam tree inscribed on its trunk, “the soul is like unto this” (“huic animus similis”), an emblem that represents an uncorrupted life.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Davalus completes the physical description by noting how Colonna herself puts on the final adornments: no one positions pearls and gems more strikingly. In sum, after being itemized, the parts of her body have been reassembled, the whole being portrayed as set in motion, lavishly clothed and elegantly adorned. And most importantly, Giovio does not end the description there.

A Woman in Full

Davalus now cedes the floor to Iovius, who details Colonna’s abundant possession of the other three chief virtues mentioned earlier: nobility of lineage, civic responsibility, and chastity. These, he says, are far superior to the physical beauty that mainly entices young men. Her magnanimity, personal distinction, prudence, chastity, and piety have enabled her not only to move beyond womanly capacity, but to equal the most widely esteemed and wisest of men. While she actively shuns vice, her lineage has played a key role in enabling her to be virtuous amid the corruption of the times: “This quality, especially, is an ancestral one: her display of unyielding resistance to all cupidity and to all injuries of fortune. To someone enjoying such wealth and freedom, and in a licentious age marked by corrupt morals, it would have been a great accomplishment to refrain from sin, let alone to win renown for the finest virtues.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸

Her civic responsibility shows both in the feminine domain of home economics and in the virile public sphere that includes governance, politics, and warfare. In managing household furnishings and in provisioning and serving food she shows efficiency and prudence: all is elegant, tasteful, and generous, unstinting but never prodigal. Meanwhile, she has been discerning and measured in her administration of territories on behalf of her father and her husband. While generally clement and mild, when necessary she has exacted justice with manlike strictness (“virili severitate”).Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Iovius asks rhetorically, “Who ever exercised judgment more reliably than she about the secret objectives of princes, or more profitably about military discipline, or more clearly about the difficulties of provisioning troops with money and food, or with more foresight concerning the overall outcome of wars?”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This, too, attests her lineage, for she learned the art of war as the daughter, granddaughter, wife, and cousin of exceptional commanders.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Indeed, both her husband and the leaders of the Colonna family have sought her advice on such matters.

Integral to her strict but measured religious observance is a steadfast chastity. In her marriage, she had been faithful to Pescara even as he indulged in extramarital affairs.Footnote ¹⁸² Bereft of him and in mourning, now she has two elderly virgins blocking access to her, “like two huge and wild mastiffs keeping watch at her feet.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Amid readings of scripture and religious services, she wears out her back and knees in supplications before statues of saints. She eats just a single scant meal per day, wears a shift made not of linen but of wool, and “even lashes private parts of her body with the stinging blows of a whip, a punishment undeserved.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Significantly, while Giovio emphasizes the austerity of Colonna’s rites of mourning, he does not describe her religious commitment as something newfound. Until recently, scholars have inclined to portray her as a celebrator of earthly love who, following her husband’s death, came to focus upon religious topics. Recent work, however, has substantially overturned that view. Colonna’s writing on sacred subjects and her piety were by no means new after 1525.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ As Abigail Brundin has observed, the view of Colonna’s poetry as progressing from the amorous to the spiritual, in the manner of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, is owed largely to Ludovico Dolce’s edited collection that organized them as such.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Moreover, already in her earliest amorous poems Colonna witnessed her religious faith through the expression of love for her husband.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Finally, she was first exposed to religious reform not by Bernardino Ochino or Juan de Valdés in the years after the Sack of Rome, but in encounters with members of Giovanni Pontano’s academy, including Jacopo Sannazaro, long before.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Colonna’s patronage of religious art was of similarly long standing: it dates back at least to a polyptych that she and Costanza d’Avalos the Elder commissioned, which was executed around 1512–15 for the church of the Poor Clares within the grounds of the castello on Ischia.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In its central panel the two donors venerate a Madonna in Glory whose right breast is exposed (fig. 10).Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The theological meaning is clear enough: Mary, who had nursed Christ, is interceding with him on behalf of the souls suffering in purgatorial flames below.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Colonna herself has individualized features, including an oval face with a long nose and a hint of a double chin, details consistent with the later painting of her that hung in Giovio’s gallery, known today through the copy of it by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, itself an object of imitation (fig. 11).Footnote ¹⁹² In the altarpiece, the image of Colonna also resembles Giovio’s description of her as a Petrarchan beauty: bedecked in pearls and sumptuously dressed, she has almond eyes, a long columnar neck with the line across the middle that was considered desirable, rosebud lips, and perfectly arched eyebrows.Footnote ¹⁹³ Thus in the altarpiece, as in the dialogue written over a decade later, the human beauty of Vittoria Colonna could help to inspire the contemplation of divine perfection.

Figure 10. Anon. Madonna in Glory in between the Donors Costanza d’Avalos and Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Ischia, Convento di Sant’Antonio. Photograph: Enzo Rando. © Enzo Rando. Permission for access kindly granted by the Convento di Sant’Antonio and by the Sopraintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici e per il Patrimonio Storici, Artistici ed Etnoantropologici per Napoli e Provincia, Naples.

Figure 11. Anon. Vittoria Colonna, sixteenth century. Florence, Casa Buonarroti. © Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Giovio is at pains not to portray Colonna’s devotion as lugubrious. Her austerity is neither insincere nor extravagant. In her piety, she “commits no superstitious, feigned, or foolish action.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ When not in mourning, she is neither gloomy nor severe. She both appreciates others’ light humor and on occasion contributes her own witticisms. On the other hand, she laughs at women who, making a show of modesty that slips into prudery, “frown ill temperedly and furrow their brows at slightly salacious jokes with a kind of religious boorishness.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The extreme example of Giovanna Castriota sets Colonna’s decorous modesty in perspective.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Preening and ostentatious, Castriota “thought it a sin if she were spoken to flirtatiously, or someone laid a finger on her, or even if she were looked at by hungry eyes.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ When bathing, she would be disrobed only after her maidservant had been blindfolded and the lights extinguished. Guests at a banquet at her house found that she had censored the dining-room tapestries, which depicted the judgment of Paris, by having covered the three goddesses’ thighs and hips with sewn-together tablecloths. Most absurdly, she anxiously asked theologians whether at the Last Judgment, when all stand naked before the tribunal of God, “she herself, as a deserved reward for her well-guarded virginity, might be able to obtain by request from the Virgin Mother of God at least a strip of linen to cover her genitals.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Following the mockery of Castriota, Iovius returns the focus to Colonna and in particular to her erudition, which is so impressive that philosophers praise her argumentation, theologians listen enthusiastically to her, and literati admire her as one divinely inspired.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Her Tuscan poems display eloquence, erudition, and metrical skill, and her innumerable letters to the most learned and powerful men exhibit not only charm, but also manly decorum (“virile decus”).Footnote ²⁰⁰ Her writings are like the massive fires that Egyptian kings had lit atop pyramids as part of public celebrations: great in themselves, they shone forth all the farther for having been set at such a height.Footnote ²⁰¹ Thus Colonna’s brilliance is all the more conspicuous for having been built upon a solid foundation of virtue and nobility. Here ends the dialogue: right after Iovius has articulated this imposing image, with its recognition of Colonna’s literary acumen and leadership, the fall of dusk necessitates that the men break off their conversation to return to the fortress of Ischia and to the women who superintend it.

Historical Specificity and Changing Contexts

The portrait of Vittoria Colonna with which Giovio closes Notable Men and Women might appear at first glance to knit the dialogue’s constituent parts into a harmonious whole. Yet he never completed the work to his satisfaction, and not for lack of trying. Publication appeared imminent in early 1530 when Giovio was in Bologna for the festivities that would culminate in Clement VII’s crowning of Charles V as Holy Roman emperor on 24 February.Footnote ²⁰² Since the literati gathered there were debating how best to reform the vernacular language, the moment seemed auspicious for vaunting the literary analysis in dialogue 2. On 8 February Giovio went so far as to request from Isabella d’Este seventy reams of top-quality paper for the purpose of publishing “the luxurious Dialogue, in which that famous house [of Gonzaga] has a distinguished part.”Footnote ²⁰³ But even upon obtaining the paper, he did not publish. Although he returned to work on Notable Men and Women repeatedly in the 1530s, it remained unfinished.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Giovio’s inability to complete this book resulted in part from other projects taking precedence. Among these were a biography of Pope Leo X, written mostly if not entirely between 1529 and 1534; a commentary on the Turks, probably begun just after he returned to Rome in 1530 and published in 1532; the Histories, on which he resumed work by 1533; and the biography of Pescara that Vittoria Colonna herself had commissioned in 1528.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Later in life, when writing his Elogia Virorum Illustrium (Sketches of illustrious men), he would draw passages verbatim from the manuscript of Notable Men and Women, now permanently set aside.

The chief reason why the dialogue remained unfinished surely rests with the passing of the political moment that is its setting. Giberti, for whose comfort while a hostage it was initially intended, escaped from captivity on the night of 29–30 November 1527. A week later, Pope Clement VII was liberated from the Castel Sant’Angelo. Major military changes ensued. Initially, French advances gave hope for the formation of a new alliance against Emperor Charles V: in late April of 1528 Odet de Foix, Viscount of Lautrec, laid siege to Spanish-controlled Naples, and the Genoese captain Filippino Doria (then employed by the French) destroyed the Imperial fleet in the Battle of Capo d’Orso.Footnote ²⁰⁶ In August, however, Lautrec died and the French were forced to retreat from Naples. In September the pope, who had remained neutral for months, entered into negotiations with the emperor that would issue in an alliance concluded at Barcelona on 29 June 1529. These changes necessitated shifts in the perspective taken on the events recounted in the dialogue. Its candid criticisms of Charles V and of Clement VII were hardly suited to the Imperial coronation in Bologna. Indeed, addenda and corrigenda to the manuscripts attest to Giovio’s efforts to portray both rulers in the best possible light, but dialogue 1 in particular would have required a complete overhaul to be adapted to the times.

If Notable Men and Women was too time bound to be completed, it shared that fate with another prosopographical dialogue, Pierio Valeriano’s De Litteratorum Infelicitate (On the ill fortune of learned men), which was set in Rome during Lent of 1529.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Both works emerged from and represented a short-lived political constellation, and both resisted subsequent efforts to reframe their meanings. Julia Gaisser’s formulation with respect to Valeriano’s text applies equally well to Giovio’s: “the literary design of his dialogue was both created and disrupted by real events. Valeriano used a specific historical moment to give his dialogue not only its occasion, but also its structure and meaning. But the moment was brief — hardly a nano-second of historical time. When events changed and the moment was gone, the work lost its relevance and much of its artistic power.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ As for Valeriano’s dialogue, so too for Giovio’s: the historical specificity of a work written in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome militated against its completion.

Nor were all the changes political: for within a half decade after Giovio began writing the dialogue, many of the youths upon whom its interlocutors had pinned modest hopes for renewal had died.Footnote ²⁰⁹ More significantly, the synecdoche that the dialogue posits between particular Italian cities and their noblewomen was becoming less meaningful. Milan and Naples remained under Spanish rule; Genoa yielded to Spanish domination in 1528; in the 1530s Florence became a hereditary principate of the Medici family under the aegis of the emperor; and Rome fell increasingly under the control of the papacy, which in turn was often beholden to Spanish interests.Footnote ²¹⁰ Only Venice retained the political autonomy that Giovio connected so directly with civic culture and thereby with the status of women. Meanwhile, as elites throughout the peninsula intermarried, a pan-Italian ruling class was crystallizing at the expense of regional particularities.Footnote ²¹¹

One can see a move beyond local identity, too, in the career of Colonna herself: although often in Naples or on Ischia in the early 1530s, thereafter she would spend most of her time elsewhere, including Ferrara, Orvieto, Viterbo, Fondi, and especially Rome, where she became a lay resident in the convent of San Silvestro.Footnote ²¹² Both in person and through correspondence she supported the work of religious reformers, including Juan de Valdés and Bernardino Ochino, and she furthered the cause of literati through her example, guidance, and patronage.Footnote ²¹³ Most famously, she became a close friend of Michelangelo’s, with whom she discussed in detail the relationship between art and religion just as he was making original contributions to what has been termed “the reform of art.”Footnote ²¹⁴ Insofar as she assumed an active role in the rapid transformation of culture throughout Italy, Colonna became less identifiable with the arcadian tranquility and disengagement from peninsular affairs of Ischia that Paolo Giovio had portrayed.

So, too, in its discussions of beauty and of religious devotion, the dialogue was moored to the moment it was written. In describing the body of his female patron so graphically, Giovio took a step as bold as it was unusual. It may not have been less decorous, however, than the image of Vittoria Colonna as Victory on the 1525 portrait medal (fig. 3), which similarly blends stock fictive elements with the representation of a flesh-and-blood woman. At the same time, like Nifo’s inventory of Giovanna d’Aragona’s body, Giovio’s effictio of Colonna participated in current learned discourse about the decorousness of desirable female beauty in the erotics of religion.Footnote ²¹⁵ Vittoria’s breasts, which Giovio describes in the third Ischian dialogue as filled not with milk but with heavenly nectar, are for him integral parts of her entire beautiful body that, in harmony with her inner beauty, could inspire contemplation of the divine. In widowhood, Colonna would not jettison her belief in the power of earthly beauty as a spur toward the sacred, a fact evident not only in her poetry, but also in her devotional use of a Magdalene by Titian — quite possibly the Penitent Magdalene (1530–35) now in the Pitti Palace, in which the saint’s hair and arms do not hide her breasts but instead frame them and set them in relief (fig. 12).Footnote ²¹⁶ The literary and artistic exploration of the erotics of religion did not entirely cease with the indexes of prohibited books or with the Council of Trent.Footnote ²¹⁷ Strikingly, in the collection of paintings that Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631) assembled to exemplify decorous Christian art, he included a replica of the Pitti Magdalene.Footnote ²¹⁸ No longer, however, was there the representational latitude regarding the place of physical beauty in religious devotion that had distinguished the 1520s and 1530s.

Figure 12. Titian. Penitent Magdalene, ca. 1530–35. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. © Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

Conclusion

Notable Men and Women leaves unresolved the critical issues of how Italy could regain political vitality, literary leadership, the fertility of its noble lines, and the preeminence of its chaste noblewomen. Nevertheless, Colonna herself did become a beacon and inspiration to other intellectuals, both men and women, in the vibrant literary and religious cultures of the mid-Cinquecento.Footnote ²¹⁹ Even at a time when she was enclosed, in mourning, in the castello on Ischia, Giovio could see within her the qualities that would later enable her to play such a forceful role in renewal. The third Ischian dialogue has bequeathed to us, as an enduring legacy, its eloquent portrayal of Vittoria Colonna at a distinct time both in the representation of beauty in literature and art, and in her own literary and spiritual development. For a while, writers and painters enjoyed a latitude and openness to ambiguity that allowed them to portray women as idealized, classicized, mythical, and erotically charged, yet, at the same time, real, contemporary, Christian, and chaste. It is precisely the unresolved tensions among these conceptual vocabularies — something that would no longer be so open to exploration a few decades later — that animates these works and gives them much of their aesthetic appeal. Giovio’s image of Vittoria Colonna, like the dialogue in which it appears, exemplifies the scope for the blending of representational possibilities that distinguished the time of its composition: a moment when her commemoration of her husband, both in observing religious rituals and in composing verse, coalesced with her faith, and when her Petrarchan physical beauty could be seen to combine with her other virtues to form a harmonious, desirable, and inspirational whole.