Colonna, Vittoria

A perennial spring of piety and of poetry enabled her to throw around those she loved a halo of sweetness and elevated sentiment, and to a great extent her ideal was realized. Father, husband, adopted son were among the better representatives of the age in which they lived. Her married life was among the purest and happiest ever found in such a sphere and must have been almost incomparable in her own day. One is almost inclined to think she owes her exceeding brightness to the moral darkness in which she shone. But a wider knowledge of history shows us that such bright and lovely blossoms do, at long intervals, appear on the tree of humanity as if to show of what it is capable and still more by their moral loveliness to cheer those who are so happy as to come beneath their influence.
But it is not often such women add to their moral charm the high gift of poetry. It was here Vittoria Colonna specially excelled. This gift was to her pure, well-balanced mind the greatest of all consolations, and probably a singular help against temptations. By its means she was enabled to bear the great loss which fell upon her in 1525. Pescara was only thirty-six years of age when he was taken from her. Her grief at first was irrestrainable, and she was determined to end her days in a convent. But the intervention of her friend, Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, Clement VII., issued a brief forbidding the nuns of S. Silvestro to receive her, and she was thus almost forced to give herself to the world.
This she did, but in the best sense; for she soon became the center of a high class and elevated society which shone like a silver moon in the night of Italian religion and Italian freedom. All the nobler minds were among her friends: Contarini and Reginald Pole, both Cardinals; Giulia Gonzaga, famous for her beauty and virtue. These with many others, noble and learned persons, were much affected by the peculiar doctrines of the Reformation―justification by faith. I have hinted how interested Vittoria Colonna was in the Pauline Epistles, and how much she valued the teaching of Occhino, at one time General of the Capuchins, and confessor and private chaplain to the Pope. Peter Martyr, then an Augustinian monk, and the Spaniard Juan Valez were among the leaders; indeed, to the latter the whole movement seems traceable.
It was just at this happy moment in the life of this charming lady that Michael Angelo, sad-hearted and weary, having worn his chain some sixty years, came under her influence. It affected him like a symphony of sweet music. It not only lulled his pain, but introduced a new hope. Liberty was lost, the tide of corruption was overwhelming Italy, but here was new life. Individual conversion, personal consecration, individual justification, individual sanctification; what might not be hoped if such a faith could spread?
That this fascinating woman should herself be an example of this faith, was an attraction to a heart so profoundly pious as that of Michel Angelo, cannot be doubted; but for both awaited purifying trials, dark days to be passed through before Eternal light appeared. Contarini died; Pole was overwhelmed with relative trials; Occhino and Peter Martyr, dismayed by the rapid rise of a persecuting party, fled from Italy, and Vittoria had to bend to the storm, for Caraffa and his terrible Inquisition were at hand; in a few years, to hold the opinions held by cardinals Contarini and Pole and openly advocated by Occhino, would be death. Some, indeed, would go to the stake simply for having been members of Vittoria Colonna’s society. To culminate her sorrows, she lived to see the ruin of her family. That family which had so often wrestled with Popes was now overcome by Paul III. He managed by force and treachery to seize their castles and their lands, and the last time Vittoria Colonna came to Rome, none of her family were there.
At the beginning of 1547 her strength completely failed. She was carried from the convent where she was residing to the palace of Giuliano Cesarini, a relative in Rome. She had hardly anyone to console her but Michel Angelo.
The end came one evening towards the close of February 1547. She said to Michel Angelo who stood by her couch: “I die. Help me to repeat my last prayer. I cannot now remember the words.” Holding her cold hands in his, he repeated the prayer, her lips moving as he spoke. Suddenly her large eyes opened and gazed upon him, the old smile played upon her face, and she passed away, saying something that was inaudible. He bent down and reverently kissed her hand; of nothing, he afterwards said, did he so much repent as not having kissed her forehead and her cheeks also.
The nations who bask in the sunlight have sometimes seemed most in bondage to the fear of death. The Florentines were peculiarly affected by its terrors. Michel Angelo was no exception. The approach of night, of the grave, of death and of judgment to come, such is the melancholy note which runs through much of his work. And now when the most elevating friendship he had ever formed was thus broken, his thoughts rested with solemn awe on the possibilities of the double death.
At first it was natural that he should invoke the help of that bright spirit whose unclouded faith had aroused hope in the midst of his darkness, and in a sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna, he says:

’Midst endless doubts, shifting from right to left,
How my salvation to secure I seek,
And still ’twixt vice and virtue balancing,
My heart, confused, weighs down and wearies me;
As one who, having lost the light of Heaven,
Bewildered strays, whatever path he takes;
I, Lady, to your sacred penmanship,
Present the blank page of my troubled mind,
That you, in dissipation of my doubts,
May on it write, how my benighted soul
Of its desired end may not so fail,
As to incur, at length, a fatal fall;
Be you the writer, who have taught me how
To tread by fairest paths the way to Heaven.
―John S. Harford’s Life of Michel Angelo, 1858, from whence also most of the other translations of quotations from Michel Angelo’s poems are drawn.

Just before her death he had made for her a drawing of a Madonna, sitting at the foot of the Cross; the dead body of the Christ is stretched upon her lap, and her eyes and arms are raised to Heaven. The Cross itself is shaped so as to symbolize the Trinity, and on it is written a line from Dante’s Paradise.
No one reflects how much blood it has cost.
The sentiment intended to be aroused was pity―compassion for Divine suffering. It was a favorite form, in which Michel Angelo chose to set forth the Crucifixion. But now the great artist, il gran Michel Angelo, as his contemporaries called him, began to be full of pity for his own soul.

My spirit now, midst errors multiform,
Weak, wearied, and infirm, pardon implores;
O Lord, most high, extend to me that chain
Which links within its grasp each gift divine;
Chiefest to Faith I bid my soul aspire,
Flying from sense whose ways conduct to death.
The rarer be this gift of gifts, the more
May it to me abound.

But Michel Angelo, in whom as we have seen the sentiment of justice was so profound, saw that Pity could not be divorced from Justice in Him Who was alike the source of all justice and all pity; and it was perhaps this aspect of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ that brought home to his struggling soul its power to deliver the conscience and set the burdened sinner free. He writes in one sonnet attributed to this time:
For though Thy promises our faith compel,
Yet, Lord, what man shall venture to maintain
That pity will condone our long neglect?
Still from Thy blood poured forth, we know full well
How without measure was Thy martyr’s pain,
How measureless the gifts we dare expect.
Thus is he led to see that salvation is by grace, and that every effort towards Divine Light is itself an inspiration from Heaven.
What sweetness will attend my acts of prayer,
If Thou to pray to Thee will give me power!
Within my heart’s bleak soil, no means are found
Fruits to produce of innate excellence.
Thou art the seed of just and holy works;
Where’er Thy power is felt they germinate:
None have th’ heroic will to follow Thee
Unless Thou teach them first Thy beauteous ways.
How diverse in this matter is human experience. Vittoria Colonna found her way into the new life, as the butterfly bursts from the chrysalis. One of her sonnets ends thus:
And as the light streams gently from above,
Sin’s gloomy mantle bursts its bonds in twain;
And robed in white, I seem to feel again
The first sweet sense of innocence and love.
Whereas the deliverance of Michel Angelo can only be compared to the efforts of an half sculptured statue to escape from the marble block. There it must forever remain unless the master’s hand shall set it free.
So Michel Angelo himself was at last able to say:
From a vexatious, heavy load, set free,
Eternal Lord, and from this world unloos’d,
Weary to Thee I turn, like a frail bark
’Scaped from fierce storms into a placid sea.
And on his eighty-third year he addressed a sonnet to Vasari, in which he writes:
Painting and Sculpture’s aid in vain I crave;
My one sole refuge is that Love Divine
Which from the Cross stretch’d forth its arms to save.
―R. Heath.